WHEN DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES and ad makers began mapping out their midterm campaign strategies last year, they went looking for a villain beyond Donald Trump—a bogeyman who could motivate voters.

Elon Musk played the role for a while. Then Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took center stage in the midterm messaging. Other operatives have floated making JD Vance or Trump family members the bête noire.

But as the midterms near, it turns out it’s not a person who Democrats are villainizing, but a place. Or, rather, the concept of them.

Data centers are the Democratic party’s en vogue bad guy, increasingly demonized by candidates running in competitive races, along with the corporations racing to build them around the country.

A sampling:

• Ohio Senate candidate Sherrod Brown released two ads last month alone going after data centers for raising utility bills and attacking his Republican opponent, Sen. Jon Husted, for seeking to bring data centers to the state.

• In the northeast corner of Pennsylvania, Paige Cognetti, who is hoping to unseat first-term Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan, released a campaign ad slamming data center developers.

• James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, held a news conference two weeks ago calling for tighter regulations on data centers.

• And in Florida, David Jolly, the former Republican member of Congress running for governor as a Democrat, made waves when he called for a moratorium on the construction of data centers.

These are just a few examples of what has become a major talking point for Democratic candidates across much of the country.

“Voters were already looking for a fight over high utility bills, and then data centers walked in the door and gave voters a target to take out that anger on,” said Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster. (McCrary’s clients include Tennessee state legislator Justin Pearson, another candidate who has made data centers a focal point of a congressional campaign.)

There are several reasons Democratic campaign officials believe data centers are a potent political issue. First,

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EMBATTLED DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE Chair Ken Martin is “open” to the idea of bringing on additional help from an experienced party leader to address the committee’s ongoing fundraising problems, according to a DNC official.

What role that person would play—let alone if it will happen before the midterms—remains unclear. But the willingness to entertain such a change comes as operatives in the party have begun broaching the idea of bringing on a co-chair at the committee to deal with fundraising as well as media appearances.

Martin has been beset by constant complaints over his struggles in these two areas—complaints that crested with a trio of stories over the weekend highlighting the DNC’s financial challenges and his increasingly erratic behavior.

Operatives across the party have come to believe that the best path forward is to bring on board someone who has credibility with donors and is capable of appearing on podcasts and cable news, which is itself a major fundraising function since top donors are particularly addicted to shows like MS NOW’s Morning Joe. Those in favor of bringing on a new hire in addition to Martin said it would take the pressure off him to fill the more public-facing responsibilities and allow him to focus on the day-to-day operations inside party headquarters. They noted that during the Clinton years, it was common to have DNC co-chairs with differing responsibilities. They see the need for a co-chair as acute right now, but downright paramount as the 2028 presidential primary season nears.

But even as the DNC is now expressing some openness to fresh blood at the committee, there remain questions as to whether Martin—who would have to sign off on it—will ultimately get on board.

“There’s been talk of an intervention or of adding a co-chair—but all these ideas are ideas that Ken Martin will not agree to,” one DNC member told me. “His ego just won’t allow for that.”

Another party operative said that they actually encouraged Martin to bring on bigger party names to the DNC earlier this year in a role akin to a co-chair. But their suggestion then was ignored. “That whole operation is just in a bunker right now,” the strategist said.

That Martin may be softening on this is a testament to how rocky and untenable his tenure has become. Martin stepped into the role of DNC chair with the backing of many state party chairs but without a national profile or the national connections that are essential for fundraising. Rather than adjust, he’s adopted a go-it-alone approach, contributing to the DNC’s insularity and furthering the image that he is hampered by his own insecurity.

His troubles are well documented at this point, illustrated regularly when the DNC files its financial reports. But they’re amplified by the fact that he has done little to build alliances throughout the party. Multiple operatives said they were frustrated that the only time they’ve heard from Martin’s team has been when his staffers asked them to stop publicly criticizing him on cable and social media.

“After founding Moms Demand Action, helping to raise $11 million for Kamala Harris’s campaign, hosting fundraisers at my home, donating individually, and becoming a member of the DNC Finance Committee, I assumed he’d reach out—if for no other reason than to ask me for more money,” posted Shannon Watts, who founded the gun-safety group after the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012.

“Nope, never heard from him,” she added in the post. “However, about six months into his tenure, he did have a DNC staff member call me to tell me he didn’t like something I’d tweeted.”

Another problem with changing up the DNC’s leadership is that even if Martin were to ultimately agree to a co-chair, it’s unclear who would want to be responsible for digging the DNC out of $2 million of debt while navigating low staff morale and a toxic workplace environment. Those challenges haven’t stopped frustrated operatives from wishcasting. Among the names tossed around in conversations these past few weeks are Donna Brazile, Pete Buttigieg, Terry McAuliffe, Howard Dean, and Jon Tester. But the name I’ve heard mentioned most frequently is Rahm Emanuel.

“We all know who it should be: It’s Rahm,” said a progressive Democratic strategist. “Even the progressives know that Rahm doesn’t fuck around and he raises a shit-ton of money and is very organized. It’s the perfect job for him. He has his enemies for sure, but even the people on the progressive side of the party want a functional, credible DNC.”

Emanuel is currently in the midst of exploring a presidential run and is extremely unlikely to drop that idea for a co-chair gig at the DNC. And the other people whose names have been floated are, for the most part, either enjoying retirement, don’t want to deal with the DNC’s problems, or also have their sights set on running for president.

