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Tag: Democrats

  • The Republican House Has Returned to Washington. Will Kevin McCarthy Lead It?

    The Republican House Has Returned to Washington. Will Kevin McCarthy Lead It?

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    The Republican House is ready to take over. Nancy Pelosi has already moved out of the Speaker’s office and the GOP’s ever-so-small majority will be sworn in to the new Congress Tuesday. But even with just 24 hours left until his party assumes power, Kevin McCarthy is apparently still short of the votes he needs to take over the gavel.

    A group of nine extremely right-wing House Republicans wrote Sunday that McCarthy still has not done enough to win over their support. His most recent overtures in what has been a weeks-long lobbying effort came “almost impossibly late” to address their concerns, read a letter signed by noted ultra conservatives Paul Gosar, Scott Perry, and Chip Roy, among others.

    McCarthy can only afford to lose four votes from his own party Tuesday when the decision comes to the House floor. On Sunday, he made a series of key concessions to the right flank of his party, including promising the creation of a select committee to investigate the “weaponization” of the FBI and Department of Justice, and giving House Republicans the ability to oust him in a snap vote at any time. Still, the remaining holdouts said McCarthy’s offers were “insufficient” and “vague” (one of their requests appears to be that they essentially want it to be even easier to oust the McCarthy as Speaker). For his part, McCarthy told Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman that he was feeling “actually really good” Monday. 

    Should McCarthy repeatedly fail to win the speaker vote Tuesday, Republicans will need to quickly coalesce around another leader. So far, no alternative candidates with enough support to win over the Republican House have stepped forward. Though, if Tuesday does indeed fall into chaos, all eyes will be on someone like Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Republican who has quickly risen in the party’s ranks and is seen as the apparent successor to McCarthy.

    Despite all this leadership drama, the contours of a Republican-led House are already taking shape. McCarthy’s offers to Republicans, which came in the form of a House Rules package, give an excellent window into how any Republican speaker would govern the body. The rules proposal called for eliminating legislative staff’s right to collectively bargain, undoing a hard fought change last summer that ushered in a wave of unions in Democratic congressional offices. 

    McCarthy also called for reinstating a rule that would allow Republicans to use spending bills to slash salaries of, or even fire, specific federal employees. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent pointed out, this could have major implications for the next Congress given the GOP’s appetite for political investigations and its ire towards agencies like the FBI and IRS. While any attempts to actually defund positions or Donald Trump-related probes would likely fail in the Democratic-controlled Senate, these maneuvers could go a long way to sabotage already tricky government funding negotiations.

    The drama begins tomorrow.

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    Tara Golshan

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  • Did Kyrsten Sinema Betray Her Volunteers?

    Did Kyrsten Sinema Betray Her Volunteers?

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    When Kyrsten Sinema campaigned for the Senate as “an independent voice for Arizona,” her volunteers didn’t take that literally. Perhaps they heard what they wanted to hear. Ana Doan, a retired teacher, thought Sinema would bring fresh energy to Washington as Arizona’s first openly LGBTQ senator. Devina Alvarado, a young Costco forklift driver, thought Sinema would defend women’s rights from Donald Trump. Michael (identified by his middle name to avoid retaliation) admired that Sinema had made it out of poverty after experiencing homelessness as a child, as he did. Each from a different corner of Arizona, they were all proud to have volunteered to get Sinema elected, proud of the doors they’d knocked and calls they’d made, proud to have had her glossy purple-and-yellow literature scattered in their home or on the floor of their car. But their pride had curdled long before Sinema announced she was leaving the Democratic Party last Friday.

    So far, both the White House and Sinema’s Senate colleagues have been conciliatory, praising her legislative skill and acting as if little will change following her switch. (Sinema will still caucus with the Democrats.) Although her influence will diminish in a forthcoming 51–49 chamber, Democrats can ill afford to make Sinema a pariah. When reached for comment about the switch, Sinema’s press secretary told me in an email, “Kyrsten’s approach remains the same from when she first ran for Senate,” and directed me to a sleek video Sinema released on Friday: “I’m gonna be the same person I’ve always been,” the senator said.

    But many of her most dedicated supporters don’t see things that way. I spoke with dozens of Sinema’s former volunteers from across Arizona, some of whom I managed in 2018 as a field organizer for the Arizona Democratic Party. What they’ve described to me is a feeling more raw and pained than mere disagreement over policies. Arizona Democrats are used to that; many have Republicans and independents in their family. They’re used to talking through differences. What they cannot forgive is the feeling that Sinema was not straight with them.

