FOR A BRIEF MOMENT over the weekend, some Democratic officials in Montana had high hopes that their party’s candidate for the United States Senate would drop out.

It’s not that the candidate, Alani Bankhead, an Air Force veteran and political newbie, was beset by scandal. It was that they wanted the field to be cleared for someone without a D next to their name. Seth Bodnar is an independent running for the seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Steve Daines, and he’s backed by several prominent Democratic leaders, including former Sens. Jon Tester and Max Baucus, who over the past few years have come to believe that the Democratic party’s brand has grown far too toxic to win statewide.

But after teasing a “very important announcement” that was interpreted in some quarters as a coming campaign suspension, Bankhead instead doubled down. Standing at a lectern in front of the University of Montana’s iconic bronze grizzly bear statue, she didn’t just say she was “never dropping out,” of the race, “ever, ever.” She made clear that Bodnar was one of the reasons why.

“Seth Bodnar is absolutely the last person on the face of the Earth I would ever drop out of this race for,” Bankhead said.

The press conference was the latest hiccup in a bank-shot play Democrats have been making to wrest control of the Senate from Republicans. Hoping to grab GOP-held seats in traditionally conservative states, the party has tried to elevate independent candidates without putting too much of the Democratic party’s odor on them.

It has proven to be a tricky balancing act, nowhere more so than in Montana, where Bankhead’s commitment to stay in the race has ignited a fresh round of debates about whether the Democratic brand is damaged beyond repair, or if giving up on it is premature and shortsighted.

Some Montana party officials I spoke with argued that in the face of Trumpism and democratic backsliding, Democrats had to shed their partisan preferences and do whatever was required to deny the GOP another Senate majority. And that meant being clear-eyed about the fact that the era of Democrats realistically being able to win statewide in Montana was over—at least for now. But others in the party believe that Tester and his allies have over-learned lessons from his 2024 campaign, which he lost to Republican Tim Sheehy after serving three terms. They argued that the party needed to run different types of candidates, not shed party labels entirely.

“[Tester’s] conclusion was, as he looked in the mirror, that if Jon Tester can’t win, nobody can win. I disagree with that,” said former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who told me that he unsuccessfully tried to convince Bodnar to run as a Democrat instead of an independent.

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MONTANA ISN’T THE ONLY STATE WHERE this intraparty debate is getting spicy. It is also heating up in South Dakota and Idaho, where there are both Democrats and independents running for Senate. Democratic leaders in these states have sought advice from the Nebraska state party chair Jane Kleeb, hoping to glean some wisdom from how she handled the decision in 2024 to keep Democratic candidates out of the race and clear the field for independent Dan Osborn. Osborn lost to Republican Sen. Deb Fischer, but only by 7 points while Donald Trump carried the state by 20. Osborn is running as an independent again this year against Sen. Pete Ricketts.

“Every state chair needs to make a decision that’s best for themselves, but they also need to make a decision that’s best for the electorate, that’s best for the state, and what’s best for our country. So sometimes you do put aside your partisan loyalty,” Kleeb told me. “I’m not saying every election cycle we’re now going to endorse an independent in a congressional or senate race, but for this cycle, with this candidate, it makes sense for us.”

But not all state party leaders share Kleeb’s outlook. Some feel it’s their duty to stand by the Democratic nominee, no matter how doomed their candidacy may be. And to be clear, their prospects don’t look great. The Democratic candidates in South Dakota, Idaho, and Montana have very little cash on hand, while their independent and GOP counterparts have far bigger war chests. Just looking at the numbers, it’s almost like the Republican and the independent are the major parties, and the Democrats are the third-party spoiler.

And then there’s the matter of state history. Trump carried all three states by wide margins. The last Democrat elected to the Senate in Idaho was Frank Church in 1968; the last Democrat elected to the Senate in South Dakota was Tim Johnson in 2008. Although Tester won his 2018 re-election bid, some party officials view that as an anomaly in this hypernationalized political era.

“Democrats, at least in Montana, are struggling,” said Baucus, who was the longest-serving U.S. senator from Montana ever when he was appointed by Barack Obama in 2014 to serve as ambassador to China.

“The Democratic leaders that I talk to—the Democrats who hold leadership positions—publicly have to be for the Democrats, because they’ll lose their job if they don’t. But privately, they’re not. Privately, a lot of them really, really like Seth Bodner,” Baucus added.

But simply pointing to recent history, campaign finance reports, and polling data is often not enough to convince Democratic nominees that they should cede the floor to independents. Unlike in Nebraska, where Democrat Cindy Burbank promised during her primary campaign to drop out of the general to give Osborn a clear shot at Ricketts, there hasn’t been the same level of coordination in other states.

Which leads to that same bizarre spectacle we’ve seen in Montana: Some party officials in Idaho and South Dakota have been trying to come up with strategies to force their own party’s candidates there to drop out. Former Idaho Rep. Larry LaRocco, a Democrat, told me he’s spoken with other officials in his state about hiring a professional mediator to see what would get the party’s nominee, David Roth, to consider ending his campaign. LaRocco has also considered asking prominent party strategists like Jim Messina, who grew up in Idaho, to sit down with Roth and explain why it’s in the interest of the party that he end his race and support independent Todd Achilles.

“I’m looking for a person who might be able to talk to David, and I’m trying to be respectful. But this is his fourth run,” said LaRocco. “The brand has been beaten up quite a bit. . . . At some point, you can’t keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome. That’s the definition of insanity.”

Meanwhile, over in South Dakota, the independent candidate running for Senate, Brian Bengs, told me he sat down earlier this spring with Democratic nominee Julian Beaudion, and they agreed that if one of them didn’t drop out, Sen. Mike Rounds would coast to re-election. Bengs suggested that they reconvene in early summer and “judge the health of a campaign based on who’s got the best polling and the best fundraising.” A recent poll sponsored by Bengs’s campaign found that Rounds was up 25 points in a head-to-head with Beaudion, but led by just 4 points against Bengs.

But that was an internal poll. And Bengs said Beaudion hasn’t been willing to pick the conversation back up. He argued that Beaudion had been buoyed by Joe Biden’s endorsement earlier this month and was no longer looking at the race objectively. Beaudion did not respond to an interview request.

“The question for the Democratic party in the state is: Do we want to have another sacrificial lamb?” Bengs said in a phone interview. “Or do you want to support somebody who can’t guarantee a win, but is in the game and is within striking distance?”

DEMOCRATIC OFFICIALS in Montana, South Dakota, and Idaho remain somewhat paralyzed about how to proceed, especially as deadlines to drop out of the race near. While whoever emerged in each of those states to take on the Republican would remain a long shot, there is still opportunity in trying to make these races competitive—if, for nothing else, draining GOP resources on a state they assumed would be a cakewalk.

In Montana, at least, there is some chatter that the contest could actually get competitive, given the state’s more recent history of electing Democrats statewide.

“Montana ain’t Nebraska. We simply ain’t Idaho. And we’re not South Dakota,” said Schweitzer. “The right Democrats can win in Montana.”

The questions about whether or not Democrats should run have been shaping these races since the primaries. In Montana, Schweitzer and other prominent party leaders had initially backed former state Rep. Reilly Neill in the primary. Neill had vowed to stay on the ballot in the general election, and as she appeared poised to win the nomination, Democrats advocating for the independent route grew anxious. In the final few days of the primary, a super PAC popped up and dropped $3.3 million on ads for Bankhead, securing the party’s Senate nomination for the political novice who moved to Montana around three years ago.

And then . . . she too decided to stay in the race.

“They knew Riley wasn’t going to drop out, and so they hedged their bets on me, but I’m not going to drop out,” Bankhead told me in a phone interview, when I asked her about the super PAC investment. She said no one approached her beforehand to ask if she’d consider withdrawing from the general. “You guys are making a lot of assumptions about what you think I’m gonna do, and dropping out is not one of them.”

Given that the money came from a super PAC, it’s difficult to pin down exactly who was behind it and what their intentions were. By law, super PACs cannot coordinate with candidates or campaigns. But that hasn’t stopped frustrated Democratic officials from engaging in some finger-pointing.

As one Montana Democratic official put it to me: “Alani [Bankhead] now really believes she won the election. . . . But she didn’t win the election, somebody decided she was going to win the election. And that somebody created a monster.”

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WHEN JAMES TALARICO FIRST STARTED to take off last summer, moderate-minded Democratic officials were anxious. They’d seen videos of him in the state House talking about how “God is nonbinary” and were convinced that he was too liberal to win statewide. They thought he’d bungle the party’s admittedly slim chance at flipping the Texas Senate seat.

Some moderate operatives were so worried about the prospect of Talarico winning the nomination that they tried to boost retired NASA astronaut Terry Virts as an alternative candidate. Virts even put out an attack ad warning that Talarico’s past woke comments would lead to Republicans holding the seat. But Virts never caught traction. He dropped out four months before the primary.

Three months have now passed since Talarico won the party nomination and some of the once-panicking moderate Democratic operatives are starting to feel slightly reassured. As they see it, Talarico isn’t running the same playbook from Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate campaign that came close, but ultimately squandered a similar opportunity to flip a GOP seat.

He’s adapted himself to Texas’s political landscape.

In the past few months, Talarico has

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DEMOCRATS MAY HAVE BEEN rightly apoplectic with the Supreme Court’s ruling gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—and the rush to carve up the electoral power of black voters in the South that followed. But in the short term, they have begun to see political opportunity.

In the past few weeks, operatives involved in competitive House, Senate, and gubernatorial elections have argued to me that the Republican attack on black rights and representation unleashed by the Supreme Court will powerfully energize their base this midterm cycle. And not just in Southern states that are redrawing congressional lines. The Court’s ruling, Democrats say, could increase black voter turnout enough to clinch narrow elections.

“It could be a game changer across the country, especially in these marginal districts where candidates win with less than 2 percent of the vote,” said Donna Brazile, the former Democratic National Committee chair.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee provided me with a list of eighteen districts they’re eyeing in which black residents make up between 12 and 33 percent of the voting-age population. Some districts on that list, like North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, are swing seats that Democrats are defending. But others—like Virginia’s 2nd district, Ohio’s 10th, Michigan’s 10th, and North Carolina’s 3rd—are critical pickup opportunities. The DCCC believes that historical turnout among black voters could be the difference in flipping those seats.

“People are very upset,” said former Rep. Elaine Luria, who is running to take back the seat she once held in Virginia’s 2nd district, adding that the way the Virginia Supreme Court threw out the state’s redistricting referendum only added to the outrage. “This is a district where one in five or four voters are African American. . . . All of this was just a very emotionally charged combination of things, and we’ve certainly been hearing about it everywhere we go.”

There’s no denying that some of this analysis is the product of party officials desperate to find a silver lining to the VRA ruling. And it’s not clear that even a groundswell of black opposition to the Court would be enough to make up for the seats that GOP legislatures have redrawn to their favor since the Callais decision.

But there’s some evidence that such a groundswell might be coming.

Cornell Belcher, a pollster who worked closely with Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, told me that in a recent nationwide poll he conducted on behalf of the group BlackPAC—which works to turn out black voters for Democrats—81 percent of likely black voters said they were very motivated to participate in the upcoming election. At this same point in June 2024—during a presidential election year wherein voter enthusiasm is almost always higher—Belcher said 76 percent of likely black voters were very motivated to participate.

“That [high motivation] is not something I typically see at this juncture, especially going into a midterm,” said Belcher. “There’s tremendous potential here: a different kind of turnout and participation if messaged correctly.”

While affordability and cost-of-living concerns remain a major source of motivation for voters this cycle, Belcher and other Democratic operatives argue that economic issues—although important to black voters—don’t generate the intense frustration and righteous indignation that the dismantling of black representation does. Strikingly, according to Belcher’s poll, more black voters (41 percent) now identify the Supreme Court as the top threat to their community than the Trump presidency (39 percent). In June 2024, just 26 percent said the Court was the top threat.

There are other data points too. In Georgia, which faces Republican-led redistricting, Democrats drew over 1 million ballots in last month’s primary, compared to Republicans’ 940,000. Charlie Bailey, chair of the Georgia Democratic Party, told me that was the largest edge that the party has held over the GOP in a primary since 1998. And he attributed the turnout to Georgia’s primary taking place shortly after the SCOTUS ruling and while Republican lawmakers announced plans to redistrict ahead of the 2028 cycle.

“It’s pissing people off. And that’s maybe even an understatement,” said Bailey. “It is emotional. I think it is disrespectful, and it is not hard to explain [to voters].”

Likewise, Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, says black voters around the country frequently bring up redistricting and the VRA ruling unprompted in her focus.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Georgia voters are especially motivated by the VRA ruling since their congressional representation could soon be upended. One challenge for Democrats will be figuring out how to motivate black voters around the ruling in states that aren’t facing imminent redistricting.

Another is making the issue land with black voters who, compared to their peers, are relatively disengaged. As the Democratic pollster Josh Doss has documented, black voters aren’t a monolith, and finding a winning message that resonates with voters—young and old, regular and irregular—is difficult.

“There’s a different understanding about what is actually happening in real time between older voters and younger voters. Older voters remember Jim Crow,” said former North Carolina state Rep. Raymond Smith, who is running to flip the state’s 3rd Congressional District. Younger black voters may not be so outraged: “[The GOP’s] effort, in my humble opinion, could be lost on the younger generation.”

Last month, the DCCC launched a digital ad campaign in hopes of imparting those historical lessons. The ads highlighted GOP attacks on black voters’ representation and voting rights, while decrying the Trump administration’s “white nationalist agenda” and “Jim Crow 2.0.”

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Operatives like Belcher want even more. In their view, Democrats should dedicate more resources to messaging about the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act and, with it, black political representation. They see a parallel to the ways the party rallied around abortion rights after Roe v. Wade was overturned during the 2022 midterm election cycle.

“Almost every piece of literature going into that campaign season had something about the rights of women being rolled back and attacked,” Belcher said. “What’s the difference here?”

Other operatives agree. They told me the party had a track record of fixating on appealing to white women and white working-class voters but had shown itself to be slow to respond to black voters’ interests.

“The fact that we’re already in June and I’m not seeing an attempt to have targeted conversations with key constituencies within the Democratic coalition, the black community—I’m not sure where money is being spent right now,” said Shropshire. “We continue to see elections where black folks just decide that they’re going to stay home because the party that’s supposed to be standing up for their interests simply is not.”

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— Graham Platner officially became the Democratic nominee for Maine’s Senate seat on Tuesday evening, earning around 72 percent of the vote. Gov. Janet Mills got 19.4 percent, even though she had dropped out of the race; David Costello came in third place with 8 percent. The challenge for Platner now will be earning the trust of those primary voters who didn’t back him while also broadening his appeal to independent and Republican voters whom he will have to win over in order to defeat Susan Collins.

