Races I'm interested in? I'm interested in several, but here's a few:
- NY-17 is my home district, and it's becoming a mess. A ton of candidates are running -- Dem frontrunner is probably Rockland County legislator Beth Davidson. This is also assuming Lawler runs at all -- I've been told that, on the GOP side, State Assemblyman Matt Slater may run if Lawler tries for governor.
- Besides NY-17, I'm watching the NYC Council races too. I'm a progressive personally, so I'm interested in the Alexa Aviles (District 38) and Shanana Hanif (District 39) races in particular -- both are progressive incumbents with well-funded centrist/moderate challengers. There are also several open seats too. Whatever your ideological stance, the Council races will certainly be interesting.
- Finally, an underreported race. San Diego County, California has an open seat on its Board of Supervisors -- one that could tip the scales of which party controls the seat. Currently the Board is 2-2 Dem/Rep. The Democratic candidate is Imperial Beach mayor Paloma Aguirre, while the Republican candidate is Chula Vista mayor John McCann. July 1 is the election -- hopefully Aguirre can pull it off. (Question for any posters here from that area -- how likely are the chances for Aguirre to pull it off?)
I'll leave my comment with a question of my own -- are there any non-special election local races people are watching? State Senate/House? City councils? County races? Others? Virginia and NJ are probably on a lot of peoples' minds, but I'm also curious about 2026 local races.
Not from CA at all but your question made me curious. The vacancy is district 1. Nora Vargas was the incumbent here before she refused to take her second term; she was a democrat and won 57-43 in 2020 and 63-37 in 2024. At least on paper it looks favorable for us, but officially nonpartisan elections always add a bit of extra worry for me...
I've mentioned before that I want to relocate to Boston, so I follow their local politics more than anything near me. The mayoral election this year should be an easy win for Wu, but I am curious about one of the city council seats. The incumbent for district 7, Tania Fernandes Anderson, plead guilty for bribery in federal court recently.
She marks a bit of a repeat blemish in the city because there was another council member, Kendra Lara, also thought of as a progressive who crashed her car into a house while driving double the speed limit, without a license, without car insurance, and without registering her car. She lost her primary that year.
Anderson has agreed to resign as part of her guilty plea. Curious to see who will win that and if there are going to be any more embarrassments out of the city council. Unfortunately I don't know anything about any of the several people competing in the primary to replace her.
This occurred in 2023 and the reason for her lack of a license was due to an unpaid traffic ticket from Connecticut... from 2013.
It was blatant disregard for the law from her as far as I'm concerned. She used the excuse of it being an easy mistake that we can all make because routine tasks slip through the cracks or some such. Bunch of BS.
Worst part is she got off with a slap on the wrist. Most of the charges ended up getting dropped. At least she got kicked out of office right after it happened.
I'm in NY 17 as well. I'm not paying 100% attention at the moment but in what way do you see it as a mess? Just in the number of people running? It seems weird to me that there are only 4 board members for all of San Diego county. I don't know that. Though I know Los Angeles has a small number as well and that's obviously an even bigger county.
Almost all California counties have five members on their Boards of Supervisors. The only current exception is the City and County of San Francisco, which has 11 Supes, if I recall correctly.
Last November Los Angeles County voters passed a measure to expand the L.A. County Board to nine Supervisors, but the expansion hasn't happened yet. Our current supervisorial districts have about two million people in each district, which is too many people...
Do you have an opinion about the 22nd New York City Council race? I'm undecided, except that there's no way in hell I'd vote for Anthony Weiner, and I can't imagine who would or why.
I bet TDB number crunchers already have it or are quite close to.
If you want to do it yourself, here are the full results by Vote tabulating areas (essentially geo-id-ed precincts) on Texas Capitol Data portal. You can also find in the site the relationship files of all sorts of districts to the VTAs. So should be able to aggregate to any district you want to see.
Republicans have already started campaigning for the Nebraska Senate race. As someone who believes that Texas and Alaska can be flipped in 2026, Nebraska's fundamentals are just too Republican to be flipped imo but Osborn's entire 2024 campaign was antithesis to and about opposing the big, beautiful bill before the bill itself so maybe there's an outside chance. He lost by 6.5 points, massively overperforming Democrats.
Nathan Sage was the only candidate who lead Ernst after the candidates' backgrounds were made known to potential voters. He's sought to emulate Osborn.
Note: Sharing an article from a site doesn't mean I share its polarizing opinions, I shared it because I found it the to be the first article about poll and the only one containing the candidate's own perspective.
No reason not to run strong candidates/campaigns in as many places as possible. Some of them just might win, and—even if they lose—running up the score at the top of the ticket helps downballot candidates to get over the finish line as well.
Realistically, there are some counties that are pointless, like the ones with populations of a few hundred in the Texas desert that vote 80% Republican or worse.
If I remember correctly, Democrats failed to challenge roughly a thousand state legislative seats in 2024. That is political malpractice! And it’s not a mitigating excuse that Republicans left even more races, 1300 or so, unchallenged.
Yes, there may well be some counties with further-downballlot races that seem pointless. But I still contend that Democrats’ cardinal rule should be: Run a candidate in every race!
Even in instances of near-certain loss, local candidates can win important arguments and tell voters what the Democratic Party stands for, strengthening our hand in the long term.
Maybe you could be more successful recruiting candidates for certain losses than the people who've done that until now, but everyone should recognize that it's not easy to get people to devote so much time, lost sleep, effort and probably money to such hopeless, highly intrusive to themselves and their families, and potentially dangerous endeavors. Especially now, we should be aware that Democratic candidates in highly Republican areas could be risking their lives.
I think there’s a happy medium between what both of you are saying. We should run in every race, we shouldn’t expect anyone to donate a lot of time or money to any campaign. I seriously don’t get why some Democratic voters or the party’s in these districts just file a name and do nothing else. It’s better than having only a Republican to vote for on their ballot. You can crowd fundraise any filing fee very easily if you can’t afford the cost.
There’s no actual requirement to spend a certain amount of time on a campaign. And then of course there’s the potential for a shock lightning strike win if another Republican files as a 3rd party to run or the GOP’er gets disqualified/has a massive scandal break (how many Republicans have been arrested on cp charges and how many more are out there yet to be exposed as only 1 example). Doug Jones won 3 years as a Democratic Senator for 1 of the reddest states.
We miss 100% of the shots we don’t take. Put a name up every cycle so at least voters there are given a choice (and there are Democrats in every town/district/county across the country, no matter how red it is) so our voters have something to turnout for and those not GOP partisan voters know we care about earning their potential vote.
Whether that person wants to devote their time and money towards running, whether they want to go knock on doors, run ads, make signs, create mailers is completely up to them.
You need someone's consent to run in a hopeless race and risk their life in order to put their name on the ballot. Of course, theoretically, someone should run in every race, and the closer we can get to that, the better, but this is the real world.
Of course, I’m not saying file any name without talking to that person (and I’m really not sure why you’re assuming I’m making that argument given what I wrote), but there has to be 1 person out of the thousands who live in each area who would at least file to run for office.
I don’t hold anything against candidates if those fears do hold them back from running, they’re real questions with real potential consequences that someone has to consider. But what I’m advocating for is a name on the ballot that a person has consented to and filed for, without any expectation to actually run a real campaign.
I know realistically that there will never be any election where every office has a Democrat running, but if we can start to get down to only a couple hundred races left uncontested, that’s a very worthy goal to try to aim for and a clear message that we want to give every voter a choice. Right now it’s in the thousands and far more than that further down ballot.
My theory about putting a name on the ballot without a campaign is just to make the barrier into running for these hopeless districts easier for people and less of a job for someone who’s also trying to live their life. That would mean more candidates would consider compared to how it currently is, trying to convince party stalwarts to run a real hard campaign they know they will lose. The only ones who can commit to that are those retired or without children/with children fully grown.
It’s a smaller pool to pull from and further entrenches the image of the party as old people or those who don’t understand what the average voter cares about in thousands of districts. What we’re doing isn’t working, so let’s try something different.
In an interview, Mr. Fetterman, who represents 13 million people, said he felt he had been unfairly shamed into fulfilling senatorial duties, such as participating in committee work and casting procedural votes on the floor, dismissing them as a “performative” waste of time.
He said he enjoys the company of G.O.P. lawmakers and agrees with them on several issues — unequivocal support for Israel, the need to crack down on immigration, the downsides of cancel culture — but would never switch parties.
“I’m not going to become a Republican; there’s no lane for me,” he said. “I’m very pro-L.G.B.T.Q.+, pro-choice, pro-union, pro-Medicaid. It’s just not a good match for either of us.”
The fact that there’s been talk of even entertaining the idea of switching parties is inconceivably baffling. He could become another Sinema, and I would support a primary challenger.
He's not going to be a Sinema or Manchin-they were NOT pro-LGBT, pro-choice, pro-union or pro-medicaid (in fact, Joe Manchin might have hypothetically been able to win a Republican primary in West Virginia if he'd wanted to run for reelection-his positions on the issues are basically the same as Jim Justice's).
