The Democrats made a very wise decision this spring, said Lauren Egan on The Bulwark. They were considering whether to host their own midterm convention to steal attention from the one staged by the Republicans in Dallas.

In the end, they opted not to, because they were short on cash and thought it might be “strategically smart to cede the stage to Donald Trump in hopes that he would dig his own political grave”. Boy, did that pay off.

Trump, who has already alienated voters this summer by talking about how great data centres are and how he loves inflation, was on unhinged form in the two-day conference. He boasted that America “controls the Trump Strait”; he demanded that the audience join him in a pledge (“I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States...”); he even promised every American a $5,000 bounty if his party wins the midterm elections.

Democrat insiders have long joked that Trump is trying to lose November’s midterms, but some are now seriously wondering whether he has lost his grip on reality.

An ‘incredibly risky’ bet

Republican candidates contesting swing seats in November certainly regard him as a liability, said Ayman Mohyeldin on MS Now. Many of them stayed well away from Dallas, wary of association with a president whose approval rating is down to below 35%. The Republican Party has nevertheless decided that, despite everything, it’s worth making Trump the face of the midterms, because of his unrivalled ability to drive Republican voters to the polls.

It’s an “incredibly risky” bet, said Kimberley A. Strassel in The Wall Street Journal. The Maga base is already “fired up”. It’s among the larger category of traditional Republicans that the GOP has a turnout problem. They need to inspire these people to vote by offering a coherent agenda.

There’s little evidence of that, said The Washington Post. Trump’s wild proposal to pay $5,000 to every adult citizen if the GOP retains control of Congress in November beggared belief. It’s a “desperate gimmick” that betrays a total lack of seriousness about America’s fiscal situation. It would cost more than $1.2 trillion, in a country already saddled with $40 trillion in debt.

The Democrats are in no position to accuse Trump of trying to “trade votes for cash”, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review. It’s what they do in every election, albeit in more disguised ways. But this bribe is still a terrible idea, not least because it would stoke inflation. Trump says he’s defending America from the socialists, but if his populism means throwing money at voters, “what need is there of socialism at all”?

Another Trump ‘con’

Trump’s cheques will never arrive, said Steve Benen on MS Now. Congress wouldn’t approve the move, the courts would object, and the money’s not there in any case. It’s just another Trump “con”. He pulled the same trick before the 2018 midterms, when he claimed that he and Congress were preparing a new, “very major” tax cut that would exclusively benefit the middle class. Even White House officials were “mystified” by this declaration, which had no basis in reality.

It’s bad enough that Trump spouts nonsense, said Eric Boehm in Reason Magazine. Worse was the sight of his VP, J.D. Vance, defending the bribe plan and insisting it could be funded through tariffs. Vance is supposed to be the heir apparent to Trump – “the guy with the political and policy chops” to redefine this populist movement for the next generation. Yet he has no problem with the concept of bribing Americans with their own money? “Trumpism is out of ideas, and soon it is likely to be out of power – no matter what ridiculous promises the president makes along the way.”

Republicans have usually claimed the faith mantle in U.S. politics. This year’s midterm elections are developing along a different path, with Democrats like James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas highlighting their religious bona fides on the campaign trail.

What did the commentators say?

“Faith is back in Democratic politics,” Jim Wallis said at Religion News Service. Democrats have often chosen to “ignore, dismiss or even discredit religion” because they did not know how to talk about such values without sounding as though they were “imposing their religion upon a pluralistic society.” But a new generation of “faith-forward” candidates is “reclaiming religion” as a “moral framework for public service.” They talk of faith “with authenticity instead of apology.” There could be broad benefits. “Faith may be our last line of defense in saving, and then restoring, our democracy.”

Democratic Socialists have received a lot of attention this campaign cycle, “but Democratic Christians may prove more influential this November,” Bill McKibben said at The New Yorker. Candidates like Talarico and Hamilton are leading a “resurgence of the once dominant and long-dormant mainline Protestant tradition” in Democratic politics. Their prominence can be seen as a response to the “right-wing evangelical hijacking of the Gospel message” and evangelicals’ embrace of Donald Trump. “Everyone should welcome a new depth to the debate.”

Other faith-centric Democrats in this year’s midterm elections include Iowa’s Sarah Trone Garriott, a Lutheran minister, and Arkansas’ Robb Ryerse, an evangelical pastor. Iowa’s Rob Sand is not a pastor, but his campaign has featured messaging about “how his faith is deeply woven into his public service,” Vote Common Good’s Doug Pagitt said at The Hill.

A “sense of belonging” is important in “both religion and politics,” said Pagitt, but Republicans are “narrowing their definition of who belongs and which faith matters” with conservative Christian Nationalist rhetoric. Democrats have an opportunity to “welcome those Trump is denying.”

Democratic efforts to “reclaim God” are “unlikely to succeed” unless the party moves toward the center, Eric Teetsel said at The Washington Post. Barack Obama embraced religious rhetoric during his rise to the presidency, but once in the White House he advanced causes — abortion access, LGBT rights — that were “at odds with evangelical priorities.” Today’s progressive Christians are “not reaching out to religious voters by taking a more moderate stance” on transgender rights or euthanasia. Trump is problematic, but he has been able to “achieve reasonable policy wins consistent with a Christian understanding of the good.”

What next?

Republicans are pushing back. Democratic candidates “don’t profess the true gospel of Jesus Christ,” Iowa congressional candidate Joe Mitchell said at July’s Family Leadership Summit, per Religion News Service. Democrats also have to figure out how to speak the language of faith without alienating the large number of secular voters who make up their base, said ABC News. Achieving that balance is a “tricky road,” the University of Notre Dame’s David Campbell said to the outlet. Some candidates “do it better than others.”

The outcome of Michigan’s high-stakes Senate race may come down to a streamer from California, said Alexei Koseff in The Washington Post. Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing a campaign crisis after his friend and political ally Hasan Piker—a progressive influencer with millions of followers—suggested in a livestream that if Jewish Americans continue to support Israel, “eventually someone is going to come around and take action—not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” Republican opponent Mike Rogers immediately played up El-Sayed’s ties to his fellow Muslim Piker, calling the streamer his “running mate.” El-Sayed attempted to mend bridges with Michigan’s Jewish community but refused to disavow Piker outright. “If you want to make this race about a streamer in California,” he said, “I just think you’re missing the boat.”

“It shouldn’t have taken this long for prominent Democrats to confront their party’s antisemitism problem,” said David M. Drucker in Bloomberg. Piker has been “spouting antisemitic and antiIsrael nonsense since at least last year”—even as El-Sayed brought him on the campaign trail. Some liberal activists see Piker as the Democrats’ version of Joe Rogan, helping them reach voters under 30, but his incendiary rhetoric risks Democrats’ “historically strong bond” with Jewish voters. Some Democrats are complaining that Republicans aren’t required to denounce right-wing influencers like the racist and Islamophobic Laura Loomer, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. True enough. But as “an avatar” of the insurgent left, Piker has made it clear he wants to purge all Zionists who believe in a Jewish homeland from Democratic ranks. Even though I’m critical of Israel’s policies, “it’s easy for me to see why Piker’s rise panics some Jews.

Like it or not, El-Sayed’s alliance with Piker “is one of the important questions at stake in the election,” said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. Piker is not only virulently anti-Israel; he’s a self-described Marxist who has expressed admiration for Mao Zedong and once said America deserved 9/11. El-Sayed has said “he intends to use his victory as a platform” to move the Democratic Party to the left. His victory in November could “throw open the doors of the party to a strain of militant politics that many Jews justifiably consider dangerous.” Given that the alternative—the Republican Rogers—is an adamant Trump supporter, Michigan Democrats face “a grim choice."

Six years after the term “woke” peaked in the political lexicon amid the George Floyd protests, some on the left have taken to referring to this period of ultra-liberal declarations as “Woke 1.0,” insinuating that the upcoming midterm elections will pave the way for “Woke 2.0” as a backlash against the Trump administration. But not everyone in the Democratic Party seems to agree on how, or even if, “woke” should be used as a campaign tool.

‘We need a strong progressive movement’

The main buzz over “Woke 1.0” came after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) referred to the era in a disparaging way in an interview with ABC News earlier this month, saying, Woke 1.0 “was crazy.” While “many politicians and activists no longer use the rhetoric they did six years ago,” there is “no such thing as ‘Woke 1.0,’ and it would be almost impossible to define such a time, era or set of positions,” said Perry Bacon at The New Republic. This comes even as Ocasio-Cortez herself “implied that Woke 1.0 included her own previous statements on abolishing the police,” said Owen Carry at USA Today.

Ocasio-Cortez’s comments “underscore an important duality,” said Bacon. “We need a strong progressive movement pushing progressive ideas, including some that are essential but not yet popular,” and we also require “progressive politicians focused largely on popular ideas so that they can win elections and power.” The early days of “woke” weren’t “just about the changing language or super far-fetched proposals” like defunding the police or canceling Thanksgiving — the “Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements were much needed reckonings in how America dealt with issues of race and gender.”

It appears the new plan for many Democrats is to “brush it off. Then refocus on the present, and on the policies that will actually make people’s lives better,” said Astead Herndon at Vox. The “broad ideals — diversity, equity, a basic sense of fairness — still matter to Democratic voters.” And it appears many of these viewpoints have remained successful: Minority and women candidates “have kept winning since 2024, and even ideas like reparations still resonate with big chunks of the Democratic electorate.”

‘How radioactive they have become’

Not all Democrats are on board with the idea of adapting the term Woke 1.0, as some believe it is too damaging politically. Progressive platforms “have been reshaped by an ideology centered on systemic oppression and the radical policies ostensibly needed to correct it,” said Idrees Kahloon at The Atlantic. Ocasio-Cortez now “declining to defend — and indeed wishing to move past — these positions shows how radioactive they have become.”

Many “ideas that once seemed weighty look flimsy,” and “most members of the party’s elite apparently hope that the ideas from the period will simply recede from public consciousness,” said Kahloon. But “accompanying those movements was an adoption of postures and behaviors that signaled that one was on the right side,” said Nesrine Malik at The Guardian. Given a “chance, the left will waste capital by descending into infighting, radicalism and alienation,” which can be “blamed for what has followed Woke 1.0: the resurgence of Donald Trump.”

It was “hard to articulate exactly” what Woke 1.0 is or, “I suppose, was,” said Luke Winkie at Slate. When people “derisively say” Woke 1.0 now, “what we are gesturing at is the shudderingly visceral feeling of the whole thing — the distinct haughty tang, the way-too-online insularity and, most important, the telos that amounted to little more than inflicting guilt and experiencing guilt.” But the “challenge, for AOC and anyone else dreaming up” Woke 2.0, is to “bring the cause to scale.”

“For years, Democrats have debated whether the progressive politics that surged around 2020 went too far,” said Pilar Melendez and Allan Smith in NBCNews.com. Now Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, borrowing a phrase from New York councilman Chi Ossé, has officially admitted it did: “Woke 1,” she said last week, “was crazy.” Wokeness has become a shorthand for a series of former progressive priorities: defunding the police, self-flagellating admissions of guilt about privilege, and the adoption of stilted academic terms like “Latinx” to prove your elevated consciousness. Those who failed these tests could be attacked on social media and “canceled.” Donald Trump returned to power amid a backlash against wokeness, said Astead Herndon in Vox, so Democrats are backing away from previous woke stances. In this election cycle, they hope “to reintroduce themselves after workshopping their ideas over the last five years.”

Sorry, but the only lesson Democrats seem to have learned is that “some policies are so toxic politically as to deny them office,” said Kimberley A. Strassel in The Wall Street Journal. AOC and her cohort can chuckle about the extremist positions they held, but there’s nothing funny about those whose lives were forever damaged by the Woke 1 era. Just ask the Americans “who lost jobs or friends, or who were otherwise canceled” for violating far-left orthodoxy. Some dissenters were branded Nazis, fascists, or xenophobes for wanting a secure border. Woke Democratic prosecutors released violent criminals to commit new crimes. “Is this the part where we laugh with AOC?”

“I think we can all agree that there were some embarrassing excesses” in the Woke 1 era, said Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. “But just take a minute and look around.” Roe has been toppled, immigrants are being snatched off the street by masked thugs, and Trump is amassing billions in corrupt riches. Progressives shouldn’t play into Republican hands by apologizing for Woke 1 “instead of focusing on the dire state of the country right now.” Besides, Americans aren’t angry at woke anymore, said Luke Winkie in Slate. Today their fury is directed at masked ICE thugs, tech oligarchs, data centers, inflation, and incompetent public officials. Democrats have an opportunity to carve out a “more practical, forward-looking wokeness,” focusing on fairness, human rights, and empathy, without the guilt and pedantic, scolding tone. “A better world is still possible, so long as we’re not too annoying about it.”

Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – better known as AOC – preparing to run for the presidency? That is the question being asked in Washington. Last week, the left-wing Democrat revealed on Instagram that she was freezing her eggs to “feel more in control” – which fuelled speculation about her political ambitions. Hours later, she gave an interview in which she refused to rule out making a White House run in 2028.

Youth in revolt

If she does go for the Democrat nomination, said Dace Potas in USA Today, she’ll have every chance of success. The democratic socialist Bernie Sanders proved to be a serious contender a decade ago, and today, the political climate is “even more receptive to his brand of populist anger”. AOC, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is well placed to capitalise on the moment. With strong name recognition and almost 30 million social media followers to help fund her campaign, she’d have a headstart on most of her likely rivals.

What might count against her is her youth, said Henry Olsen in The Washington Post. Were she to win the election, she’d enter the White House at the age of 39, four years younger than the youngest-ever elected president, JFK. On the other hand, AOC may never get a better chance to bid for the top job, so, if she’s keen, she should take it. American history is littered with would-be candidates – Walter Mondale, Mario Cuomo, Chris Christie – who hesitated and missed their moment. Of course, winning the Democrat nomination would be the easy bit. “The general election would be a different story.”

Woke 2

AOC carries a lot of baggage, said David Harsanyi in the Washington Examiner. In the Covid era, she joined in the talk of defunding the police and the clamour to cancel any public figure deemed to have transgressed progressive pieties about race and systemic oppression. Asked last week about some of the more extreme positions she and other left-wingers had taken, she tried to laugh it all off, saying “Woke 1 was crazy”. Granted, everyone should be allowed to change their views “as they learn and grow”, but AOC needs to explain exactly how her thinking has evolved and what her vision of Woke 2 is.

