re California Gov. candidates now that Harris is out,
Looking over that list of our declared candidates, don't count out Lt Gov. Eleni Kounalakis. Traditionally, Lt. Gov. has not been a great stepping stone to the CA Governor's office, but that seems to have changed in the 21st century.
2 out of the past 4 California Governors were Lt. Governor. And if you were to discount Schwarzenegger (since he was an aberration because of that 2003 recall election), then it's 2 out of 3 past Governors. Pretty good batting average.
One pretty big difference between Gray Davis, Gavin Newsom, and Eleni Kounalakis is that the former two were very high profile politicians in the state when they ran for Governor, having spent years building up a lot of name ID and getting attention. Eleni has kept a lower profile and is still fairly unknown to a lot of voters.
I agree Eleni shouldn't be counted out, but she has not cleared the field, and so far, polling shows former congresswoman Katie Porter ahead of her.
I’d be curious to know what the 2Q fundraising reports show.
The only one I have seen so far in looking via Google is that State Senate Pro Tem Toni Atkins out raised all the rivals (especially Eleni Kounalakis) back in August 2024, just months before the presidential election. This was of course before Katie Porter jumped in the gubernatorial race.
speaking as a Cal Dem Party faithful, Kounalakis has made a major effort to engage the party delegates but she's not taken seriously. Many of the delegates consider her to be a bubble headed idiot with big daddy money.
Another problem - Kounalakis has only been elected once to political office and as Lt. Governor. The position isn't exactly high profile and doesn't wield too much influence.
By contrast, Former State Controller Betty Yee, State Senator Toni Atkins, and former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra have more recent and direct experience. Being elected as Lt. Governor without any prior political experience is unusual.
I take issue with what Politico is saying about Katie Porter when they say, “No one is more poised to benefit more than Katie Porter”
We don’t know that. Porter lost the Senate primary race to Adam Schiff last year and is making a big leap to running to Governor when she doesn’t already have the relationships with state government. I don’t understand how Porter is going to benefit more from Harris not jumping in the race when she couldn’t even beat Schiff in the Senate primary.
Does Porter have the freedom to fundraise more freely now? Yes.
But she has to face State Senate Pro Tem Toni Atkins who has already been quite good at fundraising and is popular in state government circles. She was already very good at fundraising before Porter joined in and even before was a presidential candidate.
You are correct that Porter's name brand is significant and she can in fact get national attention. I don't doubt she can be quite the juggernaut in fundraising. In fact, her candidacy may galvanize the rest of the candidates to do more. I commend Porter's decision to run for Governor.
But let's not be under any illusion that by default she's going to own the race just yet. Although I am intrigued by Tony Atkins' candidacy, this by no means suggests I am being biased towards her.
I am mainly pointing out that so far, even while the polls suggest otherwise, Atkins has in fact been a proven fundraiser early on in the race. Maybe not earth shattering fundraising compared to what Porter could raise but she was in the lead with this early on.
But numbers matter, not just polls. And anything could change in the race.
I do not claim any special knowledge here, but the last poll had Porter at 36% and Atkins (not Akins) in single digits.
Don't discount Porter because she lost to Schiff. After leading the impeachment, Schiff was unbeatable and tons more money. He even helped Garvey just to keep Porter out of the November runoff.
Atkins is unknown in NCal but she has lots go time. Still, with so many candidates, we are looking at a donnybrook.
Oh no, I am not discounting Porter because she lost to Schiff. I am just pointing out that it's a stretch for Politico to say the following:
"PORTER’S IN COMMAND: No one is poised to benefit more than Porter, who shares an overlapping base of national benefactors and has performed better than all Democrats but Harris in public polling of the race."
My point is, hold on for a moment. There is no official evidence that Porter is in fact in command. Polls may be one thing but it's still very early in the race. We still need to see more evidence in the coming weeks and months on where the race is going, irrespective of who is leading.
It's very dishonest reporting to even suggest this so early with Harris making an announcement. It's like we've gone from Harris to potentially having been a gubernatorial candidate clearing the field to Porter all of a sudden being in charge just because Harris isn't running.
You are correct that Atkins is unknown in NorCal to many residents. She resides in San Diego, which means she's going to have to have a more focused campaign than just simply concentrating on SoCal.
Both Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom are also native San Franciscans so needless to say, the Bay Area has been represented in the governor's mansion for over a decade now. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis were the last two Governors to hail from SoCal.
Didn't Beto O'Rourke win 3 of the 5 districts in the new map back in 2018? Perhaps this could open the door for Democrats finding strong candidates to run. With Trump's job approval tanking after only 7 months, imagine where we'll be in 15 months. Primary season starts in March, 2026.
Would love to see those numbers if someone can crunch those. It was a long time ago at this point, so the 2022 gov and 2024 senate numbers below Harris might be helpful too.
2018 proved under the right circumstances with the right candidate utilizing social media effectively to earn votes normally unavailable to other Democrats, TX can be purple instead of red. In 2026 Texas Democrats need to prove that again and if they can, the GOP power grab will backfire in spectacular fashion. Time to get to work!
