ReportWire

Tag: Republicans

  • Commentary: Democrats crumble like cookies. Is this really the best they can do?

    [ad_1]

    Democrats just crumbled like soft-bake cookies.

    The so-called resistance party has given up the shutdown fight, ensuring that millions of Americans will face Republican-created skyrocketing healthcare costs, and millions more will bury any hope that the minority party will find the substance and leadership to run a viable defense against President Trump.

    Sunday night, eight turncoat Democrats sold out every American who pays for their own health insurance through the affordable marketplaces set up by President Obama.

    As has been thoroughly reported in past weeks, Republicans are dead set on making sure that insurance is entirely out of financial reach for many Americans by refusing to help them pay for the premiums with subsidies that are part of current law, offered to both low- and middle-income families.

    Republicans — for reasons hard to fathom other than they hate Obama, and apparently basics such as flu shots — have long desired to kill the Affordable Care Act and now are on the brink of doing so, in spirit if not actuality, thanks to Democrats.

    Trump must be doing his old-man jig in the Oval Office.

    The pain this craven cave-in will cause is already evident. Rates for 2026 without the government subsidies have been announced, and premiums have doubled on average, according to nonpartisan health policy researcher KFF. Doubled.

    Insurance companies are planning on raising their rates by about 18%, already devastating and symptomatic of the need for a total overhaul of our messed-up system. That increase, coupled with the loss of the subsidies beginning at the start of next year, means a 114% jump in costs for the folks dependent on this insurance. Premiums that cost on average $888 in 2025 will jump to $1,904 in 2026, according to KFF.

    But it’s the middle-income people who will really be hit.

    “On average, a 60-year-old couple making $85,000 … would see yearly premium payments rise by over $22,600 in 2026,” KFF warns, meaning that instead of paying 8.5% of their income toward health insurance, it will now jump to about 25%.

    Merry Christmas, America.

    Although the eight Democrats who broke from their party to allow this to happen are directly responsible (thankfully our California senators are not among them), Democratic leadership should also be held accountable.

    A party that can’t keep itself together on the really big votes isn’t a party. It’s a bunch of people who occasionally have lunch together. Literally, they had one job: Stick together.

    The failure of Democratic leadership to make sure its Senate votes didn’t shatter in this intense moment isn’t just shameful, it’s depressing. For all of the condemnation of the Republican members of Congress for failing to uphold their duty to be a check on the power of the presidency, here’s the opposition party rolling over belly up on the pivotal issue of healthcare.

    As Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) put it on social media, “Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced. If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?”

    If the recent elections had any lessons in them, it’s that Democrats — and voters in general — want courage. Love or hate Zohran Mamdani, his win as New York City mayor was due in no small part to his daring to forge his own path. Ditto on Gov. Gavin Newsom and Proposition 50.

    Mamdani put that sentiment best in his victory speech, promising an age when people can “expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve, rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt.”

    Before you start angry-emailing me, yes, I do understand how much pain the shutdown in causing, especially for furloughed workers and people facing disruptions in their SNAP benefits. I feel for every person who doesn’t know how they will pay their bills.

    But here are the facts that we can’t forget. Republicans have purposefully made that pain intense in order to break Democrats. Trump has found ways to pay his deportation agents, while simultaneously not paying critical workers such as airport screeners and air traffic controllers, where the chaos created by their absence is both visible and disruptive. He has also threatened to not give back pay to some of those folks when this does end.

    And on the give-in-or-don’t-eat front, he’s actually been ordered by courts to pay those Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and is fighting it. Republicans could easily band together and demand that money goes out while the rest is hashed out, but they don’t want to. They want people to go hungry so that Democrats will break, and it worked.

    But at what cost?

    About 24 million people will be hit by these premium increases, leaving up to 4 million unable to keep their insurance. Unable to go to the doctor for routine care. Unable to pay for cancer treatments. Unable to have that lump, that pain, the broken bone looked at. Unable to get their kid a flu shot.

    In many ways, this isn’t a California problem. The majority of these folks are in Southern, Republican states that refused to expand Medicaid when they had the chance. About 6 in 10 subsidy recipients are represented by Republicans, according to KFF, led by those living in Florida, Georgia and Mississippi. But Americans have been clear that we want access to care for all of us, as a right, not an expensive privilege.

    Which makes it all the more mystifying that Democrats are so eager to give up, on an issue that unites voters across parties, across demographics, across our seemingly endless divides.

    But I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.

    [ad_2]

    Anita Chabria

    Source link

  • Republicans turn their attention to bashing Obamacare as shutdown enters day 39

    [ad_1]

    NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

    Amid a 39-day government shutdown, Republican after Republican took to the Senate floor on Saturday to blast the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, calling the program a failed approach to addressing the country’s health care needs.

    Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., went as far as to say the current system might need replacing.

    “You were promised when Obamacare passed in 2010, President Obama said, that every family in America who participated in this thing would have a $2,500 savings in premium reductions. It’s been like a 100% increase. This thing is unsustainable,” Graham said.

    FLASHBACK: TED CRUZ PREDICTS BALLOONING OBAMACARE SUBSIDIES NOW AT CENTER OF SHUTDOWN FIGHT

    U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham speaks during a press conference on Saint Michael’s Square in the city center on May 30, 2025 in Kyiv, Ukraine. A bipartisan delegation from the USA, including Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, arrived in Kyiv for a visit (Viktor Kovalchuk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)

    “We’re going to replace this broken system with something that is actually better for the consumer to meet the goal of lowering health care costs,” Graham added.

    Graham wasn’t the only Republican voice to speak out against Obamacare. 

    “I hate to report that folks on the other side refused to acknowledge the very obvious damage being done across the board by Obamacare,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said. “The problem we have in healthcare is we’ve largely driven free-market principles out of healthcare. That’s because of the faulty design of Obamacare. It’s got to be fixed.” 

    Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., a former health care executive and longtime critic of the program, joined in.

    “It’s all caused by Obamacare. When the government gets involved in things, they often go up in price,” Scott said. 

    Notably, Republican criticisms of Obamacare on Saturday went beyond the front-and-center issue holding up consideration of government funding.

    Where Republicans have advanced a short-term spending package meant to keep the government open through Nov. 21, Democrats have rejected it 14 times, demanding that lawmakers first consider extending COVD-era emergency tax subsidies for Obamacare plan holders. 

    Republicans, who maintain the temporary subsidies and their expiration have nothing to do with government spending, have largely focused their attention on the shutdown itself instead of engaging in a debate over the COVID-era assistance. They’ve said they will negotiate on the subsidies when the government reopens.

    But President Donald Trump changed the picture on Saturday morning in a post to Truth Social by arguing that lawmakers should re-structure the enhanced subsidies so that they go directly to the policyholders instead of insurance companies who currently receive the tax credit payments.

    TRUMP URGES SENATE REPUBLICANS TO REDIRECT FUNDS FROM OBAMACARE-BACKED INSURERS, PAY AMERICANS DIRECTLY

    President Donald Trump gestures while speaking

    President Donald Trump speaks during a breakfast with Senate and House Republicans in the State Dining Room of the White House, Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (Evan Vucci/AP Photo)

    In the wake of Trump’s suggestion, lawmakers began blasting Obamacare’s structure.

    “Obamacare costs the federal government closer to $150 billion a year. That’s right. We’re spending $150 billion of your tax-earned dollars supplementing other people’s health care,” Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., said.

    “When they sold this to the American people, they said it would cost $40 or $50 billion, but we’re triple that. That’s $400 million a day,” he added.

    Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, echoed those comments, arguing that Obamacare had missed the mark on its original design. 

    “It’s clear that Obamacare has failed to deliver on its promises,” Ernst said. “The answer isn’t throwing more money into a broken system. What we need to do is fix what’s broken. We can end that waste.”

    HOUSE REPUBLICANS DIVIDED OVER OBAMACARE AS GOP EYES FIX AFTER SHUTDOWN

    Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa

    Ernst is chairwoman of the DOGE caucus. (Reuters)

    Like Ernst and Marshall, Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio., also took to the floor, calling for Congress to evaluate the source of climbing health care costs.

