jakke:

Why not go for someone outside the Senate? Senators already hold high-profile positions that they need enormously expensive campaigns to maintain, so they’re honestly not the most realistic long-shot progressive primary opponents. Also, they are overwhelmingly elderly white millionaires with backstories of moving from one position of power and influence to another, which is not super inspiring.

There are like a dozen House members who seem great with the media and reliably on the liberal progessive end of the Democratic caucus and not really in danger of losing their seats - Raúl Grijalva, Mike Honda, and Barbara Lee are probaby the highest profile, but there are a bunch of others. If you want someone who’s held high office (and enacted left-leaning policy) out of Congress, Julian Castro and Hilda Solis seem happy to show up in the media whenever possible. A draft of Elizabeth Warren is absolutely not going to happen, but that’s okay since she’s not the only politician you probably agree with more than Hillary Clinton.

No way could Hilda Solis survive the media attention, she’s too tied into Gil Cedillo’s skeevy-ass Latino Legislative Caucus machine, which dominates the rotten boroughs east of downtown LA (either engineered as refuges for commerce and industry, like Commerce and Industry, or with few enough citizens that elections are won with liquor-filled limo GOTV ops [which is actually pretty in keeping with tradition - Election Day used to be a drinking holiday like St. Paddy’s, NYE, and Purim])

Seriously, start by asking why all the Solis siblings have suspiciously remunerative public jobs and contracts, move on to the way figures associated with her funded the machine by widespread seizures and auctions of cars from (majority) illegal immigrants and then talked a big game about amnesty/sanctuary cities to try to lay down a smokescreen.