Truth be told, when California governor Gavin Newsom announced back on July 31 that he was going to pursue a constitutional amendment to retaliate against Donald Trump’s Texas gerrymandering power grab, I was very skeptical it could work.
First of all, it involved firing at a moving target. Though there was never any doubt Texas Republicans would do as they were told, the actual new congressional map wasn’t finally put into place until the end of August, nearly a month after Newsom made his move. Second of all, the time frame was really constrained: Any proposed amendment had to clear the California legislature almost instantly and then survive legal challenges. Third of all, the nonpartisan citizens redistricting commission that Newsom wanted to push aside was well-established (created by voters in 2008 and extended to congressional redistricting two years later) and widely popular, particularly among Democrats and good-government types. And fourth of all, he and his allies would have very little time to raise the vast funds necessary to explain this arcane issue to voters, persuade them to give redistricting (albeit temporarily) back to politicians, and mobilize them to vote in an off-year special election.
In addition, Newsom was picking a fight with one of the few Californians better known than himself: his predecessor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who regarded the nonpartisan redistricting system as an important part of his own legacy.
Newsom and his allies (including virtually every Democratic pol in the state, along with national Democratic celebrities and pro-Democratic constituency groups, especially unions) methodically got the job done. They didn’t wait for the Texas power grab to be consummated before laying the groundwork for the ballot initiative, making it initially contingent on what happened in the Lone Star State. They went right ahead and secured legislative approval of an actual congressional map so that voters could see what they were voting for instead of trusting the pols to get it right. Enough money was lined up to give Prop 50 (as it came to be known) a big financial advantage over its opponents (a coalition of Republicans and allegedly independent good-government advocates). And most of all, Newsom & Co. settled quickly on a message that made Prop 50 a referendum on Donald Trump and his many terrible works.
The strategy closely resembled what Newsom did to defeat a Republican-led 2021 recall effort that would have removed him from office: making it a partisan contest in which the Democrats who outnumber Republicans about five to three in the Golden State would prevail if motivated and united. But beyond that, the Prop 50 campaign focused on Trump — not just the gerrymandering scheme the initiative countered, but his ongoing battle with California across a broad landscape of legal and policy issues. So while Prop 50 opponents were consigned to abstract arguments over complex systems for drafting and approving congressional maps, Prop 50 proponents could simply produce visceral and threatening images of a very unpopular president. And because Trump really did start the redistricting fight, Prop 50 could be presented as a righteous measure to prevent a proliferation of gerrymandering this year and on into the future. The campaign turned a retaliatory power grab into a good-government measure of its own.
Prop 50 got some breaks, too. The “No on 50” coalition was divided on tactics and strategy between those who wanted to keep the high nonpartisan ground and those who wanted to demonize Newsom. Schwarzenegger, who was probably unhappy with any association, however indirect, with Trump (the nominally Republican actor went so far as to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024), gave the “No on 50” cause little more than lip service. And Trump himself seemed to be on his worst behavior in the months that preceded the vote.
In the end, it was no contest, but still, the numbers are remarkable. With 75 percent of the vote counted (California, which sends mail ballots to all registered voters, counts votes slowly), Prop 50 is leading by a margin of 63.8 percent to 36.2 percent, and the “yes” margin is likely to go up as a “blue shift” (the typical Democratic lean in the last-counted mail ballots) develops. That’s already a higher percentage of the vote than the last three Democratic presidential candidates secured in California, and for that matter, a higher percentage than Newsom’s in his two gubernatorial elections and his recall win. On a bad Election Night for Donald Trump, it was the largest and noisiest blow to the 47th president of them all. And most obviously, Prop 50, intended to flip five U.S. House seats, could pay major dividends in the 2026 midterms, particularly since Republican gerrymandering efforts are currently stalling in Indiana and Kansas.
The big win for Prop 50 will also boost Gavin Newsom’s all-but-certain 2028 presidential candidacy. To this Californian, it feels like Newsom has been running for that office for decades. But he deserves whatever juice he gets from his anti-Trump efforts in 2025. Prop 50 represented a master class in persuasion and a strategy executed to perfection. If Newsom’s future campaign is as competent, he’ll be in good shape.
Deal-making overseas is so much more interesting than deal-making at home. Photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Before last night’s off-year elections, there was quiet momentum in Washington toward an end to the government shutdown, which has officially become the longest one in U.S. history. Among Senate Democrats, there was angst over the damage being done to public employees and SNAP beneficiaries and some confidence that public reaction to Obamacare-premium spikes would lead Republicans to agree to a subsidy extension after the government reopened. Among congressional Republicans, there was a realization that the public was blaming them for the shutdown and a recognition that Democrats needed some sort of moral victory in order to give up the fight. And among appropriators of both parties, there was a desperate desire to return to bipartisan spending decisions instead of lurching from shutdown threats to stopgap spending bills and back again. So a deal seemed likely.
But only one person could make a deal possible: President Donald Trump. Without his personal involvement, no Democrat could trust that a deal would be honored. And without his personal pressure, too many House Republicans would refuse to make any concessions to Democrats at all, particularly if it involved the hated Obamacare program. Yes, Trump was too distracted by his recent world travels to cut deals and lobby for peace prizes. But he’d eventually focus, particularly after Senate Republicans made it clear they wouldn’t just cut to the chase by killing the filibuster and crushing Democrats without negotiations.
Then last night happened, and suddenly it’s not at all clear if the government is reopening soon. Trump publicly blamed Republican losses on the shutdown and accurately pointed out the quickest solution to that problem was for Republicans to follow his earlier instructions: Kill the filibuster, and impose a reopening on Democrats by a simple majority vote in the Senate. During what Axios described as an “uncomfortable breakfast” with Republican senators who were sorting through the ashes of the off-year elections, Trump stamped his foot:
The room was “eerily silent” and “uncomfortable” Wednesday morning as President Trump cajoled Republican senators to end the filibuster, multiple attendees told Axios …
Trump warned the party would “get killed” and be viewed as “do-nothing Republicans” if they don’t change Senate rules requiring 60 votes for most legislation.
“If you don’t terminate the filibuster, you’ll be in bad shape,” the president told GOP senators during the televised portion of the breakfast remarks.
He went even further after the press was instructed to leave.
So much for the prior Republican self-assurance that if they just held their ground, Democrats would either cave or crawl to them for a face-saving deal that wouldn’t require real concessions. But as John Thune made clear after the “uncomfortable breakfast,” the Republican votes aren’t there to do what Trump wants. So it will require some very serious presidential arm-twisting (making Senate GOP lives “a living hell,” one Trump adviser warned) to bring them around.
Meanwhile, as Punchbowl News reports, Democratic spines were stiffened by the same election returns that enraged Trump:
Senate Democratswho want to keep up the fight are pointing to Tuesday’s election results as evidence that the public is with them — and that they shouldn’t cave now.
Sen. Chris Murphy(D-Conn.) said their victories should “give Democrats confidence that the American people have our back as we engage in the fight to protect people’s health care and save our democracy …”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) are leading 25 fellow Senate Democrats in a new letter to the Trump administration that slams the GOP for refusing to negotiate a deal to reopen the government that concretely addresses health care. It lists rising health care costs, including spiking Obamacare premiums, and says voters want Congress and the president to act.
So what, or who, is going to give? Trump, most Democrats, and the more sensible Republicans all want the government to reopen. But it’s not happening unless Trump okays concessions he is in no mood to consider or, alternatively, unless Senate Republicans stop thinking ahead to a future in the minority and make Congress a totally party-run operation. It does not seem to have occurred to Trump that another authoritarian power grab might be as unpopular as the shutdown it would end. And it must really suck to be John Thune right now and bear the burden of talking either his president or his colleagues into abandoning their positions.
You’ve certainly heard of the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House. But were you aware that there is also a Lincoln Bathroom? No? Well, it’s probably for the best, because it was a total dump!
As Trump revealed in this Truth Social post on Friday, the bathroom off the Lincoln Bedroom has been renovated as part of his ongoing Midas-like effort to add gold to just about every surface in the White House. Here’s a closer look at the Art Deco–style “before”:
And here’s the “after”:
Trump then sent out an additional sixTruthSocialposts showing off photos of the renovation. Here’s a small sample:
If the goal was to make people using the Lincoln Bathroom feel like they are trapped in block marble, the renovation clearly succeeded. But Trump said his main issue was historical accuracy, complaining that the previous design “was totally inappropriate for the Lincoln Era.”
“I did it in black and white polished Statuary marble,” he explained. “This was very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln and, in fact, could be the marble that was originally there.”
Marble walls and floors with polished gold fixtures certainly weren’t common for bathrooms of the time — nor was indoor plumbing. The Springfield, Illinois, home where the Lincolns lived before he was elected president had an outhouse, which you can still visit:
Photo: Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress
The family quarters in the White House were an upgrade for the Lincolns simply because the residence had indoor plumbing. However, when they moved to Washington in March 1861, Mary Lincoln was disappointed to discover that many areas of the White House were worn down. She embarked on a massive renovation project, according to WhiteHouseHistory.org:
Concluding that it would be “a degradation” to subject her family and her guests—to such surroundings, the new first lady launched a monumental redecorating project, purchasing new carpets, draperies, wallpaper, furnishings, china, and books, and modernizing plumbing, heating, and lighting.
Abraham Lincoln was furious when his wife overran a congressional appropriation allocated for the renovation by about 30 percent. After Mary spent $7,500 on furniture, including the Lincoln Bed, in the fall of 1861, she sent Commissioner of Public Buildings Benjamin Brown French to deliver the bad news to her husband. As the First Lady predicted, he was irate.
“It would stink in the nostrils of the American people to have it said that the president of the United States had approved a bill over-running an appropriation of $20,000 for flub dubs for this damned old house, when the soldiers cannot have blankets,” he shouted at French.
So perhaps Trump decking out a White House bathroom in marble and gold just as millions of Americans are poised to lose SNAP benefits due to a government shutdown actually wouldn’t go over well with “Honest Abe”? But at least we know Mary Lincoln would have loved it!