    David A. Graham: Kyrsten Sinema’s decision is all about 2024

    Doan, the teacher, had worked on a lot of campaigns in the border town of Nogales. She had just retired when Sinema announced her run, and she threw herself into the Senate race. Sinema was smart, well-spoken, a member of the LGBTQ community, and a fundraising powerhouse. In previous elections, Doan had begged the state party to do more phone banking in Spanish, and she didn’t like that phone bankers rushed older Latino voters who had questions about important issues. Things were different on Sinema’s campaign. Doan could have phone-bank lists brought to the houses of other volunteers, so they could make calls from the comfort of their own home.

    She was thrilled when Sinema won, but her excitement was short-lived. Sinema, in her view, started spending too much time with the Big Business people who had funded her campaign and not enough time among the working-class folks who’d made phone calls for her. Doan told me it hurt to watch her senator block positive initiatives that other Democrats wanted to pass. “She made an idiot out of me, and I made an idiot out of all the people I spoke to,” Doan said. She said she wished Sinema had run as an independent in 2018, so people knew who she really was.

    Alvarado, the forklift driver, had never volunteered on a political campaign before. She canvassed for Sinema a few days a week after finishing work and on the weekends too, always wearing her pink Planned Parenthood shirt. Alvarado couldn’t believe it when Sinema said she thought protecting the filibuster was essential to protecting women’s rights. When Sinema comes up in conversation these days, Alvarado’s fiancé teases her. “He knows I’m super salty that I volunteered for her,” she told me. “I for sure look forward to canvassing for her opponent.”

    Michael considered Sinema to be a personal hero when he started volunteering on her campaign in Phoenix. A few years before, he’d been homeless, just as she had been. But Michael felt betrayed in March of 2021, when Sinema voted against raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. “Hunger changes people,” he wrote to me in an email. “It made me want to make no one feel that way. I’m guessing it made her protective of what she has.”

    Some of the people with the fewest illusions about Sinema were the people furthest away from her. Missa Foy, the chair of the Navajo County Democrats, didn’t even vote for Sinema in the primary. In 2018, she knocked on more than 1,000 doors for a ballot initiative in Navajo County, one of Arizona’s most rural regions. (You can’t walk down the sidewalk to the next house on your list in Navajo—you get back in your truck and drive there.) The voters Foy spoke with would offer her dinner and shelter from the cold, and listen to why they should oppose programs such as expanding school vouchers. Although Foy passed out the Democratic slate of candidates, with Sinema on top, she didn’t talk her up. Foy told me she was grateful for all the things that Democrats, including Sinema, were able to pass through the Senate, but she didn’t think Sinema’s new party preference was earth-shattering stuff. “Our mission is the same as before this news broke,” she said.

    When Sinema visited Hopi sovereign land in 2018, Karen Shupla was impressed by her familiarity with water rights and other issues important to Native Americans. A tribal-elections registrar, Shupla is scrupulously neutral, but she does volunteer hundreds of hours to make sure elections run smoothly in a region that Democrats carry by more than two to one. She was unsurprised when the Hopi and other tribes supported Sinema by broad margins, and she was indifferent about Sinema becoming an independent. “It depends on how she deals with Natives from here on out,” Shupla told me. “We don’t want to be guessing which side she’s going to take on matters.”

    Read: The deepening mystery of Kyrsten Sinema

    The volunteer I spoke with over the weekend who still has the most affection for Sinema was the one who knew her personally. Martha “Marty” Bruneau met Sinema when the two of them ran for different seats in the Arizona state legislature in 2000. “I never ran again, and she never lost again,” Bruneau told me. The two of them stayed in touch. Bruneau thinks her fellow progressive Democrats have been exasperating and believes they put too much pressure on Sinema, who votes with Biden more than 90 percent of the time. She told me she doesn’t get Sinema’s reputation for being unapproachable. When I asked her if she’d support Sinema over a Democratic challenger, Bruneau praised Sinema’s record and said she’d have to look at both candidates. This was, in dozens of interviews, the closest that any of Sinema’s former volunteers came to saying they would vote for her again.

    Some believe that Sinema is becoming an independent because she can’t win against a primary challenger. Campaigning as an independent worked in Alaska for Lisa Murkowski in 2010, and in 2006 for Joe Lieberman in Connecticut—but they were running in deep-red and deep-blue states, where their party was dominant enough to form a coalition with voters from other parties. Arizona is purple, with roughly equal portions of Republicans, independents, and Democrats. Sinema positioned herself as a lone politician capable of uniting her state, but if she is reelected, it will likely be by forcing an expensive and vicious election.

