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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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🫏 Donkey Business:

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

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

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

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

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— Signed, Sealed, Delivered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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My open tabs:

— California’s Blue Armageddon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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My open tabs:

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

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

— Bernie Sanders Is Back as a Left-Wing Kingmaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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🫏 Donkey Business:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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My open tabs:

— Inside a Corporate Retreat That Went Very Badly Wrong

— The Endless Goodbye

— Democrats Should Try Being an Actual Political Party Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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🫏 Donkey Business:

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

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

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

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

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My open tabs:

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

— Judge Jeanine’s Big Audition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ladies and gentlemen . . . the Democrats!

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🫏 Donkey Business:

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

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

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

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

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

— The bros are more liberal than you think

FOR DECADES, REPORTERS ON DEADLINE had a reliable go-to when in need of expert analysis or a no-nonsense, authoritative quote about the latest political development.

It was Stuart Rothenberg, author of an influential newsletter—The Rothenberg Political Report, renamed in 2017 to Inside Elections—that analyzes and rates the competitiveness of House and Senate races.

Just scan the archives of the nation’s leading media outlets. There, you’ll find dozens of articles featuring Rothenberg’s quotable wisdom. He was the emblem of detached objectivity—an honest broker amid the increasingly piqued partisan turf wars.

Rothenberg’s competitor and longtime friend Charlie Cook, another famously neutral analyst and the founder of the Cook Political Report newsletter, explained it this way: “The highest compliment I can get from someone is when they say, ‘You know, I can’t tell whether you’re a Democrat or Republican.’. . . It’s something that, back when I started the newsletter in 1984, I tried very, very, very hard to do. And when Stu was doing the Rothenberg Political Report, he did as well.”

But things have changed for Rothenberg. He’s still opining on every topic under the political sun, from whether rising gas prices really are politically perilous for the incumbent president to the impact of the latest congressional scandal on the voters in a swing House district. But over the last decade, this platonic ideal of a down-the-middle pundit has become a vocal, unapologetic critic of Donald Trump and his administration.

In just the past few weeks, Rothenberg has called Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent a “jerk” and Trump an “idiot” and a “lunatic.”

He agreed that Trump is the worst president in history and warned that “no matter how vile Trump is today, he’ll be worse tomorrow.” “Lock him up,” Rothenberg posted in response to Trump saying that there would be “Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!”

Hours after Trump posted “I’m glad he’s dead” about the former FBI director, Rothenberg tweeted that the president “couldn’t carry Robert Mueller’s jockstrap.”

And Rothenberg is not shy about his desire for Democrats to take back power, retweeting campaign videos of Democratic Senate candidates and calling Democratic party lawyer Marc Elias “terrific.”

One explanation for the shift could be

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PICTURE THIS. It’s early January 2028. It’s cold, dark, and gloomy—but Democrats aren’t succumbing to seasonal depression or a post-holiday-season hangover. They’re eagerly, anxiously anticipating the first presidential primary contest, which is just a few weeks away.

The half-dozen candidates who are still in the race had imagined that the final days before voting started would be defined by debates over AI policy, health care, or housing. Instead, the race has been roiled by rumors spread by mid-tier content creators that one candidate was talking trash about another behind closed doors. During campaign stops at New Hampshire’s Red Arrow Diner and Iowa City’s Hamburg Inn, the roiling online drama is all that the actual press corps is asking the candidates about.

If that scenario sounds familiar—if not depressing—it’s because we just lived it the Texas Senate Democratic primary. The last few weeks of the race were consumed by heated debates about racism and identity politics—not because the candidates themselves had sparked them but because Morgan Thompson, a Dallas-based content creator, posted a TikTok to her nearly 200,000 followers claiming that James Talarico called his former primary opponent Colin Allred a “mediocre black man” in a private conversation. Talarico said his comments had been mischaracterized. But supporters of Allred and Talarico’s primary opponent, Jasmine Crockett, amplified Thompson. The back-and-forth became the predominant lens through which much of the national media covered the race.

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For many Democratic officials, the Texas episode was a startling example of the new challenges that campaigns face. Social media influencers who are posting about and even covering their races are playing by a looser set of rules and ethics than conventional journalists. And their impact is often many magnitudes greater as voters increasingly turn to social media and short-form videos for their news. The situation in Texas underscored just how tricky the relationship can be between campaigns and those influencers who are often incentivized to start drama that gains them clout, followers, and money.

When I asked Democratic campaign operatives about the role of influencers in politics, almost every one let out an audible groan. While some well-known influencers like Carlos Eduardo Espina—who has 22 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook—tend to be less catty and more professional, the operatives I talked to say the majority don’t exhibit those traits. And they emphasized that the internet is teeming with thousands of micro- and nano-influencers looking to make a name for themselves.

These smaller influencers still have very engaged and loyal followers—making them important communication tools for campaigns. But they often lack an understanding of how politics works—or, more specifically, an appreciation for the tradeoffs that often must be made—and tend to spread content that revolves around conflict and misinformation.

“Wild West,” “tinderbox,” and “chaos ecosystem” were just a few of the phrases that Democratic campaign staffers used to describe this era of political influencers.

“The 2028 primary, the whole discourse, all the news cycles: There’s a world in which they’re all rooted in things—true or untrue—that start from influencers,” said Democratic strategist Andrew Mamo.

As the midterms get nearer, campaigns are scrambling to figure out how to navigate these relationships. There are basic organizational questions that have to be sorted out, such as who on the campaign should manage creators. Is it the responsibility of the digital team, which typically oversees online content? Or should it be the press secretary, who deals with reporters? “It’s a weird in-between zone,” said Parker Butler, former director of digital rapid response on Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

Aside from the issue of editorial standards, there are also questions about money and transparency. The Federal Election Commission does not require influencers to disclose when they are paid to promote political candidates or causes, which has allowed a network of dark money groups to buy online influence almost unnoticed. Some Democratic staffers said creators have demanded campaigns pay them thousands of dollars to post a positive video and threatened to go negative on those campaigns if they don’t agree to the fee.

The lack of transparency about who is paying for what content has also fueled bitter speculation among staffers about whether rival campaigns are behind negative TikToks. Days before the March 17 Illinois primary, MS Now reported that a secretive political organization called Democracy Unmuted was offering content creators $1,500 to make negative videos about Kat Abughazaleh, a candidate for the 9th Congressional District.1

“It’s going to be a disaster,” said Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki when I asked how influencers could, um, influence the 2028 primary. “Part of what’s hard about it is some of these things are organic and reflect the individual opinions of the creators. And some of them aren’t. And because there’s less transparency around this, it’s really hard for viewers to make those distinctions.”

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Last year, the journalist Taylor Lorenz published an investigation in Wired about the dark underbelly of paying political influencers for content. According to her reporting, the Chorus Creator Incubator Program—which was originally sponsored by a liberal dark money group called the Sixteen Thirty Fund—offered dozens of high-profile progressive, pro-Democratic influencers thousands of dollars a month to support their work. Lorenz wrote that they did so under the condition that they not acknowledge the existence of the program or that their content was being paid for, though a person familiar with the operation stressed that there were no such demands—either for secrecy or around the type of content created. After the report came out, some creators denied taking the money.

Maria Comstock, an influencer who posts videos satirizing D.C. stereotypes (such as Capitol Hill staffers) as well as Q&As with former spies,2 told me that every creator has a different standard for transparency with their followers. “I’ve had funders ask me not to [disclose that I was being paid] before,” she said, “and I’m like, ‘Absolutely not.’ It’s just rude to my audience.” Comstock also emphasized that content creators are ultimately small business owners who rely on their accounts to generate money.

The opaqueness of the political influencer market incentivizes everyone to get in on the game. No candidate can know for sure that their primary opponents aren’t using social media pay-to-play against them. So the safe bet is to quietly hire some social media champions of their own.