    “So, I hope we want to get at the costs and the cause of what’s affecting the unaffordability of health care in this country. Health care has increased since Obamacare started by 6% a year while overall inflation has been 3% or less,” Husted said.

    “I hope we will reopen the government and begin serving the American people while we continue the very important conversation of how we make health care more affordable,” he added.

    CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

    Although Sen. Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has kept the Senate in session over the weekend while lawmakers attempt to break the gridlock, it’s unclear when lawmakers will next consider spending legislation. 

    Leo Briceno is a politics reporter for the congressional team at Fox News Digital. He was previously a reporter with World Magazine.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Trump made inroads with Latino voters. The GOP is losing them ahead of the midterms

    [ad_1]

    WASHINGTON — President Trump made historic gains with Latinos when he won reelection last year, boosting Republicans’ confidence that their economic message was helping them make inroads with a group of voters who had long leaned toward Democrats.

    But in this week’s election, Democrats in key states were able to disrupt that rightward shift by gaining back Latino support, exit polls showed.

    In New Jersey and Virginia, the Democrats running for governor made gains in counties with large Latino populations, and overall won two-thirds of the Latino vote in their states, according to an NBC News poll.

    And in California, a CNN exit poll showed about 70% of Latinos voting in favor of Proposition 50, a Democratic redistricting initiative designed to counter Trump’s plans to reshape congressional maps in an effort to keep GOP control of the House.

    The results mark the first concrete example at the ballot box of Latino voters turning away from the GOP — a shift foreshadowed by recent polling as their concerns about the economy and immigration raids have grown.

    Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill celebrates with supporters after being elected New Jersey governor.

    (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

    If the trend continues, it could spell trouble for Republicans in next year’s midterm elections, said Gary Segura, a professor of public policy, political science and Chicana/o studies at UCLA. This could be especially true in California and Texas, where both parties are banking on Latino voters to help them pick up seats in the House, Segura said.

    “A year is a long time in politics, but certainly the vote on Prop. 50 is a very, very good sign for the Democrats’ ability to pick up the newly drawn congressional districts,” Segura said. “I think Latino voters will be really instrumental in the outcome.”

    Democrats, meanwhile, are feeling optimistic that their warnings about Trump’s immigration crackdown and a bad economy are resonating with Latinos.

    Republicans are wondering to what degree the party can maintain support among Latinos without Trump on the ticket. In 2024, Trump won roughly 48% of the Latino vote nationally — a record for any Republican presidential candidate.

    Some Republicans saw this week’s trends among Latino voters as a “wakeup call.”

    “The Hispanic vote is not guaranteed. Hispanics married President Donald Trump but are only dating the GOP,” Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida said in a social media video the day after the election. “I’ve been warning it: If the GOP does not deliver, we will lose the Hispanic vote all over the country.”

    Economic issues a main driver

    Last year Trump was able to leverage widespread frustration with the economy to win the support of Latinos. He promised to create jobs and lower the costs of living.

    But polling shows that a majority of Latino voters now disapprove of how Trump and the Republicans in control of Congress are handling the economy. Half of Latinos said they expected Trump’s economic policies to leave them worse off a year from now in a Unidos poll released last week.

    In New Jersey, that sentiment was exemplified by voters like Rumaldo Gomez. He told MSNBC he voted for Trump last year but this week went for for the Democratic candidate for governor, Rep. Mikie Sherrill.

    “Now, I look at Trump different,” Gomez said. “The economy does not look good.”

    Gomez added he is “very sad” about immigration raids led by the Trump administration that have split up hardworking families.

    While Latino voters fear being affected by immigration enforcement actions, polling suggests they are more concerned about cost of living, jobs and housing. The Unidos poll showed immigration ranking fifth on the list of concerns.

    In New Jersey and Virginia, Democrats’ double-digit victories were built on promises to reduce the cost of living, while blaming Trump for their economic pain.

    Marcus Robinson, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said Democrats “expanded margins and flipped key counties by earning back Latino voters who know Trump’s economy leaves them behind.”

    “These results show that Latino communities want progress, not a return to chaos and broken promises,” he said.

    Republicans see a different Trump issue

    GOP strategist Matt Terrill, who was chief of staff for then-Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, said the election results are not a referendum on Trump.

    Latino voters swung left because Trump wasn’t on the ballot, he said.

    Last year “it wasn’t Latino voters turning out for the Republican party, it was Latino voters turning out for President Trump,” he said. “Like him or not, he’s able to fire up voters that the Republican party traditionally does not get.”

    With Trump barred by the Constitution from running for a third term, Republicans are left to wonder if they can get the Latino vote back when he is not on the ballot. Terrill believes Republicans need to hammer on the issue of affordability as a top priority.

    Mike Madrid, a “never Trump” Republican and former political director of the California Republican Party, has a different theory.

    “They’re abandoning both parties,” Madrid said of Latinos. “They abandoned the Republican party for the same reasons they abandoned the Democratic party in November: not addressing economic concerns.”

    The economy has long been the top concern for Latinos, Madrid said, yet both parties continue to frame the Latino political agenda around immigration.

    “Latinos aren’t voting for Democrats or Republicans — they’re voting against Democrats and against Republicans,” Madrid said. “It’s a very big difference. The partisans are all looking at us as if we’re this peculiar exotic little creature.”

    The work ahead

    Democrat Abigail Spanberger was elected governor in Virginia in part because of big gains in Latino-heavy communities. One of the biggest gains was in Manassas Park, where more than 40% of residents are Latino. She won the city by 42 points, doubling the Democrats’ performance there in last year’s election.

    The shift toward Democrats happened because Latinos believed Trump when he promised to bring down high costs of living and that he would only go after violent criminals in immigration raids, said Democratic strategist Maria Cardona, who worked with Spanberger’s campaign on outreach to Spanish-language media.

    Instead, she argued, Trump betrayed them.

    Cardona said Medicaid cuts under Trump’s massive spending package this year, along with the reduction of supplemental nutrition assistance amid the government shutdown, have Latinos families panicking.

    “What Republicans misguidedly and mistakenly thought was a realignment of Latino voters just turned out to be a blip,” she said. “Latinos should never be considered a base vote.”

    Political scientists caution that the election outcomes this week are not necessarily indicative of how races will play out a year from now.

    “It’s just one election, but certainly the seeds have been planted for strong Latino Democratic turnouts in 2026,” said Brad Jones, a political science professor at UC Davis.

    Now, both parties need to explain how they expect to carry out their promises if elected.

    “They can’t sit on their laurels and say, ‘well surely the Latinos are coming back because the economy is bad and immigration enforcement is bad,’” Jones said. “The job of the Democratic party is now to reach out to Latino voters in ways that are more than just symbolic.”

    [ad_2]

    Ana Ceballos, Andrea Castillo

    Source link

  • New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill on tackling rising cost of living

    [ad_1]

    New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill’s transition is already underway, naming several senior advisers, including her chief of staff. Sherrill sat down with CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent and “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan for an interview that will air on Sunday.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Social Security Employees Grill Management During Tense Shutdown Meeting

    [ad_1]

    On the call, SSA managers spoke about how difficult it was to keep employees motivated, especially when they knew that their work would have to ramp up after the shutdown concludes. “It’s hard to keep morale going with the way the staff is going and they also know that as soon as this shutdown is over, we’re going to hit ’em hard with [more work],” said one employee. “It’s very frustrating when we have to keep those staff motivated and we need ’em for the long haul, not just for this fiscal year.”

    Employees also described the specific toll the shutdown was taking on Social Security beneficiaries. In one instance, recounted on the call, an office lost half their team. “Now my public is waiting two hours in [the] reception area, hour and hour and a half on phones,” said the same employee, who noted there used to be around a half hour wait time.