Donald Trump does not appear to be particularly worried about public opinion. Despite a government shutdown, which he seems to believe his party is “winning,” the president is jetting around the world, cutting deals, accepting extravagant gifts, and claiming to resolve wars and other conflicts. Indeed, in the context of his unhappiness at not being able to run for a third term, he keeps telling us he has “the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had.”
That’s not true. In fact, according to the polling averages we use here from Silver Bulletin, Trump’s net approval rating today, at minus-10.8 percent, is the lowest of his second term. His average approval rating of 43.1 percent also equals his second-term low, and his average disapproval rating is also a second-term high at 53.9 percent. He’s at net double-digit negatives in the most recent polls from Economist-YouGov (minus-19 percent), Quinnipiac (minus-14 percent), Reuters-Ipsos (minus-17 percent), American Research Group (minus-23 percent), and Gallup (minus-13 percent). Even Trump’s favorite polling outlet, Rasmussen Reports, currently has him at a second-term low net approval rating of minus-8 percent. By way of context, it should be noted the only president dating back to Harry Truman with a lower net job approval rating at this point of his presidency was Trump himself during his first term (he was at net minus-17.3 percent, per Silver Bulletin).
Trump’s low point in net job approval is the product of a slow and somewhat erratic deterioration over time rather than any sudden lurch. It’s been underwater since March, and over 5 percent-net-negative since June. There’s no single issue driving his lower approvals, so far as we can tell, though again, according to Silver Bulletin, he has net-negative job-approval averages on immigration (minus-3.0 percent), trade (minus-16.2 percent), the economy (minus-16.4 percent), and inflation (minus-27.6 percent). Bad as that last number is, it was quite a bit worse on October 1 (minus-32.8 percent).
More specific issues aren’t helping Trump’s standing but may not be as significant as the fundamentals. The most recent Quinnipiac poll shows voters split pretty equally on blame for the ongoing government shutdown. And while nearly half of respondents approve of Trump’s handling of the Israel-Hamas cease-fire, well over half doubt it will stick. A recent Yahoo-YouGov poll finds that Americans disapprove of Trump’s demolition of the White House East Wing to build a ballroom by a 61 percent to 25 percent margin, but it’s unclear how much it matters to them.
Trump has been very preoccupied with trying to improve his party’s odds in the 2026 midterms by pushing Republican-controlled states to draw congressional maps in the GOP’s favor. Polls show why he feels the need to rig the landscape: In the generic congressional ballot that tests which party Americans want to control Congress, Democrats currently lead by 2.7 percent in the RealClearPolitics averages. In the same averages before last year’s elections producing the current tiny GOP House majority, Republicans led by 0.3 percent. DecisionDesk HQ places the current Democratic advantage on the generic ballot at 3.5 percent.
Mikie Sherrill and Jack Ciattarelli debating. Photo: Heather Khalifa/AP Photo
Most of the known metrics for next Tuesday’s gubernatorial election in New Jersey suggest cautious optimism for Democratic nominee Mikie Sherrill. All but one public poll in the entire cycle has shown her leading Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli, usually by a small but steady margin. Early voting numbers show much the same narrow Democratic margin in in-person voting (which concludes on Sunday), plus a big Democratic margin in voting by mail, that prevailed in 2021. That’s when current incumbent Phil Murphy defeated Ciattarelli by 3 percent — a shockingly low margin given both polling and expectations but a win nonetheless. Overall early voting is up, which might simply reflect a competitive high-stakes race. Direct-candidate spending is capped by New Jersey’s public-campaign financing system, but heavy independent expenditures lean in Sherrill’s direction.
There is nonetheless a distinct air of uncertainty surrounding the ultimate results and a lot of nervousness among Democrats. Much of the uncertainty flows from what might be called a double-incumbency phenomenon. Off-year elections in New Jersey and elsewhere tend strongly to cut against the party controlling the White House, particularly when the occupant is as unpopular as Donald Trump is right now. But New Jersey hasn’t awarded its governorship to the same party for three straight elections since 1961, and two-term incumbent Murphy isn’t terribly popular either (Republicans blame him for high local taxes and high housing and utility costs). And Democratic jitters are attributable in no small part to Ciattarelli’s surprisingly strong showing in 2021 and Trump’s even more startling gains in 2024 (he cut the Democratic presidential margin in New Jersey from 16 percent to less than 6 percent). As my colleague David Freedlander recently explained, there are also doubts about how well Sherrill has campaigned:
A former Navy pilot, prosecutor, and three-term member of Congress, she has been an uninspiring campaigner, someone prone to word-salad answers and awkward freezes. “There is a generation of Democratic candidates who were brought up in a certain way, and now they are behaving in that way,” says one party strategist in the state. “She is a good person who would probably do a pretty good job as governor, but she is a product of a system that spits out replacement-level candidates.”
For his part, Ciattarelli has campaigned well and is generating some unmistakable enthusiasm, but a lot of it is probably attributable to his self-transformation into a close ally of the president’s (he definitely wasn’t in 2021), which may cost him among swing voters. Trump’s recent decision to unilaterally cancel the Gateway Tunnel project that would give some relief to New Jersey commuters into New York did the Republican no favors; neither has the administration’s abrasive, racially profiling mass-deportation program, which may well reverse the pro-GOP trend among Latino voters (a large presence in New Jersey) so evident last year.
Independents (who participate at reduced levels in non-presidential elections) tend to break against incumbent parties in elections like this one. But which incumbent will they punish? Given Trump’s unparalleled ability to dominate the news every hour of every day, you’d have to figure he will be more front of mind with undecided voters than Murphy, or at least that’s what Democrats hope.
Unlike the off-year contest in Virginia, where toxic texts from the Democratic nominee for attorney general have all but overshadowed the gubernatorial election, Sherrill and Ciattarelli have the spotlight all to themselves (the only other statewide office up this year is that of the lieutenant governor, who runs on a ticket with the candidate for governor). Some late public polls are being touted by Republicans as showing a surge for their candidate, but that could be because they were conducted by pollsters who are often pro-GOP outliers. Quantus Insights has Sherrill leading by three points, Co/Efficient shows her up by one, and Emerson — which had the race tied in September — has Sherrill up by two points, all results within the margin of error. The very latest poll, from Quinnipiac, has Sherrill ahead 51 percent to 43 percent among likely voters, pretty much where they had the race in September and early October. But in a good sign for the Democrat, a new Fox News poll shows her expanding her lead from five points to seven during the last couple of weeks.
Given lingering Democratic concerns about Sherrill, it’s worth noting that she overperformed expectations in the June primary, when she comfortably dispatched five viable rivals. And she may currently suffer in media perceptions by being compared unfavorably to New York phenomenon Zohran Mamdani, a problem that probably won’t carry over to actual voters. As New Jersey native Matthew Cooper observed, she’s still favored unless some late developments cut the other way:
The best thing Sherrill has going for her is that no one inside the campaign thought this would be easy, and now they’ve had enough scares that they’re not taking anything for granted. The wind may finally be at Sherrill’s back, but as a helicopter pilot, she knows it can shift.
When will we know the results? It depends. It’s worth noting that New Jersey is one of 22 states that allow mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they are received by election officials within a set period of time (six days, in this case). This is a practice that Trump has loudly denounced as inherently fraudulent; so if the race is very close when Election Day ballots have been counted, you can expect some “stolen election” noise from the White House since mail ballots will definitely skew Democratic. It’s another reason Democrats everywhere are praying that Sherrill, as Cooper puts it, manages to stick the “landing.”
Trump whooping it up with Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
You know, it’s hard work being a historic president elevated by God himself to save America and then the whole world. So it’s understandable that Donald Trump is deeply annoyed, and even embarrassed, that while he was off cutting deals, ending wars, and accepting presents from grateful foreign leaders, his hirelings in Congress still can’t end the government shutdown. He fully vented his wrath at Truth Social:
I just got back from Asia where I met the Leaders of many Countries, including China, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and others. It was a Great Honor to meet them but, more particularly, to see that America is respected again — RESPECTED LIKE NEVER BEFORE! Great Trade Deals were made, Long Term relationships now exist, and money is pouring into our Country because of Tariffs and, frankly, the Landslide Results of the 2024 Presidential Election. The one question that kept coming up, however, was how did the Democrats SHUT DOWN the United States of America, and why did the powerful Republicans allow them to do it? The fact is, in flying back, I thought a great deal about that question, WHY?
After repeating some lies about illegal immigrants being the principal beneficiaries of the Democratic health-care demands that congressional Republicans have refused to consider, the president cut to the chase: “It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!”
In other words: “This isn’t my problem, it’s yours, so go fix it!”
It’s certainly an unwelcome message to his loyal congressional troops. Along with their Democratic opponents, they have been waiting for Trump to cut some sort of deal to end the shutdown. Having deferred to the administration to an embarrassing degree from the moment his second term began, Republicans in Congress will be understandably chagrined to be told they are on their own. The one thing, perhaps the only thing, that they are likely to deny him in this demand (and not for the first time) is a complete end to the Senate filibuster. Yes, it would rob Democrats of the one bit of leverage they have in 2025, which they’ve used to bring Trump’s legislative agenda to a halt and to advance their own priorities. But it would also expose Republicans to the future wrath of a Democratic trifecta regime long after Trump has left Washington for good. You can’t really expect the narcissist-in-chief to care about what happens when he’s gone, but Republicans will be loathe to disarm future Senate minorities.
They are certainly making that clear today in extremely rare rebukes to Trump, as Politico reports:
[John] Thune has defended the filibuster multiple times during the shutdown, calling it a “bad idea” to suggest eliminating it. “The 60-vote threshold has protected this country,” he said earlier this month.
Ryan Wrasse, a spokesperson for the South Dakota Republican, said in a statement on Friday that “Leader Thune’s position on the importance of the legislative filibuster is unchanged.”
Kate Noyes — a spokesperson for Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 GOP leader — said on Friday his position in support of the legislative filibuster also hasn’t changed….
Prior to Trump’s postings Thursday, more than a dozen GOP senators had rejected chatter about changing Senate rules as the shutdown dragged on in recent weeks.
