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  • Van Hollen, Democrats in Iowa call for end to political violence after Kirk’s killing

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    Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) speaks with Iowa state Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott, who is running for Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, at the Polk County Democrats Steak Fry in Des Moines on Saturday. (Photo by Robin Opsahl/Iowa Capital Dispatch)

    Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Iowa congressional candidates took time Saturday at the Polk County Democrats’ Steak Fry to condemn political violence in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s killing in Utah.

    Van Hollen, gave a keynote address at event, an annual Iowa fundraiser that featured speeches from Democratic candidates for Iowa’s U.S. Senate race, as well as from the 3rd and 4th congressional district races. He spoke about Kirk’s death, saying the shooting is a reminder of “how fragile our democracy can feel,” while criticizing Trump’s response to the issue.

    On Wednesday, Kirk, the co-founder of Turning Point USA, was shot while answering a question at an event at Utah Valley University. The suspected gunman was identified and taken into custody Friday.

    Politicians and leaders mourned Kirk’s death and called for a change to prevent future politically motivated violence.

    “The answer cannot be more violence,” Van Hollen said. “The answer cannot be vengeance. And sadly, the president is using this moment not to unite America against political violence, but to engage in finger pointing.

    “But we will not be silenced. We will speak out for what we believe vigorously, courageously and peacefully,” he said.

    Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart said it has been a “really hard week” in light of Kirk’s death, and that Democrats, and all Americans, need to take steps to ensure these threats are eliminated.

    “We don’t have to look very far to see other examples of violence that has occurred because of political leanings,” Hart said, in part referring to the fatal shooting of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman in June. “And none of us find that to be acceptable, because it simply isn’t.

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    “We live in a country that was founded on the principle that we could stand up in a place like this and express our feelings, our thoughts, our attitudes, our beliefs and our political leanings, and not get shot because we have an opinion or a thought that’s different than somebody else’s,” she said.

    In Iowa, there has been an outpouring of sympathy for Kirk’s family and calls to stop political violence. Speaking with reporters, Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate called for an end to political violence.

    In recent days, there has been some criticism from Republicans and others of Iowans, including some teachers, who have made controversial social media posts about Kirk’s death.

    Democratic Senate candidate Jackie Norris, the school board president for the Des Moines Public Schools, said political violence was unacceptable, and that teachers — alongside most people — should be more cognizant of what they are publicly posting on social media. However, Norris added, “we have to respect that people have different views,” including teachers.

    “It is important that we tone down the rhetoric, but we also have to respect that (teachers) have strong feelings too,” Norris said. “It’s a balance.”

    Van Hollen calls Democrats ‘spineless’ for not backing Mamdani

    Van Hollen also told Iowans at the event that winning in 2026 will mean Democrats must be outspokenly in support of Democratic candidates running in 2025 races — including New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

    The Maryland Democrat said Iowa would play an important role in the 2026 midterms — but that supporting Democrats in 2025 races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, as well as for New York City mayor, will help build “momentum” for 2026.

    Van Hollen criticized New York Democrats for not supporting Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who won the Democratic mayoral primary. He said many Democrats representing New York in the U.S. House and Senate have “stayed on the sidelines” as President Donald Trump and others have mobilized to defeat the Democratic candidate.

    “That kind of spineless politics is what people are sick of,” Van Hollen said. “They need to get behind him and get behind him now.”

    Van Hollen criticized other aspects of the Democratic Party, saying the Biden administration was “feckless” in holding the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accountable to U.S. and international law. But he largely focused his remarks on Trump and Republicans in control of Congress.

    In addition to talking about Medicaid cuts and criticizing Trump’s foreign policy decisions, Van Hollen said the Trump administration was violating people’s constitutional rights by pursuing mass deportations. Van Hollen gained a significant national platform earlier in 2025 for his work involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who was deported to El Salvador erroneously and held in prison there before being returned to the U.S. He is currently being held in Virginia by immigration authorities.

    Van Hollen was one of the major advocates for returning Abrego Garcia to this country and allowing his case to go through the U.S. court system. At Saturday’s event, he said he was advised not to pursue the issue, as immigration is not a winning topic for Democrats, but said he continued to fight for Abrego Garcia’s due process rights because “our democracy cannot survive on silence or equivocation.”

    “And lo and behold, Americans across the political spectrum do believe in the red, white and blue essential right to due process in the United States of America,” he said. “They do believe in the principle that no one in America — I mean, no one — should be disappeared by the state without having a chance before a court of law.
    “And Americans understand this is not about one man,” Van Hollen said. “It’s about all of us. Because when you strip away the rights from one person, you threaten the rights … of all of us.”

    Abrego Garcia has been returned to the U.S., though the Trump administration has said it intends to deport him again, potentially to the country of Eswatini, previously known as Swaziland.

    Van Hollen said he would “never, ever apologize for standing up for anybody’s constitutional rights,” and said Democrats need to do more to speak out on issues they believe are important, even if polls or pundits say the topics are not politically advantageous. This will be especially important in states like Iowa, he said.

    “We can and we will win here again, if — if — we speak to our core values, if we show people what we will stand up for and we will fight for,” Van Hollen said. “That’s why it’s great to be here to flip steaks and flip seats.”

    – This story originally appeared in Iowa Capital Dispatch, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com.

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  • U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Democrats call for end to political violence after Charlie Kirk’s death

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    U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, spoke to state Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott, who is running for Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District in 2026 at the Polk County Democrats Steak Fry in Des Moines Sep. 13, 2025. (Photo by Robin Opsahl/Iowa Capital Dispatch)

    U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, and Iowa congressional candidates took time Saturday at the Polk County Democrats’ Steak Fry to condemn political violence in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s killing in Utah.

    The Polk County Democrats Steak Fry, an annual fundraiser, featured speeches from Democratic candidates for Iowa’s U.S. Senate race, as well as from the 3rd and 4th congressional district races. Van Hollen, who gave a keynote address at the event, spoke about Kirk’s death, saying the shooting is a reminder of “how fragile our democracy can feel,” while criticizing Trump’s response to the issue.

    On Wednesday, Kirk, the co-founder of Turning Point USA, was shot while answering a question at an event at Utah Valley University. The suspected gunman was identified and taken into custody Friday. Politicians and leaders mourned Kirk’s death and called for a change to prevent future politically motivated violence.

    SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX

    “The answer cannot be more violence,” Van Hollen said. “The answer cannot be vengeance. And sadly, the president is using this moment not to unite America against political violence, but to engage in finger pointing. But we will not be silenced. We will speak out for what we believe vigorously, courageously and peacefully.”

    Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart said it has been a “really hard week” in light of Kirk’s death, and that Democrats, and all Americans, need to take steps to ensure these threats are eliminated.

    “We don’t have to look very far to see other examples of violence that has occurred because of political leanings,” Hart said, in part referring to the fatal shooting of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman in June. “And none of us find that to be acceptable, because it simply isn’t. We live in a country that was founded on the principle that we could stand up in a place like this and express our feelings, our thoughts, our attitudes, our beliefs and our political leanings, and not get shot because we have an opinion or a thought that’s different than somebody else’s.”

    In Iowa, there has been an outpouring of sympathy for Kirk’s family and calls to stop political violence. Speaking with reporters, Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate called for an end to political violence.

    In recent days, there has been some criticism from Republicans and others of Iowans, including some teachers, who have made controversial social media posts about Kirk’s death.

    Democratic Senate candidate Jackie Norris, the school board president for the Des Moines Public Schools, said political violence was unacceptable, and that teachers — alongside most people — should be more cognizant of what their are publicly posting on social media. However, Norris added, “we have to respect that people have different views,” including teachers.

    “It is important that we tone down the rhetoric, but we also have to respect that (teachers) have strong feelings too,” Norris said. “It’s a balance.”

    Van Hollen calls Democrats ‘spineless’ for not backing Mamdani

    Van Hollen also told Iowans at the event winning in 2026 elections will mean Democrats must be outspokenly in support of Democratic candidates running in 2025 races — including New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

    The Maryland Democrat said Iowa would play an important role in the 2026 midterms — but that supporting Democrats in 2025 races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, as well as for New York City mayor, will help build “momentum” for 2026.

    Van Hollen criticized New York Democrats for not supporting Mamdani, who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He said many Democrats representing New York in the U.S. House and Senate have “stayed on the sidelines” as President Donald Trump and others have mobilized to defeat the Democratic candidate.

    “That kind of spineless politics is what people are sick of,” Van Hollen said. “They need to get behind him and get behind him now.”

    Van Hollen criticized other aspects of the Democratic Party, saying the Biden administration was “feckless” in holding the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accountable to U.S. and international law. But he largely focused his remarks on Trump and Republicans in control of Congress.

    In addition to talking about Medicaid cuts and criticizing Trump’s foreign policy decisions, Van Hollen said the Trump administration was violating people’s constitutional rights by pursuing mass deportations. The Maryland Democrat gained a significant national platform earlier in 2025 for his work involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who was deported to El Salvador erroneously and held in the country’s megaprison.

    Van Hollen was one of the major advocates for returning Abrego Garcia to the country and allowing his case to go through the U.S. court system. At the Saturday event, Van Hollen told Iowans he was advised not to pursue the issue as immigration was not a winning topic for Democrats — but he said he continued to fight for Abrego Garcia’s due process rights because “our democracy cannot survive on silence or equivocation.”

    “And lo and behold, Americans across the political spectrum do believe in the red, white and blue essential right to due process in the United States of America,” he said. “They do believe in the principle that no one in America — I mean, no one — should be disappeared by the state without having a chance before a court of law. And Americans understand this is not about one man. It’s about all of us. Because when you strip away the rights from one person, you threaten the rights of all, of all of us.”

    Abrego Garcia has been returned to the U.S., though the Trump administration has stated they intend to deport him again, potentially to the country of Eswatini.

    Van Hollen said he would “never, ever apologize for standing up for anybody’s constitutional rights,” and said Democrats need to do more to speak out on issues they believe are important, even if polls or pundits say the topics are not politically advantageous. This will be especially important in states like Iowa, he said.

    “We can and we will win here again, if — if — we speak to our core values, if we show people what we will stand up for and we will fight for,” Van Hollen said. “That’s why it’s great to be here to flip steaks and flip seats.”

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  • Sonia Sotomayor Should Retire Now

    Sonia Sotomayor Should Retire Now

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    On Election Day in 2006, Justice Antonin Scalia was 70 years old and had been serving on the Supreme Court for 20 years. That year would have been an opportune time for him to retire—Republicans held the White House and the Senate, and they could have confirmed a young conservative justice who likely would have held the seat for decades to come. Instead, he tried to stay on the Court until the next time a Republican president would have a clear shot to nominate and confirm a conservative successor.

    He didn’t make it—he died unexpectedly in February 2016, at the age of 79, while Barack Obama was president. Conservatives nevertheless engineered some good fortune: There was divided control of government, and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to even hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee to the seat. Donald Trump won that fall’s election and named Neil Gorsuch to the seat that McConnell had held open.

    But imagine for a moment that Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, as many expected. By running a few points stronger, she might have taken Democratic candidates across the finish line in close races in Pennsylvania and Missouri, resulting in Democratic control of the Senate. In that scenario, Clinton would have named a liberal successor to Scalia—more liberal than Garland—and conservatives would have lost control of the Court, all because of Scalia’s failure to retire at the opportune moment.

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor will turn 70 in June. If she retires this year, President Joe Biden will nominate a young and reliably liberal judge to replace her. Republicans do not control the Senate floor and cannot force the seat to be held open like they did when Scalia died. Confirmation of the new justice will be a slam dunk, and liberals will have successfully shored up one of their seats on the Court—playing the kind of defense that is smart and prudent when your only hope of controlling the Court again relies on both the timing of the death or retirement of conservative judges and not losing your grip on the three seats you already hold.

    But if Sotomayor does not retire this year, we don’t know when she will next be able to retire with a likely liberal replacement. It’s possible that Democrats will retain the presidency and the Senate in this year’s elections, in which case the insurance created by a Sotomayor retirement won’t have been necessary. But if Democrats lose the presidency or the Senate this fall—or both—she’ll need to stay on the bench until the party once again controls them. That could be just a few years, or it could be longer. Democrats have previously had to wait as long as 14 years (1995 to 2009). In other words, if Sotomayor doesn’t retire this year, she’ll be making a bet that she will remain fit to serve until possibly age 78 or even 82 or 84—and she’ll be forcing the whole Democratic Party to make that high-stakes bet with her.

    Steven Mazie: The Supreme Court justices do not seem to be getting along

    If Democrats lose the bet, the Court’s 6–3 conservative majority will turn into a 7–2 majority at some point within the next decade. If they win the bet, what do they win? They win the opportunity to read dissents written by Sotomayor instead of some other liberal justice. This is obviously an insane trade. Democrats talk a lot about the importance of the Court and the damage that has been done since it has swung in a more conservative direction, most obviously including the end of constitutional protections for abortion rights. So why aren’t Democrats demanding Sotomayor’s retirement?

    Well, they are whispering about it. Politico reported in January:

    Some Democrats close to the Biden administration and high-profile lawyers with past White House experience spoke to West Wing Playbook on condition of anonymity about their support for Sotomayor’s retirement. But none would go on the record about it. They worried that publicly calling for the first Latina justice to step down would appear gauche or insensitive. Privately, they say Sotomayor has provided an important liberal voice on the court, even as they concede that it would be smart for the party if she stepped down before the 2024 election.

    This is incredibly gutless. You’re worried about putting control of the Court completely out of reach for more than a generation, but because she is Latina, you can’t hurry along an official who’s putting your entire policy project at risk? If this is how the Democratic Party operates, it deserves to lose.