She owes voters more than just an “oops”, agreed Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review. Were the tables turned, she wouldn’t let a Republican politician get away with it. If AOC wants to win the trust of American voters, “she’ll have to do better than this”.

‘LinkedIn users are rewriting the past to land their next jobs’

Beth Kowitt at Bloomberg

LinkedIn “has inadvertently become a treasure trove for economists studying the modern labor market,” says Beth Kowitt. New research “has uncovered a problem with treating LinkedIn as a historical record: users keep mucking up the data.” People “have been polishing their resumes for as long as resumes have existed,” but “today when workers rewrite their own career histories, they’re also altering the public record and our understanding of the labor market.” The “result is a kind of arms race.”

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‘Debbie Wasserman Schultz running in a Black district is brought to you by the Supreme Court — and the GOP’

Andra Gillespie at MS NOW

After the Supreme Court “gave Florida Republicans permission to redraw district lines to benefit their party, the biggest news is the decision by Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a white woman, to run in the state’s only plurality-Black district,” says Andra Gillespie. Her “candidacy there highlights the tensions between descriptive and substantive representation and the strategic risks that emerge when a large field of candidates run for the same seat.” But “she could still win with a plurality.”

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‘The age of big-spending Republicans is here’

Merrill Matthews at The Hill

It “may be hard for the Gen Z crowd to accept, but there was a time when Republicans in Congress believed in fiscal responsibility — restraining government spending,” says Merrill Matthews. Now “all most Gen Zers have ever known is big-spending Republicans.” The GOP “used to be serious about controlling federal spending, but that was before Trump.” These party members “may soon find voters and the economy demanding they return to their conservative roots.”

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‘What my dad’s generation of engineers can teach the AI industry’

Len Khodorkovsky at Newsweek

“Half of companies rolled out an AI agent that passed internal testing but still failed once real customers began using it,” and the “gap isn’t a failure of engineering. It’s a permanent feature of it,” says Len Khodorkovsky. It’s the “everyday cost of manufacturing at scale.” A “model that aces its benchmarks but fails in the real world is like a tolerance that only looks good on paper,” and “every factory learned a long time ago that reality humbles perfect designs.”

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Abdul El-Sayed has issued a “call for Democratic unity,” said Toluse Olorunnipa and Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic. That’s a new message for Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, a charismatic left-wing populist who earlier this month edged the establishment-backed Haley Stevens in a bitterly contested primary. During the campaign, El-Sayed—a former public health official who’s aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders—denounced the Democratic Party’s brand as “so bullshit.” Since then, he’s started making amends, and Stevens has endorsed him. El-Sayed will need moderate votes to defeat the Republican nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, in a crucial November race that could determine if Democrats gain control of the Senate. El-Sayed, who beat Stevens by only a point, advocates Medicare for all, ending unconditional military aid to Israel, and getting “money out of politics.” He hasn’t shown any signs of moderating his stances, even though his primary support in a purple state came mainly from highly educated whites and college students, not the working class or Black voters.

Republicans have already chosen their campaign strategy—“anti-Muslim bigotry,” said Paul Waldman in Public Notice. Republicans all refer to El-Sayed by his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, as a way to make him “sound alien and threatening.” President Trump calls El-Sayed “a jihadist” and posted a photo of himself with Melania and El-Sayed with his wife, American-born psychiatrist Dr. Sarah Jukaku, to call attention to her hijab. It’s unwise for Republicans to focus so heavily on El-Sayed’s religion or to call him a radical socialist, said Abe Greenwald in Commentary. “When a candidate makes his opponent’s unfitness the central message of his campaign, he also makes the race all about his opponent.” Rogers needs to make a case for himself.

El-Sayed will do plenty of self-damage, said Dace Potas in USA Today. He still “holds the same arrogant attitude” he did during the primary, and he won’t ditch his pal Hasan Piker, an “antisemitic Twitch streamer” and far-left bomb thrower. El-Sayed won’t reach for “an ideological middle ground,” said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, because he doesn’t believe any reasonable person can disagree with his positions. He’s absolutely certain that “there’s a hidden reservoir of voters hungry for progressive populist policies” among the working class. In November, El-Sayed and other left-wing populists “may get a hard lesson on the necessity of pragmatism.”

What happened

Primaries on Tuesday in Minnesota and Wisconsin offered mixed verdicts for the progressive and establishment wings of the Democratic Party and for candidates endorsed by President Donald Trump. In the most-watched contest, establishment-backed David Crowley eked out a projected win in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, beating democratic socialist Francesca Hong by less than 1%. He will face Rep. Tom Tiffany (R) in the general election. Michael Alfonso, the Trump-backed son-in-law of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, won the GOP primary for Tiffany’s seat.

Trump-endorsed “MyPillow Guy” Mike Lindell lost Minnesota’s GOP gubernatorial primary to state House Speaker Lisa Demuth. She will face Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D). Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan (D), the more progressive candidate in the primary to replace retiring Sen. Tina Smith (D), beat Rep. Angie Craig and will face Republican former sports broadcaster Michele Tafoya.

Who said what

Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, dropped out of the “chaotic race” in July but “reactivated his campaign” after the “implosion” of two top establishment rivals, CNN said. His “stunningly narrow, surprise win” over Hong “seemed to settle little in the party’s national battle” between establishment and “insurgent, populist” left, The Associated Press said. A week after progressive Abdul El-Sayed beat out his moderate rival by a similarly “razor-thin” margin in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, “neither side” appears to be “winning the argument convincingly.”

What next?

In South Carolina, Trump-endorsed Sen. Darline Graham (R) advanced to an Aug. 25 runoff in Tuesday’s special GOP primary to replace her brother, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, on November’s ballot. She will face hardline conservative Rep. Ralph Norman.

After notching a string of Democratic primary wins in New York City and Colorado, the far-left Democratic Socialists of America will face its “biggest test” soon, said Caroline Vakil in The Hill. If the polls are right, the likely winner of the Democratic gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin will be state Rep. Francesca Hong, 37, a tattooed former restaurant worker and “proud” DSA member who a few years ago called for the abolition of Thanksgiving. Hong has sought to distance herself from that statement and from the DSA’s radical platform, which includes such proposals as abolishing the police, prisons, borders, and the U.S. Senate, as well as ending U.S. support for Israel. Because of that baggage, mainstream Democrats like current Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers doubt Hong can beat the GOP’s presumptive nominee, Rep. Tom Tiffany, in November, and worry she’ll hurt downballot candidates. But Hong’s supporters see no need to stress. They note the rising antiestablishment mood among Democrats and voters in general, and say the narrow win by progressive Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate Democratic primary shows there’s a possible path to victory in purple states.

The “Democratic machine is fighting back” as best it can, said Noah Rothman in National Review. The Democratic National Committee last week tweaked its presidential primary schedule to favor centrist-leaning states like Nevada and South Carolina, which should help ward off “the insurgent socialists in their ranks.” But with 1 in 3 Democratic voters now identifying as a democratic socialist it may be too little, too late. This is “a story of establishment collapse rather than left-wing ascension,” said Astead Herndon in Vox. Candidates like Hong are winning over normie Democrats not with the DSA’s extreme ideas but by pushing popular measures: new taxes on the superrich, Medicare for all, restraining the artificial intelligence industry. The “rudderless” Democratic establishment, by contrast, is offering nothing except ineffective opposition to President Trump.

We need better labeling, said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. The truth is that a likely majority of DSA members, and the overwhelming majority of those who tell pollsters they’re “democratic socialists,” aren’t “socialists” at all. “They’re social democrats, in the European tradition.” Like the DSA-endorsed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), their main objectives are an expanded welfare state, including universal health-care coverage, funded by a more progressive tax code. Social democrats also want to win elections, meaning they could be a great asset within the Democratic coalition. Not so the DSA’s “Das Kapital–loving, Mao-admiring” genuine socialists who need to be rejected before they “do to the Democratic Party what MAGA did to Republicans.”

Democrats should stop “whining,” said Paul Waldman in Public Notice. With the primaries largely over, it’s electoral self-harm to keep screaming “half our candidates are crazy!” The party’s centrists need to understand that, with control of Congress in the balance, “they have an interest in seeing all Democrats succeed—even those who are too progressive for their taste.” Whatever happens in November “will inform 2028,” said Nia-Malika Henderson in Bloomberg. If DSA-backed candidates can “pull off victories in purple states,” then a new template will emerge on how to win. But if those candidates lose, the Democratic Party will have less power than ever to “rein in Trump’s many excesses,” and will sail toward 2028 still “wrestling with itself” over what it actually believes.

What happened

Progressive firebrand Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary last week, in a race viewed by many political observers as a referendum on the party’s identity. That fight turned out to be much closer than polling suggested. El-Sayed, a former public health official endorsed by independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), used his campaign as a litmus test for Democratic support of Israel, and blasted Stevens for receiving more than $30 million—about half her advertising funding—from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Stevens said El-Sayed, who would become the first Muslim U.S. senator if he wins in November, wants to “blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.” After his victory was confirmed, El-Sayed called on Michigan Democrats to “mend fences” ahead of his race against the GOP nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers.

Another Michigan progressive, William Lawrence, won his Democratic primary in a battleground House district following a campaign that focused heavily on opposing data centers. But the party’s leftward momentum stalled in St. Louis, where Missouri Rep. Wesley Bell defeated his challenger, former Rep. Cori Bush, in a House primary. A pro-Israel moderate, Bell unseated Bush in 2024 after she became one of the first sitting lawmakers to call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. Following that loss, Bush vowed to run again and warned AIPAC that she would “tear your kingdom down.” Bell won this week by more than 20 points.

What the columnists said

El-Sayed’s win was not the “resounding verdict in the Democratic civil war” he had anticipated, said Adam Wren in Politico. He was confident throughout the race, bragging about feeling no stress as voting began. Can you blame him? Some polls gave him a double-digit lead. But in the end, Stevens lost by only a point, thanks to strong support from Black and lower-income voters. Still, it was “an impressive effort” from the grassroots El-Sayed, who was outspent by Stevens by almost $60 million.

Are Democrats “playing for fun” or “playing to win”? asked Kevin D. Williamson in The Dispatch. Defeating Rogers, the GOP’s “bland Trump factotum,” in November ought to have been “pretty easy.” But it won’t be after Democrats nominated El-Sayed, a “left-wing goofball” who fixates on Jews, parties with podcaster and “Hamas apologist” Hasan Piker, and “advocates a state-monopoly health-care system that would strip Michigan union members of cherished benefits.” In a must-win battleground state, polls show he’s trailing Rogers, 46% to 43%.

Stevens may have been a safer bet, said William Kristol in The Bulwark. But once the bitterness of the primary subsides, the “national environment will still help the Democratic nominee.” It’s Rogers, not El-Sayed, who’s tainted by the historically unpopular President Trump. If El-Sayed leaves his squabbles with fellow Democrats for another day and sticks to “the fundamentals” of fighting Trump, he can help them flip the Senate.

What happened

The Democratic Party’s moderate and progressive wings each won key primaries in Michigan, Virginia, Missouri, Kansas and Washington state on Tuesday. In the highest-profile showdown between the two factions, progressive candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Senate primary in Michigan, The Associated Press projected, beating establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens.

Voters in Kansas defeated a Republican ballot measure that would have turned state Supreme Court appointments into partisan races — a “referendum designed to overturn Kansas’ constitutional right to abortion,” Politico said. In Missouri, voters overwhelmingly rejected a GOP-led amendment that would have made it harder to pass voter-approved ballot measures.

Who said what

The winners in the Democrats’ moderate faction include Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), who fended off a leftist challenger; former Rep. Elaine Luria (Va.) and Richmond-area prosecutor Shannon Taylor, who won swing-district primaries; and Rep. Wesley Bell (Mo.), who prevailed in his rematch against democratic socialist former Rep. Cori Bush. Progressive climate activist William Lawrence won a three-way primary against two moderates in Michigan and will face Rep. Tom Barrett (R) in a “competitive contest that will test whether left-wing populism is viable in swing districts,” The New York Times said.

What next?

The race between El-Sayed and Stevens was this year’s “most significant test” of how Democratic voters are “weighing questions of ideology and electability,” CNN said. Despite his eventual victory, El-Sayed’s consistently thin lead was “much narrower than what the most recent polling had shown” in the pivotal race to succeed retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D), the Times said. El-Sayed will face former Rep. Mike Rogers (R) in the general election.

President Donald Trump has long flirted with dispatching federal forces to polling sites as part of a broader and oftentimes martial emphasis on election security. Now, with the 2026 midterms just months away and Democrats looking increasingly likely to make major (perhaps even chamber-flipping) gains in November, party figures are starting to take Trump’s threats seriously. As blue state attorneys general coordinate with one another and Senate Democrats convene high-level strategy sessions, is the party ready to face the White House’s increasingly brazen electoral saber-rattling?

‘War room’ preparations

In July, a “group of powerful” Democratic lawmakers “rehearsed for some of their darkest fears” about the midterm elections,” said MS NOW. Among those concerns: “disinformation triggering voter-roll purges,” soldiers “deployed to polling places” during open voting hours, and the “machinery of a free election seizing up in real time.” The session was “part of a broader effort” by the party to “prepare for anything ahead of November.”

Democrats are “ramping up” their efforts, said The New York Times. At a meeting in May attended by “staff members from the offices of every Democratic attorney general” and “about a dozen Democratic secretaries of state,” party officials “held tabletop exercises” to prepare for “hypothetical scenarios in the November midterm elections.”

The “sad reality” necessitating these “war rooms” is that the federal government, once a trusted election partner, is now “our biggest concern,” said Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown to the Times. It “doesn’t matter” what the White House “tries to throw at us,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in a recent Senate speech. Planning sessions like these “ensure we’ll be ready to respond.” Democratic senators have also introduced legislation to “limit the potential for armed military personnel or federal law enforcement at election polling places,” said CBS News.