He's basically what Conor Lamb would have been had he won the Senate race (which is a good reason not to support Lamb if he goes through with a Primary Challenge).
Lamb might have done things we'd have disliked, but I'm reasonably confident he'd have been less of a disappointment than Fetterman is currently. Granted, that's a low bar to clear, but that makes it easy to be confident.
I bet he would’ve been a regular ole Democrat and done what he needed to win elections. People take this “moderate vs progressive” primary angles too seriously sometimes. There certainly can be major differences between Democrats but Lamb just seemed like a guy that was running in a red district and did as needed to match his district while being a solid Democrat.
Manchin had zero chance to win a Republican primary. You forgot that he voted for every piece of legislation that passed Congress during the Biden Administration and voted to remove Trump from office twice? But sure, he was identical to a Republican. Sure...
Manchin probably could have switched parties and gotten away with it in 2015 (when the Senate went GOP) or 2017 (with then-Gov. Justice). By 2021 it was much too late.
Had he switched parties, he would have had to support election denial and so forth. So your argument amounts to "If my grandmother had wheels, she could have been a cart."
Lamb literally voted with Biden 100 percent of the time after re districting and always toed the party line whatever you say. He fully supported For the People and Build Back Better acts. Unfortunately, Fetterman’s populist shtick and progressive momentum behind him got him over the fence even after the stroke.
He held balanced foreign policy views in an evolution from the radical ones he held in his college days unlike Fetterman who calls for bombing Iran daily like it's a joke. We don't have money for Medicaid and he wants us to start a new war. Being moderate in rhetoric and some policy issues would be a plus point for Lamb in holding a swing state seat not a minus.
Lamb was the evil moderate and Fetterman was the Shrek looking bern9e supporting progressive. Considering how many of these DSA candidates turn conservative ill stick with a boring iberal Democrat from now on.
He wasn't DSA at all but he fully embraced the progressive platform at the time except on I/P but not nearly to the extent seen today and fracking at the time. Being pro fracking is a standard Pennsylvania progressive position. He was supposed to be the common man in pajamas fighting against the system and a would-be Sinema 2.0 in a suit.
Though Fetterman did seem like he was going to be the next Bernie at that point, regularly feud with Shapiro over clemency and touted that he was starting a progressive movement in Pennsylvania.
He was absolutely embraced by "progressives" in 2022 though. No getting around that. He won statewide because he refused to call himself a socialist of ANY type or even a "progressive." His being "anti Establishment" was good enough for them.
as an admitted progressive i have to admit i got duped by fetterman, 500 dollars I could have given to catholic charities or wounded warriors instead given to fetterman
I'm not denying he ran as a progressive. I supported him at the time as well, clearly a mistake in hindsight. I'm aware of the campaign he ran, the positions he took, etc.
I'm saying that comparing him to the DSA is hyperbolic. DSA and what Fetterman ran as are different types of progressive. The DSA are often quite puritanical about their policy positions -- local branches have even kicked out genuine progressives like Mike Connolly in MA for petty reasons. Fetterman would never fly in the DSA.
"Progressive" isn't a monolith. Progressives fight a lot, some even refuse to support each other in elections. I don't think it does us good to lump them all together.
At this point, I’m convinced he won’t run again in 2028. It’s a closed primary and his approval with Democratic voters in PA is in the toilet. I think he’ll complain about how much the Senate sucks and bounce. Normally, it’s very hard for Democratic voters to hold a long grudge against their politicians, especially when it comes to incumbent Senators in primaries because of the six year terms. But Fetterman has put himself in such a bad spotlight and the it’s clear that NY Mag article about his health has shed a new bad spotlight which explains a lot. Glad to see Conor Lamb being incredibly active in PA. It’s almost like he’s Fetterman’s understudy for a Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania should be doing.
I’d prefer Fetterman take care of his health and work elsewhere (say at a non-profit for small business redevelopment) that he can focus without having the demand of being on the job in the Senate on his mind.
Makes me wonder why Fetterman decided to run for political office in the first place.
Yeah although I don’t think Fetterman’s ego is as high as Trump’s. He probably has this deep mental health stigma to grapple with and wants to fight off any negative criticism in this light. Not so much narcissism in the vein of Trump.
If he gets primaried out of office in 2028, I don’t see how he’ll be very combative over losing the primary. At best, Fetterman would deny of disagree with the primary voters’ decision but would respect the will of the voters. Still three years from now.
Well, it's not really about being combative after losing a primary, but will he proactively step aside if it looks like his health and political winds are strongly blowing against him, or will he go down fighting and take the ticket with him.
Right now, I just see Fetterman only stepping aside or dropping his ego if he loses the primary race in 2028. I do know it’s likely going to get worse for him in the coming weeks and months ahead and pressure may continue on to the degree where he’s forced to resign or at least he’s continuing trying to fight against the pressure of doing so.
I think though Fetterman is aware that there are multiple GOP Senators who are supporting him and may not want to give them any more reason to make him join their side. He’s continuously said no to becoming a Republican and wants to keep it that way. This is one thing I will admit I respect him for.
How the hell are procedural votes and committee assignments “performative waste of time”? That’s part of the fucking job! Just because you don’t love every part
of your job doesn’t mean you get to skip out on it. I don’t recall him acting this way when he was Lt. Governor. He was very active grant it that was before the stroke.
Both recently lost statewide bids for State Auditor to the same black Republican by quite a bit. Electability matters and both are viewed as "too liberal" by most PA voters. PA is nothing like CA or NY. There's got to be someone out there, in the mould of Joe Sestak or Katie McGinty would be terrific!! 💙🇺🇲
Interested in IL-9 this week. Particularly how Abughazelah's strategy of using campaign funds to feed the hungry in the district will go over. Will that lead to people voting for her in the primary? Will people remember this? I go back and forth on whether or not she's a good candidate but I am intrigued.
It's tactics like this that feels fresh and new that we need more of. There really is only upside to it too. It allows people to see the benefits of "government" intervention even in small doses and if people try to fight her on it as "buying votes" she can use it as a cudgel against the Republican establishment that THEY prevented her from continuing this practice.
The obvious but most obviously evil answer is "Swift Boaters for Truth". Taking your opponents strength and turning it into a weakness was brilliant but clearly bad for anyone who wanted a competent Democrat in Office.
A not evil take on that would be Obama's campaign against Romney.
Romney's biggest electoral strength was his record as a successful businessman. Voters generally love that type of thing, especially on the moderate/conservative side of the electorate. Obama took Romney's personal story and turned it into a negative, by relentlessly depicting him as being "the guy that fired your dad" as I recall one person describing it. The vulture capitalist depiction was brilliant and effective.
In hindsight HRC probably should have done exactly the same thing in 2016.
It wouldn't have worked. People tend to remember these strategies. Jimmy Carter tried the same strategy with Reagan the way LBJ did with Goldwater. Nobody bought it.
Did nobody buy it or was Carter so in the hole in 1980 that it didn't matter all that much what his campaign did? I don't buy that as a compelling argument that it wouldn't have worked.
We'll never know, but it's generally easier to repeat the "story" of the prior campaign if the shoe fits well. By the time he won in 2016 it was too late to define him that way afterwards as people were assessing him on his present rather than past. But I think it would have worked well in 2016 itself.
Respectfully disagree. Romney wasn't being shown as a "successful businessman" on television for several years. Trump was. No "The Apprentice", and he never lives in the White House.
To me that's part of why it would have worked. The purpose here is to take the positive (good businessman) and turn it into a negative. The effort there isn't to convince people that what they saw on TV was a lie, that he was a bad businessman — which I think is closer to what HRC's campaign did try to do, to an extent.
Instead the effort there is to inexorably link that trait to something negative that overrides it. Obama didn't convince people that Romney was a bad businessman. He convinced people that Romney's good businessman experience was bad for them, personally. Show him off as his successful business ventures being the result of him as the enemy of the working people. There was plenty of ammo for that.
That's infinitely easier to do against a vulture capitalist than a real estate developer. There is a higher level of tolerance for shady developers who screw over subcontractors and creditors but at least "get things done" than rich guys like Romney who just swoop in to buy up preexisting businesses, fire a bunch of people, and reap the profits.
I think Clinton would have won if she had attacked Trump for being a fraud and ripoff artist only out for himself instead of for being a bigot. Everyone for whom bigotry is a dealbreaker was already going to vote for her anyway.
Carter had a lot of handicaps that LBJ didn’t have. And Reagan was a more “attractive” candidate than Goldwater. What would have worked in 1976, had Reagan gotten the nomination, didn’t work in 1980.
if only we had dumped carter in 80, talk about a moment we will forever regret. Teddy may not have won the presidency but we certainly don't lose the almost complete entirety of the liberal class of 58
Goldwater literally campaigned for Segregation and was the precursor to Wallace, the Southern strategy and the party flip in the South so I am sure there were many other factors at play too.