As so the government shutdown will drag on for the time being, with the man who considers himself the greatest deal-maker in human history on the sidelines, pouting. Perhaps he’ll get back on Air Force One and seek more congenial surroundings somewhere, anywhere, other than the ungrateful country over which he grudgingly presides. Or maybe he’ll get over it and do his job. Tens of millions of Americans who are about to lose SNAP benefits this weekend, along with tens of millions more who will receive notices their health-insurance costs are about to skyrocket, are counting on him to help resolve the crisis. Having said for years about every problem that “Only I can fix it,” it’s no time for him to just walk away.
Abigail Spanberger on the campaign trail. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Virginia’s off-year elections have predictably lined up as a negative referendum on Donald Trump’s fractious second-term agenda. But while the Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate, the centrist congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, looks to be cruising toward a comfortable win over Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, there’s trouble two spots downballot. A scandal involving newly unearthed 2022 text messages from attorney general nominee Jay Jones has roiled his close race against incumbent Republican Jason Miyares and discomfited his ticket-mates (statewide candidates in Virginia run separately but often campaign together). While Spanberger and the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, Ghazala Hamshi, have denounced the texts, which wished terrible deaths for a Republican legislative leader and his family, they haven’t asked Jones to withdraw from the race as the GOP and its allied media have predictably demanded.
So Virginia Democrats have been thrown off-balance, and limited polling shows Jones in serious trouble. Hamshi’s race against Republican John Reid for the LG position is also very close. But Republican hopes that the scandal would derail Spanberger’s campaign don’t look to be realistic at all. For one thing, Jones’s troubles are mostly just convincing voters to skip the AG race rather than voting Republican, which mitigates the damage to his own candidacy and isolates the fallout. For another, Donald Trump is just a lodestone for the GOP that’s too difficult to throw off, as veteran Virginia political reporter Jeff Schapiro recently observed:
The ongoing federal government shutdown, triggered Oct. 1 by a partisan standoff in Congress, and preceded by a wave of DOGE-induced layoffs and retirements of government workers that, starting this past winter, fueled a steady increase in joblessness into the final months of the Virginia campaign. These spikes are most evident in Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs but they are flaring elsewhere in the state.
Further, Trump’s tariffs are eroding by nearly 10% cargo traffic through the state’s gateway to the world, the Port of Virginia, a pillar of the coastal Virginia economy along with surrounding military bases and related federal civilian employment.
Add in unhappiness with Trump’s mass-deportation overreach among Virginia’s sizable population of immigrant citizens, and it’s clear the usual swing against the party controlling the White House (which gave the commonwealth Republican governor Glenn Youngkin four years ago) has been intensified this year. Spanberger has also run a highly disciplined campaign, fueled by a big funding advantage over Sears-Earle. So while Virginia experienced a significant swing toward the GOP in 2024 (Kamala Harris won it by just under six points; Joe Biden won it by ten in 2020), it’s still a blue state in a blue mood over a Republican presidency.
Aside from the Jones brouhaha, there’s one other late development that some Republicans think might help them: a surprise decision by Democratic legislative leaders to undertake a long-shot effort to get a constitutional amendment enacted so they can draw up a favorable congressional map prior to next year’s midterms. But since over a million Virginians have already voted early, and the gerrymandering process is extremely tentative and complex, it seems unlikely to have an impact other than on the margins.
Gubernatorial polls show no late Republican trend. The most recent publicly released survey, from Roanoke College, showed Spanberger with a ten-point lead over Earle-Sears (51 percent to 41 percent). The RealClearPolitics polling averages have the Democrat leading by 7.2 percent. The only poll indicating a really close race was a mid-October finding from the decidedly pro-GOP combine of Trafalgar and Insider Advantage, and even they gave Spanberger a three-point advantage. Jay Jones may or may not go down, but barring a shocker, Virginia will be governed by Democrats, almost certainly in a trifecta, next year.
One historical note worth mentioning: no matter who wins the race, Spanberger will be the first woman to serve as governor or senator of Virginia. That will leave Pennsylvania as the only state that has never broken the male monopoly on these positions.
Lis Smith is one of the few political consultants who can approach the celebrity level of their clients. An opinionated, sometimes pugilistic presence in Democratic politics (and online), she is best known for engineering Pete Buttigieg’s overachieving 2020 primary run. But Smith already had an extensive résumé before that, including running rapid response for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection and serving as a spokesperson for Bill de Blasio, before a romance with former governor Eliot Spitzer got her fired. Later, she advised — and defended — Andrew Cuomo during the thick of the sexual-harassment allegations that ended his governorship before turning against him sharply. Since releasing a campaign memoir in 2022, Smith has worked for Michigan senate hopeful Mallory McMorrow, among others, and is now advising a new Super-PAC, Majority Democrats, that advances a moderate agenda. I spoke with her about Zohran Mamdani’s star-making campaign, how Democrats bungled 2024, and who she has her eye on for 2028.
You have been very critical of Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign. What do you make of what he’s been doing out there? This has been an unimpressive effort — did he lose his political touch at some point? Look, he earned the nickname “The Prince of Darkness” for a reason. He’s channeling the side of him that people call Bad Andrew, where he will do basically anything he can do to hold on to power. And what we’re seeing is a very dark campaign that appeals to the worst aspects of humanity and is closing on the most pessimistic note possible. Laughing about Zohran Mamdani cheering on 9/11; standing with Eric Adams when he talks about radical Islamists burning down churches; having supporters run ads with the word “jihad” over Zohrani Mamdani’s face. Contrast that with Mamdani, who has run an issue-based, positive, sunny campaign. I think New Yorkers ultimately will choose a positive, sunny campaign over Andrew.
Wasn’t Cuomo always like this, on some level? You really see someone’s character when they’re cornered. And with me, with other advisers, you really saw that at the end, when he was called on to resign and when he was faced with the threat of impeachment. That’s what you’re seeing right now. His general-election campaign is, I would note, much darker than his primary campaign was. His real character is coming out right now, and I think it’s the character of someone who should not be handed the reins of power again.
You’re somebody who’s pretty familiar with young talent in the Democratic Party. Was Mamdani on your radar before this race? No. In October of last year, my friend Eric Koch, who is a Democratic consultant, told me, “You’ve gotta keep an eye on this Zohran Mamdani guy. I really think he could be the nominee.” I thought he was crazy, but I remember just being lights-out impressed by him, especially in the debates. Generational talents don’t come around that often — that’s why they’re called generational talents. I talk about Bernie Sanders’s socialism as DSA 1.0. AOC is DSA 2.0. I think Zohran Momani is DSA 3.0, where he’s less into demonizing political opponents and people who disagree with him and more interested in engaging with people who have different viewpoints. You’ve seen him do interviews on platforms and with media outlets that are not exactly DSA friendly — Fox News, The Bulwark.
He’s done the podcast circuit. Yeah, Flagrant. And he has run a very positive, issue-based campaign at a time when Democrats have gotten into a trap of only talking about Donald Trump and not offering up big ideas. I think there’s something Democrats on every part of the spectrum can learn: That you shouldn’t just run against Donald Trump, and that you need to offer an affirmative vision. And if you do that, people will rally around you, even if you are an unknown 33-year-old member of DSA.
On a somewhat similar note, there’s the Maine Senate race, where we’ve got Graham Platner, who is, in a way, a perfect test case of various questions surrounding the Democrats. There’s this debate about how big a tent the Democratic Party should be. Purity tests are less popular now, but Platner not only wrote all these Reddit posts he had to apologize for but he got a symbol associated with Nazis tattooed on his chest. Polls nonetheless show him winning by a lot, though at least one came out before the Nazi thing. People want a challenger who seems honest and authentic, but is there, like, a limit to that? I managed to avoid the great online Maine Senate War of 2025, but I guess it’s inevitable I’d have to weigh in at some point. The poll that came out showing Platner with more than double the support of an established, relatively popular governor — that’s a real wake-up call. It should be a flashing red light to party leadership that Democratic voters are pissed off and they’re not gonna take it anymore. They are pissed off at the gerontocracy that cost us the 2024 election. They’re pissed off at being force fed, subpar subpar, uninspiring, yesterday’s-news candidates, and they’re just hungry for something new, for unconventional, refreshing voices, and even people outside politics like Graham Platner.
That being said, some of these revelations about him are obviously pretty troubling — the tattoo, his old posts. But we haven’t really seen much sign that Maine voters are moving away from him. I do think we need to leave room in politics and the Democratic Party for second chances and redemption stories, because, let’s be real, most of the people who turn out to vote for these candidates are not all a hundred percent good themselves. We’ve all done things through regret, all had our struggles. So I think some of Platner’s story — the idea of being lost, finding a community and purpose — is actually relatable to a lot of people. But that being said, one man’s redemption story shouldn’t come at the cost of a Senate seat.
It does test the limits of the big-tent approach. It does, and it also tests the limit of recruiting a 77-year-old to run for Senate. In all the research I’ve seen, Democratic voters are saying, “No more gerontocracy. We want fresh, new voices.”
Another young candidate, Jay Jones in Virginia, texted violent fantasies about his political adversaries but has not dropped out of the attorney-general race there. What do you make of that story? Jay Jones made a mistake. It’s the worst possible text to come out in the weeks after Charlie Kirk was assassinated. But he apologized for it. He owned up to his mistake. And I do think people should be judged by more than their worst moments.
It’s really hard for me to take the criticism from the right wing all that seriously when they have a president who goes out and stokes violence on a monthly basis and who encouraged the insurrection on January 6. Ultimately, I think Jones will be able to pull through, because attorney-general positions right now are really important when you have a president who has completely weaponized his DOJ and weaponized federal law enforcement.
I was watching an interview you did with Jen Psaki in which you reminisced about working on Obama’s reelection bid in 2012, when the campaign painted Romney as this corporate villain early in defining him and how effective that was. That did not remind me of Mamdani a bit — not so much defining his opponents that way but the relentless focus on the economy and affordability. With all this talk about the future direction of the party, do you think that is the most surefire way forward for Democrats right now? Yes. And the biggest mistake we made in 2024 was not leading every single conversation by talking about the economy. When people feel like they are one accident, one incident, one layoff away from financial collapse, they do not want to hear us starting conversations by saying, “The most existential issue you should care about is democracy.” Or abortion rights. Those are very important issues, don’t get me wrong. But we were not listening to voters, and we were not meeting them where they were.