After Trump “declined to rule out” sending National Guard troops or DHS agents to polling sites on election day, a coalition of Democratic district attorneys calling itself the Project for the Fight Against Federal Overreach also warned the White House that “any federal agents sent to polling places within their jurisdictions will be prosecuted,” said Politico. But it’s “unclear” whether that would include “working with local law enforcement to block federal agents from visiting polling places,” and what, if any, “potential consequences would be for the election” should prosecutors find evidence of “mass voter intimidation” by federal agents.

‘Unprecedented’ electoral environment

Although attorneys general and secretaries of state often work closely together in a particular state, they “rarely work” with corresponding figures from another, said the Times. Given Trump’s threats, Democratic figures say “creating a national network of these two offices is necessary.”

The “most realistic threats” from the Trump administration “create confusion, trigger litigation, delay certification or further undermine public confidence," said Ari Mittleman, the executive director of the nonpartisan Keep Our Republic election group, to Newsweek. Though such officials remain “confident in the professionalism” of the local officials tasked with overseeing the electoral mechanics of the midterm race, the “current environment is unprecedented,” said the outlet. “The guardrails are real,” said Mittleman. But they “depend on courts acting promptly, officials following the law and political leaders refusing to promote” election lies.

Graham Platner’s “reputation is in tatters,” said George F. Will in The Washington Post, and “so should be the reputations of all those national figures” who tried to make him a U.S. senator. For months, Democrats stuck by the 41-year-old political novice, primary voters’ choice to challenge Maine’s longtime GOP Sen. Susan Collins in November, despite a steady drip of scandals. They weren’t fazed by his troubling Reddit posts, the Nazi chest tattoo, his habit of sexting women not his wife, or claims of physical abuse by an ex-girlfriend. It took one ex’s claim that Platner showed up drunk at her house in 2021 and raped her to dislodge him from “the warm embraces” of left-wing populists such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, leaving Platner little choice but to end his “ludicrous-from-the-start” campaign. Democrats would have you believe they turned on Platner because of the rape accusation, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch—an accusation that Platner, in a “mopey, 11-minute” exit video, called “all false.” In truth, they looked at his sinking poll numbers and reports that this supposedly working-class oysterman was actually the privately schooled son of a successful attorney, who sold his oysters mostly to his mother’s upscale restaurant. As Democrats scramble to find a new nominee for a race that could decide control of the Senate, what lessons can they learn from this “Frankenstein-tier experiment gone wrong?”

They can start by accepting the need to vet their candidates, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Platner was discovered and groomed for the spotlight by a pair of progressive operatives, Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, who were “so infatuated with his identity—a gruff, handsome oysterman with social democratic politics—that they failed to do their due diligence.” This was Platner’s first run for office, yet they skipped the standard $20,000 background check for a budget-friendly “expedited” version that didn’t find the many skeletons in his closet. These are the corners you cut when you “fall in love too easily,” said Renée Graham in The Boston Globe. Why bother vetting when in this gravel-voiced Marine combat veteran they’d been handed the perfect “white working-man whisperer” to sell socialism to the masses?

The truth is darker than that, said Monica Potts in The New Republic. When Platner’s “questionable treatment of women” started coming to light, his boosters did more than defend him. They celebrated his “checkered history” as proof of Platner’s “authenticity,” that he was, in the words of independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, not a “smoothgroin” politician. In defending Platner, Democratic elites revealed their disdain for blue-collar voters, said Noah Rothman in National Review. A binge-drinking, woman-abusing, Nazi-curious liar, they clearly thought, is “just what you get when you meet the American working class where they live.”

Platner was a “train wreck,” said Perry Bacon in The New Republic, but it wasn’t crazy to think an unconventional outsider might resonate with Maine’s white, rural electorate. Maybe not, said The New York Times in an editorial, but Platner’s initial appeal “was never really about oysters or facial hair.” He won June’s primary by 50 points because, unlike many Democratic candidates, he seemed to stand for something beyond simply opposing President Trump—he spoke with “conviction” about fixing “an economy that seems rigged for the powerful.” The lesson of Platner is not that the party needs to find scandal-free saviors, but rather that it should find a “purpose.”

“Imagine the ecstasy Democrats felt when they first found Graham Platner,” said Carine Hajjar in The Washington Post. At last, a man who could help them win back the blue-collar vote: a charismatic, gruff-talking oyster farmer and combat veteran.

They were so excited to think his run for Maine senator might succeed, and deliver their party control of the upper chamber of Congress, that they dismissed a growing list of ugly revelations about him.

A gamble too far

That large Nazi tattoo on his chest? Platner didn’t know the skull motif had SS associations (though he apparently called it his “Totenkopf”). His history of bigoted comments on social media, and sexting of women? He’d been through a “dark period”, but had “grown”. The allegation of physical abuse from a (Republican) ex-girlfriend? Probably politically motivated. But a credible accusation of rape from a (Democratic) former partner finally tipped the balance – and, last week, Platner quit the race.

The Platner affair was a train wreck, said Perry Bacon in The New Republic, but that shouldn’t deter Democrats from seeking unconventional candidates who will make voters give them a second look. The party has to enlist support from outside its core base.

Platner was a gamble too far, but we know from the 2016 and 2024 elections what happens when Democrats run milquetoast candidates with “Republican-lite” policy platforms: they lose. The party needs new blood, said The New York Times. More importantly, though, it needs to define what it would do with power. It needs “a purpose” more than it needs charismatic outsiders.

Selected on ‘vibes’

The Democrats must take more care with recruitment, said Christina Cauterucci on Slate. Platner was enlisted by a political strategist called Daniel Moraff, solely on the basis of “vibes”. He had no track record as an official or an activist. There was minimal vetting. Voters wanted “real human beings”, Moraff insisted, not “vat-grown people”.

Yet the joke is that Platner’s rugged image is itself confected. He comes from an affluent family and attended a fancy prep school; his oyster farm’s main customer is his mother’s upscale restaurant. Genuinely working-class voters weren’t impressed by Platner: he polled poorly among them, and did much better among college-educated voters. This is a cautionary tale about treating “class signifiers” – a dense beard, tattoos and a grimy sweatshirt – as proof “of political merit”.

What happened

Graham Platner Wednesday suspended his campaign to unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), saying in a video he intended to file “paperwork to withdraw” from the pivotal Senate race. The Maine Democratic Party shortly before had announced that if Platner bowed out, his replacement would be chosen at an expedited party convention.

Platner’s political and financial support evaporated Monday after an ex-girlfriend accused him of rape, and his last major backer, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), urged him to quit the race on Tuesday.

Who said what

“We believe that for the movement to continue, it can’t be me,” Platner said in his 11-minute exit video. “I know that some will think it’s an admission of guilt, and it most certainly is not.” Former state Sen. Troy Jackson, brewery owner Dan Kleban and ex-congressional staffer Jordan Wood jumped in the race Wednesday, and more candidates are expected.

“Platner and his supporters have sought to influence who replaces him,” The Washington Post said, but few potential successors “appear hungry for his endorsement,” and some ruled it out. For all the new uncertainty, Platner’s exit “will be an enormous break for Democrats,” Nate Cohn said at The New York Times. Few of the likely replacements are “especially well known,” but “in this political environment,” Collins “would be in jeopardy against any one of them.”

What next?

The pop-up Democratic convention, to be held before July 27, will include “500 delegates elected proportionally by county committees” and the roughly 100 state party committee members, said the Bangor Daily News.

Democratic socialists are winning Democratic primaries and Republicans see an opportunity. GOP candidates are increasingly tagging their rivals as “communists,” an approach embraced by President Donald Trump. The United States “did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” Trump said during his Independence Day speech. Democrats say the attacks harken back to discredited “red-baiting” smears of earlier eras. Will the accusations help the GOP in this fall’s midterm elections?

What did the commentators say?

The attacks come as U.S. voters increasingly “take on a positive view of socialism,” said The Washington Post. The longstanding Republican accusation that Democrats are socialists is no longer an “attack that stings as much,” GOP strategist Alex Conant said to the outlet. That leaves conservatives trying a message they hope will work with voters “old enough to remember Soviet-era nuclear drills and spy dramas,” said Axios. Trump himself “came of age” during the Cold War, historian Beverly Gage said to the publication. Whether accusing opponents of being communists resonates with younger voters is an open question, however. “Is the United States actually still susceptible to that kind of political language?"

“It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump went full Joe McCarthy,” Heather Digby Parton said at Salon. Republicans have used “red scare” tactics for nearly a century, and McCarthy’s right-hand man was a lawyer named Roy Cohn who later mentored Trump. The challenge for Republicans is that the policies advocated by upstart Democrats are “standard issue Bernie Sanders-style progressivism” that is popular among young voters and “some of the more populist MAGA types.” That ideology “certainly isn’t communism.”

Despite “media dismissals,” it is actually true that the “majority of the Democratic Socialists of America’s leadership identifies with Marxist ideology,” said Stu Smith at City Journal. The DSA was “not always” aligned with communism, but the organization’s recent “leftward shift” has attracted “members with Communist political tendencies.” Trump is “correct” in linking communism to the DSA’s “toehold in the Democratic Party,” said Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic. But the president’s demand for partial government stakes in companies such as U.S. Steel, Nvidia and OpenAI reveals he has “more in common with Communists than his hostile rhetoric lets on.”

Communist accusations against Democrats are “laughably false,” Sara Pequeño said at USA Today. National Democrats “barely want” DSA members in the party. “Why on earth would they suddenly be welcoming Marxist theory with open arms?”

What next?

Polls show “most Americans disapprove” of Trump’s job performance but there are also “warning signs” for Democrats, said USA Today. A majority of battleground state voters say Democrats are “too far to the left,” a sign Republicans “could find fertile ground” by raising the specter of communism. Democrats could be hurt if the midterms become a “referendum on the craziest ideas” of democratic socialist candidates, Third Way’s Matt Bennett said to the outlet.

So it isn’t just a New York thing, said Eliza Collins in The Wall Street Journal. Last week in Colorado, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), defeated 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette, 68, in a Democratic primary to represent the deep-blue Denver area. The win by Kiros, who most recently worked as a barista while studying for a Ph.D., is “the latest advance for a socialist groundswell that is forcing a reckoning for Democrats.” DSA candidates swept primary races in New York City last month, and insurgent leftists are now eyeing wins in the upcoming Michigan Senate primary, where progressive Abdul El-Sayed leads the polls, and the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary. The Democratic establishment fears this Tea Party–like rebellion could cost them the midterms, because DSA policies—rent freezes, abolishing ICE, ending U.S. aid to Israel—could repel moderates in November. For now, centrist Democrats are talking tough, said Andrew Howard in Politico. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has downplayed the significance of “a handful of primaries,” while 15 moderate House Democrats and candidates signed a letter reaffirming their commitment to “growth, competition, and broad prosperity.’” But in private they’re “freaking out” that “the Left’s winning streak is potentially just starting.”

Republicans can’t believe their luck, said Jonah Goldberg in The Dispatch. They’ve long caricatured Democrats as anti-American communists. But in a truly “crazy” figure like Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of the New York DSA-ers now headed to Congress, they’ve been gifted that “caricature made flesh.” Avila Chevalier has denounced relationships between minority men and “ugly [white] colonizer women”; attended a pro-Hamas rally the day after Palestinian terrorists massacred Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023; and wants to abolish prisons, preferring to send murderers back to their “community.” Kiros is similarly extreme: She refuses to describe last year’s deadly firebomb attack on pro-Israel protesters in Boulder, Colo., as antisemitic. To call the DSA a “hate group” is not hyperbole, said Noah Rothman in National Review. And while its venom is right now focused on Jews—or “Zionists,” in members’ preferred euphemism—ultimately “what it hates is America.”

Focusing on the DSA misses what’s really going on with Democrats, said Nia-Malika Henderson in Bloomberg. Yes, the party’s voters are “fed up” with its graying leaders, whom they blame for not blocking Trump’s second-term agenda. But that doesn’t mean they want “socialism.” Voters’ overriding hunger is for young, authentic “anti-candidates” willing to fight Trump head-on. In progressive areas like New York City, that translates to wins for the DSA. But in deep-red Texas, voters rejected a progressive and chose young moderate James Talarico as their Senate candidate. The DSA’s rise shows Democrats need to embrace a “bolder, less cautious approach” to politics, not necessarily “move further left.”

Voters aren’t electing socialists because they dislike President Trump, said Harold Meyerson in Prospect. They’re electing socialists because working Americans are being ground down by the cost of gas, housing, and health care, and because they’re tired of watching the “Barons of Silicon Valley” game politics to expand their fortunes and lower their tax bills. Democrats shouldn’t embrace every radical policy of every DSA firebrand. But you’d think a party that’s been fretting for a decade about how to win back the votes of working people would recognize the DSA’s rise as a sign of what needs to happen for Democrats to “return to power and hold it.”

What happened

Maine and national Democrats and a growing number of high-profile progressive Graham Platner endorsers Monday called for the Democratic Senate nominee to drop out of the race to unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R) due to a rape accusation from a former girlfriend.

“Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically false,” Platner said in a video after Politico published the allegation. “Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we’re taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.”

Who said what

Maine resident Jenny Racicot told Politico that Platner, whom she had dated on and off, came over drunk and uninvited one night in 2021 and forced her into unwanted sex. She provided corroborative evidence. “He violated multiple layers of consent that night,” she told CNN Monday night.

Platner “has long been controversial,” The Associated Press said, but the “sexual allegation sparked a flight away from the candidate.” The “three biggest Democratic groups trying to flip the Senate” all “dropped their nominee in a must-win race,” Politico said, and support from “key outside groups” also “immediately dried up.”

What next?

If Platner withdraws from the race by next Monday, the state Democratic Party can still replace him up to July 27. Top Maine Democratic Party officials have discussed a “pop-up convention” or a “statewide caucus” to pick Platner’s potential replacement, but have “ruled out having the state party’s committee” make the choice, The New York Times said.

So much for post-election talk of the Democrats moving towards the centre, said National Review. The party is now careering in the opposite direction. In the last year, both New York City and Seattle have elected mayors that are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA); Washington DC is on course to join them.