2018 was before four years of border policy neglect that large numbers of Texas Democrats seemed to take personally. Was it realigning? We'll see, but it's a fair bet that hundreds of thousands of votes available to O'Rourke in 2018 are no longer available to Democrats, with a heavy concentration of these located in the two reconfigured districts that the Democrats would seem to have the best chance of holding on paper.
I agree that it could possibly be a permanent realignment, but your second argument doesn’t hold much water for me. I’m sure you are right that hundreds of thousands of voters switched party allegiance from D to R in these last 8 years for a multitude of reasons (I don’t agree it’s just because of the border, but we’ll leave that discussion for another time). Whether that’s permanent is TBD.
But isn’t that only half the story? It also aligns perfectly with your personal opinion. So my question to you is this: How many voters moved to Texas over those 8 years and how many hundreds of thousands of more votes are available for Democrats now, then there was in 2018?
Or in other words which is bigger? Shifts among Latino/Hispanic native Texans? Or people moving to Dallas/Houston? I don’t know the answer for sure, but I suspect it’s the latter based on US census data. Let’s dive in together shall we?
Obviously it won’t be the same every year, but let’s say for this hypothetical that 8 years creates up to 4.5m new voters (not all will vote obviously, but a majority of them will).
From Dallas and Houston alone, they made up 367k of the 563k population increase. Or in percentage, the metros made up 65% of population growth in the entire state over 1 year. Let’s assume hypothetically this is the case for all 8 years (again it won’t be, but it illustrates the point I’m making). That would be 2.9 million possible voters.
I think even giving a generous margin for Republicans would see Democrats makeup any potential votes lost by Hispanic/Latino vote switchers by city growth of young professionals and maybe even could exceed any losses.
Again, not great, but not basement-level we got in 2017-18. And that means it's not necessarily a given the House will flip, especially with gerrymandering shenanigans.
The averages are filled with right wing pollsters like Inside Advantage and RMG that werent pumping out regular polls in 2018. With the non-partisan firms he's not far from where he was in 2017 and notably doing worse with independents.
And a lot of that decline was based on the expectation of more painful fallout from tariffs than has yet materialized. If the tariffs haven't triggered a recession by next year at this time, Trump's approval ratings are likely to go up, not down.
Does the technical definition of “recession” even matter anymore? We didn’t have one post covid and yet the “vibes” on the economy sucked. Now we do have somewhat slowing job growth, shitty housing starts, and price increases starting to slowly trickle through.
I don’t think it’s a binary with what’s bubbling up through the cracks economically right now, through nobody’s fault but one idiot
Allred lost TX-28 and TX-34 by 0.2 and 2 points respectively (I know people were asking about the 2024 race in each new district). Dunno if there’s a more complete breakdown of the districts by that election result anywhere else yet. So there’s a piece of it at least.
I'm in greg casar's congressional district which also landed me in a god awful gerrymandered state senate race. I think this backfires on the republicans .... At a certain point everyone is going to get fed up with this political crap and say enough is enough. I think we are at that point.
The news coming out of the post flood review regarding republican leadership for the state gives dems a lot of ammunition to say "through the bums out.". Several dozen dead children have a way if promoting that thinking.
I would say the opposite. Very rarely (ever? I'm sure someone will show me a counter-example) has gerrymandeing angered voters enough to the point where they voted out someone from the other party over it (which would be counter-intuitive, if you think about it).
What Republicans grasped during the Bush years is that you can draw the most ridiculous lines, and unless a court challenge stops them, voters will not care and/or have no ability to do anything about it. Dems bizarrely drifted in a different direction -- fairness/good government will win votes and pushed for commissions. Now we're up shit creek in a lot of states because of this.
Every commission in blue states needs to end, by ballot or legislature. Best we start working on this now, rather than 2030 with fights for control over redistricting for the next decade at stake, regardless of who is president.
And then Dems need to have a filibuster carve out to pass a national law requiring nonpartisan commissions in every state with strict anti-county and city splitting rules when they next have a federal trifecta.
Would Texas dems really have to leave the state “indefinitely” to block the redistricting? Couldn’t they just wait out the clock until the filing deadline on December 8th?
If that’s all they had to do, the DNC and any Dem aligned redistricting organizations should offer to pay for Texas Dem legislators’ food and lodging while they are out of the state in order to stop this plan from passing.
There is also a $500/day penalty that would kick in on any absent member. In addition, since the Texas legislature is part-time, legislators have day jobs. If forced to go out of state, many of them would lose substantial amounts of income, if not be forced to lose their jobs.
FYI Liam Elkind isn't a "businessman"; he's a nonprofit executive who started Invisible Hands, which delivered food to homebound New Yorkers during the pandemic.
Maybe it's best for him to remain incoherent, but I don't see him being any kind of threat to Jerry Nadler, anyway, unless God forbid Nadler has another severe health crisis during the campaign.