“To any of those who feel let down or disappointed or disillusioned, it is my job to earn your trust, faith, and support. And I will spend every day of this campaign—and if I have the privilege, every day in the United States Senate—doing exactly that,” Platner said in his victory speech on Tuesday evening.

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— Some progressive House members are threatening to withhold their DCCC dues out of frustration with the committee’s handling of the primary in California’s 22nd district, Axios reports. Shortly before the election, the DCCC took the rare step of picking sides in a primary race, endorsing the more moderate California Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains over progressive activist and political science professor Randy Villegas, who had been endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Despite DCCC’s $135,000 joint ad buy in support of Bains shortly before the race, Villegas won 5 percent more of the vote than Bains—enough to advance to the general election against GOP Rep. David Valadao. It’s just one congressional race, but it underscores the continuing divide within the party about what sort of candidate is most “electable” in the purple and red parts of the country.

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THE CONTINUOUS WAVE of public controversy surrounding Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner has given way to a private wave of recriminations over how the party’s marquee Senate race ended up in such a tenuous place.

And within the fractious and competitive world of Democratic operatives and consulting firms, it is the Philadelphia-based ad firm chiefly behind Platner’s rise that has taken it most on the chin.

Fight Agency is a new shop that has had a fairly remarkable run of success. Launched in 2025 by alums of the campaigns of John Fetterman, Ruben Gallego, and Bernie Sanders, the group quickly set the pace for the rest of the party in re-engaging the Trump-curious voters it lost in 2024. Its formula was fairly obvious: elevate more nontraditional, outside-the-box candidates with a working-class and anti-establishment appeal. And it scored arguably one of the most significant wins over the past year, when it helped a previously unknown New York state assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani to Gracie Mansion.

Platner seemed poised to be Fight Agency’s next triumph. And he may very well prove to be. But since October, he has repeatedly been accused of not being forthright about various episodes in his past, both troubling and embarrassing. There have been stories about Platner’s years-old Reddit comments, his Totenkopf tattoo, and whether—as the son of a Dartmouth-educated lawyer and the recipient of a private education—he was inflating his “working-class” background. Late last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Platner’s wife had discovered him sexting with other women in the spring of 2025. And last week the New York Times published a report about how some of Platner’s ex-girlfriends found him to be demeaning to women and, in at least one instance, physically threatening.

Platner has denied that last item. And he has continued to insist that he was unaware of the meaning of his tattoo. He has stressed that much of the controversy stems from a period in his life when he was struggling with PTSD following tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, overcoming a drinking problem and social isolation. And he has argued, more generally, that Maine voters are simply not as interested in or obsessed with dredging up the skeletons from his past as the national press corps is.

But the problem remains that he previously insisted there were no more skeletons. And there clearly were, leading to one of two conclusions:

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OVER THE PAST FEW WEEKS, the conversation around whether Democrats can retake the Senate has zeroed in on the state of Maine. Party operatives and impassioned observers alike are fiercely debating whether Graham Platner’s controversial tattoo, his old Reddit posts, and his sexting revelations have jeopardized chances of flipping the seat now held by Republican Susan Collins.

But lost amid the frenzy is an equally significant development about the future of both the party and the Senate. Elsewhere around the country, establishment candidates running very conventional races are finding real success with their boilerplate approaches. These candidates may lack the drama—or chaos—of a Platner, but they reduce the risk that a faceplant in Maine will cost Democrats big in November.

Let’s take a tour of these states. On Tuesday, Iowa state Rep. Josh Turek—the preferred candidate of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—crushed progressive state Sen. Zach Wahls in the Senate primary, winning 63 percent of the vote. In North Carolina, former Gov. Roy Cooper, whom Schumer also recruited to run for Senate, appears to be coasting to victory. Up in Alaska, another Schumer recruit, Mary Peltola, is by all evidence, running a strong campaign despite receiving little national media attention. Former Sen. Sherrod Brown, yet another Schumer recruit, is in a tighter but still competitive race to win back Ohio. (Update, June 3, 2026, 7:30 p.m. EDT: A new poll released just as this newsletter was being published gives Brown an 8-point lead over Republican incumbent Jon Husted.) Top party officials increasingly see pickup opportunities in unexpected states like Texas, Nebraska, and maybe even Mississippi.

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So much of the narrative this election cycle is that Democratic voters just want to cast out the old guard. And while operatives are busy fixating on the attention economy or debating candidates’ morality, it turns out that plain vanilla Democratic politics may actually be working.

“What Iowa, North Carolina, Alaska are telling us is that the recipe is actually pretty simple: You find candidates with long, deep relationships in those states who understand those states, and then you let them run campaigns that are focused on those states rather than trying to nationalize everything,” said Caitlin Legacki, a party strategist who is working with Schumer-backed Rep. Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary.

Always fractious, Democrats have debated how best to campaign while Trump occupies the White House, having argued about it since the earliest days of his first term. But this perennial argument has taken on added significance as the Platner saga rumbles on. Disagreements that were once about campaign strategy have turned into fights over whether key issues or candidate morality even matter at all.

The contrast is remarkable. As Platner’s defenders have invested themselves in making him an avatar of a new type of populist politics, other Democrats running for Senate have been strikingly conventional. Cooper, the 68-year-old former North Carolina governor well-known in his home state, put out a no-thrills bio ad this week that was so colorless it borders on parody.

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This approach hasn’t always worked. After all, the entire reason the 41-year-old Platner is a national figure—one who draws large, impassioned crowds on the stump—is because Maine’s 78-year-old Gov. Janet Mills, another Schumer recruit it must be said, failed to gain traction among primary voters after she launched her Senate bid. But Platner’s an outlier. There are enough data points now to say that the old candidate calculus hasn’t been proven obsolete.

“Chuck Schumer has recruited top-notch candidates in swing states that a Democratic majority requires,” said Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a former senior official in the Biden White House. “He may face a lot of griping, but he’s set a path to a Democratic Senate and getting the job done.”

The relative success of these old-fashioned candidates has forced operatives to reconsider some of their assumptions about politics in 2026. Several officials I spoke with suggested that candidacies like Cooper’s and Peltola’s scuttled the new conventional wisdom that what really matters in politics today is going viral online.

Yes, these operatives conceded, breaking through social media algorithms matters in presidential elections and Senate races in places like Texas (where the state’s size makes it both expensive to run TV ads and difficult to rely on retail politics). But virality is no panacea. They pointed to Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff—who isn’t very online, yet holds a comfortable lead over his Republican rivals in a very competitive state—as proof that the party shouldn’t fixate quite so much on a candidate’s TikTok presence.

“That stuff is really helpful for online fundraising. It is really helpful if you are trying to break through and nationalize your race. But if you’re actually trying to communicate to voters in a statewide race, it’s different,” said Legacki. “In an era of this virality conversation, one thing we’ve heard from voters consistently in focus groups is they want someone who is going to still be effective and good at the job.”

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REGARDLESS OF HOW BETTER POSITIONED the party may be in Senate races previously thought out of reach, every Democrat I spoke with was emphatic that the Maine situation is a disaster. Sen. Susan Collins is the only Republican up for re-election in a state that Kamala Harris won; her seat should have been Dems’ easiest win this cycle. Even as Democrats make promising gains elsewhere, control of the Senate could still be decided by Mainers.1 And there’s deep anxiety within the party that more damaging news stories about Platner’s personal conduct will come out in the coming days.

It’s a dicey situation. Many operatives I’ve spoken with are anxiously awaiting another shoe to drop. “Graham Platner is going to lose in November. Most people who are serious campaigners here understand that,” one Maine Democratic strategist told me. “The negatives against him are just much more salient than the negatives against Susan Collins.”

But if Platner does implode, it could be that another vanilla Democrat stands to benefit. Over the weekend, Mills reminded a local outlet that she may have suspended her campaign but she hadn’t dropped out. She will still be on the primary ballot next Tuesday if Mainers want an alternative to Platner. If he wins the nomination, though, Platner has until early July to drop out. The Maine Democratic Party would then select his replacement for the general election ballot.

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Columbia, South Carolina
SOUTH CAROLINA REP. JIM CLYBURN’S “World Famous Fish Fry” is a storied tribute to Democratic politics in the South. The annual event is a jubilant affair; the type you get when you combine sticky summer air, deep-fried fish, music, booze, and a smattering of ambitious politicians eager to impress an early-voting state crowd.

But Friday’s fish fry felt more like a resurrection than a celebration.

Just days before attendees started showing up at the outdoor patio of a local children’s museum decorated with red, white, and blue balloon arches and “Jim Clyburn Delivers!” campaign signs, Clyburn had been granted a remarkable lease on his congressional life after the Republican-led South Carolina state Senate somewhat unexpectedly shot down a redistricting measure pushed by President Donald Trump. Had it been successful, the effort would have exploded Clyburn’s safe Democratic seat by spreading the district’s large population of black voters across new congressional lines. And so, rather than mourning the end of Clyburn’s thirty-three years in office, folks gathered with a sense of solace that the 85-year-old veteran of the House—the last of the old guard of Democratic leaders there—will serve at least one more term.

A woman named Phyllis I spoke with, who seemed only mildly annoyed that I interrupted her dancing to Beyoncé, told me she felt “vindicated” and “electrified” by last week’s state Senate vote. Another woman, Jackie, said she was relieved Clyburn wasn’t going anywhere: “We trust him. He’s done so much and he means so much,” she told me. And in between bites of her fried fish (which she rated a 10 out of 10), another voter, Gelinda, said she’d come to her first fish fry to “celebrate that Clyburn is still here.”

These are trying times for Democrats in the South—success is measured not by progress made but by harm mitigated. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling last month gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Southern Republicans raced with shocking speed to redraw congressional lines to benefit themselves, along the way threatening to erase an entire generation of Southern black political leadership. So far, they’ve largely succeeded—or have positioned themselves to do so in the coming years.

As I watched the hundreds gathered at the fish fry—dancing, drinking, and holding plates of whiting fish deep-fried to a flaky perfection and served on white bread with mustard and hot sauce—I couldn’t help but see the moment as a crossroads: a party clinging to its traditions while political trends outpace them.

Clyburn’s fish fry began in 1992 in the parking lot of his campaign office. It’s become a must-stop for Democrats with presidential ambitions, serving as an early testing ground for a candidate’s ability to appeal to black voters in the South. It’s also a way to pay homage to the congressman—a kingmaker in South Carolina’s early presidential primary—who exhibits great pleasure in making would-be presidents don matching blue “Clyburn” t-shirts and vie for his approval in front of a large and loyal crowd.

For all the relief, this year’s fish fry could very well be one of the last. There’s no guarantee Republicans won’t eliminate Clyburn’s district in 2028 or 2030 when the political environment could be more favorable for the GOP. More broadly, the political system that gave voice to the Black Belt over the past sixty years is ending. In its place, much of the former Confederacy appears to be marching toward a deeply gerrymandered structure, in which the overwhelmingly white Republican party is largely assured of holding power, while Democrats, many of whom are black, are left politically voiceless.

I ASKED CLYBURN HOW HE FELT about all this and he referred me to his recent book, The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation. The book, which came out last November, chronicles the black South Carolina congressmen who served during and after Reconstruction. He also mentioned Ralph McGill, the white anti-segregationist publisher of the Atlanta Constitution in the 1950s and ’60s who advocated for the “New South,” a modernized, upwardly mobile region that retired longstanding racist, romanticized visions.

“We’ve got some people in Washington who would love for us to revert to the Old South,” said Clyburn. “What I think about it: I think that good, positive thinking Southerners are going to continue this thrust toward a more perfect union, irrespective of those people up in Washington, who day after day are insulting the intelligence of Southern voters.”

It’s a nice idea, but “good positive thinking” in the face of Republican chicanery hardly seems like a fair fight. But it seems to be what Democrats here are going with—at least for right now. The two presidential hopefuls invited to speak at this year’s event—California Rep. Ro Khanna and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear—stayed resolutely positive themselves. They largely applauded South Carolina Democrats for beating redistricting, ignoring the fact that Republicans killed the effort out of sense of their own self-interest and fears that, with Democrats polling so well, the proposed map could be a dummymander.

Khanna condemned how the current Supreme Court had “engaged in the fastest rollback of black political rights since Rutherford Hayes ended Reconstruction in 1877.” He cheered Clyburn and South Carolina Democrats for standing “up for freedom against the evil forces that were taking it away.” But he also called for expanding the Court to thirteen justices and implementing term limits—two proposals that would only be possible with massive, sustained Democratic majorities and momentum.

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Throughout the evening, Beshear touted Democratic progress in the South—electing blue governors in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Virginia (as well as two senators from Georgia)—and applauded South Carolina for saying “no thank you to Donald Trump’s redistricting.” Attendees trailed Beshear closely, eager to grab a selfie with the Kentuckian while excitedly chatting about the possibility of dozens of presidential candidates coming to next year’s fish fry when the primary is in full swing.

Positive thinking. Full plates. Palmetto trees. 2028 buzz. Clyburn got his fish fry. But as the drinks flowed and the DJ turned up the volume on Tamia’s “Can’t Get Enough,” it was hard to not feel like Clyburn and his fellow Democrats were operating on borrowed time.

“This is a celebration,” said Charles Brooks, an 86-year-old retired professor, gesturing at throngs of people dancing in front of the stage. “But we can’t stop the work now. There’s an attempt to bring us back.”

“But I’m just a soldier marching on.”

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— The Death of the Texas Political Machine That Bush Built

— ‘Both Parties Kind of Get It Wrong’: The Young Men Who May Swing the Midterms

FOUR YEARS AGO, an alliance of MAGA policy groups led by the Heritage Foundation began organizing a compendium of principles and plans designed to serve as guidance for Republicans should they win back the presidency. Their publication was officially titled Mandate for Leadership1, but ever since its release in April 2023, it has been universally known by the name of the group effort: Project 2025.

Over the course of the 2024 campaign, Project 2025 morphed from a blueprint into a political albatross. But while the policy-vague Donald Trump eventually disavowed the initiative, he didn’t actually abandon it. Many of its contributors took on important roles in his administration, including one of the project’s “architects,” Russ Vought, who is now Trump’s budget director.2 Many of the project’s ideas became pursuits—and executive orders—when Trump won the White House.

Having seen the impact of having a ready-made set of policies, orders, and staffers, Democrats came to embrace the idea that their party needed a project of its own. And now, it’s nearing its public debut.

The Democratic policy group Project 2029 is releasing an initial set of proposals in hopes of shaping the fast-approaching presidential primary campaign and guiding leaders on how they might earn back voter trust. It plans to roll out dozens of more ideas on domestic and foreign policy over the next year, all of which the group eventually intends to turn into a book that will be published as a sort of governing blueprint for Democrats.

