It’s Still a Blue Wave
The fundamentals still apply after Tuesday night’s primaries. And they look good for Democrats.
Now that Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general has made it out of committee, the race is on to figure out which Republican senators get to take a show vote against him without imperiling his nomination. It’s a tricky thing, given that Blanche can only afford to lose two. The first, unsurprisingly, is Susan Collins, who said yesterday that Blanche “has taken several actions that have further eroded” the Justice Department’s independence. She’s not kidding! Who the lucky second abstainer will be remains to be seen: Lisa Murkowski has said she is still weighing her decision. Bill Cassidy has been mum. But it can only be one. Happy Wednesday.
About Last Night
by William Kristol
It would be nice to be able to draw some novel, surprising, or dramatic conclusions from last night’s election results. But sometimes the truth is messy and prosaic. The fact is that the results were a mixed bag. And they don’t seem to me to change anything much about what’s likely to happen in November.
The highest profile race was the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. The polls suggested that the leftist insurgent, Abdul El-Sayed, would easily defeat the establishment candidate, Haley Stevens, perhaps by double digits. It looks early this morning that El-Sayed will likely eke out a victory by a percentage point or two. [Update (August 5, 2026, 10:30 a.m. EDT): The Associated Press called the race for El-Sayed at 10:05 a.m. EDT.]
It’s a good reminder that polling in primaries can be unreliable. More importantly, it probably means Republican Mike Rogers, who almost won his senate race against Elissa Slotkin in 2024, has better odds than he otherwise would have had this November. But the national environment will still help the Democratic nominee, and it’s also the case that some swing voters may be more attracted to the change El-Sayed represents than put off by some of his left-of-the-mainstream views. So while this is a chance—very likely the only one—for a Republican Senate pickup, it’s by no means guaranteed.
On the other hand, the continuing cascade of news about Rep. Max Miller’s horrifying personal behavior, combined with his determination to stay in the race for his Ohio congressional seat, makes me more convinced than ever that Democrats will have a better-than-expected cycle in that state—and that Sherrod Brown could very well win the Senate race there.
Put that together with likely Democratic pickups in North Carolina and Maine, and decent opportunities for victory in Alaska, Iowa, and Texas, and I think Democrats have a pretty good chance—I’d say slightly better than 50-50—of controlling the Senate.
And there are other states that aren’t being much discussed that could well be in play. Last night, Kansas Democrats nominated a strong moderate, Alan Hamilton, to take on a weak Republican incumbent, Roger Marshall. At the same time, voters in that state soundly defeated a Republican-backed measure to change the way Kansas Supreme Court’s judges are selected—a measure that was really a referendum over the court’s more liberal decisions, especially on abortion rights. By the way, that topic could return more centrally to the electoral conversation this year after the recent emergence of a recording by Todd Blanche assuring faith leaders that he’d work to extend anti-abortion measures nationally.
I’d also note that the Democratic nominees have withdrawn from Senate races in South Dakota and Idaho, clearing the field for moderate and attractive independent candidates to stand as the alternative to the Republican nominees. The same thing may well happen soon in Montana. One or more of those races might become competitive. In these cases, Democratic parties are behaving responsibly, putting their pride and narrow self-interest aside, and trying to rise to the moment by making it easier for voters to elect candidates not burdened by the Democratic brand but who, as senators, would help check Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, nothing that happened in House primaries last night—a mixed bag of progressive and moderate victories—changes the broader electoral landscape. We are today where we were a few days ago when Ron Brownstein said on our Bulwark on Sunday podcast that “like Bogart, I believe the fundamental things apply.”
One fundamental thing that applies is that the party of the incumbent president hasn’t maintained control of the House in an off-year election since 2002. Voters like their checks and balances! Another fundamental is that special elections have produced consistent and marked Democratic overperformances over the past year and a half.
And the most significant fundamental is that Donald Trump’s approval is so far underwater. He’s far worse off than George W. Bush in 2006, or Barack Obama in 2010, or Joe Biden in 2022, or than he himself was in 2018. In all those instances, the House flipped. Trump’s not going to escape the same fate.
The task for Democrats isn’t complicated. They need to focus on the fundamentals and keep on fighting Trump. They also need to prepare for a desperate Trump administration and Republican party to do whatever they can to tilt the playing field. But on this front, Democrats seem to be getting better prepared, and courts and voters seem increasingly alert to the danger. Yesterday, for example, public outrage forced Republicans in important Tarrant County, Texas to back down from a scheme to drastically reduce the number of voting locations, including cutting early voting locations on college campuses.
It’s no time to relax, and it’s no time to panic. Ron Brownstein’s Casablanca reference made me think of World War II, which in turn reminded me of the famous British World War II poster: “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Good advice then, good advice now.
Psycho Congressman, Qu’est-ce Que c’est?
by Andrew Egger
Things are quickly going from terrible to unsustainable for Max Miller. The congressman, who has long faced serious, troubling allegations of domestic abuse, became a national spectacle this week after he tried to refute the allegations in a bizarre livestream. Incomprehensibly, he decided to take another bite of the apple yesterday afternoon, going on CNN for a lengthy interview with Jake Tapper.