In looking at Elkind's encounter with Rep. Nadler, he seems to be too snobby and naive as to how politics works, especially considering he's only 26 and says he grew up voting for Nadler since he had the ability to vote.
What would Elkind do if he was in office and was in Nadler's shoes? Would he be able to wave a magic wand and come up with a plan that can really stop the tariffs?
There's no real strategy Nadler or anyone in the Democratic Party has to be able to stop the tariffs. As previous discussion here on TDB has revealed, it's not so easy to just go ahead and all of a sudden eliminate tariffs like that.
Part of his decision to run, Elkind told CNN, was a conversation he had with Nadler this spring at a local political event. “What’s the plan?” Elkind says he asked about Trump, and says the congressman responded by saying that the president’s tariffs will crash the economy and hand Democrats the midterms.
“For a man I respected, a man I grew up voting for, it felt like such an un-strategic take,” Elkind said.
Elkind's LinkedIn profile describes him as "a startup founder, nonprofit CEO, community organizer, and Rhodes Scholar." And it lists "startup founder" first. https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-elkind-72724015a/
If the Latino turnout snaps back to pre-2024 voting patterns, there could be potential for a dummymander. Emphasis on could.
And if Paxton prevails in the primary (and there's a strong Dem candidate), anything could happen. Gerrymandering can only do so much if GOP turnout collapses and angry Dems turn out in full force.
I really think 2024 was an inflation/economy election. That's all I heard going into it -- I remember seeing Biden "I did that" stickers next to gas prices even here in the NYC suburbs.
Not sure if we should be basing our analysis of the map on 2024 alone -- I think Biden 2020 and Beto 2018 numbers are important to consider too, especially in what is shaping up to be a highly blue year. (As another poster here pointed out, Trump's approval rating could sink even further too -- we're only 7 months in. The fact they even did this gerrymandering in the first place tells me they're worried.)
I'm not giving up hope yet. There's also the potential of VRA litigation -- if SCOTUS goes through with it (and they did for Allen v. Milligan). We'll see.
I agree 2024 was the inflation election. There’s 1 key difference though now that sadly I think will end up with SCOTUS on the opposite side of the coming legal fight this time: these districts have Hispanic/Latino VRA districts, not black voter ones as was the case in AL/LA.
Republicans can easily and persuasively argue in court to the fact Hispanic/Latino voters are no longer solidly Democratic, they’re closer to 50/50 and thus no longer need VRA districts to have a chance to elect someone of their choice.
Also the fact that Texas voters demographically are far more closely split than the Deep South. In Texas white voters are what 60-40 R or something? I haven’t checked, so I’m pulling numbers from thin air. While Latino/Hispanic voters are 55-45 D (again guessing)?
Whereas in AL/LA it’s 90-10 for white voters voting GOP and 90-10 black voters voting Democratic. There was a beyond obvious case the only way black voters could elect someone of their choice was VRA districts in AL/LA that even Trump judges couldn’t dismiss/ignore. That’s not even close to the same situation as now in Texas unfortunately.
2024 was the key election Republicans needed to make their dreams a reality. I’d prepare ourselves for no more Hispanic/Latino VRA protected districts, because imo that’s the most likely outcome of this legal battle once settled.
Agreed, I’m not saying it’s a huge loss to Democrats if all VRA Hispanic/Latino districts are ruled unconstitutional or anything. Just that I doubt the Trump Supreme Court will actually keep them for the aforementioned reasons and that losing the power of the VRA argument in court means the TX gerrymander will likely be approved for 2026 elections.
Definitely not what I want to happen, but what I expect will happen sadly. California needs to do a redraw. Then if other red states decide to follow TX, so too does NY to counterbalance.
Paxton is the big wild card, as even most "traditional" Republicans can't stand him. See the split in the Texas House caucus for Speaker. That's the the Senate GOP is so gung ho against him. I'm surprised they haven't conivnced Trump to back Cornyn or someone else by now honestly.
Looking at the map it’s a good visual of the packing and cracking form of gerrymandering. I’m hoping it blows up on them, but it’s now on the Democrats to get in the mud and fight like rethugicons.
A new Zogby Strategies national poll of 1,010 likely voters conducted July 28-29 reveals an intense collapse among key cohorts that enabled the President’s battleground state sweep in November. Among voters, the President is underwater 11 points with 43% approving of his job and 54% disapproving. Looking closer at independents, there is a gap of 32 points (31 – 63 approve/disapprove rating).
Only 76% of Republicans are proud Trump is president. That and Parents going from 64% to 50% approval are the 2 pieces of data that stand out the most to me.
Epstein has cracked Trump’s base along with tariffs, his usual chaos and daily embarrassment he provides thanks to the stupid people who put the biggest conman in the country in office as president again. Who could’ve predicted this outcome? Anyone with an educated mind of course. 2026 can’t come soon enough.
Point taken and tipped, but when a poll aligns with reason and common sense and does appear tailor-made to serve some agenda, I tend to pay attention to it.
Frankly? I'm an ardent skeptic of the entire polling industry and have been since Research2000 or whatever it was scammed Markos so brazenly. To me, every poll is doctored to some degree.
