When Ted Kennedy was running for president in 1980, he was famously tripped up by that one little question: “Why do you want to be president?”

Donald Trump has wanted to be president for decades, and has now had his wish fulfilled for more than five and a half (non-consecutive) years. To hear Maggie Haberman tell it, Trump’s answer to that question wouldn’t be all that complicated.

“The things that make him happiest, really, are things that he can feel and touch, and then things that are, in his mind, hopefully irreversible physical testaments to himself,” Haberman told me.

Haberman estimated that 70% (!) of Trump’s brainpower these days is spent on renovation projects, from the White House ballroom to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

That is a remarkable statement: Trump is president of the United States, leader of the free world, commander-in-chief of the planet’s greatest fighting force. He has powers, to change the country and people’s lives, that most of us could never dream of. And his attention is predominantly focused on interior design and architecture, according to Haberman, a White House correspondent for the New York Times who is widely considered to be the reporter who knows him best.

What about things like inflation, or health care, or tech policy? “He finds the economy boring. It’s not what he wants to talk about,” Haberman told me.

“Policy is about other people,” she said. “Monuments, in his mind, are him.”

Haberman, who has covered Trump since she was working for the New York tabloids and he was a frequent character in them, is the author of “Confidence Man,” the best book for understanding his rise in the worlds of both business and politics (and the throughlines that connect them), and co-author of the new book “Regime Change,” the most comprehensive book yet on Trump’s second term in office.

“Regime Change” is packed with richly reported anecdotes that flesh out the themes Haberman and I discussed in our interview, the latest installment of the Wake Up To Politics Book Club.

There is the scene of him sitting down with the four top congressional leaders — on the eve of a government shutdown — and repeatedly diverting the meeting to dig through a bowl of candy and pull out “Trump 2028” hats. There is the time that the head of the Smithsonian Institution, Lonnie Bunch, came to the White House to try to defuse the president’s recent criticism of the museums. But when Bunch got there, Trump never said a negative word, instead taking Bunch on a tour of the White House, meticulously “noting which artworks were correctly framed and which were not.”

At one point, waiting with Mike Johnson as July 4th festivities were about to begin, Trump treats the House speaker to “his own indoor version of a light show,” using a laser pointer to show which presidential portraits in the Oval Office were made with “good oil paint” and which ones with “cheat paint.” At another, Trump suddenly pauses a conversation to phone Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. What urgent matter did the president have to discuss with his French counterpart?

“Emmanuel? Emmanuel?” Trump said, according to Haberman and her co-author Jonathan Swan, a fellow Times reporter. “I’m building a big arch, Emmanuel. I’m trying to figure out if I need a viewing deck. Your arch—do you have—do you have a viewing platform?”

Haberman is careful with her words. She is the farthest thing from a partisan cheerleader — for either side — and she is unflinchingly fair in her coverage. Her liberal critics sometimes bemoan that she does not editorialize more (she “normalizes” or “sanewashes” Trump, they will allege), but the truth is, her assessments of the president are all the more biting because they are so matter-of-fact, and stripped of any partisan outrage or reaction.

Reading how Trump is described in “Regime Change” — picking Cabinet secretaries based off looks, or dropping bombs on Iran in 2025 because of the “nonstop adulation” Israel was receiving on Fox News for its attacks against Tehran, or acting sympathetically towards Mexico because he “liked the way [its president, Claudia Sheinbaum’s] voice sounded” — I couldn’t help but walk away with the impression that Haberman views Trump as, fundamentally, a simple person.

She admitted there was something to that. Trump is “shrewder and more calculating than people realize,” Haberman said. “But in terms of the things that either animate him or will compel him to take actions, those tend to be fairly simple.”

In our conversation, Haberman gave me an inside perspective on what is truly animating Trump at this point in his political life — and what isn’t. On their own, many of the things she told me would make for shocking assessments of an American president:

• That he “really doesn’t” care whether his political party controls Congress after the midterm elections.

• That he went to war with another country, destabilizing the U.S. economy and foreign policy, in no small part to get revenge for threats made against him personally.

• That he now regrets launching the war, one of his most significant presidential decisions, in the first place.

Taken together, they paint an extraordinary picture of how the president thinks and how he operates.

Perhaps the most striking thing to me about Trump’s conception of the presidency, in Haberman’s account at least, is how backwards it all is.

Most presidents are forgotten. But some are remembered as great leaders, the type we carve into mountains and build statues of. To get there, though, presidents typically have to do things: win a war, or create a lasting legislative program, like the New Deal or the Great Society or Reaganomics. On the basic level, that sort of recognition requires some sort of policy agenda and showing of achievement.

Trump is trying to skip a step. He doesn’t spend his time on policy — Policy is about other people, after all — and instead focuses on erecting monuments he hopes to be remembered by, not realizing that impactful policies are actually how presidents typically reach such hallowed status. Why do great things to then get monuments for you, when the monuments could simply be your great things? It’s a cheat code to a legacy, in his view, without any of the work involved.

But the truth is, Lincoln isn’t remembered because he has the Lincoln Memorial, and Washington isn’t remembered because he has an obelisk. It’s the other way around. They have those monuments because they did things worth remembering.

If only for no other reason than self-interest, and his own legacy, Trump would probably be better off spending his time focused on policy, in order to advance the sort of agenda that might land him in the pantheon of presidential greatness. There are likely aides around him who have recognized this, too, but “Regime Change” depicts a group of courtiers terrified to contradict the president or offer adverse opinions.

It’s sad, really. Trump spent years working to return to the Oval Office — and now that he got there, he has spent the whole time obsessed with how he will be remembered, without even trying to do any of the things that could potentially burnish a lasting presidential legacy. “Buildings can outlive him,” Haberman told me. “I don’t think it’s that complicated, I really don’t.” But is the Kennedy Center really the main thing people think of when they think of JFK?

Towards the end of our conversation, Haberman told me that I was making a common mistake, “trying to apply a framework for all of this that does not fit for Donald Trump.”

Perhaps. But my bet is that this more traditional framework for presidential legacies will win out in the end. Policy may be for other people, but “other people” are also who write history books, and who get to pass judgement on Trumpism at the ballot box. When all is said and done, Trump might end up wishing he spent a little bit more time on policy and not so much on architecture.

You can watch my interview with Haberman above, touching on how Trump views everything from China to Iran to the Supreme Court to a potential House Democratic majority.

The beginning is available for everyone; like all “Book Club” installments, the full thing is available to paid subscribers. This is the type of extra content that you get with a paid subscription. If you haven’t subscribed already, I think you’ll find this to be a fascinating conversation and I hope you consider upgrading.

A full transcript is available below for paid subscribers. As always, thank you for your support, which allows me to bring you conversations like this one.

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It was later revealed that Carlock was among dozens of underage boys who were being sexually abused by the camp’s longtime director, Peter Newman. As a young adult, Carlock eventually sued Kanakuk for allowing Newman’s abuse to take place. The two sides reached a settlement, which included Carlock signing a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) preventing him from speaking out about what he experienced.