A preview of the first policy proposals being released, shared exclusively with The Bulwark, outline an anti-corporate, Big Tech–skeptical approach to the modern economy, with a particular emphasis on parenting and families.

“It’s very clear for many people what Democrats are against,” said Chad Maisel, Project 2029’s executive director. “What people are not clear on is what we are for and what we would do if and when we have our next governing moment. We see Project 2029 as answering that question of: What would we do? What would we fight for? How would we solve problems?”

The plans include the following, as taken from a preview shared by Project 2029:

Utility Monopolies: America’s electric grid still runs on a century-old monopoly model that leaves 150 million households with no choice in who provides their power and tens of billions of dollars in potential savings locked behind outdated laws. Our proposal outlines how the next President should break these monopolies open, letting competition drive down bills, speed up delivery, and unleash a new wave of cleaner, cheaper energy for families and businesses.

Child Care: Families today are caught in the “Child Care Catch-22.” With child care costs taking up nearly 10 to 20 percent of the average family’s already stretched take-home pay, families can’t afford to pay for child care while they work. And because parents with young kids are managing other costs like saving for a home or paying student debt, many can’t afford to stay home and not work. Our proposal outlines how the next President can ensure that every family has the time, financial support, and high-quality care options they want, giving parents back the power of choice on how to support their young children.

Kids Over Clicks: Parents today are raising kids in a digital environment engineered to hook them and the consequences, from a worsening youth mental health crisis to a new wave of harm from AI chatbots, are no longer in dispute. Just as America sets minimum ages for drinking and gambling, it’s time to set real guardrails around the products targeting kids online. Our proposal would protect children from the most harmful features of social media and AI, give parents stronger tools, and dismantle the surveillance advertising model that drives much of the harm.

The Annoyance Economy: Americans are losing enormous amounts of time, money, and patience to the small, daily hassles corporations deliberately design into modern life: spam calls, useless chatbots, surprise fees, impossible cancellations, endless paperwork. The hassle isn’t a bug; it’s the business model, and it costs households well over a hundred billion dollars a year. Our proposal would take on the “Annoyance Economy” directly, restoring basic fairness and common sense to the everyday transactions that shape how Americans experience the economy.

Although Democrats have sharply criticized Project 2025, some of the party’s top policymakers believe that its bevy of goals and proposals enabled Trump to rapidly implement conservative priorities. By the end of January 2025, a CNN analysis found that 36 of Trump’s first 53 executive orders could be found in Project 2025.

For Maisel and others, the tradeoff was clear: Exposing Democrats to scrutiny and criticism over a book of policy proposals was a fine price to pay for being prepared for the rigors of the campaign and the demands of actually governing.

“If there’s a really big library shelf full of a bunch of good ideas, and you just pluck the right one off the right shelf at the right moment, that can be really powerful—that can help government be more effective,” said Justin Wolfers, an economist on the advisory board for Project 2029. “Lots of people have different views, but I do know everyone agrees that on January 20 you have to do something.”

PROJECT 2029 IS JUST ONE of a number of groups churning out white papers ahead of what’s expected to be a crowded and competitive Democratic presidential primary race. The purpose of these proposals may be to shape the direction of the party. But it will also allow ambitious policy advisers to carve out footholds in the next Democratic administration.

Project 2029 hasn’t been without its critics. Some party strategists privately groan about the so-called “ideas primary.” They lament that the Democratic party’s struggles are with messaging rather than substance, and complain that the party habitually wastes time on damaging intraparty policy fights that only hamper candidates at the ballot box—as was the case with the debates over immigration and policing during the 2020 primary. Some party strategists have also argued that it’s best for candidates to customize their policies based on their backgrounds and their personal experiences with the electorate rather than taking cues from D.C.-based institutions.

Even so, those involved with Project 2029 stress that voters are desperate for Democrats to present a vision that goes beyond opposition to Trump and offer something positive. As they see it, the greater risk is not having debates about policy priorities at all.

“If you’ve had a big debate about what you’re doing in the course of a campaign, it’s much easier to move things forward than to start a public conversation about something in your early days in office,” said another Project 2029 policy adviser, Tara McGuinness, an Obama administration alum who worked on the Biden transition. “The next president needs ideas [and] needs a credible case that they’re on the side of most people in the country.”

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Project 2029 plans to tackle other hot issues in the coming months, including AI, a subject about which many Americans are beginning to express serious skepticism. Maisel says he wants the group to respond to voter concerns as they arise. He thinks Democrats missed opportunities during the last few election cycles by not focusing on salient issues like social isolation and loneliness. But whatever form the project’s proposals take, he said, they are mostly meant to be an “aspirational vision.” The Project 2029 policy advisers with whom I spoke said they were less concerned with calculating how programs would be paid for or whether their plans could be realistically shepherded through Congress than with animating their base.

At this stage, it’s unclear what success would look like for Project 2029 or even if Democratic presidential candidates would be willing to associate themselves with it. The name alone, with its Heritage Foundation echoes, is a turnoff. Comparison to the right-wing policy book gives further cause for caution. Trump’s post–Election Day embrace of Project 2025 may have allowed him to move faster in office. But the cavalcade of hard-right policies he’s unleashed has also resulted in an approval rating hovering around 37 percent, and with Republicans growing nervous about getting clobbered in the midterm elections.

When I asked Maisel how he defined success, he told me: “We need more big ideas. And we think success [for us] is putting forward ideas that are adopted by candidates that help inform the debate. . . . We need to move away from tinkering. We think we need to move towards big, bold ideas that are exciting to people. And we also think we need to put forward ideas that people understand.”

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— The Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee is meeting this week to discuss the 2028 primary calendar, as Delaware, New Hampshire, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Nevada, New Mexico, Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan are all competing for an early slot in the nominating process.

At today’s meeting, representatives from New Hampshire emphasized that their state could be relied on to count votes quickly (a not-so-subtle jab at Iowa). Illinois joked that, unlike Michigan, it could keep the roads open in a winter storm. Michigan boasted that it actually produced more agricultural crops than Iowa. And Iowa stressed that as the first nominating state for the Republican party, Democrats shouldn’t risk looking like they’re abandoning rural voters. Meanwhile, DNC members peppered the presenters with questions about their states’ diversity, voter registration, election security, cost of media markets, and how they’d use the attention to boost downballot candidates.

The DNC announced earlier this year that it would select one state from four different regions (Eastern, Midwest, Western, and Southern) to hold an early nominating contest ahead of Super Tuesday. Those vying for an early slot are desperate for the influence, attention, and resources that come with leading the calendar. As NOTUS’s Elena Schneider reported today, some Iowa officials are threatening to go rogue if they aren’t selected by the DNC and hold an early nominating contest anyway. You can add that to the long list of things giving DNC Chair Ken Martin a headache these days.

More states will make their case tomorrow as the meeting continues. DNC officials are expected to make a decision on the calendar order later this fall.

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My open tabs:

— The Caitlin Clark Machine Is Turning on Caitlin

— The Antitrust Theory of Everything

— A Skeptic’s Guide to Whether Texas Democrats Can Actually Win This Year

— Canadians are folding on Vegas. Democrats see a royal flush.

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THE KNIVES ARE OUT for Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin after his much-delayed, painfully botched release of the 2024 campaign autopsy report.

But sharpening political cutlery is one thing. Turning it into an actual dagger is quite another.

Here’s a common refrain I’ve heard in conversations with party strategists over the past few days about whether or not the beleaguered Martin can continue serving in his post: No one else wants the job. The prevailing view is that the DNC is so riddled with debt and money problems—problems compounded by Martin’s leadership—that the responsibility of cleaning up the mess is simply too daunting.

And even if a clutch save were possible, there’s another factor giving people pause: whether the DNC is relevant anymore in this day and age.

But an effort to find and court a Martin replacement is very much underway. Just hours after the autopsy went public, DNC members and party operatives began listing possible successors to Martin. Some of them hoped that Howard Dean, who ran the DNC during the 2008 cycle, would be willing to come back, but Dean told me he had not been approached, and if asked, his answer would be “No.” Other operatives looked to convince former Montana Sen. Jon Tester—though he told Politico he wasn’t interested either.

I got my hands on another list of potential chairs that frustrated operatives and DNC members had put together. This one included

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AS THE GEORGIA PRIMARY ELECTION RESULTS trickled in last night, some Democratic officials began to feel uneasy. Many had been convinced that none of the Democratic candidates for governor would secure more than 50 percent of the primary vote, meaning that the nomination would be decided in a June runoff.

Instead, Keisha Lance Bottoms—the former Atlanta mayor and senior adviser to President Joe Biden—destroyed the primary field, earning a shocking 56 percent of the vote. Jason Esteves, a former state senator, came in a distant second place with 18.7 percent of the vote. Geoff Duncan, the former Republican lieutenant governor who switched parties, didn’t even crack 10 percent.

While Bottoms’s victory was publicly celebrated by the national party—DNC Chair Ken Martin, for example, called her a “battle-tested leader” who could flip the seat blue—it left some Democrats worried about the general election challenge ahead of them. For months, local officials had privately been agonizing over Bottoms’s candidacy, fearing that her tenure as mayor of Atlanta from 2018 to 2022—during which she oversaw the city’s sometimes-controversial response to COVID and struggled to cope with a massive spike in crime—could damage her in the general election. But local officials I spoke with following last night’s results lamented that little was done to recruit another candidate who could compete with Bottoms’s name recognition. As one dejected Democratic state representative put it to me: “It’s like we were all sleepwalking to this nomination.”

“The strongest primary candidate is not necessarily the strongest general candidate,” lamented state Rep. Michelle Au, who supported Duncan, the former Republican, in the primary.

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On the surface, the governor’s race might seem like less of a national story than one of interest chiefly to Georgians. But the reality is that this election will have dramatic ripple effects at the national level.

Two of the Democratic party’s most promising presidential prospects come from Georgia: Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. But their cases for running for president—or even their odds of being selected as vice president—would be dramatically weakened if Democrats don’t control the governorship. That’s because, if either left the Senate, it would be up to the next governor to appoint a replacement.

Further complicating matters, Republicans could end up nominating Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is headed to a runoff next month against billionaire Rick Jackson. Jones acted as a fake elector for Donald Trump in 2020 and pushed for a special session of the state legislature to overturn Trump’s loss.1 And the thought of Jones being in charge during a presidential year—when Georgia is likely to once again be a key swing state—is enough to give Democratic officials nightmares.

“If there is a Republican—especially if there is an election-denying Republican governor of Georgia—I think that shuts down their presidential talk,” said Democratic strategist and Georgia native Tré Easton. “The risk is not worth that reward.”

This dynamic underscores just how much political fortunes can be shaped by seemingly unrelated races. And given the national importance, there’s a feeling among local and national Democratic officials that the party did not approach this race with the seriousness it deserves; that it failed to nominate a top-tier candidate, instead settling for an ineffective mayor vulnerable because of her ties to the Biden White House and record from the COVID era.

“It is the most important governor’s race in the country,” said Democratic pollster Adam Carlson, arguing that there was an early opening to launch a serious challenge against Bottoms last summer, but no candidate emerged. Now, Carlson said, Democrats will be left trying to get a “very flawed Democratic nominee” through the general.

Democratic strategists said that they kept expecting national party leaders to wade into the race and endorse an alternative to Bottoms, as sometimes happens when a candidate deemed too risky for a statewide race surges (as when national party leaders threw their support behind Amy McGrath instead of Charles Booker in Kentucky’s Senate race in 2020,2 or behind Henry Cuellar instead of Jessica Cisneros in a Texas House rematch in 2022). If the race had gone to a June runoff, there would have been an extended opportunity to put forward an alternative to Bottoms.

But national intervention never came. Georgia operatives who opposed Bottoms in the primary told me that none of the other primary candidates felt like they could go negative on Bottoms and bring up her shaky record as mayor, worrying that it would be a bad look to criticize the only black woman running. The race stayed largely quiet and uneventful, as party officials privately fretted that they were backing themselves into a corner—but did very little to stop it. The only major national endorsement came from Joe Biden, who threw his support behind Bottoms in the final few weeks of the race.

Bottoms’s allies argue that the concerns about her being a weak general election candidate are largely coming from a small minority of hyper-online politicos and aren’t grounded in reality. Her resounding primary win is evidence, they say, that she can energize voters, especially black women—who are the base of the Democratic party, especially in Georgia. And they note that Bottoms is running in a very favorable environment for Democrats. Plus, Democrats believe that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s recent call to redistrict ahead of the 2028 cycle will only further energize the party’s base to turnout for Bottoms.

“Political insiders have underestimated Keisha her entire career—and she’s constantly proven them wrong, just like she did last night,” said TaNisha Cameron, a spokesperson for the Bottoms campaign, in a statement. “Voters know that Keisha was a strong leader for Atlanta and will be a strong leader as Georgia’s next governor fighting for Georgia families.”

Even Bottoms’s critics who worked on opposing primary campaigns acknowledged that her ability to energize black women was impressive—a sentiment shared by national observers as well.

“There is something still very powerful in the Democratic party about identity, especially in the wake of Kamala Harris losing,” said Easton. “In Georgia, especially, I think they see Keisha as the next stand, and there’s a sense of ‘We’re not gonna let them do to her what they did to Kamala.’”

Anita Howard, the district attorney for the region around Macon, similarly told me that “the electorate in Georgia wants a black female governor.”

“The politicos and elected officials, the small percentage of naysayers, have got to come to grips with it. We’ve got to give the electorate what they want.”

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— A few other notes from last night’s primaries: Despite the fact that more Democratic voters turned out in Georgia than Republicans, the party wasn’t able to unseat two conservative state Supreme Court justices. When I was talking with Dem officials on the ground today, this was seen as a huge missed opportunity and a clear sign that the party didn’t invest enough resources in informing their voters whom to support. Other operatives also said it helped explain why Bottoms had such a resounding win; Tuesday’s electorate consisted of fairly low-information voters who were relying on name recognition in their voting decision. Given the redistricting battles ahead—and whatever mayhem comes in the 2028 election—the lack of investment in these judicial races is likely to follow around the state party for a long time.

— Pennsylvania also held its primary elections yesterday, in which Bob Brooks, a retired firefighter and union leader, won a closely watched race to take on GOP Rep. Ryan Mackenzie in a Lehigh Valley district. Brooks is one of the buzzier candidates running this cycle, getting attention for his gruff working-class persona—the kind of thing that Democrats are desperate to embrace. (See also Platner, Graham.) Ahead of the primary, he also secured endorsements from leaders across the party’s ideological spectrum, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Gov. Josh Shapiro. And the “Squad” is likely to get another member next year after state Rep. Chris Rabb won the nomination for a safe Philadelphia-area district, shutting out the more establishment candidates by embracing his progressive credentials.

