These polls suck! What’s going on with the polls! We at The Bulwark are demanding a complete and total shutdown of polling1 until we can figure out what’s going on. Happy Wednesday.
Join Mark Hertling and Ben Parker for Command Post at 10:30 a.m. EDT today on Substack and YouTube.
Keep Calm and Crowley On
by William Kristol
One week ago, after Abdul El-Sayed had beaten back a late surge by his moderate opponent, Haley Stevens, to eke out a 1-point victory in Michigan’s Democratic senate primary, I wasn’t a particularly happy scribbler. But as dawn broke, and I sipped my coffee and braced myself to attack my keyboard, I recalled the words of the great poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall.
I will say that it seems to be especially the case that into your life some rain will fall if you’ve decided to cast your lot with the Democratic party.
On the other hand, I woke up this morning to good news. And so I was reminded of two other lines in the same Longfellow poem:
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining.
What caused my heart to cease repining? The remarkable come-from-behind victory by the impressive young mainstream liberal, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, over democratic socialist Francesca Hong in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary.
The race was a pretty crazy one. Crowley had actually dropped out in early July, as he was running in single digits. Then Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez left the race due to a campaign finance scandal, and Crowley reentered as a moderate alternative to Hong. A Marquette University Law School poll just three weeks ago had Hong leading the field with 38 percent of the vote with Crowley at 7 percent. But then another of the non-Hong options, former lieutenant governor and 2022 losing Senate nominee Mandela Barnes, also dropped out, after which Hong’s past comments about abolishing the police and Thanksgiving came back to haunt her, and the Democratic establishment led by Gov. Tony Evers coalesced behind Crowley. He came from way behind to win—by less than half a point.
So the 2026 Democratic primary roller coaster rolls merrily on. But I’ll stick with my judgment from a week ago: We’re likely to see a real Democratic blue wave this November, with Democrats very likely to win the House, and the odds of Democrats taking the Senate (slightly) better than 50/50. And I’ll now add that the prospects for holding important governorships in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona also look good.
Let me also mention another result from last night that isn’t likely to get the attention it deserves. In a Democratic primary in Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District, former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin easily defeated fourteen-term incumbent Rep. John Larson. This is apparently the first time in modern Connecticut history that a sitting House member has lost in a primary—and Larson has been a well-liked and respected congressman. Bronin himself said that Larson is “a good man.”
But Bronin also pointed out that Larson is 78 years old and has been in Congress for almost thirty years. As Bronin said over and over, it was time for a change.
Bronin is a centrist Democrat with establishment-type credentials. A Yale graduate and Rhodes Scholar who was an officer in the Naval Reserve, he served two terms as a successful, pragmatic mayor of Hartford, where he stabilized the city’s finances, managed the city competently, and at times took on the city employee unions.
This year, Bronin ran as an energetic and fighting centrist. He emphasized that he’d vigorously take on Donald Trump. As he said to supporters last night, “From the start, this campaign was about something very simple: that if we are going to fix this mess that we’re in, we need to build a Democratic party that’s bringing a whole new energy to this fight.” Bronin ran on kitchen-table issues like bringing down inflation—but also on abolishing ICE.
So it turns out you can be a centrist and for change. You can be a moderate and a fighter. You can be competent and combative. Not a bad model for other Democrats.
Trump is as dangerous as ever—perhaps becoming more so as he becomes more desperate. What ICE is doing is as horrifying as ever. The attacks on vulnerable groups like transgender individuals are as appalling as ever. The Trump administration will work as hard as ever over the next three months to tilt this year’s electoral playing field. The Republican party will be as dishonest and as demagogic in its attacks as ever.
What is to be done? My counsel a week ago was, Keep Calm and Carry On. I think it’s still good advice—come rain or shine.
AROUND THE BULWARK
How a German Bus Driver May Have Averted a War… MARK HERTLING shares an object lesson in hybrid attacks, escalation, deterrence, and miscalculation.
What Does Hungary’s New President Mean for Its Post-Orbán Future? Poetic justice: A judge once purged by Viktor Orbán will be the new head of state as the country works to dismantle the authoritarian system Orbán left behind, writes H. DAVID BAER.
The Dystopian Novel Fueling the Far Right’s Migration Myths… From Ceuta to Washington, hard-right leaders regularly cite Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel to transform real-world border events into apocalyptic threats to Western civilization, writes JULIETTE HEINZLEF.
Audit the White House! On The Bulwark Daily, AMANDA CARPENTER joins TIM MILLER with a plea: audit the people’s house.
MAGA Has Found Its New Favorite Culture War… On The Next Level, TIM, SARAH, and JVL are BACK TOGETHER after a month apart!
Iran Assassination Threat Sparked Trump’s Secret Evacuation… On a special Bulwark Take, MICHAEL WEISS and MARC POLYMEROPOULOS discuss how Donald Trump was secretly smuggled out of Turkey last month, but the journalists and White House staff traveling on Air Force One were left in the dark.
BOOK CLUB TODAY AT 1:30 P.M. EDT!
Join Mona Charen and Bill Kristol for our August Book Club this afternoon. They’ll be chatting LIVE with our Bulwark+ members about Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. Join using this link. If you’re read the book, prepare your questions and comments for the chat, and if you haven’t yet—still stop by. This will be an interactive discussion about not only the book, but whether Mark Twain was ahead of his time.