My impression is why Goldwater lost in a landslide was less due to segregation and more due to his militarism. The possibility of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was very real in those days and Americans decided that Goldwater couldn't be trusted not to press the button.
goldwater, from the making of the presidency by teddy white 1964, specifically decided not to make race an issue. He carried the south because lbj was pro civil rights and goldwater wasn't. but goldwater never got close to wallace or reagan level rhetoric
he was a pos, however he did make a bargain with lbj that the "race question," should not be campaign issue as it would enflame the nation. see the making of the presidency 1964 by teddy white. lbj could not believe his good luck, however that goodluck turned to backlash by watts and the riots of 66. goldwater simply wanted to lob a nuclear missile into the "kremlin's men's room,"
Hillary should’ve played Trump’s old videos on Youtube praising Bill, supporting her in presidential primaries against Obama, arguing that the economy does better under the Democrats and praising Democratic economic policies in her ads on repeat. Not sure if it would have made a difference but a missed chance nonetheless. Voters preferred Trump on the economy according to the polls, obviously due to The apprentice cultivated image.
Surely LBJ’s idea of having his campaign spread the rumor that his opponent was "a pig-fucker" has to rank highly. Whether we like it or not. (And whether the anecdote is apocryphal or not.)
.
On a civil note, there is the brilliant campaign billboards Saatchi & Saatchi devised for Thatcher’s Tories. Devastating!:
It’s something different, which is badly needed across the Democratic Party. Some of these new strategies won’t work, but at the same time, some obviously will. This is why I’m so supportive of primaries this cycle.
Get new people with new ideas, because the old ones and the old people have been rejected by lifelong Democratic voters in favour of one of the worst human beings on this planet. Time to shake things up and stop doing things how they’ve always been done because it isn’t working anymore.
I’ll be intrigued to see if this has any impact on the primary in this district, but at first glance, I like it.
I've been reading this book about how Business spent 40 years to change public opinion in the aftermath of WW2 to make sure that people love Big Business and hate Government and if this can help us build up trust in government again then I am all for it.
Yeah, I don't know how I feel about giving actual food away, but I think UBI is a good idea that Dems should campaign on. Make Republicans say that they'll literally stop giving people money.
It probably won't happen for years and years. Last time there were no strings attached stipends, inflation happened. Also, some people genuinely get meaning out of their work and would go mad from idleness (which is the endgame of UBI, to pay people who get their work ended by automation).
For those who miss Primary School/Primaries For Progress, it's been relaunched by "Nick Tagliaferro" (real name Kevin) on Ghost. Co-writer "Opinion Haver" was unable to devote the time needed to resurrect it, but approves of Nick/Kevin's effort.
In case anyone needs to be reminded, PS/PFP was a Substack where they presented thorough analysis of and advocated for candidates in Democratic primaries who would overall push the party to the left--but (usually) not in races where doing so risked a GOP win. I didn't always agree with their perspectives or candidate choices, but their on-the-ground knowledge and analysis of candidates and constituencies was really detailed and extended well downballot.
Can't speak for them obviously, but I do have some leftie friends who have a skeptical view of Substack because it's backed by the same Silicon Valley VC tech bro types that have brought us other social media disasters. Same sort of folks who prefer Mastodon to Bluesky. There's also criticism of them for hosting extremist views, but it's not like Ghost restricts content in any way on their hosted sites, at least I don't think they do. Alternatively, they might just like Ghost better, rather than it being an ideological choice.
Now I really see why a NYT skepticism among some liberal factions has taken hold. It's not just about "her emails".
Obviously a vast majority of counties are rural and exurban and they swung to the right in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
Then 2024 was a 5 point national swing for Democrats and almost every county even urban and suburban ones swung right so there was no big 3 election county streak for us.
NYT just needs their "centrist" doomer content to re-litigate their same old map from November again and again with newer tweaked versions. They are doing their own version of "Land doesn't vote" meme now lol. I expect a lot of Twitter trolling over this and frankly, they earn most of their revenue from their games now according to the data publicly available.
We can surely do much better among working class voters but I don't expect the urban-suburban-rural realignment to change anytime soon. No liberal pr conservative party has been able to defy this force! NOT in England, not in Canada and Australia, not in Germany, Poland and Turkey and so on. The suburbs in fact delivered a landslide for Labor in Australia.
The 2024 election was a bad rejection but it was also one of the narrowest loss and there was no such reciprocal thrashing of the GOP after their multiple 4-6 point losses 3 times since 2000, was there?
Also, Democrats are obviously "still searching for a path forward" as stated in another article of the series, Republicans' path forward wasn't decided until Trump won the 2016 GOP presidential primaries!
In terms of the political coverage, I'm finding it harder and harder to find the NYT's good. Nate Cohn is one of the best things they've got.
Incidentally, Nate posted a few days ago that they're hiring a staff editor to help with elements of their election polling and modelling. He says "If you're interested elections and you're excited to apply your technical skills and ingenuity to novel problems in a high-profile setting, this might just be the job for you." And this group probably has some of the kind of people he's looking for...
I'm amazed about how people consistently make grand proclamations about national swings to be permanent precursors. To be fair, sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren't. Many of these articles could've literally been copied and pasted from post 2004-screeds. Then Democrats went on to win the PV in every presidential election (and EC in all but one) until last year.
You Tube is all aflutter about some monumental announcement Fetterman made an hour ago. I havent had time yet to look at the video but I suspect it is bs as usual for you tube.
Looks like a nothingburger. Him reacting to bad coverage and nothing more interesting than that.
Searched his name and a news article from two hours ago has the headline: "Sen. John Fetterman says his mental health struggles have been 'weaponized' against him, shaming him into attending votes and hearings"
I agree. I merely meant that the story making its rounds isn't a big deal. Fetterman is pissed that people are pissed at him. Too bad, do your damn job.
Also it'd be one thing if he was getting critiqued for doing parts of the job that actually are performative. Yet casting legislative votes is the core distillation of the entire job! It'd be like a programmer saying that writing code was a performative part of the job.
Hate to say it, but every Democratic member of Congress should aspire to be more like Susan Collins. Since first becoming Senator in 1997, she hasn’t missed a single vote! In April of last year Senator Collins entered her 9000th consecutive vote.
Whatever else I may think of Collins, I think that is deeply admirable.
Right but Fetterman forgets it’s his own Chief of Staff who made a bombshell of a story weeks ago about Fetterman’s problems. It isn’t just about what his doctor had said to him years ago.
Good rule of thumb: If someone or the internet at large says something is a huge deal without ever telling you what exactly it is, right then and there, they’re lying to you and don’t know anything.
The cryptic nature is to get people talking about it (which you did), to get more people to learn about it. Republicans do this all the time. Republican: “I think it’s a huge deal”, reporter: “what is it”, GOP: “you’ll see when it comes out, but it’s never been done before”.
People fall for this stuff all the time. My advice, ignore it and go about your business. 9 times out of 10 it will be nothing. The 1 out of 10 times it’s real, any credible journalist out there would have a story on it within the hour, so we’ll find out anyways in the end.
This is exactly why I always try to read the whole article and not be immediately be drawn to the headlines just because they sell things this way.
In the case of Fetterman, based on what I read in the original article citing his own Chief of Staff, it had quite a revelation of information based on the sequence of events. Anytime this kind of detail is put in an article, you can tell it’s really investigative.
Otherwise, if the article has information is thrown in there at random as if it was put in a hurry, I am less compelled to believe the reporting.
Way too late for most people to read about this, but for anyone still around, there’s 2 things that stand out here, 1 being a shock, the other more expected.
House Majority Forward, the nonprofit affiliated with House Democratic leadership and House Majority PAC, will start running digital ads next week attacking House Republicans voting to cut Medicaid spending, according to a spokesperson for the group. The ads will appear in 25 battleground districts in California, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin.
The shock: Missouri. This is the first time it’s been mentioned by Dem operatives as a target seat as far as I’m aware. The closest district is probably (?) MO-02 with a pretty strong incumbent GOP rep Ann Wagner. That they’re spending cash on it this early means they think a 2nd Trump term can completely break away the still red Republican suburban districts that haven’t shifted towards Democrats very much up until now. Or they have data showing that it’s winnable. Or maybe they think she’ll retire.
The more expected from previous articles, but still good to see is the party investing in Iowa, which they haven’t really done since 2018 except for IA-03 (and we all know how close that got the state blue). They sense opportunity in old Democratic held districts among the working class the party has been bleeding. Or they have data for it.
Good to see something like this from the party. The strategy is to use what got Trump elected twice against him, everywhere (media). That only happens if you go out and frame the debate before Republicans can.
Yet another possibility: That Missouri is also about psychological warfare, intending to scare the bejeezus out of Republican lawmakers, hoping to peel away the few that are needed to stop Trump’s insane budget proposal.
Just because not every ad produced by a Democratic affiliated group is airing in a particular district doesn't mean that Dems are "giving up on it".
But in the regions you name we're probably going to mostly be playing defense. There are at least a couple of potentially flippable now-red seats but they may be tougher targets than ones in the states mentioned, while several Dems only narrowly held on.
We are going to playing defence there only if 2020-2024 trend continues and Trump's coalition doesn't break apart by then or hasn't already broken apart.