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My open tabs:

— Democrats are racing to one region ahead of the 2028 presidential primaries

— He Was Jailed Over a Charlie Kirk Post. The Sheriff Now Owes Him $835,000.

— My Son’s Hockey Team and the Crisis of American Resentment

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PRESIDENT TRUMP IS RARELY SEEN IN PUBLIC these days without a thick layer of nude-colored makeup slathered on the back of his right hand.

His aides have (unconvincingly) attributed the makeup, which conceals discoloration that resembles bruising, to the sheer number of hands the president shakes and to the aspirin he takes. But recently, Trump was photographed with both hands puffy and lathered—even though he obviously hasn’t become an ambidextrous greeter of White House visitors.

That’s not all. Trump’s been to see a dentist three times so far this year without explanation. Last fall, he told reporters he received an MRI but didn’t say—or, at times, seem to know—what for. He’s repeatedly bragged about acing cognitive tests, raising questions about why he’s taking so many in the first place. His ankles have been visibly swollen. He keeps a fairly light public schedule, especially compared to his first term. There have been multiple occasions where he has appeared to fall asleep during televised White House events—episodes aides insist are just prolonged blinks. Yet despite all that, Trump refuses to be transparent about his health.

The aging of the president is arguably among voters’ chief concerns, and it’s a subject the news media is discussing with increasing openness. And the many questions about Trump’s age and health would seem like quick and easy fodder for Democrats. After all, the president, like all of us, is dying. He’s the oldest person ever elected to the office1, and turns 80 next month; it’s totally reasonable to scrutinize his mental and physical state. Yet as Democrats make their case ahead of the midterms, Trump’s health rarely comes up—at least in public.

The age and health of the president are almost never mentioned in Democratic press conferences or in hits on cable news. Neither the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee nor the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have posted about Trump’s age on their X accounts. When House Leader Hakeem Jeffries briefly suggested that the Oversight Committee investigate the president’s health, the emphasis was quickly dropped. Instead, the party has focused its political efforts on Trump’s corruption and inability to lower costs.

Operatives and lawmakers say there are several reasons for this reticence, but mainly they admit

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WHEN STATE REP. JUSTIN JONES went to the House floor in Nashville last week to speak against Republican plans to redistrict the state, he compared his GOP colleagues to some of the nation’s most abhorrent segregationists.

“You will be in the history books with Bull Connor and George Wallace. And your children will be ashamed of where you stand by presenting these maps,” said Jones.

He wasn’t done. Outside the State Capitol, Jones carried around a sign that read “Fight Against White Supremacy!!” Later in the week, he stood in the halls of the building burning a paper image of the Confederate flag while chanting: “We will not go back.”

Jones’s anger was righteous and understandable and, for his supporters, utterly justifiable. What it was not, in the most immediate terms at least, was effective.

Republicans moved aggressively last week to carve up Memphis’s majority-black congressional district, which will almost certainly leave black Tennesseans without a voice in Congress for the first time in decades.

Tennessee is among a handful of Southern states that have rushed to carve up the electoral power of black voters following the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. While the response has been shock, anger, and—increasingly—despair among Democrats, a harsh reality is sinking in: It’s going to take more than impassioned appeals to morality and history, like Jones’s, to claw back power in the South.

“It probably fundamentally forces a recalibration of what the Democratic coalition, Democratic electorate looks like in these states,” said Zac McCrary, an Alabama-based Democratic pollster. “It really requires Democrats to think about things and go back to the drawing board in a way that we haven’t had to do in quite some time.”

To get a sense of what that trip to the drawing board will look like, I spent the past few days talking to Democratic operatives and officials in several Southern states, some part of this year’s Republican redistricting wave, others already severely gerrymandered: Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana. The question I asked them was straightforward: How do Democrats compete for House seats in this region when the districts have been drawn by Republicans to overwhelmingly favor their own side?

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Although there’s still uncertainty in some of these states about what the final congressional lines will look like, there was widespread agreement among the Democrats I spoke with that their party would have to do things drastically differently.

It starts with the candidates they recruit to run. Operatives repeatedly told me that the party needs to embrace people with political views on issues—whether it be guns, immigration, or various social and cultural topics—that fall substantially outside the boundaries of the national Democratic mainstream. They stressed that this will mean ditching purity tests and elevating people who aren’t hyperpartisan or highly ideological. And, they said, this shift can’t just happen at the state level: It will require buy-in from the national party at large.

“We have to build a broader coalition in all these places, and we have to create space for candidates like John Bel Edwards,” said Steve Schale, a Democratic operative who has worked on races across the Southeast, referring to Louisiana’s former governor. “That’s going to be a huge test for the national party—whether we are willing to not only create the space for those candidates within the coalition, but also create the space in our rhetoric, in our branding as a larger party, to give those people a chance to win.”

Edwards kept coming up in my conversations as the archetypal candidate who could succeed in some of these new districts. A conservative Democrat, Edwards, whose military and rural background had strong regional appeal, won back-to-back terms in 2015 and 2019 in part by taking pro-gun and anti-abortion positions. Some combination of these factors let him make inroads with white voters.

But “inroads,” here, is a relative term. Edwards won roughly 30 percent of the white vote. While that might be good enough to win statewide in a state with a 33 percent black population, it won’t be nearly enough to carry—let alone compete—in these newly gerrymandered congressional districts.

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More than any other question, the racial composition of the electorate in these new Southern congressional districts was pinpointed as the party’s greatest hurdle going forward. “In many Southern states, party affiliation is simply a proxy for race, and everyone knows that,” Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, told me.

For years, Democrats in many Southern states have prioritized motivating voters in majority-minority districts, essentially writing off races beyond the likes of Rep. Bennie Thompson’s seat in the Mississippi Delta or Rep. Jim Clyburn’s in South Carolina’s Black Belt. Now that cities like Memphis have been spread across three different congressional districts, Democrats have little choice but to figure out how to appeal to white Southerners.

“The way we deal with this massive shift in the paradigm is to begin organizing outside of our base,” said Rickey Cole, the former chair of the Mississippi Democratic Party. “We haven’t had boots on the ground among white voters in Mississippi for probably close to two generations.”

Any new approach, Cole said, would require being more strategic about what the party emphasizes in white communities. He argued that Democrats should focus on cost-of-living issues and eschew other topics long at the core of the party brand in the region.

“I live in lily-white Mississippi. You can believe in civil rights and you should believe in civil rights. I believe in civil rights. But it ain’t gonna be my topic of conversation at the gas pump with Bubba,” said Cole. “I’m gonna talk to him about something else.”

I’VE BEEN CLOSELY FOLLOWING—and occasionally covering—Tennessee politics since I moved back to the state last year. And I’ve been struck by how often Democrats here concede that they have to do things differently to compete, only to then explain how difficult it’s been to actually break with party orthodoxies.

There’s a variety of reasons for that. One of them, which came up regularly among the Tennessee Democrats I spoke with, was the dominance of social media in our politics. Since Jones was expelled from the Tennessee legislature in 2023 for protesting the state’s gun laws, he has amassed a huge social media following—and with it, the ability to raise significant amounts of money. He often goes viral for his fiery speeches on the House floor protesting the Tennessee Republican Party, and he’s become a hero among Nashville’s activist community and educated liberal voters.

But recognition and social media clout don’t always add up to expanding political power.

“For some activists, they measure their success . . . not so much by the laws that they pass or the change that they create, but more on the number of views, the number of likes, the number of clicks, the number of reshares, how many followers they have on Instagram. And that’s great for them individually,” said Darden Copeland, a Nashville-area businessman who is considering running for Congress in Tennessee’s newly drawn 7th district. “But they’re not going to win.”

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The math in these new districts across the South is what it is: Democrats simply cannot get elected to the U.S. House by relying on their typical coalition of liberal whites and black people. They must win more voters in rural and suburban areas—and that means elevating candidates who are of and from these areas. Notably, Chaz Molder, a small-town Tennessee mayor who, as of now, is challenging Rep. Andy Ogles in the 5th district, did not attend last week’s State Capitol protests against redistricting.

“You’re going to need candidates that can appeal to both your urban voters and also to rural voters,” said Lisa Quigley, former chief of staff to Jim Cooper, who held a Nashville-based House seat for decades before the GOP chopped it into three separate districts in 2020.

“It’s going to be much harder, I think, for the activists to accept that you might not have somebody that simply says yes to everything on the Democratic agenda. They may have a slightly different take. They may want to emphasize different things,” she added.

What those “different things” might be wasn’t often outlined—at least with any specificity—by the Southern Democratic officials and operatives I spoke with. And when I pushed them on specifics, there wasn’t exactly consensus. To wit, while some of the people I spoke with are convinced that the party has to run more anti-abortion candidates in the mold of Edwards, not everyone is buying it. Others stressed that the politics of abortion had changed dramatically since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. They argued that Democrats don’t need to shift toward becoming pro-life to win, but that the party could benefit by embracing the Clinton-era talking point that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” itself a step away from the position Democrats have staked out nationally over the past decade.

“Pro-life is a line that Democrats aren’t going to cross back over. I think that polling on that and national sentiment—even among Republicans, Christians, and conservatives—there are still a number of folks that agree we’ve got to keep hands-off and politicians out of a woman’s right to choose,” said Copeland, the Nashville businessman.

If there was any real agreement over what to emphasize to reach Southern voters after this current wave of redistricting, it was that the MAGA agenda had failed the very people it had promised to help. In particular, Democrats I spoke with this week said they were hopeful that Donald Trump’s tariff agenda and health care policies—which have crushed farmers and slashed funding for rural healthcare facilities—could give them an opening this cycle.

But it’s getting painfully late. It took until the end of last year for House Democrats to announce their first-ever rural-outreach program. And if Republicans get their way over the next few days and weeks, Democrats in Southern cities will be facing a host of newly drawn seats—with major GOP tilts—in which they will have to compete. It has already happened in Memphis and Nashville, and will likely soon happen to voters in New Orleans and Birmingham and other cities.

“We should never have gotten into the condition of being a party that’s only viable in cities,” said Jeff Yarbro, a Tennessee state senator. “The coalition that brought the Democratic party to its high-water mark was one built on an alliance between rural folks and African Americans and liberals who saw their common interest and organized around it.”

The current version of the Democratic party, he lamented, feels far away from that.

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My open tabs:

— The Last Days of Butter Ridge

— The Savannah Bananas Bring Back a Negro Leagues Team

— These Are the Hiring Hot Spots Where College Grads Are Landing Good Jobs

WHEN THE SUPREME COURT ISSUED a ruling last week gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, it didn’t surprise Democratic leaders, many of whom have come to view the John Roberts–led body as an increasingly partisan institution.

Still, the ruling sent a chill through the party, as Democrats realized that an entire generation of black leadership in the South—where a majority of the United States’ black population lives—could be pushed out of office.

That was the first reaction. The second reaction was a search—and thirst—for retaliation.

Party leaders are already plotting how to counteract the gerrymanders that Republicans are expected to undertake in Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, and Louisiana. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has pointed to New York, Illinois, Maryland, and Colorado as states where Democrats could redistrict ahead of the 2028 election cycle. Other Democratic officials whom I spoke with said there’s discussion about pursuing redistricting in Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, and New Jersey as well.

“There are going to be many Democratic states that need to move forward in order to offset what Republicans are doing. That’s a simple mathematical reality,” said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “It is going to be mass redistricting on a nationwide scale.”

But redrawn maps are just one of the ways the Court’s Callais decision is likely to alter our political landscape and with it the aims of the Democratic party. Operatives and lawmakers I spoke with this week say that it is increasingly likely that

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KEN MARTIN’S TENURE AS CHAIR of the Democratic National Committee over the last year has been defined largely by frustration with his leadership. That frustration crested last week when Martin went on Pod Save America to defend himself against charges that he has backed out of his promise to release an after-action report about what went wrong in the 2024 election—as well as accusations that the DNC has had trouble raising money and balancing its budget.

DNC members and party strategists I talked to after Martin’s podcast appearance said they believe his defensive comments further tarnished the party brand and deepened trust issues stemming from his decision to cancel the autopsy report.

The concerns have become so pronounced in recent weeks that some DNC members have privately discussed trying to force Martin out of the job, according to three people familiar with these conversations. The idea was put on hold after members failed to identify an alternative candidate willing to step into the role.

But the panic over the direction of the party hasn’t dissipated. Instead, it has led these worried party leaders to entertain other possible reforms, such as trying to force a resolution that would require Martin to rein in the DNC’s spending and balance its budget.

“I think that would be a very hard job, no matter who has it. But [Martin] seems to be uniquely ill-suited for it,” Democratic strategist Jesse Lehrich, who is not a party to those internal talks, told me. “The Pod Save interview was mind-blowing to me.”

Martin’s rocky tenure as party chair does owe something to factors out of his control. A party that is out of power but desperate to flex its muscle will naturally see its leaders as feckless. Martin, like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, is a convenient punching bag.

But much of the criticism is about things that are directly under Martin’s purview. Since 2025, the DNC has spent more money than it has raised and has more debt than cash on hand. The RNC has a roughly seven-to-one money advantage over the DNC, and last October, Martin took out a $15 million loan ahead of the elections in Virginia and New Jersey. Multiple people familiar with the DNC’s money issues said that the situation is so dire that Martin will likely be forced to make another tough call this summer: take out another loan or lay off staff. During his Pod Save interview, Martin repeatedly characterized the claim that the DNC is contemplating layoffs as “garbage.”

“The biggest strike against him is that he seems to be utterly incapable of managing a budget. To put the DNC in such a bad financial situation going into what is . . . likely be the most wild [presidential] primary we’ve had in a while—it reeks of irresponsibility and immaturity,” said a DNC member who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the topic.

“It just feels like we’re being gaslit at this point.”

The agita over the state of the DNC is not merely another round of Beltway bickering. It’s one of the more consequential storylines in Democratic politics these days. There is a deep concern among party officials that Martin is driving the committee into irrelevance, potentially harming Democratic chances in the midterms, and inviting uncomfortable questions about whether the 178-year-old committee should even exist anymore.

“The DNC should not be a useless or irrelevant institution,” said Democratic strategist Ross Morales Rocketto. “It’s currently irrelevant because of the leadership.”

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THIS ISN’T THE FIRST TIME THE DNC has faced questions about its relevance. Following the 2008 election, Organizing for America, the political operation that grew out of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, became the central organizing axis for the party. But when Democrats suffered heavy losses in 2010, and again after Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, party leaders demanded a shift back, blaming OFA for taking away donor money and volunteers from the DNC and leaving the party unable to coordinate effectively.