    The cowardice in speaking up about Sotomayor—a diabetic who has in some instances traveled with a medic—is part of a broader insanity in the way that the Democratic Party thinks about diversity and representation. Representation is supposed to be important because the presence of different sorts of people in positions of power helps ensure that the interests and preferences of various communities are taken into account when making policy. But in practice, Democratic Party actions regarding diversity tend to be taken for the benefit of officials rather than demographic groups. What’s more important for ordinary Latina women who support Democrats—that there not be one more vote against abortion rights on the Supreme Court, or that Sotomayor is personally there to write dissenting opinions? The answer is obvious, unless you work in Democratic politics for a living, in which case it apparently becomes a difficult call.

    I thought Democrats had learned a lesson from the Ruth Bader Ginsburg episode about the importance of playing defense on a Court where you don’t hold the majority. Building a cult of personality around one particular justice served to reinforce the idea that it was reasonable for her to stay on the bench far into old age, and her unfortunate choice to do so ultimately led to Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment and a string of conservative policy victories. All liberals have to show for this stubbornness is a bunch of dissents and kitsch home decor. In 2021, it seemed that liberals had indeed learned their lesson—not only was there a well-organized effort to hound the elderly Stephen Breyer out of office, but the effort was quite rude. (I’m not sure screaming “Retire, bitch” at Stephen Breyer was strictly necessary, but I wasn’t bothered by it either—he was a big boy, and he could take it.) But I guess maybe the lesson was learned only for instances where the justice in question is a white man.

    One obvious response to this argument is that the president is also old—much older, indeed, than Sonia Sotomayor. I am aware, and I consider this to be a serious problem. But Democrats are unlikely to find a way to replace Biden with a younger candidate who enhances their odds of winning the election. The Sotomayor situation is different. Her age problem can be dealt with very simply by her retiring and the president picking a candidate to replace her who is young and broadly acceptable (maybe even exciting) to Democratic Party insiders. And if Democrats want to increase the odds of getting there, they should be saying in public that she should step down. In order to do that, they’ll have to get over their fear of being called racist or sexist or ageist.

    This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.

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  • The Special Election That Could Give Democrats Hope for November

    The Special Election That Could Give Democrats Hope for November

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    Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.

    In late 2021, Tom Suozzi made an announcement that exasperated Democratic Party leaders: The third-term representative would give up a reelection bid for his highly competitive New York House district to mount a long-shot primary challenge against Governor Kathy Hochul.

    Suozzi got trounced, but the ripple effects of his ill-fated run extended far beyond his Long Island district. Democrats ended up losing their narrow majority in the House, in part because the seat Suozzi vacated went to a little-known Republican named George Santos. He’s not so little-known anymore. Nor is he in Congress, having been expelled in December after his colleagues discovered that his stated biography was a fiction and that his campaign was an alleged criminal enterprise.

    Steve Israel: How a perfectly normal New York suburb elected a con man

    In a special election next week, Suozzi will try to reclaim the seat he abandoned—and bring the Democrats one step closer to recapturing the House. He’s made amends with party leaders (including Hochul), but he’s not apologizing. “I don’t regret any of my decisions,” Suozzi told me recently. “When things don’t work out, that’s the way it is.”

    A pro-business moderate, Suozzi helped start the cross-party Problem Solvers Caucus in the House after Donald Trump won the presidency. He told me that his penchant for bipartisanship makes him “a very poor candidate” in a Democratic primary—he’s now lost two such gubernatorial campaigns by more than 50 points—but a much better one in a general election.

    Officials in both parties give Suozzi a slight edge; he has more money and is much better known than his GOP opponent, Mazi Pilip, a county legislator who spent her teenage years in Israel and served in the Israeli Defense Forces. But Suozzi is trying to run as an underdog, shunning a Democratic brand that he believes has been soiled on Long Island by voter frustration with the migrant crisis, the high cost of living, and turmoil overseas. He’s kept his distance from President Joe Biden, who, according to both Democratic and Republican strategists, is no more popular in the district than Trump. “If I run my campaign to say, ‘I’m Tom Suozzi. I’m the Democrat, and my opponent’s the Republican,’ I lose this race,” Suozzi said at a rally before members of the carpenters’ union on Saturday.

    The third congressional district borders the blue bastion of New York City and includes a sliver of Queens, but Republicans have clobbered Democrats across Long Island in recent years. Tuesday’s special election represents the Democrats’ first attempt to claw back some of that territory and test out messages that they hope can resonate in suburban swing districts across the country this fall.

    Like other Democrats, Suozzi is emphasizing his support for abortion rights, an issue that has helped the party limit GOP gains since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But he’s also pitching himself as a bipartisan dealmaker—his campaign slogan is “Let’s fix this!” Suozzi is betting that voters are angered as much by congressional inaction on issues such as immigration and border security as they are by Biden or his policies. If he’s right, the GOP’s rejection this week of a bipartisan border deal that its leaders had initially demanded will play into his hands.

    Whether Suozzi’s campaign proves effective next week will offer clues about the swing districts that could determine control of Congress. A win could point the way for Democratic candidates to redirect attacks on Biden’s record and ease fears that the border impasse could be an insurmountable liability this fall. But his defeat in a district that ought to be winnable for Democrats would suggest that the party is in real trouble as the general election begins.

    Next week’s election will also serve as a test of whether Democrats can turn out voters for a candidate who, like Biden, doesn’t inspire much enthusiasm.

    Read: Is Biden toast?

    Suozzi, 61, is a familiar figure on Long Island; he became a mayor at 31 and then won two terms as a county executive overseeing a population of 1.3 million people in Nassau County. But he’s also suffered his share of defeats. Eliot Spitzer beat him by more than 60 points in the 2006 primary for governor. Suozzi then lost two campaigns for county executive before winning a House seat in 2016. “He felt that he was destined to be president of the United States,” former Representative Peter King, a Republican who served alongside Suozzi in the House and has known him for decades, told me. “Tom started off as the young superstar, and then suddenly you become old.”

    On Saturday, local labor organizers amassed several hundred members of the carpenters’ union in a banquet hall for the rally. Most of them had been bused from outside the district, and many of them weren’t exactly excited to be there. “We’re here under protest,” one union member grumbled as I searched for actual Suozzi supporters in the crowd. The murmuring laborers showed so little interest in the speakers who were touting Suozzi that the candidate at one point awkwardly grabbed the microphone and implored them to pay attention.

    Some of the attendees who did live in Nassau County weren’t thrilled about the Democrat, repeating attacks from GOP ads that have been airing nonstop in recent weeks. “Suozzi’s terrible on the border,” said Jackson Klyne, 44, who told me he didn’t plan to vote for either Suozzi or Pilip next week. A Biden voter in 2020, Klyne said that “it would probably be Trump” for him in November.

    Suozzi must also win over Democrats who are unhappy that he abandoned his congressional seat to challenge Hochul, leading to the election of Santos. “It was a dangerous choice,” Stephanie Visconti, a 47-year-old attorney from New Hyde Park, told me. “I thought it was self-serving.”

    Visconti volunteers with Engage Long Island, an affiliate of the progressive organizing group Indivisible that endorsed a primary challenger to Suozzi for Congress in 2020. But she fully backs him now; on Saturday, she and other members of the group were knocking on doors for his campaign. “He is the right candidate for right now,” she said, citing the need for Democrats to win back control of the House. “Looking at the global big picture, this for us is the first step toward making bigger and broader changes.”

    Biden carried the district in 2020, but Republicans have been ascendant on Long Island ever since. They swept the House races in the midterms and won big local races again last year. Santos defeated the Democratic nominee in the third district by seven points in 2022, and Suozzi isn’t sure he would have won had he been on the ballot. When I asked him what he’d say to people who argue that he bears some responsibility for Santos’s election, Suozzi replied, “‘Thank you for your endorsement, because you’re saying I’m the only person who could have won.’”

    Republican leaders are relying on Biden’s unpopularity and their party’s prodigious turnout machine to keep the seat. They picked Pilip as their candidate—the special election had no primary—in part because in the aftermath of October 7, they hoped that her connection to Israel would resonate in a district where about 20 percent of the electorate is Jewish. (Suozzi is also a longtime supporter of Israel. Within a week of Pilip’s selection, he traveled there to meet with the families of hostages held by Hamas.)

    With only a few exceptions, Pilip has kept a low profile for a political newcomer. She’s agreed to just one debate with Suozzi, three days before the election, and she hasn’t held many publicly promoted campaign events. (Her campaign did not make her available for an interview.) Nassau County Republicans scheduled their biggest rally of the election for a Saturday, when Pilip, who observes the Sabbath, would not be able to attend. She filmed a short video to be played in her absence. “The strategy is intentional,” Steve Israel, a Democrat who represented the third district in the House for 16 years, told me. “She is untested, and Republicans fear that she will say something that could effectively lose the election. They’d rather take their lumps for hiding her.”

    That approach could be risky given the district’s experience with Santos. “We’ve already had someone we didn’t know. We don’t want that again,” Judi Bosworth, a Democratic former town supervisor, said as she campaigned with Suozzi.

    Abortion has been a central issue in the race; Democratic ads have warned that a vote for Pilip could lead to a national ban. But in the closing weeks, the migrant crisis has come to the fore. GOP commercials blame Suozzi and Biden for the “invasion” at the southern border, and Suozzi has criticized Pilip for opposing the bipartisan border-security deal unveiled this week in the Senate. Although national issues are dominating the race, neither candidate wants to be associated with their party’s leaders in Washington. Pilip, until recently a registered Democrat, has declined to say whether she voted for Trump in 2020 and has yet to endorse his comeback bid. When House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries spoke at a rally for Suozzi on Saturday, the Democrat’s campaign did not invite the press. The day before, the Pilip campaign kept quiet about an appearance by Speaker Mike Johnson.

    The outcome next week could have an immediate impact in the narrowly divided House, where Republicans have only a three-vote majority. Earlier this week, Republicans fell just one vote short of impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; a Suozzi victory would likely keep it on hold, at least for the time being. But Suozzi wants to make a deeper impression in a second stint in Congress. He has campaigned not as a dispassionate centrist but as an impatient negotiator anxious to get back to the bargaining table.

    He had wanted a bigger job altogether, but he assured me that he would not be bored by a return to the House. I asked him what message his victory would send. He rattled off a list of bipartisan deals he wants to strike—on the border, Ukraine, housing, climate change, and more. “If I win,” he said, “I can go to my colleagues in Washington and say, ‘Wake up. This is what the people want.’”

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  • Is Biden Toast?

    Is Biden Toast?

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    It’s a year before the presidential election, and Democrats are panicking. Their incumbent is unpopular, and voters are refusing to give him credit for overseeing an economic rebound. Polls show him losing to a Republican challenger.

    What’s true now was also true 12 years ago. Today, Democrats are alarmed by recent surveys finding that President Joe Biden trails Donald Trump in five key swing states. But they were just as scared in the fall of 2011, when President Barack Obama’s approval rating languished in the low 40s and a pair of national polls showed him losing to Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who would become the GOP nominee. Barely one-third of independent voters said Obama deserved a second term. A New York Times Magazine cover story asked the question on many Democrats’ minds: “Is Obama Toast?”

    A year later, Obama beat Romney handily, by a margin of 126 in the Electoral College and 5 million in the popular vote. Those results are comforting to Democrats who want to believe that Biden is no worse off than Obama was at this point in his presidency. “This is exactly where we were with Obama,” Jim Messina, the former president’s 2012 campaign manager, told me by phone this week. For good measure, he looked up data from earlier elections and found that George W. Bush and Bill Clinton each trailed in the polls a year out from their reelection victories. Perhaps, Messina hoped, that would “calm my bed-wetting fucking Democratic friends down.”

    Yet the comparison between Biden today and Obama in 2011 goes only so far. The most obvious difference is that Biden, who turns 81 this month, is nearly three decades older than Obama was at the time of his second presidential campaign. (He’s also much older than Clinton and Bush were during their reelection bids.) Voters across party lines cite Biden’s age as a top concern, and a majority of Democrats have told pollsters for the past two years that he shouldn’t run again. Obama was in the prime of his political career, an electrifying orator who could reenergize the Democratic base with a few well-timed speeches. Not even Biden’s biggest defenders would claim that he has the same ability. Put simply, he looks and sounds his age.

    Watch: America’s aging presidential front-runners

    In a recent national CNN poll that showed Trump with a four-percentage-point lead over Biden, just a quarter of respondents said the president had “the stamina and sharpness to serve”; more than half said the 77-year-old Trump did. Privately, Democratic lawmakers and aides have fretted that the White House has kept the president too caged in for fear of a verbal or physical stumble. At the same time, they worry that a diminished Biden is unable to deliver a winning economic message to voters.

    “The greatest concern is that his biggest liability is the one thing he can’t change,” David Axelrod, Obama’s longtime chief strategist, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on the day that The New York Times and Siena College released polls showing Trump ahead of Biden by as much as 10 points in battleground states. “The age arrow only points in one direction.” Axelrod’s acknowledgment of a reality that many senior Democrats are hesitant to admit publicly, and his gentle suggestion that Biden at least consider the wisdom of running again, renewed concerns that the president and his party are ignoring a consistent message from their voters: Nominate someone else.

    Tuesday’s election results, in which Democratic candidates and causes notched wins in Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio, helped allay those concerns—at least for some in the party. “It’s way too early to either pop the champagne or hang the funeral crepe,” Steve Israel, the former New York representative who chaired the Democrats’ House campaign arm during Obama’s presidency, told me on Wednesday. “Biden has the advantage of time, money, a bully pulpit, and, based on last night’s results, the fact that voters in battleground areas seem to agree with Democrats on key issues like abortion.”

    The Biden campaign embraced the victories as the continuation of a trend in which Democrats have performed better in recent elections than the president’s polling would suggest. “Time and again, Joe Biden beats expectations,” the campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler told reporters Thursday morning. “The bottom line is that polls a year out don’t matter. Results do.”