MO-2 has absolutely shifted toward Dems by quite a bit. The old 2010s district, which was pretty much all suburban, was essentially even in 2020 presidential vote share (Daily Kos Elections says Trump won it narrowly, Daves Redistricting says Biden won it narrowly) after going for Romney by 16 in 2012. Despite being heavily gerrymandered, the new district has still shifted a lot, from Romney +20 in 2012 to Trump +8 in 2024. If Republicans hadn't gerrymandered it, it might already be blue.
I would guess Trump won it by a point or two. It had parts of Jefferson, St. Louis, and St. Charles counties which moved 2020 to 2024 by R+2.9, R+0.6, and D+0.5 respectively.
The Fair District Amedment in Florida doesn’t have a commission and just relies on vague language that legislators are supposed to abide by. The Ohio commission is a complete sham that guarantees Republicans will have control of the process and specifically allows the splitting of certain counties when it’s convenient for Republicans to do so.
What is needed is a California/Colorado/Michigan type commission that requires equal members from each party on the commission.
Charlotte, NC's municipal elections are getting interesting.
The Mayor's race is likely to be sleepy again, assuming Mayor Vi Lyles seeks a 5th term. However, the city council could see some significant turnover. Federal prosecutors indicted District 3's Tiawana Brown for misusing COVID relief funds. Brown, who was first elected in 2023, is the first formerly incarcerated person to serve on the city council. https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article306970521.html
There are currently announced challengers to D-4's Renee Johnson and D-5's Marjorie Molina, but I haven't heard of anyone challenging Brown before the indictment.
The New Republic: Senate Republicans Flirt With Nuking the Filibuster
GOP Senators are chipping away at the 60-vote threshold, marking one more step toward majority rule in the upper chamber.
“I think the filibuster is on borrowed time. I think a decade from now it’ll be gone,” said Glassman. “It takes the right orientation of politics to get you to that point, but we’re closing in on it. And things like this just open up people’s eyes that the procedures are relatively simple, and it’s not hard to go down there and do it.”
Not a bad idea at all, let Presidents be allowed to implement their entire agenda if they also win both the chambers of Congress obviously under the limits of the constitution and voters can decide after 2 years if they want it to continue of not like it happens in every other nation. Just imagine if Obama got whatever he wanted, a public health insurance option, a big beautiful stimulus, cap and trade, maybe add 2 more states, redistricting reform! The filibuster is a southern segregationist and obstructionist relic. I believe it would strengthen our citizens' faith in the ability of our democracy to improve people's lives too which is at an all time low.
Like John Oliver said on the Daily Show - "Sorry Jimmy, no healthcare for you due to a weird rule".
And enshrining Roe into federal law. That won't get past the 60 vote cloture threshold. Better to just do away with the filibuster entirely when Ds get back into power.
National independent redistricting and DC statehood (ie two Democratic Senators) would be a MASSIVE win for voters. The GOP would gnash their teeth and complain about "overreach" and "DC tyranny" when the law is merely giving the District of Columbia the statehood and representation it deserves.
I hope if we do get a Democratic trifecta after 2028, that these theoretical laws are worded in a way that avoids SCOTUS gutting or invalidating parts of it. And GOP states and/or AGs will be challenging them like no tomorrow, ie Ken Paxton and his idiotic culture war challenging of Biden's EOs.
I fully believe part of the biggest problem in getting voters to understand how bad the Republican Party is, is that they never get to implement their true agenda because it’s too extreme to pass into law with the way things currently are.
So people just view each party as two choices to choose from, not 1 party too extreme to vote for and the other that mostly tries to do things right as they should. Partisanship has obviously increased a lot since, but there have been time periods where 1 party has total control of 1 branch for almost or over a decade in American history.
Maybe if they didn’t have any guard rails to safeguard them from the consequences, voters would finally understand that Democratic attacks are on things the GOP absolutely would do if they could. They don’t believe something bad could happen until after it does. Let them experience the full breadth of the right wing’s corruption, chaos and extremism. What is the worst that could happen? Honestly? How could it be any worse than now (speaking about political power only, not the negative effects these laws will have on people)?
I guarantee if the GOP passed these insane MAGA policy bills into law the voters would wake up quickly to how stupid they have been in their voting choices.
This article on State Navigate (the successor to CNalysis) gives a good rundown on the Virginia Democratic Primary for Lieutenant Governor. It says the top three vote-getters will likely be Stoney, Hashmi, and Rouse; it's just a matter of who gets 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place, which is consistent with the Reddit threads that I've read on the LG primary.
My first choice among the three is Hashmi, who also seems to be the consensus pick among Redditors who have been following this primary. With that being said, my top priority in the LG primary is making sure that Stoney doesn't win. He's probably the only candidate who could realistically lose the general election, even if Spanberger wins the Governor's race by double digits. Therefore, I might vote for Rouse over Hashmi if that's what it takes to keep Stoney from winning.
It's FPTP. Arlington County and Charlottesville City have started using RCV for local elections, though. It's times like these I wish we had RCV/IRV in Virginia.
Thomas Massie (R-KY) may have GOP primary challengers. Trump isn't happy with him for not voting for the "big, beautiful bill", and it looks like two possible opponents in the primary are State Sen. Aaron Reed and State Rep. Kimberly Moser.
Moser actually strikes me as a very strong potential candidate-not just for this district, but possibly in a future statewide race in Kentucky. We could be looking at someone who would be primarying Rand Paul in 2028 if this challenge is successful.
Races I'm interested in? I'm interested in several, but here's a few:
- NY-17 is my home district, and it's becoming a mess. A ton of candidates are running -- Dem frontrunner is probably Rockland County legislator Beth Davidson. This is also assuming Lawler runs at all -- I've been told that, on the GOP side, State Assemblyman Matt Slater may run if Lawler tries for governor.
- Besides NY-17, I'm watching the NYC Council races too. I'm a progressive personally, so I'm interested in the Alexa Aviles (District 38) and Shanana Hanif (District 39) races in particular -- both are progressive incumbents with well-funded centrist/moderate challengers. There are also several open seats too. Whatever your ideological stance, the Council races will certainly be interesting.
- Finally, an underreported race. San Diego County, California has an open seat on its Board of Supervisors -- one that could tip the scales of which party controls the seat. Currently the Board is 2-2 Dem/Rep. The Democratic candidate is Imperial Beach mayor Paloma Aguirre, while the Republican candidate is Chula Vista mayor John McCann. July 1 is the election -- hopefully Aguirre can pull it off. (Question for any posters here from that area -- how likely are the chances for Aguirre to pull it off?)
I'll leave my comment with a question of my own -- are there any non-special election local races people are watching? State Senate/House? City councils? County races? Others? Virginia and NJ are probably on a lot of peoples' minds, but I'm also curious about 2026 local races.
Not from CA at all but your question made me curious. The vacancy is district 1. Nora Vargas was the incumbent here before she refused to take her second term; she was a democrat and won 57-43 in 2020 and 63-37 in 2024. At least on paper it looks favorable for us, but officially nonpartisan elections always add a bit of extra worry for me...
I've mentioned before that I want to relocate to Boston, so I follow their local politics more than anything near me. The mayoral election this year should be an easy win for Wu, but I am curious about one of the city council seats. The incumbent for district 7, Tania Fernandes Anderson, plead guilty for bribery in federal court recently.
She marks a bit of a repeat blemish in the city because there was another council member, Kendra Lara, also thought of as a progressive who crashed her car into a house while driving double the speed limit, without a license, without car insurance, and without registering her car. She lost her primary that year.
Anderson has agreed to resign as part of her guilty plea. Curious to see who will win that and if there are going to be any more embarrassments out of the city council. Unfortunately I don't know anything about any of the several people competing in the primary to replace her.
Unbelievable on Lara! How could someone do something so stupid? Why didn't she have a license? Previous severe traffic violations?
This occurred in 2023 and the reason for her lack of a license was due to an unpaid traffic ticket from Connecticut... from 2013.
It was blatant disregard for the law from her as far as I'm concerned. She used the excuse of it being an easy mistake that we can all make because routine tasks slip through the cracks or some such. Bunch of BS.
Worst part is she got off with a slap on the wrist. Most of the charges ended up getting dropped. At least she got kicked out of office right after it happened.
I'm in NY 17 as well. I'm not paying 100% attention at the moment but in what way do you see it as a mess? Just in the number of people running? It seems weird to me that there are only 4 board members for all of San Diego county. I don't know that. Though I know Los Angeles has a small number as well and that's obviously an even bigger county.
I meant mess in the sense of the number of people running, yes. I’ve been hearing from people I know there’s even more people considering too.
Almost all California counties have five members on their Boards of Supervisors. The only current exception is the City and County of San Francisco, which has 11 Supes, if I recall correctly.
Last November Los Angeles County voters passed a measure to expand the L.A. County Board to nine Supervisors, but the expansion hasn't happened yet. Our current supervisorial districts have about two million people in each district, which is too many people...
Do you have an opinion about the 22nd New York City Council race? I'm undecided, except that there's no way in hell I'd vote for Anthony Weiner, and I can't imagine who would or why.