I think this is part of a trend among Democrats in recent years, where we stopped treating voters like adults. When they would say, “Prices are killing me,” we would say, “Actually, inflation is higher in Sweden.” When they would say, “Crime is out of control,” we’d respond, “Actually, it’s lower than it was 40 years ago.” And when they said, “Hey, shouldn’t we maybe do something about the border?” we said, “Turn off Fox News. That’s a right-wing talking point.” Voters noticed that. They thought we weren’t listening to them. And that is why they were willing to go vote for someone like Donald Trump. Say what you will about him — he at least was speaking a language of grievance, talking about taking on the status quo that was driving a lot of these problems. And to a lot of people, that was more appealing than people who were talking down to them or not even listening to them.
The thinking was that Democrats’ strongest issues were abortion rights and democracy and that they were getting killed on the economy, so it was better to all but ignore it. But it wasn’t even that, because you remember the Biden administration had the whole “Bidenomics” campaign.
Yeah, but then they got rid of it when they realized it wasn’t working at all. In 2012, Barack Obama was running with an unemployment rate at which no president had been reelected in the past. How did he win that election? It wasn’t by ignoring the economy. It was by going right at it and saying, “We are working every day to dig our way out of this recession. I know it’s not enough, but look at who the opponent is. This is a private-equity guy who’s gotten rich by buying up companies, laying off workers, and destroying communities, and that’s not who we need to hand the economy over to at this moment.” By making the economic contrast clear and acknowledging that there was still work to do, that things weren’t perfect — we didn’t call it Obamanomics — Barack Obama was able to win when the economy was still in pretty dire straits.
Who in the Democratic Party is impressing you at the moment? It feels like things are wide open in a way they haven’t been in a long time, and there’s a real reward for being creative, mixing it up, doing something different. I’ll put Pete Buttigieg aside, because people know I’m very biased toward him, so anything I say about him will come with that asterisk. But I still do think that he is one of the Democrats’ best and most compelling communicators.
Ruben Gallego is someone I tell everyone to take a look at. He is someone who really understands how to speak to the financial fragility that people are feeling, this feeling that the American dream no longer exists, the feeling that you can do everything right in life and still not be able to pay your bills, not feel safe in your community, not be able to send your kid to a school that you feel is going to educate them well. And he meets voters where they are on immigration. He talks about the need for a secure border but also an end to the lawless ICE raids and the racial profiling that’s happening with interior-immigration enforcement across the country. And he’s someone who also just speaks like a normal person. He doesn’t talk in policy talking points. He doesn’t sound like he’s reading off a staffer’s memo. He’s also got a very compelling personal story. Another thing I think is impressive about him is that he was able to vastly overperform the top of the ticket in 2024 and to win Latino voters. Democrats will need to figure out how to fix our problem with Latino voters and our problems with Black voters and Asian voters if we’re going to win more elections.
Trump does already seem to be alienating some of the Latino voters who came over to vote for him last year. Yeah. One thing we saw is Latino voters are pretty conservative on the issue of the border and illegal immigration. But the racial profiling we’re seeing from ICE, and these chaos-inducing raids, are just a bridge too far. But we’re not going to be able to win by hoping Trump screws up enough on immigration. Democrats need to go out and say some hard truths. One is that we need a secure border. We’re a sovereign nation; sovereign nations have secure borders. Two is that we need to deport criminals, violent criminals especially. And until we state those two plain truths that a lot of Democrats have seemed loath to do in recent years, we will not have credibility with voters. Voters will not let us get to the part where we can criticize the ICE raids and talk about how they’re undermining public safety and how they’re deeply immoral until we acknowledge the hard truths that Democrats have had so much trouble acknowledging in recent years.
How do you feel about Gavin Newsom’s strategy of going on offense by trolling Trump all the time? There’s always a room for a troll in a political party, so I’m glad he’s taking up that mantle.
You think he’s presidential timber? I don’t know, but in 2028, whoever is going to win will be someone who doesn’t just focus on Donald Trump and who has an affirmative vision, one that’s rooted in understanding that people are sick of the status quo, sick of the Establishment, and they really want change. I think 2028 is very ripe for our party finding another Barack Obama type. Voters are pissed off and want to take on the status quo, just as Obama did in 2008 when he criticized all the people who voted for the Iraq War, when he took on the Clinton dynasty. And I think we’re ripe for another moment like that.
How do you think Chuck Schumer and Democrats have handled the government shutdown? It seems like Schumer has quelled the critics a bit, for now at least. Everyone wants a fight, and he’s finally picked one. Democrats have been smart to zero in on the issue of health-care costs and ACA subsidies. They could have gone in a million different directions.
I’m a little surprised at how effective it’s been. Cost is the No. 1 issue for voters. And one of the top three concerns about costs is health care, so it was a really smart fight to pick. It’s also smart because Democrats know there are Republicans in the House and Senate who want to extend these subsidies. They know it’s a fight they’ll win with the public, and it’s one that they’ll likely win with the House and Senate, whether it’s in a shutdown negotiation or months afterward.
I sometimes see people make the point that maybe the median voter’s No. 1 issue isn’t Trump destroying democracy, or tearing down the East Wing of the White House, or any of the other crazy things he’s doing, but that the point of politics is to make people care about these issues more. And so to downplay those issues is political malpractice. We’ve got to meet voters where they are. Do we need to save democracy? Hell yes. But to save democracy, maybe we don’t talk about democracy. Maybe we talk about cost. Maybe we talk about a commonsense approach to the border. Maybe we talk about ways we’ll overhaul health care, whatever it is. But election after election has shown us that voters do not respond to this democracy argument.
To go back to Pete Buttigieg: Do you think America is ready for a gay president? I think America could be. The same question was raised in 2008 with Barack Obama — was America ready for a Black president? A lot of people thought no. I think sometimes we don’t give the American people enough credit that their views can change and evolve over time and that they’re willing to look past identity labels and look more at someone’s characters, someone’s ideas, someone’s passion to lead, more than an identity characteristic. That’s something we learned with Barack Obama and that maybe one day we could learn with Pete.
I was surprised he didn’t run for the Michigan Senate seat. Does experience like that matter to voters anymore? Actually, in a lot of races, we’re seeing that experience is more of a negative than a positive, because a lot of voters equate experience with being part of the problem. If you’ve been in office and you haven’t fixed things, why should I vote for you? It’s not always fair, but this is a moment when people are looking for leaders who will challenge the status quo. That’s more likely to come from someone who hasn’t spent their career climbing the ladder and who hasn’t spent their career asking for permission to run for this office or that office, or get this endorsement from leadership or that endorsement from leadership.
It reminds me of what was happening with the GOP in the early 2010s. There’s this conversation about whether Democrats are going through a Tea Party moment. Maybe — maybe it’s our own little version of the Tea Party. But to me it feels less ideological than the GOP version in 2009 and 2010. It feels more generational, and more rooted in who will fight versus who will fold. Also, Democratic voters, more so than Republican voters for whatever reason, seem a bit more concerned about electability. 2026 will test it; these primaries will test it. But in focus-group polling I’ve seen for 2026, the top issues for voters are generational change, getting rid of the gerontocracy, who will stand up and fight, and electability. And that’s pretty notable — that even when they want to take on the Establishment and want a new generation of leadership, they still want someone who can win. Whereas in 2010, it really felt like Republican voters wanted just to burn the house down, even if they were in it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Gipper loved him some free trade. Photo: The Independent
One of Donald Trump’s most interesting political achievements has been to force a Republican Party that had embraced free-trade orthodoxy for many decades into supporting, or at least tolerating, his own vintage 19th-century protectionist views. Like his harsh criticism of the Iraq War launched by the last GOP president, Trump’s frequently savage words about free trade and globalization have clearly embarrassed a lot of Republicans who are old enough to remember when that kind of talk was associated with lefty union types and cranky Old Right figures like Pat Buchanan. The fact that he has now made tariff-driven trade wars the centerpiece of his second-term economic policies is often ignored by old-school Republicans, or rationalized as merely a rhetorical weapon he deploys in cutting commercial deals with other countries.
But at least one of the Canadians who are so often an object of Trump’s protectionist belligerence is drawing attention to the 180-degree turn the 47th president executed in conservative international economic thinking, or the lack thereof. Ontario premier Doug Fordran an ad on U.S. television networks featuring clips in which the unquestioned patron saint of pre-Trump conservatism, Ronald Reagan, loudly and proudly embraces free trade:
Here’s what the Gipper says in the ad, which is from a 1987 speech:
When someone says, “Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,” it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while, it works — but only for a short time.
But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer.
High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars.
Then the worst happens. Markets shrink and collapse. Businesses and industry shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.
Throughout the world, there’s a growing realization that the way to prosperity for all nations is rejecting protectionist legislation and promoting fair and free competition.
America’s jobs and growth are at stake.
Trump promptly pitched a fit at Truth Social and suspended trade negotiations with Canada:
CANADA CHEATED AND GOT CAUGHT!!!They fraudulently took a big buy ad saying that Ronald Reagan did not like Tariffs, when actually he LOVED TARIFFS FOR OUR COUNTRY, AND ITS NATIONAL SECURITY…. Thank you to the Ronald Reagan Foundation for exposing this FRAUD.
Actually, the Reagan Foundation complained that Ontario hadn’t asked for permission to use the clip and said it “misrepresented” the overall speech, which indeed justified the imposition of tariffs on Japan. But there’s nothing fake about the clip; Reagan was making it clear that the measures he was taking against Japan were unfortunate and temporary expedients that did not detract from his more general commitment to free trade. The 40th president did not “love tariffs for our country and its national security.” Like nearly every pre-Trump Republican leader who remembered the disastrous effects of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which helped exacerbate the Great Depression, Reagan only used trade restraints sparingly and grudgingly.
Trump, on the other hand, has called “tariffs the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary” and believes in them not as a temporary measure or negotiating ploy but as the foundation of a good economy. He dreams of replacing the federal income tax with tariff revenues. He is precisely the sort of demagogue Reagan was speaking of as a misguided advocate of tariffs as “patriotic.”
You can debate whether Trump is right or (as most economists believe) wrong. But you can’t debate whether he’s taken the free-trade policies of Ronald Reagan (who was particularly devoted to dismantling barriers to trade with Canada) and tossed them in a wastebasket. That may embarrass him and other Republicans, but it’s no excuse for blaming those with better memories.