It couldn’t have gone worse. Tapper began the interview by asking about a new allegation from Miller’s former father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who said Miller had recently refused to return a treasured stuffed animal—a blue bunny—to his daughter, who can’t sleep without it.1 Tapper wanted to know: Was that true? Miller responded:
Jake, I would agree that if that were true that would be incredibly disturbing and that the senator would be right. However, he has taken two years to publicly acknowledge for me to resign from my seat. Why is that, Jake? If he truly believed—look, I’m a father to a two and a half year old daughter. I believe that you’re also a father to children. And I don’t know if you’re also a father to a daughter. But what I can tell you is that if my daughter came to me and she said ‘my ex-husband did x, y, and z,’ and then I waited because I was nervous that a political livestream was going to expose a deeply and personal embarrassing matter to the senator, for him to take that action. Sadly, this has nothing to do with my daughter, Jake, and that’s what this entire thing is about. This is nothing more than an individual who is being politically vindictive in talking about a blue bunny.
It went on and on like this, for 22 painful minutes. Miller was utterly unconvincing in his denials, strange and offputting in his tone and approach, and seemed unable to speak in complete sentences, stringing together semi-related fragments of talking points at random.
Not only did he fail to offer reasonable rebuttals to the accusations already out there against him, he somehow managed to find new reasons for voters to be apprehensive about his candidacy and character. When was the last time, Tapper wondered, that Miller had used illegal drugs? “The last time, I don’t know—I would have to say the last time I had illegal drugs would have been, I don’t know, several years ago. I mean, I don’t have a timeframe on it, but I don’t use illegal drugs.”
“Two?” Tapper prompted. “Twenty?”
“No, Jake, this is what they’re doing, okay? This whole needles thing. . . .”
Any half-sane person who found himself in this situation would go straight off the air and into monastic life or the Witness Protection Program. Miller, on the other hand, says he’s determined to stay in the race. And the only people who could perhaps change his mind—House Speaker Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump—seem determined not to force the issue.
Twice this week, Trump has made it clear where his sympathies lie: “It’s a very sad thing,” he said Monday. “I know Max. He’s a good person. I’m going to let the families figure that out.” Last night, he added: “I hope he’s able to work it out. I feel badly for him.” Johnson, meanwhile, is holding his tongue pending the results of an Ethics Committee investigation. “There’s all sorts of domestic events going on with 435 members of Congress all the time, it’s not my business to get engaged in it,” Johnson told Politico in an interview published this morning. “We have to allow this process to play out. It’s just begun.”
The trajectory of the next few months thus seems basically set. Miller insists he isn’t dropping out, and Republicans are basically out of time to replace him. The guy who went on Jake Tapper last night is not winning re-election in a R+5 district in a blue-wave year. He will run and lose and that will be the end of it—including the House Ethics Committee investigation. These obscene humiliations will last only a few more months at most. The stain on Trump and Johnson, however, will remain.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Vivek Ramaswamy Gets a Reality Check at the County Fair… He handled the hecklers. Explaining how he would pay for all his promises was harder, JIM SWIFT reports from Owensville, Ohio.
TNL LIVE Election Night Coverage… With Sarah on vacation, JVL, SAM, and TIM gathered to discuss last night’s primary election results. Things stayed mostly on the rails.
The Saddest Congressman in America… On Bulwark Takes, SARAH MATTHEWS joins WILL SOMMER to dig into the creepy details of Rep. Chuck Edwards, who suspended his campaign this morning, and why GOP colleagues stayed quiet.
Quick Hits
DANGEROUS SKIES: Earlier this year, a medevac plane took off from Roswell, New Mexico, and flew into the side of a mountain, killing everyone on board. Now, thanks to new reporting from Wired, we know why: The plane had been disoriented and was relying on old-school navigational instruments due to GPS jamming from a nearby U.S. military exercise.
Wired called the tragedy “the first time that GPS jamming has contributed to the crash of a civilian plane in the United States,” but “there’s no reason to think it will be the last.” As drone-based combat becomes the new normal in military conflicts around the world, the U.S. military needs to spend more time training on anti-drone measures, which includes GPS jamming. Such jamming can’t be microtargeted, meaning exercises like the one earlier this year end up jamming GPS hundreds of miles beyond their training area. The military tries to take countermeasures—nearby planes were on notice that their GPS systems wouldn’t work, and the White Sands Missile Range, where the event was held, is one of the most sparsely populated places in the continental United States. But regardless, a few planes, like the ill-fated medevac, are likely to be flying nearby. When they do, they’re forced to rely on pre-GPS navigational instruments and techniques—instruments demanding a much higher degree of skill and familiarity to operate safely, and which today’s pilots rarely if ever use.
“Living in a world with drones of both the friendly and unfriendly variety is going to take a lot of adjusting,” Wired notes. “Historically, major changes in aviation take place only after crashes that kill a large number of people. But a sufficiently motivating catastrophe may not be far off.” Read the whole thing.
Cheap Shots
If there’s anyone in this sordid story who deserves a collective apology, it’s Moreno. The senator has taken a lot of grief over his silence on Max Miller until now, but his explanations for that silence are rock solid: “What my daughter’s been through, what my daughter’s going through. . . . You’ve got to remember, when you don’t have kids and you get divorced, you can just say farewell. You never have to see each other again. But when you have a child, you have to coparent with that individual for the rest of your life. That means scheduling pickups, scheduling drop-offs. This is not something that you can just say, I’ll never have to deal with this guy again. My daughter lives in constant fear of this man . . . . You can’t fathom what that makes me feel like, when a dad’s number one job is to protect your kids. And to have this whole thing out in the public like this is not what I wanted to do, and it’s not what my daughter wanted to do.”
No sympathy for Moreno. He may care about his own daughter and grandchild, but he has done nothing to show he cares about protecting abused women and children as a general principle.
Pretty much all the Trump 2024 counties in Michigan's Upper Peninsula ... carried El-Sayed yesterday. My stars! I had no idea you had it in you, Yoopers! Well done!