And in three New York congressional primaries last week, the socialist candidates backed by New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, all trounced establishment Democrats. Even by DSA standards, these are “wild-eyed radicals”. The most extreme is Darializa Avila Chevalier. Her greatest hits include demanding “No more police at all – ever”; claiming that a world without borders or prisons is “possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward”; and insisting that “Israel doesn’t exist!”.

The triumph of Mamdani’s candidates was a “rout for the far-left over the Left”, said The Wall Street Journal – one that could have major knock-on effects for the Democratic Party and US politics as a whole.

‘Sewer socialism’

The lesson of these primaries, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, is that Democratic voters are exasperated by the “cautious, compromising establishment”. With good reason. A candidate as “flawed” as Chevalier could only have won against a “complacent political machine that’s lost touch with the people it’s supposed to represent”.

This is basically a Democratic version of the Tea Party, the fiscally conservative political movement that pushed the Republican Party sharply to the right during the Obama administration. We saw something like this in Trump’s first term, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and some other outspoken DSA members won political office; but that movement petered out during Biden’s presidency amid sectarian infighting.

Progressives now have a fresh opportunity to advance their agenda. They could succeed if they steer away from Chevalier’s rigid form of “academic Leftism” and embrace the more pragmatic, optimistic, community-based politics pursued by Mamdani: a “sewer socialism” tightly focused on voters’ everyday material concerns.

‘Dismal’ reality

Americans are certainly open to that type of politics at the moment, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. Many voters are unhappy with the status quo and are feeling the pinch as a result of higher interest rates and inflation. In a 2025 poll, 39% of respondents viewed socialism favourably (66% of them Democrats); 54% said the same of capitalism.

The problem for these socialist politicians, though, is that the same “dismal fiscal realities” fuelling discontent also constrain their ability to deliver dramatic change. Mayors can’t squeeze rich residents too much because cities are much easier to leave than states or countries.

Socialism has a hopeless track record, said Aubrey Harris in The American Spectator, but Republican politicians shouldn’t assume that they’re going to benefit from what one dismissed as the Democrats’ “Bolshevik revolution”. To win over voters, the GOP is going to have to come up with some creative solutions of its own to the affordability crisis. If and when it manages that, “the sudden rise of nouveau socialism will come to an end as swiftly as it began”.

What happened

Far-left candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept Democratic House primary races in the city last week, a sign that the party’s momentum has lurched sharply left. Two of the three Mamdani-backed primary winners are fellow members of the Democratic Socialists of America, a political organization that favors universal health care and higher taxes on the rich and calls Israel an “apartheid regime.” Darializa Avila Chevalier pulled off the evening’s biggest stunner, unseating Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Another DSA member, Claire Valdez, beat a candidate endorsed by retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez, while Brad Lander, a Mamdani ally who’s a former DSA member, trounced incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman. Much like Mamdani’s grassroots mayoral campaign last year, the upstarts relied on thousands of DSA volunteers, who knocked on doors and made phone calls to turn out votes. The DSA has also had success outside of New York, with its candidates advancing in mayoral primaries in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles earlier this month. “The Democratic establishment better wake up,” Usamah Andrabi of the progressive group Justice Democrats told Politico. “Because the Left is winning.”

Moderate Democrats fared better outside of New York City. In Utah, former representative Ben McAdams staved off progressive challengers to win his primary in a redrawn district that now favors Democrats. In Maryland, Adrian Boafo earned a chance to succeed his old boss, Rep. Steny Hoyer, a staunch supporter of Israel. Among Republicans, several candidates endorsed by President Trump pulled off upsets: In upstate New York, Anthony Constantino defeated an assemblyman backed by the N.Y. GOP, while in the race for Republican nominee for South Carolina governor, Alan Wilson, the attorney general Trump endorsed at the last minute, won in a landslide

What the columnists said

Mamdani’s “audacious gamble” paid off, said Nicholas Fandos in The New York Times. He’s now “the unquestioned political kingmaker of the nation’s cultural and financial capital,” and the DSA, after years on the margins, is “a formidable force.” But it’s too early to tell if this movement has expanded beyond the bluest parts of the state. After all, New York held primaries for all 26 of its congressional districts, 13 of which are housed, at least in part, in the city. Mamdani got involved in only three.

Those were the races in which criticism of Israel played a major role, said Lisa Kashinsky in Politico. Lander, who is Jewish and a self-described “liberal Zionist,” upbraided his opponent for failing to endorse an arms embargo on Israel “and for refusing to call its war in Gaza a genocide.” Avila Chevalier “relentlessly attacked” Espaillat for taking AIPAC money. And the crowd at several of the victory parties chanted “Free, free Palestine.” Criticizing Israel “is now not only politically survivable” for a Democrat but actually “advantageous.”

It’s not mere criticism—some of these people openly side with the terrorists who murdered Israelis on Oct. 7, said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. Avila Chevalier, a Muslim convert, is adamant “that Hamas Did Nothing Wrong.” But that’s not the only reason she is set to become “the single craziest member of Congress.” She’s also a “prison abolitionist who authentically believes murderers should not be behind bars.” In her now-deleted social media posts, she calls for abolishing national borders and nationalizing private companies and rages against mainstream Democrats. In one post, she calls former president Joe Biden a “rapist.” In another, she declares, “F--- Kamala Harris.”

In endorsing such extreme leftists, Mamdani is trying to “remake the national Democratic Party,” said Perry Bacon in The New Republic. Mayors “don’t usually interject themselves into congressional races.” Unable to run for president since he wasn’t born a U.S. citizen, this is how he can leave his mark nationally.

The charge he has led against the Democratic Party establishment is “reminiscent of the Tea Party that once shook Republicans,” said David Smith in The Guardian. That grassroots movement remade the Republican Party in the 2010s, turning it into a hotbed of anti-incumbent fury and contempt toward elites. Will the DSA surge do the same? Democratic primary voters clearly want their candidates to “stand for something, rather than nothing, because writing strongly worded letters to Trump is not enough.”

Strong showings from the Democrats’ left flank in recent elections have spooked some in the party’s leadership. Criticism of Israel, once deemed outside the bounds of mainstream political discourse, has become an increasingly common feature of progressive campaigns. Victories in New York City by candidates who “ran hard against the war in Gaza” are now “turbocharging” Democrats’ “yearslong shift away from Israel,” said Politico. While progressives begin flexing their newfound electoral muscles, party centrists are feeling anxious. These growing pains for the party, combined with an appetite for sharper Israel criticism, could reflect a national electoral risk in November.

What did the commentators say?

Progressive primary victories by strident Israel critics in New York “paint a picture of a Democratic Party rapidly shifting” on an issue once considered a ”bipartisan prerequisite for success in the Big Apple and beyond,” said Politico. The victories of candidates like self-described “liberal Zionist” Brad Lander over the more conservative Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman demonstrated that “harsh criticism” of Israel is “not only politically survivable” but can even be “advantageous in New York City’s dominant party.”

Primary wins in the “deep-blue districts of Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier” signaled a “new era of skepticism” among some Democrats “toward the Jewish state and its actions,” said The New York Times. Do those wins “mark the end for Democratic politicians who hold traditional pro-Israel views?” asked Forward. Or do they “represent something more narrow” and specific to New York?

Democrats’ shifting relationship with Israel “looms in Michigan,” where the party will defend outgoing Sen. Gary Peters’ seat, and “may continue” to be felt in Colorado, where challenger Melat Kiros has accused Rep. Diana DeGette of “being too supportive of Israel,” said The Guardian. The ongoing focus on Israel has become a “bigger issue” that Democrats need to “deal with more comprehensively than, like, ‘If I don’t talk about it, it doesn’t happen,’” said Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) to The Hill. The debate has become a “corporate issue with all these PACs pouring in a lot of money,” which is “giving people a really bad taste in their mouth.”

In previous elections, Democrats’ Israel-focused policies have been “confined largely to niche foreign policy considerations for most voters,” said Haaretz. This year, voters are “considering Israel at the ballot box more than ever before.” Establishment Democratic leaders “still very much believe that being a Zionist and a Democrat are not mutually exclusive.” But it’s become “abundantly clear” that aspirants “within the party structure” are “participating in a real-time vibe shift” that prioritizes a “willingness to hold Israel to account” over “pro-Israel bona fides.”

“More and more Democrats” are “making it clear” they want to end “U.S. taxpayer support to the government of Israel,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to the Times. Next session, Congress should eschew “reflexive unconditional support to the government of Israel.”

What next?

Incumbent losses in New York’s recent primaries show that the debate over Democrats’ relationship with Israel has “already left a lasting mark on the midterms,” said the Times. No matter what “other issues were at play in the individual races,” said JTA, the success of candidates with an “outsized focus” on criticizing Israel “sends the message that their approach is a winning strategy.” Republicans, meanwhile, “believe that Democrats reap what they sow” ahead of the midterms, said Fox Business. Conservatives “plan to use this” in November, as Democrats contend with a trend that works in “urban areas, but not swing districts.”

Leftist critics of Israel are having a moment,” said former Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) to Politico. “That doesn’t mean they represent a majority of congressional Democrats in the country.” Pro-Israel Democrats must develop a “better strategy before a handful of primaries approach a tipping point.”

The effects will likely be felt beyond November. Every Democratic presidential candidate “will be required to declare himself or herself on the matter of the United States’ stance toward Israel,” said Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Bill Galston to The Guardian. “The question was largely evaded in 2024. That strategy is no longer possible.”

How do you run for president in the 2020s? By becoming popular online. That is how Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia has emerged as a contender for the Democratic nomination in 2028.

What did the commentators say?

Ossoff has become an “internet sensation” churning out viral content for his current Senate reelection campaign, said The New York Times. His argument that President Donald Trump’s administration is “fundamentally corrupt and threatens American democracy” is “resonating on the ground and online” with Democratic voters who liken him to a young Barack Obama. Trump is a “failed president and a national disgrace” Ossoff said in one widely seen video. Ossoff is refusing to talk about 2028 for now, said the Times, keeping a “laserlike focus” on winning his Georgia campaign. He has nonetheless earned Trump’s ire. “Os(jerk!)off” is a “joke” who will lose his Senate seat in November, the president said on Truth Social.

Instead of pitting Democrats against Republicans, Ossoff is trying to define U.S. politics as the “wealthy elite versus average Americans,” Perry Bacon said at The New Republic. The senator helped popularize the term “Epstein class” to evoke “super-wealthy individuals” like Bill Gates and even Bill Clinton who have left the U.S. working class behind. Progressive Democrats appreciate Ossoff’s “willingness to slam corporations and the super-wealthy,” while moderates like that he “doesn’t push Medicare for All” or “other ideas that they worry scare off swing voters.” That “artful straddling of the center-left divide” is putting him “high on the 2028 lists.”

Ossoff is “becoming a rock star” in a “divided” Democratic Party, Lindsey Granger said at The Hill. He is just 39 years old, making him the “youngest sitting U.S. senator,” and he has proven his ability to “blend populist economic messaging with a more moderate record.” All of this matters to Democrats who are “searching for a new generation of leaders who can connect with younger voters” and compete in battleground states. Ossoff still has to win his Senate reelection campaign, but he is already “controlling the conversation before the real fight even begins.”

“Sorry, liberals. Jon Ossoff isn’t running for president,” Patricia Murphy said at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He has “zero interest” in running for president in 2028, Ossoff said in a statement to the paper. Presidential speculation surrounding him “has only grown louder online with each campaign rally” despite that declaration, Murphy said, but Ossoff is “strategic enough” to stay focused on the “relationships he’s cultivated” across Georgia as he fights for reelection.

What next?

First, the Senate. Before Ossoff can think about the Democratic nomination “he must win reelection in a swing state that went for Trump,” said USA Today. A loss in Georgia “would create a much tougher map for the party to flip control of the Senate” in the midterm elections. An Ossoff victory, meanwhile, would signal that he “successfully appeals to a broad coalition and could be a viable presidential candidate.”

Lawmakers are exploring a new front in the electoral battle between Democrats and Republicans. Both parties have zeroed in on the other’s fundraising operations, with Republicans vowing to intensify their existing investigation into Democrats’ ActBlue online platform after Executive Director Regina Wallace-Jones repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment protections during a Republican-led House hearing last week. In turn, Democrats have increased calls for similar investigations into the GOP’s WinRed platform over allegations of illegal international contributions and fraud.

Foreign funds and ‘profoundly alarming’ allegations

Democrats on the House Administration, Judiciary and Oversight committees last week requested WinRed CEO Ryan Lyk sit for a “transcribed interview” and “preserve documents and communications” about WinRed’s fraud prevention, said Politico. Reports that “foreign nationals have used WinRed to donate money to President Donald Trump’s campaign” are “profoundly alarming,” said New York Rep. Joe Morelle, Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), and Robert Garcia (D-Ca.), in a letter to Lyk.

The letter is the “latest salvo in a long-running battle” between Democrats and Republicans over their respective online fundraising infrastructures, said Politico. Republicans have spent “over a year looking into ActBlue’s process for vetting foreign political contributions,” said Campaigns and Elections. Conservatives “escalated their probe” in April following a “bombshell New York Times report” that ActBlue’s lawyers had “previously warned Wallace-Jones that she may have misled congressional investigators” about ActBlue’s donation vetting practices. That warning “instigated a meltdown at the highest levels of ActBlue” and was a “key cause of the tumult” at the organization, said The New York Times.

The GOP’s pursuit of ActBlue is not “legitimate oversight,” said Wallace-Jones at The Washington Post. Rather, it is a “coordinated campaign of political retribution,” and last week’s hearing was the “latest assault in that corrupt campaign.” Democrats on the House Administration committee have meanwhile “sought to draw attention” to Ken Paxton, Texas’ Republican attorney general and Senate nominee, whom they claim has ignored questions “about any similar probes of GOP fundraising practices,” said Roll Call.

‘Defrauded, in real time’

“Dozens of political donors” have “begged Paxton’s office in recent years for recourse” against both WinRed and ActBlue, “complaining of thousands of dollars in unauthorized charges and nonstop text messages requesting more money,” said the San Antonio Express-News. But Paxton “hasn’t publicly taken action” and “deploys the same aggressive tactics” in his own WinRed fundraising.