    The SSA has been embroiled in chaos throughout president Donald Trump’s second term. WIRED reported in March that almost a dozen operatives from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency had been deployed to SSA, including big-name early operatives, including Luke Farritor, Marko Elez, and Akash Bobba.

    According to a court filing from the SSA in federal court and accompanying sworn statements, a number of the DOGE operatives had access to a number of sensitive data sets, including Numident, which contains detailed information about anyone with a social security number. DOGE claimed they required this kind of access in order to detect “fraud.” However, many of DOGE’s claims about the agency were untrue and inaccurate, including the claim that 150-year-olds were collecting social security benefits.

    In August, SSA’s chief data officer, Chuck Borges, submitted a whistleblower complaint that claimed DOGE had mishandled sensitive data and uploaded the confidential information of millions of Americans to an insecure server. When Borges sent an email to agency staff stating that he was involuntarily resigning, following his whistleblower complaint, the email mysteriously disappeared from inboxes, employees told WIRED at the time.

    “I’m invested in this organization. I love what we do, but I feel like it’s not going in the right direction and we’re not really serving the public like we should or even our employees,” said one employee during Thursday’s management call. “We’re not trying to beat people up, it’s just that we are so invested.”

    [ad_2]

    Zoë Schiffer, Leah Feiger

    Source link

  • Duffy on flight cuts due to government shutdown

    [ad_1]

    Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says safety is his priority during the government shutdown as the Federal Aviation Administration instructs airlines to cut flights to deal with staffing shortages at major U.S. airports. Duffy spoke to the team at “CBS Mornings.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Republicans, including ‘cowardly’ Schwarzenegger, take heat for lopsided loss on Prop. 50

    [ad_1]

    Republican infighting crescendoed in the aftermath of California voters overwhelmingly approving a Democratic-friendly redistricting plan this week that may undercut the GOP’s control of Congress and derail President Trump’s polarizing agenda.

    The state GOP chairwoman was urged to resign and former Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who championed the creation of the state’s independent redistricting commission, was called “cowardly” by one top GOP leader for not being more involved in the campaign.

    Leaders of the Republican-backed committees opposing the ballot measure, known as Proposition 50, were questioned about how they spent nearly $58 million in the special election after such a dismal outcome.

    Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, the once-prodigious Republican fundraiser, reportedly had vowed that he could raise $100 million for the opposition but ended up delivering a small fraction of that amount.

    Assemblyman Carl DeMaio (R-San Diego), a conservative firebrand, called on state GOP Chair Corrin Rankin to step down and faulted other Republican leaders and longtime party operatives for their failure to defeat the measure, calling them “derelict of duty and untrustworthy and incompetent.”

    “Unless serious changes are made at the party, the midterms are going to be a complete disaster,” DeMaio said, also faulting the other groups opposing the effort. “We need accountability. There needs to be a reckoning because otherwise the lessons won’t be learned. The old guard needs to go. The old guard has failed us too many times. This is the latest failure.”

    Rankin pushed back against the criticism, saying the state party was the most active GOP force in the final stretch of the election. Raising $11 million during the final three weeks of the campaign, the party spent it on mailers, digital ads and text messages, as well as organizing phone banks and precinct walking, she said.

    Former Speaker of the House and California Republican Kevin McCarthy speaks to the press at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 19, 2023.

    (Samuel Corum / AFP via Getty Images)

    “We left it all on the field,” Rankin said Wednesday morning at a Sacramento news conference about a federal lawsuit California Republicans filed arguing that Proposition 50 is unconstitutional. “We were the last man standing … to reach out to Republicans and make sure they turned out.”

    Responding to criticism that their effort was disorganized, including opposition campaign mailers being sent to voters who had already cast ballots, Rankin said the party would conduct a review of its efforts. But she added that she was extremely proud of the work her team did in the “rushed special election.”

    Barring successful legal challenges, the new California congressional districts enacted under Proposition 50 will go into effect before the 2026 election. The new district maps favor Democratic candidates and were crafted to unseat five Republican incumbents, which could erase Republicans’ narrow edge in the the U.S. House of Representatives.

    If Democrats win control of the body, Trump’s policy agenda will probably be stymied and the president and members of his administration could face multiple congressional investigations.

    Gov. Gavin Newsom and other California Democrats proposed Proposition 50 in response to Trump urging elected officials in Texas and other GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts to increase the number of Republicans elected to the House next year.

    The new California congressional boundaries voters approved Tuesday could give Democrats the opportunity to pick up five seats in the state’s 52-member congressional delegation.

    Proposition 50 will change how California determines the boundaries of congressional districts. The measure asked voters to approve congressional district lines designed to favor Democrats for the 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections, overriding the map drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission.

    Some Republicans lamented that Schwarzenegger was not more involved in the election. The movie star championed the creation of the independent commission in 2010, his final year in office. He campaigned for the creation of similar bodies to fight partisan drawing of district lines across the nation after leaving office.

    Shawn Steel, one of California’s three representatives on the Republican National Committee, called Schwarzenegger “a cowardly politician.”

    “Arnold decided to sit it out,” Steel said. “Arnold just kind of raised the flag and immediately went under the desk.”

    Steel said that the former governor failed to follow through on the messages he repeatedly delivered about the importance of independent redistricting.

    “He could have had his name on the ballot as a ballot opponent,” Steel said. “He turned it down. So I’d say, with Arnold, just disappointing but not surprised. That’s his political legacy.”

    Schwarzenegger’s team pushed back at this criticism as misinformed.

    “We were clear from the beginning that he was not going to be a part of the campaign and was going to speak his mind,” said Daniel Ketchell, a spokesman for the former governor. “His message was very clear and nonpartisan. When one campaign couldn’t even criticize gerrymandering in Texas, it was probably hard for voters to believe they actually cared about fairness.”

    Schwarzenegger spoke out against Proposition 50 a handful of times, including at an appearance at USC that was turned into a television ad by one of the anti-Proposition 50 committees that appeared to go dark before election day.

    On election day, he emailed followers about gut health, electrolytes, protein bars, fitness and conversations to increase happiness. There was no apparent mention of the Tuesday election.

    The Democratic-led California Legislature in August voted to place Proposition 50 on the November ballot, costing nearly $300 million, and setting off a sprint to Tuesday’s special election.

    The opponents were vastly outspent by the ballot measure’s supporters, who contributed nearly $136 million to various efforts. That financial advantage, combined with Democrats’ overwhelming edge in voter registration in California, were main contributors to the ballot measure’s success. When introduced in August, Proposition 50 had tepid support and its prospects appeared uncertain.

    Nearly 64% of the nearly 8.3 million voters who cast ballots supported Proposition 50, while 36% opposed it as of Wednesday night, according to the California secretary of state’s office.

    In addition to the state Republican Party, two main campaign committees opposed Proposition 50, including the one backed by McCarthy. A separate group was funded by more than $32 million from major GOP donor Charles Munger Jr., the son of a billionaire who was Warren Buffet’s right-hand man; he bankrolled the creation of the independent congressional redistricting commission in 2010.

    Representatives of the two committees — who defended their work Tuesday night after the election was called moments after the polls closed, saying that they could not overcome the vast financial disadvantage and that the proposition’s supporters must be held to their promises to voters such as pushing for national redistricting reform — did not respond to repeated requests for comment on Wednesday.

    Newsom’s committee supporting Proposition 50 had prominent Democrats stumping for the effort, including former President Obama starring in ads.

    That’s in stark contrast to the opposition efforts. Trump was largely absent, possibly because he is deeply unpopular among Californians and the president does not like to be associated with losing causes.