“I almost think of Obama as a similar figure to Trump in terms of having this movement of people that were so fired up about him. They weren’t exactly Democratic party super fans,” said Lehrich, who served as communications director for OFA (rebranded then as Organizing for Action) in the late 2010s. The goal of OFA, Lehrich explained, was to keep Obama’s loyal army of grassroots supporters engaged. “But the DNC was rightfully frustrated that it was funneling away people and resources and creating a shadow apparatus.”

Shortly after Tom Perez, the former labor secretary in the Obama administration, was elected DNC chair in 2017, OFA was quietly wound down. But while the DNC played important roles in helping the party win back the House in 2018—and the White House in 2020—it never quite reemerged as the central organizing entity in the Democratic party firmament.

Instead, much of that responsibility has been taken over by nonprofit organizations and super PACs. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision generated a wave of donations to non-party entities, empowering them in the process to handle traditional party functions like GOTV, research, and advertising.

Many Democratic strategists say that while they understand the trend, they have lamented it, too—noting that the DNC has at least one major advantage over these groups.

“The biggest . . . is they coordinate across campaigns,” said Steve Schale, a longtime Democratic strategist and Obama’s 2008 state director in Florida.1 “It’s way fucking easier to run a campaign when you can talk to the main players in the operation. I can’t imagine, for example, on either Obama campaign, having to run a state where my entire field operation was outsourced to an organization I couldn’t talk to.”

“The DNC allows all that to work,” Schale added. “That’s why I think it’s pretty vital for it to be a—not even necessarily a thriving—but a competent, respected vessel for where donors have trust in sending their money.”

MARTIN’S PITCH WHEN RUNNING FOR DNC CHAIR was that he would restore the committee to its status as a central coordinating hub for the party—and that he would do so by ensuring that the DNC was supporting those parts of the party that had long been neglected. Last year, he announced that the DNC would spend more than $1 million a month on a fifty-state program and would increase transfers to parties in red states by 50 percent and in blue states by 30 percent.

The data is mixed as to how well that’s going. Some state parties, like Mississippi and Alaska, are receiving far more cash this cycle compared to 2022. But some DNC members said that Martin is overstating just how significant these investments are. They noted that although all fifty state parties (plus the territories) are now regularly receiving funds from the DNC, there’s still significantly less money on the whole being transferred to state parties so far this election cycle than by this point in 2022.

Martin and his allies often argue that 2022 isn’t a fair comparison because Democrats were in power then, and it was a far better fundraising environment for the party. The better point of reference, they say, would be the 2018 cycle. However, as Democratic strategist Tim Tagaris has noted, a larger percentage of the committee’s overall budget went to state parties in 2018 compared to now.

Still, Martin has his defenders. Although the DNC did not provide a comment for this newsletter, Michael Kapp, a California-based DNC member, told me that people were upset with Martin because he’s “shifting the party away from a consultant-centered model and toward one that is more centered on state parties and organizers—and that was always going to create friction.”

“The loudest people in D.C.—including the Pod Save America folks—are often the furthest away from the doors that are being knocked. What I’m hearing from state parties, organizers, and activists on the ground is overwhelmingly positive,” Kapp added. “Since [Martin’s] become DNC chair, we won 30 out of 30 State House legislative flips. The strategy is working.”

Another DNC official—who declined to go on the record—also stressed that the committee was making significant investments in voter registration and on-the-ground organizing. They suggested that the fundraising concerns were overblown, noting that the DNC hasn’t hit the limit of its existing line of credit and doesn’t have to start making payments on the loan until after the midterms. And they, too, reiterated that Democrats have been overperforming around the country under Martin’s leadership.

Others, however, have publicly argued that Martin is taking too much credit for some of those wins. Allison Campolo—chair of the Tarrant County Democratic Party in the Fort Worth area—tweeted on Friday that the DNC provided minimal support earlier this year in a special Texas Senate election. Although the Democratic candidate, Taylor Rehmet, flipped the deep red seat, Camolo said it was thanks to county parties, volunteers, and donors who stepped up.

Aside from the investments in state parties, other Democratic officials have taken issue with the fact that Martin is still spending DNC money on consultants, despite pledging during his campaign for chair to get rid of the consultant-industrial complex. In a February interview with Newsweek, Martin said that “the consultants who are trading in practice and tactics that are not rooted in the reality of where we’re at in politics right now . . . they’re all gone, I fired them all, none of them work for the DNC anymore, right? And as long as I’m here, they’re not going to work for the DNC.”

While the DNC’s problems under Martin have sparked panic in the party, there is still considerable confidence that the midterms won’t be lost because of them. Candidates themselves are raising loads of money on their own. And the anti-Trump backlash is likely to provide a highly favorable electoral climate for them.

But if the DNC isn’t raising money and building infrastructure as effectively as it could be, then its problems will compound. And in addition to the current frustrations and anxieties, there are growing concerns among party leaders about how the committee will manage the explosive intraparty fights that come with an open presidential cycle, which Democrats are facing in 2028. The committee will be tasked with running a primary and hosting debates while also managing skepticism and suspicion from the party’s progressive wing following years of perceived mistreatment; the DNC was accused of putting its thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and shielding Joe Biden in 2024.

Martin could still turn things around. He could shine up his currently tarnished image. But the very thought of him still being in charge during that process is making some Democrats uneasy.

“In a year where the presidential primary is going to be a wide-open race, when they have a chance to reset the calendar, when there’s going to be debates with insane cutoffs [for qualifying]—it matters that people trust this institution to do that well, to do it in a way that they feel like is confident, is fair,” said Amanda Litman, the cofounder of Run for Something, a progressive group that recruits and trains first-time candidates.

“I don’t think Ken Martin is doing himself any favors in terms of rebuilding trust.”

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— On Friday, Republican governors in Alabama and Tennessee called for their state legislatures to reconvene for special sessions to redraw congressional lines following the Supreme Court’s ruling that significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana’s GOP governor also suspended House primaries in order to give lawmakers time to redraw congressional maps, despite the fact that absentee voting had already started and early voting was set to begin this past weekend—leading to an enormous amount of confusion for voters.

It’s truly bonkers stuff that these Republican governors are pulling, and it’s forcing Democrats to consider where else they might be able to redistrict ahead of the 2028 elections. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told Politico that New York, Illinois, Maryland, and Colorado could redraw their maps for 2028. Of course, one could reasonably ask why those states didn’t go ahead and redistrict this cycle when it’s been fairly clear for months that SCOTUS was going to rip up the VRA.

It’s unclear what options Democrats will have to push back before the elections, especially as primaries are already over in some blue states and the window for acting is quickly narrowing. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker told reporters last week that “we have options for pushing back and that’s under discussion with the legislature,” but didn’t give much detail. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) also told reporters that Democrats needed to keep exploring ways to “provide balance” to the GOP’s gerrymandering “until we get to the day when we can all finally agree to put this behind us and pass nonpartisan gerrymandering federally.”

The GOP in states like Tennessee may be taking a pretty big risk in what is expected to be a wave election year for Democrats. There’s no way to redraw the districts without making some of them more competitive, meaning that it’s not implausible for Democrats to end up picking up an additional Congressional seat or two.

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— Signed, Sealed, Delivered

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Jackson, Mississippi
THE MERE SUGGESTION that Democrats could win the Mississippi Senate race this cycle can produce dismissive eyerolls. (Trust me, I’ve seen it often enough from my editor.)

But as I’ve been talking with party officials and operatives over the past few months, no race is as regularly mentioned, or elicits as much excitement, as this one. They argue that circumstances are converging to flip a state that Donald Trump won by a 23-point margin: There is a charismatic Democrat at the top of the ticket, the state’s large black population is being mobilized, and there is a generationally weak Republican incumbent. As longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, who lives part-time along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, put it to me: “It would take a unique set of circumstances, but we just might be operating under a unique set of circumstances.”

Eventually, enough quotes like this piled up in my notebook from enough influential Democrats that I was able to turn my editor’s eyerolls into a signoff to check out how real the hype is. So last weekend I made the trek down I-55—a stretch of highway that runs parallel to the Mississippi River, passing over bayous dotted with cypress trees—to spend a day on the campaign trail with Scott Colom, the Democratic candidate for Senate.

Colom is a 43-year-old district attorney, a devout Mississippi State sports fan, and father of two young girls. He was raised in a political household: His mom was an elected judge and his father ran for office as a Republican in the 1980s before eventually becoming a Democrat. In 2022, President Joe Biden nominated him to be a federal judge. But after getting approval from the state’s senior senator, Roger Wicker, Colom’s nomination was blocked by Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith—the very Republican whom Colom is now trying to unseat.

Colom and I chatted in the back seats of his pickup truck on a recent Saturday morning with pickleball equipment and footballs strewn about our feet as his staff drove us to the first campaign event of the day. With a giant to-go cup of hot coffee in his hand (something that he seemed to have perpetually refilled throughout the day), Colom stressed that his campaign wasn’t about getting revenge on Hyde-Smith.

“As a Christian, I really had to forgive people,” he said.

And yet, there is something about Hyde-Smith that drove him to run. Democrats involved in the race believe she is a uniquely vulnerable candidate and that Colom would not have run if Wicker were the one up for re-election. Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the Senate in 2018 to replace Thad Cochran, rarely if ever holds town halls or attends community events. And in a state that regularly ranks as the poorest in the nation, Colom argued that Mississippians are yearning for a senator who delivers.

That’s a common refrain for any challenger trying to unseat an incumbent. But in Colom’s case, there is fodder to work with. Whereas Cochran ended his four decades in the Senate as the chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee—a post that helped him secure federal goodies for Mississippi—Hyde-Smith doesn’t have a comparable record of delivering for the state. She has taken votes that have placed rural hospitals at risk of closing. She has backed Donald Trump’s tariff agenda, even though it has hurt the state’s soybean farmers. And she voted against the 2021 infrastructure bill—which brought billions of federal dollars to the state—while even her fellow Republican Wicker supported it.

“The number-one rule of politics: Bring home resources for your state, look out for Mississippi,” said Colom. “You got to do that because we’re not a state that can afford to have partisan warriors.”

“You got to show up, you got to listen. You got to show that you’re running a different type of campaign, rooted in listening to people. And that’s what it’s going to take to win Mississippi,” Colom added. “I’m about to do more in one day than [Hyde-Smith] has done in six years, as far as interfacing with the public.”

That’s all well and good and makes for a buzzy campaign talking point. But this is still a state Trump won by double-digits. Plus, this isn’t the first time Democrats have talked up their opportunities in Mississippi only to go on to lose the election. Sen. Chuck Schumer has been publicly arguing since 2021 that the state could be in play. So what makes this year any different?

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COLOM AND HIS TEAM came prepared with data about why their race should be viewed as just as competitive as those in, say, Iowa or Texas. They argued that Mississippi Democrats had been making consistent progress over the past few cycles: Mike Espy lost his Senate race to Hyde-Smith in 2018 by 7.8 points, then in 2019 the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Jim Hood, lost by 5.5 points, while in 2023 Brandon Presely lost his bid for governor by just 3.2 points. Last year, Democrats broke the GOP’s supermajority in the state senate. And 158,196 voters participated in the Republican Senate primary in March compared to 150,641 in the Democratic primary—which Democratic pollsters told me was unusually high turnout and, they believe, a sign of a narrowing enthusiasm gap.

“This has the beginnings and makings of another race that could be in the single digits. I truly believe that,” said Democratic pollster Kevin Akins, who recently conducted a survey that found Hyde-Smith leading among likely voters with 42 percent of the vote compared to Colom’s 39 percent.

Any poll showing two leading candidates hovering right above or below 40 percent has to be regarded skeptically—if for nothing more than it shows the race hasn’t gelled yet. But part of the reason Democrats view Mississippi as one of the few places in the Deep South where they can compete is due to its large population of black voters, who’ve traditionally supported Democrats. Black people make up 38 percent of Mississippi’s population, the largest percentage of any state in the country. Colom’s team and allied Democrats believe that in order to win, they have to turn out as much of the black population as possible while earning above 20 percent of the white vote. (For comparison, Espy received 24 percent of the white vote when he ran against Hyde-Smith in 2020.)

Akins told me that Colom doesn’t start off with that kind of support from white voters, which means he’ll have to focus on making up ground over the next six months. But there’s also an independent candidate in the race—Ty Pinkins, a former Democrat who left the party in 2025—who could chip away at Hyde-Smith’s advantage.

“One of the key findings in the poll is that a majority of the third-party candidate supporters are Republicans or are Trump supporters,” said Akins. “There’s a set of Republicans who are just looking for an alternative to the senator. It might not be that all of them can get all the way to voting Democrat—but can some of them either sit the election out or support a third-party candidate?”

Aside from winning over some white and Republican voters, one of Colom’s biggest hurdles is raising enough money. Talking to Colom, it’s obvious that he gets frustrated watching candidates like James Talarico in Texas rake in $27 million in one fundraising quarter compared to the $600,000 he raised over the same period of time.

“People have been conditioned to think of Mississippi as not mattering, and that’s the biggest obstacle,” he told me. Colom tries to convince donors that their money can go a lot further in a race like his where it’s less expensive to buy TV ads. He thinks he needs to raise just around $15 million to win.

“I need to have enough money where, when [Hyde-Smith] starts lying about me, I can respond and I can tell the voters what I care about,” Colom said. “I’m not trying to out-TV her because I think that really is just diminishing returns at a certain point. But I can’t be like too many of our candidates, unable to communicate at all.”

One of the big unknowns is just how involved powerful party committees will get in the race on behalf of Colom. Right now, the national party appears Colom-curious, but increasingly intrigued. Last October, the Democratic National Committee transferred $100,000 to the Mississippi Democratic Party ahead of the state’s legislative races. The DNC has also invested additional money in the state party as part of its effort to build party infrastructure in red states around the country. And the campaign committees of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Mark Kelly have given to the state party as well.

Meanwhile, super PACs associated with a number of prominent Senate Democrats—including Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, and Chris Murphy—have given directly to Colom’s campaign. And while the Senate Majority PAC—Democrats’ main Senate super PAC, which is heavily influenced by Schumer—has yet to spend on the race, spokesperson Lauren French told me “We’re looking at it very seriously and definitely not counting it out as a place that we could eventually end up spending this cycle.”

IF COLOM IS TO WIN THE RACE, it won’t be because he outraises Hyde-Smith or skyrockets to TikTok fame like some of the other buzzy Democratic Senate candidates this cycle. Rather, it will be because of a relentless focus on retail politics. And, as it happens, it’s something he’s good at.

We started our day in the rural town of Vicksburg, where Colom attended a community clean-up event before hopping back in the pickup to drive to the annual South Jackson Festival. At the festival, Colom made his way down rows of food trucks that were selling lemon pepper wings, pickled pigs’ feet, and fried chicken. He shook hands, took pictures, and listened to stories about how one woman’s prescription drugs recently increased from $100 to $600 a month—making them unaffordable.