I truly despise this man, Tim Moore and Destin Hall for what they've done to our state and doing the bidding for the likes of Art Pope and Americans for Prosperity.
It is so crucial that my fellow voters in NC flip control of SCONC by 2028. I am so sick of Berger and Hall gleefully and ruthlessly overriding both Cooper and Stein's vetoes on toxic red meat bills.
It would please me SO much to see Berger back in the minority by 2030 and watch helplessly as Ds undo everything he did. Not only do we need fair legislative and Congressional maps, but those sneaky laws covering GOP corruption need to go. I expect a potential NC Dem trifecta to push more legislation into effect than Virginia did in 2020-2021 or Michigan and Minnesota from 2023-2024.
Both are progressives, but given the generational and rhetorical gap I fear this could turn into another ugly ideological showdown if both try to run. Doggett doesn't seem like someone who would want that to happen in my opinion, so I'd think he'd step down in such an occasion. Just my opinion though.
The appeals court case on tariffs apparently did not go well for the government, with arguments so shambolic that judges had to hypothetically defend their positions on their behalf. I would imagine all non-Section 232 duties are about to be struck down agai
Hence why Wall Street has been holding up the last couple months. The quiet belief that they'll get struck down. Assuming they have such medium-term thinking that is.
That’s a big part of why the post-April rally has held, though the cracks in the armor are starting to show.
Ideally this gets slapped down without cert from SCOTUS, though the steel/copper tariffs are still on solid legal footing thereafter (but less arbitrary, and less unpredictable for small and midsize concerns6
At some point, La Raza in Texas is going to have to decide to come out and vote for their own community (I say this as a fronterizo). It's like, your opps are literally counting on you not being engaged enough to come out so they can install people who actively harm you and your families. Such a damn shame. TX Dems are going to have to work harder.
Dollar tree is raising base orices to $1.50 (i.e., 20 percent increSe). plus trump is eliminating the tariff exemption for direct ship items below $800 value.
Thats all you need to know ... Prices will skyrocket or supply will be cut off.
A technical comment. Often the key or code to the colors on graphs or maps is left off. This renders them pretty uninformative to me sometimes. Please include the keys?
A lot of pollsters seem to have their thumb on the scale pushing things rightward. I think the trendlines are correct, but perhaps suggesting a rosier picture for him than is accurate. To wit, Dems are performing better in every sense in the special elections than they did in 2017-2018.
They likely won't. An ever increasing share of the electorate no longer uses traditional landlines that were used to conduct a majority of polls in the past. Moreover, more voters and eligible voters don't even bother to respond to pollsters anymore, so response rates are abysmal. Millennials and Gen Z are very different from the Boomers and Gen X in more than just ideology, but also habits including those with technology and media.
The trendline is unmistakable. But more to the point, a huge swing in specials proved to be an accurate predictor of the 2018 midterm and to a more modest degree, the 2022 general.
Reported for spamming.
re California Gov. candidates now that Harris is out,
Looking over that list of our declared candidates, don't count out Lt Gov. Eleni Kounalakis. Traditionally, Lt. Gov. has not been a great stepping stone to the CA Governor's office, but that seems to have changed in the 21st century.
2 out of the past 4 California Governors were Lt. Governor. And if you were to discount Schwarzenegger (since he was an aberration because of that 2003 recall election), then it's 2 out of 3 past Governors. Pretty good batting average.
One pretty big difference between Gray Davis, Gavin Newsom, and Eleni Kounalakis is that the former two were very high profile politicians in the state when they ran for Governor, having spent years building up a lot of name ID and getting attention. Eleni has kept a lower profile and is still fairly unknown to a lot of voters.
I agree Eleni shouldn't be counted out, but she has not cleared the field, and so far, polling shows former congresswoman Katie Porter ahead of her.
Looks like spam.
I’d be curious to know what the 2Q fundraising reports show.
The only one I have seen so far in looking via Google is that State Senate Pro Tem Toni Atkins out raised all the rivals (especially Eleni Kounalakis) back in August 2024, just months before the presidential election. This was of course before Katie Porter jumped in the gubernatorial race.
Eleni can just self-fund, right? I thought her dad was a big developer in Sacramento years ago.
speaking as a Cal Dem Party faithful, Kounalakis has made a major effort to engage the party delegates but she's not taken seriously. Many of the delegates consider her to be a bubble headed idiot with big daddy money.
Another problem - Kounalakis has only been elected once to political office and as Lt. Governor. The position isn't exactly high profile and doesn't wield too much influence.
By contrast, Former State Controller Betty Yee, State Senator Toni Atkins, and former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra have more recent and direct experience. Being elected as Lt. Governor without any prior political experience is unusual.
Wow, tell us how they really feel!