Still, operatives I spoke with aren’t giving up hope that one of the longer-shot presidential contenders could be convinced to take on fixing the DNC.

“I think you can say: ‘Look, you fucking clean this place up. You do a badass job. You raise money. And then you position yourself and make it very clear that you’re in this because you want to serve in the next administration,’” said a veteran strategist, noting that Ron Brown was elected chair of the DNC in 1989 and then appointed secretary of commerce by President Bill Clinton after his 1992 election.

“That would require a risk, of course, and you do have to forgo the presidential campaign. But I also think there’s an opportunity to do something there.”

WHETHER OR NOT MARTIN brings on a big name—or even a co-chair—he is almost certainly staying put himself. Though senior lawmakers aren’t happy with the DNC’s dysfunction, they also don’t seem interested in forcing him out this close to the midterm elections. But that sentiment could quickly shift post-November, especially if the DNC’s fundraising hasn’t significantly improved.

In anticipation of that, party officials are still adding names to informal short lists of who could step into Martin’s role after the election. Some Democratic donors recently started floating Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, as a potential Martin replacement, noting that she was able to grow the nonprofit’s fundraising from $17 million in 2024 to $65 million in 2025.

The real gut-check on Martin’s future will come next month when DNC members travel to Austin, Texas, for their annual summer meeting. Aside from Martin resigning voluntarily, the only other way to force him out would be for a majority of the DNC’s roughly 450 members to vote in favor of removing him.

DNC members I spoke to said that since members are spread out across the country, much of the discussion about how to handle Martin’s chairmanship had been happening through various group chats and Signal chains. That made it hard to get a good read on whether anything nearing a majority of members favored ousting him. But they emphasized that Martin’s strongest critics would be working the crowd at the August meeting to get a sense of members’ willingness for action.

The conventional wisdom among DNC members has been that state party chairs, who are DNC members, have remained loyal to Martin because many of them have received an influx in funding under his leadership—and because Martin himself was once a state party chair. And given that state delegations typically follow the lead of their state chairs, there hasn’t been a real groundswell of support to vote him out. But some operatives are beginning to question whether state chairs will start to decide that the dysfunction and ongoing negative attention—all of which undermines the operations they’re trying to stand up on the local level—is no longer worth the promise of extra cash.

“More people are realizing that he can’t stay,” said another DNC member. “This will be the topic in Austin.”

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AS DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE members gathered at the end of last week to discuss the 2028 presidential primary calendar, their chair, Ken Martin, had another topic on his mind.

The DNC’s latest fundraising numbers had come out, showing the committee yet again falling far behind its GOP counterpart. After the latest update, the committee had $2 million of debt compared to the Republican National Committee’s more than $128 million on hand. And the already embattled Martin was mindful that some of those gathered in a conference room at the Salamander Hotel weren’t particularly supportive of his tenure and were increasingly concerned about the state of the committee.

In between discussions about leading the primary calendar with either Nevada or South Carolina, Martin urged DNC members to read and share a Substack article he’d posted defending the committee’s dismal financial situation. He re-emphasized the main points: that it was “simply wrong” to say the DNC was in financial trouble; that the committee was raising an average of $8.6 million per month and spending it on important projects; and that they were building campaign infrastructure, not just tending to a healthy balance sheet.

To the national committee members and party officials I spoke with—including several who were at the Salamander meeting—Martin’s post came off as

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COMING OUT OF THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, Democrats had no shortage of ideas for how the party could win back working-class voters.

Moderates wanted to move to the middle on social and cultural issues. Self-identified reformers preached the merits of embracing heterodoxy on some social issues or typical Democratic policy positions. Others talked about getting tougher on immigration. And more than a handful of consultants pitched new policies and messaging designed to bring back those working-class voters who had drifted away from the party’s tent.

Progressives had a different vision.

As they saw it, winning back working-class voters required elevating working-class candidates (or, at least, candidates with a working-class aesthetic1) who embraced populism and eschewed the caution they believed to have been detrimental to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. They rallied around a cluster of candidates—including Zohran Mamdani, Graham Platner, and Abdul El-Sayed—who they believed could steer the party in the right direction.

But so far, the bet on a combination of populist politics and a hardscrabble persona has not paid off—at least according to the polling. Before Platner dropped out of the Maine Senate race, a New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll found that Republican Sen. Susan Collins led among non-college-educated voters by 21 percent while Platner led with college-educated voters by 34 percent. Although Mamdani won over some Trump voters—67 percent of them in the 2024 election had no college degree—exit polls show that the mayor’s strength was still with college-educated voters.

And last week, the Detroit News/Glengariff released a new poll showing Rep. Haley Stevens winning non-college-educated voters by 22 points in the Michigan Senate primary against Abdul El-Sayed, who carried college-educated voters by seven points.

Polls are just that—snapshots of an electorate, not actual voting results. But the data has given fodder to moderate and establishment Democrats to argue that the left’s case for winning back working-class voters is not all it’s made out to be.

“It has been a pretty big lie people [have] told themselves on here that working class people are closet leftists,” Neera Tanden, the president of Center for American Progress, posted on X. “They are in fact much more moderate than college educated folks.”

Tanden is a longstanding combatant in the online intraparty wars that Democrats have long waged. But as the Michigan primary approaches, she and other moderate operatives have begun amplifying their warnings, insisting that progressives aren’t just misreading the electorate but actually exacerbating the very class divide that the party is trying to address. “They’re making [the divide] worse by picking these people who they think are going to appeal to non-college voters,” Matt Bennett, cofounder of the center-left group Third Way, told me. “They somehow think that their people are the right people, and it’s pretty evident that they’re not at all.”

