D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto told WTOP Monday she has entered the race to become the city’s next congressional representative.
Ward 2 Council member Brooke Pinto tells WTOP she’s challenging Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton for the District’s congressional seat.
D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto told WTOP Monday she has entered the race to become the city’s next congressional representative, after releasing a video online earlier in the morning.
Pinto joins Robert C. White Jr., her council colleague, in the campaign for Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton’s seat, which Norton has held for over 30 years.
The seat representing D.C. in Congress is a nonvoting position.
In a news release, the Ward 2 council member and chair of the D.C. Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety pledged to “fight for DC’s autonomy” and the city’s safety.
She also touted her years of service on the Council and the bills she has shepherded into law, including the public safety package Secure D.C.
Regarding Del. Norton, Pinto said: “What she has done for the District has been so important. … And that’s what I want to build on.”
Listen to the entire interview at the top of this post.
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WASHINGTON — The Democratic Party’s standing in public opinion polls has sunk to its lowest point in more than 30 years. Many of the party’s own voters think their leaders aren’t fighting hard enough against President Trump. In one survey, the words they used most often were “weak” and “tepid.”
“The party is in shambles,” said James Carville, the political strategist who helped Bill Clinton win the White House after a similar bout of disarray a generation ago.
And yet, in recent weeks, the beleaguered party has begun to exhibit signs of life.
Its brand is still unpopular, but its chances of winning next year’s congressional elections appear to be growing; in recent polls, the share of voters saying they plan to vote Democratic has reached a roughly 5% lead over the GOP. Potential presidential candidates, led by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, are competing noisily for the title of fiercest Trump-fighter. And they have an ace in the hole: As unloved as the Democratic Party is, Trump is increasingly unpopular, too, with an approval rating sagging to 40% or below in some polls.
“There’s no requirement that people love the Democratic Party in order to vote for it,” Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini said last week. “In an era of negative partisanship, people are motivated to vote more by dislike of the other party than by love for their own.”
So Carville, despite his diagnosis of “shambles,” thinks things are looking up in the long run.
“The Democratic Party’s present looks pretty bad, but I think its future looks pretty good,” he said. “I think we’re going to be fine.”
He cited several straws in the wind: the Democrats’ new energy as they campaign against Trump; the encouraging poll numbers on next year’s congressional elections; and an impressive bench of up-and-coming leaders.
“The talent level in the current Democratic Party is the highest I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Whoever comes out on top of that competition is going to be a pretty strong candidate.”
But that nomination is three years away — and meanwhile, Democrats face daunting hurdles. For one, Trump has pressed Texas and other Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps to cement GOP control of the House of Representatives — an effort that could succeed despite Newsom’s attempt to counter it in California.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing a measure to redraw California’s congressional map to aid Democrats.
(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)
The Democrats, by comparison, remain leaderless and divided — arguing over the lessons of their 2024 defeat and debating how to regain their lost support among working-class and minority voters.
In a historical sense, the party is going through a familiar ordeal: the struggle a party normally faces after losing an election.
So Carville and other strategists have sketched out variations of what you might call a three-step recovery plan: First, get out of Washington and rally public opposition to Trump. Second, focus their message on “kitchen table issues,” mainly voters’ concerns over rising prices and a seemingly sluggish economy. Third, organize to win House and Senate elections next year.
“We have to do well in 2026 to demonstrate we’re not so toxic that people won’t vote for us anymore,” said Doug Sosnik, another former Clinton aide.
They’re arguing over the lessons of defeat and debating how to regain lost support among working-class and minority voters.
In battling Trump, they say they’ve found a starting point.
“We’ve found our footing. We’ve gone on the offensive,” argued Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont), who spent most of the summer campaigning across the country. “Trump’s cuts to Medicaid and tax breaks for billionaires have given us a message we can unite around.”
They still have plenty of differences over specific policies — but a spirited debate, some say, is exactly what the party needs.
“The most important task of the Democratic Party is to organize … the most robust debate Democrats have had in a generation,” said William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution, a former Clinton aide who argues that the party needs to move to the center.
Here’s what most Democratic leaders agree on: They’ve heard their voters’ demands for a more vigorous fight against Trump. They agree that they need to reconnect with working-class voters who don’t believe the party really cares about them. They need to cast themselves as a party of change, not the status quo. And they need to begin by regaining control of the House of Representatives next year.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) says the Democrats have “found our footing.”
(Sue Ogrocki / Associated Press)
Most Democrats also agree that they need to focus on a positive message on economic issues such as the cost of living — to use this year’s buzzword, “affordability.”
But they differ on the specifics.
Progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have focused on “fighting oligarchy,” including higher taxes on the wealthy and government-run health insurance.
Khanna, a Silicon Valley progressive, is campaigning for a program he calls “economic patriotism” — essentially, industrial policies to spur investments in strategic sectors.
Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, a blunt-spoken populist, wants to make capitalism do more for ordinary workers. “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck,” he said in an interview with the New York Times. “We’re afraid of saying, like, ‘Hey, let’s help you get a job so you can become rich.’”