    [ad_2]

    Seema Mehta

    Source link

  • President Trump urges Republicans to reopen government as shutdown marks longest in US history

    [ad_1]

    The government shutdown has reached its 36th day, the longest in U.S. history, as President Donald Trump pressures Republicans to end the Senate filibuster in order to reopen the government.”It’s time for Republicans to do what they have to do, and that’s terminate the filibuster. It’s the only way you can do it,” Trump told senators Wednesday at the White House.The filibuster is a Senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation. Ending the filibuster would allow Republicans to pass a bill with a simple majority, but several Republicans warn that when Democrats are in power, they’d be able to do the same thing. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said after breakfast at the White House, “It’s just not happening.”The president also said the shutdown was a “big factor, negative” in Tuesday’s election results.”Countless public servants are now not being paid and the air traffic control system is under increasing strain. We must get the government back open soon and really immediately,” Trump said.The shutdown is hitting home for many Americans, with lines stretching at food banks across the country as SNAP benefits are delayed and reduced for more than 40 million Americans. After-school programs that depend on federal dollars are closing. The Transportation Secretary said, starting Friday, there will be a 10% reduction in flights at 40 airports across the country.Republicans have pushed to reopen the government with a short-term spending bill. Democrats have rejected those bills, arguing that Republicans are leaving out a key provision: restoring expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies that help millions of Americans lower their health-insurance costs. Democrats say passing a short-term bill without those subsidies would leave families facing sudden premium spikes.”The election results ought to send a much needed bolt of lightning to Donald Trump that he should meet with us to end this crisis,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York. “The American people have spoken last night. End the shutdown, end the healthcare crisis, sit down and talk with us.”Republicans have said they’re willing to negotiate ACA subsidies, but only after the shutdown is over.See more government shutdown coverage from the Washington News Bureau:

    WASHINGTON —

    The government shutdown has reached its 36th day, the longest in U.S. history, as President Donald Trump pressures Republicans to end the Senate filibuster in order to reopen the government.

    “It’s time for Republicans to do what they have to do, and that’s terminate the filibuster. It’s the only way you can do it,” Trump told senators Wednesday at the White House.

    The filibuster is a Senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation. Ending the filibuster would allow Republicans to pass a bill with a simple majority, but several Republicans warn that when Democrats are in power, they’d be able to do the same thing.

    Senate Majority Leader John Thune said after breakfast at the White House, “It’s just not happening.”

    The president also said the shutdown was a “big factor, negative” in Tuesday’s election results.

    “Countless public servants are now not being paid and the air traffic control system is under increasing strain. We must get the government back open soon and really immediately,” Trump said.

    The shutdown is hitting home for many Americans, with lines stretching at food banks across the country as SNAP benefits are delayed and reduced for more than 40 million Americans. After-school programs that depend on federal dollars are closing.

    The Transportation Secretary said, starting Friday, there will be a 10% reduction in flights at 40 airports across the country.

    Republicans have pushed to reopen the government with a short-term spending bill. Democrats have rejected those bills, arguing that Republicans are leaving out a key provision: restoring expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies that help millions of Americans lower their health-insurance costs. Democrats say passing a short-term bill without those subsidies would leave families facing sudden premium spikes.

    “The election results ought to send a much needed bolt of lightning to Donald Trump that he should meet with us to end this crisis,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York. “The American people have spoken last night. End the shutdown, end the healthcare crisis, sit down and talk with us.”

    Republicans have said they’re willing to negotiate ACA subsidies, but only after the shutdown is over.

    See more government shutdown coverage from the Washington News Bureau:

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Only Trump Can Reopen the Government. But He’s Not in the Mood.

    [ad_1]

    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 Democrats who 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.


    See All



    [ad_2]

    Ed Kilgore

    Source link

  • After Republican election losses, Trump pushes lawmakers to end shutdown, filibuster

    [ad_1]

    WASHINGTON — As the federal shutdown has dragged on to become the longest in American history, President Trump has shown little interest in talks to reopen the government. But Republican losses on election day could change that.

    Trump told Republican senators at the White House on Wednesday that he believed the government shutdown “was a big factor” in the party’s poor showing against the Democrats in key races.

    “We must get the government back open soon, and really immediately,” Trump said, adding that he would speak privately with the senators to discuss what he would like to do next.

    The president’s remarks are a departure from what has largely been an apathetic response from him about reopening the government. With Congress at a stalemate for more than a month, Trump’s attention has mostly been elsewhere.

    He spent most of last week in Asia attempting to broker trade deals. Before that, much of his focus was on reaching a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas and building a $300-million White House ballroom.

    To date, Trump’s main attempt to reopen the federal government has been calling on Republican leaders to terminate the filibuster, a long-running Senate rule that requires 60 votes in the chamber to pass most legislation. Trump wants to scrap the rule — the so-called nuclear option — to allow Republicans in control of the chamber to push through legislation with a simple-majority vote.

    “If you don’t terminate the filibuster, you’ll be in bad shape,” Trump told the GOP senators and warned that with the rule in place, the party would be viewed as “do-nothing Republicans” and get “killed” in next year’s midterm elections.

    Trump’s push to end the shutdown comes as voters are increasingly disapproving of his economic agenda, according to recent polls. The trend was reinforced Tuesday as voters cast ballots with economic concerns as their main motivation, an AP poll showed. Despite those indicators, Trump told a crowd at the American Business Forum in Miami on Wednesday that he thinks “we have the greatest economy right now.”

    While Trump has not acknowledged fault in his economic agenda, he has began to express concern that the ongoing shutdown may be hurting Republicans. Those concerns have led him to push Republicans to eliminate the filibuster, a move that has put members of his party in a tough spot.

    Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota has resisted the pressure, calling the filibuster an “important tool” that keeps the party in control of the chamber in check.

    The 60-vote threshold allowed Republicans to block a “whole host of terrible Democrat policies” when they were in the minority last year, Thune said in an interview Monday with Fox News Radio’s “Guy Benson Show.”

    “I shudder to think how much worse it would’ve been without the legislative filibuster,” he said. “The truth is that if we were to do their dirty work for them, and that is essentially what we would be doing, we would own all the crap they are going to do if and when they get the chance to do it.”

    Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) said last week he is a “firm no on eliminating it.”

    “The filibuster forces us to find common ground in the Senate. Power changes hands, but principles shouldn’t,” Curtis said in a social media post.

    As the government shutdown stretched into its 36th day Wednesday, Trump continued to show no interest in negotiating with Democrats, who are refusing to vote on legislation to reopen the government that does not include a deal on healthcare.

    Budget negotiations deadlocked as Democrats tried to force Republicans to extend federal healthcare tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year. If those credits expire, millions of Americans are expected to see the cost of their premiums spike.

    With negotiations stalled, Trump said in an interview aired Sunday that he “won’t be extorted” by their demands to extend the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies.

    On Wednesday, Democratic legislative leaders sent a letter to Trump demanding a bipartisan meeting to “end the GOP shutdown of the federal government and decisively address the Republican healthcare crisis.”

    “Democrats stand ready to meet with you face to face, anytime and anyplace,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both from New York, wrote in a letter to Trump.

    The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Democrats’ letter.

    “The election results ought to send a much needed bolt of lightning to Donald Trump that he should meet with us to end this crisis,” Schumer told the Associated Press.

    Trump’s remarks Wednesday signal that he is more interested in a partisan approach to ending the shutdown.

    “It is time for Republicans to do what they have to do and that is to terminate the filibuster,” Trump told GOP senators. “It’s the only way you can do it.”

    If Republicans don’t do it, Trump argued Senate Democrats will do so the next time they are in a majority.

    Democrats have not signaled any intent to end the filibuster in the future, but Trump has claimed otherwise and argued that it is up to Republicans to “do it first.”

    [ad_2]

    Ana Ceballos

    Source link

  • Democrat-backed candidates flip 3 Texas school board seats

    [ad_1]

    Progressive-backed candidates flipped three school board seats in a district near Houston, Texas, as Democrats flipped seats across the country Tuesday night.

    Mike Doyle, chair of the Harris County Democrats, told Newsweek in a phone interview that the wins in a red-leaning, suburban area are a testament to “a lot of hard work” by candidates and their supporters.

    Newsweek reached out to the Harris County GOP for comment via email.