The incentives get even stronger when it comes to the general election, as Republicans are known to be far more aggressive at paying off social media influencers than Democrats. Pay-for-post schemes have been rampant throughout the conservative commentariat during the Trump years (as studiously documented by my colleague Will Sommer). One reason being that there is just a lot more money at play.

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In a recent LinkedIn post about the economics of political content creation, Comstock wrote that she was offered $2,000 in 2024 by a left-leaning group to create political content—and $36,000 by a right-leaning group.

“Because of my values, I worked with organizations on the left and declined the offers on the right. But let’s be honest: For many creators, that delta makes the decision for you,” she wrote in the post. “And if you’re a lifestyle, sports, or comedy creator who doesn’t deeply care about politics? The incentive structure nudges you in one direction.”

Between the prisoner’s dilemma of buying social clout and the amount of money that right-leaning groups are apparently spending on online influence, Democrats have plenty of reason to believe that they have to figure out how to work with content creators, however painful (or expensive) that process might be.

“The MAGA movement has been freaking stellar in this space, where they’ve been building these comms hubs for decades,” said Linh Nguyen, a Democratic digital strategist, arguing that her side of the aisle was still playing catch up. “They’ve known the role of influencers for years.”

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— Speaking of influencers, the Democratic party is at odds over how friendly it should be with the streamer Hasan Piker. A self-described socialist, Piker has around 4.5 million followers across YouTube and Twitch and is often talked about as the Joe Rogan of the left. But he’s faced accusations of being antisemitic and defending terrorist groups and has raised eyebrows for recent trips he’s taken to Cuba and China. In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Jonathan Cowan and Lily Cohen of the center-left think tank Third Way argued: “Piker is anti-American, antiwomen, anti-Western and antisemitic. No Democrat should engage with him. All should seek to push him to the fringe, where he belongs.”

So when Abdul El-Sayed, who is running in Michigan’s competitive Democratic primary for Senate, announced that he’d be campaigning with Piker next month, it set off another round of questions among party leaders about how to engage with influencers who hold some controversial views but have a loyal and engaged follower base.

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— The 2026 Midterms Are Critical. But 2032 Could Be Existential.

— Sorry, Mom. You’re Chatting With an A.I. Agent, Not Your Son.

— The Real March Madness Is the Corporate Race to Ink Viral Stars

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This story has been updated with additional reporting.

THE DEBATE AMONG DEMOCRATS over how to win back disaffected voters has touched on virtually every aspect of campaigns, policy, and politics. But what if the answer is so primal, so shallow, so inherently biological that to hear it out loud would make you uncomfortably chuckle?

What if the key to winning was to run more “hot” people?

Don’t laugh.

The idea that the Democratic party has a hotness deficit it needs to address has come up repeatedly in conversations I’ve had over the past few months as I’ve talked to strategists about what the party can do to improve how it’s perceived. Yes, they say, Democrats need to shed litmus tests, put aside purity politics, and drop the academic-sounding language. But they also would benefit from simply having more thirst-traps on the ticket, more candidates who could make voters swoon.

“It’s easier to elect hot people. America is a superficial nation, and we want our politicians—especially those that are representing us on an international stage, as the number-one world power—to be hot, to look good,” said Yemisi Egbewole, the former Biden White House press office chief of staff, adding that this had become a “foundational brunch time conversation” among the D.C. Democratic class.

“We are drawn to attractive people. That’s just science.”

Wait, is it science?

In fact, it is.

“There’s lots of evidence that people focus on appearances just all the time,” said Gabriel Lenz, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who coauthored a 2010 study that found that the physical appearance of candidates strongly influences voters.1

“We’re asking [voters] to make really hard decisions—which is who’s going to be the best leader, representative, whoever it is. And we’re often not making it that easy for them to get a lot of other information about the candidates. So people exhibit a very basic pattern that’s well established and well documented,” he added. “They swap in who just looks like a leader, and don’t realize they’ve done that.”

Whether motivated by the data or more carnal desires, the “hot people” conversation has begun to take over parts of the political internet, where a number of left-leaning influencers and podcast hosts have expressed their desire for the next class of Democratic leaders to have some sex appeal.

“Oh my God, I want a hot president,” Jennifer Welch of the I’ve Had It podcast said in an interview last week. “Hot democrat alert,” posted Democratic influencer Keith Edwards in response to a video clip of Sam Forstag, a 31-year-old smokejumper running for one of Montana’s two House seats. If you search Jon Ossoff’s name on X or TikTok, you’ll be met with a number of thirsty posts calling the Georgia senator a “total hottie.”

“Jon Ossoff—there was just something about him,” said the content creator Qondi Ntini, who runs what can best be described as an Democratic thirst-trap X account, where she frequently refers to Ossoff as “Senator My Boo.” She’s raised thousands of dollars for Democratic candidates through the account and has been invited to the White House and the DNC as a part of their content-creator programs.

“The way I see thirst and the people that I choose to support, it’s more about their values and what they can do for their constituents. The hotness stems from that, and it makes them hotter. It’s also kind of a rebuke of toxic masculinity,” she added. “It’s a fun way to still stay engaged with politics without burning out.”

It goes without saying that simply running for office as a “hot” candidate doesn’t guarantee your election, even if the research suggests it could enhance your chances. For starters, there is no universal definition of what constitutes “hot.” Beauty, in this case, is in the eye of the voter.

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HERE’S THE THING: Good looks are fairly synonymous with an aura of youth or vitality—and that seems to be a real driving motivation for Democrats. The party is in the middle of a mass rejection of its gerontocracy—slamming the door shut on the Biden presidency that wasn’t exactly known for its, uh, sex appeal. There is a deep desire to recapture the cultural relevance the party enjoyed during the Barack Obama and Bill Clinton years and to shed the current perception that Democrats are the dweeby teacher’s pets who sit at the front of the classroom.

“Obama and Clinton both had kind of intoxicating personalities; they were young and they were the cool ones. I do think that’s a huge part of this—people think of Democrats in this era as the ugly, hall monitor indoor kids,” said Democratic strategist Jesse Lehrich. “It’s just time for us to have a hot, young, charismatic face in the party.”

It’s not an irrational or even materialistic concern. Some of the most influential voices in the media have remarked that Democrats lack a certain panache that they had in the past—dating back to John F. Kennedy. But there are also real complications and discomforts that come when the conversation moves to this place.

Case in point: Last year, comedian Andrew Schulz—one of the biggest stars of the so-called “manosphere”—went on the TRIGGERnometry podcast and offered his candid thoughts on why the Democratic party had lost its appeal.

“When I was younger, like, Democrats were cool. They were getting their dick sucked in the office,” Schulz said. “It was cool to be a Democrat. Now, conservatives got three baby mamas, the president got three baby mamas. He’s getting pussy left and right. He’s cool. . . . You want me to be a Democrat again? Get some pussy.”

In an interview with the New York Times, Schulz later explained that he was being “purposely reductive” to make a point—and no, of course he didn’t actually think that Democratic leaders simply needed to get laid more in order to win. But his point still resonated with Democrats, for two reasons. The first was because it was a clear signal about the current state of the cultural-political zeitgeist. The second was because it was crass and outdated. Monica Lewinsky was an intern—an employee—in her early twenties when she and the three-decades-older Clinton had an affair.

Even less scandalous discussions of sex appeal and “hotness” can quickly become awkward, such as back in 2008, when Amber Lee Ettinger became internet-famous for lip-syncing a music video called “(I Got a) Crush on Obama.” The video of Ettinger dancing in a bikini singing lines like “never wanted anybody more than I want you” and “universal health care reform, it makes me warm” was a viral sensation. And as the New York Times observed at the time, Ettinger, who became known as “Obama Girl,” helped “crystallize the view of the candidate as a pop culture figure and, to some, a sex symbol.”