I don’t - haven’t read a lot about that particular race. I do agree that the last thing we need is the return of Wiener.
Sorry, it's the 2nd District.
Is there any way to post a table here?
Imgur
Anyone have Texas Presidential results by state legislative district?
I bet TDB number crunchers already have it or are quite close to.
If you want to do it yourself, here are the full results by Vote tabulating areas (essentially geo-id-ed precincts) on Texas Capitol Data portal. You can also find in the site the relationship files of all sorts of districts to the VTAs. So should be able to aggregate to any district you want to see.
https://data.capitol.texas.gov/dataset/2024_general
thanks!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GiIiDrVwddCH4Pc0Jsc9u9hxbm3mVRZVgivUeeT2ssQ/edit?usp=drivesdk
State Navigate does, just find the TX sheet
thank you!
https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2025/05/23/ricketts-gets-early-ads-from-group-tied-to-senate-gop-in-potential-osborn-race/
Republicans have already started campaigning for the Nebraska Senate race. As someone who believes that Texas and Alaska can be flipped in 2026, Nebraska's fundamentals are just too Republican to be flipped imo but Osborn's entire 2024 campaign was antithesis to and about opposing the big, beautiful bill before the bill itself so maybe there's an outside chance. He lost by 6.5 points, massively overperforming Democrats.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/nathan-sage-democrats-iowa-senate
Nathan Sage was the only candidate who lead Ernst after the candidates' backgrounds were made known to potential voters. He's sought to emulate Osborn.
Note: Sharing an article from a site doesn't mean I share its polarizing opinions, I shared it because I found it the to be the first article about poll and the only one containing the candidate's own perspective.
No reason not to run strong candidates/campaigns in as many places as possible. Some of them just might win, and—even if they lose—running up the score at the top of the ticket helps downballot candidates to get over the finish line as well.
Hear, hear! Democrats need a 3143-County Strategy, which means never again leaving any Republican candidate unopposed. Never again, anywhere!
Yep, especially in places with cheap media and/or complacent incumbents. Even "entrenched" politicians can be caught napping!
Realistically, there are some counties that are pointless, like the ones with populations of a few hundred in the Texas desert that vote 80% Republican or worse.
If I remember correctly, Democrats failed to challenge roughly a thousand state legislative seats in 2024. That is political malpractice! And it’s not a mitigating excuse that Republicans left even more races, 1300 or so, unchallenged.
Yes, there may well be some counties with further-downballlot races that seem pointless. But I still contend that Democrats’ cardinal rule should be: Run a candidate in every race!
Even in instances of near-certain loss, local candidates can win important arguments and tell voters what the Democratic Party stands for, strengthening our hand in the long term.
Maybe you could be more successful recruiting candidates for certain losses than the people who've done that until now, but everyone should recognize that it's not easy to get people to devote so much time, lost sleep, effort and probably money to such hopeless, highly intrusive to themselves and their families, and potentially dangerous endeavors. Especially now, we should be aware that Democratic candidates in highly Republican areas could be risking their lives.
I think there’s a happy medium between what both of you are saying. We should run in every race, we shouldn’t expect anyone to donate a lot of time or money to any campaign. I seriously don’t get why some Democratic voters or the party’s in these districts just file a name and do nothing else. It’s better than having only a Republican to vote for on their ballot. You can crowd fundraise any filing fee very easily if you can’t afford the cost.
There’s no actual requirement to spend a certain amount of time on a campaign. And then of course there’s the potential for a shock lightning strike win if another Republican files as a 3rd party to run or the GOP’er gets disqualified/has a massive scandal break (how many Republicans have been arrested on cp charges and how many more are out there yet to be exposed as only 1 example). Doug Jones won 3 years as a Democratic Senator for 1 of the reddest states.
We miss 100% of the shots we don’t take. Put a name up every cycle so at least voters there are given a choice (and there are Democrats in every town/district/county across the country, no matter how red it is) so our voters have something to turnout for and those not GOP partisan voters know we care about earning their potential vote.
Whether that person wants to devote their time and money towards running, whether they want to go knock on doors, run ads, make signs, create mailers is completely up to them.
You need someone's consent to run in a hopeless race and risk their life in order to put their name on the ballot. Of course, theoretically, someone should run in every race, and the closer we can get to that, the better, but this is the real world.
Of course, I’m not saying file any name without talking to that person (and I’m really not sure why you’re assuming I’m making that argument given what I wrote), but there has to be 1 person out of the thousands who live in each area who would at least file to run for office.
I don’t hold anything against candidates if those fears do hold them back from running, they’re real questions with real potential consequences that someone has to consider. But what I’m advocating for is a name on the ballot that a person has consented to and filed for, without any expectation to actually run a real campaign.
I know realistically that there will never be any election where every office has a Democrat running, but if we can start to get down to only a couple hundred races left uncontested, that’s a very worthy goal to try to aim for and a clear message that we want to give every voter a choice. Right now it’s in the thousands and far more than that further down ballot.
My theory about putting a name on the ballot without a campaign is just to make the barrier into running for these hopeless districts easier for people and less of a job for someone who’s also trying to live their life. That would mean more candidates would consider compared to how it currently is, trying to convince party stalwarts to run a real hard campaign they know they will lose. The only ones who can commit to that are those retired or without children/with children fully grown.
It’s a smaller pool to pull from and further entrenches the image of the party as old people or those who don’t understand what the average voter cares about in thousands of districts. What we’re doing isn’t working, so let’s try something different.
I don't disagree. Maybe you can persuade more people to consent to having their names put on ballots.
Obviously, Republicans are concerned.
I would love for Susan Collins to be concerned while being out of office.
The moment a Democrat runs in the NE-SEN race, it’s on.
I don’t care if it’s a some guy candidate. Get him in the Senate!
Osborn is running, he's an Independent who'll probably vote with Democrat 70 percent of the time and never support an anti labor justice.
Fine with me if he takes over the race!
In an interview, Mr. Fetterman, who represents 13 million people, said he felt he had been unfairly shamed into fulfilling senatorial duties, such as participating in committee work and casting procedural votes on the floor, dismissing them as a “performative” waste of time.
He said he enjoys the company of G.O.P. lawmakers and agrees with them on several issues — unequivocal support for Israel, the need to crack down on immigration, the downsides of cancel culture — but would never switch parties.
“I’m not going to become a Republican; there’s no lane for me,” he said. “I’m very pro-L.G.B.T.Q.+, pro-choice, pro-union, pro-Medicaid. It’s just not a good match for either of us.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/us/politics/fetterman-senate-absence-mental-health-interview.html
The fact that there’s been talk of even entertaining the idea of switching parties is inconceivably baffling. He could become another Sinema, and I would support a primary challenger.
He's not going to be a Sinema or Manchin-they were NOT pro-LGBT, pro-choice, pro-union or pro-medicaid (in fact, Joe Manchin might have hypothetically been able to win a Republican primary in West Virginia if he'd wanted to run for reelection-his positions on the issues are basically the same as Jim Justice's).
He's basically what Conor Lamb would have been had he won the Senate race (which is a good reason not to support Lamb if he goes through with a Primary Challenge).
whomever you support in the primary he/she had better be someone who can win. Dems need all the Senate seats they can get their hands on.
Sinema was very pro-LGBT and pro-choice.
Being pro-LGBTQ and pro-choice is so low bar for Senator Fetterman and Sinema. Any Democrat could be that and elected for State Auditor.
Fetterman just doesn’t have his shit together.
Disagree about Lamb. I think he fits the PA mold perfectly, and would be fine with him.
Agree on all other points.
Lamb might have done things we'd have disliked, but I'm reasonably confident he'd have been less of a disappointment than Fetterman is currently. Granted, that's a low bar to clear, but that makes it easy to be confident.
I bet he would’ve been a regular ole Democrat and done what he needed to win elections. People take this “moderate vs progressive” primary angles too seriously sometimes. There certainly can be major differences between Democrats but Lamb just seemed like a guy that was running in a red district and did as needed to match his district while being a solid Democrat.
Manchin had zero chance to win a Republican primary. You forgot that he voted for every piece of legislation that passed Congress during the Biden Administration and voted to remove Trump from office twice? But sure, he was identical to a Republican. Sure...
Manchin probably could have switched parties and gotten away with it in 2015 (when the Senate went GOP) or 2017 (with then-Gov. Justice). By 2021 it was much too late.
Had he switched parties, he would have had to support election denial and so forth. So your argument amounts to "If my grandmother had wheels, she could have been a cart."
Shelley Moore Capito never did, to my knowledge.
Ok, in that case, I take this point.
Lamb literally voted with Biden 100 percent of the time after re districting and always toed the party line whatever you say. He fully supported For the People and Build Back Better acts. Unfortunately, Fetterman’s populist shtick and progressive momentum behind him got him over the fence even after the stroke.
He held balanced foreign policy views in an evolution from the radical ones he held in his college days unlike Fetterman who calls for bombing Iran daily like it's a joke. We don't have money for Medicaid and he wants us to start a new war. Being moderate in rhetoric and some policy issues would be a plus point for Lamb in holding a swing state seat not a minus.