Considering the weight of the charge—and the recent polling data—I was curious how operatives on the populist and progressive left are thinking about this dynamic. Did they look at these same polls and worry that their preferred politics aren’t resonating with the voters they are intended to appeal to?

The answer was clear: not really.

Many progressive strategists told me that moderate and establishment Democrats were wrong to imply that only the left flank of the party is struggling with working-class voters, saying that it is instead a broader branding problem facing candidates across the ideological spectrum. There was little appetite for second-guessing on this point.

“When you look at the data, what you see is that the Democratic party, moderate or progressive, is struggling with working-class voters. It’s not a progressive problem,” said Mark Longabaugh, a top strategist for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. “If a guy that looks like Platner was struggling with working-class voters, you can see the [enormousness] of our problem.”

THE INABILITY OF ANY SIDE of the Democratic party to consistently reach voters who did not attend college is a problem for the party’s long-term health. Outside of some affluent coastal and suburban congressional districts, there simply aren’t enough college graduates to be a potent electoral force nationally. But times have changed since the weeks immediately following the 2024 election: Unlike back then, when Democrats of all kinds seemed eager to figure out why the party has this problem, the people I spoke with gave few signs that they’re interested in grappling with why this dilemma exists. Instead, the various Democratic factions seemed more focused on pointing fingers.

Some of the progressive operatives I spoke with argued that moderate Democrats were cherry-picking poll numbers and ignoring progressives’ successes in House primaries in Maine, Colorado, and New York—victories, they argued, that could not have happened without support from working-class voters. Nearly everyone I spoke with pointed to Harris’s presidential race—during which she lost working-class voters—as evidence that it was misguided to think that establishment candidates universally did better among these voters.

“The Democratic establishment’s campaign strategy in 2024 was a campaign strategy that, by the results, lost more working-class voters than Democrats had lost in recent memory at the national level, and gained more of the wealthiest voters,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, which backed insurgent democratic socialist House candidates this cycle, such as Melat Kiros in Colorado and Claire Valdez in New York. “There’s only one side of this debate that is actually trying to lead with a vision that centers working-class communities, and it is the left.”

In the case of the Michigan primary, progressive operatives supportive of El-Sayed downplayed polls showing Stevens winning working-class and black voters, stressing that her success thus far was not a reflection of the popularity of her politics but of the millions of dollars in super PAC money that has been spent boosting her campaign.

“I don’t think you can talk about Haley Stevens’s poll numbers in any way, shape, or form, no matter the demographic, without stating first and foremost that she would be nowhere without $50 million from super PACs,” said Bill Neidhardt, a former 2020 Sanders presidential campaign staffer and a senior media adviser at the consulting firm Middle Seat, whose clients include Kiros and Darializa Avila Chevalier.

One of the few progressive operatives who was willing to be more candid about the challenge in reaching working-class voters was pollster Adam Carlson.

“It’s pretty inarguable that in Democratic primaries so far, working-class voters, particularly working-class voters of color, have been gravitating toward the more establishment, moderate, centrist candidates,” he told me.

Carlson, who has worked this cycle on behalf of progressive candidates including El-Sayed, said that the black working-class voters in particular had a lot of “skepticism of leftist candidates overpromising.”

“When you’re kind of living a little more hand-to-mouth, you’re just not looking for these big sweeping changes. You’re looking for things that can help you right now.”

With the Democrats out of power, questions about how the party can win back working people will remain paramount. There is always the possibility that it solves itself: with a backlash to Trumpism and all its harms to the working class ultimately driving these voters to Democrats regardless of any changes the party makes.

But if that doesn’t happen, then each side will have serious accusations to work through. For moderates, it will be a repeat of ’24: Does an approach defined by incrementalism and moderation simply fail to meet the moment? For progressives, it will be arguably more existential: If the left is the working-people faction of the party but working people don’t vote for its candidates, then what really are they?

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🫏 Donkey Business:

The White House Correspondents’ Association is scheduled to reconvene its annual awards dinner this Friday. The event, originally held in April, was abruptly canceled partway through dinner after a gunman stormed the Washington Hilton Hotel in an alleged attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet.

Before the originally scheduled dinner, I wrote about the danger of the press corps rubbing elbows and breaking bread at such a glitzy affair with an administration that’s at war with a free press. That tension hasn’t gone away. Trump is expected to attend Friday’s rescheduled dinner, and since April, we’ve gotten even more glaring examples of his seeming intent to undermine the First Amendment. On Monday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration sought phone records of several of its journalists and even those journalists’ relatives in an attempt to identify sources for a recent story. The FCC also threatened to punish ABC for its decision not to carry live a July speech Trump gave on election security.

Ahead of the first dinner, 300 former journalists sent a letter to the WHCA urging them to use their speeches to condemn those who threaten press freedom. Since then, the letter’s organizers told me that they’re up to 500 signatures. They are reaffirming their calls to the WHCA this week in advance of Friday’s dinner.

“Since the first dinner was canceled in April, President Trump has escalated his attacks on journalists and news organizations,” said Lisa Stark, a former ABC News correspondent who helped organize the letter. “The WHCA cannot normalize this behavior.”