The Obama team embraced the cultural phenomenon element of it. But they were not particularly thrilled when, a few months later, Washingtonian magazine put a shirtless photo of the then-president on the cover of their May 2009 edition and declared: “Our new neighbor is hot.”

The issue for the Obama team was that the focus on the aesthetics felt incompatible with the seriousness of the job. The issue for Democrats more broadly is that the soundness of the message (and the merits of the policy) should matter more than the symmetry of the face.

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And then, of course, there are the thornier questions about the objectification of women. Can, or should, an open push to run hotter candidates extend to them? Would anyone dare say so publicly? As of now, no. Democratic operatives I talked to all agree that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is indisputably “hot”—but not a single person wanted to be on the record saying it.

If all this feels uncouth, I get it. I am acutely aware that the very act of turning this topic into a newsletter is bound to induce groans and even a few perplexed or angry comments. But the issue is very real—you can see it playing out on the campaign trail. Staffers told me that all those social media videos of candidates working out in muscle tanks and tight biker shorts tend to do quite well online. An adviser to Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed told me they were left completely stunned at a campaign event last year after a throng of older women came up to El-Sayed and “latched on to his biceps.” I witnessed a similar phenomenon last fall at an event for Graham Platner’s Senate race in Maine; a voter sheepishly admitted to me that she’d come to the event because she thought he was attractive.

Then there is California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who, as Vogue put it in a profile earlier this year, is “embarrassingly handsome.” As vain as it is, this is going to be a real element of his 2028 campaign, should he choose to run for president. In fact, some Democratic officials told me that they think Newsom might be too good-looking, arguing that candidates still need to feel relatable.

Yet that’s not how looksmaxxer influencer Clavicular views it. In an interview with the Daily Wire last month, Clavicular said he would vote for Newsom over Vice President JD Vance in the 2028 presidential race because Newsom was, well, hotter.

“JD Vance is subhuman,” he declared. “Whereas Newsom is a 6′3′′ chad.”

The hotness election is upon us, whether we’re turned on by it or not.

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— Congressional Black Caucus members are pissed off at Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker for backing Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton in the state’s Democratic Senate primary rather than the caucus’s preferred candidate, Rep. Robin Kelly. Keep in mind that both Stratton and Kelly are black women. Yet CBC leaders are warning Pritzker that he’s made a serious mistake and has a lot of relationships to repair, especially if he plans to run for president in 2028.

“He has to justify what he did,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) told Politico. “I’m sure at some point if he decides to run, he’ll have to come with that justification. As to whether or not it has merit or not, remains to be seen.”

— Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear went after Vice President JD Vance in a speech on Saturday at a Democratic dinner in the Ohio county where Vance grew up, calling him the “most arrogant politician I have ever seen.” He argued that Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, was “poverty tourism” and “trafficked in this tired stereotype” about the region.

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— How White South Africans Are Reshaping the Mississippi Delta

— The Incredible Story of the Cartel Olympics

— Growing Frustration With Chuck Schumer Spurs Talk of Replacing Him

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG after the 2024 election—in which their party lost the White House and the Senate—for Democratic leaders to identify the problem: The party had drifted too far to the left on social and cultural issues.

It also didn’t take them long to come up with a solution: simply to shut up about it.

On the campaign trail, candidates like James Talarico in Texas have argued that “culture wars are a smokescreen.”

In an interview last year with NBC News, Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said that the GOP’s “obsession with these culture war issues is driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”

And in my conversations over the past few weeks, strategists and campaign staffers I’ve talked to across the country have argued that in order to win back working-class voters, Democrats just need to jiu-jitsu uncomfortable cultural questions about race or gender into criticism of the billionaire class.

“If I was running for governor of Tennessee, I wouldn’t say shit about guns. I mean, I own guns. I just wouldn’t talk about it,” Corbin Trent, former communications director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a cofounder of Justice Democrats (as well as a fellow Tennessean), told me in an interview last month. “It’s just not what I would talk about because I don’t think it’s the most pressing issue that people are facing.”

The shut-up-and-pivot approach is not without merit. As its proponents see it, people vote largely on economics. And for Democrats specifically, there’s little upshot in trying to formulate a nuanced position on cultural issues when they’re bound to either disappoint progressives or provide fodder to conservatives—or both.

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But the dismissiveness of cultural issues as not ‘real issues’ that actually matter to voters—and therefore not worthy of formulating an opinion on—has left some party operatives on edge. They worry that by not engaging, Democrats will continue to be perceived as condescending and untrustworthy. They fundamentally don’t believe that the party can win back working-class voters and prevent a lasting GOP majority by pretending these issues simply don’t exist.

And it doesn’t require one to look too far back in political history to see another downside of not engaging. During the close of the 2024 election, Donald Trump’s campaign pummeled Kamala Harris over transgender rights, turning her support for transition surgery for inmates into one of the most-advertised issues in the race. Harris’s operation chose not to respond. At least one prominent Democrat with a history of effectively triangulating on these types of issues was beside himself.

Democrats are raising fears of repeating those mistakes. But what’s different this time is

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Nashville, Tennessee
A SHORT FIFTEEN-MINUTE DRIVE from Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk and Jason Aldean’s Rooftop Bar—just two of the many country music celebrity–branded establishments that dot Nashville’s lower Broadway—sits Little Kurdistan.

To make that trip from downtown is to encounter the American South at its most glorious. There’s a pitmaster working a smoker on the side of the road, a Waffle House packed to the brim, and people perched on lowered tailgates at the Sonic drive-in soaking in the pristine 75-degree mid-March weather.

Keep driving until you hit Nolensville Road, and you’ll eventually come upon Little Kurdistan. From the outside, it’s utterly unassuming; it looks like any of the other hundreds of roadside shopping plazas found throughout the city. But this one is different. Store fronts are plastered with Kurdish signs advertising halal meat and shawarma. A mural depicting people playing backgammon in the streets of Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, wraps around the side of a building. You’ve reached the cultural hub for the 20,000 Kurds who live in Nashville, many of whose families began arriving here in the 1970s after fleeing persecution in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

Today, Nashville is home to the largest Kurdish population in North America. And the restaurants, supermarkets, clothing stores, and mosques that fill Little Kurdistan’s block-long retail space have become a point of pride—a symbol that the city has transformed from a sleepy state capital into a booming international destination. On any given day, you can hear a mix of Kurdish and Southern accents chatting over plates of grilled kebabs at Edessa Restaurant, or browsing the pastry case stacked full of flakey baklava at Azadi International Food Market and Bakery.

For years, this place has been a relatively peaceful, if not sleepy, mosaic; an ethnic neighborhood that blossomed in one of the South’s fastest-growing hubs. But the climate has recently become more tense.

As it happens, Little Kurdistan falls within the boundaries of Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District, which is represented by one of Congress’s most virulently anti-Muslim members. Republican Rep. Andy Ogles, now in his second term in the House, has spent the past week spewing Islamophobic comments on social media—and then unapologetically doubling down on them when called out.

“Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie,” Ogles tweeted last week.

In another post, he wrote: “If we don’t cease to import islam, the West falls.”

He shared images depicting Muslims as violent criminals and terrorists and said that “Paperwork doesn’t magically make you American. Muslims are unable to assimilate; they all have to go back.”

Forty-eight hours ago, he posted that he doesn’t “care about ‘dangerous rhetoric,’” because the “threat is dangerous muslims.”

Anyone thinking that Ogles might be doing this performatively, to cynically reap the political rewards of some sort of anti-Islam backlash from the war in Iran, need only check out his record: The congressman has a history of disparaging Muslims. And the LGBTQ community. And he isn’t exactly a paragon of decency beyond his rhetoric: He has faced accusations of inflating his resume and has been investigated by the FBI for violating campaign finance rules. And he hasn’t been able to explain where the nearly $25,000 he raised in a GoFundMe campaign for a children’s burial garden went after the garden never materialized.