At one point, Colom stopped to tell me that life in Mississippi revolves around “faith, family, and football” and that candidates for office have to show up in these spaces—from local festivals, to college tailgates, to the church pews. “There’s one thing we can all agree on: Fuck Lane Kiffin,” he told me as we left the festival, referencing the Ole Miss coach who made a dramatic late-season departure to LSU.

These are the types of asides that will win Colom applause. What he needs, though, are votes. And for those, he believes there is a different calculus that Mississippians are making. Colom stressed that the most frequent thing he hears from voters is that they want to send someone to Washington whom they believe will follow through on the promises of the campaign trail.

“I’m not asking you to send me to D.C. to be the Democratic senator. I’m asking you to send me to D.C. to be the Mississippi Senator,” is a phrase Colom often repeated in his conversations with voters.

He was still in campaign mode when we stopped for lunch at IHOP. Colom gave the waitress a campaign pamphlet before he finished scarfing down a stack of pancakes. (Retail campaigning is hungry work.) At a campaign office opening later that day, he stayed for hours talking to volunteers and passing out paper trays of ribs and baked beans. And he ended the day at the Leake County annual NAACP dinner, where he worked the room of mostly older black voters.

When I asked Hyde-Smith’s team about Colom’s critiques that she wasn’t present enough in the state, they hit back with culture-war attacks. “The ‘Transgender Defender,’ Scott Colom, was handpicked by Chuck Schumer and the D.C. liberal elite. His previous campaigns were bankrolled by out-of-state billionaire George Soros,” said Jake Monssen, Hyde-Smith’s campaign manager. “He’s soft on crime, and he pushed for radical sex changes for children and protections for the doctors who perform them. Colom’s claims are purely politics from a struggling campaign that can’t defend his own extremist record.”

Maybe this type of broadside will be enough to carry Hyde-Smith in a conservative state. It was the playbook she used when she moved to block Colom’s federal judicial nomination. And it’s one that Republicans have used ad nauseam in the Deep South to retain a grip on power. Although Colom takes care to distance himself somewhat from the national party—he declined my invitation to offer advice on how it can fix its brand—Democrats are often seen in these parts as woefully out of touch with the voters they want to represent.

But there is another element of Mississippi culture that Colom and his allies believe is underappreciated and worth emphasizing in the context of a campaign. To drive through Mississippi is to reckon with the state’s violent past. Poor rural black communities serve as constant reminders that Mississippi’s brutal history of slavery and segregation wasn’t all that long ago. Throughout the day, Colom referenced this Mississippi legacy—from blues legends like B.B. King born in the Delta to literary legends like William Faulkner from the hill country. It was art, Colom said, that grew out of the state’s history of pain and suffering.

White and black Mississippians often haven’t agreed on how to address the state’s history. Historical markers remembering Emmett Till’s death have been shot up and vandalized. And even Hyde-Smith’s campaign is a reminder of this tension. In 2018, Hyde-Smith was criticized after a photo surfaced of her posing in a replica Confederate soldier’s hat and holding a rifle at the home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, with the caption: “Mississippi history at its best!”

“A photo is worth a thousand words. Sometimes it’s worth the complete works of William Shakespeare,” said Carville, pointing to that photo when I asked why he thought Hyde-Smith was an especially weak candidate.

Colom is betting that this type of politics will catch up to Hyde-Smith and that Mississippians no longer have an appetite for GOP-themed culture-war politics when faced with mounting economic concerns. He’s banking on his belief that you cannot win by ignoring your voters. He’s betting on voters like John Byrd, a retiree who grew up in the Delta and now helps organize local events like the South Jackson Festival, who told me that he never sees Hyde-Smith in the community.

“They won’t come out here,” he said, referring to white Republican candidates. “It’s still plantation politics here until they start showing up.”

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THE MEMBERS OF THE D.C. PRESS CORPS will dust off their black-tie attire and flock to the basement ballroom of the Washington Hilton this Saturday evening for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

The evening is supposed to be a celebration of the First Amendment and a toast to the institutions tasked with covering the most powerful person in the world. But this year, some attendees fear it could become a staging ground for their ritualistic humiliation.

Donald Trump will, for the first time, be on the dais. And no one is quite certain if he will use the occasion to disparage the very organizations whose coverage of him the evening is meant to honor. That certainly would be in character for a man who has called reporters “enemies of the people,” accused the New York Times of “treason,” filed numerous defamation lawsuits against independent media outlets, banned the Associated Press from the White House press pool, revoked $1.1 billion in already appropriated federal funding for public broadcasting, and cheered the arrest of reporters. Even if he does not give remarks of that sort, the very fact of his presence on the stage threatens to normalize the attacks on the press he engages in daily.

“[Presidents] all have a version of the same message: ‘I don’t always like what you do, your stories are a pain in the ass sometimes, but I get it. This is part of our democracy, and I respect that.’ That’s not what Donald Trump has said,” said Frank Sesno, a former CNN correspondent, anchor, and Washington bureau chief. “We’re living in a world where this administration, if they don’t like something, they sue the reporter, they sue the news organization.”

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Let me say at this point that I recognize that any ink spilled over the WHCA Dinner might come off as insufferable parlor room chatter. While presidents have attended since the days of Calvin Coolidge—using the opportunity to send a public signal about the mutual understanding that democracy cannot thrive without a critical and robust press corps—the affair long ago became a gauche display of Washington’s excesses.

But this year is different. This year will give us a vivid illustration as to the role the White House press corps feels it should play when faced with an administration that is contemptuous of a free press.

And I fear it could go poorly. Because, as I’ve found out in my conversations with fellow reporters,

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ONE OF THE MAJOR OPEN QUESTIONS that could jolt this year’s midterms—a known unknown—is whether Donald Trump will get a chance to nominate another Supreme Court justice before Election Day. Will 76-year-old Justice Samuel Alito retire? What about 77-year-old Justice Clarence Thomas? Or both?

On Friday night, CBS News’s Jan Crawford, a journalist well connected in conservative legal circles, reported that neither of the Court’s two oldest members would step down “this year”—that timeframe being significant as it would extend to after the election and assuredly into the next Congress. Fox News followed up with a similar report. Yet both men are under pressure from Republicans to vacate their posts before the possibility arises that control of the Senate changes hands. And Democrats, for their part, are treating the reports as smokescreens, choosing instead to plow forward with a major campaign for the likelihood that a vacancy (or two) will emerge before November.

That campaign is being led by Demand Justice, a liberal judicial advocacy group. The group plans to spend an initial $3 million on framing a pending Supreme Court nomination battle in the public mind, and another $15 million if and when a justice retires. Its executive director, Josh Orton, told me the reporting of Alito and Thomas sticking around for another term was a case of the justices simply wanting “to look like they’re in control of their own destiny. Ultimately, he said, “if Trump wants them off, they’re off.”1

Even before this weekend’s reporting, the possibility of a Supreme Court confirmation fight has been the subject of rampant chatter among the Washington political class. A retirement—whether truly voluntary or forced by Trump—would not just reshape the contours of the midterm elections, it would give the president the chance to have the most enduring stamp on the judiciary of anyone to hold the office in nearly a century.

“This could be unlike any other Supreme Court nomination fight in modern times, in that the first question will be: Is this person loyal to the truth or loyal to Donald Trump?,” said Orton. “In the coming months, we have this opportunity to call the question on whether or not we will continue to allow Trump to attack and undermine our democratic institutions.”

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Orton said Demand Justice plans to run TV and digital ads, although the timing and content are to be determined: The group will conduct polls and focus groups in battleground states in the coming weeks with the goal of finalizing messaging that resonates with not just their base voters, but independents and Republicans. Orton said he intentionally brought together a team of operatives across the left’s ideological spectrum out of a desire for the campaign to appeal to the broadest possible range of voters. Demand Justice’s leaders have also been meeting with Democratic Senate candidates to work on consistency in messaging.

“For all the reasons that you see Senate battleground candidates talk about needing to rein in [Trump’s] authoritarian excesses, how he’s much more willing to serve the billionaire and the corporate class than average working people—the reason that him appointing a crony creates this opportunity is because, almost by definition, that person will not be a reliable vote on the Court for everyday people,” said Orton.

DEMOCRATS HAVE HISTORICALLY been outmatched by Republicans when it comes to waging federal judicial fights. That’s in part because the right has unified around originalism, while the left lacks a similar intellectual framework to rally its donors, advocacy groups, and think tanks. Well-funded conservative groups like the Judicial Crisis Network and the Federalist Society have spent decades working to tilt the courts to the right, while liberals have struggled to come up with a long-term game plan, both for confirmation fights and around landmark decisions, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Demand Justice was founded in 2018 for this precise purpose. Its success has been mixed. In the aftermath of the group’s founding, Trump got two nominees—Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—confirmed to the high court. But each of those fights was bruising and it’s fair to say that Democrats have a heightened appreciation for the stakes in confirmation battles and the resources needed to fight them in Washington and the states.

A battle this year over a fourth Trump-nominated Supreme Court justice (Neil Gorsuch was confirmed in 2017) would likely be another intense political clash. But the outcome would likely prove the same as the first three: with success for the president.

That’s because without control of the Senate, Democrats have limited tools to stop a Trump nominee from getting confirmed. Party leaders whom I spoke with were clear-eyed about the fact that it’s unlikely that four Senate Republicans would break with Trump—although some said not to rule out possible defections from GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), or Thom Tillis (N.C.).

But even Orton acknowledged that blocking a nominee might not be achievable. Rather, the aim of Demand Justice’s campaign is to make a confirmation vote as politically painful as possible—ultimately damaging vulnerable Senate Republicans who are up for re-election, making Trump look weak in the process, and doing something past confirmation fights have not: motivate Democratic voters more than Republicans.

“You need to make the fight as painful for the regime as possible so that the Susan Collins of the world face a steeper climb to stay in the Senate if they go along with it,” said Ezra Levin, a co-executive director of the liberal grassroots group Indivisible, which is working with Demand Justice on the project. “It’s a good fight for policy grounds and it’s a good fight for political grounds. You don’t need to start at the outset knowing ‘Here are the five senators who are going to join us from the Republican side.’ You’re not going to find those senators unless you engage in the fight. And whether you find those senators or not, you set yourself up better for November.”

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DESPITE FRIDAY’S REPORT to the contrary, a vacancy could still pop up this year. While Alito and Thomas, as mere mid-septuagenarians, are slightly on the young side to be stepping down,2 they have both had health scares in the past few years: Alito was taken to a hospital last month after falling ill during a Federalist Society dinner, and Thomas was hospitalized for a week in March 2022 for “flu-like symptoms.” Plus, Alito has a book scheduled to come out on October 6, one day after the new Supreme Court term starts, timing that contributed to widespread speculation about his pending retirement.

Should either retire, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have signaled that they’re ready to move quickly. Last week, Majority Leader John Thune said that the Senate would be “prepared to confirm” if a retirement arises, and President Trump said in an interview with Fox Business that he had a short list of possible replacements ready to go. Trump pointed to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in office as a cautionary tale.

Democrats, for their part, have become increasingly convinced that the conservative justices won’t stick around and risk dying on the bench, especially as the Democratic party’s chances of retaking the Senate continue to improve—along with the prospect of a Dem winning the White House in 2028.

“It would fit the pattern that we’ve seen previously under President Trump, where they jammed through a last-minute Supreme Court nomination,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said in a recent interview with The Bulwark, estimating a 70 percent chance that a justice would retire before the midterms. “I also bluntly think Trump’s going to need something else to distract from Epstein now that the first lady has marched out to a podium and demanded public hearings from Epstein victims and saying ‘I’m not an Epstein victim.’”

As of now, Democrats see a Supreme Court fight having the most impact in Senate races in Alaska, Maine, Ohio, North Carolina, and potentially Texas and Iowa. But it’s still unclear just how much voters would punish Republicans for confirming a justice, should the opportunity arise. After Collins voted to confirm Kavanaugh in 2018 following allegations of sexual assault, Democrats were certain that she’d lose her 2020 re-election. Instead, she cruised to a comfortable 8.6 percent victory.

But Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster working with Demand Justice on the project, said that the politics of the Supreme Court have shifted since then. Greenberg argued that the 2022 Dobbs decision made voters more aware of the Court’s impact on their everyday lives and primed people to pay more attention to a nomination fight. And while some Democrats emerged from the 2024 election believing that it was a mistake to center an election message on the need to protect the Constitution and democratic institutions, Greenberg said that voters are much more receptive to those messages now that they’re living through Trump’s second term.

“The reality of Trump being in power makes the democracy issue quite different,” said Greenberg. “The words everyone always uses in the swing [focus] groups is ‘Too far; he’s going too far.’”

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My open tabs:

— California’s Blue Armageddon

— The Seaside Town Trying to Reclaim Its Title as ‘Submarine Capital of the World’

— All Powerful or Cursed: The Ambitious House Class of 2012

Mount Pleasant, South Carolina
IN HINDSIGHT, VICE ADM. NANCY LACORE probably shouldn’t have been all that surprised when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired her from her position as chief of the Navy Reserve. Although she was just one year into what is usually a four-year appointment, Hegseth by that point had made abundantly clear that he viewed women and people of color serving in military leadership roles as relics of the “wokeness” that preoccupied the Biden administration.

It wasn’t how Lacore’s thirty-five years in the Navy—working her way from a helicopter pilot to a three-star admiral before being put in charge of 60,000 sailors—was supposed to end. She and her husband—also a Navy helicopter pilot—had dedicated their lives to the service, moving countless times around the country with their six kids in tow for deployments and new duty stations. (Yes, you read that right, Lacore raised six kids while serving.) But on a Friday last August, Adm. James Kilby (who was running the Navy at the time, after Hegseth had fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti), called Lacore to his office in the Pentagon and, with tears in his eyes, informed her that the secretary of defense had instructed him to relieve her of her duties immediately. Hegseth hadn’t provided any reason for her dismissal.1

“It was pretty miserable, to be honest,” Lacore told me. “It just changed [everything]. Other than the personal insult that it felt like to me, I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ All these thoughts that started spinning in [my] head. I’m like, ‘We gotta move. We just bought a house. We thought we were gonna have three more years of income, and I thought my retirement was going to be that much more money.’ . . . It was just this spiral of all the stuff that’s going to have to change now.”

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Shortly after her dismissal, Lacore and her husband moved to Mount Pleasant, a large suburban town across the harbor from downtown Charleston. And in January, Lacore launched her campaign for South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, which is being vacated by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who is running for governor.