Carlock struggled with having to stay silent, describing the settlement as “blood money” and hesitating to tell even his family the details of what he went through. In 2019, Carlock died by suicide at the age of 28. “They will always control me, and I’ll never be free,” he had told his therapist.

Carlock’s ordeal has become a catalyst for legislative change, with his family advocating for a bill known as Trey’s Law, which would prohibit the signing of NDAs in cases of child sexual abuse. It would also retroactively make any current such NDAs null and void. The measure aims to shield other child sexual abuse victims from the mental anguish that Carlock’s NDA caused him — and to help bring perpetrators of sexual abuse to justice before they can harm other children. Other campers had similarly reached settlements with Kanakuk Kamps, but no one knew about the extent of Newman’s actions because each victim had signed NDAs pledging them to secrecy.

Due to advocacy by Carlock’s family, versions of Trey’s Law have been passed on the state level in Missouri, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee. (A similar law already existed in California.) Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced a federal version in March of this year, with bipartisan co-sponsors including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). The bill was passed unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee in May. Six days later, it was passed unanimously by the full Senate.

The measure has not yet received a vote in the House — not because of any disagreements with the merits of the bill, but because, Cruz says, of a blockade in the House being enforced against any pieces of legislation that arrive from the Senate.

“House leadership has decided to adopt a strategy that is, frankly, indefensible,” Cruz said on the Senate floor last week, calling on the lower chamber to take up Trey’s Law. “It is a strategy where they pass bills that originate in the House; they ignore bills that originate in the Senate, and they let them die.”

A Wake Up To Politics analysis confirmed a stark drop-off in the number of Senate-passed bills that have been approved in the House this Congress, especially compared to previous Congresses where both chambers were controlled by the same party.

Between January 2009 and August 2010 — the equivalent portion of Barack Obama’s presidency — 51% of Senate-passed bills were approved by the House. In the same stretch of Donald Trump’s first term, 40% of Senate-passed bills were approved by the House. Between January 2021 and August 2022, the opening of Joe Biden’s administration, the House greenlit 45% of bills that passed the Senate.

So far this Congress, a mere 36 bills passed by the Republican-led Senate have been approved by the Republican-led House. That is a rate of 21%, the lowest this century. It is just below the percentage of Senate-passed bills that were approved by the House between January 2023 and August 2024, when Democrats controlled the Senate and Republicans controlled the House.1

That’s right: House and Senate Republicans are currently on such different pages that it’s as if Congress isn’t being controlled by the same party at all.

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Like nearly everything else on Capitol Hill these days, the bicameral tensions seem to come back to the SAVE America Act, President Trump’s top-priority legislation, which would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship before registering to vote and to provide photo ID before casting a ballot. (Trump has also called for the bill to be expanded to end mail-in ballots, prohibit transgender women from participating in women and girl’s sports, and ban gender reassignment surgeries for minors.)

Trump has called on the Senate to end the filibuster, which requires most pieces of legislation to have 60 votes to advance, a level of support that the SAVE America Act currently lacks. Senate Republicans have, so far, refused to do so.

In March, a group of 25 House Republicans penned a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) threatening to oppose any Senate-passed bills that came to the House until the Senate approved the House-passed SAVE America Act. “Consider this our filibuster,” they wrote.

Since then, these conservative members have repeatedly shut down the House floor to protest the Senate’s failure to approve the SAVE America Act.

As Trump’s anger towards Thune has risen — “His patience is running out,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently said — his allies in the House have doubled down.

“Aside from Reconciliation and a fixed version of the NDAA, the Senate will not get any legislation passed in the House because there are Members of Congress in the House that will vote against anything they send over based on the fact that they are refusing to pass the SAVE America Act and Voter ID,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) wrote on X last week. “No Senate bills until SAVE AMERICA is passed,” she wrote again two days later.

Hanging in the balance are bills like Trey’s Law. “Every day of delay is another day victims of child sexual abuse and trafficking can be legally silenced in America’s civil courts,” Elizabeth Phillips, Trey Carlock’s sister, told me in a statement.

There are other pieces of legislation recently passed by the Senate that are likely to similarly languish in the House:

• The Older Americans Act Reauthorization Act, which extends and expands programs to help senior citizens, including Meals on Wheels, the national eldercare locator service, and programs to prevent elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation.

• The Tribal Warrant Fairness Act, which would allow the U.S. Marshals Service to help tribal law enforcement track down violent criminals and search for missing children at a tribe’s request, assistance that the Marshals are currently authorized to provide to other law enforcement agencies but not to Native American tribes, despite the high rates of violence many tribes face.

• The Officer John Barnes and Chief Michael Ansbro Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Program Expansion Act, which would speed up the process of awarding benefits given to law enforcement officers disabled in the line of duty, or to the families of officers killed in the line of duty. The measure is named for an officer who had to wait for several years to receive his benefits, and another who is still waiting, eight years later.

• The Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act, which would prevent the ability of pharmaceutical companies to set up “patent thickets,” the practice of obtaining several overlapping patents around a single drug, making it impossible for competitors to bring lower-cost generic or biosimilar versions to market.

• The Rural Community Hospital Demonstration Program Reauthorization, which would extend a program tinkering with the Medicare reimbursement formula for rural hospitals, in an attempt to keep more of these remote hospitals with fewer than 51 beds afloat.

All of these bills passed the Senate unanimously. None of them are the type of measures that frequently receive national media attention. But, if they became law, they would make a meaningful difference for older Americans who are hungry, or missing Native American children, or police officers hurt in the line of duty, or people who rely on prescription drugs, or patients at rural hospitals — or children who have been sexually abused. Each bill now faces a difficult path in the House, where about 80% of Senate-passed bills are being stalled, seemingly due to partisan anger about an unrelated issue.

This phenomenon does not run in only one direction.

In fact, even fewer House-passed bills are being approved in the Senate than Senate-passed bills being approved in the House: just 7%, according to my analysis.

This stands out less because the House and Senate trends are very different: while the House, which tends to reflect the partisan balance of a given moment, generally approves more Senate-passed bills in periods of united control (like we are in now), the Senate has been approving fewer and fewer House-passed bills for more than a decade now, as partisan polarization and the increased use of the filibuster have combined to focus the upper chamber’s time on confirmations instead of legislation.

Still, it is hardly the case that the House is the only chamber that has effectively stopped considering bills — even broadly supported ones — from their colleagues on the other side of the Capitol.

In fact, Cruz has now launched a blockade of his own, rising on the Senate floor last week to block two House-passed bills from receiving unanimous consent: the Stop Secret Spending Act (which would increase transparency requirements for federal spending) and the Improving Social Security’s Service to Victims of Identity Theft Act (which would simplify the currently lengthy process for people to get help when their Social Security numbers are stolen).

Cruz said that he had no policy objections to either measure. Rather, he announced plans to block any House-passed bills from receiving unanimous consent in the Senate until the House started taking up Senate-passed bills like Trey’s Law. “If you want to change the behavior of another chamber, the only way to do so is to exercise leverage,” Cruz said.