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— Politicians Are Trying to Change What Chatbots Say About Them

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WHEN GRAHAM PLATNER FORMALLY WITHDREW from the Maine Senate race a little over a week ago, Democratic officials hoped that it would bring an end to the bitter intraparty fight over electability and ideology that had engulfed the party for months.

But such tensions run deep, and it didn’t take long for another race to pit progressives and establishment Democrats against each other.

In the days since Platner’s campaign ended, the Democratic primary for Michigan Senate between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed has descended into ugly rancor. Stevens—a four-term moderate House Democrat with close ties to party leadership—has been relentlessly ridiculed on social media for her voice and physical appearance, prompting her allies to accuse El-Sayed of sexism. El-Sayed, a progressive former health official, has seen his campaign drowned in outside advertising accusing him of being the Republicans’ preferred nominee and propping up Stevens.

Primary elections often crescendo in a fit of nastiness as the vote nears. But rarely has the online torching gotten so personal that the candidates themselves have felt compelled to urge supporters to tap the brakes, which is precisely what El-Sayed did last week.

“It’s become impossible to ignore the way that people online make fun of my opponent for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics. It’s unkind and unhelpful. If you support me, please stop,” he said in a statement.

But what really stands out about the close of the Michigan primary is that it’s not just political influencers and internet shitposters who have been engaged in a factional hot war. Top Democratic operatives have been embroiled in days-long fights over which candidate would be more competitive in the general election against presumed GOP nominee Mike Rogers. The infighting has largely taken place publicly on social media and has at times turned personal, as operatives have taken direct shots at those backing the opposing candidate. Democratic strategists I spoke with said it’s been even nastier in private, with some declaring that they’d never again work with operatives supporting the opposing camp.

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All of this has raised the stakes of the Michigan primary even higher for Democratic insiders than they already were, ascribing not just national implications to its outcome but reputational ones as well. The contest has morphed into a proxy fight over whose theory of politics is correct and, by extension, the future direction of the party. And there are still two weeks to go.

In my conversations last week with operatives, everyone had a theory as to why the opposing camp was staking so much on Michigan. As progressives see it, the moderate flank of the party is panicked after democratic socialists won House primaries last month in Colorado and New York and is looking at Michigan as one of its last opportunities to blunt left-wing momentum before the 2028 presidential primary kicks off in earnest. Centrist groups like Third Way, for example, have made the Michigan primary a top priority.

“They’re spooked because they’re seeing all of these young rising talents, and most of them are progressives,” said Mark Longabaugh, a top strategist for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. “There isn’t a lot of star power coming out of the sort of centrist, establishment wing of the party.”

Establishment Democrats, however, point to the strength of moderate candidates elsewhere, and stress that it’s the left raising the stakes in Michigan—in part as an effort to rescue their own credibility following the Platner faceplant in Maine. They believe progressives, eager to prove that Platner was a sui generis flawed candidate, are too dug in to have an honest conversation about the type of politics best suited to win a swing state that has twice voted for Donald Trump.

“Unlike in New York or Denver or Philly, you have a swing seat that really matters, where we could lose in the general,” said Matt Bennett, a cofounder of the centrist Dem group Third Way, which has been fiercely critical of El-Sayed.

THE CAUSTIC FACTIONALISM has, ironically, produced one area of agreement: Neither side is all that confident that the party is capable of uniting around the eventual nominee following the August 4 primary. Establishment party operatives whom I spoke with allege the progressive left is fine risking the balance of the Senate to prove an intraparty ideological point. Progressives felt similarly about their moderate counterparts, arguing that the establishment views candidates like El-Sayed as just as detrimental to the political system as MAGAism.

The fact that Michigan’s primary is so late in the summer allows very little time for the two camps to make nice ahead of November. Stevens’s backers are quick to note that already some El-Sayed supporters have threatened to not vote for her in the general election if she is the party nominee. And while centrist and establishment Democrats aren’t yet making similar threats publicly, there’s some fear that it would be inevitable should El-Sayed win the nomination—a fear fed by the longstanding gripe that the left is always asked to get in line while the center never faces such demands.

“Why is it the left’s obligation to always step into line when we don’t win in a primary? But centrists, moderates don’t have to do that?” asked Longabaugh.

Longabaugh added that he worried the dynamic in Michigan indicated that the party might not only be unable to come together in support of the Senate nominee but, looking ahead, that the national party would have trouble uniting around the eventual 2028 presidential nominee. And he’s not alone. The acrimony in Michigan strongly echoes the 2016 Democratic presidential primary—when backers of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton continued their feuding well after the contest ended.

As one progressive strategist put it to me: “Michigan is a battle for 2026 that will tell you everything you need to know about 2028.”

Some, however, see it all as the vanity of small differences.

“There will be people in the mainstream world as well that will be rooting for [El-Sayed] to lose because they can be like, ‘Hey, see, we fucking told you,’” said Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist who is supporting Stevens. He described it all as remarkably self-defeating.

“Where I get frustrated is that, in the end, El-Sayed’s and Stevens’s voting record—either one of them in the U.S. Senate would probably have 94 percent of the exact same vote.”

🫏 Donkey Business:

— Michigan’s is not the only Midwestern primary on the horizon that’s increasingly become a source of anxiety among Democratic officials. The August 11 race for Wisconsin governor is causing agita as well.

Although Trump carried the state in 2024, this gubernatorial contest should be winnable for Democrats given the favorable political environment. But some moderate party officials have grown worried that Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, could win the primary and tank Democrats’ chances in November. Republicans clearly see Hong as the weakest candidate in the primary; a super PAC with GOP ties is spending $2.2 million boosting her candidacy.