Lamb was the evil moderate and Fetterman was the Shrek looking bern9e supporting progressive. Considering how many of these DSA candidates turn conservative ill stick with a boring iberal Democrat from now on.
Fetterman wasn’t DSA. Not even close - his fracking position wasn’t popular with some on the left. Stop being hyperbolic.
He wasn't DSA at all but he fully embraced the progressive platform at the time except on I/P but not nearly to the extent seen today and fracking at the time. Being pro fracking is a standard Pennsylvania progressive position. He was supposed to be the common man in pajamas fighting against the system and a would-be Sinema 2.0 in a suit.
Though Fetterman did seem like he was going to be the next Bernie at that point, regularly feud with Shapiro over clemency and touted that he was starting a progressive movement in Pennsylvania.
He was absolutely embraced by "progressives" in 2022 though. No getting around that. He won statewide because he refused to call himself a socialist of ANY type or even a "progressive." His being "anti Establishment" was good enough for them.
as an admitted progressive i have to admit i got duped by fetterman, 500 dollars I could have given to catholic charities or wounded warriors instead given to fetterman
I'm not denying he ran as a progressive. I supported him at the time as well, clearly a mistake in hindsight. I'm aware of the campaign he ran, the positions he took, etc.
I'm saying that comparing him to the DSA is hyperbolic. DSA and what Fetterman ran as are different types of progressive. The DSA are often quite puritanical about their policy positions -- local branches have even kicked out genuine progressives like Mike Connolly in MA for petty reasons. Fetterman would never fly in the DSA.
"Progressive" isn't a monolith. Progressives fight a lot, some even refuse to support each other in elections. I don't think it does us good to lump them all together.
At this point, I’m convinced he won’t run again in 2028. It’s a closed primary and his approval with Democratic voters in PA is in the toilet. I think he’ll complain about how much the Senate sucks and bounce. Normally, it’s very hard for Democratic voters to hold a long grudge against their politicians, especially when it comes to incumbent Senators in primaries because of the six year terms. But Fetterman has put himself in such a bad spotlight and the it’s clear that NY Mag article about his health has shed a new bad spotlight which explains a lot. Glad to see Conor Lamb being incredibly active in PA. It’s almost like he’s Fetterman’s understudy for a Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania should be doing.
I’m not convinced he’ll serve the entirety of his current term.
I think none of us are.
I’d prefer Fetterman take care of his health and work elsewhere (say at a non-profit for small business redevelopment) that he can focus without having the demand of being on the job in the Senate on his mind.
Makes me wonder why Fetterman decided to run for political office in the first place.
Because people have enormous egos.. which makes me worry he won’t go quietly away from the senate.
Yeah although I don’t think Fetterman’s ego is as high as Trump’s. He probably has this deep mental health stigma to grapple with and wants to fight off any negative criticism in this light. Not so much narcissism in the vein of Trump.
If he gets primaried out of office in 2028, I don’t see how he’ll be very combative over losing the primary. At best, Fetterman would deny of disagree with the primary voters’ decision but would respect the will of the voters. Still three years from now.
Well, it's not really about being combative after losing a primary, but will he proactively step aside if it looks like his health and political winds are strongly blowing against him, or will he go down fighting and take the ticket with him.
At this point, shall see what happens.
Right now, I just see Fetterman only stepping aside or dropping his ego if he loses the primary race in 2028. I do know it’s likely going to get worse for him in the coming weeks and months ahead and pressure may continue on to the degree where he’s forced to resign or at least he’s continuing trying to fight against the pressure of doing so.
I think though Fetterman is aware that there are multiple GOP Senators who are supporting him and may not want to give them any more reason to make him join their side. He’s continuously said no to becoming a Republican and wants to keep it that way. This is one thing I will admit I respect him for.
It sounds like he can't or at least doesn't want to perform his job. If so, why is he doing it?
How the hell are procedural votes and committee assignments “performative waste of time”? That’s part of the fucking job! Just because you don’t love every part
of your job doesn’t mean you get to skip out on it. I don’t recall him acting this way when he was Lt. Governor. He was very active grant it that was before the stroke.
He didn’t have to do much as LG and was about 2 hours from home.
Sounds like someone is not running again in 2028.
Other than Fetterman/Lamb, any other Democrats in mind for the Senate seat?
Don't say Gov. Josh Shapiro, he has to wait until 2030 to take down McCormick (if he so chooses)!! 💙🇺🇲
I personally want to see Malcom Kenyatta try again-if not him than maybe Nina Ahmad.
Both recently lost statewide bids for State Auditor to the same black Republican by quite a bit. Electability matters and both are viewed as "too liberal" by most PA voters. PA is nothing like CA or NY. There's got to be someone out there, in the mould of Joe Sestak or Katie McGinty would be terrific!! 💙🇺🇲
Someone pointed this out during the week as regard to media bias.
https://bsky.app/profile/taniel.bsky.social/post/3lpuhuf6oks2k
Interested in IL-9 this week. Particularly how Abughazelah's strategy of using campaign funds to feed the hungry in the district will go over. Will that lead to people voting for her in the primary? Will people remember this? I go back and forth on whether or not she's a good candidate but I am intrigued.
https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/kat-abughazaleh-congress
it is ok if she makes it well known!! I would be more inclined to vote for her because of this.
It's tactics like this that feels fresh and new that we need more of. There really is only upside to it too. It allows people to see the benefits of "government" intervention even in small doses and if people try to fight her on it as "buying votes" she can use it as a cudgel against the Republican establishment that THEY prevented her from continuing this practice.
Here’s a question I thought of based on your comment: what is/are the most brilliant campaign tactic(s) posters here have ever seen?
The obvious but most obviously evil answer is "Swift Boaters for Truth". Taking your opponents strength and turning it into a weakness was brilliant but clearly bad for anyone who wanted a competent Democrat in Office.
A not evil take on that would be Obama's campaign against Romney.
Romney's biggest electoral strength was his record as a successful businessman. Voters generally love that type of thing, especially on the moderate/conservative side of the electorate. Obama took Romney's personal story and turned it into a negative, by relentlessly depicting him as being "the guy that fired your dad" as I recall one person describing it. The vulture capitalist depiction was brilliant and effective.
In hindsight HRC probably should have done exactly the same thing in 2016.
It wouldn't have worked. People tend to remember these strategies. Jimmy Carter tried the same strategy with Reagan the way LBJ did with Goldwater. Nobody bought it.
Did nobody buy it or was Carter so in the hole in 1980 that it didn't matter all that much what his campaign did? I don't buy that as a compelling argument that it wouldn't have worked.
We'll never know, but it's generally easier to repeat the "story" of the prior campaign if the shoe fits well. By the time he won in 2016 it was too late to define him that way afterwards as people were assessing him on his present rather than past. But I think it would have worked well in 2016 itself.
Respectfully disagree. Romney wasn't being shown as a "successful businessman" on television for several years. Trump was. No "The Apprentice", and he never lives in the White House.
To me that's part of why it would have worked. The purpose here is to take the positive (good businessman) and turn it into a negative. The effort there isn't to convince people that what they saw on TV was a lie, that he was a bad businessman — which I think is closer to what HRC's campaign did try to do, to an extent.
Instead the effort there is to inexorably link that trait to something negative that overrides it. Obama didn't convince people that Romney was a bad businessman. He convinced people that Romney's good businessman experience was bad for them, personally. Show him off as his successful business ventures being the result of him as the enemy of the working people. There was plenty of ammo for that.
That's infinitely easier to do against a vulture capitalist than a real estate developer. There is a higher level of tolerance for shady developers who screw over subcontractors and creditors but at least "get things done" than rich guys like Romney who just swoop in to buy up preexisting businesses, fire a bunch of people, and reap the profits.
I think Clinton would have won if she had attacked Trump for being a fraud and ripoff artist only out for himself instead of for being a bigot. Everyone for whom bigotry is a dealbreaker was already going to vote for her anyway.
Carter had a lot of handicaps that LBJ didn’t have. And Reagan was a more “attractive” candidate than Goldwater. What would have worked in 1976, had Reagan gotten the nomination, didn’t work in 1980.
if only we had dumped carter in 80, talk about a moment we will forever regret. Teddy may not have won the presidency but we certainly don't lose the almost complete entirety of the liberal class of 58
That class wasn't up in '80. But we lost a lot from the classes of '62 and '74.
Goldwater literally campaigned for Segregation and was the precursor to Wallace, the Southern strategy and the party flip in the South so I am sure there were many other factors at play too.
My impression is why Goldwater lost in a landslide was less due to segregation and more due to his militarism. The possibility of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was very real in those days and Americans decided that Goldwater couldn't be trusted not to press the button.
"Daisy" is worth rewatching. Brilliant!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDTBnsqxZ3k
goldwater, from the making of the presidency by teddy white 1964, specifically decided not to make race an issue. He carried the south because lbj was pro civil rights and goldwater wasn't. but goldwater never got close to wallace or reagan level rhetoric
I believe Goldwater was largely in favor of the various Civil Rights acts. Also, didn’t he racially integrate his family business in the early 1930s?