Later in the week, just before the Senate left for its summer recess, Cruz dropped his hold on the Stop Secret Spending Act, though his spokesperson told me that a broader breakthrough has yet to be reached.

In essence, the two sides of the Capitol have stopped functioning as a bicameral legislature, prioritizing petty feuds over substantive bills being passed by the other chamber. It is now incredibly rare for the House to pass a Senate bill, and even rarer for the Senate to pass a House bill, despite the fact that both chambers are led by the same party. The president of that party, however, does little to hide the fact that he has essentially no legislative agenda (besides the SAVE America Act, of course), which has allowed Congress to atrophy and spend more time squabbling than legislating.

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When initially blocking the House-passed Stop Secret Spending Act, Cruz noted that the Senate had already unanimously passed the legislation before the House passed an identical version of the same bill to send over to the upper chamber. “Now, mind you, that was not because they had any substantive objections to [the Senate version], but, rather, it was because they were refusing to do their job as another chamber in this Congress,” Cruz said.

“I would love to see my name at the top of the bill and it listed as a Senate bill,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), the measure’s Senate sponsor, responded. “I discussed it with my staff. I am in the last 6 months of my final term in the U.S. Senate. I would love to have more of my legacy items with my name on them, but I told my staff that it is more important that we get these bills done. I don’t care if it is a House bill. I don’t care if this has my name all over it. The important thing is that when we have good pieces of legislation put in front of us and that we worked hard in a bipartisan manner, in a bicameral manner, and it is good for the American people, that we move forward with those bills.” (This argument must have eventually won Cruz over, since he later dropped his hold.)

However, the Senate has been doing the same thing, passing bills identical to measures that were already passed by the House — but using different legislative vehicles, so the bill has to be voted on again by the other chamber to become law, even though the two chambers have already both backed the underlying legislative language. Recent examples include the Youth Poisoning Protection Act (which would ban the sale of a product frequently used to help young people die by suicide) and the DeOndra Dixon INCLUDE Project Act (which boosts funding for Down Syndrome research).

There is really no reason to do this except for credit-taking. It certainly does not help suicidal youth or people with Down Syndrome, for whom identical versions of these bills have now passed both the House and Senate — but cannot be sent to the president’s desk, because lawmakers cannot agree whether the law should say “S. ___” (the designation for a Senate bill) or “H.R. ___” (the designation in the House) at the top.

To be clear: it is not new for tensions to emerge between a House and Senate controlled by the same party. In fact, it happens basically every time, usually for the same reasons: the boisterous House being upset that the lumbering Senate is not moving fast enough to enact their party’s agenda. We saw this with Republicans during the “Contract with America” in the 1990s and with Democrats in the Obama era.

If you really want to see petty, read about the so-called “Battle of the Octogenarians,” when the government nearly ran out of funding in the 1960s because a pair of Democratic House and Senate committee chairs couldn’t agree on things like which side of the Capitol to meet in. The classic line here is about a freshman House Democrat around this time who referred to the other party as “the enemy.” No, a more senior colleague supposedly told him: “House Republicans aren’t the enemy. They’re the opposition. The enemy is the Senate.”

But Trump, as is often the case, has ratcheted tensions to a high, needling his own party’s Senate Majority Leader and egging on House conservatives to block Senate bills as a result. Musing recently about the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) platform, there was one particular plank Trump didn’t sound so averse to. “Sometimes, I’d like to get rid of the Senate too,” he said.

At a time when Americans frequently complain about Congress’ inability to get anything done across party lines, understanding the House-Senate cold war can help provide a glimpse into what is actually going on in Washington.

So far this Congress, the House and Senate have actually passed the same or a higher number of bills originating in their own chamber (655 and 171, respectively) as previous Congresses up to this point. But fewer bills have become law — only 102, compared to 168 at the same point in the Biden presidency — because there has been such a breakdown in each chambers approving bills from the other.

This means the issue is not Democrats and Republicans working together, which they are doing at perfectly normal rates, on issues from child sexual abuse victims to prescription drug prices. Rather than earlier in the process, it is at the last, final step (unfortunately, the very one required for a bill to become a law) that the system isn’t working — bills going from one side of the Capitol to another — largely because of petty squabbles within a party, rather than partisan beef between them.

I haven’t touched on this issue in the newsletter yet, but luckily it’s the topic of my latest YouTube video! If you’re curious about how Iowa got to spend so many decades at the top of the calendar in the first place, why Democrats are swapping it out, and how that will impact the 2028 race, here’s the video for you:

Now, onto our regularly scheduled programming:

If the central story of President Trump’s second term has been his quest for complete control, then he continues to run into disappointments.

His own U.S. attorney here in D.C., longtime friend and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, has ended — against Trump’s wishes — the prosecution of an Olympic canoeist who Trump has accused of vandalism in the nation’s capital. His party’s top Senate leader, John Thune, allowed the chamber to leave this weekend for its August recess without advancing a party-line measure that would have included parts of Trump’s beloved SAVE America Act.

Iran is issuing new demands in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, while a U.S. munitions shortage has limited Trump’s options to return to military escalation. (Trump told Axios that his new strategy in Iran was “low-keying it.”) Ten days ago, Trump was boasting about a “HISTORIC agreement” between Israel and Hamas that would be a “monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY.” Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was rejecting the deal, refusing to begin withdrawing from Gaza until Hamas completely disarms. (The U.S. plan had envisioned both the Israeli withdrawal and the Hamas disarmament taking place in stages.)

I’ll say one thing for Trump, though: he doesn’t give up easily. In the last few days, Trump has sought rematches in several of his highest-profile legal losses of the second term. I’ve already written about one of them: Trump attempting to impose a new wave of tariffs to replace the ones struck down by the Supreme Court. Groups of states and small businesses have already filed lawsuits challenging these tariffs, which means we could see another fight over trade eventually bubble up to the high court.

This morning, I want to break down two other back-up plans Trump is trying to execute, picking new fights over birthright citizenship and Federal Reserve independence after his first attempts were squashed by the Supreme Court. How can Trump be trying again on these scores after being told “no” by the Supremes? Let’s dig in.

First, let’s start out by stipulating that this isn’t abnormal. Presidents frequently try to do something, get told “no” by the Supreme Court, and then try to do something similar in a different way. It’s what Joe Biden did on student loans. FDR did it repeatedly, trying to revise and refashion New Deal legislation that got struck down by the justices. When the Supreme Court rules on something, it generally doesn’t say, “you cannot attempt this policy” broadly, it says “you can’t do this in the specific way you went about doing it,” so it’s not surprising that presidents might try to find a different way.

This isn’t defying the court; in fact, it’s accepting the legitimacy of the court’s decisions, by working within the confines of the ruling the court laid out.1

With all that said, let’s start by looking at Trump’s latest actions with respect to the Fed:

Trump v. Cook, Round 2

Almost exactly a year ago, Trump purported to fire Lisa Cook, one of the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the influential body that helps set interest rates.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 says that Fed governors can only be fired “for cause,” though the statute does not elabroate on what that means; until Trump, no president ever tested it. In a letter to Cook last August, Trump alleged that she had purchased two properties in 2021 and described both as her primary residence when seeking mortgages.