For a while, moderates viewed Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez as best positioned to blunt Hong’s rise and unite the party. But on Friday, Rodriguez abruptly dropped out of the race after she discovered that her campaign manager had double-counted campaign donations, leaving Rodriguez with far less money in the bank than she thought. That’s left some Democratic officials scrambling to figure out how to stop Hong.

Some Dems believe the best option is to rally around former lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes, whose pollster has argued that the primary is now a two-person race between Barnes and Hong. But there are plenty in the party who are deeply skeptical of Barnes’s ability to compete in the general election after he was attacked in his 2022 Senate campaign for his past progressive positions and lost by one percentage point to Ron Johnson. Instead, they’ve turned to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley—who jumped back in the race over the weekend after he’d suspended his campaign just a few days prior. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat who is not running for re-election, endorsed Crowley on Saturday. Keep an eye on this contest, as it’s, well, getting crazy.

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THERE HAS BEEN A LOT OF DRAMA in the Senate landscape over the past few weeks: Graham Platner’s downfall in Maine; the increasingly hostile primary battle between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan; and the sudden death of Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, which has left Democrats hoping that a bruising GOP primary in South Carolina could make the seat unexpectedly competitive in November.

So, with less than four months to go until November 3, I wanted to check in with one of the most seasoned and well-respected Democratic Senate campaign operatives: JB Poersch. Poersch served as the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2006 and 2008, and now runs Senate Majority PAC, the party’s most influential super PAC, which is aligned with Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. As you’ll see in our conversation, Poersch is very defensive of the job Schumer has done recruiting this cycle (and he has no desire to take ownership of Schumer-recruit Janet Mills’s failed bid in Maine). He genuinely believes South Carolina could be worth paying attention to. And he’s quietly watching a pair of red-state independent candidates. Our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Lauren Egan: At this phase in the midterm cycle, what is the Democratic path to winning the Senate?

JB Poersch: The cycle started off with most of the focus on Georgia, North Carolina, Maine, and Michigan. Those were the primary four. The Republicans make a lot of noise about New Hampshire, but they never tell you that the last time [former Sen. John] Sununu ran for Senate twenty years ago, he got drubbed.1

What’s happened since then is that [the GOP’s] money, their reservations have shifted primarily to four more states. They’re states that Trump won by 13 points or more, but that may be the key to holding the majority for the Democrats: Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas. They’re all toss-ups. I know that from our data, and I think public data would say the same thing. The other thing they have in common is that there are uniquely, really good [Democratic] candidates in the races in those four states.

Egan: Is there a race that’s not on folks’ radar that could end up being competitive?

Poersch: There’s another tier of races that are in strong Republican territory. There’s Florida with Alex Vindman, who’s already raised $16 million that we know of in reports. In Mississippi, Democrats are excited about Scott Colom. The independent bids are notable in Nebraska and in Montana, and we’re watching those independent candidates closely. They’re both running really, really good campaigns.

But the other one that’s coming up today is obviously

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AT EACH OF HIS MANY, MANY campaign stops, Rob Sand—Iowa’s state auditor, now the Democratic nominee for governor—rolls out the same choreographed routine. A cynic might call it a gimmick. He asks for a show of hands: Who in here is a registered Republican? A few hands invariably go up, and Sand leads the room in a round of appreciative applause. Who’s a registered independent? More hands, more applause. There’s one more round of claps for the Democrats (“I’m big on fairness,” Sand says). Finally, the candidate invites the audience—cynics, avert your eyes!—to join him in singing the first verse of “America the Beautiful.”1 Someone picks the first note, and off they go.

“Doesn’t that feel better already?” Sand says when it’s over. “Isn’t that what we ought to be doing?”

I’ve been intrigued by Sand’s candidacy this year for a few reasons. He’s running strong in a region—the Farm Belt—that has been more cautionary tale than competitive terrain for Democrats lately: As auditor, Sand is currently the only Democratic statewide officeholder in Iowa. And at a time when so much of the country’s populist energy is concentrating on the political fringes, he’s building momentum as a different kind of populist—a technocratic, centrist, competence-obsessed insurgent.

For at least this one guy, in at least this one state, something about it seems to be working. Although Iowa has voted reliably red lately, several major elections analysts have scored the governor’s contest as a tossup between Sand and Republican nominee Zach Lahn. A New York Times/Siena poll of likely voters conducted in the second half of June found Sand slightly in the lead, 48 percent to 47 percent.

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Part of the secret to Sand’s appeal is the harmony between his own biography and his political pitch. The youthful-looking 43-year-old came up in the Iowa government as a public corruption prosecutor, serving for seven years in the attorney general’s office. He leveraged that experience into two successful runs for state auditor on a clean-up-the-books platform, with a laser focus on accountability. That theme still undergirds his campaign speeches today. And Iowa Republicans did him one major political favor: They passed a law gimping the oversight powers of the auditor’s office during his tenure.