By targeting ActBlue with a lawsuit this past spring, Paxton’s “willful blindness has come home to roost,” said Reps. Morelle, Raskin and Garcia in a letter to the attorney general demanding he preserve his WinRed documents. “Dozens of your constituents are being defrauded, in real time.”

Dueling allegations over both platforms are now “putting an otherwise bipartisan effort” for campaign finance reform “at risk,” said NOTUS. With four campaign finance bills “recently approved by the House Administration Committee,” subsequent “bipartisan progress appears strained” as partisan fighting intensifies.

Democrats, meanwhile, have only increased their threats ahead of November’s midterm elections. Congress “has a duty to investigate” cases of alleged fraud and malfeasance, said Rep. Morelle, per Politico. “House Republicans have not taken that duty seriously. But next year, rest assured, committee Democrats will.”

What happened

Primary voters in Maine, South Carolina and Nevada on Tuesday set up key races that could determine which party controls Congress after November’s midterms. Democrats chose Maine oyster farmer and combat veteran Graham Platner to challenge Sen. Susan Collins (R). Republicans picked House candidates for Maine and Nevada seats they hope to flip, and Democrats chose Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford to take on Gov. Joe Lombardo (R).

A week after California’s primary, The Associated Press projected Tuesday night that Republican Steve Hilton beat Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer for second place in the gubernatorial race and will face Democrat Xavier Becerra in the general election.

Who said what

On a busy primary night, Platner’s “character test” was the “main event,” USA Today said. And despite recent “embarrassing revelations about his personal life,” he “cruised to victory.” In his victory speech, Platner “openly acknowledged” he has “repair work to do,” the AP said.

South Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial primary was the “latest test of President Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican electorate,” CNN said, and while his endorsement was “helpful,” it wasn’t a “slam dunk” for Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, who failed to get 50% and faces a June 23 runoff. On the other hand, Trump “appears to have ended the political career” of Reps. Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman, said Reuters, as both gave up their House seats to run for governor and fell far short.

What next?

California has come under fire for its slow vote-counting, the AP said, but the “final results for Maine could take even longer” thanks to its ranked-voting system.

Maine’s Graham Platner was seen as a potent populist challenger to incumbent GOP Sen. Susan Collins. But revelations about the Democrat’s Nazi-linked tattoo, charged social media posts, and past treatment of women now have his party’s leaders debating whether to pull their support. And either choice might cost them a shot at winning the Senate in November.

Democrats should “cut Platner loose,” David Frum said at The Atlantic. Republicans in 2017 ditched Alabama’s Roy Moore over revelations about his pursuit of underage girls as a thirtysomething adult. GOP leaders then had to “choose between character and power.” Now it is time for Democrats to “muster equal shrewdness and toughness.” Other observers disagree. Democratic critics must “stop submarining” Platner, Michael Tomasky said at The New Republic. The party should stick with the candidate unless there are revelations “involving murder, rape or a taste for child pornography.” That is admittedly a “low bar,” but Collins has spent her public career helping Republicans “pick the pockets of working-class people.”

‘Scandal fatigue’

The party is “betraying its own values” if it does not denounce Platner, Michael A. Cohen said at MS NOW. The evidence suggests Platner is a “moral and political train wreck” with an “unceasing drumbeat of scandals about him.” The latest revelations include reporting that he has been “volatile, unfaithful and physically threatening” to the women in his life. Supporting Platner “opens up Democrats to charges of hypocrisy” in their criticisms of Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton and risks “losing both the Maine Senate race and their souls.”

Democrats’ chances of retaking the Senate now depend on a “baggage-laden candidate with clear character issues and a sketchy past,” Nia-Malika Henderson said at Bloomberg. “Scandal fatigue” could dampen enthusiasm for Platner, but America’s “ultrapolarized” politics could also “work the other way, hardening support for Platner.” It is a dynamic that has worked for GOP candidates like President Donald Trump and Paxton, who have both succeeded “despite a raft of scandals.” After years of criticizing Trump’s transgressions, “Democratic voters face a character test of their own.”

‘Fed up with rolling revelations’

“Unfortunately for Graham Platner, he needs women on his side to win,” Steve Collins said at the Portland Press Herald. Independent and Democratic women voters in Maine are “increasingly fed up with rolling revelations” about the candidate’s past, and social media is “full of Maine women who say they’re no longer buying what Platner’s selling.” Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April, could pick up votes in Tuesday’s primary as a result.

Critics “at the national level misunderstand” his populist campaign, Platner said Friday to supporters, per Politico. “They think this is a race about me, but it isn’t.” Platner’s supporters remain similarly “unfazed” by the revelations, said The Wall Street Journal. The scandals demonstrate “that he is a real person,” Maine voter Amanda Nicholson said to the outlet.

Across the nation, Democrats are waging a “war on wealth,” said the Washington Examiner in an editorial. In March, state lawmakers in Democratic-run Washington slapped a 9.9% levy on incomes over $1 million; Maine Democrats followed suit in April with a 2% surcharge. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is currently seeking a tax on second homes worth $5 million or more. And in November, Californians will vote on a referendum that could gouge billionaires with a one-time 5% levy; Minnesota, Hawaii, and Illinois are considering similar wealth taxes. It’s a short-sighted policy spearheaded by Democrats who wrongly “see billionaires not as engines of economic growth but as villains who should be punished.” And it belies the fact that the very rich “are paying their fair share, and arguably more.” The top 1% of earners take in about 20% of all income—but pay about 40% of federal income taxes.

That’s true of high-salary workers, said Nathaniel Meyersohn in CNN.com. But billionaires’ wealth often comes from the growing value of their stock holdings, and capital gains taxes—paid when stock is sold—are lower than income taxes. From 2014 to 2018, ProPublica found, the nation’s top 25 billionaires’ wealth rose by $401 billion, while their federal income tax rate was a mere 3.4%. But state wealth taxes “may backfire” if wealthy residents flee to lower-tax red states. It’s already happening, said Jonathan Turley in the New York Post. Wealth builders are bolting from Seattle, where they face both tax hikes and “hostility” from socialist mayor Katie Wilson, who casts them as “social parasites.” Seattle-based Starbucks, whose co-founder Howard Schultz blasted Wilson for “socialist rhetoric” that “vilifies employers,” is planning a $100 million headquarters in business-friendly Nashville.

To understand why wealth taxes make sense, look to California, said Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in The New York Times. Over the past three years alone, its billionaires’ collective wealth rocketed by 144%, to over $2 trillion. But from 2019 to 2025, they paid, on average, only 0.26% of their wealth annually in state income taxes. Meanwhile, the state faces a budget gap worsened by the Trump administration’s cuts to Medicaid, and cities are cutting services. A one-time 5% tax on the “ultrarich”—who have “benefited from the state’s infrastructure, universities,” and business networks—would raise nearly $100 billion. It’s high time they “contribute in modest proportion to their gains,” and in November, “California’s voters should show the nation the way forward.”

Now we know what they were hiding, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Back in January 2025, Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, promised that by “spring” the DNC would release an analysis of Kamala Harris’ defeat in the 2024 election. Spring came and went, and in December Martin announced he was shelving the “autopsy” because “to dwell on the past” would be a “distraction.” Two weeks ago, the text finally leaked, and Martin released the autopsy himself, pre-apologizing that it “does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” On that, at least, Martin told the truth. Missing whole sections and riddled with typos and fact errors, the report’s most striking feature is its “utter lack of substance.” Nowhere in 192 pages of platitudes and wonkery will you find the words “Israel” or “Gaza,” while inflation and immigration—likely the biggest factors in Donald Trump’s re-election—are mentioned only in passing. The report is even silent on the catastrophic error of letting Joe Biden run for a second term at 81, which left Harris—nominated without a primary after Biden imploded—only 107 days to campaign. Commissioned as a plan to win back the White House in 2028, all this “ridiculous” document tells us about the Democratic Party’s future is that “Martin should be replaced.”

For all its flaws, the DNC autopsy gets some big things right, said Rich Lowry in National Review. Candidate Harris really should have done more to distance herself from Biden, as the report maintains, and make an “affirmative case” for her own presidency. Instead, she focused on Trump’s “unfitness,” as if voters weren’t already acquainted with him, while letting Trump define her as an “out of touch” California lefty—most notably in that devastating “She’s for they/them” ad. Democrats lost because their cultural extremism turned off working-class voters in swing states, said Evan Barker in The Free Press. Perhaps Martin and the authors of this report didn’t want to anger the Democrats’ progressive base with the “ugly truth”: The party’s Biden-era embrace of far-left insanity on trans and gender issues, policing, immigration, and race “has tainted the entire Democratic brand.”

Actually, Democrats “don’t need an autopsy” to teach them that lesson, said Andrew Prokop in Vox. Since their disastrous defeat by Trump, there’s been “a vibe shift” in the party. Its candidates are displaying a “laser focus on affordability,” and “quietly backing away” from “peak woke” positions. With this effort to be “more solicitous of the median voter,” Democratic candidates—moderates and progressives alike—have already racked up a string of wins in state and special congressional elections. Renewing the party’s brand will take time, said Ed Kilgore in New York, and Democrats have time. Trump’s cratering popularity should win them the House—at least—in November. They can then start choosing a message, and a candidate, for 2028. Democrats were also in the wilderness in 1992 and 2008 — until Bill Clinton and Barack Obama emerged.

Count on Democrats to screw this up again, said Ramesh Ponnuru in The Washington Post. They could offer a moderate immigration policy that includes strong border enforcement, but they’ll misinterpret their midterms success as proof they should run progressives who want to abolish ICE and offer other “boutique left-wing views.” The DNC autopsy could have been quite simple: Modern Democrats always “misread America.”

The redistricting battles are over for now, and Republicans won. But Democrats might still have a path to recapturing the House in November’s midterm elections.

President Donald Trump “succeeded in tilting the playing field to the GOP’s advantage” by pushing for mid-decade gerrymandered maps to defend Republicans’ House majority, said The Washington Post. As many as 12 seats shifted to the right. Democrats would now have to “dig deep into Trump territory” to win the chamber. But redistricting may have also “diluted” GOP votes in existing red-leading districts, said Axios, a possible “dummymander” in which sitting Republican members of Congress could be “swept out of office” in a “Democratic wave” thanks to Trump’s growing unpopularity.

‘The GOP’s voter problem’

The redistricting wins “won’t matter if Republicans can’t get people to vote for them,” Russell Payne said at Salon. All the shuffling leaves Democrats needing to win the national popular vote by at least 3.5% in order to have a chance at winning the House, but polling currently puts them closer to six points ahead. A Democratic victory in the midterms “would buy them time” to respond with gerrymandering of their own in blue states like Virginia, Illinois and New York. Trump’s negative approval rating will not help Republicans. Redistricting “can’t fix the GOP’s voter problem.”

The new House map is “so tilted” that a national four-point Democratic voting advantage “might not be enough for a majority,” Henry Olsen said at The Washington Post. That outcome “would be highly unusual historically.” The GOP’s gerrymandering “might be enough to let the party keep the House,” but it could “hold back public opinion forever.” If Democrats keep that but lose the House, they will “rightly feel robbed.”

Trump and the GOP may have given Democrats a “lifeline” with Black voters, S.E. Cupp said at the Chicago Sun-Times. Republican redistricting is “carving up predominantly Black majority districts” and “potentially marginalizing minority voters” who were starting to move right: Trump received 15% of the Black vote in 2024, up from just 1% in 2016. Gerrymandering “might be the catalyst” Democrats need to win them back. The GOP “war on Black districts” could do just that “at least in the short term.”

Democrats: ‘May still have upper hand’

Democrats should not despair. Republicans “likely won’t realize all the gains” they hoped for, Jim Saksa said at Democracy Docket. And if Democrats play “hardball” after this year’s midterms by doing more “partisan redraws” in blue states, they could end up with an advantage of as many as 13 seats by 2028. But “it won’t be easy.”

The president’s party “typically loses seats in midterms,” said Reuters. GOP chances in the House “have increased,” said Inside Elections’ Jacob Rubashkin to the outlet, and “none of the underlying politics has changed.” Inflation, gasoline prices and the Iran war will all be factors. Democrats may “still have the upper hand” going into November, said Reuters.

With Democrats looking toward the 2026 midterm elections, they are pushing an anti-corruption agenda in hopes of persuading voters. The party has called for laws against corruption to be placed on the books and repeatedly accused President Donald Trump of corrupt practices. Democrats are hoping this strategy, coupled with Trump’s plunging approval ratings, can help them win in November.

What did the commentators say?

Democrats unveiled an anti-corruption task force in their attempts to “claw back control of Congress from Republicans,” said The Associated Press. The task force will look to “overhaul ethics rules and protect access to the ballot.” Democrats aim to implement the same playbook used in Hungary against former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who “was ousted by an opposition campaign with an anti-corruption message.”

The New Democrat Coalition, a caucus of 115 moderate House Democrats, has also released a plan to “crack down on loopholes that could assist insider trading, prediction-market schemes and cryptocurrency scams that any members of Congress or officials in the Trump administration engage in, including the president,” said NOTUS. Insider trading is already illegal, but “there is a growing concern among both parties that some members are profiting off their jobs.” Democrats are hoping the anti-corruption effort will “earn the trust of Americans” ahead of the election.

Democrats are also arguing that they care more about weeding out corruption than Republicans. Democratic officials have noted in campaigns that FBI Director Kash Patel “dismantled the agency’s public corruption team, which had previously been deployed to help monitor possible criminal activity,” said ProPublica. Over 200 Democrats have additionally aligned themselves with the End Citizens United PAC, which commits to “rejecting corporate PAC money, supporting a ban on congressional stock trading and working to end dark money in politics.”

What next?

Despite Democrats having a unified message around anti-corruption practices, voters in “battleground districts still do not give Democrats any advantage over the GOP when it comes to cleaning up corruption in the capital, showing how difficult it might be for the party to break through on the issue,” said the HuffPost. The End Citizens United PAC has urged candidates to “use anti-corruption arguments to underscore Democrats’ near-universal messages about affordability,” arguing that this will push them over the edge in November.

Some have cited Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) as an example of a politician successfully running an anti-corruption platform. “Nobody is articulating this kind of frame better than he is doing right now,” Tiffany Muller, the president of End Citizens United, said to HuffPost. But “gaining an advantage on the issue may require heading into territory some Democrats are uncomfortable with,” such as supporting “anti-corruption ideas more typically favored by the right, including term limits.”