Trump wrote Cook that there was “sufficient reason to believe you may have made false statements on one or more mortgage agreements,” and therefore there was “sufficient cause to remove you from your position.”

Importantly, in its 5-4 ruling in Cook’s favor earlier this summer, the Supreme Court did not weigh in on whether or not these allegations that Cook committed mortgage fraud before taking office (for which she was never formally charged or convicted) rose to the level of “cause” required by the 1913 statute.

Instead, the court ruled that it was moot because Trump had not followed the proper process when attempting to remove Cook. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts quoted the Supreme Court’s 1901 ruling in Reagan v. United States, which said that officials who serve in positions where Congress fixed the term of office for a certain number of years — Fed governors serve 14-year terms — must receive “notice and hearing” before being removed.

This is not a requirement explicitly written into the statute (or explained much in either the 1901 or 2026 court rulings), so it still isn’t entirely clear what “notice and hearing” has to look like. According to University of Virginia law professor Aditya Bamzai, whose research was cited by Roberts, only two other presidents have ever tried to remove officials “for cause”: William Howard Taft and Richard Nixon.

Taft appointed a three-person “committee of inquiry” to investigate two members of the Board of General Appraisers he was considering firing: one who stood accused of using his position for personal gain, and another who was accused of lacking qualifications and abusing alcohol in a way that had “brought scandal upon the Board.” The committee held a public hearing and interviewed several witnesses, before recommending to Taft that he fire them both, which he did.

Nixon, on the other hand, fired the president of Fannie Mae, by sending him a letter saying, “You are hereby removed for good cause,” without offering much elaboration. He was given no hearing to plead his case.

In his opinion for the court, Roberts seemed to say that Trump needed to give Cook something in between the Taft and Nixon routes: a “full-blown judicial trial” was not necessary, Roberts wrote, but giving the official advance notice of the charges against them, and an opportunity to defend themselves (even just in writing), was.

And, no, Trump linking on Truth Social to a news article about the allegations against Cook a few days before announcing her firing did not count as “notice,” Roberts added. “That will not do,” the chief justice wrote. “At minimum, Cook was entitled to some explanation of the evidence at issue, some avenue for a response, and a deadline by which a response would be due.”

Last week, Trump responded by giving Cook exactly that. White House personnel chief Dan Scavino penned a three-page letter to Cook on Wednesday, spelling out the allegations of mortage fraud in detail. “Based on these facts,” he wrote, “a jury could find that you intended to defraud these institutions for your own benefit, but at a minimum, this conduct was grossly negligent and demonstrates that you are unfit for the office in which you serve as a controlling member of the Federal Reserve.” (Note that he said a jury “could” find her actions criminal, not that one “would.”)

Scavino then gave Cook an avenue to respond (by emailing the White House counsel) and a deadline by which to do so (August 26).

Now, we wait. Cook will either respond in the way that Scavino requested, or renew her lawsuit, or both. Either way, this is likely setting another Supreme Court clash into motion, forcing the justices to more explicitly say what “notice and hearing” has to look like and then — if they decide that the process Trump is now according Cook is sufficient — whether the allegations against Cook, properly processed, rise to the level of “cause.”

In his opinion, Roberts explicitly rejected the definitions of “cause” put forward both by Trump (who said the bar was met any time a president has concerns about a person’s “conduct, ability, fitness, or competence”) and Cook (who said that a president had to prove “inefficiency,” “neglect of duty,” “malfeasance,” or “ineligibility” for office).

He said that Trump’s definition of “cause” for firing a Fed governor was “too lenient” and Cook’s was “too stringent,” but declined to offer one of his own. Roberts did make clear that the bar, for him, would be high. It would have to be “substantial,” he said, in order to “reflect the Federal Reserve’s unique historical status and role.”

“Whether ‘cause’ for removal exists in any given situation will depend, at least in part, on the seriousness of the alleged misconduct, and the extent of any nexus that may exist to the Governor’s professional duties,” he added. “The key issue is whether ‘[t]he cause assigned’ truly ‘impl[ies] an unfitness for the place’—or whether it simply represents an effort to secure a ‘more congenial’ replacement.”

Scavino tried to establish such a nexus in his letter to Cook, writing that it was important that Fed governors “be above reproach, particularly in financial matters,” considering their role in the financial system.

Will that be good enough for Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the other conservative who joined his Cook opinion? We are likely to get a bit more clarity in the coming months.

Trump v. Barbara, Round 2

If Roberts’ majority opinion in Cook was written as narrowly as possible, then his opinion in Trump v. Barbara — the birthright citizenship case — was written fairly broadly.

Faced with Trump’s Day One executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children of immigrants in the U.S. illegally or temporarily, Roberts could have punted on the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause and ruled simply that only Congress, not the president, can attempt to reinterpret it. (This was Justice Kavanaugh’s preferred path.) He could have struck the order down by saying that the children of illegal immigrants are U.S. citizens, while leaving vague how he would categorize children of temporary visitors or “birth tourists.” (This was the path that Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, in their dissents, seemed open to.)

Instead, Roberts produced a fairly sweeping legal defense of the concept of jus soli (Latin for “right of the soil”), the idea that someone receives citizenship in the U.S. by being born on U.S. soil, not because of anything to do with their parents or ancestry.

While the dissenting justices wrote at length about the concept of being “domiciled,” arguing that the citizenship of a child was tied to whether their parents had made a permanent home in the United States, Roberts tied citizenship to the idea from British common law of the King owing his protection to anyone born within his territory, and these subjects owing him allegiance in return.

There were a few exceptions to this arrangement — children who the King was not expected to protect, or were not expected to be allegiant to the King — which gave way to the four exceptions to American birthright citizenship spelled out in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the landmark 1898 Supreme Court case:

1. Children of “foreign sovereigns or their ministers” (meaning, children of foreign heads of state or ambassadors)

2. Children “born on foreign public ships”

3. Children of “enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory”

4. Children of “members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes”

Roberts kept these four exceptions in place.2 In a new executive order last week, Trump tried to broaden the first and the third exceptions, mandating that the federal government not recognize the citizenship of:

1. Children born in the United States to any foreign government employees (meaning, not just ambassadors, but anyone who works at a foreign embassy and isn’t a U.S. citizen)

2. Children of any member of a group or person listed by law as a Foreign Terrorist Organization or Specially Designated Global Terrorist

Trump also added two additional exceptions3:

1. Children whose parents engaged in a fraudulent “commercial transaction” to ensure that the mother is present in the U.S. to give birth (so-called “birth tourism”)

2. Children whose parents hire a surrogate mother in the U.S. for the same reason

Roberts’ opinion in Barbara does not explicitly speak to these specific situations, but it does seem to hint pretty heavily that the Chief Justice would not look kindly upon new exceptions to the birthright citizenship rule. As a philosophical matter, Roberts appears to dismiss the idea that the citizenship of a child should be tied to the circumstances of their parents, outside the narrow Wong Kim Ark exceptions.