Politico had a story on this race today. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/california-playbook/2025/07/31/the-governors-race-truly-begins-00486381
I take issue with what Politico is saying about Katie Porter when they say, “No one is more poised to benefit more than Katie Porter”
We don’t know that. Porter lost the Senate primary race to Adam Schiff last year and is making a big leap to running to Governor when she doesn’t already have the relationships with state government. I don’t understand how Porter is going to benefit more from Harris not jumping in the race when she couldn’t even beat Schiff in the Senate primary.
Does Porter have the freedom to fundraise more freely now? Yes.
But she has to face State Senate Pro Tem Toni Atkins who has already been quite good at fundraising and is popular in state government circles. She was already very good at fundraising before Porter joined in and even before was a presidential candidate.
You are correct that Porter's name brand is significant and she can in fact get national attention. I don't doubt she can be quite the juggernaut in fundraising. In fact, her candidacy may galvanize the rest of the candidates to do more. I commend Porter's decision to run for Governor.
But let's not be under any illusion that by default she's going to own the race just yet. Although I am intrigued by Tony Atkins' candidacy, this by no means suggests I am being biased towards her.
I am mainly pointing out that so far, even while the polls suggest otherwise, Atkins has in fact been a proven fundraiser early on in the race. Maybe not earth shattering fundraising compared to what Porter could raise but she was in the lead with this early on.
But numbers matter, not just polls. And anything could change in the race.
I do not claim any special knowledge here, but the last poll had Porter at 36% and Atkins (not Akins) in single digits.
Don't discount Porter because she lost to Schiff. After leading the impeachment, Schiff was unbeatable and tons more money. He even helped Garvey just to keep Porter out of the November runoff.
Atkins is unknown in NCal but she has lots go time. Still, with so many candidates, we are looking at a donnybrook.
Oh no, I am not discounting Porter because she lost to Schiff. I am just pointing out that it's a stretch for Politico to say the following:
"PORTER’S IN COMMAND: No one is poised to benefit more than Porter, who shares an overlapping base of national benefactors and has performed better than all Democrats but Harris in public polling of the race."
My point is, hold on for a moment. There is no official evidence that Porter is in fact in command. Polls may be one thing but it's still very early in the race. We still need to see more evidence in the coming weeks and months on where the race is going, irrespective of who is leading.
It's very dishonest reporting to even suggest this so early with Harris making an announcement. It's like we've gone from Harris to potentially having been a gubernatorial candidate clearing the field to Porter all of a sudden being in charge just because Harris isn't running.
You are correct that Atkins is unknown in NorCal to many residents. She resides in San Diego, which means she's going to have to have a more focused campaign than just simply concentrating on SoCal.
Both Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom are also native San Franciscans so needless to say, the Bay Area has been represented in the governor's mansion for over a decade now. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis were the last two Governors to hail from SoCal.
Didn't Beto O'Rourke win 3 of the 5 districts in the new map back in 2018? Perhaps this could open the door for Democrats finding strong candidates to run. With Trump's job approval tanking after only 7 months, imagine where we'll be in 15 months. Primary season starts in March, 2026.
Would love to see those numbers if someone can crunch those. It was a long time ago at this point, so the 2022 gov and 2024 senate numbers below Harris might be helpful too.
2018 proved under the right circumstances with the right candidate utilizing social media effectively to earn votes normally unavailable to other Democrats, TX can be purple instead of red. In 2026 Texas Democrats need to prove that again and if they can, the GOP power grab will backfire in spectacular fashion. Time to get to work!
2018 was before four years of border policy neglect that large numbers of Texas Democrats seemed to take personally. Was it realigning? We'll see, but it's a fair bet that hundreds of thousands of votes available to O'Rourke in 2018 are no longer available to Democrats, with a heavy concentration of these located in the two reconfigured districts that the Democrats would seem to have the best chance of holding on paper.
I agree that it could possibly be a permanent realignment, but your second argument doesn’t hold much water for me. I’m sure you are right that hundreds of thousands of voters switched party allegiance from D to R in these last 8 years for a multitude of reasons (I don’t agree it’s just because of the border, but we’ll leave that discussion for another time). Whether that’s permanent is TBD.
But isn’t that only half the story? It also aligns perfectly with your personal opinion. So my question to you is this: How many voters moved to Texas over those 8 years and how many hundreds of thousands of more votes are available for Democrats now, then there was in 2018?
Or in other words which is bigger? Shifts among Latino/Hispanic native Texans? Or people moving to Dallas/Houston? I don’t know the answer for sure, but I suspect it’s the latter based on US census data. Let’s dive in together shall we?
In 1 year from July 1 2023 to July 1 2024 Texas added 563k people: https://www.texastribune.org/2024/12/19/texas-population-31-million/
Obviously it won’t be the same every year, but let’s say for this hypothetical that 8 years creates up to 4.5m new voters (not all will vote obviously, but a majority of them will).
Next let’s look at the breakdown of how many of the 563k came from the metro areas: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/population-estimates-counties-metro-micro.html#metro-areas-numeric-growth
From Dallas and Houston alone, they made up 367k of the 563k population increase. Or in percentage, the metros made up 65% of population growth in the entire state over 1 year. Let’s assume hypothetically this is the case for all 8 years (again it won’t be, but it illustrates the point I’m making). That would be 2.9 million possible voters.