Trump on Thursday insisted that he could continue to launch strikes against alleged drug traffickers without Congress first passing an official declaration of war. “I’m not going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war,” he said. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. Okay? We’re going to kill them, you know, they’re going to be, like, dead.”
It’s clear that Trump’s intention was to rule out any congressional interference with his constitutionally dubious use of military force in a struggle — don’t say war! — with so-called “narco-terrorists.” But the line he drew between “war” and “killing” revealed a more fundamental element of his thinking. There has always been a bit of a contradiction between Trump’s horror toward “forever wars” — not to mention his aspirations as a global peacemaker — and his more general bloodlust. He wants America’s enemies and rivals to have no doubt about his willingness to unleash incredible levels of violence if he deems it necessary. He has dismissed laws of warfare that protect civilians or prohibit the torture of potential informants. He has appointed a “secretary of war” who believes “lethality” must be central to every national-security calculation. And in all sorts of contexts, he’s rejected any restraints on retribution against anyone who crosses him.
What this apparent disconnect between aversion to war and pure enjoyment of violence shows is that Trump remains a faithful disciple of the Jacksonian tradition in American foreign policy. Like Old Hickory, Trump rejects alliances, entanglements, or commitments to deploy military force, but at the same time believes use of maximum violence to eliminate any direct threat to perceived American interests is essential to maintaining the peace and deterring bad actors.
Trump wants a huge military that is so feared that it rarely needs to be used, and he hates the idea of limited “forever” wars that don’t instantly achieve their purposes. That probably includes any armed conflict that would last long enough to require congressional authorization or oversight. So Trump has no problems with, and in fact glories in, killing people as the best possible guarantor of an America-friendly world order based on fear rather than messy treaties and rules. Sudden strikes on fishing boats that may or may not be engaged in “narco-terrorism” are right in his wheelhouse. The message to a dangerous world is Don’t tread on me — or get yourself killed. It’s chilling but entirely in character for the 47th president.
Virginia Democratic legislative leader Scott Surovell has a redistricting tiger by the tail. Photo: Minh Connors/The Washington Post/Getty Images
With all the appalling things going on every day in Donald Trump’s America, it’s tempting to view the nationwide scramble to redraw congressional maps before the 2026 midterms as just another typical incident of partisan gamesmanship. But it’s actually quite unusual. Since at least since the beginning of the 20th century, states rarely conducted redistricting other than after the decennial Census and the subsequent reapportionment of U.S. House seats between the states. Court decisions occasionally forced a mid-decade redistricting (particularly during the sadly distant heyday of the Voting Rights Act). But when then–U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay engineered a redistricting of the Texas House delegation in 2003 to help Republicans reconquer Congress in 2004, it was a national scandal.
So when President Donald Trump ordered Texas Republicans to suddenly upturn the state’s congressional map because he knew his party was likely to lose control of the House in 2026, it was a very big deal. And when he subsequently ordered Republicans to do the same thing in every single state where they had the power to pull off such blatant, minority-disenfranchising power grabs, it touched off a wild arms race between the two parties that may not subside until candidate filing deadlines for 2026 have passed. Having flipped up to five House seats in Texas, and one in Missouri, Republicans are now looking at the possibility of rewriting maps in Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Democrats are retaliating with a big redistricting push in California, also aimed at netting five seats, which will be approved or vetoed by voters on November 4. Democrats in Maryland, Illinois, and New York are thinking about joining the gerrymandering jamboree.
But the best sign of how out of control the redistricting craze has become is the out-of-the-blue plan now emerging from Virginia, where Democrats are considering a truly mad dash to flip two or three House seats before the midterms, as the New York Timesreports:
The next front in the nation’s pitched battle over mid-decade congressional redistricting is opening in Virginia, where Democrats are planning the first step toward redrawing congressional maps, a move that could give their party two or three more seats.
The surprise development, which was announced by legislators on Thursday, would make Virginia the second state, after California, in which Democrats try to counter a wave of Republican moves demanded by President Trump to redistrict states to their advantage before the 2026 midterm elections …
Democrats now hold six of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats. Redistricting could deliver two or three additional seats for the party, depending on how aggressive cartographers choose to be in a redrawing effort.
This is happening less than two weeks before a general election in Virginia in which every statewide elected office and every seat in the lower chamber of the legislature are up for grabs. Democrats have extremely narrow margins of control in both chambers, which isn’t expected to change on November 4. But the sudden gambit seems to have taken Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger by surprise. In Virginia, the governor (until January that’s Republican Glenn Youngkin) plays no role in the passage of constitutional amendments, which is what the Democratic plan will require.
The timetable is almost madcap. Democrats will need to approve the proposed constitutional amendment next week. Then they would have to pass it again in the next legislative session that begins in January. Only then can they schedule a referendum timed to enact the measure before candidate filing for the midterms ends. No telling when the actual proposed maps will be made public. There is absolutely no margin for error at any step. But that’s how frantic people in both parties have become to get control of the chain reaction Trump began with malice aforethought.
The stakes are huge because of the literally incredible things Trump might do in the last two years of his presidency if his slavishly submissive party continues to hold a governing trifecta beyond the midterms. The longer implications are ominous too, if it becomes routine for parties to repeatedly change congressional (and ultimately, state legislative) maps in order to maintain or seize power regardless of the overall contours of public opinion. It will be quite the white-knuckle ride.
Pretty soon SNAP benefits will run out in at least half the country. Photo: Lindsey Nicholson/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
For much of the country, excluding federal employees, the government-shutdown crisis gripping Congress has been a distant battle between politicians indulging in their usual partisan squabbles. No matter who they blame for the shutdown, regular people don’t appear to be that engaged. An Economist-YouGov survey released earlier this week showed about three-fourths of Americans saying the shutdown has affected them “a little” or “not at all.”
That’s about to change. Yes, some effects of the shutdown will gradually manifest themselves, particularly the missed paychecks for federal employees (e.g., active military servicemembers) who haven’t been protected by questionably legal diversion of funds by the Trump administration. But on November 1, assuming (as is wise) that the shutdown doesn’t somehow end before then, a double whammy is going to strike large swaths of the country. First, SNAP benefits are going to run out in at least half the country, as Politico reports:
Millions of low-income Americans will lose access to food aid on Nov. 1, when half of states plan to cut off benefits due to the government shutdown.
Twenty-five states told POLITICO that they are issuing notices informing participants of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — the nation’s largest anti-hunger initiative — that they won’t receive checks next month. Those states include California, Alabama, Arkansas, Hawaii, Indiana, Mississippi and New Jersey. Others didn’t respond to requests for comment in time for publication.
USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service recently told every state that they’d need to hold off on distributing benefits until further notice, according to multiple state agencies.
And it could quickly get worse:
Under SNAP, which serves more than 42 million people, families receive an average of $187.20 per month to pay for groceries. The pause in benefits would kick in just before the Thanksgiving holiday and add further strain on food banks and pantries during a typically busy season.
Second, November 1 marks the beginning of “open enrollment” season for the 24 million Americans, many of them middle class, who get their health insurance via Obamacare’s private-sector marketplace. Most of them will get a nasty shock when they realize (a) premiums are going up by double-digit percentages in most places and (b) their out-of-pocket costs will more than double on average if the “enhanced premium subsidies” for these policies enacted in 2021 expire at the end of the year. Congressional Democrats are, of course, demanding some action be taken to extend these subsidies before they supply the votes necessary to reopen the federal government, while Republicans have said they won’t negotiate over the subsidies until the government is reopened. But what probably seemed like an abstract argument until now is going to be a very big “kitchen-table issue” once people realize they may need to pay more than twice as much for the sketchy but essential health-insurance coverage Obamacare provides. And as with the SNAP cuts, the impact could quickly be compounded over time, since many healthier people will likely go without insurance, making the risk pool for Obamacare policies shakier and the costs more expensive.
The other thing that’s going to happen on or soon after November 1 is Donald Trump’s claim that the shutdown just affects “Democrat things” will be exposed as not only cruel but completely inaccurate. OMB director Russell Vought has added to the pain of the shutdown in blue cities and states with selective shutdowns of programs and projects. But as Toluse Olorunnipa explains at The Atlantic, “the pain for the president’s supporters will increase significantly if the lapse in government funding continues into November”:
Farmers, a key constituency for Trump, are among those getting hurt. The Department of Agriculture halted crucial farm aid just as planning for the 2026 planting season was getting under way. Furloughs and mass layoffs, meanwhile, have decimated a small-business-lending program popular in rural communities. Federal subsidies keeping small-town airports afloat are scheduled to run out within days. And despite what Trump might suggest, the majority of the federal employees who are currently going without a paycheck live outside of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Trump-friendly West Virginia, for instance, has among the highest number of government workers per capita in the country.
The above-mentioned Obamacare subsidy expiration will also create some specific red-state carnage, since reliance on Obamacare markets for health insurance is significantly greater in those red states that refused the Affordable Care Act’s optional Medicaid expansion.
So how will the November developments affect the battle in Congress? Clearly, heat on Republicans to negotiate over the Obamacare subsidies is going to increase significantly with both sides anxiously waiting to see if a very disengaged Trump notices the political risk and imposes a deal on his Obamacare-hating troops. If that doesn’t happen, though, some Democrats may conclude they’ve achieved a political victory by pinning higher health-care costs (both the Obamacare premium spike and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s Medicaid cuts) on the GOP, and can now vote to reopen the government.
In other words, it’s unclear the standoff will be resolved soon, but it is clear Americans will start paying a lot more attention to it.
Trump holds a rendering of the White House ballroom. Photo: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Incredibly, White House communications director Steven Cheung’s mocking of the “pearl clutching” “losers” who raised concerns about the East Wing being demolished did not quell the outrage over President Trump’s unilateral decision to tear down part of the White House to make way for his ballroom.
So the White House tried a different tactic on Wednesday afternoon: having President Trump explain that everyone needs to chill out because the East Wing was pretty ugly and his new White House ballroom will be totally badass.