Such a record wouldn’t normally fly for a congressman representing parts of his state’s biggest city. But Ogles isn’t actually a Nashville congressman, in the strict sense. His district used to be part of a city-centric seat, which for years was represented by Jim Cooper, a moderate Blue Dog Democrat. But following the 2020 census, Tennessee Republicans sliced up the district to dilute Democratic power, placing various parts of it into neighboring Republican-run areas, including the 5th district, which Ogles won in 2022.

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Because of that gerrymander, it’s not uncommon for Nashvillians to live in one district, send their kids to school in another, and go to church in a third. It has also meant that an overtly anti-Muslim congressman is representing a host of Muslim constituents—and putting them on edge.

I wanted to know what it was like for them. And so I walked around Little Kurdistan last week speaking to Muslim residents of the 5th district as they popped into markets to buy meats, breads, and labneh for Iftar. No one had any kind words to share about Ogles. They’d all grown fairly accustomed to his anti-Muslim remarks. They told me he was “racist,” “Islamophobic,” and “dangerous.”

But anger toward Ogles wasn’t the dominant emotion they expressed—rather, it was fear. They told me they were worried that Ogles’s comments would lead to their kids getting bullied in school and provoke federal agents to harass their communities. They recalled the ICE raids that took place in their neighborhoods last spring (south Nashville is also home to a large Latino population; across the street from Little Kurdistan is another strip mall called “Plaza Mariachi”) and feared that something similar could happen again. Rather than speaking out against Ogles, many said they didn’t want to draw much attention to him, believing that it would only stoke more anti-Muslim sentiment.

In a way, I found this even more jarring. It was a reminder that, despite the hope and promise of this country, many Americans feel they cannot move about their lives freely without being targeted by the very people elected to represent them.

Nearly everyone I spoke to for this newsletter asked that I not print their names out of fear that they’d become a target. Even family friends that I’ve known for a decade didn’t want me to publish their comments, worried that it would make them vulnerable. When I reached out to community organizers, imams, and the only Muslim member on the city council, they directed me to Sabina Mohyuddin, the executive director of the Nashville-based American Muslim Advisory Council, who has become the de facto spokesperson for the city’s Muslim community.

“This district probably has the largest number of Muslim communities living in it compared to any other congressional district in Tennessee,” said Mohyuddin, who sounded worn out and exhausted by the situation when we spoke on the phone. “[Ogles] doesn’t have any kind of record of serving his constituents.”

“This kind of rhetoric, it makes it unsafe for our community. It further normalizes this kind of discrimination and hateful, painful comments. And it allows for people to feel like it’s okay, it’s an acceptable conversation,” she added. “We’ve seen an increase in bullying in schools, discrimination, threats against our community.”

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WHETHER OGLES WILL PAY ANY PRICE for his recent rhetoric is an open question. One price he could pay is with his fellow House Republicans in Washington, D.C. They could decide that they don’t approve of a member of their conference engaging in open bigotry. GOP leaders could tell him to knock it off. They could remove him from committees. Not so long ago, they did just that when another member questioned why the language of white supremacy had become verboten.

But so far, Republicans appear comfortable letting Ogles keep tweeting.

Another price Ogles could pay would be with voters.

Last month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that the 5th district would be one of their top targets in the 2026 midterms.

As Democrats see it, Ogles is an especially vulnerable candidate. He’s struggled to raise money for his re-election and he’s drawn a primary challenge from former Tennessee agriculture commissioner Charlie Hatcher, a well-connected and respected dairy farmer.

Much of the establishment Democratic political scene in Nashville has been buzzing with excitement about Chaz Molder, a small-town mayor who is expected to be the Democratic nominee for the seat and has the backing of the DCCC. Molder is a Sunday school teacher and father of three who married his college sweetheart and rarely criticizes Trump directly. He’s steered clear of hot-button culture war issues, and has instead talked about the need for fiscal responsibility and being accessible and responsive to his constituents.

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But even in a politically friendly environment, he would have a tough race ahead of him. Donald Trump won the district in 2024 by 18 percentage points and the Cook Political Report rates the district as R+8. This leaves Molder with a strategic choice: try to win over disaffected Republicans by striking a more moderate posture or try to turn out progressive-minded voters by going hard at Trump—and, by extension, Trumpism. The play-it-safe mentality Molder has chosen to this point has left the district’s Muslim voters feeling underwhelmed.

In a social media video posted last week, Molder criticized Ogles for his tweets—but not for their substance: He framed the problem not as an attack on a religious minority but as a deliberate attempt by the congressman to divert attention from other issues.

“What Andy Ogles said today was outrageous,” Molder said in a flat voice. “But sadly we’ve learned to expect that from him. He wants to distract us from his multiple personal scandals, his vote to sabotage health care for rural Tennesseans, and of course today’s historic rise in gas prices. He’s been a disappointment and an embarrassment. We can do better.”

When I talked to local organizers, many told me that Molder should have spoken out more forcefully. It was not too much for someone asking for their vote, they said, to defend the fundamental, constitutional idea that they were accepted in America.

“It’s not a hard thing to say,” said Shun Ahmed, a community organizer born and raised in Nashville after her parents immigrated from Iraq—that “someone deserves the right to exist and thrive.”

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— The Year I Was Supposed to Die

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— The 20 Best Food Scenes in Movies

NEON SIGNS ANNOUNCING the price of a gallon of gasoline are as ubiquitous a feature of America’s roadways as strip malls, cigarette butts, and roadkill. With so many gas stations competing with one another, each is eager to advertise a lower rate—especially since cheap fuel helps bring people in the door of the shop, where the real profits are made selling cigarettes, lottery tickets, and snacks.

But the glowing numerals above the nation’s highways and byways aren’t just economic messages—they’re political messages, too. The price of a gallon of gasoline is one of the most tangible ways for voters to measure not only their own costs of living, but also the overall health of the economy. It’s an imperfect measure—cheap gas doesn’t always correlate with economic growth—but spikes in the price of oil usually do come with an economic downturn.

“Every time [Americans] drive to the grocery store, drive their kids to school or drive to work—there is that monstrous sign that shows them, day by day, how much [the price of gas] increases,” said Democratic pollster John Anzalone. “It’s maddening to people.”

Affordability has long been the key issue Democrats believed would motivate voters in the midterm elections—particularly the rising cost of health care, groceries, and electricity bills. But gas prices were not a part of the messaging plan because they had gradually dropped since Trump returned to office. Until the last week, that is.

Trump’s war of choice against Iran has been a self-inflicted political wound, allowing Democrats to connect their affordability case to literally the most visible price signals in the economy. As gas prices ticked up, staffers at party committees and super PACs have begun

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GAVIN NEWSOM SAT DOWN at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles last Tuesday to talk to a crowd of adoring fans about his new memoir. But it took only a few minutes before the moderators, Pod Save America hosts Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor, steered the conversation toward Donald Trump’s war in Iran and the California governor’s position on the U.S.-Israel relationship.

With a stack of copies of his book on a table at his side, Newsom likened Israel to an “apartheid state” and said that the “current leadership in Israel is walking us down that path where I don’t think you have a choice” but to rethink U.S. military support. It was a telling shift for Newsom, who has historically been a firm supporter of Israel—as when he traveled to the country in the wake of the October 7th attacks to meet with survivors and with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Democratic operatives whom I spoke with this week said that Newsom’s comments were an indication of where the wind is blowing. Several predicted that the party’s voters would become even more polarized on the issue.