If Democrats are going to have a massive blue wave this year—flipping somewhere in the range of forty House seats, as some pollsters and party officials have predicted—then it will require competing in Republican-held congressional districts like this one. Indeed, in the last wave midterm election, in 2018, Democrat Joe Cunningham flipped this seat and held it for a single term. The district has been solidly red since then; Donald Trump won it in 2024 by 13 points. As Trump’s approval rating continues to dip and gas prices soar, local Democratic officials believe that the district is in play.

“If you were to go into a laboratory and make a district that would be most affected by a wave year, this would be it,” said Lachlan McIntosh, a South Carolina Democratic strategist who is backing Lacore.

While top party committees have yet to commit to spending money in the race, Lacore is backed by The Bench, a new organization of longtime Dem operatives that recruits and supports candidates in competitive races around the country—part of a larger effort to reshape the party and usher in a new class of unconventional candidates. And as those operatives see it, South Carolina’s 1st district has larger implications beyond the congressional margin next year. It’s the type of place where Democrats will have to be more consistently competitive if they want to build lasting House majorities following the 2030 census changes.

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I SPENT LAST SATURDAY WITH LACORE, meeting up at 7:30 a.m. at her house overlooking the coastal salt marshes for a twelve-hour day of campaigning. I wanted to get a feel for the district and the type of candidate that Democratic operatives believe can broaden their coalition in red parts of the country. And I was curious about Lacore’s experience adjusting to the political arena after spending decades in the chain of command, where she was expected to keep her political views private.

Lacore’s first electoral test is just under two months away: the June 9 Democratic primary. On our drive to the Lowcountry Indivisible candidate forum in Bluffton, she told me that she didn’t grow up in a political household and spent most of her life voting for Republicans until the 2016 election. She knew very little about how political campaigns operated and was shocked by the amount of fundraising that was required. No one in her family had ever been a political donor before she jumped into the race. When I asked whether it felt odd to adopt a party label after eschewing partisan politics for so long, she asked to go off the record to answer it honestly. Publicly, she keeps her message focused on restoring democracy, the high cost of living, and the need to protect South Carolina’s coast.

“I spent thirty-five years defending the Constitution—defending the freedoms and rights that it guarantees. And that’s exactly what I intend to do in Congress,” Lacore said.

At the candidate forum, Lacore clearly felt uneasy wading into thornier partisan issues. When a voter asked the four participating Democrats seated at the front of the room to commit to impeaching Trump for his unauthorized attacks on Iran, Lacore sidestepped the question. When another voter lamented that the Democratic party wasn’t talking more about abortion rights, Lacore mentioned her Catholic faith but said personal beliefs on the matter shouldn’t be imposed on others—before quickly noting that she’d been endorsed by EMILY’s List, a pro-choice organization. At times, it didn’t always seem like she was thrilled to be running as a Democrat.

But Democratic strategists believe that Lacore’s obvious distaste for reflexive partisanship is exactly what makes her a compelling candidate, helping her score endorsements from both Democratic and Republican local officials. Strategists stressed that this district is fairly well-off—packed full of voters with college degrees and retirees who flock to communities like Hilton Head and Seabrook Island—and is also home to a large number of veterans. “It’s just not MAGA. These kinds of Republicans that live in this district are of your dad’s Republican party,” said McIntosh.

At a roundtable event later in the day, Sydney van Bulck, a former teacher who described herself as “about as far left as you can go,” said she viewed Lacore’s Republican past as a strength in the race.

“While I would love for all of our politicians to be as far left as I am, we don’t make progress that way,” van Bulck said. “I think that you need to kind of resemble the district that you’re representing.”

The race for the 1st Congressional District got one of its first major shakeups this week when Mark Sanford, the former Republican governor of South Carolina who also used to represent the district in Congress, announced that he would run to retake the seat. Sanford—who often warned about the “cult of personality” taking over the Republican party—was one of the first Republicans to pay a steep price for criticizing Trump. He lost his 2018 primary to Katie Arrington, who made the election all about loyalty to Trump. Sanford also ran a brief primary campaign against Trump in the fall of 2019. He is just one of nearly a dozen Republicans vying for the nomination this time around, and it’s hardly guaranteed that he will win. But his entry into the race has some local Democrats on edge.

“There’s a lot of Democrats who really like Mark Sanford,” said Renee Harvey, a Charleston-based Democratic strategist. “He’s going to be the hardest to beat if he should be so lucky to win that primary. But you know, him breaking with the Republican party, I think that still is a bit of a liability for him in the primary.”

The other most notable episode of Sanford’s career was when he disappeared from the state for a week in 2009, when he was still governor. He had told his staff he was hiking the Appalachian Trail; he was actually visiting a mistress in Argentina. That scandal and Sanford’s ensuing incredibly bitter divorce didn’t prevent him from completing his second term as governor and then getting elected to the House—and it would probably be even less damaging in today’s Republican party.

The last time Democrats held the 1st district was in 2018, when Cunningham defeated Arrington by 1.4 percentage points by running largely on his opposition to Trump’s offshore drilling plan. Cunningham lost his re-election to Mace in 2020 by 1.2 points (this was back when she was pitching herself as a “new voice” of the GOP and not obsessing over transgender issues).

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But a lot has changed since 2018. The Republican-controlled state legislature redrew the 1st district in 2020 to be more GOP-friendly. Plus, running for office has become only more complicated for first-time candidates, who have to figure out how to balance traditional retail politics with a robust social media presence. A camera crew followed Lacore around for most of the day on Saturday, capturing interactions with voters that could be packaged for social media clips.

Lacore ended her day in perhaps the most fitting place in the district for a former Navy officer: on a boat, touring the Charleston Harbor with Awendaw Mayor Chris Crolley, who eagerly explained the shrimp and turtle seasons and pointed out different bird species—from pelicans to snowy egrets. “You really don’t understand Charleston unless you’re on the water,” Crolley said, as Lacore nodded along in agreement.

While Lacore’s critics have pointed out that she doesn’t have deep roots in the district and it wasn’t her primary residence until a few months ago, she’s emphasized her connection to the water. She’s talked about living in other coastal cities during her service, including Norfolk, Virginia, and dealing with the threat of rising sea levels and flooding—an issue that tends to transcend partisan politics in districts like this.

“I do feel drawn to the water,” Lacore told me, when I asked about her decision to retire in the area. “Every time I start talking about protecting the coast—that resonates with everybody.”

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My open tabs:

— Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections

— I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America

— Bernie Sanders Is Back as a Left-Wing Kingmaker

— Cali Dems Need to Get Their Sh*t Together, by my Bulwark colleague Andrew Egger

WHEN HAMAS ATTACKED ISRAEL on October 7, 2023, Vice President Kamala Harris was a few weeks into a tour of college campuses to promote the Biden administration’s goals and accomplishments. In the days that followed, as Israel began bombing Gaza—attacking not only targets that were obviously Hamas-related but also schools, hospitals, refugee camps, and other civilian sites—the vice president’s team became keenly aware that many young Americans were growing deeply uneasy with the White House’s support of Israel. Harris’s team even began preparing for the possibility of campus protests.

While Harris made it through that tour without any major hiccups, it wasn’t long before student protests were shutting down campuses across the nation with demands that universities divest from Israel and calls for the White House to take a different approach to the conflict. And the protest movement wasn’t confined to colleges: At stops around the country, President Joe Biden was often confronted by demonstrators calling for a ceasefire and chanting “Genocide Joe!”

“In the White House, this was certainly a communications challenge,” said Herbie Ziskend, who served as deputy communications director under Biden. “No matter where we went and whatever the topic of conversation was, protests on this conflict were ubiquitous.”

So as President Donald Trump’s unauthorized war on Iran with Israel entered into its second month, some Democratic officials were looking around and wondering: Where are the anti-war protests this time around? And why are college campuses so quiet? While President Donald Trump announced a temporary ceasefire on Tuesday evening, he did so only after threatening to eliminate a “whole civilization” and destroy bridges and power plants—which are war crimes and, by definition, genocide. Hundreds of civilians have been killed. Hospitals have been attacked. An entire elementary school was wiped out—killing more than a hundred children and dozens of adults—after the United States struck it with a Tomahawk missile.

However understandable the downward trend in campus protests might be, the dynamic has become a point of frustration for some parts of the Democratic coalition who feel that anti-war and pro-Palestinian activists are tougher on Democratic officials than on Republicans. They note that even though Harris is out of office, she still gets interrupted at public events by pro-Palestinian protesters.

“Every single speech that Kamala Harris gave in those 107 days, they found a way to protest her and call her a proponent of genocide. But they never did that throughout the campaign for Donald Trump, and then they never did it in 2025 when he was giving Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check to annihilate Gaza,” said a former Harris campaign official. “Now, when Donald Trump is threatening to do the thing that they accused Kamala Harris and Joe Biden of being complicit of, they’re silent.”

WHEN I ASKED ACTIVISTS involved in the pro-Palestinian movement about whether there had been a change in protest culture, they pushed back against the suggestion that their coalition wasn’t responding to the Iran war with a similar level of organized activism compared to two years ago.

“These protests are happening. And so when we get questions like this, I’m always very confused,” said Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, who was a prominent supporter of the Uncommitted movement in 2024. “Every time there has been an international summit or [when] people knew where [Trump’s] motorcade was gonna be—people were there protesting.”

Other activists noted to me that around eight million people turned out around the country two weeks ago for the “No Kings” protests, which had embraced an anti-war message. They said that activists were still protesting the president, but that it was harder to do so outside of the context of a presidential campaign cycle when there are fewer public events being held. They lamented that the media simply wasn’t as interested in covering their protests in the same way now that it’s not a presidential election year.

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But Romman and other organizers also acknowledged that organizing in Trump’s second term is extremely difficult. Since returning to office, Trump has threatened to use the full force of the federal government to crack down on organizations and protesters that he views as promoting antisemitism or violence. The result, organizers say, has been a chilling effect among students. Trump has also threatened to withhold federal funding for schools that allow what he calls, without explanation, “illegal protests,” and he went after pro-Palestinian protesters involved in the occupation of Columbia University’s campus last year. Then, after Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on a college campus last September, Trump cracked down on free speech on campuses. He blamed liberal protesters and donors and signed an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization (although such a designation doesn’t actually exist under federal law).

But it’s not just Trump who is making it harder for students to participate in campus protests. In an effort to get control of campuses that had spun out of control in the weeks following the October 7th attacks, some colleges and universities implemented new restrictions on campus protests at the start of the 2024 school year—such as banning encampments and megaphones. Such changes seemed to have had an immediate impact. The New York Times reported in November 2024 that there had been just 950 protest events and 50 arrests at that point in the fall semester compared to 3,000 events and arrests during the previous spring semester.

“There’s a very real fear about the repression that was happening on college campuses, both from university administration and from the Trump administration,” said Denae Ávila-Dickson, an organizer with the Sunrise Movement. “Students were trying to get a sense of, ‘What does this mean for my life? What does this mean for my academic career?’”

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WHILE SOME CAMPUS PROTESTS are still occurring, organizers said that anti-war movements often take time to build. Although pro-Palestinian protests were spreading around U.S. campuses just days after the October 7th attack, they didn’t peak until later, in the spring of 2024. Trump’s penchant for changing his mind can also make it difficult to figure out whether a conflict like Iran is going to drag on or—as was the case with his attack on Venezuela—abruptly end after a few days. Not to mention that there’s a long list of other issues fueling the public’s outrage, especially ICE’s brutal tactics and the other acts of cruelty arising from the Trump administration’s mass-deportation agenda.

Organizers insist that the outrage is there, it just looks different. Instead of pitching tents on the campus quad, some students are organizing food drives and other community-focused efforts. Joel Payne, chief communications officer of the liberal activist organization MoveOn, said that a lot of activism is taking place online. Some of the group’s most popular online petitions of the second Trump administration have been in response to the war in Iran and thousands of people have tuned in to digital events in response to the conflict.

“You have an administration that spent the last fifteen months targeting students on campuses because of their activism. So it would not surprise me if there was some kind of backdown in campus activism going on because of that,” said Payne. “A lot of that activism has been rolled up into mass-movement mobilizations, like No Kings. And as Trump continues to wade us deeper into this, it’s only going to ramp up further. That energy is not gone.”

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— Chris Taylor, a Wisconsin appellate judge and former Democratic state legislator, won a seat on the state’s Supreme Court on Tuesday, expanding liberal control of the court to a 5–2 majority. This race got little national attention, especially compared to last year’s election, when Elon Musk poured millions of dollars into the race in support of the conservative candidate and famously appeared at a campaign rally wearing a cheesehead hat.

Democratic strategists with whom I spoke said that Taylor’s 20-point win was in large part due to her focus on abortion rights. Although some Democratic leaders have been hesitant to center abortion rights in their messaging following the 2024 election, and are instead laser-focused on affordability issues, some operatives believe that it’s still a winning issue in local- and state-level races. Taylor released multiple campaign ads focused on abortion rights that portrayed the conservative candidate as too extreme on the issue.

A similar playbook worked last year in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court elections. Gov. Josh Shapiro cut an ad urging voters to back the liberal candidates whom he said could be counted on to “protect a woman’s access to abortion and birth control.” All three of the Democratic justices up for re-election retained their seats.

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— Politico has a fun (or scary?) piece out about how politicians are starting to embrace holograms. A holographic version of Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan—dubbed “Holo-Donna”—greeted travelers at Jacksonville International Airport for about a year, and both Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Ashley Moody (R-Fla.) used holograms to “appear” on stage at a recent National Association of Realtors gathering.

David Nussbaum, chair of Proto Hologram—which made the technology used by Deegan, Booker, and Moody—told Politico that the “next president of the United States ought to be campaigning in all 50 states simultaneously without leaving the safety and security of their own campaign headquarters.”

I think voters will (rightly) demand a bit more effort from their elected officials, but time will tell!

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My open tabs:

— Inside a Corporate Retreat That Went Very Badly Wrong

— The Endless Goodbye

— Democrats Should Try Being an Actual Political Party Again

FOR A PARTY PERPETUALLY anticipating doom and engaging in acts of self-destruction, Democrats have, in recent weeks, grown shockingly optimistic about the state of the midterms.

It’s not just that the party expects to win back control of the House or even make a serious play for the Senate. No, no. Those are the aspirations of the mere mid-tier dreamers. The chatter among the party bulls these days is of flipping states once thought entirely out of reach; of unseating GOP incumbents once thought untouchable; of election waves that rival some of the most memorable in recent history.

“Democrats were always viewed as having a good shot at taking the House this cycle. But I think a lot of folks thought it would be a modest gain,” said Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster. “Instead of being 15 or 20, maybe it’s 35 or 40 in terms of the actual seats that are in play here. I think the margin could be a lot bigger than we would have thought.”

