For being the 2020 board's resident Bernie simp and hater of the anti-Democratic establishment, I actually don't like Tulsi either. To put it simply, she's a right-wing fraud.
MacArthur actually summed a lot of the dislike for Tulsi up well. She had ties to a virulently anti-gay cult, and her father was the face of Hawaiian social conservatism. I believe she's said that she's still very socially conservative personally, and only votes the way she does out of political convenience.
There's also the fact that she's very close to dictators and other far-right individuals like Vladimir Putin, Hindu nationalists, and Bashar al-Assad. Considering the Democrats' turn towards neoconservative #NeverTrumpers, this isn't going to play well with them. I'm not really a fan of the BlueAnon stuff about Russia, but as someone who's closer to the Obama/Biden wing than my comrades on fopo, I never was really a fan of Tulsi's approach to dictators.
She didn't really have a niche in the primary, aside from "Bernie 2016 voters with similar fopo beliefs". Sure, she got some of the vocal minority, but the silent majority of Bernie supporters stuck with him. To put it plainly, she didn't have the policy chops to distinguish herself. She pivoted away from M4A (the Bernie movement's sacred cow), and her vote to not impeach Trump. There was also her staying in well past her for some reason, even though she had no chance. Bernie voters had the misconception that she was siphoning votes away from him - she didn't have a tangible impact in any of the states.
I've always thought her anti-establishment "stances" were an act. I've been very consistent about the downballot, especially after seeing the losses in 2010. For all my sperging over downballot support/endorsements, Tulsi's PAC's previous Congressional contributions prove that her stances are fraudulent.
If you look at her Congressional contributions, most of the candidates you see are fairly bland, establishment-leaning candidates. In 2016, the only firmly anti-establishment candidates she donated to were Lucy Flores and Zephyr Teachout. Even then, the latter had locked her primary nomination fight up, and she donated a bit to Ruben Kihuen.
The rest were either incumbents or DCCC-backed, line-towing centrists.
2018's contributions were where they start to get egregious. You'll notice that there's no contributions to prominent Bernie-aligned challengers like AOC, Kara Eastman, Brent Welder, or even Andrew Gillum. Most of her donations are like 2016 - largely to incumbents in non-competitive primaries, and largely to more centrist-leaning candidates. There's only one instance where she donated in a competitive primary. It sticks out not because it's my congressional district, but because the candidate she backed is the total opposite of what she represents.
NH-1 had a crowded primary. Out of the 11 candidates running, six of them were Bernie-aligned. Two more were strong progressives in their own right. Sure, Levi Sanders was a meme candidate who was everything the MacArthurs, KYWildmans, and Lyndons of the world thought Bernie was, but the other five were qualified. The most prominent was Mindi Messmer, a scientist, environmental activist, and former state representative who was impeccably qualified for the job. Tulsi could have helped narrow the field and give her platform to a candidate who needed it.
Tulsi Gabbard chose to contribute to Maura Sullivan instead. Sullivan is an alt-centrist carpetbagger in the Buttigieg/Moulton mold. Putting aside the fact that she moved to my district to run for Congress, she was far to the right of the retiring incumbent, was to the right of the field on issues like immigration and marijuana, and even went as far as to "both sides" Confederate monuments. She was so bad that I decided to vote for Chris Pappas strategically because I felt stopping her was more important. A lot of progressives (myself included) actually refused to vote for Maura if she won - she was not only a bothsidesist moderate hero, she had never set foot in the district before running for office.
Basically, Tulsi Gabbard is a right-wing snake oil saleswoman, and you shouldn't trust her either.