And it’s not just voters: Newsom’s remarks are illustrative of how Democratic leaders, too, especially those with an eye on the presidential nomination, are growing more skeptical of Israel. The party’s response to Trump’s attack on Iran—especially following reports that Netanyahu convinced Trump to strike—is just the latest instance. Party officials told me that the rift has been a decade in the making, going back to 2015 when Republicans invited Netanyahu to speak to Congress and he used the occasion to criticize President Obama’s plans for a nuclear deal with Iran. That rift widened during Israel’s retaliation for the October 7th attacks, as it leveled Gaza and brutally killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians. And the fact that the Biden administration did little to pressure Netanyahu to stop created tension between the party’s base and its leaders, with Democratic officeholders and candidates stuck in the middle.

A Gallup survey published last month found that for the first time more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis. This echoes a finding the New York Times reported last year: that more voters sided with Palestinians over Israelis for the first time since the newspaper began asking the question in 1998. And while foreign policy typically isn’t what motivates voters in elections, Democratic officials believe that the debate has come to represent much more than a policy position.

PARTY OFFICIALS TOLD ME they think Democratic voters will be motivated in the upcoming elections to back candidates who feel authentic—candidates who seem like independent thinkers unafraid to say what they truly believe. Following Joe Biden’s presidency, being critical of Israel is increasingly viewed as a way to demonstrate independence and regain voter trust that deteriorated under Biden. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who has been outspoken about Israel’s human rights violations, has predicted that the nature of the U.S. relationship with Israel will be a “defining moral issue for our party and nation in 2026 and 2028.”

“It’s not just a debate over Gaza or Palestine and it’s more than just a debate about foreign policy. It is a bigger debate about how America acts in the world. But it’s also a question of ‘Can we trust our leaders?,’” said Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and executive vice president at the progressive think tank Center for International Policy. “When any candidate is running for office and they’re telling you, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do for you,’ but then when they ask about this one issue they revert to these same bullshit talking points—that seriously undermines their credibility. I think that’s what it did for Harris. And I think the reverse is true for Mamdani.”

“It really has become a litmus-test issue,” Duss added. “There’s still a lot of very justifiable anger on the part of progressive Democrats who felt that they were just completely gaslit and lied to by the Biden administration.”

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Party strategists whom I spoke with said that questions about policy toward Israel will be unavoidable as the 2026 election heats up and as the 2028 primary kicks off. It has consistently been a major point of focus on top left-leaning podcasts that party leaders are eager to appear on. Jennifer Welch of the I’ve Had It podcast has grilled leaders including New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker on their decision to accept donations from AIPAC, the hard-line pro-Israel lobbying organization. Hasan Piker has been deeply critical of Israel on his Twitch stream. And the Pod Save America hosts have also pressed their guests on military support for Israel. After the normally unflappable Pete Buttigieg went on their show last year, he was criticized for stumbling through an explanation of where he stood on the issue.

Buttigieg isn’t alone: Other Democrats have also appeared unsure on the issue. Mallory McMorrow, the state senator running in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, has been accused of waffling on Israel and Gaza. In a recent interview with Detroit Public Radio, McMorrow said her opponents were “using this as a political weapon and fundraising off of it” and argued that the debate had been turned into a “political purity test.” It was a not-so-subtle reference to one of her primary opponents, physician Abdul El-Sayed, who has consistently accused Israel of committing genocide. Meanwhile, the third contender in the primary, Rep. Haley Stevens, has embraced her pro-Israel record.

Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas has also faced pushback from activists on the issue: He has been critical of Israel but has stopped short of labeling the war in Gaza genocide (his campaign declined to provide a comment for this piece on how he’d approach the U.S.-Israel relationship if elected).

And even Newsom offered a slight walkback of his comments in Los Angeles, later saying that he was quoting a recent column from Thomas Friedman when he used the word “apartheid.”

But perhaps the biggest indication that more change is yet to come on the issue is how many Democrats, in the wake of the 2024 election, have acknowledged that Biden’s staunch support of Israel played a meaningful role in the party’s loss, particularly among young voters.

When I interviewed Newsom last month, he attributed Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss in part to the party’s support of Israel. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told the Washington Post last year that the party’s inability to address the “angst over Gaza” contributed to Trump’s win. And in her book about the 2024 campaign, Harris said that Biden’s poor polling was due in part to his “perceived blank check to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza” and said that his remarks about Palestinians “came off as inadequate and forced.”

“It’s an undeniable fact that this hurt us,” a former senior adviser on the Harris campaign told me. “Was it the primary reason we lost? No. But the emotions were real and we didn’t do enough to show our voters that they could trust us on it.”

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— How Jasmine Crockett slipped from Democratic frontrunner to decisive defeat in the Senate primary

— How Candidates Are Using Winks and Posts to Seek Crypto and A.I. Cash

— The Texas Senate Primary Was a Preview of Creator Wars to Come

DEMOCRATIC OFFICIALS WOKE UP Wednesday morning with a giant sense of relief. Their party’s messy, drama-filled Texas Senate primary was finally over. And while the major Democratic campaign committees and top super PACs stayed neutral in the race, it was a poorly kept secret that they viewed state Rep. James Talarico as the stronger general-election candidate over U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett. When he beat her by a comfortable 6-point margin, they collectively exhaled.

But underneath the quiet elation was an equally quiet fear. Texas is still Texas: No Democrat has won there statewide since 1994 and the last time Texas elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate was in 1988.1 Yet it’s still the perpetual object of Democratic longing. Precisely because Talarico won, and because he has clear gifts as a campaigner, Democrats could end up, once more, overinvesting in a contest that remains out of their reach, harming other Senate candidates in states that would be easier to win—and more likely to give them a Senate majority.

“As exciting as Talarico is, we also have to make sure we’re in a strong position in Iowa, Ohio, Alaska—and even look at states like Kansas and Mississippi and Florida,” said Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff to Sen. John Fetterman and the founder of Searchlight Institute, a Democratic think tank. “We shouldn’t just be thinking about taking back the majority in 2026, we should be thinking about building toward a substantial majority in 2028. And in order to get there in 2028, you have to run up the score in 2026.”

For well over a decade, Democrats have been investing talent and resources into trying to turn Texas blue, just to end up disappointed. Tuesday’s results make it all the more likely that they will once again invest heavily in the state. The party’s voters turned out in impressive numbers. There were also promising signs that Talarico can appeal to Latino voters, a key demographic group that has shifted to the GOP in recent cycles. Talarico also seemed to unite various ideological factions within the party. Everyone from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee to centrist Democratic think tank Third Way cheered his win. He will have to work to win over the state’s black voters, who largely supported Crockett. But he has a ten-week head start to do so while the two Republicans in the primary runoff—Sen. John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton—drag each other through the mud and exhaust GOP donors.2

All of those factors have made even the most skeptical Democratic operatives hopeful about Talarico’s prospects.

Part of the Democrats’ quandary about how much to invest in Texas is about short-term and long-term goals. With Texas on track to gain more representatives in Congress and more Electoral College votes following the 2030 census, Democrats will need to be more competitive in the state long-term. But some operatives are cautioning the party not to get too sucked into the allure of flipping the reliably Republican stronghold this year. After all, they’ve been down that road before (See O’Rourke, Beto).

“It’s a tricky dynamic, and it’s a bit incumbent on rank-and-file Democrats to be strategic in their thinking here and say, ‘I want to use what resources I have to not just give to the candidate who I like the most on [MS NOW], but to make sure Democrats have as many pieces on the board to beat Republicans as possible,” said Jentleson.

Grassroots donors became enamored with Talarico—encouraged by fawning media coverage—leaving other Democratic candidates feeling spurned (not to mention wanting for cash). Jentleson noted that often what makes candidates best suited to win in states like Ohio or Iowa is a stay-above-the-fray approach, which also makes them less likely to go viral online or inspire massive excitement with small-dollar donors. Operatives in those states recognize the challenge too.

“I spent some time with the national donor class and you have to have something to sell. It’s a transactional thing,” said Sue Dvorsky, former chair of the Iowa Democratic Party. “We have not been a good investment property. And it isn’t the donors’ responsibility to throw money at us. It’s our responsibility to get out there and prove that we can bring this back. This is a local job.”