If the Democrats win in the midterms, Trump’s “brand of corruption” will begin to wane in November and “go away in three years,” Ian Bremmer, the president of the global consultancy firm Eurasia Group, said to Semafor. The president is “putting his own best interest, and his family’s interests and his inner circle’s interest above those of the country,” Bremmer added. “Some of that is vainglorious.”

Graham Platner is the “brawler” that many Democrats have been longing for, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. The 41-year-old oyster farmer two weeks ago won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary after the dismally polling Gov. Janet Mills dropped out. It was a remarkable victory, considering the “barrage of devastating opposition” aimed his way. Old social media posts were unearthed in which he declared himself a communist, called all cops “bastards,” and blasted rural whites as “racist” and “stupid.” In October, he revealed that, while drunk on leave as a 20-something Marine, he’d inadvertently gotten a Nazi-linked tattoo. His “insurgent campaign appeared doomed.” But Mainers kept packing his town halls. “A natural on the stump,” Platner won over crowds by speaking about the struggles of working people, the futility of the wars he’d fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need for “a Democratic Party with New Deal–scale ambitions.” Maine Democrats understand Platner is a flawed candidate, but also understand that such scrappy fighters might be needed to “upend a system that they believe has failed them.”

Platner won because progressives reward antisemitism, said Philip Klein in National Review. It’s not just his now-covered SS skull-and-bones tattoo. He has sat for a friendly interview with an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist, called the U.S.-Israeli relationship “shameful,” and praised the tactics used by Hamas terrorists in a 2014 attack on Israelis. “Any of this would have once been a political death sentence”; now it’s “a ticket to success in the modern Democratic Party.” But the 78-year-old Mills’ “sleepy campaign didn’t offer any compelling alternative” to Platner, said Carine Hajjar in The Washington Post. The last thing voters wanted after watching President Joe Biden flop in 2024 was a septuagenarian freshman in Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer should never have pressured Mills into this race. He failed to realize “the imprimatur of the establishment is on the outs”—as are any moral standards for candidates.

Look, Platner isn’t “even close” to my ideal Senate candidate, said Frank Bruni in The New York Times. But if I lived in Maine, I’d vote for him in November simply because he isn’t Sen. Susan Collins, the self-declared moderate Republican who’s “shown herself to be an undependable check on Trump.” In Senate and House races across the country this year, Democrats and independents will have to decide which they fear more: A Democratic candidate who’s more progressive than they are and who may have a tarnished biography, or two more years of “an unimpeded, full-throttle Trump.” Either way, a “reckoning is at hand.”

What happened

Democrats scrambled over the weekend to respond to setbacks in the national redistricting fight, most recently the Virginia Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision last week to nullify the state’s voter-approved congressional map. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and other House Democrats “vented anger at their defeat” in Virginia during a private discussion on Saturday, The New York Times said, with “some party leaders discussing an audacious and possibly far-fetched idea” to restore the map, designed to flip four Republican seats.

Who said what

“Just two weeks ago, Democrats had fought to a draw” in the mid-decade gerrymander race started by President Donald Trump and Texas Republicans, The Washington Post said. Now, between the Virginia decision and the expected loss of several additional seats in the South following the U.S. Supreme Court’s neutering of the Voting Rights Act, Democrats are “confronting the reality that Trump succeeded in tilting the playing field to the GOP’s advantage.”

What next?

If the Republicans maintain their current net gain of about a dozen seats, Democrats “could need to win the House combined national popular vote by around 4 percentage points,” Nate Cohn said at the Times. That “structural advantage wouldn’t be enough to make the Republicans favorites,” but it “gives them a real shot” at winning. And if the court rulings help Republicans keep the House despite “badly losing the national vote, it would be yet another blow to the credibility of American institutions during a time of bitter division.”

What happened

A slate of Midwestern elections on Tuesday set up a key U.S. Senate race in Ohio, assured Michigan Democrats control of the state senate and ousted at least five Indiana Republicans targeted by President Donald Trump for voting against a mid-decade gerrymander. In Ohio, Trump-backed entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy won the GOP gubernatorial primary and will face Democratic former state public health director Amy Acton in what’s expected to be a competitive race.

Who said what

Former Sen. Sherrod Brown won Ohio’s Democratic Senate primary and will face Sen. Jon Husted (R), appointed last year to fill the seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance. Democrats face an “uphill climb” to flip the Senate in November’s midterms, Reuters said. But “they think they have momentum nationally,” and Brown’s race is one of four they “plan to pour resources into.”

In Michigan, firefighter Chedrick Greene (D) handily won a vacant state Senate seat in a closely divided district, giving Democrats a 20-18 majority. In Indiana, Trump’s “loyal and energized supporters turned out to punish” five of the seven state Senate incumbents he sought to oust, Politico said. One incumbent won and the other race was too close to call. The “stunning” results showed Trump’s “continuing ability to exact political revenge,” The New York Times said, even as his “poll numbers sag.”

What next?

Tuesday’s elections “reinforced a picture that’s becoming increasingly clear,” The Associated Press said: Trump “still dominates the Republican Party,” but “Democrats seem to have the momentum” heading into the midterms.

What happened

Democrats’ efforts to reclaim the U.S. House of Representatives got a major assist last week, after voters in Virginia approved an aggressively gerrymandered electoral map that could gain the party four more seats in the chamber. By 51% to 49%, Virginians voted to allow the state legislature to redraw the state’s representative districts in a way that likely gives Democrats 10 out of its 11 seats—up from six now—until at least after the 2030 census. President Trump immediately claimed without evidence the result was “rigged.”

Since California voters had earlier approved a map that eliminated five Republican districts, Democrats have now pulled even with GOP redistricting gains in Texas, Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina. Those states heeded Trump’s repeated calls to redraw maps to help the GOP hold the House in the midterms, setting off the redistricting battle with Democrats. “Many expected Democrats to roll over,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “We fought back. When they go low, we hit back hard.”

Virginia’s redrawn map could still be scrapped by the state Supreme Court, which is still considering Republican claims that Democrats illegally organized the redistricting effort. Republicans could also gain as many as five more seats from Florida, which will hold a special session on redistricting next week. The U.S. Supreme Court, meanwhile, has delayed a ruling on a case that could overturn the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s prohibition of racial gerrymandering, which could encourage legislatures in multiple Southern states to redraw their maps before the midterms.

What the columnists said

Carving up Virginia into “salamander-like” districts “wasn’t an easy sell,” said William Kristol in The Bulwark. As Virginia Republicans emphasized in attack ads, Democrats such as Barack Obama and Gov. Abigail Spanberger once condemned gerrymandering. But now that Trump has forced the issue, Democrats—often “thought to be hapless competitors” in this dirtier political age—finally “stepped up and fought back.”

Now they can “spare us the false sanctimony about democratic norms,” said The Washington Post in an editorial. Some 46% of Virginians voted for Trump in 2024; this outrageously gerrymandered map would reduce their House representation to barely 9%. We can blame “Trump’s original foolhardy and suicidal decision to goad Texas into mid-decade redistricting,” said Jeffrey Blehar in National Review. But it’s still unjust to turn purple Virginia “into almost a one-party state.”

This was a “less resounding” win for Democrats than the party might suggest, said Aaron Blake in CNN.com. Spanberger won the Virginia governorship by 15 percentage points in November; this map squeezed by with 2. It also may have cost her politically. The centrist Spanberger, a potential presidential candidate, faced complaints of hypocrisy from the Right and criticism from the Left for not advocating for the referendum strongly enough. “The lesson of the current redistricting war” is that pragmatism doesn’t pay; you need to “take whatever advantage you can, whenever you can.”

As polarisation increasingly divides America, violence is becoming embedded in its politics.

“We do believe it was administration officials,” said Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche, when asked for the target of the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington. “But as far as exacting threats that may have been communicated beforehand, we’re still actively investigating that evidence.”

For many Americans, Saturday night’s events were “at once shocking and familiar”, said Lisa Lerer in The New York Times. Politically motivated violence has become a “routine intruder” into our lives, bringing with it a “numbing narrative of assaults, bomb threats and assassination attempts”.

What did the commentators say?

“Instead of a speech stacked with heated barbs against the media, the event ended like many in the US do: with gun violence,” said Rachel Leingang in The Guardian.

The association’s initial decision to continue the event (it was later rescheduled) may have surprised some, but for many it “struck a chord about the regularity of gun violence in American life”. Trump said afterwards that the presidency is a “dangerous profession”, but the fact that violence in the political domain is a “feature”, rather than an “outlier, rang true on a night meant to celebrate the freedom of the press”.

Attacks like these are “convulsing” American politics from both sides of the partisan divide, said Guy Chazan in the Financial Times. The suspected gunman had barely been apprehended before “ranks of Maga influencers” were blaming Democrats, and left-leaning conspiracy theorists claimed it was a “staged” hoax to “advance Trump’s political agenda”.

So-called “conflict entrepreneurs” are “getting rich by making us angry at one another”, fuelled by a “loss of trust in democratic institutions that makes it easier to see illegal violence as a solution”, said William Braniff, from the American University. Modern assassination attempts are “backed by a growing public acceptance of the use of violence in the pursuit of political ends”, said Chazan. “Things could get even worse.”

Saturday’s events reveal how “dangerous” US politics has become over the last few years, said James Piazza, political science professor at Penn State, on The Conversation. Intense polarisation means opponents are “suspicious and hostile” towards each other, believing others to be “evil or immoral” instead of merely sharing a different view.

In turn, this has made violence more “normalised”, and because public backlash is “dampened” at each attempt, further violence becomes even “more likely”. Disinformation and social media have also accelerated this trend. Disinformed users are “hermetically sealed off” from alternative sources and this “facilitates radicalisation” for isolated communities.

Even with America’s “grim history of political violence”, Trump “certainly seems to attract a higher share than others of would-be assassins”, said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. He has now been the target of three assassination attempts: his “ear was grazed” by a bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania; there was the Mar-a-Lago golf course incident that was foiled by Secret Service agents; and then Saturday’s Washington dinner.

Nearly following in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy, Trump said that he was “honoured” by comparisons with the four assassinated presidents because he’s “done a lot”. Let’s not forget that eight children were killed in Louisiana last week, but it “only briefly made the headlines”: mass shootings are now “part of the texture of American life”, said Luce.

What next?

It is “absolutely critical” that both Democratic and Republican politicians “unite to condemn this attack and all political violence”, said Piazza on The Conversation.

Commentators should condemn any violence with political aims and political elites should “adopt rhetoric that does not normalise this sort of behaviour. If the message comes from across the political spectrum, it will be that much more effective at reducing the public attitudes that nurture political violence.”

Following the Pennsylvania assassination attempt the image of Trump with a bloodied face raising his fist “partly defined his campaign”, said Luce. This time around, “any sympathy wave is likely to be more limited”.

Before the incident at the Washington Hilton Hotel, Trump’s approval ratings hit a “personal low of below 40%” in some polls last week, and the “rising unpopularity” of the war in Iran is “driving his nadir”.

Though there is no doubt Trump will “try to make political hay” from the attempt on his life, “ironically” it has been his “early zeal for assassinating senior Iranians” that is “shaping his political future”.

What happened

Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) has died after nearly five decades in elected politics, his office announced Wednesday. The 80-year-old had recently filed to run for a 13th term and voted in the House as recently as Tuesday. Scott’s death widens the Republicans’ narrow majority in Congress ahead of November’s midterms. He was the fifth House member to die in office this Congress; four were Democrats.

Who said what

Scott, the first Black lawmaker to chair the House Agriculture Committee, was “once a leading voice for Democrats” on farm and food aid policy, The Associated Press said, but he “faced criticism and concerns in recent years because of declining health.” In his district, Scott sponsored “annual job and health fairs so popular they almost guaranteed his reelection every two years,” even as “age and physical ailments” limited his visibility, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said.

What next?

Scott had been facing “strong challenges from well-funded Democrats” in his May primary, the Journal-Constitution said. Under Georgia law, the governor “has 10 days to call a special election to fill Scott’s seat,” with the election held “at least 30 days after that,” The Washington Post said.

The field of Democratic hopefuls for the 2028 presidential campaign is expected to be massive, and candidates have a wide variety of voter issues to address. But they will likely focus on the cost-of-living crisis and questions related to the strengthening of American democracy. Plus, Democrats will be campaigning without President Donald Trump on the other side of the ballot for the first time in 12 years.

What are the issues?

Many Democrats who have been named as possible 2028 contenders, including the 2024 nominee, former Vice President Kamala Harris, have “sought to hammer the issue of affordability, almost exclusively, as they seek to win back power in Washington,” said The Washington Post. But these candidates have also been “challenged to couple that with a more full-throated description of their civil rights agenda,” especially in an era when many in the party say democratic principles are under threat.

Some of these contenders have “shifted their views on border security, DEI, crime, climate change, Covid-era lockdowns and more,” said Axios. Party pundits believe they lost to Trump in 2024 largely because voters “didn't like some of their left-leaning policies, not just how they were communicated,” and some have been arguing for a push back to the center. Others in the party have “openly questioned whether anyone other than a straight, white man can win the White House,” said Politico.

Lowering the cost of living will likely be the number one concern for voters heading to the polls. Several Democrats, including Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), have proposed tax plan changes that would raise taxes for the ultra-wealthy, but “as actual solutions to the forces pinching Americans’ pocketbooks,” these plans “largely misread the problem,” said Slate. If Democrats “really want to allay the country’s anxieties about the cost of living, tinkering with the tax code probably isn’t the way to do it.”

How will candidates approach them?

Even with affordability at the forefront, Democratic bigwigs have largely agreed that the “restoration of civil rights should be central in the next presidential election,” said the Post. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has “warned that Republicans are promoting voter suppression,” while Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) has “linked Trump’s aggressive immigration tactics to overall persecution of racial minorities.”

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg “accused the Trump administration of a ‘seek and destroy’ effort to harm disadvantaged communities,” said the Post, and Harris has “argued that the United States is losing its moral authority to stand up for human rights around the globe.” Many have also noted that Democrats are pushing to reengage with Black and Latino voters the party lost in 2024, and some see Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as a solution to this problem, as he would “likely do well among Black voters,” said Bloomberg. He has the “brawn, the billions and the blue-collar affect to make him a contender.”