    The Democrats’ strength in off-year elections, however, may not contradict Biden’s lackluster standing in a hypothetical matchup against Trump. The political realignment since Obama’s presidency—in which college-educated suburban voters have drifted left while working-class voters have joined Trump’s GOP—has given Democrats the upper hand in lower-turnout elections. The traditionally left-leaning constituencies that have soured on Biden, including younger and nonwhite voters, tend to show up only for presidential votes.

    As Messina pointed out, the overall economy is better now than it was in late 2011 under Obama, when the unemployment rate was still over 8 percent—more than double the current rate of 3.9 percent. But voters don’t seem to feel that way. Their biggest economic preoccupation is not jobs but high prices, and although the rate of inflation has come down, costs have not. Polling by the Democratic firm Blueprint found a huge disconnect between what voters believe Biden is focused on—jobs—and what they care most about: inflation. “It’s very alarming,” Evan Roth Smith, who oversaw the poll, told reporters in a presentation of the findings this week. “It tells a lot of the story about why Bidenomics is not resonating, and is not redounding to the benefit of the president.”

    Nothing stirs more frustration among Democrats, including some Biden allies, than the sense that the president is misreading the electorate and trying to sell voters on an economy that isn’t working for them. “It takes far longer to rebuild the middle class than it took to destroy the middle class,” Representative Ro Khanna of California, a former Bernie Sanders supporter who now serves on an advisory board for Biden’s reelection, told me. “No politician, president or incumbent, should be celebrating the American economy in the years to come until there is dramatic improvement in the lives of middle-class and working-class Americans.” Khanna said that Biden should be “much more aggressive” in drawing an economic contrast with Trump and attacking him in the same way that Obama attacked Romney—as a supplicant for wealthy and corporate interests who will destroy the nation’s social safety net. “Donald Trump is a much more formidable candidate than Mitt Romney,” Khanna said. “So it’s a harder challenge.”

    Just how strong a threat Trump poses to Biden is a matter of dispute among Democrats. Although all of the Democrats I spoke with predicted that next year’s election would be close, some of them took solace in Trump’s weakness as a GOP nominee—and not only because he might be running as a convicted felon. “Donald Trump, for all of his visibility, is prone to making big mistakes,” Israel said. “A Biden-versus-Trump matchup will reveal Trump’s mistakes and help correct the current polling.”

    David Frum: Here’s what Biden can do to change his grim polling

    The New York Times–Siena polls found that an unnamed “generic” Democrat would fare much better against Trump than Biden would. But they also found that a generic Republican would trounce Biden by an even larger margin. “Mitt Romney was a much harder candidate than Donald Trump,” Messina told me. (When I pointed out that Khanna had made the opposite assertion, he replied, “He’s in Congress. I’m not. I won a presidential election. He didn’t.”)

    None of the Democrats I interviewed was pining for another nominee, or for Biden to drop out. Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota hasn’t secured a single noteworthy endorsement since announcing his long-shot primary challenge. Vice President Kamala Harris is no more popular among voters, and all of the Democrats I spoke with expressed doubts that the candidacy of a relatively untested governor—say, Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, or Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania—would make a Democratic victory more likely. Messina said that if Biden dropped out, a flood of ambitious Democrats would immediately enter the race, and a free-for-all primary could produce an even weaker nominee. “Are we sure that’s what we want?” Messina asked.

    Others downplayed Biden’s poor polling, particularly the finding that Democrats don’t want him to run again. Their reasoning, however, hinted at a sense of resignation about the coming campaign. Israel compared the choice voters face to a person deciding whether or not to renew a lease on their car: “I’m not sure I want to extend the lease, until I looked at other models and realized I’m going to stick with what I have,” he explained. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said that voters he talks to don’t bring up Biden’s age as an issue; only the media does. “I don’t know. He’s old, but he’s also really tall,” Murphy told me. “I don’t care about tall presidents if it doesn’t impact their ability to do the job. I don’t really care about presidents who are older if it doesn’t impact their ability to do the job either.” He was unequivocal: “I think we need Joe Biden as our nominee.”

    For most Democrats, the debate over whether Biden should run again is now mostly academic. The president has made his decision, and top Democrats aren’t pressuring him to change his mind. Democrats are left to hope that the comparisons to Obama bear out and the advantages of incumbency kick in. Biden’s age—he’d be 86 at the end of a second term—is a fact of life. “You have to lean into it,” Israel told me. “You can’t ignore it.” How, I asked him, should Biden lean into the age issue? “I don’t know,” Israel replied. “That’s what a campaign is for.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • A Politician Who Loved Being Courted

    A Politician Who Loved Being Courted

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    Every so often, someone asks me who my favorite politicians to write about over the years have been. I always place Bill Richardson, the longtime congressman and former governor of New Mexico, near the top of my list. I once mentioned this to Richardson himself.

    “How high on the list?” he immediately wanted to know. “Top 10? Top three? I get competitive, you know.”

    Richardson died in his sleep on Friday, at age 75. I will miss covering this man, the two-term Democratic governor, seven-term congressman, United Nations ambassador, energy secretary, crisis diplomat, occasional mischief magnet, and freelance hostage negotiator who even holds the Guinness World Record for the politician who’s shaken the most hands—13,392—in an eight-hour period.

    “Make sure you mention that Guinness World Record thing,” Richardson urged me the first time I wrote about him, in 2003. “The handshake record is important to me.”

    Why? I asked. “Because it shows that I love politics,” he replied. “And I do love politics. I love to campaign. I love parades. I don’t believe I’m pretentious. I’m very earthy.”

    But why was the fact that he loved politics important?

    “Because I’m sick of all these politicians these days who are always trying to convince you that they are not really politicians,” Richardson went on. I had noticed this phenomenon as well, and it holds up: that the slickest and most unctuous people you encounter in politics are often the ones who spend the most energy trying to convince you they hate politics and are in fact “not professional politicians.”

    “I don’t mind being called a ‘professional politician,’” Richardson added. “It’s better than being an amateur, right?”

    From the September 2023 issue: How America got mean

    Richardson was an original. Born to a Mexican mother and an American businessman, he spent much of his childhood in Mexico City and identified strongly as Latino. He served as chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus in the 1980s and was the only Latino governor in America during his two terms in Santa Fe. Richardson spoke often about how his dual ethnic and cultural identities placed him in advantageous and sometimes awkward positions—“between worlds” (which he’d use as the title of his 2005 memoir).

    His identities also placed Richardson in big demand as probably the most prominent Latino elected official in the country at the time. He absolutely loved being in big demand, and was milking his coveted status as much as possible when I first encountered him. That September, all of the 2004 Democratic candidates for president—John Kerry, Howard Dean, John Edwards, etc.—were straining to pay respects to Richardson after a debate in Albuquerque.

    I was working for the Washington Post Style section at the time, and I found Richardson’s full-frontal “love of the game” quite winning. He was over-the-top and unabashed about the enjoyment he derived from the parade of candidates coming before him. “It’s fun to get your ring kissed,” Richardson told me that night, though he might not have said ring.

    We were walking into a post-debate reception for another candidate, Senator Joe Lieberman. Like most of the Democratic VIPs in Albuquerque that night, Lieberman was an old friend of Richardson’s; they’d worked together on the 1992 Democratic Party platform committee.

    “I wore this to curry favor with you,” Lieberman told Richardson, pointing to a New Mexico pin on his jacket. “You also saw that I spoke a little Spanish in [the debate].”

    “I thought that was Yiddish,” Richardson said. Lieberman then got everyone’s attention and offered a toast to El Jefe.

    Richardson let me ride around with him in the back of his SUV while he tried to hit post-debate receptions for all of the candidates. I noted that he’d instructed the state police driver to keep going faster and faster on Interstate 40—the vehicle hit 110 miles an hour at one point. When I mentioned the triple-digit speed in my story, it caused a bit of a controversy in New Mexico. Ralph Nader made a stink. (“If he will do this with a reporter in the car,” Nader said, according to the Associated Press, “what will they do when there’s no reporter in the car?”)

    The next time I saw Richardson, a few months later, he shook his head at me and tried to deny that the vehicle was going 110.  I held my ground.

    “Oh, whatever. Fuck it,” Richardson said. “That was fun, wasn’t it?”

    Richardson ran for president in 2008, but he quit after finishing fourth in both Iowa and New Hampshire. I had since moved on to The New York Times and used to run into him on the campaign circuit. A few weeks after he dropped out, I went down to Santa Fe to interview him about the lengths that the two remaining Democratic candidates—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—were going to in an attempt to win his endorsement. Another Bill Richardson primary! What could be more fun?

    “Oh, the full-court press is on like you wouldn’t believe,” he told me. The “political anthropology” of this was quite interesting too, he added. “Barack is very precise,” like a “surgical bomb,” Richardson said. “The Clintons are more like a carpet bomb.” He relished my interest in the pursuit of him.

    “I want to make it clear that I’m not annoyed by any of this,” Richardson said of the repeated overtures he was getting from the candidates and their various emissaries. I quoted him saying this in the Times, but not what I said in response to him in the moment: “No shit, governor.”

    I’ll admit that the notion of a pol who loves the game seems quite at odds with the tenor of politics today. People now routinely toss out phrases like our democracy is at stake and existential threat to America, and it’s not necessarily overheated. Fun? Not so much.

    But thinking about Richardson makes me nostalgic for campaigns and election nights that did not feel so much like political Russian roulette. Presidency or prison? Suspend the Constitution or preserve it? Let’s face it: Death threats, mug shots, insurrections, and white supremacists are supreme buzzkills.

    From the October 2023 issue: The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump

    Richardson made it clear to me that he’d loved running for president—it was one of the best times of his life, he said—and he missed the experience of it almost as soon as he got out. But what he really wanted was, you know, the job. “I would have been a good president,” he said in Santa Fe in 2008. “I still believe that. Please put that in there, okay?”

    If nothing else, the Clinton-Obama courtship was a nice cushion for Richardson as he tried to ease back into life in the relative quiet of his governor’s office. It also, he said, might get him a gig in the next administration. Richardson was 60 at the time and said he envisioned “a few more chapters” for himself in public life. Richardson told me he would have loved to be someone’s running mate or secretary of state.

    “I’m not pining for it, and if it doesn’t happen, I’ve had a great life,” he told me. “I’m at peace with myself.”

    He wound up endorsing Obama, who, after he was elected, nominated Richardson to be his secretary of commerce—only to have Richardson withdraw over allegations of improper business dealings as governor (no charges were filed).

    Richardson devoted the last stage of his career to his work as a troubleshooting diplomat and crisis negotiator. He would speak to thugs or warlords, drop into the most treacherous sectors of the globe—North Korea, Myanmar—if he thought it might help secure the release of a hostage.  Among the many tributes to Richardson this past weekend from the highest levels (Joe Biden, Obama, the Clintons), I was struck most by the ones from some of the people who knew directly the ordeals he worked to end: the basketball star Brittney Griner and the Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, who called Richardson “a giant—the first giant—in American hostage diplomacy.”

    The last time I saw Richardson was a few years ago, in the pre-pandemic Donald Trump years—maybe 2018 or 2019. We had breakfast at the Hay-Adams hotel, near the White House. I remember asking him what he called himself those days, what he considered his current job title to be.

    Richardson shrugged. “‘Humanitarian,’ maybe?” he said. But he worried that it sounded pretentious.

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    Mark Leibovich

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  • Abortion Is Inflaming the GOP’s Biggest Electoral Problem

    Abortion Is Inflaming the GOP’s Biggest Electoral Problem

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    The escalating political struggle over abortion is compounding the GOP’s challenges in the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant metropolitan areas.

    The biggest counties in Ohio voted last week overwhelmingly against the ballot initiative pushed by Republicans and anti-abortion forces to raise the threshold for passing future amendments to the state constitution to 60 percent. That proposal, known as Issue 1, was meant to reduce the chances that voters would approve a separate initiative on the November ballot to overturn the six-week abortion ban Ohio Republicans approved in 2019.

    The preponderant opposition to Issue 1 in Ohio’s largest counties extended a ringing pattern. Since the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide constitutional right to abortion with its 2022 Dobbs decision, seven states have held ballot initiatives that allowed voters to weigh in on whether the procedure should remain legal: California, Vermont, Montana, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, and now Ohio. In addition, voters in Wisconsin chose a new state-supreme-court justice in a race dominated by the question of whether abortion should remain legal in the state.

    Read: The abortion backlash reaches Ohio

    In each of those eight contests, the abortion-rights position or candidate prevailed. And in each case, most voters in the states’ largest population centers have voted—usually by lopsided margins—to support legal abortion.

    These strikingly consistent results underline how conflict over abortion is amplifying the interconnected geographic, demographic, and economic realignments reconfiguring American politics. Particularly since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s national leader, Republicans have solidified their hold on exurban, small-town, and rural communities, whose populations tend to be predominantly white and Christian and many of whose economies are reliant on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: manufacturing, energy extraction, and agriculture. Democrats, in turn, are consolidating their advantage inside almost all of the nation’s largest metro areas, which tend to be more racially diverse, more secular, and more integrated into the expanding 21st-century Information Age economy.

    New data provided exclusively to The Atlantic by Brookings Metro, a nonpartisan think tank, show, in fact, that the counties that voted against the proposed abortion restrictions are the places driving most economic growth in their states. Using data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, Brookings Metro at my request calculated the share of total state economic output generated by the counties that voted for and against abortion rights in five of these recent contests. The results were striking: Brookings found that the counties supporting abortion rights accounted for more than four-fifths of the total state GDP in Michigan, more than three-fourths in Kansas, exactly three-fourths in Ohio, and more than three-fifths in both Kentucky and Wisconsin.

    “We are looking at not only two different political systems but two different economies as well within the same states,” Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at Brookings Metro, told me.