Some of the top Democrats in the country are skeptical about Texas flipping blue in 2026, though they don’t always say it out loud. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said that the clearest path to the Senate runs through Alaska, Ohio, North Carolina, and Maine—the Lone Star state left notably off the list.

The notion of winning in Texas is part of a larger Democratic plan to expand the list of states where they can compete. Alexander Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was a key witness in President Donald Trump’s first impeachment (and the twin brother of freshman Rep. Eugene Vindman [D-Va.]) launched a bid for the Florida Senate seat in January. Democrats have also entertained the idea of backing independent candidates, such as Dan Osborn in Nebraska. On Wednesday morning, University of Montana president Seth Bodnar announced he was running for Senate as an independent, after former Democratic Sen. Jon Tester reportedly encouraged him to do so.

But if there’s one candidate who repeatedly comes up in my conversations with operatives as an under-the-radar possibility to flip a Senate seat, it’s Scott Colom, the district attorney for the 16th Judicial District of Mississippi. Both because of his state’s large black population and because of the poor approval ratings for the Republican on the ticket, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Colom might be able to win in a state even redder than Texas. But here, too, is an example of how national attention can alter the paths for Democrats to reclaim the Senate. Hyde-Smith is sitting on a healthy pile of campaign cash. Colom is not; he raised about $430,000 in the last reporting cycle and has $698,749.84 cash on hand. Compare that to the $20 million that Talarico has raised since he announced his campaign in September.

“Talarico will have the money to compete,” said Matt Bennett, cofounder of Third Way. “The question is, will that starve winnable House races or even less sexy Senate candidates?”

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A word that kept coming up in my conversations with party operatives was “discipline.” Yes, the party should get excited about Texas. No one thinks Talarico is the next Amy McGrath, who raised more than $90 million in her 2020 campaign against Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell only to lose to him by nearly 20 points. But they are encouraging donors and grassroots supporters to be strategic, show some restraint, and think of the big picture.

“You can be bullish on Texas while ensuring the rest of the map is competitive. Those two things go hand-in-hand,” said Lauren French, a spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC. “Texas changing the conversation about what’s possible in 2026 is a gift. The way you honor that gift is by building a map worthy of it. We’ve got the candidates. We’ve got the environment. Now we need to make sure we have the discipline to see the whole board.”

The hope among others in the party is that Democrats ultimately won’t have to worry much about the cash—that the money will be there for virtually all candidates because the desire to put a check on Donald Trump would be enough to fuel even the less high-profile races.

Rufus Gifford, who served as the campaign finance chair for the Biden-Harris presidential campaign, brought up Sara Gideon, who ended her failed 2020 Senate campaign in Maine with $14.8 million left unspent. For him, that’s not a cautionary tale about resources poorly allocated; it’s proof that when Trump is at the top of the ticket, Democratic donors will fund any candidate they believe will help hold him in check.

“Those candidates are going to have way, way more than money, all of them, in order to win those races,” he argued. “Most of these states that are competitive now are actually very cheap. Maine, Alaska, Iowa—these are not all that expensive of states to compete in,” he said.

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— Jasmine Crockett told the New York Times on Wednesday that she was worried her supporters would be hesitant to turn out for James Talarico in the general election after some Dallas County voters were confused about where they could cast their ballots on Tuesday and were turned away. (Republicans in Dallas decided in January to end countywide voting sites on Election Day, and instead have people vote at assigned neighborhood polling places.)

“The Democratic Party should absolutely prepare for the worst and get some things litigated right now,” Crockett said. “People will not turn out because of what’s happened, in my opinion, especially if no one fights for their votes to be counted.”

Crockett did not commit to campaigning with Talarico, telling the Times that she would not “make plans for other people’s campaigns.”

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— Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner continues to face accusations of antisemitism, this time for sitting down for an interview with Nate Cornacchia, a podcaster who has used his platform to promote antisemitic conspiracy theories. During the interview, Platner said he was “a longtime fan” of Cornacchia’s YouTube channel. Last week Platner also faced criticism after he shared a tweet from Stew Peters, a neo-Nazi influencer. His campaign told Jewish Insider that the post was a mistake and Platner quickly removed it. Despite all of that, Platner still seems to have the momentum in the primary race. Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego endorsed him on Monday, writing in a post that Platner was the “kind of fighter Maine hasn’t seen in a long time.”

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— Rep. Angie Craig, who represents Minnesota’s most competitive House district, wrote in an op-ed this week that she regrets voting for the Laken Riley Act. Donald Trump signed it into law at the start of his second term. The law requires the detention and deportation of people in the country illegally who are charged with crimes such as theft and shoplifting.

When the bill passed, Democrats were still reeling from the 2024 election loss, and many felt like the party dramatically missed how frustrated voters were with Joe Biden’s handling of immigration. But Craig is now running in a competitive Senate primary against Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, who has made Craig’s more conservative approach to immigration a major attack line in her race.

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— Pete Buttigieg in the Wilderness

— The Impossible Predicament of the Uninsured

— ​​A Talk Show for Our Times

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FEW LEADERS IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY have taken better advantage of the post-election malaise than Gavin Newsom. The California governor successfully kneecapped Donald Trump’s mid-decade redistricting scheme by engineering a counter-redistricting in his own state. And his mastery of attentional politics—from starting a new podcast to trolling the GOP on social media—earned him frontrunner glow heading into the 2028 cycle. At least for now.

Newsom still carries baggage. He’s a product of the coastal elite at a time when Democrats are desperate to win back working-class voters; a California Democrat who’s been a national political figure since he was 36 years old. And if you don’t think that’s a problem, then you should tell Newsom, because he also seems to think it is. His new book, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, has been described as a “bootstraps memoir” and reads in part as an effort to make sure that the country knows he didn’t grow up with a silver spoon, despite what his slicked back hair and well-tailored suits might suggest. He writes about his parents’ divorce and how his mother had to work multiple jobs to support her family. Whether or not voters will be persuaded remains to be seen.

Newsom kicked off his book tour on Saturday in my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. I caught up with him backstage before the event. Our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

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Lauren Egan: My newsletter is all about the Democratic party, how you get out of the wilderness.

Gavin Newsom: Are we in the wilderness? I think we’re in 2006 and you’re gonna have not Speaker Pelosi but Speaker Jeffries.

Egan: What about the Senate?

Newsom: Well, that happened in 2006 and I think the tsunami is coming. And I do think that will bode well for 2008 where we had this guy, Obama, and he did, what, 53 percent of the vote? In so many ways, the contours are similar. We lost the popular vote in 2004, we were out in the wilderness. That’s my humble opinion.

Egan: Who is Obama in this comparison?

Newsom: Whoever emerges.

Egan: I want to start with this recent Twitter exchange—

Newsom: Oh God, which one? We have a lot of them.

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NATHAN SAGE KNEW A FEW WEEKS AGO that his campaign for U.S. Senate was likely coming to an end. The 41-year-old Iowa Democrat was struggling to raise money. He wasn’t breaking through the crowded three-way race. And Democratic leaders in the state were starting to get nervous.

“People would call me and be like, ‘We’re gonna be left with fucking Zach Wahls,’” Sage told me, referring to the 34-year-old state senator who is one of the two remaining candidates in the Democratic primary now that Sage has dropped out. Wahls gained national attention when he was a teenager, after he delivered a viral speech in 2011 to the Iowa House of Representatives about his experience being raised by a lesbian couple. He is also, as Sage noted, from “the most blue area of the entire state.” And for that reason, “a lot of people across the Iowa Democratic Party know Zach is good where he’s at. He’s good in the [Iowa] Senate. . . . They don’t see him winning across the state, or connecting to voters across the state,” as he would have to do to win a U.S. Senate seat in the general election in November.