Referring to the rule in the British common law, Roberts wrote: “A foreign mother could enter the British Isles, give birth, and leave with her child the very next day, and that child would remain a British subject. Why? Because the child owed an implied allegiance to the sovereign who protected him at his birth—no matter how ‘momentary and uncertain’ his presence in the King’s realms.”

He wrote that this was true even of children born to parents subject to expulsion, such as the Romani (then known as “gypsy”) people, whose parents were directed to avoid British territory but whose children were considered citizens when born inside the King’s realm.

In early U.S. history, Roberts adds: “The young Republic attracted tens of thousands of émigrés from the Old World—Scotch-Irish, French, German, Welsh, and many more, some of whom hoped to stay only a short time, others of whom hoped never to leave. No matter their intentions, however, they could be assured that their children would be American citizens by birth alone.”

The point is clear: A parent might be in the U.S. for a short amount of time. They might be here for one day. They might be here illegally. They might even be someone viewed with suspicion by the government. But their children would still be citizens, because citizenship is about where the child is born, not the status of the parents.

“Words appearing frequently in the Executive Order—‘mother,’ ‘father,’ ‘lawful,’ ‘temporary’ — are absent” from the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, Roberts writes. “For a simple reason: they did not matter.”

Trump’s executive order once again uses similar words, which is why it’s a good bet that Roberts will once again feel similarly. Perhaps Roberts will include foreign terrorists in the U.S. as “enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory,” and therefore block their children from citizenship, though I wouldn’t even count on that. From there, his agreeing to broaden “ministers” (ambassadors) to include, say, embassy custodial staff does not seem likely; nor did he seem particularly sympathetic to arguments about birth tourism in writing that the “intentions” of a parent do not matter for the citizenship of a child.

“Fraud” and “surrogacy” are two more words that are not found in the 14th Amendment, he would likely note.

Of course, in the U.S., interpreting laws is not merely an academic exercise. A plaintiff can only sue over something they are harmed by, which means Trump’s second executive order on birthright citizenship may survive longer than the first partially because there is a dramatically smaller pool of people who could potentially challenge it.

A foreign terrorist or birth tourist might be loath to announce themselves as such, in an attempt to protect the citizenship of their child — though that also speaks to the difficulty of enforcing this executive order in the first place. Foreign terrorists and birth tourists will also be similarly loath to announce themselves as such at a hospital, which means their children will likely continue receiving birth certificates just as they would have before this order.

If the order does return to the court, however, Roberts’ opinion (joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett) pretty well tips his hand on how he would rule. (Justice Kavanaugh did not join the opinion, but wrote that changes to citizenship law would have to come from Congress, a test this order also does not pass.) Roberts’ opinion in Cook (joined by Kavanaugh) is a bit harder to parse — but only a bit. Like his ruling in Barbara, it offers clues about his broader philosophy (here, the premium he places on Fed independence) that suggest he would only allow a Fed firing over conduct that meets a substantially high bar.

You don’t hear the name Jim DeMint a lot anymore, but he was a very powerful force in the far-away era that was the Republican Party just before Donald Trump.

DeMint represented South Carolina in the U.S. House from 1999 to 2005, and then in the U.S. Senate from 2005 to 2013. While his same-state colleague Lindsey Graham had a reputation as a moderate, DeMint was known as a rock-ribbed conservative. He played a crucial role in pushing the GOP to the right, helping unleash the grassroots energy that Trump seized on in 2016.

In the 2010 cycle, DeMint emerged as a “godfather” of the Tea Party movement, one of the few incumbent GOP senators who not only didn’t fear the incoming class of rebellious Republicans but actively worked to bring them to Washington as reinforcements. His PAC, the Senate Conservatives Fund, poured money into Tea Party candidates that year. In 2011, he joined with those who were victorious, like Mike Lee and Rand Paul, to found the Senate Tea Party Caucus.

Then, in 2013, DeMint decided, in the Republican Party that he had helped transform, he would have more power as an activist than as a lawmaker. He resigned from the Senate and became president of the Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative think tank.

DeMint has been on my mind recently because of a quote he gave in 2009, at the height of the Tea Party fervor: “I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs.”

The one thing I’ll say in defense of the quote is that, in the U.S. Senate, a small, passionate minority can slow down a lot of things. (That’s sort of the whole point.) But that’s about it. Being the 30 in a 70-30 Senate would be tantamount to suicide for any of your policy ideas. Because the other party would have a filibuster-proof majority, they would spend their days ramming legislation down your throat on every issue under the sun. You could slow things down, but you’d be powerless to stop them.

If you ever wanted to affirmatively pass a policy idea of your own, not just stall those of the other side? Forget it. 30 senators is not enough to pass a single thing. To prefer that to a 60-seat majority, which might require more difficult coalition management, but could actually turn bills into law, is crazy. It’s the difference between a fractious majority that can actually do things when you’re able to get everyone on the same page, and a committed minority that can do nothing. You would have purity, but no power.

That DeMint line has been echoing in my ears because it seems to be a popular philosophy lately.

First, of course, there’s President Trump, who seems not at all bothered by the prospect of replacing a fractious majority with a committed minority come November. According to reporting by Axios, “President Trump doesn’t much care if Republicans lose the House and/or the Senate in the midterms this fall,” precisely because he knows he will “enjoy a more pro-Trump” congressional Republican caucus, “win or lose.” Put another way, Trump would rather be sure that John Cornyn will be out of the Senate next year, than be sure that a Republican will be in his Texas seat.

“It seems like he’s given up on holding the majority and focusing on loyalty in the minority,” one House Republican told Politico in May.

You see strands of this thinking in the Democratic Party as well.

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As I’m writing this, former public health official Abdul El-Sayed was just declared the winner of last night’s Michigan Democratic Senate primary by the Associated Press. With more than 95% of precincts reporting, El-Sayed currently has 48.48% of the vote, while his rival, moderate Rep. Haley Stevens, has 47.51%, giving the progressive favorite an edge of just under one percentage point.1

There are already two takes forming:

1. Someone named Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed just won a primary for the U.S. Senate, overcoming opposition from the Democratic Party establishment on both the state and national level (Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was privately steering support to Stevens, while Michigan’s sitting governor and outgoing senator publicly endorsed her) and a massive spending disadvantage (Stevens and her allies poured $65 million into advertising in the race, compared to just $7 million in ad spending by El-Sayed). This is a landmark victory for Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who backed El-Sayed, and their broader left-wing political movement attempting to remake the Democratic Party.

Or…

2. Polling averages showed El-Sayed with a mammoth 13-point lead ahead of the primary, a benchmark he is poised to underperform by about 12 points. No matter your opinion on prediction markets as an oracle for the future, they are great vehicles for assessing conventional wisdom; 24 hours ago, the favored outcome on Polymarket was that El-Sayed would win by 15-20 percentage points, followed by him winning by 10-15 percentage points. Now, it is El-Sayed winning by fewer than five percentage points, which was deemed a remote possibility yesterday. After expressing a confidence that “can border on cockiness,” progressives badly underperformed expectations in this race.

