The Other Anti-Establishment Candidates to Watch on Tuesday

“Super Tuesday No. 4” pits anti-establishment energy against Democratic Party insider status.

And no, we’re not (just) talking about the dynamic between presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

U.S. Senate primaries in Maryland and Pennsylvania on Tuesday also feature outsider challengers who are giving Democratic establishment candidates a run for their money.

“Joe Sestak and Rep. Donna Edwards don’t appear to have much in common,” Politico wrote on Tuesday. “One’s a white, former Navy admiral from the Pennsylvania suburbs, the other an African-American single mother from Prince George’s County, Maryland.”

“But this week they are united by powerful Democratic leaders’ attempts both back home and in Washington to keep them out of the Senate,” Politico continued.

Sestak’s leading opponent in his quest to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. Pat Toomey is Katie McGinty, a former chief of staff to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf. While she’s never held elected office, she’s “long been part of the Democratic political scene,” the Atlantic noted, and she’s racked up a long list of establishment endorsements.

Sestak, a former U.S. congressman who has taken a stronger stance than McGinty on issues like fracking and did well in a straw poll of progressive Pennsylvania activists in February, has said that he is fighting “for the soul of the Democratic Party,” and that political party leaders “aren’t in it for people any longer, they’re in it for power and themselves.”

(For what it’s worth, a third, “Bernie-inspired” candidate—Braddock mayor John Fetterman—has been running against Sestak and McGinty on a platform very similar to Sanders’. He’s polling at about 15 percent.)

No wonder, then, that “Senate Democrats and the White House have invested an unusual amount of effort in Pennsylvania to help McGinty,” as Politico reported.

The Hill explained last month that Sestak “riled party leaders by running and successfully winning against then-Sen. Arlen Specter (D) in 2010. He then lost to Toomey by 2 points in the general election.”

But Sestak doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, when sitting Sen. Bob Casey endorsed McGinty in March, Sestak declared in a news release: “I have had no politician’s endorsement in this campaign. With Bob Casey’s endorsement of my primary opponent today, it completes an all-inclusive rejection by Washington D.C.’s and Pennsylvania’s Democratic politicians of what I believe in, and stand for.”

Indeed, that could work in his favor. As the Atlantic adds,