Sage, an Army and Marine Corps veteran who pitched himself as a working-class populist and political newcomer in the race, ultimately ended his primary campaign on Sunday. A day later, he endorsed Joshua Turek, a 46-year-old Paralympic gold medalist and state representative. Sage didn’t hold back his disdain for Wahls’s candidacy—telling me that although Wahls appealed to a national donor base, Iowa voters would ultimately see him as a “plastic human being and fake and artificial.”

In a statement, Wahls said that he was “disappointed that the Turek campaign feels the need to go so negative in this primary. . . . They know we’re winning and because we’re the only campaign that is truly a product of Iowa—for Iowa—and not manufactured by Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, or the D.C. establishment.”

If there is a hint of desperation in the way Sage and Wahls are talking about the race, that’s by design. Across Iowa, and even among national Democrats, there is a belief that nominating Wahls might mean forfeiting the party’s already challenging shot at flipping the seat. In August, state Rep. J.D. Scholten dropped out of the same U.S. Senate race and endorsed Turek. “I did not want to take away votes. I did not want to split things,” Scholten explained to me this week. “I’m so adamant about Turek, because he’s our best chance.”

ANXIETY OVER GETTING the most “electable” candidates across the finish line in primaries is not limited to Iowa. Although Democrats have cleared the field in a handful of top-tier Senate races—including Ohio, North Carolina, and Alaska—the contests in Texas, Iowa, Michigan, and Maine continue to be wild cards. In several cases, the candidates are pitching themselves as the most electable in the race. The issue facing the party—the one that is causing the current uneasiness—is due to the fact that no one can seem to agree on what that actually means in the second Trump administration.

The debate over electability within the Democratic political class has animated a months-long X feud and Substack argument among nerdy data analysts, who have invented a whole new online language—perhaps, most famously the term “WINS ABOVE REPLACEMENT,” also known as WAR, borrowed from sabermetrics—to talk about candidates’ electability. The debate has also inspired operatives to spend countless hours carefully dissecting social media clips and reading through TikTok comments to determine whether online vibes really can win over voters.

So what matters most to electability? What’s the best indicator? Is it the ability to raise small-dollar donations? Is it a mastery of social media and the attention economy? Is it a set of policy issues and a resume of votes that can appeal to a cross section of voters? Does it require backing electoral overperformers who’ve won in Trump districts?

Ideally, it would be all of the above. But that’s often not an option. And Democrats are now left trying to work through the tradeoffs—with the result that electability is often discussed like it’s one of those difficult-to-define, you’ll-know-it-when-you-see-it, je ne sais quoi sorts of thing.

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“In a way that, really, we haven’t seen before, there’s such a gap between what ‘electable’ means to people now,” progressive Democratic strategist Joel Payne told me. Caitlin Legacki, another party strategist who is working with candidates including Rep. Haley Stevens in the Michigan Senate primary, said that there was a “shifting definition of what is electability that is very situational and depends mostly on which candidate you support in a given race.”

In many ways, the internal debate about electability is a product of political desperation. Many Democrats view winning control of at least one chamber of Congress as an imperative to protecting American democracy. And they’ve expanded their battleground map into red congressional districts and GOP-held Senate seats in hopes to give them the best chance of coming out on top. In 2006, there was a similar consternation within the party as Rahm Emanuel, then the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, recruited unconventional candidates to run in red districts around the country. But a key difference now is the prevalence of social media, which has a huge effect on how voters get their information.

In my conversations with party strategists, one of the biggest disagreements that kept coming up about what made someone “electable” was how much being good at social media actually matters. While the party has been focused on beefing up its social media presence and recruiting candidates who are naturals at direct-to-camera videos, some officials I spoke with thought that too much emphasis had been placed on this skillset—and that, ultimately, the voters Democrats need to activate are independents and soft-Trump backers, not newbies to politics. They worried that too many candidates were being deemed electable based on their ability to go viral, with no guarantee that the clicks and views would translate into general election votes.

Sage, for example, told me that voters in northwest Iowa weren’t spending their days scrolling through TikTok. Garry Jones of Lone Star Rising PAC, which is supporting state Rep. James Talarico in the Texas Senate primary, also said that some Democratic campaigns (read: Jasmine Crockett) were putting too much stock into getting online influencers to back them, noting that Democratic primary voters tended to be older and less online.

A lot of this back-and-forth is just operatives putting their finger on the scale for their own candidates (the people who say online vibes don’t matter are often the ones whose clients happen to be really bad at social media). But there’s something to be said for the Democratic party’s reputation for overlearning the lessons of the last election and fighting the last war. What matters in the end is being the right candidate for the moment and connecting with voters in a certain state—and that’s not always the same as being relevant on the internet.

“Part of authenticity is actually believing in things and having a clear narrative,” said Democratic strategist Jesse Lehrich, who recently argued in his newsletter that Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff’s strong candidacy demonstrated that not everyone needs to try to go viral all the time. “There’s something to be said for knowing who you are and not trying to be everywhere all at once.”

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— Democratic officials are planning to boycott Donald Trump’s State of the Union address next Tuesday and will instead attend a rally on the National Mall. The boycott is an attempt to have more organized counterprogramming than last year, when Democrats were mocked for their silent protests of Trump’s speech (remember those pink blazers?). The rally is being coordinated by MoveOn and MeidasTouch and will feature lawmakers including Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy and Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen.

— Andy Beshear is publishing his first book this fall, the latest sign that the Kentucky governor is inching toward a 2028 presidential run. According to the Washington Post, the book, which comes out on September 22, will focus on Beshear’s faith.

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My open tabs:

— Against thoughtless moderation

— The Disappointment of Young Trump Voters

— What’s it like to have two grandchildren in the Winter Olympics? Let John Irving tell you

TO HEAR SOUTHERN DEMOCRATS TELL IT, the path to salvation is simple: If the party gets more people to show up to vote, it can win.

During his 2018 campaign for Senate, Beto O’Rourke would often say: “Texas isn’t red or blue; it’s a non-voting state,” pointing to restrictive voting measures and racial gerrymandering to explain why Texas has one of the lowest voter-turnout rates. He lost.

Democratic nominee Lupe Valdez argued that she would defeat Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in the 2018 gubernatorial election because Texas “is not a red state, it’s a non-voting state.” She lost.

And in a speech launching her 2026 Senate campaign, Rep. Jasmine Crockett stated: “They tell us that Texas is red. They are lying. We’re not. The reality is that most Texans don’t get out to vote.” Crockett’s results are TBD.

This mindset exists far beyond the Lone Star State. I’ve heard versions of it from Democratic leaders in Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

“Tennessee is not a red state, but it’s a state that ranks fiftieth in voter turnout,” Justin Jones, the Tennessee state lawmaker who was expelled for leading a gun-control protest on the floor of the state House of Representatives, told me in an interview last year.

This slogan—[X] is not truly a red state; it’s *really* a nonvoting state—is plastered all over the Instagram and Facebook pages of local chapters of the Democratic party down in the South. It’s repeated like gospel among the party’s dedicated base voters. And it’s often used to justify why candidates running in these states don’t need to move to the center but instead spend their time trying to activate base voters depressed by years of Democratic moderation.

But is it true?

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“There’s always this kind of progressive belief that there are hidden millions of people who are dormant and are waiting to be awakened by the trumpet of true progressivism,” veteran Democratic strategist James Carville told me over the phone from his home in Louisiana. “That’s almost a doctrinaire belief of the American left—and it’s also a singularly stupid argument. There’s no evidence that it has ever worked. And it also says we don’t need to persuade anybody other than our lethargic voters.”

Younger, more progressive Democrats find it easy to dismiss Carville as a creature of the past—a disgruntled elder party member who thinks that kids don’t appreciate that politics is a game of tough choices and tradeoffs. But he is not wrong about some basic facts. Democrats have become the party of educated elites. And increasingly they’re harmed, not helped, by high-turnout elections.