    The Ohio vote demonstrated again that abortion is extending the fault line between those diverging systems, with stark electoral implications. Concerns that Republicans would try to ban abortion helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in the 2022 elections in the key swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, particularly in well-educated suburbs around major cities. Democrats won four of the six governor contests and four of the five U.S. Senate races in those states despite widespread discontent over the economy and President Joe Biden’s job performance. Even if voters remain unhappy on both of those fronts in 2024, Democratic strategists are cautiously optimistic that fear of Republicans attempting to impose a national abortion ban will remain a powerful asset for Biden and the party’s other candidates.

    When given the chance to weigh in on the issue directly, voters in communities of all sizes have displayed resistance to banning abortion. As Philip Bump of The Washington Post calculated this week, the share of voters supporting abortion rights exceeded Biden’s share of the vote in 500 of the 510 counties that have cast ballots on the issue since last year (outside of Vermont, which Bump did not include in his analysis).

    But across these states, most smaller counties still voted against legal abortion, including this last week in Ohio. A comprehensive analysis of the results by the Cleveland Plain Dealer found that in Ohio’s rural counties, more than three-fifths of voters still backed Issue 1.

    Opponents of Issue 1 overcame that continued resistance with huge margins in the state’s largest urban and suburban counties. Most voters rejected Issue 1 in 14 of the 17 counties that cast the most ballots this week, including all seven that cast the absolute most votes (according to the ranking posted by The New York Times). In several of those counties, voters opposed Issue 1 by ratios of 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1.

    Equally striking were the results in suburban counties around the major cities, almost all of which usually lean toward the GOP. Big majorities opposed Issue 1 in several large suburban counties that Trump won in 2020 (including Delaware and Lorain). Even in more solidly Republican suburban counties that gave Trump more than 60 percent of their vote (Butler, Warren, and Clermont), the “yes” side on Issue 1 eked out only a very narrow win. Turnout in those big urban and suburban counties was enormous as well.

    Jeff Rusnak, a long-time Ohio-based Democratic consultant, says the suburban performance may signal an important shift for the party. One reason that Ohio has trended more solidly Republican than other states in the region, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, he argues, is that women in Ohio have not moved toward Democrats in the Trump era as much as women in those other states have. But, he told me, the “no” side on Issue 1 could not have run as well as it did in the big suburban counties without significant improvement among independent and even Republican-leaning women. “In Ohio, women who were not necessarily following the Great Lakes–state trends, I think, now woke up and realized, Aha, we better take action,” Rusnak said.

    The Ohio results followed the pattern evident in the other states that have held elections directly affecting abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court decision. In Kansas, abortion-rights supporters carried all six of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Kentucky and Michigan votes, abortion-rights supporters carried eight of the 10 counties that cast the most votes, and in California they carried the 14 counties with the highest vote totals. Montana doesn’t have as many urban centers as these other states, but its anti-abortion ballot measure was defeated with majority opposition in all three of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Wisconsin state-supreme-court race this spring, Democrat Janet Protasiewicz, who centered her campaign on an unusually explicit pledge to support legal abortion, carried seven of the 10 highest-voting counties. (All of these figures are from the New York Times ranking of counties in those states’ results.) For Republicans hoping to regain ground in urban and suburban communities, abortion has become “a huge challenge because they really are on the wrong side of the issue” with those voters, Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, told me.

    The results in these abortion votes reflect what I’ve called the “class inversion” in American politics. That’s the modern dynamic in which Democrats are running best in the most economically dynamic places in and around the largest cities. Simultaneously, Republicans are relying more on economically struggling communities that generally resist and resent the cultural and demographic changes that are unfolding mostly in those larger metros.

    Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Northern Virginia who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, has described this process to me as Republicans exchanging “the country club for the country.” In some states, trading reduced margins in large suburbs for expanded advantages in small towns and rural areas has clearly improved the GOP position. That’s been true in such states as Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, as well as in Texas, Iowa, Montana, and, more tenuously, North Carolina. Ohio has fit squarely in that category as well, with GOP gains among blue-collar voters, particularly in counties along the state’s eastern border, propelling its shift from the quintessential late-20th-century swing state to its current position as a Republican redoubt.

    But that reconfiguration just as clearly hurt Republicans in other states, such as Colorado and Virginia earlier in this century and Arizona and Georgia more recently. Growing strength in the largest communities has even allowed Democrats to regain the edge in each of the three pivotal Rust Belt states Trump in 2016 dislodged from the “blue wall”: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

    In 2022, Democrats swept the governorships in all three states, and won a Senate race as well in Pennsylvania. Support for legal abortion was central to all of those victories: Just over three-fifths of voters in each state said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances and vast majorities of them backed the Democratic candidates, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media outlets. The numbers were almost identical in Arizona, where just over three-fifths of voters also backed abortion rights, and commanding majorities of them supported the winning Democratic candidates for governor and U.S. senator.

    Those races made clear that protecting abortion rights was a powerful issue in 2022 for Democrats in blue-leaning or purple states where abortion mostly remains legal. But, as I’ve written, the issue proved much less potent in the more solidly red-leaning states that banned abortion: Republican governors and legislators who passed severe abortion bans cruised to reelection in states including Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Exit polls found that in those more reliably Republican states, even a significant minority of voters who described themselves as pro-choice placed greater priority on other issues, among them crime and immigration, and supported Republican governors who signed abortion restrictions or bans.

    Ohio exemplified that trend as powerfully as any state. Though the exit polls showed that nearly three-fifths of voters said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances, Republican Governor Mike DeWine cruised to a landslide reelection after signing the state’s six-week abortion ban. Republican J. D. Vance, who supported a national abortion ban, nonetheless attracted the votes of about one-third of self-described voters who said they supported abortion rights in his winning Ohio Senate campaign last year, the exit polls found.

    The fate of Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who’s facing reelection in 2024, may turn on whether he can win a bigger share of the voters who support abortion rights there, as Democrats did last year in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. (The same is likely true for Democratic Senator Jon Tester in Republican-leaning Montana, another state that voted down an anti-abortion ballot initiative last year.)

    Read: It’s abortion, stupid

    Brown has some reasons for optimism. After the defeat of Issue 1 last week, the follow-on ballot initiative in November to restore abortion rights in the state will keep the issue front and center. The two leading Republican candidates to oppose Brown are each staunch abortion opponents; Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the probable front-runner in the GOP race, was the chief public advocate for last week’s failed initiative. Most encouraging for Brown, the “no” vote on Issue 1 in the state’s biggest suburban counties far exceeded not only Biden’s performance in the same places in 2020, but also Brown’s own numbers in his last reelection, in 2018.

    For Brown, and virtually every Democrat in a competitive statewide race next year, the road to victory runs through strong showings in such large urban and suburban counties. Given the persistence of discontent over the economy, it will be particularly crucial for Biden to generate big margins among suburban voters who support abortion rights in the very few states likely to decide control of the White House. The resounding defeat of Issue 1 this week showed again that Republicans, in their zeal to revoke the right to legal abortion, have handed Biden and other Democrats their most powerful argument to move those voters.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Abortion Could Matter Even More in 2024

    Abortion Could Matter Even More in 2024

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    Last month, during a meeting of Democrats in rural southwestern Iowa, a man raised his hand. “What are three noncontroversial issues that Democrats should be talking about right now?” he asked the evening’s speaker, Rob Sand, Iowa’s state auditor and a minor state celebrity.

    I watched from the side of the room as Sand answered quickly. The first two issues Democrats should talk about are new state laws dealing with democracy and education, he told the man. And then they should talk about their support for abortion rights. “People in the Iowa Republican Party and their activist base” want to “criminalize abortion,” Sand said.

    I registered this response with a surprised blink. Noncontroversial? Democrats in competitive states, and especially committed centrists like Sand, aren’t usually so eager to foreground abortion on the campaign trail. This seemed new.

    Read: The most dangerous Democrat in Iowa

    Ascribing a narrative to some elections is easy. The past two midterm cycles are a case in point. The Democrats’ 2018 blue wave, for example, will go down as a woman-led backlash to a grab-’em-by-the-groin president. In 2022, Democrats performed better than expected, according to many analysts, because abortion rights were on the ballot. Now, a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats want to do it again.

    They’re betting that they can re-create and even supercharge their successes last year by centering abortion rights in their platform once again in the lead-up to 2024. They want all of their elected officials—even state auditors—talking about the issue. “If we can do all that, we’re gonna be telling the same story in December 2024 that we told in 2022,” Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of the progressive political group Swing Left, told me.

    But this time, Republicans might be better prepared for the fight.

    After the leaked draft opinion before the Dobbs decision last May, many in Washington assumed that abortion would fade from voters’ minds by the time November rolled around. “As we get further away from the shock of that event, of Roe being overturned, you don’t think that … people will sort of lose interest?” CNN’s Don Lemon asked the Democratic political strategist Tom Bonier in September 2022. People did not. Two months later, Democrats celebrated better-than-expected results—avoiding not only the kind of “shellacking” that Barack Obama’s party had suffered in 2010, but the widely predicted red wave. The Democrats narrowly lost the House but retained control of the Senate, flipping Pennsylvania in the process. Abortion-rights campaigners won ballot measures in six states.

    “The lesson has been well learned,” Bonier told me last week. “This is an issue that is incredibly effective, both for mobilizing voters but also for winning over swing voters.”

    Read: Is Gen Z coming for the GOP?

    The latest polling suggests that the issue is very much alive. A record-high number of registered U.S. voters say that abortion is the most important factor in their decision about whom to vote for, and most of those voters support abortion rights, according to Gallup. Rather than growing less salient over time, abortion may even have gained potency: Roughly a quarter of Americans say that recent state efforts to block abortion access have made them more supportive of abortion rights, not less, according to a USA Today poll last week. Not only that, but recent data suggest that demand for abortion has not been much deterred, despite post-Dobbs efforts to restrict it.

    Americans have watched as Republicans in 20 states restricted or banned abortion outright, and activists took aim at interstate travel for abortions and the pill mifepristone. Stories about pregnant women at risk of bleeding out or becoming septic after being denied abortions have lit up the internet for months. All of this attention and sentiment seem unlikely to dissipate by November 2024.

    “Republicans ran races on this issue for decades,” the Democratic strategist Lis Smith told me. “You’re gonna see Democrats run on this issue for decades to come as well.”

    Already, Democratic activists plan to engage swing voters by forcing the issue in as many states as possible. So far, legislators in New York and Maryland have introduced abortion-related ballot measures for 2024. Similar efforts are under way in other states, including Florida, Arizona, Missouri, South Dakota, and Iowa.

    Smith and her fellow party operatives are confident that they’ve landed on a message that works—especially in purple states where candidates need to win over at least a few moderates and independents. The most successful Democrats last year anchored their abortion messages around the concept of personal liberty, Swing Left’s Radjy told me, because it was “the single issue that is equally popular among far left, far right, center left, and center right.” Radjy shared with me a research report that concluded: “With limited attention and resources, [candidates should] lead with the freedom to decide. Freedom is resonating with the base and conflicted supporters, as well as Soft Biden and Soft Trump women.”

    Smith echoed this reframing. “Republican politicians want to insert themselves into women’s personal medical decisions,” she said, by way of exemplifying the message. “They want to take away this critical freedom from you.” In her view, that gives Democratic candidates a decisive advantage: They don’t even have to say the word abortion; they only have to use the language of freedom for people to be receptive.

    Joe Biden has never been the most comfortable or natural messenger on abortion. But even he is giving the so-called freedom framework a try. Freedom is the first word in the president’s reelection-announcement ad. Republicans, he says in a voice-over, are “dictating what health-care decisions women can make”; they are “banning books, and telling people who they can love.”

    Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion

    It’s helpful, Democratic strategists told me, that the Republicans jockeying for the presidential nomination have been murky at best on the issue. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley held a press conference in April to explain that she sees a federal role in restricting abortion, but wouldn’t say what. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was foggy on his own commitments in interviews before appearing to support a 15-week national ban. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who recently signed a six-week limit on abortion, talks about that ban selectively. The leader of the primary pack, Donald Trump, has said that abortion laws should be left to the states, but told a reporter recently that he, too, is “looking at” a 15-week restriction.

    Trump clearly wants to appease the primary base while keeping some room to maneuver in the general election. But if he’s the nominee, Democrats say, he’ll have to answer for the end of Roe, as well as the anti-abortion positions advocated by other Republicans. “When I worked for Obama in 2012, as rapid-response director, we tied Mitt Romney to the most extreme positions in his party,” Smith told me. If Trump is the abortion-banning GOP’s nominee, they will “hang that around his neck like a millstone.”

    I found it difficult to locate Republican strategists willing to talk with me about abortion, and even fewer who see it as a winning issue for their party. One exception was the Republican pollster and former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, who says that Republicans can be successful in campaigning on abortion—if they talk about it the right way. At a press conference celebrating the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, hosted by the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, Conway seemed to take a swipe at the former president—and the rest of the wishy-washy primary field. “If you’re running to be president of the United States, it should be easy to have a 15-minimum-week standard,” she said.

    To win on abortion is to frame your opponent as more extreme, and Democrats have made that easy, says Conway, who also acts as an adviser to the Republican National Committee. Broad federal legislation put forward by Democratic lawmakers last year, in response to the Dobbs leak, would prevent states from banning abortion “after fetal viability” for reasons of the mother’s life or health. Republicans claim that this means that Democrats support termination at all stages of pregnancy. Voters may not like outright bans on abortion, but they also generally don’t support abortion without limits. Conway advises Republican candidates to explain to voters whether they support exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, and get that out of the way—and then demand that their Democratic opponents define the time limits they favor. “I’d ask each and every one of them, ‘What are your exceptions? I’ve shown you mine,’” Conway told me.