    As David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic last week, Sinema’s move is flashy but comes from a place of weakness. She seems vulnerable to a challenge from not only the left but also the center. Arizona just elected a full slate of establishment Democrats in a year far less favorable than 2018, when Sinema won her seat. It’s unclear if the campaign arm of the Senate Democrats will even support her next time around. What’s more, 2024 is a presidential-election year in an era when split-ticket voting is rare. Although Sinema is an incumbent, her sour relationship with the Arizona Democratic Party means she will not benefit from party infrastructure, for fundraising or mobilization. They don’t know what to expect from her, and she feels no obligation to explain publicly what she believes, or why she believes it. That’s her prerogative. But it’s also the prerogative of people who lent Sinema their time and reputation to now turn against her. In bitter irony, the volunteers who cut their teeth working to get her elected may be among those working the hardest to defeat her.

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    Nathan Kohrman

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  • “They Don’t See Us”: Ayanna Pressley Won’t Let Women Be Ignored by the Republican Majority

    “They Don’t See Us”: Ayanna Pressley Won’t Let Women Be Ignored by the Republican Majority

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    With the GOP gearing up to retake the House majority, the Massechussetts Democrat is angling to protect women’s rights by running for chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus. “This is not a social club,” Pressley told Vanity Fair. “We are all formidable in our own right.”

    When Ayanna Pressley made her debut on the Beltway, Democrats held a double-digit majority in the House of Representatives. Donald Trump was a perfect foil for Pressley and her progressive compatriots. Their influence only expanded with more insurgent progressive wins in 2020. Plus, Democrats won back the Senate and sent Joe Biden to the White House. But now in the twilight of the 117th Congress, “the Squad”—Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, alongside newer recruits like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush—will soon find themselves in unfamiliar territory: the House minority. This is not lost on Pressley, nor are the stakes. In her words, the House Democratic caucus is at a “critical inflection point” ahead of this shift to come on January 3. Pressley is plotting her next move. 

    After a midterm cycle that showed the power of galvanizing voters who care about women’s reproductive rights, this is where Pressley sees a path forward for progressives. That, and turning attention to the White House. “There’s an opportunity certainly in the next two years to make sure we’re offering a clear affirmation of who Democrats are and part of that is working closely with the White House,” she says in an interview with Vanity Fair. To steward this, Pressley is running to be the chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, with the intent to make it as relevant a voting bloc as groups like the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus—both of which she’s also a member of. And she’s preparing to push back against a Republican House that appears more interested in scoring political points than pushing any kind of policy agenda. “It couldn’t be more clear. The Republican Party of [Kevin] McCarthy and Trump, they don’t have a policy vision—certainly not one that centers women’s families and the most marginalized,” she says. “They don’t see us. They don’t see women,” she continued later in the conversation.

    Pressley pitched herself in a letter to her colleagues at the end of last month. If elected to the chair position, she wrote that she would, “defend women’s issues from the ongoing attacks from those across the aisle,” in the face of the “extremists pose serious threats to the rights of every woman that calls this country home.” She wants the caucus to “be seen as the go-to for women across the board” and to serve as a bulwark against a backlash to women she is bracing for after a historic number were elected to Congress. “It’s always that strange dichotomy,” Pressley said. “[It’s] When we see this wave of women—and none of us are there by magic; we’re there by hard work…. When we see the most coordinated and underlining policy attacks against us.” 

    But Pressley’s bid is part and parcel of progressives, and more broadly, the Democratic Party’s reliance on and recognition of the critical role women—and particularly women of color—play in securing victories up and down the ballot. Her party, Pressley stressed, has to keep serving the interests of this critical voting bloc. “The reason why I’m running is to ensure that our collective voices remain front and center at the policy-making table,” she said. Pressley noted Raphael Warnock’s victory over Herschel Walker in the runoff election for the Georgia Senate seat as evidence of this. “We know the outsized role that Black women continue to play, both as strategy partners and building these coalitions and putting together these winning strategies,” she said the day after Warnock’s victory. “But also in the electorate at the ballot box.”