Indeed, there’s been ample evidence that the more voters show up, the worse it is for the party. Democratic data guru David Shor found in his post-2024 election analysis that, had everyone in the country voted, Donald Trump would have won by an even wider margin. In their own analysis of the 2024 electorate, Nate Cohn and colleagues at the New York Times wrote that “the least frequent voters are the most Republican.” The elections analyst David Wasserman likewise argued that the “defining data point of the 2020s” was that Trump performed “the best with the most peripherally-engaged voters” while Democrats made gains with “the most civic-minded voters who not only show up in presidential years, but reliably vote in midterms, primaries and special elections as well.”

Yet many operatives and politicians still believe higher turnout means Democrats will win. They’re resistant to the fact that low-propensity voters are now more likely to be Trump supporters and still holding on to a belief that they’re just one well-funded voter-registration drive away from flipping states across South.

The party’s commitment to this idea has even perplexed Republicans. In a 2022 interview, former Texas GOP chair Steve Munisteri told Texas Monthly that Democrats were misunderstanding the partisan allegiance of unregistered voters and argued that they were investing too heavily in voter registration. “They just don’t understand the numbers or haven’t done the research,” he said.

DEMOCRATS MIGHT BE ABLE to get through this year without facing these facts head on. Voter frustration with the current administration could be enough to deliver the party wins in a handful of congressional districts that went for Trump in 2024 and even to flip some Senate seats. But Carville isn’t the only Democratic operative warning that a Trump backlash is not good enough to sustain long-term relevance. They fear that candidates like Crockett are using the “nonvoting state” theory to avoid thorny debates about whether the party is out of step with average voters in their states.

“Base voters love that idea—they love the theory that ‘Actually, we don’t need to change anything about what we’re doing. Everyone else is just not paying attention. And if we get them to pay enough attention, then we’ll be okay,’” said Lakshya Jain, political analyst at Split Ticket, an election-modeling and data-analysis group. “Election after election proves that this idea of high turnout being the key to Democratic wins is completely wrongheaded. The lean of low-propensity voters in states like Texas, etc.—they are all pretty Republican.”

“It’s an insult to voters to believe that they have no [policy] preferences of their own and that they’re simply ignorant sheep waiting to be shown the light,” Jain added.

Crockett’s campaign did not respond to my request for comment. But when I asked Jaime Harrison, who ran for Senate in South Carolina in 2020 against Lindsey Graham and then chaired the Democratic National Committee from 2021 to 2025, whether he agreed with Crockett’s “nonvoters” diagnosis, he told me that she was “spot on.” He said that those who disagreed were, in particular, undervaluing the importance of the black vote. Although black voters shifted toward Trump in 2024, they still overwhelmingly favored Kamala Harris. Harrison argued that if the party were to have a strong voter registration push in states like South Carolina, where black people make up 25.7 percent of the population, then they could be more competitive.

“I’d much rather put energy into that,” Harrison said, instead of trying to win the “mythological, moderate Republican that we think we are going to sway over. . . . That just does not work.”

Harrison lost to Graham by 10 percentage points in that 2020 race, despite record-high turnout at the time. Could he have done better by focusing less on turning out reluctant voters and more on converting Republicans and independents? Possibly. But in a better political climate for Democrats in 2018, former Democratic Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen took that type of approach and lost his Senate race to Rep. Marsha Blackburn by a similar margin.

Still, Jain, Carville, and others say the math is clear as to which strategy to take. Turning out a Democratic voter who otherwise wasn’t going to vote nets one additional vote. Convincing a Republican voter to switch sides nets that same vote and deprives the Republican candidate of one as well.

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But there are other numbers to consider. There are relatively few states where there’s a large enough pool of low-propensity black voters to flip the state. Mississippi may be the most promising for Democrats, with black people accounting for 37.7 percent of the population. But in Texas, just 13.7 percent of the population is black. And it is far from clear that low-propensity black voters will vote for Democratic candidates at the same rate as black voters generally. That’s because, no matter their race, low-propensity voters have tuned out of politics for a reason. If Democrats want to build lasting majorities, they need to more seriously engage with why.

In Tennessee, Corbin Trent—former communications director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a cofounder of Justice Democrats who lives in the northeast part of the state—told me that the lack of curiosity around that question could ultimately doom the party.

“I don’t think Democratic leadership or the consultants or even the donors that I deal with understand people. I think they’re in these very isolated bubbles,” Trent said. “Too few people get Donald Trump’s appeal. They just look at him and they see a lying, sexual-assaulting piece of shit, and they don’t understand what connected with [voters].”

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— Nathan Sage announced on Sunday that he was ending his campaign for the Democratic nomination in Iowa’s U.S. Senate race, leaving just two candidates to battle it out in the June 2 primary: Joshua Turek, a Paralympic gold medalist and state representative, and Zach Wahls, a state senator. In a video, Sage said that “as a true grassroots campaign, we simply were unable to raise the financial resources necessary to keep this campaign viable.”

Sage, an Army and Marine Corps veteran who previously ran the chamber of commerce in Knoxville, pitched himself as the working-class populist and political newcomer in the race. He fashioned a campaign brand similar to that of fellow veterans Graham Platner in Maine and Dan Osborn in Nebraska, often referring to himself as a ​​“child of a trailer park.” But unlike Platner, Sage struggled to break through in a more crowded field.

Although Turek is viewed as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s preferred candidate in the race, he was outraised by Wahls in the most recent fundraising quarter.

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My open tabs:

— America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs

— The Quad God’s Olympic Mortality

— Why changes in a Florida ocean current could wreak havoc worldwide

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS SPENT much of the last year trying to rival the GOP’s online dominance. Donors have sunk millions of dollars into new projects aimed at building networks of left-leaning content creators; members of Congress have tried to perfect the art of the direct-to-camera video (with varying degrees of success); Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are among the many Democrats who have started their own Substacks; and party leaders like California Gov. Gavin Newsom have added “podcast host” to their resumes.

The conventional wisdom has been that this is all part of a generational shift, one sparked by young politicians like Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, two charismatic thirtysomething New Yorkers whose aura-farming skills are self-evident. But in recent weeks, it’s been an octogenarian Democrat with no national footprint who has been making some of the biggest waves online: Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas.

As the Democratic party has raced to keep up with Donald Trump’s mid-decade redistricting scheme, the 82-year-old Lucas, president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, has played a leading role in state Democratic lawmakers’ efforts to pass a new map—one that favors their party ten to one, which would be a significant shift from the current breakdown of six Democrats to five Republicans.1 And Lucas has been making her case on X, shitposting about other Democratic-controlled states that have dragged their feet on redistricting and talking trash about her GOP opponents.

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Throughout the redistricting fight, she’s made memes of herself as Thanos collecting the Infinity Stones (or, in this case, congressional districts). She’s trolled her Republican rivals, as with this meme making fun of GOP Rep. Rob Wittman for reportedly complaining in private about the redistricting effort (Wittman will likely lose his seat if the new map is approved). Although the Dark Brandon meme felt cringe by the end of the Biden administration, the beaming red laser eyes somehow work for Lucas. She’s shown remarkable fluency in internet slang—from “cuck” to “OOMF”—especially for someone who was born before D-Day.

Last week, Lucas made national news for hitting back at Texas Sen. Ted Cruz after he complained about Virginia Democrats’ proposed new map, posting: “You all started it and we fucking finished it.” It’s that willingness to punch back that has earned her praise from national party figures, including Ocasio-Cortez and Pennsylvania Rep. Brendan Boyle, who told me that he was a “big fan of the toughness and tenacity of Louise Lucas.”

Lucas’s posts have been circulating in Democratic operative group chats over the past few weeks, with one digital staffer telling me that they’ve shown her memes to

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