Most pundits, depending on their factional loyalties, will spend most of the day trumpeting one of these two narratives. But here at Wake Up To Politics, we have no factional loyalties, so we can be honest: There is truth in both.

Considered on its own terms, El-Sayed’s apparent victory is deeply impressive: with all the party elites (and outside money) stacked against him, he could now become the first Muslim senator in U.S. history.2 But considered within the context of the renewed civil war that has been brewing within the Democratic Party all year — ever since Zohran Mamdani beat Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayoral primary last June — the outcome is more of a draw. In a race that was decided by about 20,000 votes out of more than 1.5 million cast, it can’t exactly be said that either side of the Democratic Party ran away with a victory.

Instead, when considering the results from Michigan and other primary races across the country, a picture of two Democratic Parties — roughly evenly matched — comes into view.

El-Sayed trounced Stevens in Kent County (home to Grand Rapids), 61% to 35%, and Washtenaw County (home to Ann Arbor), 61% to 36%. Both counties are overwhelmingly white (70% and 67%, respectively). Washtenaw County, home to the University of Michigan, is disproportionately young and college-educated: 20% of the county is in their 20s (compared to 13% of Michiganders overall), while 60% have a bachelor’s degree or higher (compared to 33% statewide). Though not by as much, Kent County also punches above its weight in terms of education (42% of residents have at least a college degree). Both counties have higher median household incomes compared to Michigan overall.

Stevens, meanwhile, came out ahead in Wayne County (home to Detroit), which has a significantly smaller white population (48%) and significantly larger Black population (37%). Its educational attainment (28% have a bachelor’s degree) and median household income ($59,000) are both below the figures for the state overall. Stevens is winning there, 52% to 45%.

Statewide, according to the New York Times, Stevens is winning in rural counties, Detroit, and its suburbs. El-Sayed is winning in other suburbs and mid-size cities. In counties with more young residents, El-Sayed is winning by 21 points. In counties with more old residents, Stevens is winning by two.

These patterns would be striking if they didn’t align so perfectly with the results we have seen across the country this year. In June, the democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th congressional district (covering upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx). According to the Times, Avila Chevalier romped to victory in the younger, more college-educated, higher-income precincts. Espaillat won in lower-income areas. Avila Chevalier overperformed in the majority Black precincts in the district, while Espaillat overperformed in the majority Hispanic precincts. The same age and income trends held true in New York’s 7th district (covering parts of Brooklyn and Queens), though there left-wing candidate Claire Valdez overperformed in the majority Hispanic precincts while moderate Antonio Reynoso performed well in areas that were majority Black.

Yesterday, at the same time as El-Sayed eked out a victory in Michigan, his fellow left-wing candidate Cori Bush fell flat in Missouri’s 1st district (my home district, comprising St. Louis) against moderate Rep. Wesley Bell. The district is 43% Black (compared to 12% nationwide), with a median household income of $60,000 (compared to $81,000 nationwide). Bell beat Bush by 22 percentage points.

One of the two Democratic Parties is younger, whiter, more college-educated, and higher-income. This one is generally trying to tug the broader party to the left. The other is older, less white, less college-educated, and more working-class. This one is trying to keep the Democratic platform where it is, or move it to the center.

Despite what either faction might tell you, neither of these smaller parties has a clear advantage, which shouldn’t be surprising when considering the demographics of the Democratic Party as a whole. According to Pew Research Center, 56% of voters who lean Democratic are white. 44% are not. 47% are 18 to 49 years old. 53% are 50 or older. 45% have at least a college degree. 55% do not. The party is evenly split on all of its most salient demographic lines.

As a result, the party is split as to its direction. When a CNN poll last week asked Democrats whether they wanted their party to move to the left on policy issues, 54% said “yes” and 45% said “no.” When the poll then asked whether the party should move to the center, 54% said yes and 46% said “no.” (Yes, this means some Democrats answered “yes” to both.) There is no clear winner in the Democratic Party’s factional battle, only temporary victories based largely on the demographics of a given contest, which is how moderate Reps. Wesley Bell (in Missouri) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (in Washington state) can fend off left-wing primary challenges on the same day that progressives Abdul El-Sayed (in the Michigan Senate race) and Donavan McKinney (challenging incumbent Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar) eked out narrow victories.3

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All this said, it’s important to remember that the two Democratic Parties differ directionally, on the question of whether the broader party should inch left or right. But it really is a game of inches, with divides smaller than some make them seem.

Ahead of the Michigan primary, the journalist Astead Herndon (reliably a thoughtful observer of Democratic Party politics) penned an explanation of why the democratic-socialist faction of the party was on an “upward march.” (Remember, this was back when polls were saying El-Sayed would dominate.) “The left has a vision,” Herndon wrote. “Do moderates?”

Last week, I watched the final debate between Stevens and El-Sayed — their last opportunity to differentiate themselves before the primary — and I certainly did not come away with the sense that Stevens had a stirring vision for the future of the Democratic Party. But nor did it seem to me like El-Sayed had a clear policy agenda that was all that much different than the party’s existing platform.

For El-Sayed, nearly every question came back to campaign finance (and the $65 million barrage that was being dumped on him, about half of it from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC), just as for Stevens, nearly every question came back to electability (and the polls that showed her running ever-so-slightly better against Republican nominee Mike Rogers in the general election). These are both interesting political questions, deeply relevant in the heart of a campaign. But neither offers much of an indication of the broader policy agenda either candidate would push.

The very first question El-Sayed received was about what he would do differently than the politicians in Washington right now to address affordability, a pitch-perfect opportunity to speak to the No. 1 concern for voters in Michigan and across the country. “For me, it’s I don’t take money from the corporations who are jacking up your prices in the first place,” El-Sayed began his answer, before launching into an explanation of the companies that had contributed to Stevens and not him. But when he got around to the actual economic policy differences that he believed would stem from those differing campaign finance stances, his vision frankly didn’t seem that distinct from the broader Democratic Party that he largely framed his campaign around running against.

The three economic policies El-Sayed named were antitrust enforcement, taxing billionaires, and ending aid to Israel. The first two are pretty standard fare within the Democratic Party (Stevens supports both); the third is a notable foreign policy difference, but hardly as meaningful an economic point as El-Sayed made it out to be. Because he is not backed by AIPAC, El-Sayed said, “I can do things like make sure that rather than sending your money somewhere else to drop bombs on other people and their kids, we can keep that money here at home.”

But, as Bill Scher of the Washington Monthly noted: “For the last 15 years, the U.S. has spent about $4 to 5 billion a year on military aid to Israel, except for a one-year spike to $12.5 billion in Fiscal Year 2024 following the October 7 attacks. Annual federal spending on education between 2021 and 2024 roughly ranged from $170 to $180 billion. For health care, the range is $1.8 to $2.1 trillion.” Whatever your opinion on the morality of sending aid to Israel, its existence is not much of a budgetary barrier. Ending it would not unlock much fiscal space to fund a brand-new, progressive economic vision.