    “The Squad” moniker can be traced back to a somewhat spontaneous photo taken during new member orientation. The snap of Pressley, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Omar tied their political fates together. The group’s outspokenness and the fact that both Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez bested Democratic incumbents in the primaries, put their party’s Old Guard on notice. Their profiles and platforms quickly eclipsed those of the traditional arbiters of political influence in Washington. But the quartet represented something of a sea change within the Democratic Party; they redefined what it meant to be a “progressive” and the résumé required to run for Congress. With their historic victories, the members of “the Squad” paved the way for a new generation of progressives, which only grew this past midterm cycle with the additions of Summer Lee and Maxwell Frost, among others. They shifted the Overton window. In some ways, Pressley was always a bit of an outlier in the group. She largely avoided the type of skirmishes with leadership and rank-and-file members the other three, at various times, found themselves embroiled in. 

    While “the Squad” branding has faded—largely relegated to the right-wing and conservative press—when asked to reflect on those early days of her congressional tenure, in which the group as a collective, became a bigger target of criticism than even Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi, Pressley responded: “My priorities haven’t changed. My convictions and my resolve have only been further emboldened and the issues I’ve led on my entire life are the issues that I’ve continued to work on.” Policy is her “love language” and she has “always just followed the work.” But as she positions herself for life in the minority, where chances at policy will be few and far between, Pressley acknowledged that her outsized platform could aid her effort to thrust the caucus into greater relevance. “I do think that the platform that I have  earned and built up over time, would [serve]  in such a way to increase the reach and the impact and the influence of this caucus,” she said. 

    Pressley isn’t the only “Squad” member to set her sights on a leadership post. Last week, Omar was elected deputy chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Speaking on Monday night, Omar reflected on the approaching shift to the minority. “It is going to be an effort to try to block as much progress as Republicans want to make in the house, even in their messaging bills,” the Minnesota congresswoman said. “I know that with a slim majority, it was challenging—even for Speaker Pelosi.” But this time around, every Squad member, including Pressley, is bringing a lot more legislative expertise to the table. “It was clear from pretty early on when she came to Congress that she had a really deep passion for reproductive rights issues, issues facing women—economic issues and care issues,” a former Capitol Hill staffer said of the Massachusetts Democrat. “And I think the idea of having the Democratic Women’s [Caucus] as more of an organized bloc would be a good one.” 

    Pressley was the first woman of color to serve on the Boston City Council, a perch from which she launched the Healthy Women’s Families and Communities Committee. With her election to Congress, she claimed another first as the first woman of color elected to represent Massachusetts. And in her time on Capitol Hill, protecting and promoting women has been a throughline: she is colead of the Women’s Health Protection Act; she serves on the Pro-Choice Caucus; she has been a leader in the fight for paid leave and maternal health justice; and she is the lead co-sponsor in the fight to abolish the Hyde Amendment, to name a few. “The issues of consequence in this moment are issues that I’ve led on,” she pitched. 

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    Abigail Tracy

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  • Raphael Warnock’s win in Georgia runoff extends Democrats’ Senate majority

    Raphael Warnock’s win in Georgia runoff extends Democrats’ Senate majority

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    Raphael Warnock’s win in Georgia runoff extends Democrats’ Senate majority – CBS News


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    Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock locked in a six-year term by defeating Republican challenger Herschel Walker in Georgia’s runoff. The win gives Democrats have 51 seats in the Senate. Nikole Killion has more.

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  • What the Georgia Runoff Revealed

    What the Georgia Runoff Revealed

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    Senator Raphael Warnock’s win in yesterday’s Georgia Senate runoff capped a commanding show of strength by Democrats in the states that decided the 2020 race for the White House—and will likely pick the winner again in 2024.

    With Warnock’s victory over Republican Herschel Walker, Democrats have defeated every GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidate endorsed by Donald Trump this year in the five states that flipped from supporting him in 2016 to backing Joe Biden in 2020: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.

    Coming even amid widespread discontent over the economy, this year’s Democratic sweep against the Trump-backed candidates underscores the continuing resistance to the former president’s influence. In particular, Warnock’s decisive margins in Atlanta and its suburbs yesterday extended the Democratic dominance of white-collar (and usually racially diverse) metropolitan areas, as varied as the suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia and the booming hot spots of Phoenix and Madison.

    Read: The great Senate stalemate

    “The huge question after the election of 2020 was whether the suburbs would snap back to the GOP column after Trump was no longer on the ballot,” Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party chair in Wisconsin, told me. “What we saw in 2022 was suburbs continuing to trend toward Democrats.”