    Read: The abortion absolutist

    Conway’s bullishness is belied by what some of her political allies are up to. While Democrats are pushing for ballot measures that will enshrine abortion rights into law, Republicans are trying to make it harder to pass state constitutional amendments. For example, after it became clear that a ballot measure could result in new abortion protections being added to the Ohio Constitution, state Republicans proposed their own ballot measure asking voters in a special election later this summer to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments.

    This scheme does not demonstrate faith that a majority of voters are with them. But it does set up Ohio as the first practical test of abortion’s salience as a political issue in 2024. If Democrats can get their voters to show up this August in the name of abortion rights, maybe they can do it next year too.

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    Elaine Godfrey

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  • Republicans Need to Stop Being Jerks

    Republicans Need to Stop Being Jerks

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    Let’s say you’re a politician in a close race and your opponent suffers a stroke. What do you do?

    If you are Mehmet Oz running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, what you do is mock your opponent’s affliction. In August, the Oz campaign released a list of “concessions” it would offer to the Democrat John Fetterman in a candidates’ debate, including:

    “We will allow John to have all of his notes in front of him along with an earpiece so he can have the answers given to him by his staff, in real time.” And: “We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby.”

    Oz’s derision of his opponent’s medical condition continued right up until Oz lost the race by more than 250,000 votes. Oz’s defeat flipped the Pennsylvania seat from Republican to Democrat, dooming GOP hopes of a Senate majority in 2023.

    A growing number of Republicans are now pointing their finger at Donald Trump for the party’s disappointments in the 2022 elections, with good reason. Trump elevated election denial as an issue and burdened his party with a lot of election-denying candidates—and voters decisively repudiated them.

    But not all of Trump’s picks were obviously bad. Oz was for years a successful TV pitchman, trusted by millions of Americans for health advice. The first Muslim nominated for a Senate run by a major party, he advanced Republican claims to represent 21st-century America. Oz got himself tangled up between competing positions on abortion, sometimes in consecutive sentences, precisely because he hoped to position himself as moderate on such issues.

    But Oz’s decision to campaign as a jerk hurt him. When his opponent got sick, Oz could have drawn on his own medical background for compassion and understanding. Before he succumbed to the allure of TV, Oz was an acclaimed doctor whose innovations transformed the treatment of heart disease. He could have reminded voters of his best human qualities rather than displaying his worst.

    The choice to do the opposite was his, not Trump’s.

    Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point

    And Oz was not unique. Many of the unsuccessful Republican candidates in 2022 offered voters weird, extreme, or obnoxious personas. Among the worst was Blake Masters, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. He released photos and campaign videos of himself playing with guns, looking like a sociopath. He lost by nearly five points. Trump endorsed Masters in the end, but Trump wasn’t the one who initially selected or funded him. That unsavory distinction belongs to the tech billionaire and Republican donor Peter Thiel, who invested big and early in the campaign of his former university student.

    Performative trolling did not always lead to failure. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis indulged in obnoxious stunts in 2022. He promoted anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists. He used the power of government to punish corporations that dissented from his culture-war policies. He spent $1.5 million of taxpayer money to send asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard.

    But DeSantis was an incumbent executive with a record of accomplishment. Antics intended to enrapture the national Fox News audience could be offset by actions to satisfy his local electorate: restoring the Everglades, raising teacher pay, and reopening public schools early despite COVID risks.

    DeSantis’s many Republican supporters must now ponder: What happens when and if the governor takes his show on the road? “Pragmatic on state concerns, divisive on national issues!” plays a little differently in a presidential race than it does at the state level. But the early indications are that he’s sticking with divisiveness: A month after his reelection, DeSantis is bidding for the anti-vax vote by promoting extremist allegations from the far fringes that modern vaccines threaten public health.

    A generation ago, politicians invested great effort in appearing agreeable: Ronald Reagan’s warm chuckle, Bill Clinton’s down-home charm, George W. Bush’s smiling affability. By contrast, Donald Trump delighted in name-calling, rudeness, and open disdain. Not even his supporters would have described Trump as an agreeable person. Yet he made it to the White House all the same—in part because of this trollish style of politics, which has encouraged others to emulate him.

    Ilana E. Strauss: How science explains why some politicians are jerks

    Has our hyper-polarized era changed the old rules of politics? James Poniewozik’s 2019 book, Audience of One, argues that Trump’s ascendancy was the product of a huge shift in media culture. The three big television networks of yore had sought to create “the least objectionable program”; they aimed to make shows that would offend the fewest viewers. As audiences fractured, however, the marketplace rewarded content that excited ever narrower segments of American society. Reagan and Clinton were replaced by Trump for much the same reason Walter Cronkite was replaced by Sean Hannity.

    It’s an ingenious theory. But, as Poniewozik acknowledges, democratic politics in a two-party system remains an inescapably broadcast business. Trump’s material sold well enough in 2016 to win (with help from FBI Director James Comey’s intervention against Hillary Clinton, Russian hackers amplified by the Trump campaign, and the mechanics of the Electoral College). But in 2020, Trump met the political incarnation of the Least Objectionable Program: Joe Biden, who is to politics what Jay Leno was to late-night entertainment.

    Trump-led Republicans have now endured four bad elections in a row. In 2018, they lost the House. In 2020, they lost the presidency. In 2021, they lost the Senate. In 2022, they won back the House—barely—but otherwise failed to score the gains one expects of the opposition party in a midterm. They suffered a net loss of one Senate seat and two governorships. They failed to flip a single chamber in any state legislature. In fact, the Democrats gained control of four: one each in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and both in Michigan.

    Plausible theories about why Republicans fared so badly in 2022 abound. The economy? Gas prices fell in the second half of 2022, while the economy continued to grow. Abortion? The Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June, and Republican officeholders began musing almost immediately about a national ban, while draconian restrictions began spreading through the states. Attacks on democracy? In contest after contest, Republicans expressed their contempt for free elections, and independent voters responded by rejecting them.

    All of these factors clearly played a role. But don’t under-​weight the impact of the performative obnoxiousness that now pervades Republican messaging. Conservatives have built career paths for young people that start on extremist message boards and lead to jobs on Republican campaigns, then jobs in state and federal offices, and then jobs in conservative media.

    Former top Trump-administration officials set up a well-funded dark-money group, Citizens for Sanity, that spent millions to post trolling messages on local TV in battleground states, intended to annoy viewers into voting Republican, such as “Protect pregnant men from climate discrimination.” The effect was just to make the Republicans seem juvenile.

    In 2021, then–House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy posted a video of himself reading aloud from Dr. Seuss to protest the Seuss estate’s withdrawing some works for being racially insensitive (although he took care to read Green Eggs and Ham, not one of the withdrawn books).

    Trump himself often seemed to borrow his scripts from a Borscht Belt insult comic—for instance, performing imagined dialogues making fun of his opponent’s adult children during the 2020 campaign.

    This is not a “both sides” story. Democratic candidates don’t try to energize their base by “owning the conservatives”; that’s just not a phrase you hear. The Democratic coalition is bigger and looser than the Republican coalition, and it’s not clear that Democrats even have an obvious “base” the way that Republicans do. The people who heeded Representative Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Joe Biden in South Carolina do not necessarily have much in common with those who knocked on doors for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign. Trying to energize all of the Democratic Party’s many different “bases” with deliberate offensiveness against perceived cultural adversaries would likely fizzle at best, and backfire at worst. On the Republican side, however, the politics of performance can be—or seem—rewarding, at least in the short run.

    This pattern of behavior bids fair to repeat itself in 2024. As I write these words at the beginning of 2023, the conservative world is most excited not by the prospect of big legislative action from a Republican House majority, and not by Trump’s declared candidacy for president in 2024 or by DeSantis’s as-yet-undeclared one, but by the chance to repeat its 2020 attacks on the personal misconduct of President Biden’s son Hunter.

    In the summer of 2019, the Trump administration put enormous pressure on the newly elected Zelensky administration in Ukraine to announce some kind of criminal investigation of the Biden family. This first round of Trump’s project to manufacture an anti-Biden scandal exploded into Trump’s first impeachment.

    The failure of round one did not deter the Trump campaign. It tried again in 2020. This time, the scandal project was based on sexually explicit photographs and putatively compromising emails featuring Hunter Biden. The story the Trump campaign told about how it obtained these materials sounded dubious: Hunter Biden himself supposedly delivered his computer to a legally blind repairman in Delaware but never returned to retrieve it—so the repairman tracked down Rudy Giuliani and handed over a copy of the hard drive. The repairman had also previously given the laptop itself to the FBI. Far-fetched stories can sometimes prove true, and so might this one.

    Whatever the origin of the Hunter Biden materials, the authenticity of at least some of which has been confirmed by reputable media outlets, there’s no dispute about their impact on the 2020 election. They flopped.

    Pro-Trump Republicans could never accept that their go-to tactic had this time failed. Somebody or something else had to be to blame. They decided that this somebody or something was Twitter, which had briefly blocked links to the initial New York Post story on the laptop and its contents.

    So now the new Twitter—and Elon Musk allies who have been offered privileged access to the company’s internal workings—is trying again to elevate the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, and to allege a cover-up involving the press, tech companies, and the national-security establishment. It’s all very exciting to the tiny minority of Americans who closely follow political schemes. And it’s all pushing conservatives and Republicans back onto the same doomed path they followed in the Trump years: stunts and memes and insults and fabricated controversies in place of practical solutions to the real problems everyday people face. The party has lost contact with the sensibility of mainstream America, a huge country full of decent people who are offended by bullying and cruelty.

    There’s talk of some kind of review by the Republican National Committee of what went wrong in 2022. If it happens, it will likely focus on organization, fundraising, and technology. For any political operation, there is always room to improve in these areas. But if the party is to thrive in the post-Trump era, it needs to start with something more basic: at least pretend to be nice.

    * Lead image source credits: Chris Graythen / Getty; Ed Jones / AFP / Getty; Drew Angerer / Getty; Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty; Michael M. Santiago / Getty; Brandon Bell / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty; Alex Wong / Getty

    This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Party of Trolls.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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    David Frum

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  • Four Lessons Republicans Must Learn Before 2024

    Four Lessons Republicans Must Learn Before 2024

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    The Republican Party swaggered into Tuesday’s midterm elections with full confidence that it would clobber President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party, capitalizing on voters’ concerns over inflation and the economy to retake majorities in both chambers of Congress. The question, party officials believed, was one only of scale: Would it be a red wave, or a red tsunami?

    The answer, it turns out, is neither.

    As of this morning, Republicans had yet to secure a majority in either the House or the Senate. Across the country, Democrats won races that many in the party expected to lose. Millions of votes are still to be counted, particularly in western states, but this much is clear: Even if Republicans eke out narrow congressional majorities, 2022 will be remembered as a triumph for Democrats, easily the best midterm cycle for an incumbent president’s party since 2002, when the country rallied around George W. Bush and his GOP in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

    Given the tailwinds they rode into Election Day—a fragile economic outlook, an unpopular president, a pervasive sense that our democracy is dysfunctional—Republicans spent yesterday trying to make sense of how things went so wrong. There was a particular focus on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, three battleground states that went from red to blue on Election Day 2020, and states where Democrats won major victories on Tuesday.

    Based on my reporting throughout the year, as well as data from Tuesday’s exit polling and conversations with Republican officials in the immediate aftermath of Election Day, here are four lessons I believe the party must learn before the next election in 2024.

    1. Democratic turnout is going to boom in the post-Dobbs era.

    For 50 years, Republicans raged against the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that established a constitutional right to an abortion, arguing that the ruling should be struck down and abortion policies should be determined by individual states. When it finally happened—when Politico in early May published a leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization striking down Roe v. Wade—I warned the evangelical leader Russell Moore on his podcast that Republicans, and especially conservative Christians, were about to deal with some devastating unintended consequences.

    Up until the 2022 election, most voters had engaged with the abortion issue as an every-four-years, very-top-of-the-ticket decision. Presidents appoint Supreme Court justices, after all, and only a Supreme Court ruling could fundamentally change abortion policies in the country. (This was essential to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016: Nearly a quarter of his voters said the Supreme Court was their top issue in the election, after he’d promised to appoint “pro-life judges.”) Given that abortion rights were protected by Roe, the voters who identified abortion as their top priority always skewed Republican, and they were primarily mobilized by presidential campaigns and the prospect of Supreme Court vacancies.

    We have now entered a different political universe.

    More than a quarter of all voters named abortion as their top priority in this election. That number would be astonishing in any cycle, much less in a midterm campaign being waged against a backdrop of historic inflation and a looming recession. (The only issue of greater salience to voters overall—and not by much—was the economy, which 31 percent named as their top priority.) Even more surprising was the gap in partisan enthusiasm: Among the 27 percent of voters who prioritized abortion in this election, 76 percent supported Democratic candidates, according to exit polling, while just 23 percent backed Republicans.

    This is a direct result of the Dobbs ruling, which left individual states scrambling to figure out their own abortion regulations. With Republicans pushing a menu of restrictive measures across the nation, Democrats running for office at every level—Congress, state legislature, governor, attorney general—suddenly had ammunition to mobilize a party base that was, until that time, looking complacent. (When Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in deep-blue Virginia last year, only 8 percent of voters named abortion as their top priority.) At the same time, Dobbs gave Democrats a tool to reach moderates and independents, particularly suburban women, who’d rejected the Republican Party in 2020 but were beginning to drift back toward the GOP because of concerns about inflation and crime.

    Democrats I spoke with throughout the summer and fall were hopeful that the abortion issue would be sufficient to prevent a Republican rout. It did that and much, much more. The Dobbs effect on this election is almost impossible to exaggerate. All five states that featured a ballot referendum on questions of abortion saw the pro-choice side win. (This includes Kentucky and Montana, states that President Joe Biden lost by 26 points and 16 points, respectively.) In those states alone, dozens of Democrats, from the top of the ballot to the bottom, received a potentially race-deciding boost from the abortion referendum. Even in the 45 states where abortion wasn’t literally on the ballot, it was clearly the issue that carried the day for a host of vulnerable Democrats.