I think even giving a generous margin for Republicans would see Democrats makeup any potential votes lost by Hispanic/Latino vote switchers by city growth of young professionals and maybe even could exceed any losses.
His job approval isn't "tanking" the way it was in 2017 -- only down 10ish, not 15-18. I wouldn't count on the same resistance surge we got back then.
From his 1st week in office as of 7/28 he's down 21 points. Econ/YouGov poll.
18-29 year old - 44 points
Hisp/Lat - 30 points
Indi - 30 points
Less than $50000 - 20 points
$50-$100000 - 22 points
Inflation - 31 points
Immigration - 14 points
His coalition is unraveling leaving open spaces for Democrats to fill. Time to get to work! Primaries start in March.
In the averages, it's about 12%
https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/data
Again, not great, but not basement-level we got in 2017-18. And that means it's not necessarily a given the House will flip, especially with gerrymandering shenanigans.
Never said it was a "given" Have a little faith and let's get to work. Do you have a plan to help Democrats take back the House?
Voting. I've worked in politics for 2 decades.
The averages are filled with right wing pollsters like Inside Advantage and RMG that werent pumping out regular polls in 2018. With the non-partisan firms he's not far from where he was in 2017 and notably doing worse with independents.
And a lot of that decline was based on the expectation of more painful fallout from tariffs than has yet materialized. If the tariffs haven't triggered a recession by next year at this time, Trump's approval ratings are likely to go up, not down.
Does the technical definition of “recession” even matter anymore? We didn’t have one post covid and yet the “vibes” on the economy sucked. Now we do have somewhat slowing job growth, shitty housing starts, and price increases starting to slowly trickle through.
I don’t think it’s a binary with what’s bubbling up through the cracks economically right now, through nobody’s fault but one idiot
BTW, Covid's still everywhere, the pandemic's still going. Wear a respirator mask (N95, P100)
Spoke too soon. Foreign countries are suspending package delivery to the US. The economic catastrophe is pretty obvious.
According to this article from Politico.
https://archive.ph/zw31k
Allred lost TX-28 and TX-34 by 0.2 and 2 points respectively (I know people were asking about the 2024 race in each new district). Dunno if there’s a more complete breakdown of the districts by that election result anywhere else yet. So there’s a piece of it at least.
I'm in greg casar's congressional district which also landed me in a god awful gerrymandered state senate race. I think this backfires on the republicans .... At a certain point everyone is going to get fed up with this political crap and say enough is enough. I think we are at that point.
The news coming out of the post flood review regarding republican leadership for the state gives dems a lot of ammunition to say "through the bums out.". Several dozen dead children have a way if promoting that thinking.
I would say the opposite. Very rarely (ever? I'm sure someone will show me a counter-example) has gerrymandeing angered voters enough to the point where they voted out someone from the other party over it (which would be counter-intuitive, if you think about it).
What Republicans grasped during the Bush years is that you can draw the most ridiculous lines, and unless a court challenge stops them, voters will not care and/or have no ability to do anything about it. Dems bizarrely drifted in a different direction -- fairness/good government will win votes and pushed for commissions. Now we're up shit creek in a lot of states because of this.
Every commission in blue states needs to end, by ballot or legislature. Best we start working on this now, rather than 2030 with fights for control over redistricting for the next decade at stake, regardless of who is president.
100% agree
And then Dems need to have a filibuster carve out to pass a national law requiring nonpartisan commissions in every state with strict anti-county and city splitting rules when they next have a federal trifecta.
Agreed. Redistricting is so inside baseball the vast majority of folks don't know or care
Would Texas dems really have to leave the state “indefinitely” to block the redistricting? Couldn’t they just wait out the clock until the filing deadline on December 8th?
If that’s all they had to do, the DNC and any Dem aligned redistricting organizations should offer to pay for Texas Dem legislators’ food and lodging while they are out of the state in order to stop this plan from passing.
That’s actually already happening: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/07/29/texas-democrats-quorum-break-fundraising-fines-redistricting/
There is also a $500/day penalty that would kick in on any absent member. In addition, since the Texas legislature is part-time, legislators have day jobs. If forced to go out of state, many of them would lose substantial amounts of income, if not be forced to lose their jobs.
Tough times call for tough measures
Even adding up all this money this shouldn't be more then 2 million a month. Money that dems will pay gladly to save 5 seats.
I wonder how much we spend on court cases challenging these things in court, and how that compares to what that would cost.
FYI Liam Elkind isn't a "businessman"; he's a nonprofit executive who started Invisible Hands, which delivered food to homebound New Yorkers during the pandemic.
Hope he comes up with sentences that mean something rather than this word salad lol
https://x.com/PeterTwinklage/status/1950698047773548709
Maybe it's best for him to remain incoherent, but I don't see him being any kind of threat to Jerry Nadler, anyway, unless God forbid Nadler has another severe health crisis during the campaign.