Quick Hits
MORE VACCINE LIES FROM PEOPLE WHO KNOW BETTER: It was bad enough on Monday seeing MAGA influencers and GOP senators spread ludicrous lies about a hallucinated relationship between COVID-19 vaccines and miscarriages. It was even worse yesterday, seeing the government’s top health officials spreading the same ridiculous assertions. National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ally, made the rounds on a host of conservative media platforms yesterday to further disseminate this week’s moral panic.
“Do we know—because everyone has heard anecdotal instances where women had miscarriages during that period near the time that they took this vaccine—do we know if the vaccine caused adverse effects that could have led to miscarriages in that time period?” Fox News’s Martha MacCallum asked Bhattacharya.
“Well, Martha, it’s certainly possible,” Bhattacharya replied. “You saw that reflected in Tony Fauci’s text.”
This is, of course, hogwash. It is beyond ludicrous for Bhattacharya to pretend that a single speculative text message from January 2021 should outweigh the accumulated evidence of millions upon millions of pregnant women receiving the COVID vaccines, which eventually led to a whole host of gold-standard surveillance data conclusively demonstrating that the vaccines led to no uptick in miscarriage. As we mentioned yesterday, this has been so conclusively demonstrated that even today’s CDC—while introducing plenty of antivax misinformation to its website in plenty of other places—still testifies online that “COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy has not been linked to increased health risks for pregnant women or babies.” But why would the NIH director share that information to reassure people when he could chase those sweet, sweet panic clicks instead?
MYPILLOW MAN OUT: Barring enormous political upheaval, Minnesota’s next governor will be Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar. But surprisingly, the Republican she’ll likely beat in November won’t be former MyPillow CEO and certified election-fraud loon Mike Lindell. In the Republican governor’s primary, Lindell had an enormous name ID advantage, a polling lead, and a coveted endorsement from Donald Trump. But yesterday, Republican voters instead handed their gubernatorial nomination to a relative normie: state House Speaker Lisa Demuth, who defeated Lindell 43 percent to 32 percent.2
Klobuchar is Minnesota’s most popular politician, Minnesota is a blue state, and 2026 is shaping up to be an enormously favorable national environment for Democrats. In practical terms this year, Demuth is only more “electable” than Lindell in the same way that an NBA team would rather draft Andrew than Bill. Still, it’s interesting—and encouraging!—to see state Republicans come out and convincingly pick relative professionalism and normalcy over a Trump-show MAGA clown.
True to form, Lindell has so far refused to concede, telling reporters last night that his team needed to look into “anomalies” in the numbers. We’ll all be holding our breath.
RETURN TO SENDER: We wrote last week about Donald Trump’s attempt to weaponize the Postal Service to take unprecedented control over states’ administration of mail-in ballots, or even to prevent ballots from being mailed at all. It remains to be seen how the Supreme Court will handle Trump’s order—but in the meantime, lower courts keep restricting it further.
In June, a Boston federal judge forbade the USPS from implementing Trump’s order in any of the 23 mostly Democrat-run states that had sued to block it. Yesterday, she expanded that ruling, enjoining the government from trying to implement Trump’s mail-in ballot rules in any state.
“Throughout the multiple actions before district courts, courts of appeal, and the Supreme Court of the United States, the federal government has declined to defend the constitutionality of the EO’s directives,” Judge Indira Talwani wrote in her order. Instead, they have focused purely on arguments that legal challenges to the order should fail on the grounds of standing—arguments Talwani ruled are unpersuasive.
Cheap Shots
This is a joke. Please keep the polls coming.
That’s as of this writing, with more than 95 percent of the vote having been counted.
I was never so happy to be wrong. I had all but given up on my state (WI) and resigned myself to watching a Hong victory party last night. Evidently enough people paused just long enough to see that there was no pathway forward with the far left fork in the road.
It was also a good night for outgoing Governor Evers and his legacy, helping his candidate over the finish line and validating his message.
And, yet again, though some will not want to hear it, it is a reminder that relying on young people in particular to turn out en masse and make a big difference is fool's gold. For all of the idealism and enthusiasm of the most faithful among them, too many are simply unreliable to match what they do to what they say and think.
So, it is a good morning for those with a left agenda but not an irrational one. Still, there is much work to do. Crowley needs to introduce himself on a larger scale -- an opportunity in some ways, but also something of a drain of his time and energy away from other necessary campaigning. He also must bring the factions on the left together and create a united front, not an easy task by any means. And after regrouping, the dark forces on the right will hit him hard, on every imaginable front -- and don't think that some subtle racism won't come into play by people and groups that DJT has only emboldened over the past decade to speak out and foment prejudice-based discord.
Nevertheless the pure spring water in Wisconsin tastes a little sweeter this morning. Enjoy the moment, but then roll up the sleeves and quickly make the campaign not only about Tiffany's extreme baggage and DJT's many failures, but also what viable game plan the Democrats have to make our lives better and retake the state legislature with the best opportunity to do so in a decade and a half. We are back in a game that we feared we had lost. Now let's go for the win.
Two people have reasons to celebrate this morning: David Crowley and Ann Selzer.
Selzer's polling in November of 2024 showing Harris narrowly beating Trump in Iowa looks pretty good compared with this summer's polling in Wisconsin.