    By every metric available—turnout, exit polling, individual races, and referendum results—abortion was the dominant motivator for Democrats, particularly younger Democrats, who have historically skipped midterm elections. It was also the dominant motivator for moderates and independents to stick with an unpopular president. The story of this election was that millions of voters who registered dissatisfaction with Biden and his economic policies voted for his party anyway. Why? Because they were more concerned about Republicans’ approach to abortion than Democrats’ approach to inflation.

    This is very bad news for the GOP. Democrats now have a blueprint for turning out the vote in a punishing political environment. In each of the two midterm elections under President Barack Obama, Democrats hemorrhaged congressional and state legislative seats because the party lacked a base-turnout mechanism—not to mention a persuasion tactic—to compensate for voters’ concerns over a sluggish economy. Politics is a copycat business. Now that Democrats have found a winning formula, you can expect to see entire field programs, messaging campaigns, microtargeting exercises, and ballot-initiative drives built around abortion access.

    A winning issue today is not necessarily a winning issue tomorrow. Abortion rights will rise and fall in terms of resonance, depending on the place, the party in control, and the policies that govern the issue locally. We’ve seen Democrats overplay their hand on abortion in the past, as in 2014, when Republicans flipped a U.S. Senate seat because the Democratic incumbent, Mark Udall, campaigned so myopically on abortion rights that even the liberal Denver Post editorial board ridiculed him as “Senator Uterus.” If Democrats rely too much on the issue—or, maybe the greater temptation, if they use their legislative power to advance abortion policies that are just as unpopular with moderates and independents as some of what Republicans campaigned on this cycle—their advantage could evaporate quickly.

    Still, the “Senator Uterus” episode came in the pre-Dobbs era, back when Americans still viewed the Supreme Court as the most immediate arbiter of abortion rights, and local candidates didn’t have nearly the reason (or incentive) to engage with the issue. This is now the post-Dobbs era. Voters who care about abortion are thinking less about Supreme Court justices and more about state legislators. The political advantage, at least for now, belongs to a Democratic Party that just weaponized the issue to turn out its base in a major and unexpected way.

    2. Bad candidates are an incurable (and fast-spreading) cancer.

    In Michigan, “Prop 3,” the ballot proposal enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution, drove enormous voter participation. Democrats were the clear beneficiary: They won all three statewide campaigns as well as the state’s most competitive congressional races. But Democrats did even more damage at the local level, ambushing Republicans in a number of off-the-radar local contests and winning back control of both state legislative chambers for the first time since 1983.

    But if you ask Republicans in the state, Prop 3 wasn’t the biggest contributor to the down-ballot massacre. Instead, they blame the terrible GOP candidates at the top of the ticket.

    Whereas Republicans in other states nominated one or perhaps even two far-right candidates to run in marquee statewide races, Michigan Republicans went for the trifecta. Tudor Dixon, the gubernatorial nominee, was a political novice who had made extreme statements about abortion and gun control in addition to casting doubts on Trump’s 2020 defeat. Matt DePerno, the nominee for attorney general, was best known for leading a crusade to investigate and overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the state. Kristen Karamo, the nominee for secretary of state, was a like-minded conspiracy theorist who manifestly knew nothing about the way Michigan’s elections are administered, and even less about the other duties of the job she was seeking.

    “You just can’t ignore the question of candidate quality,” Jason Roe, who ran Republican Tom Barrett’s campaign against Elissa Slotkin, one of the nation’s premier congressional contests, in Michigan’s Seventh District, told me. “We had a fundraising disadvantage, we had Prop 3 to overcome, but candidate quality—that was our biggest headwind. Tom ran about seven points ahead of the statewide ticket. I’m not sure what else he’s supposed to do.”

    The same pattern was visible in different parts of the country. In Pennsylvania, Democrats seized back control of the state House chamber for the first time in more than a decade. How? Two words: Doug Mastriano.

    In the campaign to become Pennsylvania’s next governor—what was once expected to be one of the nation’s tightest races—Mastriano, the GOP nominee, proved particularly unpalatable. It wasn’t just Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in that state, who stayed away; most GOP state lawmakers, even those who shared some of Mastriano’s fringe worldview as it pertains to election legitimacy or Christian nationalism, kept their distance.

    But it hardly mattered. The smoldering crater left by Mastriano’s implosion (he trailed by nearly 14 points as of yesterday evening) swallowed up Republicans all around him. Not only did Democrats improbably win back control of the state House; they also won all three of the state’s contested congressional races.

    Time and again on Tuesday, bad candidates sabotaged both their own chances of victory and also the electoral prospects of their fellow partisans on the ticket. And for most of these bad candidates, a common quality stood out: their views on the legitimacy of our elections.

    3. Voters prefer “out of touch”  to “out of their mind.”

    For Republicans, a central charge against Democrats throughout 2022 has been that Biden and his party are out of touch with ordinary Americans. A distilled version of the argument went like this: Democrats, the party of social and cultural elites, can’t relate to the economic pain being felt by millions of working people.

    That message penetrated—to a point.

    According to exit polls, 20 percent of voters said inflation has caused their families “severe hardship” over the past year. Among those respondents, 71 percent supported Republicans, and 28 percent supported Democrats. This is broadly consistent with other findings in the exit polling, as well as public-opinion research we saw throughout the summer and fall, showing disapproval of Biden and his stewardship of the economy. This would seem damning for Democrats—that is, until you consider the numbers in reverse and ask the obvious question: Why did three in 10 people who said they’ve experienced “severe hardship” decide to vote for the party that controls Congress and the White House?

    The simplest explanation is that although many of these voters think Democrats are out of touch, they also think Republicans are out of their minds. And it seems they prefer the former to the latter.

    “This is what I would see in our focus groups all summer, and it makes more sense now in retrospect,” says Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who produced a podcast series this year narrating her sessions with undecided voters. “We would have these swing voters who would say things are going bad: inflation, crime, Biden’s doing a bad job, all of it. And then you say, ‘Okay, Gretchen Whitmer versus Tudor Dixon. Who are you voting for?’ And even though they’re pissed at Whitmer—she hasn’t fixed the roads, she did a bad job with COVID—they were voting for her. Because they all thought Dixon was crazy.”

    It was the same thing, Longwell told me, in her focus groups all over the country—but particularly in the Midwest. She said that Tony Evers, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, kept getting the same benefit of the doubt as Whitmer: “They didn’t like a lot of his policies, but they thought Tim Michels”—his Republican challenger—“was an extremist, a Trumplike extremist.” Her conclusion: “A lot of these people wanted to vote for a Republican; they just didn’t want to vote for the individual Republican who was running.”

    For many voters, the one position that rendered a candidate unacceptable was the continued crusade against our elections system. In Pennsylvania, for instance, 34 percent of voters supported Democrats despite experiencing “severe hardship,” significantly higher than the national average. The reason: 57 percent of Pennsylvanians said they did not “trust” Mastriano to oversee the state’s elections.

    Another strategy Republicans used to portray Democrats as “out of touch” was to focus on rising crime rates in Democratic-governed cities and states. This was an unqualified success: Exit polling, both nationally and in key states, showed that clear majorities of voters believe Republicans are better suited to handle crime. In Michigan, 53 percent of voters said they trusted Dixon to deal with crime, as opposed to just 42 percent for Whitmer. But it barely made a difference in the outcome: Despite trailing by 11 points on that question, Whitmer actually won the race by 11 points. To understand why, consider that 56 percent of Michigan voters characterized Dixon as “too extreme.” Only 38 percent said the same about Whitmer.

    In the exit polls, perhaps the most provocative question was about society’s changing values relative to gender identity and sexual orientation. Half of all voters—exactly 50 percent—said those values are changing for the worse. Only 26 percent, meanwhile, said those values are changing for the better. (The remaining 24 percent did not have a strong opinion either way.) This is another data point to suggest that Democrats, by championing an ultraprogressive approach to LGBTQ issues, come across as out of touch to many Americans. And yet, even among the voters who expressed alarm over America’s values in this context, 20 percent voted for Democrats. This is a revelation: Given the ferocity of rhetoric in this campaign about drag shows, transgender athletes, and sexualized public-school curricula, one might have predicted virtually zero people would both decry the LGBTQ agenda and vote Democratic. But two in 10 voters—more than enough to tip any close election—did exactly that. Why?

    Again, the simplest explanation is probably best: Plenty of voters are worried about unchecked progressivism on the left, but they’re even more worried about unchecked extremism on the right.

    That extremism takes many forms: delegitimizing our elections system, endorsing the January 6 assault on the Capitol, cracking jokes and spreading lies about the assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. And all of this extremism, which so many swing voters spurned on Tuesday, is embodied by one person: Donald Trump.

    4. Trumpism is toxic to the middle of the electorate.

    Here’s the scenario many of us were expecting on Election Day: The president, still the titular head of his party despite a growing chorus of questions about his age and competence, suffers a series of humiliating defeats that reflect the weakness of his personal brand and cast doubt on his ability to lead the party moving forward.

    And that’s precisely what happened—to the former president.

    If Tuesday felt strange—“the craziest Election Night I’ve ever seen,” as the elections-analyst Dave Wasserman tweeted—it’s because so many races revolved around someone who wasn’t running for anything. The reason that practically every first-term president in modern history has gotten pummeled in the midterms is that the opposition party typically cedes the stage and makes it all about him. The idea is to force the party in power to own everything that’s unsatisfactory about the country—its economic performance, military failures, policy misfires. It’s a time-honored tradition: Make the election a referendum on the new guy in charge.

    Until now.

    In each of the three states that saw major Democratic victories—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—25 to 30 percent of voters said they had cast their vote in opposition to Trump. To reiterate: This is a quarter of the total electorate, consistently across three of the nation’s most polarized battleground states, acknowledging that they were motivated by the idea of defeating someone who wasn’t on the ballot, and who currently holds no office. It’s easy to see why they succeeded: In these states, as well as nationally, the only thing worse than Biden’s approval rating was Trump’s. In state after state, congressional district after congressional district, voters rejected the Trump-approved candidate, for many of the same reasons they rejected Trump himself two years ago.

    Looking to 2024, GOP leaders will attempt to address the missed opportunities of this election. They will, no doubt, redouble their efforts to recruit strong candidates for statewide races; they will prioritize proven winners with mainstream views on abortion and democratic norms and the other issues by which moderates and independents will assess them. Whatever success party officials might find on a case-by-case basis, they will be treating the symptoms and ignoring the sickness. The manifest reality is that Trumpism has become toxic—not just to the Never Trumpers or the RINOs or the members of the Resistance, but to the immense, restless middle of the American electorate.

    We’ve long known that Trumpism without Trump doesn’t really sell; the man himself has proved far more compelling, and far more competitive, than any of his MAGA imitators. But what we saw Tuesday wasn’t voters selectively declining certain decaffeinated versions of Trump; it was voters actively (and perhaps universally, pending the result in Arizona’s gubernatorial race) repudiating the core elements of Trump’s political being.

    This trouncing, on its own, might have done little to loosen Trump’s chokehold on American conservatism. But because it coincided with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s virtuoso performance—winning reelection by an astonishing 1.5 million votes; carrying by double digits Miami-Dade County, which Hillary Clinton won by 30 points; defeating his Democratic opponent by nearly 20 points statewide—there is reason to believe, for the first time in six and a half years, that the Republican Party does not belong to Donald Trump.

    “I’ll tell you why Tuesday was a bad night for Trump: Ron DeSantis now has 100 percent name ID with the Republican base. Every single Republican voter in the country knows who he is now,” says Jeff Roe, who managed Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign and runs the nation’s largest political-consulting firm. “A lot of these people are gonna say, ‘All these other Republicans lost. This is the only guy that can win.’ That’s really bad for Trump. Republicans haven’t had a choice in a long time. Now they have a choice.”

    Trump’s intraparty critics have long complained that his brutally effective takeover of the GOP obscures his win-loss record. This is someone, after all, who earned the 2016 nomination by securing a string of plurality victories against a huge and fragmented field; who lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million; who gave away the House in 2018 and the Senate in 2020; who lost the popular vote to Biden by 7 million and handed over the White House; and who just sabotaged the party’s chances of winning key contests in a number of battleground states.

    Earlier this week, Trump pushed back the expected launch of his 2024 presidential campaign. This was done, in part, so that he could appropriate the narrative of a grand Republican victory against Biden and the Democrats. Given his humiliating defeats, and how they’re being juxtaposed against the victories of his emerging young rival from Florida, Trump might want to move the announcement back up before a very different narrative begins to take hold.

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    Tim Alberta

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  • Why This Election Is So Weird

    Why This Election Is So Weird

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    The two major factors shaping the 2022 midterm elections collided in tumultuous fashion on Tuesday morning.

    First came the government report that inflation last month had increased faster than economists had expected or President Joe Biden had hoped. The announcement triggered a sharp fall in the stock market, the worst day on Wall Street in two years.

    That same afternoon, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced legislation that would impose a nationwide ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

    The inflation report captured this year’s most powerful tailwind for Republicans: widespread dissatisfaction with Biden’s management of the economy. Graham’s announcement captured this year’s strongest Democratic tailwind: widespread unease about abortion rights.

    Molly Jong-Fast: Of course voters care about abortion

    The shift in the campaign debate away from Biden’s management of the economy and toward the GOP’s priorities on abortion and other issues has been the principal factor improving Democratic prospects since earlier this summer. But the unexpectedly pessimistic inflation report—which showed soaring grocery and housing bills overshadowing a steady decline in gasoline prices—was a pointed reminder that the economy remains a formidable threat to Democrats in November.