    Why It Matters

    Tuesday’s elections were a key bellwether for the electorate’s mood ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, when Democrats are hoping to stage a comeback following losses in the 2024 elections. The results fueled Democratic optimism after a year of uncertainty about the party’s future, with Democrats outperforming expectations in key races.

    Those victories extended to suburban Texas. The Lone Star State has been viewed as a reliably conservative state. Democrats did make some gains in the first Trump administration, but it shifted back toward Republicans last November. Still, Democrats are hoping to make the state’s Senate race competitive next November.

    Public education has remained a divisive issue in Texas as some state legislators have supported bills that would infuse religion into schools, including by requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms across the state.

    What to Know

    Three candidates who have identified as being more progressive flipped seats on the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD school board, reported local news outlet Houston Press. Lesley Guilmart, Cleveland Lane Jr. and Kendra Camarena all defeated Republican-aligned candidates in the race, the news outlet reported.

    That is the third-largest school district in the state

    Technically, the board is nonpartisan, but Guilmart, Lane and Camarena have all voted in Democratic primaries, while their opponents were viewed as more conservative. They have said they would keep their personal politics off of the school board due to its nonpartisan nature, the news outlet reported.

    Conservatives previously held a 6-1 majority on the school board, but will now be in a 4-3 minority, reported Houston Public Media. They have implemented policies including book-banning practices and adding a Bible-focus elective course for students, according to the report.

    The races became competitive as voters saw “Republican ideologues fully revealed themselves,” Doyle told Newsweek. The race, despite the nonpartisan nature of the board, had become partisan, he said.

    “They were focused on banning books and running off good teachers and cutting school budgets, and pretty much ripping into the fabric of the school system out there,” he said.

    Their defeat comes amid a broader debate about religion in schools, of which Texas has found itself the center after lawmakers passed a bill that required schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms. In August, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, issued a statement directing schools to abide by the order.

    “The woke radicals seeking to erase our nation’s history will be defeated. I will not back down from defending the virtues and values that built this country,” he said in a statement at the time.

    What People Are Saying

    School Board Trustee-elect Lesley Guilmart wrote in a Facebook post: “’Im so proud of us, and I am deeply grateful. We came together across lines of difference, from across the political spectrum to do right by our children. Every student and staff member deserves to thrive in our district, and Cleveland4CFISD, Kendra 4 CFISD, and I will fight for just that.”

    Zeph Capo, president of Texas American Federation of Teachers (AFT) wrote in a statement: “While there’s more work to do to make this board representative of the community and responsive to its needs, this victory turns the page on a dark chapter in this district’s history. The trustees defeated last night routinely pushed the school board into a hard right turn to the extremist fringe, and voters said enough.”

    What Happens Next

    Republicans will continue to grapple with losses during Tuesday night’s elections. Democrats performed well across the country, including in high-profile contests like the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races. Victories also extended into states like Georgia and Mississippi.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • What the Democrats’ Good Night Means for 2026 and Beyond

    [ad_1]

    Election Night 2025 was a good one for Democrats. On Tuesday, the Party recaptured the governorship in Virginia, with the victory of the former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger over the Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, and held the governorship in New Jersey, with the congresswoman Mikie Sherrill’s defeat of Jack Ciattarelli. Both victories had been expected, as was Zohran Mamdani’s defeat of Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayoral election. (Spanberger and Sherrill won by approximately fifteen and thirteen percentage points, respectively; Mamdani appears on track for a high single-digit win.) Democrats also did well lower down the ballot in a number of Virginia races, in state races in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and, notably, in California, where the redistricting referendum led by Gavin Newsom—a response to Texas’s Republican-led effort to create five new G.O.P. House seats—passed overwhelmingly.

    To talk about the election results, and what they portend for next year’s House and Senate races, I spoke by phone with Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Democrats managed to outperform expectations, the trouble Republicans face without Donald Trump on the ballot, and what the results mean for 2026 and 2028.

    What’s your biggest takeaway from Tuesday’s results?

    It’s a bad night to be a Republican. It’s hard to see what the silver lining is when you have losses all over the place.

    In the past nine months or so, a lot of people have been saying that the Democratic Party’s brand is in the toilet. Democrats are not popular. They seem disliked by much of the country, including a big chunk of their own voters. This is not a good place to be if you’re a Democrat. How much does this really matter if you are the opposition party? How did you see that question before tonight, and do you see it any differently now?

    I have a long-standing belief that elections are referenda on the party in power. My first reaction when I started hearing the argument that Democrats were in trouble was that I had heard the exact same argument in 2010. You may recall that Obama had an entire post-financial-crisis spiel about how the Republicans had driven the car into the ditch and now the Democrats were trying to help it out. It went on for quite some time, but voters didn’t care. They didn’t like Republicans, but they didn’t like what Democrats were doing, either. [Republicans had huge success in the 2010 midterms.] And I think it’s the same story today, with the parties flipped. People’s dislike of some things that Democrats believe and do might be a problem for governing when Democrats win, but I don’t think it’s a problem for elections.

    Trump is not that popular, but he does bring certain benefits to Republicans when he is on the ballot, especially in terms of turnout. In most elections during the Trump era when he has not been on the ballot, Democrats have done well. Broadly speaking, Republicans seem to do quite poorly when he is not on the ballot.

    Yeah, we saw a similar thing with Obama. He was a political force and could turn out all kinds of voters in Presidential elections, but the Democrats would get walloped in the off-year elections. And I think Trump has a similar effect. There are a lot of true Trump voters out there who just aren’t going to show up in the off-year elections. And, meanwhile, Republicans have kind of traded away their big advantage, which was upper-class suburbanites who vote during the off years. Now those people are mostly Democrats.

    When I grew up and was following politics, people often talked about the desire of voters to keep a check on the party in power. So, if you had Republicans in power, you would want to vote for Democrats, and the President’s party would often lose midterm elections. That still seems true, but now the story seems to be about there being different electorates in off-year elections. Has there been a change of some sort?

    I think that, as we’ve become more polarized and there are fewer swing voters, it’s become more about who is voting. It’s less of a persuasion game and more of just a simple turnout game. That’s the beginning and end of it. We are in a highly polarized environment where there just aren’t that many marginal voters, and you don’t really see the types of swings that you would have seen from, say, 1964 to 1980. It’s just harder and harder to persuade people. It’s about getting your voters to the polls, and that’s not a good bargain for Republicans right now.

    The theory of politics you have just described—that it’s more about motivating people than persuasion—is normally viewed more sympathetically by more ideological party members, and less so by centrists. Democrats have been engaging in this debate about whether they need to fire up their own voters or reach out to voters in the center. As someone who’s followed your work closely, I would not think of you as someone who has the perspective that parties just need to fire up their own voters. Have you changed your opinion?

    Generally speaking, Americans still don’t like radical change. They don’t like tariffs being sprung on them willy-nilly. They don’t like some of the things that Democrats in power do. So where moderation, I think, can help is when you’re actually governing. That distinction is what we were talking about a little bit at the beginning—about how it doesn’t matter that you’re unpopular when you’re out of power, but, when it comes to governing and we start talking about the, like, seven or eight per cent that’s persuadable, it could be a problem.

    On Tuesday, two gubernatorial candidates, in Virginia and New Jersey, who are considered more moderate did quite well, and outperformed the polls. In Virginia, they did better than Democrats had done in 2017, during Trump’s first term. And in New Jersey they maybe did a little bit worse, but, at the same time, New Jersey has come much closer to being a purple state in the past decade, or at least it was in the last election. So, do people who are making the case that moderation is crucial for Democrats to win have an argument about these two races?

    Yeah, and I think you summed up the argument there. If you’re looking for a counter on that, it would be the Virginia attorney general’s race, right? That’s where you had, I think, a pretty radical-sounding Democratic candidate. Maybe people rationalized it away, but he ended up running only four points behind Spanberger. And, over all, he will win by about six points, and Spanberger will have won by about fifteen. So I think that actually gives you a pretty good insight into what the universe of persuadable voters was. Twenty years ago in Virginia, a guy who got caught texting the things that the soon-to-be attorney general did would have run much worse. [Jay Jones, the Democrat, fantasized in text messages about shooting a Republican colleague.] So that’s the polarization and the limit on how much radicalism can hurt you in a general election right there.