None of this is meant as a defense of Stevens or of the Democratic Party’s moderate faction, neither of which (to Herndon’s point) have articulated much of a vision for the last 10 years beyond opposing Donald Trump. Rather, I mean to question just how meaningfully either faction differs from that same, familiar party line.

El-Sayed, to his credit, has a detailed platform on his campaign website.4 But if you read it, the vast majority of the points either align with the Democratic Party or are vague as to how they differ. There are points about protecting “the rights of all Americans,” regardless of “how—or if—they pray, their sexual orientation, gender identity, how old they are, or how much money they make,” which all Democrats would agree with. There is support for a “muscular Federal Trade Commission that enforces anti-monopoly laws” and empowering Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, which were both signature Biden administration policies.

Unsurprisingly, much attention is paid to campaign finance, though his prescriptions (overturning Citizens United, banning super PACs, and public financing for elections) are broadly shared within the Democratic Party. Stevens certainly had a different policy than El-Sayed about accepting contributions to her individual campaign, but she is a co-sponsor of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and (like 219 other House Democrats) voted for the party’s H.R. 1, which would have imposed stricter campaign spending limits and expanded public financing.

Perhaps the three key points where El-Sayed differs from the party are: supporting Medicare for All, wanting to abolish ICE, and pushing for a change to U.S. policy in the Middle East. But none of the three points are as cut-and-dried as the sloganeering can make them seem.

Medicare for All is one of the key planks of El-Sayed’s campaign, but even he acknowledged, in an interview with the Bulwark, that “we’ve got to take a pathway there,” adding that he would support anything that “reduces the power of the health care corporations, expands health care, and does so publicly.” That doesn’t sound too distinct from Stevens’ preferred path to universal health care, a public option (where government-run health insurance is an option for all Americans, but not required, competing with instead of replacing private plans).

On ICE, El-Sayed’s platform calls for ending ICE, but maintaining “a safe, secure border and immigration enforcement” program, without making clear how the two would differ from each other. In the debate, he called for an agency that would enforce immigration policy, but in accordance with the Constitution, hardly something any sitting Democrats would disagree with (whether they would call that agency “ICE” or something else).

Finally, on the Middle East, El-Sayed has called for an end to Israel aid but left unclear his broader vision for the region. In the debate, he said he supported “self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike.” Does that mean he supports a two-state solution? A single, binational entity? El-Sayed has repeatedly refused to say.

He has also frequently called for taxpayer funds to stop flowing overseas and instead be spent domestically. “I believe that in an era where our schools are crumbling and healthcare is unaffordable, we should be spending our taxpayer dollars here at home,” his campaign website says. How far does that extend? In the same section, he refers to “supporting Ukraine against Russian invasion” as being on “the right side of justice.” So, is he opposed to foreign aid, or are there some taxpayer dollars that should be spent on bombs abroad, depending on the circumstance? It’s never quite made clear.

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On two of these policy issues — health care and Israel — El-Sayed clearly aligns with the Democratic base, and has used his obvious communications abilities to accentuate cleavages between Democratic leaders and their voters. In a recent New York Times poll, 50% of Democrats said they wanted the party to move to the left on health care and 60% said they sympathized more with the Palestinians than with Israel.

I don’t mean to minimize the split on Israel, which is obviously incredibly salient within the party. One common strand among American voters of all ideological stripes is that they hate being told how to feel and resent a conventional wisdom being forced down their throats. This explains much of the backlash to the “wokeness” phenomenon c. 2020. It also helps explain why the divide over Israel has become so motivating to so many Democratic voters, as they break away from a pro-Israel consensus that has dominated American politics for so long, creating an easy litmus test to separate those politicians who are still hewing to old ways and those who are updating their thinking after a deadly war.

But a meaningful difference on one foreign policy issue does not equal an entirely new political vision. On almost everything else, for all the sturm und drang about running against his party and remaking the Democratic platform, El-Sayed falls into the same rhythms as the rest of the party, but just with superior communications skills. Like Stevens and many other Democrats in both the mainstream and progressive factions, El-Sayed shies away from expressing positions on social issues. According to the same Times poll, pluralities of Democrats want the party to move to the center on immigration, crime, and transgender issues. Here, El-Sayed and Stevens both offer the same, familiar moves to the left.

During the debate, El-Sayed was asked, “What is the No. 1 thing Senate Democrats are failing to do right now that you would do differently?” His answer — that he would eliminate the Senate filibuster — was downright bizarre, for two reasons. The first is that almost all Senate Democrats already support eliminating the filibuster, at least when they are in power. But the second is that the question was about “right now,” which suggests that El-Sayed wants to end the filibuster now that Republicans are in the majority and Trump is in the White House. El-Sayed has repeatedly suggested that Democrats are not doing enough to counter Trump, but the filibuster is the Senate Democrats’ only real tool to do so, the tool that progressive activists have called on them to use again and again, to stop everything from government funding bills to the SAVE Act.

So if El-Sayed was in the Senate right now, his answer would be to fight Trump … less?

Surely this was a slip of the tongue, but it gets at a broader sidestepping about where exactly this big new vision differentiates itself. Here’s the question I would ask: If Abdul El-Sayed was Senate Minority Leader right now, not Chuck Schumer, what would currently be different?

A few weeks ago, Politico leaked audio of El-Sayed, which mostly drew attention for him referring to an “ogre on a pike” (which Stevens took to mean her, but which he said was referring to John Fetterman). But, to me, the more interesting part was El-Sayed’s description of his job for the next two years, if elected to the Senate: “throwing as much sand in the gear of the Trump administration as I can and using them to posterize them,” by which he meant conducting investigations to “tell the story about the corruption” within the administration. Democrats are going to investigate Trump with or without El-Sayed in the Senate. The real difference, then, is about messaging. It’s stylistic, not substantive.

El-Sayed is no doubt a superior communicator to Chuck Schumer. But I’ve yet to hear the specifics of what he would be doing differently to counter Trump5 or reach voters who are turned off by the Democratic Party’s existing social or economic policies — or, for that matter, to cobble together the three-fourths majority in state legislatures needed to overturn Citizens United, as he calls for.

The Democratic Party is split between two camps, which have some differences at the margins on where the party should go, but largely are offering the same policy prescriptions that Democrats have been selling for years, with mixed success. The great promise of El-Sayed’s candidacy, according to a sympathetic profile at its outset, was his ability to attract “working- and lower-middle-class Americans who pulled twice for Obama before switching to Trump over the past decade.”

El-Sayed will now have the opportunity to test that theory in November. So far, like other left-wing candidates, he has appeared no more adept at winning working-class voters than the existing Democratic ruling class, who does well with the segment of this constituency who votes in Democratic primaries but often struggles among the remainder who participate in general elections. The fact that polls showed both El-Sayed and Stevens running about even with Rogers, in a state with two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor, in a year where a Republican president is historically unpopular, is a warning in of itself. Michigan is to the left of about half the country, friendlier territory than many of the states required for Democrats to win the Senate.