    These two events also underscored how, to an extremely unusual degree, the parties are talking past each other. As the Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me, 2022 is not an election year when most Americans “agree on what the top priorities [for the country] are” and debate “different solutions” from the two major parties.

    Instead, surveys show that Republican voters stress inflation, the overall condition of the economy, crime, and immigration. For Democratic voters, the top priorities are abortion rights, the threats to democracy created by former President Donald Trump and his movement, gun control, climate change, and health care.

    Few questions may shape the November results as much as whether the issues Democrats are stressing continue to motivate roughly as many voters as Republicans’ preferred issues. Gene Ulm, a Republican pollster, told me he believes that pocketbook strains will ultimately prove decisive for most voters, particularly those without a college degree. Those voters, he added, are basically saying, “‘I am worried about putting food on the table, and you are talking to me about all this other crap.’”

    Yet there is no question that Democratic candidates are performing far above the consistently bleak public assessments of the economy, and especially Biden’s management of it. In one sense, that’s not shocking: Over the past few decades, voters’ economic assessments have become less predictive of election results, in large part because those judgments are themselves so heavily shaped by partisanship. But even in light of that trend, the disconnect between voters’ views on Biden’s economic management and their willingness to support Democratic candidates for the House and Senate remains striking.

    Read: How the Democrats rallied

    Biden has positive trends in the economy to celebrate, particularly robust job growth. He’s been cutting ribbons at a steady procession of infrastructure projects and manufacturing-plant openings (like last week’s groundbreaking for an Intel semiconductor facility in Ohio) tied to the tax incentives and direct spending from the infrastructure, climate, and semiconductor bills that he’s signed. Those economic milestones—yesterday, for instance, the White House touted $85 billion in new private investments for electric-vehicle production since Biden took office—will likely be a political asset for him in 2024, especially in the pivotal states across the industrial Midwest. But those accomplishments won’t necessarily sway voters this November, and in any case, all of these favorable trends for now are being overshadowed in most households by the persistent pain of higher prices on consumer goods.

    Even before this week’s inflation report, voters gave Biden an extremely negative grade for his economic performance. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Institute poll released last week, just 34 percent of those surveyed said that his actions have helped the economy, while 57 percent said they have hurt it. Not surprisingly, that discontent was most intense among Republicans and also among white voters without a college degree (a stunning 76 percent of whom said Biden’s actions had hurt the economy.) But that belief was also shared by 63 percent of independents, 55 percent of Generation Z and Millennial voters, 47 percent of nonwhite voters, and even 16 percent of people who voted for him in 2020.

    However, the share in each of these groups that gave Biden an overall positive mark on his job performance was consistently five to nine percentage points higher than those who believed his actions had helped the economy. And the share in each group that said they intend to support House Democrats in the November election was higher still—enough to give Democrats a narrow lead on that crucial question. Independents, for example, were split evenly on which party they intend to support in November, even though they were negative on Biden’s economic performance by more than two to one.

    This stark pattern points to another consequential anomaly in the 2022 polling so far. One of the most powerful modern trends in congressional races is a correlation between voters’ attitudes toward the president and their willingness to vote for candidates from his party. Virtually all voters who “strongly disapprove” of a president have voted against his party’s candidates in recent House and Senate elections. In 2018, two-thirds of voters who even “somewhat disapproved” of Trump voted for Democratic House candidates, according to exit polls. In 2010, two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Barack Obama likewise voted for Republican candidates.

    By contrast, in the Marist survey, and another recent national poll by the Pew Research Center, Democrats led slightly among those who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden—a stunning result.

    Murphy told me this disconnect has been evident since the outset of Biden’s presidency: Even when his approval numbers were high during his first months, she said of her polling, that didn’t lift other Democratic candidates, so she’s not entirely surprised that his decline hasn’t tugged them down. But Murphy, like others in the party, believes that concerns about Republicans—centered on their abortion-restriction efforts, their nomination of extremist and election-denying candidates, and their unflagging defense of Trump—also explain why Democratic candidates are consistently running ahead of Biden’s approval rating.

    “It should have been pretty easy for [Republicans] to put these races away, given how concerned voters are about the economy and inflation,” Murphy told me. Now, she said, “I do think they are having to go back to the drawing board.”

    Graham’s abortion legislation is certain to benefit Democratic efforts to shift voter focus from what Biden has done to what Republicans might do if returned to power. In a press conference, Graham flatly declared, “If we take back the House and Senate, I’ll assure you we’ll have a vote on our bill.” Although many Republican senators and candidates quickly distanced themselves from his proposal, his pledge meant that every Democratic Senate candidate can plausibly argue that creating a GOP majority in the chamber will ensure a congressional vote on a national abortion ban.

    Dan Sena, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who now consults for many party House candidates, told me that the abortion fight’s biggest impact will be to inspire higher turnout from liberal-leaning and young voters. Abortion, he said, “has energized a group of people that we saw in 2018 and we saw in 2020 that traditionally don’t participate in midterm elections and are much more motivated by the cultural fight.”

    Read: Abortion could define California’s elections

    Yet few Democrats believe that the political threat from inflation and general unease about the economy is behind them in this election cycle. In focus groups, Ulm, the GOP pollster, told me, “We hear more gripes about groceries than anything.” Sena largely agrees: “Jobs and paychecks still matter, pal,” he said.

    One Democratic pollster, who asked not to be identified while discussing private campaign research, told me that inflation and crime—the principal issues Republicans are stressing on the campaign trail—remain tangible and immediate concerns in swing districts. In House district polling, the pollster said, the firm often asks voters whether they worry more that Democratic policies are fueling inflation and crime or that Republicans are too extreme on abortion and too soft on the January 6 insurrection. On balance, the pollster told me, most respondents in swing districts say they worry more about Democratic policies.

    Yes, the pollster said, the Supreme Court abortion decision, the revelations about Trump from the House January 6 committee hearings, and the Justice Department’s investigation into his stockpiling of classified documents have energized and awakened Democratic voters. But, the pollster added, it’s not as if everyone has decided that abortion and January 6 are more important than crime and inflation.

    Strategists and pollsters on both sides believe that these diverging agendas could intensify one of the most powerful trends in modern American politics: the class inversion in which Democrats are running stronger among white voters with college degrees and Republicans are gaining ground among white voters without them, as well as among blue-collar Latino voters.

    In white-collar America, inflation may be more of an inconvenience than an existential threat, which provides space for voters to prioritize their values on issues such as abortion or Trump’s threat to democracy. In blue-collar America, where inflation often presents more difficult daily choices and sacrifices, abortion and the fate of democracy may be less salient, even among those who agree with Democrats on those issues. In the Marist poll, twice as many white voters without a college degree picked inflation over abortion as their top concern in November, while slightly more college-educated white voters picked abortion than inflation.

    Even with inflation at its highest level in 40 years, Republicans appear unlikely to significantly cut into such key Democratic constituencies as college-educated white voters, young people, and residents of large metropolitan areas. And even such a seismic shock as the Supreme Court abortion decision may not significantly loosen the Republican hold on white women without a college education. Although there may be some movement around the edges (inflation, for instance, could help Republicans gain among Latino voters), the biggest story of 2022 may be how closely it follows the lines of geographic and demographic polarization that the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections have engraved.

    As in those contests, a handful of competitive swing states (Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) will tip the precarious national balance of power between red and blue areas that now behave more like separate nations than different sections. The November elections seem likely to demonstrate again that the U.S. remains locked in a struggle between two coalitions that hold utterly antithetical visions of America’s future—yet remain almost equal in size.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • How the Democrats Rallied

    How the Democrats Rallied

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    By now you’ve surely heard: Reports of the Democrats’ inevitable defeat this November (might) have been exaggerated. The party infamous for its disarray is suddenly passing legislation left and right (well, center), making a mockery of its effete opposition, and scoring huge abortion-rights victories in Republican strongholds. Inflation may have peaked, and President Joe Biden slayed a terrorist (while sick with COVID). On Capitol Hill, Democrats finally mounted an effective case against former President Donald Trump, who, by the way, had his mansion searched by the FBI for the possible pilfering of nuclear and other highly sensitive secrets.

    The Democrats’ recent hot streak has political prognosticators reassessing the party’s once-brutal outlook for this fall’s midterm elections. Its chances of retaining control of the Senate and swing-state governorships are rising, and although Democrats remain an underdog in the battle for the House, a GOP majority isn’t the sure thing it once was. Republicans have nominated highly flawed candidates in key Senate races (most notably Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia), and Democrats have gained ground in the closely watched generic-ballot polling measure.

    Democrats have plenty of reason for caution. Polls are notoriously unreliable in August, and recent elections have shown that political fortunes can change fast. Biden’s lackluster approval ratings remain a clear drag for the party, and even a slowdown in inflation means prices will remain high for a while. The president’s party historically loses seats in a midterm election even when voters are happy about the economy; the Democrats’ majorities in Congress are tiny to begin with. Yet the party’s prospects are clearly better now than they were back in the spring, thanks in large measure to three main developments.

    Read: Democrats might avoid a midterm wipeout

    The Overturning of Roe

    If Democrats somehow maintain control of the House, or even lose their majority by less than expected, history will look at June 23—the date that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The 5–4 decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito was not a surprise to political junkies, but surveys suggest that it stunned rank-and-file voters who consistently told pollsters that they did not believe the end of Roe was coming. “It’s always been theoretical. People thought, Oh, they won’t go that far. And now it’s here,” Kelly Dietrich, a longtime Democratic operative who founded the National Democratic Training Committee, told me.

    The clearest signal of an electoral backlash came just six weeks later in Kansas, when voters in the solidly Republican state overwhelmingly defeated an amendment that would have allowed the legislature to ban abortion. Democrats, however, have seen indications of higher engagement in several elections in which abortion was not directly on the ballot. In special elections in Nebraska and Minnesota, Democrats lost both House races but kept the gap several points below Trump’s 2020 margin of victory in each district. They performed better in Washington State’s nonpartisan primaries than they did in comparable contests in 2010 and 2014, both GOP “red wave” years. And in Alaska, the party exceeded expectations in a special House election, positioning Democrats to possibly capture a seat that the party has not held in more than 50 years.

    Read: The Kansas abortion shocker

    Polls show Democratic enthusiasm for voting in the midterms—a data point in which they had severely lagged behind Republicans—spiking after the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Dietrich told me that registrations for candidate trainings have also surged in the past two months, and new Democratic voter registrations have significantly outpaced Republican ones in states where abortion rights are at risk, such as Wisconsin and Michigan, according to data compiled by TargetSmart, a Democratic firm.

    Joe Manchin Gets to Yes

    After more than a year of on-and-off-again negotiations, the Senate’s Hamlet on the Potomac finally agreed to a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to back legislation lowering prescription-drug prices and making the nation’s largest-ever investment in the fight against climate change. The oddly named Inflation Reduction Act, which doesn’t do much to tame inflation but will reduce the deficit, hands an enormous and long-sought victory to Biden and the Democrats just in time for the fall campaign.

    The law contains only a fraction of Biden’s original transformative vision, but because most Democrats had given up on Manchin entirely, they were ecstatic at his surprise, eleventh-hour decision to support a robust climate, health, and tax package. The elements of the law poll exceedingly well with key constituencies, making it an easy—and timely—issue for Democratic candidates to campaign on this fall.

    Whether the Inflation Reduction Act by itself will boost the party in the polls is hard to say. But its enactment is the latest in a string of legislative achievements for Biden, including the passage of a modest gun-reform bill, the CHIPS Act to support high-tech manufacturing, and the PACT Act to help veterans exposed to toxic burn pits. Along with last year’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the $1 trillion infrastructure law, the recent run should erase the image of a do-nothing Congress and a Democratic Party that was seen as squandering its two years in power. “It’s an opportunity—almost a mandate—for Democrats to get out there and brag,” Dietrich said. “Democrats can’t be humble anymore.”

    The January 6 Hearings: This Summer’s Surprising Smash TV Hit

    Many cynics in media had low expectations for the hearings that the House Select Committee on January 6 would hold. But Democrats running the panel hired a former ABC News executive to help produce the events, and the result was a series of newsy and often riveting hearings that drew strong TV ratings and built a compelling case against Trump. The starring role of Vice Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming lent the hearings a bipartisan sheen and helped obscure the lack of involvement from most other Republicans, and the committee made a smart decision to almost exclusively feature testimony from current and former Trump confidants rather than famous critics of the former president.

    Did the hearings change public opinion? For Democrats, the early evidence is mixed at best, and it’s possible that this month’s FBI search of Trump’s Florida home helped him consolidate support among Republicans all over again. Yet the hearings succeeded in reminding voters of the horror of the attack on the Capitol and what many of them disliked most about Trump. To that end, Democrats believed the hearings helped energize their base about the urgency of the fall elections, potentially protecting against a drop in turnout that would seal their defeat.

    The biggest question about the Democrats’ newfound momentum is how long it will last. Did the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling and the party’s flurry of legislative success in Congress represent a decisive turning point, or merely a brief calm before the crashing of a red wave? Republicans have history and, they believe, political gravity on their side. Biden’s approval ratings have ticked up a few points to an average of 40 percent, but that dismal standing would still ordinarily point to a rout for a president’s party in November. Democrats are left to hope that this is no ordinary year, and if they do come out ahead in the fall, this summer’s comeback will likely prove to be the reason.

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    Russell Berman

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  • The Radical Fringe That Just Went Mainstream in Arizona

    The Radical Fringe That Just Went Mainstream in Arizona

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    It might be nice one day to wake up and feel serene—even hopeful—about the state of American politics. To know that all of those people who have been warning about the growing threat to democracy are way ahead of their skis. But today is not that day.