“You know, the East Wing was not much,” Trump mused before the press in the Oval Office. “It was not much left from the original. It was, over the course of 100 years, it was changed, the columns were removed, it was a much different building. Then a story was added on in 1948, 1949. There was a story added on which was not particularly nice. And the building was very, very much changed from what it was originally. It was never thought of as being much. It was a very small building.”
So, Trump asserted, it would be wrong to let this historic eyesore stand in the way of his grand ballroom vision. “Rather than allowing that to hurt a very expensive, beautiful building that frankly they’ve been after for years,” he said.
While he was speaking, Trump brandished what appeared to be unreleased blueprints for the ballroom project, which have yet to be submitted to the National Capital Planning Commission as (arguably) required by law.
He also raised the estimated cost of the ballroom from $200 million to $300 million, and revealed that the military is heavily involved in the project … because they just love making beautiful buildings?
“We’re also working with the military on it, ’cause they want to make sure it’s perfect, and the military is very much involved in this,” Trump said. “They want to make sure that everything is absolutely beautiful.”
And while Trump said in July that the project “won’t interfere with the current building,” he appeared to confirm the entire East Wing will soon be no more.
“We are using little sections of footings and various other things, but that’s sort of irrelevant,” he said. “In order to do it properly, we had to take down the existing structure.
Earlier today, a White House official told NBC News that the “entirety” of the East Wing would go but would eventually be “modernized and rebuilt.” Trump’s model showed the new ballroom dwarfing the rest of the White House complex, but it’s unclear where this modernized East Wing might go (the giant structure on the right is the Treasury Building).
A rendering of President Trump’s proposed $250 million White House ballroom. Photo: Getty Images
A few hours later on Truth Social, Trump shared a video of Senator Josh Hawley calling liberals hypocrites because they were in favor of removing offensive statues and now oppose destroying parts of the White House with no oversight.
“They didn’t have any concern for history then,” Hawley said. “Now all of a sudden they’re like, oh, the facade of the East Wing is iconic.”
Trump has certainly raised some interesting arguments, but we still have a lot of questions. It probably would have been good if he’d made this pitch before most of the East Wing was reduced to rubble.
This post was updated to include Trump’s Truth Social post.
Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman has notoriously been taking an unorthodox path since Donald Trump reentered the White House. It’s a matter of some dispute as to whether Fetterman’s growing estrangement from his own party has anything to do with his medical and mental-health struggles following a 2022 stroke. Regardless of these concerns, Fetterman’s political situtation is becoming increasingly fraught, particularly for someone once firmly ensconced in the progressive, Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.
Fetterman has famously criticized other Democrats for saying mean things about the 47th president. He has split from them on certain confirmation votes (he was, for example, the only Democrat to vote to confirm Pam Bondi as attorney general). He has defended ICE against Democratic criticism. And most conspicuously, he has become perhaps one of the Senate’s most hardcore supporters of everything Israel has done in its war with Gaza. Public-opinion polls in Pennsylvania show he is now more popular with Republicans than with Democrats.
So it wasn’t particularly surprising when Fetterman joined two of the 47 Senate Democrats (Catherine Cortez Masto and Angus King) in voting for the Republican-sponsored stopgap spending bill at the end of September, rejecting the conditions most Democrats placed on cooperating to keep the federal government open. Fetterman is, however, placing himself on an island by agreeing with far-right Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Chip Roy that it’s time to crush the Senate Democratic opposition by “nuking” the filibuster, as The Hillreported:
Democratic Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.) told reporters Tuesday that he would support Republicans using the so-called nuclear option to override the Senate filibuster to pass a bill to reopen the government.
Fetterman said the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is running out of money and people “need to eat” as the government shutdown dragged into its 21st day …
“This is just bad political theater. Open it up,” he said.
Asked if he would support Republicans “nuking” the filibuster to let a House-passed funding measure pass the Senate with a simple-majority vote, Fetterman replied affirmatively.
More specifically, Fetterman appeared to endorse not a total abolition of the filibuster but a “carve-out” to allow a vote to reopen the government to pass the Senate by a simple majority. And he rationalized that position by noting that Democrats had in the past supported their own carve-outs.
“We ran on that. We ran on killing the filibuster, and now we love it. Carve it out so we can move on. I support it because it makes it more difficult to shut the government down in the future, and that’s where it’s entirely appropriate,” he said. “I don’t want to hear any Democrat clutching their pearls about the filibuster. We all ran on it.”
The filibuster isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition, and not all carve-outs are alike. Over the years, Congress has carved out a series of exceptions to the right to filibuster Senate votes, notably executive- and judicial-branch confirmations and congressional budget measures (e.g., the huge “budget reconciliation” bills like this year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act). This year, Senate Republicans also implicitly carved out certain budget scoring rules to make it easier to disguise the deficit-swelling nature of the OBBBA. So the question is not, as Fetterman appears to suggest, whether to have filibuster carve-outs: It’s what the carve-out is for and whom it benefits.
The Democratic carve-out proposal Fetterman is apparently alluding to as something “we ran on” was to exempt voting-rights measures from the filibuster following a series of state voter-suppression measures sponsored by Republican-controlled states and defended by Senate Republicans. Some Democrats (notably Kamala Harris) also backed a carve-out for congressional measures to ensure abortion rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision reversing Roe v. Wade. In both cases, the proposed carve-outs involved fundamental rights. In the current situation, the right in question is the Senate majority’s power to deny Democrats their one bit of significant leverage over the Trump administration and its congressional allies at a time when Republicans are running the country almost exclusively via executive actions and filibusterproof budget measures (e.g., the OBBBA). The lights really do go out for congressional Democrats if they can’t use this limited power to stand in the way of the Trump 2.0. steamroller.
Fetterman is obviously within his rights to conclude that the cost the country is paying for the government shutdown is too high and to cross the aisle to help the GOP end it. But there’s nothing hypocritical about Democrats wanting to get rid of the filibuster for one thing and not for another; it’s not and never has been an all-or-nothing matter. So Fetterman should probably omit this argument from his litany of grievances about his party.
Heavy machinery tears down a section of the East Wing on Monday. Photo: Pedro Ugarte/AFP via Getty Images
Since President Trump announced his plan to build a White House ballroom this summer, members of his administration have been making contradictory remarks about what that means for the East Wing.
In July, Trump promised the project “won’t interfere with the current building. … It’ll be near it but not touching it — and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.”
But that same month, the White House put out a press release that said, “The site of the new ballroom will be where the small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits.”
The administration’s stance on what we’re supposed to know about this project has been similarly confusing. Trump talks about the ballroom all the time and even alluded to the demolition during an unrelated White House event on Monday, saying, “You know, we’re building right behind us, we’re building a ballroom.”
However, after images of the White House destruction went viral, the Treasury Department told employees not to share photos of the view from its headquarters, which is next to the East Wing. The Wall Street Journalreported:
“As construction proceeds on the White House grounds, employees should refrain from taking and sharing photographs of the grounds, to include the East Wing, without prior approval from the Office of Public Affairs,” a Treasury official wrote on Monday evening in an email to department employees viewed by The Wall Street Journal. A Treasury Department spokesman said the email was sent to employees because photos could “potentially reveal sensitive items, including security features or confidential structural details.”
But images of the East Wing in ruins couldn’t be all that sensitive, since White House communications director Steven Cheung posted a photo himself:
By Tuesday, Treasury’s apparent attempt to conceal the extent of the White House destruction had backfired completely. Multiple media outlets ran live feeds of the East Wing’s walls crumbling to the ground.
If anything, the edict only drew more attention to the secrecy around the ballroom project. While the White House has vaguely described the project, detailed architectural plans have not been released. And while federal law says the National Capital Planning Commission must vet even relatively minor construction and renovation projects at the White House, the project has not been submitted to the board.
That may sound kind of illegal, and indeed experts have alleged that the White House is violating federal law by moving forward with the ballroom project. But Trump-appointed National Capital Planning Commission chair Will Scharf, who is also a top White House aide, recently claimed the board only has jurisdiction over construction at federal buildings, not destruction.
And, according to Cheung, people who care about destroying the “People’s House” without any oversight are all “losers” anyway:
Previous presidents must be surprised to learn that Team Trump would have been totally cool with them bulldozing huge sections of the White House!
John McCain killing the GOP’s Obamacare repeal bill in 2017. Photo: C-SPAN/Youtube
From the very beginning of the current federal government shutdown, the big question has been whether Democrats can convince Republicans to give them the trophy of an extension of soon-to-expire Obamacare premium subsidies that were enacted in 2021. Democratic optimism on this subject has been based on the belief that Republicans up for reelection next year really don’t want to get blamed for the huge spike in health-insurance premiums that would hit upward of 20 million mostly middle-class Americans if the subsidies expire (with the first flare-up occurring when open enrollment for Obamacare plans begins on November 1). And indeed, Punchbowl News’s soundings of the U.S. House indicate there are “somewhere between 20% and 30% of GOP lawmakers” who are “open to extending” the subsidies.
But Punchbowl’s reporting also shows why bringing along the the rest of the GOP caucus (which aside from the ever-erratic Marjorie Taylor Greene aren’t going to split the party wide open over this issue) will be extremely difficult. An interview with the No. 2 House Republican, Steve Scalise, served as a reminder that the majority of Republicans don’t just hate the expanded subsidies enacted in 2021, but Obamacare itself, and will be loathe to lift a finger to make it work better:
I know they’re [Democrats] trying to dump the problems of Obamacare off on everybody, other than the people that actually passed and voted for Obamacare. Those high premiums are a result of Democrat policies. If they really wanted to work with us on lower premiums, there are a lot of bipartisan ideas that you could come to the table and bring and do, and they’ve got to stop fighting the things that have been proven to work, as well.”
Those bipartisan ideasthat Scalise is referring to include association health plans, which allow employers to join together to buy insurance plans, plus health savings accounts.
Long story short, the “bipartisan ideas” Scalise is touting are the same old tired proposals Republicans have been pushing for more than a decade that would make it easier for insurance companies to cherrypick young and healthy people while leaving older and sicker people a few ways to get really crappy insurance at terrible rates. Yes, Obamacare has gone from being a risky experiment that people happy with their health insurance feared to becoming a generally accepted and even popular way for government to make health care widely available and affordable. But many, perhaps most, Republicans haven’t changed their minds at all. Given half a chance, they’d try again to repeal Obamacare whether or not they had any workable replacement (pro tip: they still don’t!) to offer.