As for the Senate? “Six months ago, you really had to squint to see how Democrats could take the majority,” said McCrary. “Now, I think it’s a very straightforward path—and a very plausible and realistic path that Democrats can get to 51 or 52 [seats]. And maybe there’s even an upper end of that as well.”

Some context may be helpful here. McCrary is hardly the type of operative to offer an overly optimistic outlook just to be a good party cheerleader; he lives in a deep-red district in Alabama and knows the danger of Democrats getting their hopes up on races they have no chance of winning. Not so long ago he was telling me that the Senate was almost certainly out of reach. But he’s among a growing number of Democrats who are allowing themselves to get buzzed on a little bit of electoral hopium.

And, frankly, why not? There are plenty of signs that Americans aren’t feeling great about the direction of the country. Despite a stronger than expected March jobs report, consumer sentiment is declining. Young people are stressed about job opportunities. Families are wondering how they’re going to tighten their budgets to pay for rising gas prices. And Americans are deeply worried about finding affordable health care. Not to mention the unnerving prospect of getting bogged down in yet another conflict in the Middle East.

As my Bulwark colleague Catherine Rampell noted last week, it’s not difficult for Democrats to tie these anxieties to President Donald Trump’s policy decisions—from his war of choice in Iran to his Medicaid cuts to his tariffs.

“If you were trying to actively shipwreck the Republican party in 2026, candidly, I don’t know what he’d been doing differently,” said Ian Russell, a Democratic strategist who served as the political director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2014 and 2016.

In my conversations with Democratic officials, there was a general consensus that the party’s strength in the midterms was being underestimated and that the ceiling is much higher than they thought even just a few weeks ago.

“This cycle very well might be more like a 1974 post-Watergate cycle, where voters are saying ‘burn the ships,’” said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman who switched parties and is now running as a Democrat for governor of Florida.

Jolly certainly needs to pray for a ’74-like climate—in which Democrats gained 48 House seats in the midterms—owing to Florida’s dramatic rightward tilt over the past few cycles. But even if he doesn’t win his statewide race, there are real possibilities that fellow Democrats will make inroads elsewhere in the state. Already, the party has seen major gains.

On the congressional level, Democrats need to flip 4 seats to retake the Senate; Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he views North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, and Alaska as the most winnable. In the House, the party needs a net of just 3 seats and the Democratic Campaign Congressional Committee has identified 44 districts it believes are in play this year.

Those are relatively straightforward propositions. But lately Democrats have been asking themselves whether they should be thinking bigger—and acting more boldly.

“When there’s a wave, odd things can happen. Long shots can become competitive,” said Simon Rosenberg, perhaps the party’s most rosy-eyed operative. “A month ago, we would have said the Senate is competitive, and the Democrats had a shot. But we now have Democrats ahead in states that get us to 51 [seats],” he said, alluding to several recent polls, “and that’s without Iowa and Texas.”

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Although most Democrats I spoke with last week still acknowledged that it would be incredibly difficult for the party to get beyond 52 seats in the Senate, no one said it was impossible. While Schumer seemed hesitant just a few weeks ago to spend money in Texas or Iowa, the strategists I spoke with said they expected that to change. Some also mentioned that Senate races in Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, and Mississippi could get more attention from Democrats, particularly if the Iran war drags on, the economy continues to sputter, and Trump’s approval rating continues to crater. Operatives also said they expected the DCCC to add more seats to its target list, particularly in rural districts where it’s relatively inexpensive to advertise.

“From Pennsylvania to Iowa, Texas, and heck, even in Trump’s backyard, it’s crystal clear that voters are fed up with Republican rule and ready to kick them to the curb,” said DCCC spokesperson Viet Shelton. “2026 is shaping up to be a lot like 2006 and 2018 when voters repudiated Republicans in favor of Democrats, and our map of offensive opportunities across the country reflects this on-the-ground reality.”

In a recent focus group of swing voters conducted by The Bulwark, many expressed concern about the state of the country. Few believed that going to war with Iran was in America’s best interest; several worried that the country was too politically divided. The strength of the economy was a widespread concern for nearly all the participants. Some even said they preferred the Biden years over how Trump’s second term was going, which is especially remarkable considering how unpopular Biden became (at his lowest point, his approval rating matched Trump’s today) and how sour voters were over Biden’s job performance on economic issues.

“The economy is going down. Gas prices are super high. . . . Food is expensive, of course. I just think the economy is on a downward spiral right now,” said one focus group participant, a Pennsylvania voter who backed Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024. “Even my husband right now, like, it’s really hard to find a job. So I have a lot of people I know who have bachelor’s [degrees] who have been working [in] retail for the past couple years.”

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SO WHAT COULD DEFLECT A BLUE WAVE? A few things. Trump could try to interfere with the election in a way that gives his party a boost. Or he could get a bump in approval should he bring a quicker end to the war. And then there is the matter of cash.

Nearly every Democrat I talked with mentioned that the party was still having trouble raising money. Few people thought that Democrats could realistically catch up to the GOP’s war chest, even if their donors grow more optimistic and thus more willing to open up their pocketbooks. Trump, meanwhile, is sitting on a pile of cash in his political action committee. And Elon Musk could spend seemingly unlimited money to keep Republicans in control.

If they do, it will surely be spent on ads reminding voters why they still don’t trust Democrats all that much—even in this moment of backlash directed at the president. That, for sure, would take some of the hopium out of the balloon. Though even those Democrats inclined to be nervous believe such an anti-Dem ad blitz might matter more in the next presidential election than in a cycle like this.

“Voters are still not that into us, but this is going to be—at least, based on all the available evidence—a massive, massive refutation of Trump and a rejection of Trumpism. That is not the same thing as an embrace of Democrats,” said Russell. “Heading into 2028, we need to have a real lengthy conversation inside the party about what will work going forward, and resist our urge to constantly fight the last battle.”

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— ActBlue, the Democratic donation platform, is in turmoil after news broke that its then-lawyers warned it in 2025 that its chief executive might have misled Congress about steps the organization was taking to make sure that it wasn’t processing donations from foreign citizens. According to the New York Times, the law firm Covington & Burling warned ActBlue that it didn’t always follow the safeguards that Regina Wallace-Jones, the group’s CEO and president, had described to congressional investigators. “Within weeks” of the law firm telling the organization that it could be vulnerable to criminal investigation, “ActBlue and Covington parted ways.”

“ActBlue is now all but declaring war on its own past lawyers, an extraordinary turn of events at a moment when President Trump has already ordered a Justice Department investigation into the organization. Democrats are nervous that any additional upheaval at ActBlue could destabilize the party’s critical fund-raising apparatus ahead of the midterm elections,” the Times reports.

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— In a New York Times opinion piece last week, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote that since Russian President Vladimir Putin attempted to sway the 2016 presidential election, there has understandably been a lot of focus on protecting future elections from foreign meddling. But “foreign interference is no longer the most pressing danger to our elections,” he warned. “It is increasingly evident that the greatest threat now comes from inside our own government.”

Warner noted that Trump has called for the federal government to “take over” elections and pointed to recent reporting from the Washington Post about a draft executive order that has been circulating among Trump’s allies that would declare a national emergency based on fabricated claims of foreign interference as a way to grant the president enormous control over elections.

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My open tabs:

— The Women Who Believe That Women Should Lose the Right to Vote

— Judge Jeanine’s Big Audition

— Running for Congress at 30,000 Feet: A Flight Attendant’s Campaign Trail

IN THE AFTERMATH of the 2024 election, a few points of agreement emerged among Democrats about where the party had gone wrong. Chief among them was that candidates simply had to ditch the litmus-test culture that had forced them to adopt positions outside the mainstream and led them to avoid uncomfortable or tricky interviews.

Among those most vocally making the case were center-left organizations like Third Way, which urged the left flank of the party to recognize that a winning coalition requires tolerance of a wide range of viewpoints. They begged candidates to stop listening to advocacy groups and to refuse to fill out questionnaires and policy pledges that they argued had pushed the party too far left.

For a good part of the past year, this consensus held. Democrats embraced a just-win-baby! mentality as they branched out to different podcasts and generally avoided the rhetorical and policy missteps that plagued them in 2024.

But as the midterms near, the consensus is now being tested—and it’s Third Way doing the testing.

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The group has spent the past few weeks urging Democrats to distance themselves from Hasan Piker, the widely popular Twitch and YouTube streamer. The group’s president and press adviser, Jonathan Cowan and Lily Cohen, coauthored a Wall Street Journal opinion piece arguing that Piker’s “misogyny is indistinguishable from that of far-right influencers” and accusing him of antisemitism, saying that there was “no excuse for putting political tribalism before Jewish safety.” Things escalated last week when Abdul El-Sayed, who is running in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat, announced that Piker would campaign with him on college campuses. Then, this morning, Cowan sent a letter to El-Sayed warning that it would be a “stain” on his character if he followed through with the planned rallies, especially after a Michigan synagogue was attacked last month. The letter lists six questions in bullet points, asking El-Sayed to respond:

To Third Way’s critics, this was nothing short of abject hypocrisy—a group applying litmus tests to a liberal candidate after demanding that liberal groups drop the litmus tests they placed on mainstream candidates.

“This is so clearly Third Way riling people up in a way that is so disingenuous,” said Amanda Litman, the cofounder of Run for Something, a progressive group that recruits and trains first-time candidates. She emphasized that part of politics is “having to deal with people who say crazy things you don’t agree with—and you have to work with them anyway.”

“Who’s doing the scolding here?” she asked. “I thought we weren’t supposed to be canceling anyone anymore.”

For Third Way, there is nothing inconsistent about its approach. In an interview, Cowan told me he draws a distinction between demanding policy purity from a candidate and moral clarity. He argued that if Piker had said offensive things about a minority group other than Jews, Democrats wouldn’t have hesitated to shun him. For El-Sayed to rally with Piker, he said, is as if George Bush had campaigned with David Duke instead of denouncing the KKK leader.

Most significantly, Cowan made it clear that he’d rather accept some electoral risk than see the party show flexibility on this front.

“If people really are arguing that the price of winning is becoming like a bigoted misogynist like Hasan Piker, then I’ll take not winning,” Cowan told me. “What is the point of reviving the Democratic party so it can compete in an age of right-wing populism, if the price of that is you mainstream bigoted, anti-American, misogynistic voices?”

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THAT PIKER HAS GAINED this type of lightning-rod status for Third Way is a testament to two things: the controversial statements he has made in the past and the size of the audience he has in the present.

The 34-year-old operates one of the most-subscribed-to channels on Twitch, has sat for glossy magazine profiles, and has been generally viewed as the type of person who could be the “liberal Joe Rogan” that Democrats need—someone who would help the party regain cultural relevance and reach people who had tuned out its message. After all, he is an unapologetic progressive who lifts weights and pops Zyn and has millions of men (mostly young, mostly white) flocking to his stream to watch him game and analyze the news.

Given the size and makeup of his audience, operatives have hustled to get their candidates booked on his stream. Recent guests include: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.); California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer; Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson; former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes; Saikat Chakrabarti, who is running in the Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi in California; and El-Sayed.

“If you want to run for office and engage in politics today, you have to go to where people are actually paying attention,” said Chakrabarti. “It’s ridiculous that the Democratic party is on the one hand saying ‘Let’s find our own Joe Rogan on the left,’ and then you have someone like Hasan—who is actively engaging the populations the Democratic party wants to engage with—and they’re not willing to go on his stream. I think it shows a disrespect for voters, and that’s, frankly, one of the reasons people keep not voting for Democrats.”

But Piker has also said some offensive things. He can be crass and cocky and kind of annoying. He has hesitated to support Democrats he views as too moderate, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Joe Biden.

And then there are his comments about Jews and the Middle East. He often blurs the line between thoughtful anti-Zionism and antisemitism—a problem that Democratic leaders have grown increasingly worried about as the situation in the Middle East grows more unstable. He has repeatedly referred to Orthodox Jews as “inbred.” In a 2019 video, he said that “America deserved 9/11.” He later said that his remark about 9/11 has been taken out of context from the larger point he was trying to make about the “boomerang effect” of the U.S.’s interventions in the Middle East. And he likewise maintains that his other critiques have been of the Israeli government and not the Jewish people.

Despite the controversy—or because of it—millions of people turn to Piker for their news. As evidence of his draw, El-Sayed’s campaign told me that they’d received more signups—by far—for their rally with Piker than for any of their other events.

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THE DEBATE AROUND PIKER goes deeper than clashes over campaign tactics and media strategy; it involves questions about what is required of the Democratic party in this political moment to keep Donald Trump’s authoritarian project at bay. If democracy really is at risk, do Democrats have the luxury of kicking someone like Piker out of their tent, or does it require making political alliances with people who have said bad things on the internet? Alternatively, is staying away from Piker an important part of guarding the party’s boundaries, something that has to be done even when the stakes for democracy are existential?

For a while, the party seemed to have clear answers to these questions: that, generally speaking, the pursuit of power did not require purity or perfection; and that the party needed to go everywhere and talk to everyone. But, as is often the case, the Democratic political class also is invested in winning intraparty ideological wars. And sometimes that has come at the cost of winning elections. That might not be the case in 2026. But there’s also a nonzero chance that this soon devolves into escalating calls for cancellation.

“The tent already includes [Piker],” Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for the progressive group Justice Democrats told me when asked about Third Way’s response to Piker. “I think the question is actually whether our tent should continue to be big enough for a very vocal minority of corporatists and right-wing hawks who are still trying to keep this party under the grips of corporate interests and war-hawk lobbies like AIPAC.”

Ladies and gentlemen . . . the Democrats!

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— On a more lighthearted note, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont have a friendly bet going ahead of the NCAA Men’s Final Four matchup between Illinois and UConn this Saturday. Lamont is putting New Haven pizza (yum) and Pez candy (gross) on the line, while Pritzker offered up Chicago-based Eli’s Cheesecake and Illinois barbecue.

— California Democrats are starting to get anxious that the large number of Democratic candidates running to replace Gov. Gavin Newsom could split the vote and wind up giving the governorship to Republicans. Because California uses a “jungle primary” system, voters can select any candidate regardless of party. The top two vote-getters will advance to the general election.

Although there’s still plenty of time for the field to narrow before the June 2 primary, some polls show Republican candidates in the top two spots. Rusty Hicks, chair of the California Democratic Party, has publicly urged lower-tier candidates to drop out. But as Politico reports, his pleas have “been met with backlash and accusations of racism.” All eyes are on influential party leaders—including Newsom, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and Sen. Alex Padilla—to see if they endorse a candidate in an effort to shrink the field before it’s too late.

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My open tabs:

— They’re the Kings of ‘Seinfeld’ Trivia—and They Watch Literally Nothing Else on TV

— One of the Democrats’ Generational Battles: He’s 76, His Opponent Is 31

— The bros are more liberal than you think