    [ad_2]

    Isaac Chotiner

    Source link

  • Democrats Did Much Better Than Expected

    [ad_1]

    If you’re like me, Steve Kornacki is just as adored by your aunt as he is in your group chats. He’s become a staple of Election Day coverage, putting in long hours at the big board and copious amounts of prep beforehand.

    His granular knowledge of key counties and voter turnout trends made him not just indispensable for many Americans on election night, but also a full-blown celebrity. I caught up with him bright and early this morning to talk about Tuesday night’s election results.

    We broke down what the returns mean heading into the 2026 midterm elections, where Democrats currently hold an 8 percentage point advantage over Republicans in the latest NBC News poll, and what they say about President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda. We also spoke about what surprised him in the New Jersey governor’s race, whether Trump’s base is weakening, and, of course, New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s historic win. Heading into the midterms, Kornacki is taking on an expanded role at NBC News following parent company Comcast’s decision to spin off its cable TV properties, including a soon-to-be rebranded MSNBC.

    Kornacki is not someone to put too much stock into an off-year election, but the breadth and depth of Democratic victories suggested a political environment that’s radically changed in the year since Trump’s election—and if anyone can find some important details to follow going forward, it’s Steve.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    WIRED: Steve, thanks for joining us after a long night. Before we get into the meat and potatoes here, let’s start with a quick lightning round: How many hours of sleep were you shooting for, how many did you get, and can you tell us if you have any election night superstitions?

    Steve Kornacki: Well, I shoot for zero, so I’m not disappointed and therefore I’m pleasantly surprised with whatever I get, which I think was about two and a half last night.

    There we go.

    So that’s not too bad. Superstitions? I don’t know about that. My challenge is to just tune out all the anecdotal turnout data on Election Day. I just think it’s a ton of noise that starts messing with your head.

    What surprised you from last night?

    What surprised me was—it’s probably not the most original observation this morning—but New Jersey. [Representative Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee, won with more than 56 percent of the vote.] The margin there for Sherrill, which is about 13 points, is much more than expected. I mean, I was talking to Democrats right up through Election Day who were telling me some version of: “She’s run a terrible campaign, she’s not been a good candidate. Maybe she’ll still win because of Trump, but this is going to be closer than it should be.” I mean, that was a widely shared view between the two parties, that Sherrill had run a bad campaign and was in danger of even losing, and that was not the case at all.

    [ad_2]

    Jake Lahut

    Source link

  • It’s Never Quite Curtis Sliwa’s Last Hurrah

    [ad_1]

    It’s 9:30 p.m. on election night on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Curtis Sliwa is telling his crowd of supporters that his campaign spoke for animal lovers and the emotionally disturbed.

    Polls in New York’s mayoral race had closed a half hour prior, with Zohran Mamdani quickly declared the victor, and while the Republican candidate and longtime city fixture only offered a passing concession—“so we have a mayor-elect”—he took the broader opportunity to reflect on his idiosyncratic presence on the edges of public life for several decades now. In the closing days of the campaign, Donald Trump had come out in support of Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent, in an effort to head off Mamdani’s momentum, and claimed that Sliwa, whose calling cards include his red beret, a much-referenced 1992 shooting in the back of a yellow cab, and the animals he and his wife keep in their studio apartment, “wants cats to be in Gracie Mansion.”

    “Some of the most powerful people in the world,” Sliwa said, “made fun of Nancy and what we do to care for animals, to care for people.”

    “You’re still our mayor!” a supporter in Gucci sneakers and electric blue color contact lenses shouted.

    The audience on hand at Arte Cafe, a neighborhood Italian standby, amounted to a fittingly unpredictable mélange of Sliwa loyalists in streetwear, suits and fedoras, and pops of red in the form of Guardian Angels berets. Former New York governor George Pataki, whom Sliwa described as a key supporter in his speech along with Rudy Giuliani, was mobbed by cameras and microphones as he tried to make his way past the bar. In a quieter back room, was Brad Solomon, a Queens native who identified himself as a poker player and sports bettor by trade. He was vaping in a God Bless America hat as he described how he came to root for Sliwa.

    “We don’t want Killer Cuomo,” Solomon says. “We don’t want communists. It’s an obvious choice.” He and Sliwa were once arrested together, he says, after protesting the arrival of migrants at a mental hospital next to a Catholic school in Staten Island.

    “Curtis was the only one who stood up against that,” Solomon says.

    George Pataki attends the election-night watch party for Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa at Arte Cafe on November 4, 2025 in New York City.David Dee Delgado/Getty Images.

    [ad_2]

    Dan Adler

    Source link

  • Here’s a recap of Tuesday’s election results in Pennsylvania and New Jersey

    [ad_1]

    Tuesday proved to be a successful election day for Democrats competing in closely watched races around the country, including several locally.

    The main event for this region was between Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli for governor of New Jersey. Sherrill won by a margin that proved not to be as close as several polls had predicted. Other races that wrapped up with little drama were the retention elections for Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the contest for Philadelphia District Attorney.

    Below is a recap of those and other elections relevant to the region.

    Additional judicial election results for Philadelphia’s Common Pleas Court and Philadelphia Municipal Court are available on the city’s election website, along with results of the retention elections in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court. And results of judicial elections and retention elections in Pennsylvania Superior Court and Commonwealth Court are posted on the state’s election website.

    New Jersey Governor results

    Democrat Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli in Tuesday’s election. Sherrill will succeed New Jersey’s current governor, Democrat Phil Murphy, who was term limited after eight years in office. Sherrill, a former Navy pilot and currently the congresswoman representing New Jersey’s 11th District, will be the second woman to serve as New Jersey’s governor. The first was Republican Christie Todd Whitman who was elected to two terms between 1994 and 2001.

    Pennsylvania Supreme Court retention results

    The retention elections for Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty and David Wecht set a record for campaign spending on a nonpartisan judicial race with a total expenditure of more than $15 million. Despite all the attention, the races proved not to be close with all three justices cruising to retention victories.

    Their return to the bench on state’s highest court means the liberal justices will maintain their 5-2 advantage over the conservative justices. By winning election, Donohue, Dougherty and Wecht are each elected to new 10-year terms. Donohue, who is 73, will only serve two more years before reaching the mandatory judicial retirement age of 75.

    Philadelphia District Attorney results

    Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner easily won election to a third term on Tuesday, defeating Pat Dugan, a former Philadelphia Municipal Court judge. This is the second time Krasner defeated Dugan this election cycle: Dugan also lost to the progressive prosecutor in May’s Democratic primary election.

    Philadelphia City Controller results

    The Philadelphia City Controller is the chief auditor of the city and the School District of Philadelphia. The auditor’s office works independently of city government, and its analyses are intended to provide objective information to city leaders and the public about Philadelphia’s finances and how its money is being spent. Incumbent Christy Brady easily defeated Republican Ari Patrinos in Tuesday’s election.

    New Jersey Assembly District 1 results

    District 1 represent parts of Atlantic and Cumberland counties and all of Cape May County. Incumbent Republicans Antwan McClellan and Erik Simonsen are running against Democrats Carolyn Rush and Carol Sabo.

    New Jersey Assembly District 2 results

    District 2 represents parts of Atlantic County including several shore towns. Assemblyman Don Guardian and Assemblywoman Claire Swift are the Republican incumbents. They face challenges from Democrats Joanne Famularo and Maureen Rowan in Tuesday’s general election.

    New Jersey Assembly District 3 results

    District 3 covers Salem County and parts of Gloucester and Cumberland Counties. Democrats Dave Bailey Jr. and Heather Simmons are the incumbents, and they are running against Republicans Chris Konawell and Lawrence Moore. 