In Sand’s telling, what ails Iowa isn’t its decade of Republican governance per se, but a decade of single-party control, period. One-party Democratic control, he insists in his stump speech, wouldn’t be much better: “If you think of that as the solution, please visit California or New York. There you will find problems. Some of the problems are different, because the parties are different, but some are the same. And you know why they’re the same. It’s the same thing we pray in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Lead us not into temptation.’ Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

In his speeches, Sand flogs a host of accountability-focused reforms he’d like to achieve that are credibly populist—starting with term limits, age limits, and cognitive tests for elected officials. He wants to ban state officials from trading stocks, strengthen whistleblower protections, and increase criminal penalties for supposed public servants who embezzle or defraud. And rather than launching frontal attacks on GOP policies, he zeroes in on specific reforms for places where the GOP state government has taken unpopular stances: In the case of Iowa’s major expansion of school choice, Sand argues that wealthier Iowans shouldn’t be eligible for school vouchers, and that private schools that accept them should be eligible for public audit.

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NOTICE WHAT’S ABSENT from Sand’s pitch: The us-vs.-them rage underlying so much of today’s populist politics. His target is not so much a particular class of political or economic villains, but a set of malfunctioning political systems that he argues incentivize bad political behavior. Another recurring bit in his stump speech is a lengthy explanation of a proposed major electoral reform: the abolition of Iowa’s closed political primaries and a move to the “approval voting” system pioneered by cities like Fargo, North Dakota. Sand envisions a system where the top four vote-getters in an open primary advance to a general election in which voters can approve of any combination of the four, and the one with the most approval wins.

“We can make politicians behave like normal people just by giving them a reason to do it,” Sand argues. “Imagine politics being a virtuous cycle instead of a vicious one.”

It all adds up to a compelling message, and one Sand has been pounding the pavement to make for years. He’s been a relentless tourer of the state throughout his political career; when I caught up with him last weekend in Clark and Decatur Counties on the Missouri border, I spoke with plenty of voters who’d been following Sand since he first came to their town years before.

In Decatur County, one of these voters was Amanda Swanson—one of the few to raise her hand as a Republican at the event. (She told me she has bounced around: At various times she has been registered as a Democrat, a Republican, and an independent.) “As the auditor, [Sand] didn’t just target the opposing party,” Swanson said. “He was fair, he was balanced. And also, I really enjoy his food reviews when he travels the state.”2

Swanson’s mother, Valorie Long, chimed in in agreement: “And if you watch, his viewpoints are not Democrat, or Republican, or independent. It’s what will work, and how can it be accomplished.”

You get the idea. Sand’s got a good thing going—the kind of combination of record, pitch, and reach many politicians would kill for. What he’s got working against him, on the other hand, are two giant factors: a state that dislikes his party, and a party that’s charging in the opposite direction from him. One Republican strategist I spoke to described Sand like this: “Smart. Talented. Desperately trying to avoid his party’s brand.”

Sand may have won two races in a Democrat-hostile environment, Republicans reason. But he has yet to accomplish a much harder task: winning as a Democrat in a campaign cycle where he is the face of the Iowa Democratic Party. At the top of the ticket, Sand is already facing a concerted messaging effort to brand him personally as a lib in moderate’s clothing: “Rob Sand wants you to believe he’s a moderate,” the Republican Governors Association wrote in a typical post this month. “But he’s backed by Illinois’ JB Pritzker and California’s Gavin Newsom. Rob Sand would turn Iowa into Illinois and California.” (Wow, both of those?)

For his part, Sand dismisses the idea that the challenge to define himself is tougher than it’s been in the past. “All I do is go everywhere and I talk to everybody and say the same stuff,” he told me last week. “I think the vast majority of people already know me. The folks who are on the inside in leadership in the Republican party—they’re going to do what they’re paid to do, which is badmouth Democrats and get Republicans elected. It’s their full-time job. I’m going to keep doing what I do.”

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ONE THING SAND isn’t so keen to do is to weigh in on broader questions of Democratic infighting outside his state. Around the country, it’s candidates on the opposite side of Sand’s coalition who seem to have most of the momentum these days: Members of the Democratic Socialists of America notched major wins in New York congressional primaries last week and followed that up with another impressive showing in Colorado this week. Yes, it’s been just a handful of races in just a few places, but that’s been enough for Republicans from President Donald Trump on down to claim the results reveal Democrats’ true colors: “The Communists,” Trump posted last week, “are finally making their move.”

If Sand thinks any of this will make his race harder, he could not be more determined to keep it to himself. “I know there’s a lot of people out there that want to speculate or guess or prognosticate about the direction of either party,” he told me. “They’re free to do that. I just know what I know about Iowa.”

In some ways, watching Sand campaign feels like watching someone try to defy gravity. The campaign cuts against so much of what we take for granted about politics: that rage and partisanship is what drives the electorate, that everything ultimately comes down to jersey color, that it’s impossible to get people excited about an incrementalist agenda that promises to make things better not by implementing grand social change but by tinkering with the rules in the middle.

Then again, that turns out to be the whole substance of Sand’s pitch: If you’re sick of the status quo, why not come along with me and strive for something better? It might not touch a cynic—but I learned at those campaign stops that I’m not a cynic after all. That “America the Beautiful” shtick got me every time.

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SINCE THE START OF THE WAR with Iran, Donald Trump has argued that whatever economic pain resulted from the conflict would not only be worth bearing but temporary. Following the June 17 signing of a memorandum of understanding to end the war, he’s been practically giddy about the falling price of gas.

But what if, from a political standpoint, any reprieve at the pump is simply too late for Trump politically?

That’s what Democrats believe.

In my conversations with the party’s pollsters,

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AFTER THE 2024 ELECTION, Democratic leadership quickly concluded that a major factor for their losses had been the party’s significant drift left on social and cultural issues. And among the main policies where a recalibration seemed in order, abortion appeared top of mind.