His comments regarding social security were also a major factor.
he was a pos, however he did make a bargain with lbj that the "race question," should not be campaign issue as it would enflame the nation. see the making of the presidency 1964 by teddy white. lbj could not believe his good luck, however that goodluck turned to backlash by watts and the riots of 66. goldwater simply wanted to lob a nuclear missile into the "kremlin's men's room,"
I was thinking on our side it's definitely that and using the "47%" quote against Romney.
Hillary should’ve played Trump’s old videos on Youtube praising Bill, supporting her in presidential primaries against Obama, arguing that the economy does better under the Democrats and praising Democratic economic policies in her ads on repeat. Not sure if it would have made a difference but a missed chance nonetheless. Voters preferred Trump on the economy according to the polls, obviously due to The apprentice cultivated image.
Biden's 2016 DNC speech was focused on that point and his catchphrase "you're fired". I'm pretty sure he wins it in hindsight.
Surely LBJ’s idea of having his campaign spread the rumor that his opponent was "a pig-fucker" has to rank highly. Whether we like it or not. (And whether the anecdote is apocryphal or not.)
.
On a civil note, there is the brilliant campaign billboards Saatchi & Saatchi devised for Thatcher’s Tories. Devastating!:
"LABOUR ISN’T WORKING."
https://i.insider.com/4ec2afdd6bb3f7974900001d
I'd normally be skeptical because it smacks of Tammany Hall giving loyal voters a turkey, but considering what we're fighting...
I was skeptical when her qualifications seemed to amount to be "big on social media" but I have to admit I like this. Curious to see where it goes.
It’s something different, which is badly needed across the Democratic Party. Some of these new strategies won’t work, but at the same time, some obviously will. This is why I’m so supportive of primaries this cycle.
Get new people with new ideas, because the old ones and the old people have been rejected by lifelong Democratic voters in favour of one of the worst human beings on this planet. Time to shake things up and stop doing things how they’ve always been done because it isn’t working anymore.
I’ll be intrigued to see if this has any impact on the primary in this district, but at first glance, I like it.
I've been reading this book about how Business spent 40 years to change public opinion in the aftermath of WW2 to make sure that people love Big Business and hate Government and if this can help us build up trust in government again then I am all for it.
Yeah, I don't know how I feel about giving actual food away, but I think UBI is a good idea that Dems should campaign on. Make Republicans say that they'll literally stop giving people money.
It probably won't happen for years and years. Last time there were no strings attached stipends, inflation happened. Also, some people genuinely get meaning out of their work and would go mad from idleness (which is the endgame of UBI, to pay people who get their work ended by automation).
Seems kind of gimicky and desperate. Is she not planning on winning so she’s using “this campaign” as accomplishing her goals?
For those who miss Primary School/Primaries For Progress, it's been relaunched by "Nick Tagliaferro" (real name Kevin) on Ghost. Co-writer "Opinion Haver" was unable to devote the time needed to resurrect it, but approves of Nick/Kevin's effort.
In case anyone needs to be reminded, PS/PFP was a Substack where they presented thorough analysis of and advocated for candidates in Democratic primaries who would overall push the party to the left--but (usually) not in races where doing so risked a GOP win. I didn't always agree with their perspectives or candidate choices, but their on-the-ground knowledge and analysis of candidates and constituencies was really detailed and extended well downballot.
The old site:
https://primaries.substack.com/
And the new one:
https://primaryschool.ghost.io/primary-school-returns/
Why couldn't they relaunch it on substack?
Can't speak for them obviously, but I do have some leftie friends who have a skeptical view of Substack because it's backed by the same Silicon Valley VC tech bro types that have brought us other social media disasters. Same sort of folks who prefer Mastodon to Bluesky. There's also criticism of them for hosting extremist views, but it's not like Ghost restricts content in any way on their hosted sites, at least I don't think they do. Alternatively, they might just like Ghost better, rather than it being an ideological choice.
IIRC that’s why it’s on Ghost. Nick said on Bluesky he relaunched it there because of the right wing ties.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/25/us/politics/trump-politics-democrats.html
Now I really see why a NYT skepticism among some liberal factions has taken hold. It's not just about "her emails".
Obviously a vast majority of counties are rural and exurban and they swung to the right in 2016, 2020 and 2024.
Then 2024 was a 5 point national swing for Democrats and almost every county even urban and suburban ones swung right so there was no big 3 election county streak for us.
NYT just needs their "centrist" doomer content to re-litigate their same old map from November again and again with newer tweaked versions. They are doing their own version of "Land doesn't vote" meme now lol. I expect a lot of Twitter trolling over this and frankly, they earn most of their revenue from their games now according to the data publicly available.
We can surely do much better among working class voters but I don't expect the urban-suburban-rural realignment to change anytime soon. No liberal pr conservative party has been able to defy this force! NOT in England, not in Canada and Australia, not in Germany, Poland and Turkey and so on. The suburbs in fact delivered a landslide for Labor in Australia.
The 2024 election was a bad rejection but it was also one of the narrowest loss and there was no such reciprocal thrashing of the GOP after their multiple 4-6 point losses 3 times since 2000, was there?
Also, Democrats are obviously "still searching for a path forward" as stated in another article of the series, Republicans' path forward wasn't decided until Trump won the 2016 GOP presidential primaries!
The Times being the Times. Have to take the bad with the good.
In terms of the political coverage, I'm finding it harder and harder to find the NYT's good. Nate Cohn is one of the best things they've got.
Incidentally, Nate posted a few days ago that they're hiring a staff editor to help with elements of their election polling and modelling. He says "If you're interested elections and you're excited to apply your technical skills and ingenuity to novel problems in a high-profile setting, this might just be the job for you." And this group probably has some of the kind of people he's looking for...
Their legal coverage has been excellent.
As is their crossword puzzle.
international coverage: wanting
coverage of that man in the white house: need significant improvement
I'm amazed about how people consistently make grand proclamations about national swings to be permanent precursors. To be fair, sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren't. Many of these articles could've literally been copied and pasted from post 2004-screeds. Then Democrats went on to win the PV in every presidential election (and EC in all but one) until last year.
Exactly! One cycle does not a permanent swing make!
You Tube is all aflutter about some monumental announcement Fetterman made an hour ago. I havent had time yet to look at the video but I suspect it is bs as usual for you tube.
Looks like a nothingburger. Him reacting to bad coverage and nothing more interesting than that.
Searched his name and a news article from two hours ago has the headline: "Sen. John Fetterman says his mental health struggles have been 'weaponized' against him, shaming him into attending votes and hearings"
Being result-oriented, I think politicians should be compelled to do their effing job – if needed, by shaming.
I agree. I merely meant that the story making its rounds isn't a big deal. Fetterman is pissed that people are pissed at him. Too bad, do your damn job.
Also it'd be one thing if he was getting critiqued for doing parts of the job that actually are performative. Yet casting legislative votes is the core distillation of the entire job! It'd be like a programmer saying that writing code was a performative part of the job.
Hate to say it, but every Democratic member of Congress should aspire to be more like Susan Collins. Since first becoming Senator in 1997, she hasn’t missed a single vote! In April of last year Senator Collins entered her 9000th consecutive vote.
Whatever else I may think of Collins, I think that is deeply admirable.
As critical as I am on Collins, unlike Fetterman she is committed to the job and wants to ensure the Senate does its job.
Collins doesn’t ever try to make enemies and piss off her staff.
Hence Jared Golden’s polite decline to run against her.
Also we'd lose his seat without him.
and you can be sure her campaign will use that to her advantage when she is running for re-election!
They’d be idiots if they didn’t. Of course any campaign will use their candidate’s strengths, preferably real ones – and these are.
Right but Fetterman forgets it’s his own Chief of Staff who made a bombshell of a story weeks ago about Fetterman’s problems. It isn’t just about what his doctor had said to him years ago.
The NY Times has an article on the latest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/us/politics/fetterman-senate-absence-mental-health-interview.html
Good rule of thumb: If someone or the internet at large says something is a huge deal without ever telling you what exactly it is, right then and there, they’re lying to you and don’t know anything.
The cryptic nature is to get people talking about it (which you did), to get more people to learn about it. Republicans do this all the time. Republican: “I think it’s a huge deal”, reporter: “what is it”, GOP: “you’ll see when it comes out, but it’s never been done before”.
People fall for this stuff all the time. My advice, ignore it and go about your business. 9 times out of 10 it will be nothing. The 1 out of 10 times it’s real, any credible journalist out there would have a story on it within the hour, so we’ll find out anyways in the end.
This is exactly why I always try to read the whole article and not be immediately be drawn to the headlines just because they sell things this way.
In the case of Fetterman, based on what I read in the original article citing his own Chief of Staff, it had quite a revelation of information based on the sequence of events. Anytime this kind of detail is put in an article, you can tell it’s really investigative.