    Apart from perhaps Michigan, none of these states appears entirely out of reach for the GOP in 2024. Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, told me that although suburban voters recoiled against “delusional candidates” who “parroted” Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, Republicans “could very well come back and win the suburbs” with “non-delusional candidates.”

    Of the five pivotal states from the last presidential election, Republicans this year actually performed best in Georgia, where the party swept the other statewide offices. Even Walker remained stubbornly close to Warnock in the final results, despite an avalanche of damaging personal revelations and gaffes. Across these states, Republican dominance in rural areas that the GOP consolidated under Trump continued through this year’s midterm and allowed several of his endorsed candidates, like Walker, to remain competitive despite big deficits in the largest population centers.

    But in the end, the Democratic strength in the largest metropolitan areas proved insurmountable for the seven Trump-backed candidates in governor or Senate races across these five states. The only Republicans who won such contests in these states were Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who sharpened an image of independence by standing up to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss in the state, and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who echoes many of Trump’s themes but has an established political identity apart from him. (Johnson barely held off his Democratic challenger, Mandela Barnes.)

    “You have a large percentage of Americans who are wary of MAGA and have now voted against MAGA three times,” Simon Rosenberg, the president of NDN, a Democratic research and advocacy group, told me. Rosenberg was the most forceful public skeptic of the “red wave” theory. “They are now going to have to take all those people and turn them into Republican voters in 2024. It’s certainly not impossible, but I’d much rather be us than them going into the 2024 election”

    In many ways, yesterday’s Georgia result underscored the partisan chasm that has left the country closely divided for at least the past decade. Walker was, by any objective measure, among the weakest general-election candidates for a major office either party has produced in modern memory. Tarred by an endless procession of scandals, prone to nonsensical statements on the campaign trail (as when he mused on the relative merits of vampires and werewolves), and unwilling or unable to articulate positions on many major issues, he nonetheless drew unflagging support from national Republican leaders and held the large majority of the state’s Republican votes.

    That Walker came as close as he did to winning underscores the growing parliamentary nature of House and Senate elections, in which fewer voters are casting their ballots based on personal assessments of the two candidates and more are deciding based on which party they want to control the national agenda.

    Read: How Democrats avoided a red wave

    Yet all of that still left Walker, like the other Trump-backed candidates, short in the face of solid margins for Democrats in and around these states’ major population centers. Exit polls showed Democrats posting big advantages among all the demographic groups that tend to congregate in large metropolitan areas: young people, people of color, college-educated voters, secular voters, and LGBTQ adults.

    Thriving Cobb and Gwinnett Counties outside Atlanta, with a combined population of 1.7 million people, encapsulate the suburban evolution that has tilted the balance of power. For years, these counties were Republican redoubts: George W. Bush won them by roughly a combined 150,000 votes in the 2004 presidential race, and even as late as the hard-fought 2014 Georgia Senate race, the winning GOP nominee, David Perdue, carried each of them by double-digit margins.

    But both counties have grown more diverse. White people now make up only about three-fifths of the population in Cobb and a little more than half in Gwinnett, and nearly half of Cobb adults hold at least a four-year college degree. This has alienated them from a GOP that Trump has reshaped to reflect the cultural priorities and grievances of culturally conservative white voters, particularly those without college degrees or who live outside urban areas. Hillary Clinton narrowly carried both counties in 2016, Biden won just under 60 percent of the vote in each in 2020, and Warnock in November roughly matched Biden’s performance. As of the latest count, Warnock yesterday again carried about three-fifths of the vote in both Cobb and Gwinnett. He also ran up big margins in the suburban counties just south of Atlanta.

    The same patterns were evident in the large white-collar suburbs of the other states that Republicans must win back to recapture the White House in 2024. In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, in crushing her Trump-backed opponent, Tudor Dixon, won a higher share of the vote in Oakland and Kent Counties than she managed in 2018 or than Biden did in 2020. In Pennsylvania, Senator-elect John Fetterman matched Biden in exceeding three-fifths of the vote in both Delaware and Montgomery Counties, outside Philadelphia. In Arizona, Senator Mark Kelly carried Maricopa County, centered on Phoenix, by almost 100,000 votes—more than doubling Biden’s margin in 2020, when he became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the county since Harry Truman in 1948. In Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers won booming Dane County, centered on Madison, by 25,000 more votes than he had in 2018, and an analysis of the statewide results showed him improving the most over his first election in the counties with the highest levels of educational attainment.