So very much has happened in the past decade that it’s easy to forget that most middle-aged Republican lawmakers cut their political teeth in the Tea Party era when Obamacare was the Great White Whale for conservatives wrathful about big and intrusive government. The big federal government shutdown of that period, in 2013, was precisely over GOP efforts to blow up Obamacare by defunding its operations. It failed. So when Donald Trump took office with a Republican trifecta in 2017, the very first order of business was Trump 1.0’s version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a budget package whose central feature was repealing Obamacare. That too, failed, which probably made a deep impression on Trump. He quickly turned his attentions to a tax cut and hasn’t tried to do a whole lot on the health-care-policy front since then, other than this year’s Medicaid cuts, which Republicans have denied are cuts at all.
Trump’s bad experience with Obamacare repeal efforts is the big reason why Democrats think the president himself may impose an Obamacare subsidy deal that enables everyone to reopen the federal government. Nobody doubts his power to do so if he chooses. But no one should doubt that the bulk of Republicans will hate this like sin and won’t accommodate it on their own.
When Democrat Graham Platner entered the race to unseat incumbent Republican senator Susan Collins in August, he immediately clicked with Maine voters. An oyster farmer and ex-Marine who looks the part of a rugged Down-Easter, Platner’s brand of left-wing populism, focused squarely on the state’s cost-of-living crisis, resonated broadly. Platner has raised an impressive $4-plus million, gotten reams of positive press, drawn large crowds across the state, and received endorsements from Bernie Sanders and several progressive organizations. He has successfully positioned himself as the insurgent alternative against the Democratic Establishment’s pick to take on Collins: Maine’s 77-year-old governor, Janet Mills, who finally joined the race this week with the backing of national figures such as Chuck Schumer.
A major part of Platner’s appeal is that he is the opposite of a seasoned politician. But given that he was basically unknown before the summer, it seemed inevitable that his lack of polish would come with a few downsides. So it was perhaps not shocking when CNN’s investigative reporter Andrew Kaczynski — known for exposing politicians’ unsavory pasts — published an article that included several eye-opening internet comments made by Platner during his pre-politician days posting on Reddit, mostly from 2020 and 2021. Some of the most notable:
In one now-deleted Reddit comment from 2021, Platner responded to a thread about people becoming more conservative as they age by saying: “I got older and became a communist.” The comment was made on a subreddit called r/Antiwork, a far-left forum “for those who want to end work.”
In one deleted comment, in a thread about a Black army lieutenant who was held at gunpoint and pepper-sprayed by police during a traffic stop, one Reddit user wrote, “Bastards. Cops are bastards.” Platner replied, “All of them, in fact.”
In another since-removed post from 2020, Platner responded to a thread titled “White people aren’t as racist or stupid as Trump thinks” by writing, “Living in white rural America, I’m afraid to tell you they actually are.”
In the now-deleted posts, Platner also used the word “retarded” repeatedly to denigrate other commenters, along with other harsh language, as when he responded to a question about why Maine had voted against a power line that would connect Massachusetts to Canada: “I have to ask, and I do mean this is the most charitable of ways, but are you retarded? We shouldn’t have the [sic] eat the pain because you cunts and Massachusetts couldn’t act like adults. Fuck off and die, leave Maine out of your capitalist fantasies.”
And Platner detailed the disillusionment he experienced after his military service, sounding a pessimistic note about the U.S.: “My time in America’s imperial wars definitely radicalized me further,” he wrote, “and I’m significantly more left today than I was back then. It is difficult to see all that horror, as well as all the grift and corruption, and not find the entire thing utterly bankrupt. I did used to love America, or at least the idea of it. These days I’m pretty disgusted by it all.”
In an interview with Kaczynski, Platner said many of his comments were broadly unrepresentative of his current views. “That was very much me fucking around the internet,” he said. “I don’t want people to see me for who I was in my worst internet comment — or even, frankly, who I was in my best internet comment … I don’t think any of that is indicative of who I am today, really.”
“I’m not a communist. I’m not a socialist. I own a small business. I’m a Marine Corps veteran,” he continued.
Platner said he is still “very angry still about the wars I had to fight in and what I had to take part in” — a view that is unlikely to alienate many voters — while sounding a brighter note about America’s future: “I absolutely love the place that I live, and I love the people around me,” he said. “And I do actually believe firmly in the idea that we as Americans have a lot in common and that we can be the thing that we want to be the thing that we claim to be.”
On Thursday night, Politico published its own story about Platner’s internet past, this one focusing on his seeming endorsement of political violence. In comments he made in 2018, as part of a sub-Reddit called the Socialist Redditor Rifle Association, Platner wrote that if people “expect to fight fascism without a good semi-automatic rifle, they ought to do some reading of history.” And there was more where that came from:
In a July 2018 post on the same subreddit, Platner said that he “agreed” with a 1914 quote from former socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs that workers should arm themselves unless they are “willing to be forced into abject slavery.”
Platner cited Debs, who ran for president from prison, as an example to counter the notion that the 2nd Amendment only gained salience in the 1970s.
“That’s why this poster and the Debs quote that follows above should be shared far and wide. An armed working class is a requirement for economic justice,” Platner said.
“As I told CNN, I was fucking around on the internet at a time when I felt lost and very disillusioned with our government who sent me overseas to watch my friends die,” Platner told Politico. “I made dumb jokes and picked fights. But of course I’m not a socialist. I’m a small-business owner, a Marine Corps veteran, and a retired shitposter.”
And the hits kept on coming. On Friday, the Bangor Daily Newsrevealed a series of Platner Reddit posts from 2013, in which he openly mused about a racist stereotype and appeared to make light of sexual assault:
Platner responded to a 2013 post on Reddit entitled “What is one question you have always wanted to ask someone of another race,” writing, “Why don’t black people tip?” He worked as a bartender at Tune Inn on Capitol Hill, where he was a guest bartender last month.
“I work as a bartender and it always amazes me how solid this stereotype is,” he wrote. “Every now and again a black patron will leave a 15–20% tip, but usually it [is] between 0–5%. There’s got to be a reason behind it, what is it?”
That same year, he also responded to a post about underwear designed to prevent sexual assault saying people should “take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f–ked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?”
Whether Platner can surmount any fallout from the posts may depend on how well he can incorporate them effectively into his regular-guy image — and whether there is more from his past to be exposed, which seems like a decent bet at this point.
The reporting on Platner’s online past is already having an impact on his campaign. Per the Bangor Daily News, Maine state representative Genevieve McDonald left her role as Platner’s political director on Friday, writing in her resignation letter that the past remarks “were not known to me when I agreed to join the campaign, and they are not words or values I can stand behind in a candidate.”
This is all undoubtedly good news for Mills, who faces major electability questions herself, primarily regarding her age. She has pledged to serve only one term, but if Mills beats Platner and Collins, she would be the oldest freshman senator ever at 78. Especially after a presidential election defined by a Democrat’s advanced age, Mills will need to convince voters both that she’s fit to serve six years and that an Establishment deeply disliked by rank-and-file voters can still be trusted to pick the right candidate against the formidable Collins. Any more doubts about Platner’s viability will help.
Did the country mandate this? Photo: Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images
When looking at judicial review of Trump 2.0’s many audacious power grabs, it’s easy to get bogged down and tangled up in legalisms. Constitutional law is complicated. Federal court procedures are not designed to cope with unprecedented assertions of presidential power advanced almost hourly in places all over the country. An extraordinary percentage of lower court, appellate court, and Supreme Court cases involving the administration’s actions are on emergency dockets. Staid jurists are trying to keep up with a fast-moving Trump train that is very deliberately violating norms in every direction.
But now a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in a ruling that halted a National Guard deployment in Chicago, wrote some sentences that cut through the fog like a powerful search light and reached the real point of contention:
Political opposition is not rebellion. A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest. Such conduct exceeds the scope of the First Amendment, of course, and law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrators accordingly. But because rebellions at least use deliberate, organized violence to resist governmental authority, the problematic incidents in this record clearly fall within the considerable day-light between protected speech and rebellion.
In other words, the judges (one of whom was appointed by Trump, another by George H.W. Bush) slapped down as absurd the administration’s claim that protests against ICE’s activities in Chicago constitute a “rebellion” that warrants otherwise illegal deployments of military force in a U.S. city. And neither Donald Trump nor Pete Hegseth nor Kristi Noem nor Tom Homan nor Pam Bondi can turn these protests into the equivalent of the Whiskey Rebellion, the Civil War, or a foreign invasion. Nor can Texas governor Greg Abbott, who is eager to send his own National Guard units to Democrat-governed Illinois in what amounts to a war between the states.
It’s increasingly clear that treating political opposition as a rebellion is at the heart of the administration’s legal case for the militarization of political conflict that goes well beyond protests against ICE raids. In MAGA-speak circa 2025, the “Democrat Party” is now the “Radical Left,” and everything it does is presumptively illegitimate and probably illegal. Just yesterday White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt bluntly asserted that “the Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” Earlier this week House Speaker Mike Johnson said the peaceful No Kings rally in Washington planned for October 18, which will feature massive displays of Old Glory and countless patriotic gestures, is insurrectionary: “This ‘Hate America’ rally that they have coming up for October 18, the antifa crowd and the pro-Hamas crowd and the Marxists, they’re all going to gather on the Mall.”
This follows onto the threats of repression broadcast by the president and by his top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Both men blamed this crime by a deranged individual on Trump opponents writ large, with Miller going so far as to suggest that calling his boss “authoritarian” was an illegal incitement to the kind of violence that murdered Kirk, and an act of “terrorism.” Trump’s subsequent executive order called for a literal war on “antifa,” the shadowy and scattered network of protesters, that is useful in the ongoing clampdown precisely because it’s nowhere and everywhere. Meanwhile, his so-called Secretary of War called in the entire leadership of the U.S. armed forces to mobilize them for duty against the “enemy within.” This steady escalation of rhetoric, to be clear, is the logical culmination of the president’s relentless campaign of demonization throughout the 2024 campaign that treated opponents as anti-American, anti-Christian crooks who were deliberately destroying the country and importing millions of criminals to steal elections.