Otherwise, if the article has information is thrown in there at random as if it was put in a hurry, I am less compelled to believe the reporting.
Way too late for most people to read about this, but for anyone still around, there’s 2 things that stand out here, 1 being a shock, the other more expected.
https://archive.ph/QhowK
House Majority Forward, the nonprofit affiliated with House Democratic leadership and House Majority PAC, will start running digital ads next week attacking House Republicans voting to cut Medicaid spending, according to a spokesperson for the group. The ads will appear in 25 battleground districts in California, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin.
The shock: Missouri. This is the first time it’s been mentioned by Dem operatives as a target seat as far as I’m aware. The closest district is probably (?) MO-02 with a pretty strong incumbent GOP rep Ann Wagner. That they’re spending cash on it this early means they think a 2nd Trump term can completely break away the still red Republican suburban districts that haven’t shifted towards Democrats very much up until now. Or they have data showing that it’s winnable. Or maybe they think she’ll retire.
The more expected from previous articles, but still good to see is the party investing in Iowa, which they haven’t really done since 2018 except for IA-03 (and we all know how close that got the state blue). They sense opportunity in old Democratic held districts among the working class the party has been bleeding. Or they have data for it.
Good to see something like this from the party. The strategy is to use what got Trump elected twice against him, everywhere (media). That only happens if you go out and frame the debate before Republicans can.
Yet another possibility: That Missouri is also about psychological warfare, intending to scare the bejeezus out of Republican lawmakers, hoping to peel away the few that are needed to stop Trump’s insane budget proposal.
So they're officially giving up on South Florida and South Texas districts that used to be close just a few years back or were won by Biden?
Just because not every ad produced by a Democratic affiliated group is airing in a particular district doesn't mean that Dems are "giving up on it".
But in the regions you name we're probably going to mostly be playing defense. There are at least a couple of potentially flippable now-red seats but they may be tougher targets than ones in the states mentioned, while several Dems only narrowly held on.
We are going to playing defence there only if 2020-2024 trend continues and Trump's coalition doesn't break apart by then or hasn't already broken apart.
MO-2 has absolutely shifted toward Dems by quite a bit. The old 2010s district, which was pretty much all suburban, was essentially even in 2020 presidential vote share (Daily Kos Elections says Trump won it narrowly, Daves Redistricting says Biden won it narrowly) after going for Romney by 16 in 2012. Despite being heavily gerrymandered, the new district has still shifted a lot, from Romney +20 in 2012 to Trump +8 in 2024. If Republicans hadn't gerrymandered it, it might already be blue.
I wonder who carried the old MO-02 in 2024, though? Missouri seems to be the last holdout on DRA for 2024 data.
I would guess Trump won it by a point or two. It had parts of Jefferson, St. Louis, and St. Charles counties which moved 2020 to 2024 by R+2.9, R+0.6, and D+0.5 respectively.
Why haven’t Democrats tried putting indepdent congressional redistricting on the ballot like they have for state legislative redistricting ?
Probably because the GOP will just ignore it like they did in Ohio and Florida.
The Fair District Amedment in Florida doesn’t have a commission and just relies on vague language that legislators are supposed to abide by. The Ohio commission is a complete sham that guarantees Republicans will have control of the process and specifically allows the splitting of certain counties when it’s convenient for Republicans to do so.
What is needed is a California/Colorado/Michigan type commission that requires equal members from each party on the commission.
Charlie Rangel has passed.
https://abc7ny.com/post/charlie-rangel-former-congressman-harlem-survivor-gang-dies-94/16553821/
Charlotte, NC's municipal elections are getting interesting.
The Mayor's race is likely to be sleepy again, assuming Mayor Vi Lyles seeks a 5th term. However, the city council could see some significant turnover. Federal prosecutors indicted District 3's Tiawana Brown for misusing COVID relief funds. Brown, who was first elected in 2023, is the first formerly incarcerated person to serve on the city council. https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article306970521.html
There are currently announced challengers to D-4's Renee Johnson and D-5's Marjorie Molina, but I haven't heard of anyone challenging Brown before the indictment.
Is Brown likely to be the first formerly incarcerated City Council member who got incarcerated again?
https://archive.ph/0Ogs4
The New Republic: Senate Republicans Flirt With Nuking the Filibuster
GOP Senators are chipping away at the 60-vote threshold, marking one more step toward majority rule in the upper chamber.
“I think the filibuster is on borrowed time. I think a decade from now it’ll be gone,” said Glassman. “It takes the right orientation of politics to get you to that point, but we’re closing in on it. And things like this just open up people’s eyes that the procedures are relatively simple, and it’s not hard to go down there and do it.”
Not a bad idea at all, let Presidents be allowed to implement their entire agenda if they also win both the chambers of Congress obviously under the limits of the constitution and voters can decide after 2 years if they want it to continue of not like it happens in every other nation. Just imagine if Obama got whatever he wanted, a public health insurance option, a big beautiful stimulus, cap and trade, maybe add 2 more states, redistricting reform! The filibuster is a southern segregationist and obstructionist relic. I believe it would strengthen our citizens' faith in the ability of our democracy to improve people's lives too which is at an all time low.
Like John Oliver said on the Daily Show - "Sorry Jimmy, no healthcare for you due to a weird rule".
A decade from now? Not a very urgent matter.
Don't be sure about that.
In an optimistic scenario: we’ll have gutted it by 2029 and then Republicans will get rid of the rest the next time they win.
Dems should absolutely make a carveout for voting rights legislation in 2029 (national independent redistricting and DC statehood).
And enshrining Roe into federal law. That won't get past the 60 vote cloture threshold. Better to just do away with the filibuster entirely when Ds get back into power.
I wouldn’t fully get rid of it in one swoop. I’d do carveouts.
National independent redistricting and DC statehood (ie two Democratic Senators) would be a MASSIVE win for voters. The GOP would gnash their teeth and complain about "overreach" and "DC tyranny" when the law is merely giving the District of Columbia the statehood and representation it deserves.
Absolutely. And there are absolutley no good arguments against either of those things.
I hope if we do get a Democratic trifecta after 2028, that these theoretical laws are worded in a way that avoids SCOTUS gutting or invalidating parts of it. And GOP states and/or AGs will be challenging them like no tomorrow, ie Ken Paxton and his idiotic culture war challenging of Biden's EOs.
It will be impossible to make them ineligible for Supreme Court fuckery, if that's what the Supreme Court wants to do.
Don't forget a decolonisation referendum for Puerto Rico with all options on the ballot, including statehood which they prefer!
Yes, but they need to shut up about it while they are out of control of the White House, both Houses of Congress and the Supreme Court.
Yes, it's a good idea, but not now.
I fully believe part of the biggest problem in getting voters to understand how bad the Republican Party is, is that they never get to implement their true agenda because it’s too extreme to pass into law with the way things currently are.
So people just view each party as two choices to choose from, not 1 party too extreme to vote for and the other that mostly tries to do things right as they should. Partisanship has obviously increased a lot since, but there have been time periods where 1 party has total control of 1 branch for almost or over a decade in American history.
Maybe if they didn’t have any guard rails to safeguard them from the consequences, voters would finally understand that Democratic attacks are on things the GOP absolutely would do if they could. They don’t believe something bad could happen until after it does. Let them experience the full breadth of the right wing’s corruption, chaos and extremism. What is the worst that could happen? Honestly? How could it be any worse than now (speaking about political power only, not the negative effects these laws will have on people)?
I guarantee if the GOP passed these insane MAGA policy bills into law the voters would wake up quickly to how stupid they have been in their voting choices.
The problem is that we're talking about a potential end to democracy now.
https://statenavigate.org/which-democratic-candidate-for-lieutenant-governor-is-the-most-electable/
This article on State Navigate (the successor to CNalysis) gives a good rundown on the Virginia Democratic Primary for Lieutenant Governor. It says the top three vote-getters will likely be Stoney, Hashmi, and Rouse; it's just a matter of who gets 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place, which is consistent with the Reddit threads that I've read on the LG primary.
My first choice among the three is Hashmi, who also seems to be the consensus pick among Redditors who have been following this primary. With that being said, my top priority in the LG primary is making sure that Stoney doesn't win. He's probably the only candidate who could realistically lose the general election, even if Spanberger wins the Governor's race by double digits. Therefore, I might vote for Rouse over Hashmi if that's what it takes to keep Stoney from winning.
Do they require a runoff? Or FPTP?
It's FPTP. Arlington County and Charlottesville City have started using RCV for local elections, though. It's times like these I wish we had RCV/IRV in Virginia.
KY-4:
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/22/thomas-massie-trump-kentucky-republican-primary
Thomas Massie (R-KY) may have GOP primary challengers. Trump isn't happy with him for not voting for the "big, beautiful bill", and it looks like two possible opponents in the primary are State Sen. Aaron Reed and State Rep. Kimberly Moser.
Make all of this what you will.
Moser actually strikes me as a very strong potential candidate-not just for this district, but possibly in a future statewide race in Kentucky. We could be looking at someone who would be primarying Rand Paul in 2028 if this challenge is successful.