    New Jersey Assembly District 4 results

    District 4 represents parts of Camden, Atlantic and Gloucester counties. Democrats Dan Hutchinson and Cody Miller are the incumbent members of the state assembly representing this district. They are challenged for their seats on Tuesday by Republicans Amanda Esposito and Gerard McManus.

    New Jersey Assembly District 5 results

    District 5 represents portions of Gloucester and Camden Counties. Assemblymen William Moen Jr. and William Spearman, both Democrats, are the incumbents and are running for reelection against Republicans Constance Ditzel and Nilsa Gonzalez, along with Green Party candidate Robin Brownfield.

    New Jersey Assembly District 6 results

    District 6 represents parts Camden and Burlington counties. Democrats Louis Greenwald and Melinda Kane hold the assembly seats in this district. They are running against Republicans John Brangan and Peter Sykes.

    New Jersey Assembly District 7 results

    District 7 represents municipalities in the portion of Burlington County along the Delaware River. Carol Murphy and Balvir Singh, two Democrats, are the current assembly people representing this district. Republicans Douglas Dillon and Dione Johnson are running against them. 

    New Jersey Assembly District 8 results

    District 8 represents parts of Atlantic and Burlington counties. Headed into Tuesday’s election, its assembly seats are split between Republican Michael Torrissi Jr. and Democrat Andrea Katz. The other candidates in this election are Republican Brandon E. Umba. and Democrat Anthony Angelozzi.

    [ad_2]

    PhillyVoice Staff

    Source link

  • Commentary: Proposition 50 is a short-term victory against Trump. But at what cost?

    [ad_1]

    One of the great conceits of California is its place on the cutting edge — of fashion, culture, technology, politics and other facets of the ways we live and thrive.

    Not so with Proposition 50.

    The redistricting measure, which passed resoundingly Tuesday, doesn’t break any ground, chart a fresh course or shed any light on a better pathway forward.

    It is, to use a favorite word of California’s governor, merely the latest iteration of what has come to define today’s politics of fractiousness and division.

    In fact, the redistricting measure and the partisan passions it stirred offer a perfect reflection of where we stand as a splintered country: Democrats overwhelming supported it. Republicans were overwhelmingly opposed.

    Nothing new or novel about that.

    And if Proposition 50 plays out as intended, it could make things worse, heightening the country’s polarization and increasing the animosity in Washington that is rotting our government and politics from the inside out.

    You’re welcome.

    The argument in favor of Proposition 50 — and it’s a strong one — is that California was merely responding to the scheming and underhanded actions of a rogue chief executive who desperately needs to be checked and balanced.

    The only apparent restraint on President Trump’s authoritarian impulse is whether he thinks he can get away with something, as congressional Republicans and a supine Supreme Court look the other way.

    With GOP control of the House hanging by the merest of threads, Trump set out to boost his party’s prospects in the midterm election by browbeating Texas Republicans into redrawing the state’s congressional lines long before it was time. Trump’s hope next year is to gain as many as five of the state’s House seats.

    Gov. Gavin Newson responded with Proposition 50, which scraps the work of a voter-created, nonpartisan redistricting commission and changes the political map to help Democrats flip five of California’s seats.

    And with that the redistricting battle was joined, as states across the country looked to rejigger their congressional boundaries to benefit one party or the other.

    The upshot is that even more politicians now have the luxury of picking their voters, instead of the other way around, and if that doesn’t bother you maybe you’re not all that big a fan of representative democracy or the will of the people.

    Was it necessary for Newsom, eyes fixed on the White House, to escalate the red-versus-blue battle? Did California have to jump in and be a part of the political race to the bottom? We won’t know until November 2026.

    History and Trump’s sagging approval ratings — especially regarding the economy — suggest that Democrats are well positioned to gain at least the handful of seats needed to take control of the House, even without resorting to the machinations of Proposition 50.

    There is, of course, no guarantee.

    Gerrymandering aside, a pending Supreme Court decision that could gut the Voting Rights Act might deliver Republicans well over a dozen seats, greatly increasing the odds of the GOP maintaining power.

    What is certain is that Proposition 50 will in effect disenfranchise millions of California Republicans and Republican-leaning voters who already feel overlooked and irrelevant to the workings of their home state.

    Too bad for them, you might say. But that feeling of neglect frays faith in our political system and can breed a kind of to-hell-with-it cynicism that makes electing and cheering on a “disruptor” like Trump seem like a reasonable and appealing response.

    (And, yes, disenfranchisement is just as bad when it targets Democratic voters who’ve been nullified in Texas, North Carolina, Missouri and other GOP-run states.)

    Worse, slanting political lines so that one party or the other is guaranteed victory only widens the gulf that has helped turn Washington’s into its current slough of dysfunction.

    The lack of competition means the greatest fear many lawmakers have is not the prospect of losing to the other party in a general election but rather being snuffed out in a primary by a more ideological and extreme challenger.

    That makes cooperation and cross-party compromise, an essential lubricant to the way Washington is supposed to work, all the more difficult to achieve.

    Witness the government shutdown, now in its record 36th day. Then imagine a Congress seated in January 2027 with even more lawmakers guaranteed reelection and concerned mainly with appeasing their party’s activist base.

    The animating impulse behind Proposition 50 is understandable.

    Trump is running the most brazenly corrupt administration in modern history. He’s gone beyond transgressing political and presidential norms to openly trampling on the Constitution.

    He’s made it plain he cares only about those who support him, which excludes the majority of Americans who did not wish to see Trump’s return to the White House.

    As if anyone needed reminding, his (patently false) bleating about a “rigged” California election, issued just minutes after the polls opened Tuesday, showed how reckless, misguided and profoundly irresponsible the president is.

    With the midterm election still nearly a year off — and the 2028 presidential contest eons away — many of those angry or despondent over the benighted state of our union desperately wanted to do something to push back.

    Proposition 50, however, was a shortsighted solution.

    Newsom and other proponents said the retaliatory ballot measure was a way of fighting fire with fire. But that smell in the air today isn’t victory.

    It’s ashes.

    [ad_2]

    Mark Z. Barabak

    Source link

  • Dick Cheney’s Brand of Conservatism

    [ad_1]

    As I think about Dick Cheney after his death, my memory offers up a snippet from an interview I had with Bob Michel when I was reporting for a New Yorker profile of Cheney that appeared in 2001. Michel now looks like a figure from a forgotten Republican past, an amiable congressman from Peoria, Illinois, who had voted for all the major civil-rights laws and who loved crafting legislative compromises with Democrats. In the eighties and early nineties, Michel was the House Minority Leader. The rise of Newt Gingrich and his incendiary brand of Republicanism eventually forced Michel aside—but during much of the time that Michel was leader, Cheney was one of his principal deputies. In the interview, I suggested to Michel that Cheney might be a conservative ideologue. Michel did an instant, reflexive double take: Dick Cheney? The phlegmatic-process guy? No way.

    We were speaking some months before the September 11th attacks, and it’s likely that George W. Bush still saw Cheney in the same way that Michel did. Cheney had loyally served George H. W. Bush, a much more moderate Republican than his son, had been chief executive of a Dallas-based energy contractor, and had gone from running the 2000 Republican Vice-Presidential search—a perfect assignment for a neutral professional—to becoming the Vice-Presidential nominee himself. After 9/11, it instantly became clear that Cheney had been a genius at appearing to be neutral, at least to Republicans who outranked him, rather than actually having been neutral. Within minutes of the attacks, he was in charge (Bush was out of town), expertly putting the country on a path that led to the War on Terror and the Iraq War.

    How did Cheney manage to strike people as something he wasn’t? When did he become so conservative? And, finally, his reappearance in recent years as a passionate opponent of Donald Trump raises what might be the most interesting question of all: What was it, exactly, that made the currently reigning version of conservatism so repellent to him?