And from the party’s centrist wing, former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel describes his program as “build, baby, build,” arguing that Democrats should focus on making housing affordable and expanding technical and vocational education.
A sharper debate has opened over social and cultural issues: Should Democrats break with the identity politics — the stuff Republicans deride as “woke” — that animates much of their progressive wing? Moderate Democrats argue that “wokeness” has alienated voters in the center and made it impossible to win presidential elections.
“I think there’s a perception that Democrats became so focused on identity that we no longer had a message that could actually speak to people across the board,” former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told NPR last month.
The controversy over transgender women and girls in women’s sports has become an early test. Newsom, Buttigieg and Emanuel have broken with the left, arguing that there’s a case for barring transgender women from competition. “It is an issue of fairness,” Newsom said on his podcast in March.
Their statements prompted fierce backlash from LGBTQ+ rights advocates. “I’m now going to go into a witness protection plan,” Emanuel joked in an interview with conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly in July.
Other Democrats have tread more cautiously. “We need to make a compelling economic vision … our first, second and third priority,” Khanna said. Meanwhile, be said, “we can stay true to our values.”
Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin was blunter. “We have to stand up for every LGBTQ kid and their family who want to play sports like any other kid,” he said last week.
Those battles will play out over the long campaign, already in its first stirrings, for the next presidential nomination — the traditional way American political parties settle on a single message.
“It takes time for a party to get up off the mat,” acknowledged Sosnik, the former Clinton strategist. “We didn’t get here overnight. We’re not going to get out of it overnight.”
A decade’s worth of disappointment has conditioned Black Americans and Democrats to fear voting-rights rulings from the Supreme Court. In 2013, a 5–4 majority invalidated a core tenet of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Subsequent decisions have chipped away at the rest of the law, and in 2019, a majority of the justices declared that federal courts have no power to bar partisan gerrymandering.
So this morning, when two conservatives joined the high court’s three liberals in reaffirming a central part of the Voting Rights Act, Democrats reacted as much with shock as with relief. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder that stripped the government’s power to vet state voting laws in advance, today released an opinion ruling that Alabama’s congressional map illegally diluted the votes of Black people by packing them into one majority-minority district rather than two.
The decision in the case known as Allen v. Milligan preserves, for now, the landmark civil-rights law that many legal observers worried the Court would render all but moot. It also could have important ramifications for the 2024 elections and control of the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold just a five-seat majority.
Many Democrats believe that the ruling will have a domino effect on other pending cases and ultimately force three southern states—not only Alabama but also Louisiana and Georgia—to each add a new majority-minority district before the congressional election, which would almost certainly flip seats currently held by Republicans. Texas might have to add as many as five majority-minority districts to its map. “It really clears the path for these cases to move forward hopefully in a quick resolution,” Abha Khanna, a Democratic lawyer who argued the Allen case before the Supreme Court on behalf of Black voters from Alabama, told me.
These potential gains could more than offset the losses that Democrats are anticipating in North Carolina, where a new conservative majority on the state supreme court is expected to draw a congressional map more favorable to Republicans. After the ruling, the nonpartisan prognosticator Cook Political Report immediately shifted its projections for the 2024 elections by moving five House seats in the Democrats’ direction.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a 2018 appointee of former President Donald Trump, joined Roberts and the Court’s three Democratic appointees, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in the 5–4 ruling. The decision was surprising not only because it ran counter to the Court’s recent jurisprudence on voting rights but also because last year, a majority of justices left in place the same maps that the Court today deemed illegal. That ruling, which came in an unsigned opinion on the Court’s so-called shadow docket, might have made the difference in the Democrats losing their House majority.
“While we were certainly disappointed,” Khanna told me of that decision, “I think today’s victory shows that in this case, justice delayed was not justice denied.”
Advocates for voting rights were caught off guard. “Supreme Court Shocks Nation by Doing the Right Thing,” one left-leaning group, Take Back the Court, wrote in the subject line of an email that read like a headline from The Onion. George Cheung, the director of a voting-rights group called More Equitable Democracy, told me he was stunned by the ruling: “I and many others assumed that they would undermine if not completely gut what remained of the federal Voting Rights Act.”
Instead, the Court’s majority rejected a bid by Alabama to reinterpret the redistricting provisions of Section 2 of the law as “race neutral,” a change that would have reversed the VRA’s original intent to protect disenfranchised Black voters.
For Democrats, the decision offered a rare moment to celebrate a ruling from an institution in which many in the party have lost faith. The Court’s decisions in earlier voting-rights cases, on gun laws, the environment, campaign finance, and in particular the national right to abortion—which was reversed last year—have led progressives to accuse conservative justices of ruling according to their political preferences instead of the law
The Court’s decision, Khanna told me, shouldn’t have been surprising—even if, to many people, it clearly was. “It’s certainly a remarkable victory for the Voting Rights Act and for minority voting rights,” she said, “but it’s rather unremarkable, because what it says is the law is as we have said it to be for the last nearly 40 years.”