In my conversations with party strategists during those months, many said that while support for abortion rights was foundational, Democrats needed to recreate the 2006 midterm model when pro-life (and pro-gun) candidates were recruited to run in red districts. They noted that it was on the backs of anti-abortion lawmakers like Heath Shuler of North Carolina, Brad Ellsworth of Indiana, and Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania that Democrats regained majorities in both chambers of Congress.

But over the past few months, this Bush-era thinking has begun to seriously soften.

There is a growing sentiment among that same consulting class that abortion access can actually serve as a winning issue for Democrats running in red parts of the country. They increasingly view the traditional pro-life versus pro-choice faultline as a relic. In its place, they see a series of state-specific battles in which candidates focus on the state- and local-level restrictions directly affecting their constituents rather than a larger narrative about the legacy of Roe v. Wade.

“There is real value and imperative to be a different kind of Democrat. But the idea that being a pro-life Democrat is sort of a cookie-cutter cheat code—we’re not in that era anymore,” said Zac McCrary, an Alabama-based Democratic pollster.

McCrary, like other party operatives I spoke with, told me that the end of Roe, which came four years ago today, has fundamentally changed how people perceive the debate around abortion. No longer a right to be protected, abortion access has become, for many voters, a pain that is endured. In states with restrictive policies in place, people have now lived for years being denied medical care, sometimes in life-threatening situations. Such restrictions have allowed Democratic candidates to run against specific policies and outcomes, rather than having to mount a broad defense of an abstract right or the now-overturned Supreme Court decision.

“Pro-life was a comfortable theoretical stance for a lot of voters and politicians [before Roe v. Wade was overturned]. But that abstraction has been replaced by the messy reality of government-enforced mandates,” said McCrary. “The Republican party has pivoted from defending a moral principle to enforcing a restriction that compromises individual freedom. That’s an overreach that voters, even in red states, have found deeply uncomfortable.”

Anecdotal voter data bear this out. As The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell wrote this week, participants in focus groups she’s recently conducted often bring up abortion as an issue—especially in states with restrictive bans. In these focus groups, it has been the Republican voters who have talked about what they see as the cruelty of forcing women to continue carrying a nonviable pregnancy, as well as the sheer terror of the possibility of being denied care that could save their life.

“I think we’re returning to it being an important issue. It may not be the number one issue, but it’s still part of the conversation,” said Josh Marcus-Blank, a Democratic consultant. “[Democrats] are a little bit more balanced in their perspective on it than they may have been right after 2024 when people were pointing fingers at everyone on every issue as the reason why we lost.”

Recent election results also support the idea that downplaying or running away from the issue of abortion isn’t necessary for Democrats to thrive. Abigail Spanberger went after her GOP opponent’s “extreme” stance on abortion in her successful bid for Virginia governor last year, and Virginia Democrats expanded their majority in the state House by thirteen seats by running pro-choice candidates who put money into ads focused on abortion rights. Earlier this year, Chris Taylor won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court by 20 points after running multiple campaign ads focused on abortion rights that portrayed the conservative candidate as too extreme on the issue. Some of the party’s top-flight Senate candidates in traditionally Republican states are also not shying away from talking about abortion rights. Former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, former Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola, and Texas state Rep. James Talarico all put out statements on Wednesday about the Dobbs anniversary and reaffirmed their belief in the fundamental right to reproductive care. And in Ohio, gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton also posted on social media about the anniversary of Dobbs.

“Spanberger really provided the model for how Democrats can do this in tough states, and it was using reproductive freedom and abortion as a deal breaker,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All.

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There’s still an instinct among some Democrats—particaurly those who haven’t run in competitive races since the Dobbs decision—to shy away from talking about abortion or to reflexively tack to the center on the issue. While reproductive rights advocates have stressed that the country has moved beyond the Clinton-era talking point that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” some operatives still see merit in that type of messaging. Timmaraju and others chalk this up to a failure to appreciate just how much the Dobbs decision and the restrictive abortion laws that followed have shifted public opinion on abortion access. Pollsters like McCrary told me that before Dobbs, the country was more “softly pro-life,” but that we’ve since become “more of a softly pro-choice country.”

“The anti-abortion movement really did a number on Democrats’ confidence on this issue,” said Timmaraju. “What we’re doing is trying to get Democrats to understand we’re not on the defense on this—we’re on the offense.”

The party operatives I spoke to told me that in the wider Democratic ecosystem, many people still worry that Kamala Harris lost in 2024 because she focused too much on restoring abortion access. They fear that Democratic candidates will gravitate single-mindedly toward attacking Donald Trump’s failed economic agenda and in doing so ignore abortion, potentially missing out on an opportunity to paint their Republican opponents as out of touch with voters.

“We need to be able to talk about the economy and abortion at the same time. And we as an entity are worried that Democrats are going to run away from abortion as an issue because of what happened in 2024,” said Priorities USA’s executive director, Danielle Butterfield. “Abortion needs to be centered in the conversation consistently.”

Butterfield told me that in Priorities USA’s research on the 2024 election, they found that Harris and Trump voters recalled Democratic ads on abortion more often than they did ads on the economy. Because Democrats had a clear point of view and an emotional story to tell on abortion issues, Butterfield argues, it stuck more with voters than an often vague economic message.