To communicate with voters, any good candidate will need to “speak directly and honestly to the electorate with tangible political platforms” and “tangible messages that are simply about what we’re going to do for you,” Maya Handa, the campaign manager for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D), said at a Dartmouth University event. Democrats “should be recruiting candidates who are generationally talented communicators. But if we can’t, then I think we have to get more creative about it.”

Democrats are ready to be done with Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump’s critics are starting to talk more openly about removing him from office, using impeachment or the 25th Amendment. They assert that his recent social media tirades against Iran and Pope Leo reveal he is unfit for office.

Democrats in Congress mostly “steered clear of threatening impeachment” since Trump’s return to the White House, said The New York Times. The president’s threat last week to wipe out Iranian civilization “dramatically” shifted their calculations, spurring dozens of “formerly hesitant” House Democrats to back articles of impeachment. Trump “seems to be taking us on a path to mass war crimes,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said on X. The president’s recent “erratic behavior and extreme comments” have “turbocharged” discussion of his mental fitness, said the Times. The challenge: Removal efforts are “doomed to fail so long as Republicans control Congress,” said The Associated Press.

What did the commentators say?

The “fate of the Earth depends” on Trump’s removal from office, Will Bunch said at The Philadelphia Inquirer. The president’s growing list of “embarrassingly profane and unspeakably evil” social media posts demonstrates that he is “mentally and physically deteriorating,” a danger given his command of the “planet’s largest air force and a large cache of nuclear weapons.” The threat is too urgent to wait for Democrats to win control of Congress in November. Americans should join a May 1 general strike called for by the organizers of the “No Kings” protests to make their feelings clear. “It is a time for action.”

Democrats’ talk of impeachment “plays into Iran’s hand,” Peter Lucas said at The Boston Herald. Despite his words, Trump “will not end civilization in Iran.” But he will end Iran’s attempt to develop its own nuclear weapon. Democrats are looking for an excuse to “impeach him anyway if they gain control of the House in November.” They should instead acknowledge that Trump “saved the day” by taking action against Iran.

The 25th Amendment is “having a moment,” Ian Millhiser said at Vox, but it is unlikely to be used against this president. The constitutional provision would allow the White House cabinet to “temporarily prevent Trump from acting as president,” but the process is designed to replace an executive who is “physically or mentally incapacitated” rather than one who is “merely bad at being president.” Other democracies make it easier to remove an “incompetent, unfit or unpopular leader.” The United States should join their ranks.

What next?

Democratic leaders are trying to “shut down” impeachment talk, said Axios. That is not the “best use of our time” given that the effort would inevitably fall short, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) said to the outlet. Dean and other senior Democrats want the party’s focus to be on “concrete issues like the war in Iran and affordability” as midterm elections approach, said Axios. An impeachment that fails to remove Trump, said Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), “is worse than no impeachment at all.”

Should Democrats shun Hasan Piker? asked Lauren Egan in The Bulwark. The irreverent, far-left livestreamer, who has nearly 5 million subscribers between his YouTube and Twitch channels, has become a “litmus test” for the party. Some progressives view Piker, a 34-year-old video gamer and gym bro, as a “liberal Joe Rogan” who can reach “tuned out” young white men. “Operatives have hustled to get their candidates booked on his stream,” which runs eight hours a day, seven days a week. Recent Democratic guests include Tom Steyer, who’s running for governor of California, and Abdul El-Sayed, a U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan who invited Piker to campaign with him on college campuses.

But many Democrats say Piker’s extremism should be disqualifying: A self-described Marxist, he has said that it didn’t matter “if rape happened on Oct. 7,” and that “Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state” of Israel. Piker has also used the C-word and other misogynistic slurs.

Piker’s language sometimes is unfortunate, said Aaron Regunberg in The New Republic. But moderate “Third Way” Democrats have, “in bad faith” and without context, seized on a few moments from “almost 20,000 hours of entirely unscripted, off-the-cuff streaming.” The son of Turkish Muslim immigrants, he is an anti-Zionist but not an antisemite, and in fact has warned that antisemitism is “a canary in the coal mine of fascism.” Piker didn’t condone Hamas’ sexual violence against Israeli women, but argued that the attacks didn’t justify Israel’s subsequent bombing and killing in Gaza.

Why any Democrat would want to associate with Piker “is baffling,” said Michael A. Cohen in MS.now. A recent poll found that just 55% of Democrats have ever heard of him, and of those, “only 13% view him favorably.” Given his history of toxic comments, going on his livestream show is “a potential liability.” Sure, Piker can be “an insufferable jerk,” said Jesse Singal in his Substack newsletter, but Democrats he interviews don’t need to endorse his views. Piker appeals primarily to young, disillusioned males “who are looking to rebel.” In 2020, many in this cohort voted for Donald Trump. “It’s unfortunate” that young dudes are drawn to transgressive loudmouths, but to win back power, Democrats must “go to war with the potential voters they have, not the potential voters they want.”

‘Hardly anyone checks this little box on their tax return. Why keep it?’

Adam Lashinsky at The Washington Post

There “was a time when nearly a third of U.S. taxpayers checked that little box on their income-tax returns authorizing the Internal Revenue Service to allocate $3 of their taxes” to “help pay for presidential campaigns,” says Adam Lashinsky. But now Americans “are — quite rationally — unwilling to fork over the cost of a Snickers bar to help elect the leader of their country.” Congress “ought to simply junk the checkoff as the relic it is.”

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‘Democrats need to start planning now for a return to power’

Symone D. Sanders Townsend at MS NOW

Democrats “are already talking about a wave election,” and “people are starting to ask: What would Democrats do with that power?” says Symone D. Sanders Townsend. It’s a “more important question now than ever because, this time, winning will come with more risk and more responsibility.” A Democratic win “will not just be a rejection of President Donald Trump. It will be an expectation that they can use power in a way that actually changes people’s lives.”

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‘Kalshi is half right about prediction markets and gambling’

Aaron Brown at Bloomberg

Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour “has an argument why prediction markets shouldn't be regulated as gambling,” says Aaron Brown. Sportsbooks “profit from customer losses, making them structurally predatory. Kalshi, by contrast, operates as a peer-to-peer exchange.” He is “right about the business model distinction. He’s wrong that it answers the regulatory question.” What Mansour is “describing — a balanced book, fees on both sides, no house risk on outcomes — has been the operating model of sports betting, both legal and illegal.”

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‘Women’s brains are a $1 trillion opportunity’

Lisa Mosconi and George Vradenburg at Time

Nowhere is the “cost of ignoring women’s health more visible or more correctable than in the brain,” say Lisa Mosconi and George Vradenburg. Closing the “women’s health gap could add $1 trillion in annual incremental GDP to the global economy.” This should “reframe how every boardroom and budget office thinks about women’s health.” Researchers “need to mandate sex-disaggregated data and fund women-focused trials for brain disease,” and policymakers “need to recognize women’s brain health as a core input to labor force productivity.”

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Donald Trump’s political rivals have denounced him as an “unhinged madman” and a “dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual” after he directed a string of expletives at the Iranian regime. “Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell!” the US president said on his Truth Social platform .

But Trump is far from the only potty-mouthed politician, and trends suggest that swearing in politics is increasingly going from taboo to mainstream.

‘Profanity seal’

Woodrow Wilson “broke the profanity seal” in 1919, when the then president recalled a time he made a “conspicuous ass of himself”, said Joseph Phillips, a politics lecturer at Cardiff University. “Since then, presidents, their seconds-in-command, and presidential hopefuls have used profanity at least 692 times” – but the vast majority of curse words, 87%, occurred in the last 10 years.

We’ve “come a long way from our shock” at John Major, not knowing he was being recorded, using the word “bastards” while prime minister in 1993, said Robert Crampton in The Times. Although “tough talk is nothing new in politics”, leaders “long avoided flaunting it”, said The Independent. But now, public vulgarity is “in vogue”. During a political rally in 2025, Trump “used profanity at least four times”. J.D. Vance has also sworn publicly, and former vice president Kamala Harris “earned a roar of approval from her audience” last October when she said of the Trump administration that “these mother******* are crazy”.

Members of Congress and the Senate have also sworn as a “volley of vulgarities underscores an ever-coarsening political environment” on social media. Posts that “evoke the strongest emotions are rewarded with the most engagement”.

‘Anti-intellectualism’

There’s a “misguided belief” that “profanity is more ‘honest’ or ‘authentic’ than polite speech”, said Solomon D. Stevens in the Illinois paper the Journal-Courier. This suggests that politicians who swear are “telling it like it is” or “being real”, while those who don’t must be “holding back and not telling the truth”. But “politicians who swear are just politicians who swear. They can lie just as easily as those who don’t swear.”

There’s also “an anti-intellectualism at work”, as politicians who swear imply that those who don’t are “putting on airs”. While some intellectuals can “certainly be pretentious”, “refraining from coarse language” is not in itself a sign of that.

Trump’s “disinhibited language” sounded like a “tantrum”, said Melanie Phillips in The Times. It “suggested that he’d lost self-control because Iran wouldn’t do what he wanted”. Swearing points to an “emotional release and thus a loss of reason”.

The president’s recent profanity also distracted from “the message itself”, said the Deseret News. A “rousing and well-crafted argument” could have “built a compelling case for ousting the country’s ruling regime”, because “when it comes to war, calm self-assurance speaks louder than ranting expletives”.

Politicians aren’t “bawling swear words because they can’t contain their outrage”, said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. They do it because, “like preteen boys trying to sound tough”, they believe “the odd public expletive enhances their authenticity” and gives them “an air of pugnacity apropos to the moment”. But they are mistaken. “Most Americans still prefer their leaders to talk like grown-ups.”

Nevertheless, Democrats are pushing back against the right, using bad language themselves and embracing more confrontational and crass tactics. They see it as a way to beat Maga at its own game, attempting to “step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing”, said The New York Times.

Endorsements are designed to help a candidate win. But President Trump’s endorsement this week of California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton may have the paradoxical effect of keeping Golden State power in Democratic hands.

Trump’s decision to back Hilton could keep Democrats “from an embarrassing lockout” in the June primary election, said Politico. Candidates from both parties compete together in the primary election, with the top two — regardless of party — advancing to the November general election. Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco had a chance of creating a “Republican-on-Republican general election,” but Trump’s endorsement seems likely to send GOP voter support mostly to Hilton, away from Bianco, and give Democrats an opening for the second slot. It is “weird to feel thankful for a Trump action,” said the anonymous head of a Democrat-aligned group to Politico.

The Hilton backing is the latest twist in an “unusually messy” campaign to replace outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom, said The New York Times. Aside from Hilton and Bianco, the slate includes “eight prominent Democrats” who created a field “so fractured that no clear front-runner has emerged.” The result: Democrats were “increasingly panicked” about the possibility of a GOP-only November election. Trump “may have solved their problem.”

What did the commentators say?

GOP voters are “badly outnumbered in California” Matthew Hennessey said at The Wall Street Journal. Democrats have twice the number of registered voters as Republicans in the state. The key to pulling off a Democratic lockout, then, was “keeping the split between the two Republicans relatively even” while letting their opponents divvy up voters eight ways. The president’s endorsement means the “dream of a complete Democratic lockout is probably over.”

Trump forgot that one should “never interrupt your opponent while he’s making a mistake,” Noah Rothman said at the National Review. Two Republicans facing off to win the governorship of a famously Democratic state would have produced the “funniest of all possible results” for conservatives. That was an “unlikely” outcome, but the prospect might have forced Democrats to spend millions to avoid it. The president’s intervention means the California campaign is much “less interesting” than it might have been. “It was funny while it lasted.”

California is already in the midst of the “weirdest campaign for governor in recent history,” Dan Waters said at CalMatters. But Trump’s support for Hilton “does not absolutely close the door” to an all-GOP general election. The “top tier” of Democrats includes Rep. Eric Swalwell, former Rep. Katie Porter and billionaire Tom Steyer. Without a breakthrough by one of them, Republicans could still win both slots despite “Trump’s tactically foolish intervention.” Time is running short. “The clock is ticking.”

What next?

Trump’s endorsement will help Hilton “coalesce conservative support” in the primary but could “become a liability” in a general election campaign against a Democrat, said The Associated Press. Hilton remains a long shot anyway: GOP candidates have “not won a statewide election in California in two decades.”

‘The return-to-the-office trend backfires’

Gleb Tsipursky at The Hill

Many “business leaders think that a stricter return-to-office policy will cause a surge in productivity. But in reality, the data tells a different story,” says Gleb Tsipursky. Companies that “commit to highly flexible models, including remote-first, report strong output, healthier engagement and faster growth than mandate-driven peers.” These are “not isolated anecdotes; they are economy-wide patterns.” If “flexibility supports performance and expands talent, what do return-to-office mandates do? A growing body of research answers bluntly: not what its champions promise.”

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‘From medals to the Capitol: When women are elected, everyone wins.’

Lauri Hennessey and Kiana Scott at The Seattle Times

Many of the “barriers that kept women, especially women of color, from full participation in elected leadership are still in place today, and are present in and beyond politics,” say Lauri Hennessey and Kiana Scott. While men “share the weight of family care more than they once did, the scales are still deeply unbalanced, forcing many women and families to make choices.” Women are “still fighting, in many ways, for equality. That’s part of why electing women matters.”

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‘Latinos are turning away from Trump’s GOP. That doesn’t mean Democrats are entitled to their votes.’

Luis F. Carrasco at The Philadelphia Inquirer

In 2024, Donald Trump “could rightfully point with pride to how he performed with Hispanic voters in Texas,” but last week Latinos “turned out in massive numbers for the Democrats,” says Luis F. Carrasco. This is “good news for Democrats, but here’s the caveat: they cannot draw the lesson that this is Hispanic voters coming home. Instead, both parties must understand they cannot take Latinos for granted.” Some Latinos have a “sense that Democrats are not properly focused.”