    After this year’s defeats, many analysts in both parties are dubious that Trump can recapture enough (and maybe any) of these five states in 2024. The bigger question facing Republicans is whether another candidate, one who does not have Trump’s personal baggage but who shares most of his culture-war views, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, could perform much better.

    Read: Georgia sends a preacher to Washington

    Republicans are generally optimistic that DeSantis could regain ground Trump has lost among suburban voters who leaned Republican not too long ago. They point to Georgia Republican Governor Kemp performing better than Walker did in the Atlanta suburbs as evidence that a more mainstream Republican can slice the Democratic advantage in such places. DeSantis, Ayres said, “has got a lot of things he can sell to suburban Republican voters that Trump just can’t sell.”

    Almost universally, Democrats believe that Republicans are underestimating how hard it will be to reel back in college-educated suburban voters who have now mobilized against Trump’s vision for America in three consecutive elections, especially in these battleground states. Although DeSantis is less belligerent than Trump, and not associated with the violence and subversion of the January 6 insurrection, so far he has emphasized a similar style of politics focused on conservative grievance against “woke” cultural liberalism. “Ron DeSantis is every bit as MAGA as Donald Trump,” Rosenberg said. “This idea that he is some more moderate version of Trump is just farcical.”

    The fact that even a candidate as weak as Walker remained as competitive as he did underscores how difficult it may be for either side to establish a comfortable advantage in these states in 2024. (The exceptions could be Michigan, which even many Republicans agree looks daunting for them, and maybe Pennsylvania, which also tilted blue last month.)

    These states provided Democrats with their own warning signs this year. Exit polls last month showed that most voters in these states disapproved of Biden’s job performance and that big majorities in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the states where the question was asked, did not want him to run again. Democrats also faced a worrying trend of lagging Black turnout in many urban centers this year, though Black voters came out in big numbers in Georgia’s early voting, and activists in the state are confident they will remain highly engaged through 2024. “Our goal was to build a culture of voting, and that’s what we have done in Georgia over the past five years,” Amari Fennoy, the state coordinator for the NAACP Georgia State Conference, told me.

    Yet the consistency of the results this year, both demographically and geographically, signal that the re-sorting of the parties in the Trump era has left Democrats with a narrow, but potentially durable, advantage in these five crucial states. That doesn’t mean Democrats are guaranteed to win them in the 2024 presidential race, but it does suggest an important takeaway from the 2022 election that finally ended last night: As long as voters still perceive Republicans to be operating in Trump’s shadow (much less if they again nominate Trump himself), Democrats will begin with an advantage in the states most likely to pick the next president.

    “I think that the coalition that turned out to stop Trump is going to be the starting point for the next presidential race,” Wikler said. “There are new threats and new opportunities, but this was not a one-off coalition that came together for a special occasion and went home.” Georgia, again, made that very clear last night.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • 12/5: Red and Blue

    12/5: Red and Blue

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    12/5: Red and Blue – CBS News


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    Georgia runoff to decide high-stakes Senate race; Trump calls for “termination” of parts of Constitution.

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  • Candidates fight for every Georgia runoff vote

    Candidates fight for every Georgia runoff vote

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    Candidates fight for every Georgia runoff vote – CBS News


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    The U.S. Senate runoff between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and GOP challenger Herschel Walker is being held Tuesday in Georgia. Nearly 2 million voters have already cast their ballots amid the frantic fight to the finish. Nikole Killion reports.

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  • CBS Weekend News, December 4, 2022

    CBS Weekend News, December 4, 2022

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    CBS Weekend News, December 4, 2022 – CBS News


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    Georgia Senate candidates make closing arguments ahead of Tuesday’s runoff; New York City launches new efforts to minimize growth of rat populations

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  • Georgia Senate candidates make closing arguments ahead of Tuesday’s runoff

    Georgia Senate candidates make closing arguments ahead of Tuesday’s runoff

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    Georgia Senate candidates make closing arguments ahead of Tuesday’s runoff – CBS News


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    The Senate runoff in Georgia will not determine which party controls the Senate, but it could decide which party has more influence in the chamber. Incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warncok and Republican challenger Herschel Walker spent the weekend making their their closing cases to outstanding voters about why they deserve the job. Nikole Killion reports.

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  • Warnock, Walker make final pleas to voters ahead of Georgia Senate runoff

    Warnock, Walker make final pleas to voters ahead of Georgia Senate runoff

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    Warnock, Walker make final pleas to voters ahead of Georgia Senate runoff – CBS News


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    Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, and Republican challenger Herschel Walker, are making their final pitches to voters this weekend as they near voting day for Georgia’s Senate runoff election. Nikole Killion has more.