Priorities USA is one of a number of Democratic-aligned groups that is planning to spend serious money on abortion messaging ahead of the 2026 and 2028 election cycle. Earlier this week, Priorities USA announced a $30 million campaign aimed at defining potential 2028 Republican presidential candidates. The campaign is expected to focus on where officials like JD Vance and Marco Rubio stand on abortion. Reproductive Freedom for All also announced it would spend $23.5 million this cycle to boost pro-choice Democrats running in battlegrounds and has also launched a content creator program to highlight personal health care stories from states with abortion restrictions.

“This is a value driver for voters,” said Jessica Mackler, the president of EMILY’s List, which works to elect Democratic pro-choice women. “When they understand where Republicans stand on this issue, it says something about who they are.”

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THE CURRENT DEBATE AROUND ABORTION has almost flipped the old dynamics of the Roe era. Back then, it was Republicans who were attacking Democrats for specific policy approaches, such as late-term or taxpayer-funded abortions. Now, they are the ones parrying Democratic attacks over the abortion-restriction laws their party has put in place.

But it isn’t all offense for those Democrats. The challenge for the party is figuring out how to run on abortion rights while accommodating candidates with more nuanced perspectives. It’s proven to be tricky in the past.

In 2016, for example, NARAL Pro-Choice America (which rebranded in 2023 to Reproductive Freedom for All) criticized Nancy Pelosi for saying she did not believe in “abortion on demand” or that “abortion is a form of birth control.” In 2017, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Democratic National Committee were fiercely criticized for elevating a candidate for mayor of Omaha who had opposed abortion. And in some corners of the party, even signaling a willingness to endorse some restrictions—such as after fetal viability—can still feel taboo.

But in many ways, the GOP’s hard-line position on abortion has made positioning easier for Democrats. The post-Dobbs landscape has allowed candidates who may be personally uncomfortable with abortion to nonetheless talk about the consequences of restrictive laws and how they are bad public policy. This approach is already playing out on the campaign trail this cycle in competitive congressional races.

Nancy Lacore, the EMILY’s List–backed Democratic nominee in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, talks about her Catholic faith, but also how personal beliefs on the matter shouldn’t be imposed on others. Bobby Pulido, running in Texas’s 15th Congressional District, has also talked about his Catholic faith and personal opposition to abortion. At the same time, he called Texas’s law “draconian,” adding that it’s not his “place to tell somebody else what they can do.”

“Bobby Pulido—a couple of years ago might have felt comfortable being silent on abortion,” said Timmaraju. “But he really understands the impact and that you can’t run in Texas right now without making a commitment to address abortion access.”

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— It was a good night for lefty insurgents in New York City yesterday, after a trio of candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept competitive House primaries. Most notably, democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the influential chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who was endorsed by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Rep. Daniel Goldman also lost his primary to Brad Lander, who criticized the incumbent for his close relationship with AIPAC and for voting for military aid to Israel.

The primary results were the latest example of Democratic voters thirsting for outsider candidates willing to critique the establishment and question the status quo. But all the usual caveats apply: New York City is not representative of the rest of the country.

I’ll also leave you with this chart from Kyle Tharp:

— The Democratic primary in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District was finally called on Friday for Matt Dunlap—and some Democratic strategists that I’ve spoken with are heated. Dunlap, who pitched himself as the progressive in the race, defeated the DCCC’s preferred candidate, the more moderate state Sen. Joe Baldacci.

The mostly rural district voted for Donald Trump by 10 percentage points in 2024 and retiring Rep. Jared Golden—one of the most moderate members of the Democratic caucus—has narrowly eked out victories in his past few races. It’s not hard to see why some operatives don’t think Dunlap is the right fit for the district.

Strategists that I’ve spoken with are particularly frustrated with national progressive figures like California Rep. Ro Khanna, who campaigned on behalf of Dunlap ahead of the primary. New FEC filings also show that a Republican-aligned super PAC spent $500,000 boosting Dunlap’s primary, a sign that the GOP viewed him as the more beatable general election candidate.

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— Florida Can’t Stop Fighting Over a Bird

— They Looked Like They Were Getting Rich on Polymarket—but None of It Was Real

— I’m a Jon Ossoff rally truther

— Americans Are in Denial About Elder Care

EARLIER THIS MONTH, the Trump-aligned super PAC Citizens for Sanity released an ad attacking James Talarico on trans issues.

That wasn’t a surprise. After all, Republican culture-war attacks against Democrats are about as dog-bites-man as it gets in politics. What stood out about the ad was the content. It was AI-generated, depicting Talarico as Maria von Trapp from The Sound of Music, singing1 about how he wants to change “the gender of all your offspring,” set to the tune of “My Favorite Things.”

Citizens for Sanity didn’t seem to have any hesitation about releasing such a spot. In fact, the group proudly leaked that they were putting six figures behind it.

That left Talarico’s campaign with a decision to make. It could forcefully condemn the ad or even threaten legal action against the group. But doing so would risk a Streisand effect, drawing more attention to the very content it wanted to bury. Alternatively, it could ignore the ad, confident that voters would not see it or would dismiss it if they did. But that risked allowing the spot to gain traction with no pushback.

The campaign chose

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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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My open tabs:

— Building Back the Bidens

— The Legend of Susan Collins

— How to Canoe to the World Cup in New Jersey

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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— Inside America’s Most Dysfunctional Zoo

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— California is drowning in internet campaign ‘slop.’ 2028 is next.

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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— How Dolly Parton Built the Tourism Empire of Her Dreams

— 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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— 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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