Mark Erwin Brings A Right Wing Bias To Americans Elect Leadership
Americans Elect, a new political party with shadowy financial ties to hedge fund managers and a secretive process for selecting candidates to endorse for public office, has announced a new group of people appointed, without any input from the rank-and-file Americans Elect membership, to an elitist “Leadership” group.
Americans Elect won’t tell its members just what “leadership” position he has, but it has revealed the appointment of Mark Erwin, President of Erwin Capital and member of the Board of Directors at New Dominion Bank. Erwin’s appointment is a test of the claim by Americans Elect to promote a centrist ideology.
Americans Elect fails the test.
Of course, just with his top role in a bank and in his own financial firm, Mark Erwin has placed himself far outside of the American center. Erwin is a member of the 1 percent, not the 99 percent.
Mark Erwin isn’t just a financial outlier, though. His political donations to members of Congress this year show that Mark Erwin is outside of the political center as well.
Erwin wrote checks to two members of the U.S. House of Representatives this spring: Republican Sue Myrick and Democrat Larry Kissell. A superficial reaction to these donations would declare it to be proof of Erwin’s centrist political identity. After all, Erwin made a donation to one Democrat and one Republican. Isn’t that balanced?
If you look a little deeper, it’s plain that, actually, Erwin’s donations are not politically balanced. Sue Myrick is a political extremist. She has a negative 66 percent legislative score for the current session of Congress, locating her far to the right of the political mainstream.
Larry Kissell does not balance Myrick’s extremism with strident left wing politics. In fact, Kissell does not even counter Myrick’s right wing legislative score with a mildly liberal record. Although Larry Kissell is a Democrat, his votes and cosponsorships in the current session of the House of Representatives shows that he leans more to the right than he does to the left. Kissell, like Myrick, has a negative legislative score, meaning that he’s counted in the right wing of Congress. He’s not as far to the right as Myrick, but he leans in the same direction.
Mark Erwin has never supported a liberal candidate to Congress. His addition to the leadership of Americans Elect takes the new political party even further to the right, showing that Americans Elect is not at all the centrist organization it claims to be.