In looking at Elkind's encounter with Rep. Nadler, he seems to be too snobby and naive as to how politics works, especially considering he's only 26 and says he grew up voting for Nadler since he had the ability to vote.
What would Elkind do if he was in office and was in Nadler's shoes? Would he be able to wave a magic wand and come up with a plan that can really stop the tariffs?
There's no real strategy Nadler or anyone in the Democratic Party has to be able to stop the tariffs. As previous discussion here on TDB has revealed, it's not so easy to just go ahead and all of a sudden eliminate tariffs like that.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/30/politics/jerry-nadler-liam-elkind-new-york-primary
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Part of his decision to run, Elkind told CNN, was a conversation he had with Nadler this spring at a local political event. “What’s the plan?” Elkind says he asked about Trump, and says the congressman responded by saying that the president’s tariffs will crash the economy and hand Democrats the midterms.
“For a man I respected, a man I grew up voting for, it felt like such an un-strategic take,” Elkind said.
I mean, Nadler should 100% retire. His successor just shouldn't be some credentialist vacuous walking suit.
I don't know. I'll say I certainly understand the opinion that he should retire.
Elkind's LinkedIn profile describes him as "a startup founder, nonprofit CEO, community organizer, and Rhodes Scholar." And it lists "startup founder" first. https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-elkind-72724015a/
Got it, I'm pretty sure the "startup" is the nonprofit. Confusing wording, but he's definitely not a businessman :)
Fair point. I've corrected.
If the Latino turnout snaps back to pre-2024 voting patterns, there could be potential for a dummymander. Emphasis on could.
And if Paxton prevails in the primary (and there's a strong Dem candidate), anything could happen. Gerrymandering can only do so much if GOP turnout collapses and angry Dems turn out in full force.
I really think 2024 was an inflation/economy election. That's all I heard going into it -- I remember seeing Biden "I did that" stickers next to gas prices even here in the NYC suburbs.
Not sure if we should be basing our analysis of the map on 2024 alone -- I think Biden 2020 and Beto 2018 numbers are important to consider too, especially in what is shaping up to be a highly blue year. (As another poster here pointed out, Trump's approval rating could sink even further too -- we're only 7 months in. The fact they even did this gerrymandering in the first place tells me they're worried.)
I'm not giving up hope yet. There's also the potential of VRA litigation -- if SCOTUS goes through with it (and they did for Allen v. Milligan). We'll see.
I agree 2024 was the inflation election. There’s 1 key difference though now that sadly I think will end up with SCOTUS on the opposite side of the coming legal fight this time: these districts have Hispanic/Latino VRA districts, not black voter ones as was the case in AL/LA.
Republicans can easily and persuasively argue in court to the fact Hispanic/Latino voters are no longer solidly Democratic, they’re closer to 50/50 and thus no longer need VRA districts to have a chance to elect someone of their choice.
Also the fact that Texas voters demographically are far more closely split than the Deep South. In Texas white voters are what 60-40 R or something? I haven’t checked, so I’m pulling numbers from thin air. While Latino/Hispanic voters are 55-45 D (again guessing)?
Whereas in AL/LA it’s 90-10 for white voters voting GOP and 90-10 black voters voting Democratic. There was a beyond obvious case the only way black voters could elect someone of their choice was VRA districts in AL/LA that even Trump judges couldn’t dismiss/ignore. That’s not even close to the same situation as now in Texas unfortunately.
2024 was the key election Republicans needed to make their dreams a reality. I’d prepare ourselves for no more Hispanic/Latino VRA protected districts, because imo that’s the most likely outcome of this legal battle once settled.
From a partisan standpoint that doesn’t have much benefit for the GOP. Outside TX, the only other seat they could really go after is FL-09.
Agreed, I’m not saying it’s a huge loss to Democrats if all VRA Hispanic/Latino districts are ruled unconstitutional or anything. Just that I doubt the Trump Supreme Court will actually keep them for the aforementioned reasons and that losing the power of the VRA argument in court means the TX gerrymander will likely be approved for 2026 elections.
Definitely not what I want to happen, but what I expect will happen sadly. California needs to do a redraw. Then if other red states decide to follow TX, so too does NY to counterbalance.
Paxton is the big wild card, as even most "traditional" Republicans can't stand him. See the split in the Texas House caucus for Speaker. That's the the Senate GOP is so gung ho against him. I'm surprised they haven't conivnced Trump to back Cornyn or someone else by now honestly.
Looking at the map it’s a good visual of the packing and cracking form of gerrymandering. I’m hoping it blows up on them, but it’s now on the Democrats to get in the mud and fight like rethugicons.
A new Zogby Strategies national poll of 1,010 likely voters conducted July 28-29 reveals an intense collapse among key cohorts that enabled the President’s battleground state sweep in November. Among voters, the President is underwater 11 points with 43% approving of his job and 54% disapproving. Looking closer at independents, there is a gap of 32 points (31 – 63 approve/disapprove rating).
https://johnzogbystrategies.com/new-zogby-strategies-poll-reveals-intense-collapse-among-trump-supporters/
Only 76% of Republicans are proud Trump is president. That and Parents going from 64% to 50% approval are the 2 pieces of data that stand out the most to me.