    Arizona Republicans are nominating an entire cast of characters who argue not only that Donald Trump won the election in 2020, but also that the state’s results should be decertified—a process for which there is no legal basis. These Trump-endorsed candidates—Kari Lake for governor, Mark Finchem for secretary of state, Abraham Hamadeh for attorney general, Blake Masters for senator—all won their respective primaries this week and are now one election away from political power.

    Read: The Kansas abortion shocker

    Some strategists might frame these Republican wins as a gift to Democrats, and you can look at it that way. Democrats will be more competitive in the upcoming midterms than they might have been if more reasonable Republicans were on the ballot. Moderates and independents abound in Arizona, and they aren’t going to be excited to vote for a passel of kooks. But that doesn’t change the simple fact that the fundamentals are on Republicans’ side this year: Joe Biden is still unpopular; inflation is still high; America might soon be entering a recession.

    “Nobody should be popping champagne,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. “This is the most antidemocracy slate of candidates in the country. We’re in a very dangerous situation.”

    “Stop the Steal” candidates are running—and winning—all over the country. But Arizona concentrates a lot of them within a single geographic area—like an ant farm of election deniers.

    Lake might prove the most significant of these candidates. Lake’s lead over her top Republican opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson, had grown to nearly 3 percent when the gubernatorial primary race was finally called in her favor on Thursday night. Before becoming an enthusiastic proponent of Trump’s election lies, Lake was a local TV-news anchor, making her a household name in Arizona and giving her something that many political candidates lack: confidence in front of the camera. Like Trump, Lake has a difficult-to-describe magnetism with Republican-base voters; they simply cannot get enough of her.

    Throughout her campaign, Lake has called Biden an “illegitimate president” and vowed that, if she becomes governor, she’ll be reviewing and decertifying Arizona’s 2020 election results—despite multiple audits (and even a partisan review) showing precisely zero evidence of widespread fraud. Even ahead of the primary, Lake claimed to have evidence of funny business; the NBC reporter Vaughn Hillyard tried to get Lake to share some of that evidence, but she would not. Lake and Finchem, the cowboy-hat-wearing would-be secretary of state whom I profiled last month, have been cooking up new ways supposedly to prevent fraud—by banning voting machines and early voting. Both Lake and Finchem primed voters to believe that, if they lost, only fraud would explain their losses. Of course they did. That’s the new Republican playbook, and these two know it better than anyone.

    Lake’s opponent in November, Katie Hobbs, is Arizona’s former secretary of state and a run-of-the-mill Democrat who will probably try to position herself as the sane, competent foil to Lake’s wild-eyed conspiracy monger. That’s a solid strategy—maybe the only one that can work. But Hobbs is so run-of-the-mill that she’s boring. And what Hobbs lacks in personality, she makes up for in baggage, after a former staffer successfully sued last year over discrimination. For Arizonans who are still fans of democracy, though, Hobbs is the obvious choice—an apt example of the “Terrible Candidate/Important Election” scenario that my colleague Caitlin Flanagan described this week.

    David A. Graham: Well, the cover-up sure isn’t making January 6 look any better

    Arizona Democrats like Hobbs do have a genuine shot at defeating this slate of extremists. The basic fact of these Republicans’ extremism makes all Democratic candidates look better by comparison. Many independent voters, who count for something like one-third of all Arizona voters, and moderate Republicans would probably have happily voted for any Republican but Lake; come November, some of them may be willing to turn that into any candidate but Lake. Plus, Democrats seem to have gotten their groove back in recent weeks. Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., reached a long-elusive deal on sweeping climate legislation; gas prices are dropping fast; and the overturning of Roe v. Wade might energize an otherwise sleepy set of Democratic voters just in time for the midterms.

    And yet. Despite what hopeful Democrats might tell you, Arizona isn’t a purple state; it’s more of a lightish red. And this year remains an excellent year for Republicans—probably the best chance for any Republican extremist to make it into elected office not just in Arizona, but anywhere in the country. “When the political party in power has a president running in the mid- or upper 30s and inflation is high and people are feeling recession-y?” Longwell said. “You’re in a danger point. You just are.”

    The danger of a Lake or Finchem election in November is pretty straightforward, as I’ve outlined in previous stories. State leaders can easily cast doubt on an election’s results if the outcome doesn’t suit them, and this entire slate of Arizona Republicans is clearly prepared to do that. Governors and secretaries of state can tinker with election procedures or propose absurd new requirements, such as having every voter reregister to vote, as the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, has suggested. What happens if the outcome of the 2024 presidential election comes down to a closely divided Arizona? What if such a pivotal state was run not by Democrats and Republicans who are loyal to the democratic process, but by conspiracy-drunk partisans who won’t stop until they see their candidate swearing on a Bible? There’s a reason Trump has endorsed this slate; he knows these candidates will be pulling for him no matter what.

    Maybe the most important thing to note is that whatever happens to these Trump sycophants in November, they’ve demonstrated that a not-insignificant number of Republican voters want them—the cream of the conspiracy crop—to lead their party. In Tuesday’s primary, Rusty Bowers, Arizona’s Republican speaker of the house who did not cooperate with attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, lost his State Senate race to an election denier. Lake, who has become a household name in Trumpworld and raked in campaign donations from across the country, will be well positioned, whatever the coming election result, to be a MAGA superstar.

    If you’re still tallying up Trump’s primary wins and losses as an indicator of his grip on the party, you’re missing the point. The man’s enduring legacy is figures like Lake and a GOP packed with cranks and conspiracy theorists. “They will be defining the next generation of Republicans, and [Lake] will be among the next generation of leaders,” Longwell said. “If she wins, or even if she loses.”

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    Elaine Godfrey

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  • Democrats Might Avoid a Midterm Wipeout

    Democrats Might Avoid a Midterm Wipeout

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    If Democrats avoid the worst outcome in November’s midterm elections, the principal reason will likely be the GOP’s failure to reverse its decline in white-collar suburbs during the Donald Trump era.

    That’s a clear message from yesterday’s crowded primary calendar, which showed the GOP mostly continuing to nominate Trump-style culture-war candidates around the country. And yet, the resounding defeat of an anti-abortion ballot initiative in Kansas showed how many voters in larger population centers are recoiling from that Trumpist vision.

    Democrats still face enormous headwinds in November, including sweeping voter dissatisfaction over inflation, low approval ratings for President Joe Biden, and the near unbroken history since the Civil War of the party that holds the White House losing seats in the House of Representatives during a president’s first two years.

    Polls indicate that many college-educated center-right voters have soured on the performance of Biden and the Democrats controlling both congressional chambers. Yet in Tudor Dixon, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, and Blake Masters, the party’s Senate selection in Arizona, Republicans have chosen nominees suited less to recapturing socially moderate white-collar voters than to energizing Trump’s working-class and nonurban base through culture-war appeals like support of near-total abortion bans. With Trump-backed Kari Lake moving into the lead as counting continues in the Arizona Republican gubernatorial primary, the top GOP nominees both there and in Michigan will likely be composed entirely of candidates who embrace Trump’s lie that he won their state in 2020.

    In the intermediate term, most Democratic strategists believe that the party must find ways to combat the GOP’s strong performance during the Trump era with working-class voters, particularly its improvement since 2016 among blue-collar Hispanic voters. But with inflation so badly squeezing the finances of many working- and middle-class families, recovering much ground with such voters before November may be tough for most Democratic candidates. Those working-class voters “know the shoe is pinching,” says Tom Davis, the former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, quoting the late political scientist V. O. Key Jr.

    The more realistic route for Democrats in key races may be to defend, as much as possible, the inroads they made into the white-collar suburbs of virtually every major metropolitan area during the past three elections. Although, compared with 2020, the party will likely lose ground with all groups, Democrats are positioned to hold much more of their previous support among college-educated than noncollege voters, according to Ethan Winter, a Democratic pollster.

    An array of recent public polls suggest he’s right. A Monmouth University poll released today showed that white voters without a college degree preferred Republicans for Congress by a 25-percentage-point margin, but white voters with at least a four-year degree backed Democrats by 18 points.

    A recent Fox News Poll in Pennsylvania showed the Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman crushing Republican Mehmet Oz among college-educated white voters, while the two closely split those without degrees. Another recent Fox News poll in Georgia found Senator Raphael Warnock trailing his opponent Herschel Walker among noncollege white voters by more than 40 percentage points but running essentially even among those with degrees (which would likely be enough to win, given his preponderant support in the Black community). The most recent public surveys in New Hampshire and Wisconsin likewise found Republicans leading comfortably among voters without advanced education, but Democrats holding solid advantages among those with four-year or graduate degrees. A poll this week by Siena College, in New York, found Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul splitting noncollege voters evenly with Republican Lee Zeldin, but beating him by more than two-to-one among those with a degree.

    This strength among college-educated voters may be worth slightly more for Democrats in the midterms than in a general election. Voters without a degree cast a majority of ballots in both types of contests. But calculations by Catalist, a Democratic-voter-targeting firm, and Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voter turnout, have found that voters with a college degree consistently make up about three to four percentage points more of the electorate in a midterm than in a presidential election. “When we see lower turnout elections,” like a midterm, “the gap between high-education and low-education voters increases,” McDonald told me. In close races, that gap could place a thumb on the scale for Democrats, partially offsetting the tendency of decreased turnout from younger and nonwhite voters in midterm elections.

    Republicans have mostly counted on voters’ dissatisfaction with inflation and Biden’s overall performance to recover lost ground in white-collar communities. But as the polls noted above suggest, many voters in those places are, at least for now, decoupling their disenchantment with Biden from their choices in House, Senate, and governor’s races. “Voters have concerns about the direction of the country,” the Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me, “but they’re terrified of the direction it would take if these MAGA Republicans took power.”

    Geraldo L. Cadava: The battle for Latino voters in the rust belt

    One reason for this decoupling may be that, although all families are feeling the effects of inflation, for white-collar professionals, it generally represents something more like an inconvenience than the agonizing vise it constitutes for working-class families.

    That doesn’t mean white-collar voters are unconcerned about the economy, but with less worry about week-to-week financial survival, they are more likely to be influenced by the trifecta of issues that have exploded in visibility over the past several months: abortion rights,  gun control, and the threats to American democracy revealed by the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.

    As last night’s Kansas result showed, abortion rights may be an especially powerful weapon for Democrats in white-collar areas. Polls, such as a recent survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, have generally found that about two-thirds or more of voters with at least a four-year college degree believe abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances. That support is evident even in states that generally lean toward the GOP: Recent public surveys found that strong majorities of voters with college degrees supported legal abortion in Georgia and Texas, and another survey showed majority backing among more affluent voters in Arizona.

    In deep-red Kansas, two-thirds or more of voters have just supported abortion rights in four of the state’s five largest counties. Particularly noteworthy was the huge turnout and massive margin (68 percent to 32 percent at latest count) for the pro-choice position in Johnson County, a well-educated suburb of Kansas City that demographically resembles many of the suburban areas that have moved toward Democrats around such cities as Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix.

    Republican candidates this year have ceded virtually no ground to the pro-abortion-rights or pro-gun-control sentiments in those suburban areas. With the national protection for abortion revoked by the Supreme Court, almost all Republican-controlled states are on track to ban or restrict the practice. In swing states that have not yet done so, GOP gubernatorial candidates are promising to pursue tight limits. Dixon, the GOP’s Michigan nominee, said recently that she would push for an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother (while she would allow them only in cases that threaten the mother’s life). Asked during a recent interview about a hypothetical case of a 14-year-old who had been impregnated by an uncle, Dixon explicitly said the teenager should carry the baby to term because “a life is a life for me.”

    Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based Republican consultant, told me that the magnitude of the pro-abortion-rights vote in Kansas was “unexpected,” but it does not guarantee Democratic candidates’ suburban domination in November. “This was a rare up or down vote on this issue,” he told me in an email. “November will be different, as voters will have lots of reasons to vote and lots of issues to consider … Polls consistently show the economy trumping this issue in the minds of the voters.”

    But Democrats believe that the contrast on abortion will be highly consequential, especially in governor’s races, where Democrats such as the incumbent Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and the nominee Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania are presenting themselves as a last line of defense against Republicans intent on banning the procedure. Suburban “voters might have been thinking about voting Republican because they are unhappy with the direction of country and inflation, and they might decide to back Whitmer because of abortion,” Winter, the Democratic pollster, told me.

    The choice may not carry such immediate implications in House and Senate races, but leading Democrats are running on promises to pass legislation restoring the national right to abortion, while Republicans are either opposing such a bill or signaling openness to imposing a national ban. The two top Democratic challengers for Republican-held Senate seats (John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin) have both called for ending the filibuster to pass legislation codifying national abortion rights.

    Davis, the former NRCC chair who represented a suburban Northern Virginia district, believes that even in white-collar communities supportive of abortion rights and gun control, Democrats won’t escape discontent over inflation. If Republicans could frame the election simply as a referendum on Biden’s performance, Davis told me, “that’s their path to victory and a path to an electoral landslide.” But, he added, the choice by GOP voters in so many states to nominate “exotic candidates” mostly linked to Trump has provided Democrats with an opportunity, particularly in higher-profile Senate and governor contests, to make this “a choice election.” And that, he said, gives Democrats a shot at winning enough “white ticket-splitters” to at least hold down their losses.

    Given the headwinds, Democrats would take a November outcome in which they narrowly lose the House but hold their Senate majority and preserve control of the governorships in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, while perhaps adding some others, such as Arizona. With Biden’s approval rating still scuffling, that outcome is hardly guaranteed. But it remains a possibility largely because, as yesterday’s primaries showed, Republicans have responded to their suburban erosion by betting even more heavily on the policies and rhetoric that triggered their decline in the first place. In November, white-collar suburbs may be the deciding factor between a Republican rout and a split decision that leaves Democrats still standing to fight another day.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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