Regarding your “Red Trickle” election update (11/10), I was happy to celebrate the mostly good or, at worst, OK news for Oregon Democrats. And I am glad that Democrat Andrea Salinas is winning our new 6th Congressional District.

What I find disturbing is the loss of seven-term incumbent Democrat Kurt Schrader’s 5th Congressional District seat to a Republican. Schrader manifested a politics that I find distasteful, for instance when he spoke or voted against his Democratic colleagues in highly visible ways. He was in a small minority of conservatives in the party.

He gave ample reasons for Jamie Mcleod-Skinner to mount her successful primary challenge from the left. Unfortunately, greater electability turns out not to have been one of those reasons. And now she has lost the election to a Republican by a little over 2 percent.

We on the left should take both these factors — ideology and electability — into account, as we choose our candidates. Many Republicans who threw in with election denial and misogyny are paying the price in electoral losses. Their record is of ignoring the lessons of failure; we need not make that same mistake.

Larry Koenigsberg

Eugene

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