Epstein has cracked Trump’s base along with tariffs, his usual chaos and daily embarrassment he provides thanks to the stupid people who put the biggest conman in the country in office as president again. Who could’ve predicted this outcome? Anyone with an educated mind of course. 2026 can’t come soon enough.
Hold it: Do we believe Zogby again now? President Kerry wants Ohio and Florida back...
Point taken and tipped, but when a poll aligns with reason and common sense and does appear tailor-made to serve some agenda, I tend to pay attention to it.
Would you say that if it was from a company known to doctor polls, too?
Frankly? I'm an ardent skeptic of the entire polling industry and have been since Research2000 or whatever it was scammed Markos so brazenly. To me, every poll is doctored to some degree.
There are very different levels. Good-faith attempts at modeling are different from just making things up.
Trouble in Bergerland, ie Phil Berger's death grip of power in the NC legislature may be loosening.
https://www.theassemblync.com/politics/phil-berger-senate-primary-2026/
I truly despise this man, Tim Moore and Destin Hall for what they've done to our state and doing the bidding for the likes of Art Pope and Americans for Prosperity.
More like Americans for Poverty, but yes here is hoping for better times in the Tar Heel State.
It is so crucial that my fellow voters in NC flip control of SCONC by 2028. I am so sick of Berger and Hall gleefully and ruthlessly overriding both Cooper and Stein's vetoes on toxic red meat bills.
It would please me SO much to see Berger back in the minority by 2030 and watch helplessly as Ds undo everything he did. Not only do we need fair legislative and Congressional maps, but those sneaky laws covering GOP corruption need to go. I expect a potential NC Dem trifecta to push more legislation into effect than Virginia did in 2020-2021 or Michigan and Minnesota from 2023-2024.
The Republican gerrymander map would pit two superb incumbents, Lloyd Doggett and Greg Casar, against each other. An impossible choice.
Lloyd Doggett will be 80 by election day. I hope he takes one for the team and retires.
I wouldn't be surprised if he did. He's been there since the mid-90s.
I would, he seems like a lifer and he would definitely be favored over Casar
Both are progressives, but given the generational and rhetorical gap I fear this could turn into another ugly ideological showdown if both try to run. Doggett doesn't seem like someone who would want that to happen in my opinion, so I'd think he'd step down in such an occasion. Just my opinion though.
The appeals court case on tariffs apparently did not go well for the government, with arguments so shambolic that judges had to hypothetically defend their positions on their behalf. I would imagine all non-Section 232 duties are about to be struck down agai
Hence why Wall Street has been holding up the last couple months. The quiet belief that they'll get struck down. Assuming they have such medium-term thinking that is.
That’s a big part of why the post-April rally has held, though the cracks in the armor are starting to show.
Ideally this gets slapped down without cert from SCOTUS, though the steel/copper tariffs are still on solid legal footing thereafter (but less arbitrary, and less unpredictable for small and midsize concerns6
At some point, La Raza in Texas is going to have to decide to come out and vote for their own community (I say this as a fronterizo). It's like, your opps are literally counting on you not being engaged enough to come out so they can install people who actively harm you and your families. Such a damn shame. TX Dems are going to have to work harder.
Do you think there will be some reversion back to previous voting patterns?
I have no clue. I hope so? But the Borderlands will break your heart every time.
Dollar tree is raising base orices to $1.50 (i.e., 20 percent increSe). plus trump is eliminating the tariff exemption for direct ship items below $800 value.
Thats all you need to know ... Prices will skyrocket or supply will be cut off.
A technical comment. Often the key or code to the colors on graphs or maps is left off. This renders them pretty uninformative to me sometimes. Please include the keys?
Doesn't mean I don't love the information! Thanks
A lot of pollsters seem to have their thumb on the scale pushing things rightward. I think the trendlines are correct, but perhaps suggesting a rosier picture for him than is accurate. To wit, Dems are performing better in every sense in the special elections than they did in 2017-2018.
If 2026 is a repeat of 2006 -- and the pollsters can't detect it -- MSM and the GOP are in for a rough 11/3/2026.
They likely won't. An ever increasing share of the electorate no longer uses traditional landlines that were used to conduct a majority of polls in the past. Moreover, more voters and eligible voters don't even bother to respond to pollsters anymore, so response rates are abysmal. Millennials and Gen Z are very different from the Boomers and Gen X in more than just ideology, but also habits including those with technology and media.
Not that you need it, but I can vouch for this as a Gen X parent of a Gen Z kid. 😒
Oh we still have a landline at my parent's home that I'm living at. It mostly receives spam calls and sometimes relative or friend calls.
In about a year you'll have to answer the landline so you can influence polling!
Isn't that the same line of thinking that proved wrong last year?
The trendline is unmistakable. But more to the point, a huge swing in specials proved to be an accurate predictor of the 2018 midterm and to a more modest degree, the 2022 general.