    My theory is that Cheney’s time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late nineteen-sixties was his ideological Rosebud. Cheney married Lynne Vincent, his home-town sweetheart from Casper, Wyoming, in 1964. Both of them were the children of career civil servants. With their echt-small-town middle-class backgrounds, plus Dick’s practice of saying as little as possible, they came across as generically, unremarkably Middle American. In 1966, the Cheneys enrolled as doctoral students in Madison; he in political science, she in English. Dick didn’t complete his degree because he went to work for Wisconsin’s governor, Warren Knowles, another moderate Republican. Lynne did finish, in 1970, the same year that radicals bombed a mathematics research center on the university’s campus, killing one person who was inside. The Cheneys appear to have taken from their time in Wisconsin an abiding conviction that the far left is an ever-present threat that Democrats and liberals are incapable of taking seriously. In 2001, Lynne told me that those years had converted them to conservatism. Dick said, “When I was given a choice between returning to academia or staying in the political area, it really wasn’t a close call.”

    Dick Cheney was always far more interested in foreign policy than domestic policy. From H. Bradford Westerfeld, a professor he studied with during his brief time as an undergraduate at Yale (he left after two years and later graduated from the University of Wyoming), he absorbed the idea of the Cold War as a world-defining existential struggle. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, quickly commissioned a report suggesting that the United States become the world’s lone superpower—permanently, if possible. Even so, threats, including from radical Islam, preoccupied him. He saw 9/11 not just as an attack to be answered, but as an opportunity to make the U.S. safer by using military force to transform the entire Middle East into an America-friendly region. Cheney believed that our enemies, if shown strength at a level that was beyond the capabilities of liberals, would always submit to our will. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the Iraq adventure would not work out.

    If you gave a modern Dr. Frankenstein the challenge of designing a Republican whom Cheney would find repellent, it would be impossible for him to invent someone more perfect than Trump: citified, undignified, showily rich, unable to ever remain silent, and drawn to dealmaking rather than force as the way to solve problems. Substantively, a crucial element of Trump’s appeal was his denunciation of the “forever wars,” of which Cheney had been the principal author. Cheney probably never had any illusion that his brand of maximal hawkishness had broad public support, but Trump demonstrating that he could make anti-Cheneyism unstoppably potent with Republican voters still must have stung. His very loyal and very Republican daughter Liz, whom he would have liked to see rise as high or higher than he did, wound up being unable to hold her father’s old seat in the House in the face of Trump’s vengeance, after she had become an unusually public intraparty critic of his.

    Cheney’s life makes for a good means of tracking the evolution of the Republican Party and American conservatism over the past half century. He started his political career in a party dominated by moderates, and helped to make it far more conservative. But he was always an inside player, who didn’t anticipate that more conservative would also come to mean flamboyantly populist. In his own distinctively pessimistic way, he participated both in crafting the zenith moment of American power, around the turn of the millennium, and then in devising the overreach that brought that moment to an end. He saw a series of early twenty-first-century disasters—9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, the financial crisis—lead to the revival of isolationism, the ideology he feared most, as the dominant element in his party, when he’d thought it resided mainly on the left.

    Thanks to luck or grit, Cheney lived longer than anyone expected, given his spectacular heart problems: five heart attacks, beginning when he was still in his thirties, and then a transplant. His surprising survivability gave him the opportunity to change, in the end, from taciturn company man to florid dissenter. This wasn’t natural for him, and it couldn’t have made him happy. He must have died disappointed. ♦

    [ad_2]

    Nicholas Lemann

    Source link

  • Republicans say Democratic wins were expected, yet see warning signs

    [ad_1]

    Republicans said Tuesday’s Democratic victories were expected. But the results revealed deeper problems for the GOP: weak turnout, slipping Latino support and growing concern that without President Donald Trump on the ballot, the party has no clear path forward heading into 2026.

    “TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,” Trump posted on Truth Social after Democrats swept in major contests.

    Democrats flipped governorships in Virginia and New Jersey, swept judicial races in Pennsylvania and won the New York City mayor’s office. While GOP officials framed the results as typical for an off-year cycle, the margins and turnout gaps sparked internal finger-pointing.

    “It’s not doomsday, but not a good tea leaf,” one White House ally told Politico. “There are people who only turn out when [Trump] is on the ballot.”

    Turnout Weakness, Latino Shift Alarm GOP

    Democrats were expected to win most major races, but several candidates exceeded expectations. Former U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger won Virginia’s governorship, defeating Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, with a focus on affordability and public safety. In New Jersey, U.S. Representative Mikie Sherrill beat Trump-backed Jack Ciattarelli. In Virginia, Democrat Jay Jones won the attorney general’s race despite a scandal over leaked text messages in which he talked about killing a Republican lawmaker and his family.

    And in New York City, 34-year-old democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa.

    “We got our asses handed to us,” Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said in a video posted to X.

    Some Republicans blamed candidate quality. “A bad candidate and bad campaign have consequences — the Virginia governor’s race is example number one,” Trump adviser Chris LaCivita said.

    Others blamed poor strategy. “Trump should absolutely have been out in New Jersey,” said Andrew Kolvet of Turning Point USA. “The people that love Trump … would have been motivated by that.”

    The party also saw steep drop-offs in key Latino areas. In Passaic County, New Jersey, where 42 percent of the population is Hispanic, Democrats flipped a 3-point GOP lead from 2024 into a 15-point win. In Manassas Park, Virginia, where Latinos make up 46 percent of the population, Spanberger won by 42 points, doubling the Democratic margin from 2024.

    “This is the clearest sign I’ve seen of Latinos abandoning the GOP after Trump’s big gains in 2024,” Republican strategist Mike Madrid told Newsweek. “Huge night for Dems but their coalition is anti-Trump, not pro-Democratic. That’s the key metric.”

    Economic Message Falters

    Trump did not appear in person at any campaign events. His administration’s shutdown and budget cuts were central themes in Democratic messaging across several states. Democrats like Spanberger and Sherrill emphasized economic moderation and avoided national ideological fights.

    Doug Gordon, a Democratic strategist, told Newsweek Republicans are paying the price for failing to deliver. “Trump and Republicans ran on lowering prices and fixing an economy that isn’t working. Instead, we have secret police disappearing people off the streets, retribution politics, and no economic improvement.”

    Republicans leaned on hard-edged messaging around immigration and crime, but failed to match Democratic outreach in suburban and Latino-heavy areas.

    “We ran into a wall,” said a GOP aide involved in the New Jersey race. “There was no Trump on the ballot, and that meant our coalition didn’t show up.”

    In Pennsylvania, Democrats held all three state Supreme Court seats. In California, voters approved a congressional redistricting measure that favors Democrats heading into 2026.

    Donald Trump

    Can the GOP Win Without Trump?

    Some Republican strategists began running ads tying swing-district Democrats to Mamdani’s far-left platform, but others acknowledged the losses were more about turnout and trust than ideology.

    “Running squishy Rs who are lukewarm on Trump and MAGA… doesn’t work,” wrote Trump-aligned PAC head Alex Bruesewitz on X.

    Yet many Republicans see the bigger problem. The GOP continues to struggle in transferring Trump’s personal coalition to other candidates.

    Polling from CNN released just before the election showed that 63 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s performance as president. Sixty-one percent said his policies have worsened the economy—a core issue cited by voters in every state with a competitive race.

    “People aren’t feeling the promises kept,” the White House ally told Politico. “You won on lowering costs … and people don’t feel that right now.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Watch: Zohran Mamdani gives victory speech after projected New York City mayoral win

    [ad_1]



    Watch: Zohran Mamdani gives victory speech after projected New York City mayoral win – CBS News










































    Watch CBS News



    CBS News projects that Zohran Mamdani will win the New York City mayoral race. See Mamdani’s address to supporters on election night.

    [ad_2]
    Source link

  • Breaking down Prop 50’s projected passage in California

    [ad_1]



    Breaking down Prop 50’s projected passage in California – CBS News










































    Watch CBS News



    CBS News projects that California will pass Prop 50 to redraw the state’s congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms. CBS News breaks down the vote.

    [ad_2]
    Source link