Suffusing this militant attitude is the pervasive belief in MAGA circles that Trump’s narrow 2024 victory represents a mandate to do whatever he wants. It’s unlikely, in fact, that the swing voters who pulled the lever for Trump because they wanted lower gasoline or grocery prices or better border control bought into the full Trump 2.0 agenda, which is why his job-approval numbers are well underwater. But even if they did buy the whole enchilada, the 49.8 percent of voters who backed Trump do not have the right to revoke the constitutional rights of the remaining 50.2 percent. That would be true, moreover, had the 47th president actually won the “historic landslide” he keeps mendaciously claiming.
The words of the Seventh Circuit judges really do need to become a rallying cry against the administration’s efforts to use every bit of power it can amass to silence and intimidate opponents and critics. Political opposition is not a rebellion and doesn’t justify a repression that turns half the country into suspected terrorists. This president has more than enough power to pursue his policies without ruling like a king. Enough is enough.
These two people are not going to be on any 2026 ballots. Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Look, I get it: There are many reasons Democrats feel the need to look back at the electoral calamity of 2024. The Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, has books to sell. Joe Biden loyalists feel they must rehabilitate his tarnished image. Operatives and donors who were knee-deep in the Biden or Harris campaigns naturally have scores to settle and grudges to air. And above all, the ideological warriors of the Democratic left and center want to blame each other for the debacle, just as they’ve blamed every Democratic defeat large or small on each other since about 1968.
In wallowing in the 2024 defeat, Democrats are avidly assisted by Republicans experiencing intense Schadenfreude at their misery. The GOP is deeply invested in spinning the close 2024 results into an irreversible realignment that will make Donald Trump and his heirs masters of the universe until the end of time.
So I’m not under the illusion that Democrats will be able to eschew 2024 reminiscences altogether. But they should give it a try. The Washington Postreported earlier this week that the Democratic National Committee was slow-walking its official “autopsy report” on 2024 until 2025 elections are over, out of concern that negative discussion of the party (and, for that matter, of the accuracy or inaccuracy of the “autopsy” itself) might affect organizers’ morale or even voter turnout. Here’s a better idea: Democrats should put off any official 2024 “autopsy” until late November 2026, when the midterms are done.
This recommendation does not stem from a preoccupation with vibes or a belief that Democrats can’t handle bad news or division over what happened in 2024. The more basic truth is that much of what happened in 2024 is probably irrelevant to what will happen in 2026, and revisiting it all is just a big, fat waste of time, at least until the next presidential election cycle arrives. Here’s why.
Midterm elections are fundamentally different than presidential elections in multiple ways. Basically, different electorates show up for each. Presidential election turnout is invariably higher (it was 67 percent in 2020 and 64 percent in 2024). Voters who participate in presidential but not midterm elections are often referred to as “low-propensity voters.”
Until very recently, Republicans had an advantage among the “high-propensity voters” most likely to show up for midterms. But in the Trump era, that advantage has shifted to Democrats. So a lot of the endless debate over Trump’s gains among low-propensity voters in 2024 might not even be relevant to the 2026 electorate.
Presidential elections are mostly comparative, i.e., a choice between two candidates representing the two major parties (although perceptions of the party controlling the White House have a significant effect on that choice). Midterm elections are mostly referenda on the party in power, particularly when that party has trifecta control in D.C., as Republicans do today. So polls showing that voters favor one party or the other on certain issues can be a bit misleading; their perceptions of the president’s performance on those issues is more germane.
This is why at least some of the fretting about the supposed weakness of the “Democratic brand” coming out of 2024 is probably excessive. In a first-past-the-post system dominated by two major parties, the “out” party will benefit from any and all misgivings about the “in” party. Trump’s persistently underwater job-approval numbers help explain why he’s trying to rig the midterms through gerrymandering and voter suppression.
There is also a tendency, which is real but hard to quantify, for voters who are aligned with or even support the agenda of the president’s party to vote against it as a “check against presidential power.” This helps explain why the party controlling the White House almost always loses congressional seats (and often governorships and state legislatures) in midterms.
The situation facing voters next year isn’t going to resemble the one that existed in the very strange 2024 election. Whether their “brand” is weak or strong, Democrats are not going to be led by 81-year-old Joe Biden and then by a relatively untested Kamala Harris. Yes, some Democrats believe they have too many old politicians in office or running for office, but it’s a different problem from a historically old man being the accepted head of the party and the most powerful person in the world.
Similarly, it makes a world of difference that Democrats will not control the White House and Congress in 2026. There is an ineradicable group of voters (growing larger with younger cohorts) who are profoundly unhappy with the status quo and will swing between the two parties based on who controls the country. This “I hate everything” vote was a millstone for Democrats in 2024. It won’t be in 2026.
The 2024 election was fought over seven battleground states that were seriously contested by both parties: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump carried all of them, which created the mirage of a landslide (as though all those 75 million Democratic votes didn’t actually count). In the 2026 midterms, the big battle will be over competitive Senate and especially House races. Of the nine Senate races deemed competitive by Cook Political Report, just three are in 2024 battleground states. Thirty-nine House races are rated as competitive by Cook. Eleven are in 2024 battleground states. Different strokes (and messages) may be appropriate for different folks.
Without a deep dive into the particulars of 2024, Democrats clearly made some mistakes that you don’t need an “autopsy” to identify. It’s been obvious at least since the swiftboating of John Kerry in 2004 that falling silent in the face of relentless opposition attacks is almost always a very bad idea — see the Harris-Walz campaign’s decision to look the other way or change the subject as the Trump-Vance campaign relentlessly pounded her using clips from the bizarre 2019 interview in which Harris appeared enthusiastic about spending taxpayer dollars on gender-assignment surgery for prisoners who were also illegal immigrants. I’m reasonably sure future candidates won’t make that mistake.
The single biggest reason 2024 is relatively useless as a model for 2026 is that Trump won in no small part because a significant slice of voters simply did not buy Democratic claims that he was dangerously authoritarian, cruel, and indifferent to the suffering he wanted to inflict on noncriminal immigrants and people dependent on government help to make ends meet. Some remembered his first term as relatively benign (aside from a pandemic for which he was not blamed), while others, particularly younger voters, thought all politicians were pretty much the same.
We’ve now had more than nine months of dramatic proof that Democratic warnings about Trump 2.0 were, if anything, understated. That won’t matter to Trump’s MAGA base; indeed, their own anger and hostility to democracy seem stronger than ever. But it will matter to many of the same swing voters who opened the door to Trump’s return to power.
It is hard to see what kind of political career Kamala Harris will ever have again. This makes her unique among recently vanquished major-party nominees — barring a remarkable shift in circumstances, there really is nowhere else for her to go.
Every defeated presidential nominee, until Harris, had a place within their party after the crushing loss. Al Gore became a famed environmental activist; John Kerry enjoyed years as a senior statesman in the Obama administration; and even Hillary Clinton, who never returned to elected office or another Cabinet, hovered over the party as the martyr of 2016 — if not for the Russians or James Comey or misogyny, some liberals might say, she would have been the nation’s first female president. After 2008, John McCain returned to the Senate, and Mitt Romney, a few years later, became a senator himself.
The media tour Harris has undertaken for her recently published memoir is a reminder that the former vice-president is going to struggle to have a place in the political firmament. She will not run for governor of California (she had no vision for the office anyway). She has mulled a 2028 presidential run, where she is no longer the polling leader. But what’s the point, really, of another presidential bid? What’s her argument? What does she have to say about this current moment, and how does she propose either defeating the MAGA movement in another election (J.D. Vance, Donald Trump running illegally) or rebuilding the nation in the aftermath of these next four years?
Harris, from both a politics and policy standpoint, has never been a true leader of the party, and her presence now is a reminder of how badly Joe Biden’s team erred in 2020 when they picked her for the ticket. Harris had been a shambolic presidential candidate, bleeding cash and dropping out before the Iowa caucuses. There were many other more capable politicians, women especially, who could have been elevated that year. Had Harris been a stronger politician, the disastrous Biden reelection saga may not have played out like it did. An elderly, senile president could have passed the baton more easily to a capable VP who seemed ready to battle Trump again. Biden’s inner circle didn’t trust Harris, and they ended up handing her the nomination only after the infamous televised debate Biden had with Trump. Harris became the Democratic candidate without having won a single primary vote.
Every ex–presidential candidate is free to write a memoir and make themselves heard. They are free to have regrets. The most newsy bit from Harris’s 107 Days is her confession that she would have preferred Pete Buttigieg as a running mate over Tim Walz but defaulted to the Minnesota governor because, she fretted, a Black woman paired with a gay man would have been too much of a political risk. Harris can be commended for her candor, but the decision also reveals her middling political acumen and relative gutlessness. There are homophobic voters in America, but far fewer of them than there used to be. Republicans in Congress no longer rail against same-sex marriage. Buttigieg, unlike Harris, has proved himself to be an adept enough politician, someone who ran competitively for the presidency in 2020. If Harris truly thought him the best, why not just pick him?
The trouble for Democrats in 2024 was that they were the incumbent party in an era of high inflation, and voters blamed them for the migrant surge at the border. It was these two issues that defined the election, and Harris (and Biden) never had much of a solution for either. Her campaign was muddled, absent any greater vision for the country, and it was far easier for the average voter to know where Trump stood and what he might do than to understand, when all was said and done, what Harris wanted for the country. Warning about the dangers of MAGA — even if these warnings were correct — was never enough.
Democrats are desperate for leaders now. It’s notable that, other than releasing her memoir, Harris has mostly removed herself from the political fray. That’s her right. But if she truly wanted, she could offer an alternative pathway for this country and a way for frustrated Democrats to feel that they are heard. Bernie Sanders will never run for president again, but he travels the country railing against oligarchy and attempting to channel the rage of the anti-Trump vote somewhere. Harris doesn’t have to do that, but she could have prescribed, in her book, a fleshed-out vision for the future of the Democratic Party or even allowed readers to imagine what a Harris administration might have been like. Harris is not alone in her failure to articulate what the near future might look like, of course. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are frustrating the base, and few of the potential 2028 candidates have offered a compelling path forward. Harris is as much symptom as she is cause, emblematic of the political failure that has made President Donald J. Trump possible.