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‘The war with Iran is reaching places you might not expect’

Grigor Hovhannisyan at Newsweek

The world’s “attention in the confrontation with Iran has focused on the obvious places,” says Grigor Hovhannisyan. But wars “rarely respect the neat geography of news coverage,” and airlines have “begun funneling through a narrow band of sky over three countries that rarely occupy the center of American strategic thinking: Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan.” The “sudden congestion overhead is less a commercial opportunity than a reminder of geography. When great powers collide, smaller states nearby tend to absorb the pressure.”

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What happened

A coalition of two dozen Democratic-led states on Thursday sued President Donald Trump at the U.S. Court of International Trade, arguing that the 10% global tariffs he imposed after the Supreme Court struck down his earlier sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs are similarly illegal. The lawsuit was filed a day after a judge on the trade court ordered the Trump administration to start refunding the more than $130 billion collected under the nullified tariffs.

Who said what

Trump imposed his new tariffs, which he plans to raise to 15%, using the never-before-invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. “The president has once again exercised tariff authority that he does not have — involving a statute that does not authorize the tariffs he has imposed — to upend the constitutional order and bring chaos to the global economy,” the lawsuit said.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai said Trump was using his legal authority to address America’s ”large and serious“ trade deficit, and the administration ”will vigorously defend” the tariffs in court. The legal question is whether Section 122’s reference to “fundamental international payments problems” — originally meant to address a 1960s crisis tied to gold-backed dollars — applies to modern trade deficits. “They are not the same thing at all,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said. “The president either doesn’t know the difference or he doesn’t care,” but “he is breaking the law” either way.

What next?

The states want the trade court to “declare the new tariffs illegal” and “refund states the cost of the new tariffs while they were in effect,” Politico said. “The focus right now should be on paying people back,” said Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield.

What happened

The 2026 midterms kicked off Tuesday with primary elections in three states, including closely watched Senate contests in Texas and North Carolina. In Texas, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico defeated Rep. Jasmine Crockett and will face the winner of a May 26 runoff between Republican incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and state Attorney General Ken Paxton. In North Carolina, Republicans chose Michael Whatley, a former RNC chair, as their candidate to replace retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R), while Democrats selected former Gov. Roy Cooper. Arkansas also held primaries.

Who said what

“This is proof that there is something happening in Texas,” Talarico told supporters before The Associated Press called the race this morning, when he was leading Crockett 53% to 46%. “Tonight, the people of our state gave this country a little bit of hope. And a little bit of hope is a dangerous thing.” Crockett said she might take legal action after voters were “disenfranchised” by confusing polling rules in her Dallas stronghold that also affected Talarico’s home base in Williamson County.

Cornyn, who was leading Paxton 42% to 41% in a three-way race, said the “flawed, self-centered and shameless” attorney general would be a “dead weight at the top of the ticket for Republicans” if he wins the runoff. The four-term senator’s advancement to a runoff against the scandal-plagued Paxton was “both a credit to and an indictment of the $70 million-plus spent on his behalf,” Theodore Schleifer said at The New York Times.

In other Texas races, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R) became the first incumbent unseated this season when he lost to state Rep. Steve Toth. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R), embroiled in controversy over an alleged affair with a staffer who killed herself, was forced into a runoff against YouTube influencer Brandon “the AK guy” Herrera.

What next?

The win by Talarico, a “36-year-old Bible scholar who captured national attention” for “using faith-based language to talk about progressive values,” provides “an early indication of the direction that the Democratic Party and its base voters are heading” into the midterms, The Wall Street Journal said. No Democrat has “won a U.S. Senate seat in Texas since 1988,” The Texas Tribune said. So “for all the focus on Texas,” said the AP, the Cooper-Whatley race in purple North Carolina “could have a bigger impact on which party ultimately wins the Senate majority in the fall.”

Democrats have long fantasized about winning a statewide campaign in deep-red Texas. Just as it did when Beto O’Rourke ran, the party is dreaming big, with a U.S. Senate primary election this week setting the stage for the next attempt in November.

Texas Democrats are “itching for a fight” in the Senate election, said NBC News. Voters this week will decide if State Rep. James Talarico or U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett will be the party’s nominee. Both candidates are “casting themselves as fighters,” but they have differing approaches. Talarico is trying to “energize voters across the political spectrum” in a fight against elites, while Crockett is attempting to harness Democrats’ “core supporters in a fight against Trump.” The winner of the primary will “provide some clues” about how rank-and-file Democrats want to win back power in an era of GOP dominance.

Republicans, meanwhile, are “freaking out” about the primary battle on their side of the ballot, said Politico. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is challenging incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, with the chance of a follow-up runoff race in May because a third Republican candidate, U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt, may make it impossible for either man to win an outright GOP majority this week. Paxton, while plagued by scandal, is a “MAGA hero” seemingly well-positioned to knock off Cornyn. But some GOP observers worry a Paxton primary victory would “put Senate Republicans’ majority at risk.”

What did the commentators say?

“Democrats are going wild” over the possibility of a Texas victory in November, said Bud Kennedy at The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. And there are “bright signs” for the party: Of the million who have already voted in the primary, “one-fourth are completely new to any party primary.” But Democrats still very much have an uphill battle to fight. Winning a statewide race will take “heavy turnout of Democrats, plus a sweep of independent voters” as well as GOP defections. Talarico “could get there” but Crockett has “yet to strike a chord with independent voters.” The lesson? “Do not drink the blue Kool-Aid.”

Texas “will be ground zero in the 2026 midterm elections,” said Ed Kilgore at New York magazine. The differences between Talarico and Crockett are “more a matter of style and strategy than of ideology,” while the divisions between Paxton and Cornyn “seem sharper and more deep-seated.” Establishment Republicans are “viscerally disgusted” by Paxton, whose supporters regard Cornyn as a “RINO sellout.” A general election between Crockett and Paxton “should be wild, loud, and unpredictable.”

What next?

Crockett has a “double-digit lead” over Talarico in pre-primary polling, said The Texas Tribune. Republicans, though, believe Crockett “would be a weaker opponent” in the general election, said The Downballot. That is why Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is running ads “pretending to attack the GOP’s preferred candidate while actually hoping to boost her with Democrats.” It is a campaign that comes while Talarico “otherwise enjoys a huge advertising advantage over Crockett.” The primary election is Tuesday.

Perhaps the second-biggest question ahead of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday (behind “what will he actually say?”) is what, if anything, will Democrats do to mark the president’s first SOTU of his uniquely authoritarian second term? In the recent past, State of the Union addresses have contended with disruptive outbursts, coordinated shows of respectful disapproval and a growing cottage industry of high-profile rebuttals, some officially party-sanctioned, others largely self-promotional. But with tensions running high and Washington decorum to consider, Democrats now find themselves torn between calls for calm and calls for more visible forms of resistance.

Call for 'silent defiance'

Democratic Party leaders are “encouraging their troops to protest” the president’s State of the Union speech Tuesday evening, but “how it’s done” remains a “sensitive topic,” said The Hill. After party members “churned headlines” last year with a “series of in-your-face demonstrations” at the president’s joint address to Congress, leaders are eager to “avoid a repeat of those theatrics.” Democrats should attend in “silent defiance” or skip the speech entirely, said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). Those skipping will have an opportunity to participate in a “variety of different alternate programming.”

Debate among Democrats over whether to disrupt, skip, or sit quietly through the State of the Union reflects “broader, ongoing divisions in party strategy,” said MS NOW. With an eye toward the upcoming midterm elections, party leaders are aware that “symbolic decisions” on interrupting or avoiding the speech “could resonate with voters back home.” For many, it’s “simply a dilemma” whether to “even attend,” said Axios. And for those who do attend, “don’t expect anything on the scale of last year” when disruptions repeatedly peppered Trump’s address. There will be “no organized choreography as far as I know,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) to the outlet.

“Central” to the Democrats’ intended “show of force” in standing up to the administration will be “victims of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein,” said Roll Call. The effort “starts from leadership on down” with multiple lawmakers, including party heads Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), expected to bring Epstein survivors as their guests. Lawmakers participating in an advocacy group-sponsored “People’s State of the Union” alternative event on the National Mall will also be “sharing letters on behalf of Epstein survivors.”

Risking a diluted impact

Attendees of the “People’s State of the Union” include many lawmakers who eschewed major Trump events, like his inaugurations in the past, “underscoring a small but consistent block of Democrats” who continue to “opt out of the president’s most high-profile events,” said Politico. But after many who skipped the president’s first inauguration ultimately attended his second, the shrinking number of those avoiding his appearances signals a “faded resistance from the first Trump era.”

Barred by party leadership from interrupting Trump’s speech, Democrats are instead “planning individualized responses” to “show opposition to his agenda,” said Axios. But by trying to mobilize “every faction of their coalition before the midterms,” the party risks the fact that a “range of messages could dilute their impact.” Still, while it may complicate efforts to present a “fully unified front,” it has nevertheless become “common for factions within both parties to deliver separate rebuttals aimed at different constituencies.”

With the midterm elections just months away, President Donald Trump has been telegraphing his intent to dominate on election night, despite not personally being on the ballot. Whether threatening that the GOP could “take over the voting in at least 15 places” or insinuating that he might deploy Department of Homeland Security forces to polling locations, Trump and his aggressive posturing have caught the attention of candidates, party officials and electoral experts on both sides of the aisle. While polling and historic trends suggest the Democrats, as the party out of power, can expect a good showing in November, Trump’s rhetoric has alarmed and galvanized those who work to keep America’s electoral system running smoothly.

What did the commentators say?

Although the White House has “no explicit authority over elections,” it has, for generations, provided local election officials with “intelligence gathering and cybersecurity defenses” among other services that “only the federal government can provide,” said The New York Times. The administration’s newly combative posturing is a “sharp shift” for secretaries of state “after decades of close alliance with the federal government.”

The “vibes” at this year’s National Association of Secretaries of State conference were “completely different,” said CNN reporter Marshall Cohen to Vox. Democratic election figures are “terrified and strategizing” for a “potential assault by Trump on the integrity of the midterms.” In particular, officials are “very afraid about possible troop deployments” as seen in Chicago and California, as well as DHS immigration forces “being sent at the last minute when it might be too late to stop, but early enough to cause chaos and possibly intimidate or disenfranchise.”

Trump’s threats have pushed the country into “uncharted territory,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) to Face the Nation. There is a “very real threat” that “without reforms at ICE,” there could be DHS patrols at polling sites on election day. “You don’t need to do a lot to discourage people from voting.” Trump intends to “subvert the elections,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to This Week, and will do “everything he can to suppress the vote.”

In particular, the “purpose” of the recent Tulsi Gabbard-led FBI raid for Georgia 2020 election data was to “establish a precedent for further federal intervention in state and local elections” as well as to “intimidate state and local officials from resisting such efforts,” said The Bulwark. Should Trump deploy federal troops, they could be used to “intimidate likely Democratic voters ahead of time,” as well as “affect the counting of the ballots.”

Congressional GOP pushes to enact laws like the SAVE and Make Elections Great Again acts, which would dramatically restrict voting access, “can be viewed as a continuation” of Trump's 2020 election denialism, said The New York Times. Similarly, they are seen by some Democrats, like Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), as “part of a larger pattern” including Trump’s nationalization rhetoric and regret over not having seized voting machines in 2020.

While this administration has worked to subvert the electoral process in the past, the “scope and severity” of his midterms effort is “unprecedented,” said Andy Craig at his UnPopulist Substack. Even so, although some of the threats are “more serious and pressing” compared to others, the overall “temptation to doomerism” is something that “we should reject.”

What next?

Unlike a “theoretical replay of 2020,” the Trump administration’s efforts to obtain local voter rolls and polling data are “operational now through four means,” said The New Republic: “Formal Justice Department demands, active litigation, seized election materials and scheduled federal briefings with state officials.” But while the effort seems designed to support Republicans at the expense of Democrats, “pushback has crossed party lines” with election officials in deep red states like Oklahoma and Kentucky bucking the White House’s initial asks.

The public should “take this seriously,” said CNN’s Cohen. Not because people should be “conspiracy theorists,” but because “we’ve lived through this before” with Trump’s many previous attempts to challenge elections. Yet “despite all this noise, despite all the fears, despite what you’ve been told that our system is garbage,” the “nonpartisan experts in election administration” agree America’s electoral structure is “quite resilient.” The public should ultimately “rest assured” that their ballots will be “counted fairly, despite all the drama.”

‘Jesse Jackson envisioned a more inclusive politics — and made it happen’

Donna Brazile at The Washington Post

Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson “profoundly changed American politics,” and his “life story is a triumph over adversity,” says Donna Brazile. Jackson “advanced a broadly progressive agenda” and “embraced the then-relatively new idea that diversity was a strength, not a weakness.” He “liked to talk about the nation as a quilt patched together by intent and accident,” and “made us see what could be, which helped so much of it come to be, and we are all the better for it.”

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‘Putin doesn’t want peace. He wants more time.’

Bloomberg editorial board

It “should be obvious by now that Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing for time,” says the Bloomberg editorial board. Putin’s “negotiators are dragging out peace talks, making enough conciliatory noises to fend off renewed U.S. pressure while Russian missiles and drones pound Ukraine.” Additional “pressure on Putin would have an impact,” and the U.S. and Europe “need to focus on further strangling Russia’s income from oil exports.” Nations have “agreed that wars should have limits.”

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‘American Ninja Warriors on ice’

Chris Schleicher at Slate

Pairs is the “best discipline in figure skating,” says Chris Schleicher. Pairs skaters are the “American Ninja Warriors of figure skating, doing X Games–level stunts with the gentility and grace of the Bolshoi Ballet.” Whether “you’re looking for beauty or you enjoy the NASCAR thrill of impending disaster, pairs has something for everyone.” It comes down to “who can sell us on their connection while forgetting for four minutes that every element they’re performing is absolutely insane.”

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‘The Mediterranean does not have to be a graveyard. Preventable failures are turning it into one.’

Amy Pope at Le Monde

The Mediterranean has “claimed lives that should never have been lost,” says Amy Pope. These deaths are the “predictable outcome of policy failure, criminal exploitation and a global conversation on migration that has become dangerously distorted – and they are largely preventable.” Migrant smuggling networks are at the “heart of this crisis — sophisticated criminal enterprises that profit from despair.” This is “more than reckless indifference; it is an appalling disregard for human life.”

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