Can an unabashed progressive win in Southern Indiana?

The Democratic nominee in the 9th Congressional District of Indiana is Liz Watson, a fifth-generation Hoosier, an attorney who has represented low-wage workers and victims of domestic violence, a former labor policy director for the U.S. House Democratic Caucus, and one of the most progressive Democrats to be nominated for a Republican-held U.S. House seat in the 2018 midterm elections.

Can an unabashed progressive like Liz Watson win a U.S. House seat in the Southern Indiana-based 9th Congressional District of Indiana? I believe that she can!

One thing that defines Watson's style of politics, more than anything else that one could say about her, is that she is a fighter for the people. On her campaign's biography page, Watson described her style of politics in this sentence:

I will always vote to make Hoosiers’ lives better, and that will be my litmus test for every single vote I take.

There is this pervasive mentality, particularly in the Trump era, among many in the Republican Party, in that they want themselves to be viewed by their far-right political base as the kind of people who boast about being more conservative than a conservative's conservative. There isn't much of a constituency, even within the progressive movement, for progressives who boast about being more progressive than a progressive's progressive, but that's not Liz's style of politics. From her support for Medicare-for-All, to her common-sense plan to combat the opioid epidemic, to her support to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour, to her support for reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and common-sense gun safety measures, Liz Watson's political modus operandi is and always will be to make Hoosiers' lives better, and there's absolutely nothing that is shady about that. In fact, the fact that her entire congressional campaign is devoted to her efforts to make Hoosiers' lives better is the single biggest reason why I believe that she can win.

I encourage voters in the 9th Congressional District of Indiana to vote for Liz Watson on November 6.