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  • Iowa Could Lose Top Spot to South Carolina As First Voting State in 2024

    Iowa Could Lose Top Spot to South Carolina As First Voting State in 2024

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    South Carolina could bump Iowa to become the home of the first presidential primary election, after the rule-making arm of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted on Friday – the first time in five decades.

    The DNC approved moving the Palmetto’s State primary to February 3rd, shifting it to the front of the calendar, followed by Nevada and New Hampshire three days later.

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    The move came after President Joe Biden sent a letter to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, explaining his reasoning for the shake-up to the nominating calendar. He emphasized the influence of the initial contests, and why he thought they should represent America’s diversity, “economically, geographically, demographically.”

    “Too often over the past fifty years, candidates have dropped out or had their candidacies marginalized by the press and pundits because of poor performances in small states early in the process before voters of color cast a vote,” Biden wrote.

    “Just like my Administration, the Democratic Party has worked hard to reflect the diversity of America – but our nominating process does not,” he wrote. “It is time to update the process for the 21st century.”

    Iowa has held the first primary for the past 50 years, since 1972, the Associated Press reported.

    Although the DNC’s rule-making arm took the first step toward making South Carolina the first state to hold a primary, the entirety of the DNC still has to vote to approve of the changes in early February.

    “I didn’t ask to be first,” said House Majority Whip and South Carolina’s lone Democrat Rep. Jim Clyburn. “It was his idea to be first.”

    “He knows what South Carolina did for him, and he’s demonstrated that time and time again, by giving respect to South Carolina,” Clyburn added.

    “This proposal reflects the best of our party as a whole, and it will continue to make our party and our country stronger,” DNC Chair Jaime Harrison said.

    Iowans are not as pleased. “Democrats cannot forget about entire groups of voters in the heart of the Midwest without doing significant damage to the party in newer generations,” said Scott Brennan, a DNC member from Iowa.

    Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley tweeted his disappointment: “Democratic National Committee is pulling the plug on the Iowa Democratic Party & that’s the WRONG THING TO DO I hope Iowa Democrats don’t throw in the towel.”

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    North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on “The Takeout” — 11/11/2022 – CBS News


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    North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper joins Major Garrett for this week’s episode of “The Takeout” to recap the 2022 midterm election results and to discuss how Democrats managed to prevent a “red wave” at the polls.

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  • Raphael Warnock, Herschel Walker make final push in Georgia runoff

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    Sen. Raphael Warnock is bringing out the heavy hitters in the final days of his Georgia Senate runoff election against challenger Herschel Walker. Nikole Killion has the latest.

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  • Hakeem Jeffries’s Test of a Lifetime: Filling Nancy Pelosi’s Shoes

    Hakeem Jeffries’s Test of a Lifetime: Filling Nancy Pelosi’s Shoes

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    I climbed out of the C train station on my way home and there, to my surprise, was Hakeem Jeffries, standing by a small folding card table. “Congress on your corner” read a banner. The image has stuck with me since that evening in 2014—not simply because it was canny retail politics, but because Jeffries was basically alone at the Brooklyn intersection, smiling and fielding any and all comments from constituents who included residents of desperately poor housing projects and of fabulously expensive brownstones. That moment is a pretty good metaphor for his rapid rise from New York state assemblyman to, as of Wednesday, the House Democratic minority leader and the successor to the legendary Nancy Pelosi.

    Jeffries has long been a fascinating, somewhat contradictory mix of down-to-earth, crafty, independent, and unifying. But he’ll have immense shoes to fill. Pelosi, who served 20 years at the helm of the House Democratic caucus, was extraordinarily effective in bending House Democrats to her will by knowing when to reward and when to punish members. Does Jeffries have the ability to push similar buttons? 

    There are plenty of talented, ambitious Democratic House members. But Jeffries is the one who has emerged to succeed Pelosi because he checks so many boxes at once. He’s an expert in the arcane congressional rules needed to pass or kill legislation. He’s able to translate complex concepts into language digestible by the general public—and an equally adept listener. He is 52 years old and Black at a time when his party’s leadership needs to become younger and less white. And Jeffries, during his 10 years in the House, has handled a series of increasingly high-profile assignments deftly, including serving as one of managers of the (first) impeachment case against President Donald Trump. There’s also the grubby reality that Jeffries, a charismatic presence particularly in small groups, should be a potent campaign fundraiser as Democrats seek to regain the majority in 2024. “He’ll do very well with the Democratic donor crowd—and for that matter, the Republican crowd too, at least personally,” says Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, a powerful business group. “I can’t speak to those characters from California, but I actually think he’ll do better than Nancy Pelosi, by a long shot, with New York donors.”

    “I’ve spent my entire adult life around the donor class,” a Washington Democratic operative says, “and they’re going to love him.”

    Colleagues point to his role in crafting and passing a federal criminal justice reform bill in 2018, where Jeffries helped bridge gaps between the left and right when explaining why he’ll make an effective leader. “In the end, what separates him is the thing that all legislative leaders need, which is a combination of people who love you and people who fear you,” a top aide to one of the more liberal Democratic House members says. “In any snapshot of the 435, there are only a handful who can hold both of those things. And Hakeem will go to the mattresses for somebody when they really need it, even if he doesn’t have a tremendous amount of warmth in his heart for that person.” All of which is why, in a famously fractious body, Jeffries was elected minority leader by unanimous acclamation.

    Which isn’t the same as universal love, however. The Democrats’ left wing has had its problems with Jeffries. Four years ago he elbowed past Barbara Lee, who was both more progressive and more senior, to win the chairmanship of the House Democratic Caucus. Last year Jeffries and Alabama congresswoman Terri Sewell formed the Team Blue PAC to help moderate incumbents beat back leftist primary challengers. “The extreme left is obsessed with talking trash about mainstream Democrats on Twitter, when the majority of the electorate constitute mainstream Democrats at the polls,” Jeffries told The New York Times. In case anyone missed the point, Jeffries told The Atlantic, “There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism.” 

    Republicans will certainly attack him, substituting racism for the sexism deployed against Pelosi. But they will have a hard time caricaturing Jeffries as a far-left radical lib. He was raised in Crown Heights, and knows well the history of racial tension in the neighborhood—an uncle, Leonard Jeffries, is a controversial former Afrocentrist professor. But Hakeem Jeffries, the son of a middle-class social worker and a substance abuse counselor, grew up to become a progressive institutionalist, someone who would try to change the system from the inside. He attended city public schools and the state university at Binghamton, then graduate school at Georgetown and law school at NYU, before being hired by one of the city’s most prominent white-shoe firms, with clients including Viacom/CBS. He ran for office for the first time (and lost) in 2000.

    Possibly the most remarkable thing about Jeffries is that he came up through Brooklyn politics and survived six years in Albany as a state assemblyman without even the hint of a corruption scandal. “Hakeem is a throwback,” says Steve Cohen, an attorney and a New York Democratic insider who has worked with Jeffries for many years in a variety of roles, including as senior adviser to Andrew Cuomo during the former governor’s first term. “He’s interested in consensus and the public good, not in what’s best for his career, and he understands that success in the public arena depends on work in the backroom.” Cohen points to the subtle part Assemblyman Jeffries played in wrangling reluctant Democratic state legislators to vote for the 2011 legalization of same-sex marriage in New York. Jeffries has sharpened those inside-game skills in Washington: When New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand was pushing to reform military sexual assault protections, her office turned to Jeffries and his staff for crucial insight on how to best assemble support in the House. 

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  • 11/28: Red and Blue

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    11/28: Red and Blue – CBS News


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    Democrats address priorities in lame-duck Congress; Georgia Senate runoff enters final stretch

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  • CBS Weekend News, November 27, 2022

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    CBS Weekend News, November 27, 2022 – CBS News


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    Air travel reaches pre-pandemic levels for holiday weekend; New film “Devotion” tells story of first black navy pilot and man who tried to save his life

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  • Top Democrats push for renewed assault weapons ban

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    Congressional Democrats are reigniting their push for new gun control legislation in the wake of recent mass shootings. President Biden has stated he’ll move on stricter gun laws before the year is over. Nancy Cordes has the details.

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  • Biden spends holiday weekend with family in Nantucket

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    President Biden spent the Thanksgiving holiday weekend with family in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Nancy Cordes has the details.

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  • CBS Evening News, November 17, 2022

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    CBS Evening News, November 17, 2022 – CBS News


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    Nancy Pelosi stepping down from Democratic leadership; Minnesota barber gives haircuts to raise money for South Africa’s poorest.

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  • 11/17: Red and Blue

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    11/17: Red and Blue – CBS News


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    Pelosi steps down as House Democrat leader; What to expect from potential 2024 contenders

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