There may be two Democratic Parties, but neither appears to have much of a vision for winning a lasting majority or making the changes needed to win over voters beyond their base.

Graham Platner’s Reddit posts. Abdul El-Sayed’s tweets. David Crowley’s burner account.

After many years of warnings, this is the election cycle where politicians’ social media archives have finally been turned inside-out. Several high-profile races have been jolted in recent months by the discovery of old (often deleted) social media posts by candidates.

Many of the finds have had a certain ideological flavor: progressive Democrats who posted things in the Peak Woke era of 2019-2020 that are no longer quite as fashionable. See Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted X posts calling for defunding the police. Or: New York House candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier (“In New York they don’t say ‘I love you,’ they say ‘NYPD suck my dick’ and I think that’s beautiful”), Texas Senate candidate James Talarico (“radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country”), and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong (“Cancel Thanksgiving”).

Other candidates plagued by their social media histories have been caught doing what everyone else does on social media: spouting off. The most notable example has been Platner, the former Maine Senate candidate, who was dinged for his thousands of deleted Reddit posts, opining on everything from foreign wars to porta-potties. Late last month, CNN reported that Troy Jackson — who took Platner’s place as the Senate Democratic candidate in Maine — used an anonymous alias to blow off steam about Republicans in the Bangor Daily News comments section while working with them in the state legislature.

Then, a few days later, NBC News reported that Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley — who is running against Hong for the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial nod — had used his personal email address in his 20s to register an account with the name “Dirt McGirk” and handle @No_pork_plz.

Many of the posts on the account were racially and sexually charged. One said: “#confession I’ve never boink a white woman!! Is that bad???” Another: “That’s just NASTY!!! I wouldn’t f– her with YOUR d–!!!!” #slapyourself” Crowley’s campaign said the account, which was active from 2010 to 2014, was shared with 10-12 other people, and that Crowley himself did not author any of the controversial posts.

Notably, in their unguarded and (they thought) fleeting missives, many of the posters-turned-candidates were found to have shared disparaging things about key constituencies they were now courting. On Reddit, Platner called rural Americans (aka 62% of Maine) “racist” and “stupid.” On Twitter, Utah state Sen. Nate Blouin, who was running for a House seat earlier this year (but was defeated in the Democratic primary), was found to have described the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (aka 61% of Utah) as “a bunch of bigoted assholes.”

Mallory McMorrow, who was running against El-Sayed for the Michigan Senate Democratic nomination (but has since dropped out), deleted X posts in which she complained about the politics of her adopted home state and even pined to leave. “There are days like these that make me miss California even more,” she wrote in one post. “Pushing for [a] future where we don’t own cars… Cars are dead,” she wrote in another, years before running for office in a state defined by its auto industry.

This is not the first election cycle where old social media posts have come back to haunt political candidates: Marjorie Taylor Greene had to answer for hours of old Facebook videos when she was first running for the House in 2020; Mark Robinson’s 2024 campaign for the North Carolina governorship never quite recovered from the revelation that he referred to himself as a “black NAZI” in comments on a pornography website’s message board. (Yes, that was a real sentence.)

But several opposition researchers I spoke to agreed that this cycle stood out for the sheer quantity of candidates being dogged by their social media pasts. “I think we are reaching kind of the peak of this,” said Tyson Brody, who has worked as a “ragpicker” (his words) for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders, among others.

Brody, one of the top Democratic opposition researchers, noted that there is a bit of what he calls an “echo effect” going on here. “Whenever there’s a big oppo story on someone, it just makes people want to do the same thing on other people,” he said. In this case, Platner’s trove of Reddit posts meant that every opposition researcher in America started looking through the social media archives of other candidates. Brody likened it to when Trump allies accused New York Attorney General Letitia James of committing mortgage fraud, and then suddenly trying to find the same dirt on all his other enemies, from Sen. Adam Schiff to Fed governor Lisa Cook.

There’s also the age factor, of course. X (formerly Twitter) is now 20 years old. Reddit is 21. Facebook is 22. If you were, say, in your 20s or 30s in the early days of the technology, you’re now the perfect age to be running for Senate or for governor. In addition, this cycle has also seen a wave of less traditional candidates — Platner included — who might have been less likely to have had perfectly manicured pasts on social media.

At the same time, Pat Dennis, the president of the Democratic opposition research super PAC American Bridge, told me that combing through social media archives has become harder as more platforms have made it difficult to access old posts in one fell swoop. Opposition research is “much more manual and boring” nowadays, Dennis said. “There are tools that allow you to sort of pull down tweets and read them programmatically. Nothing like we used to have.”

But there are a few tricks of the trade. Oftentimes, people will use the same username across multiple social media accounts — for Mark Robinson, it was “minisoldr”; for Platner, it was “P-hustle” — which means if an oppo researcher can find one account, they might stumble on a goldmine. “A lot of the real effort is finding out what username somebody is associated with, which can be a real jackpot,” Dennis said. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, whose KFILE team has unearthed many of the most damaging social media stories this cycle, has said that he found both the Platner and El-Sayed posts in this fashion.

Joe Rodota, who was one of the first political consultants to specialize in opposition research as a Republican operative in the 1980s (and now writes a Substack on the topic), told me that artificial intelligence has also changed the field. This sort of oppo research requires taking a large corpus of text and picking through it to find interesting themes or examples, the exact sort of thing AI is great at. “This is the first cycle” where AI tools have been adopted widely for opposition research, Rodota said, perhaps contributing to the explosion of stories about old social media posts.

While these scandals have ripped through the headlines all year, there is less consensus on how many races they have actually changed. McMorrow’s old posts appear to have contributed to her losing momentum in her Senate primary, though there were other factors (including her lack of a clear ideological lane) that also played a role. It can hardly be said that Platner’s Reddit posts are what sunk his campaign, though they did contain a sign of what was to come: months before he was credibly accused of sexual assault, we already knew that he had repeatedly downplayed sexual assault in Reddit comments.

Several of the candidates have tried to turn the posts into an advantage, with varying success. “I’m a very real person, warts and all,” Platner said about his Reddit history. “These are normal tweets by a normal person,” McMorrow’s comms director told CNN.

There is also a live question among operatives about whether candidates are best served by deleting the posts; some sources I spoke to said having “deleted” in a headline can make even mundane missives seem more suspicious. Perhaps it’s better just to lay it all out there, knowing there are tools that exist to find things either way. (“No, I think you should delete them,” Dennis responded. “I think you should delete the posts. That is my advice to all candidates.” Especially as platforms start making it harder to access old posts, you never know what might just never be found.)

While this certainly won’t be the last cycle to feature old social media posts, I do wonder how long the trend will last. Many of the aforementioned posts are from a certain time and place: a period in the 2010s when people would create accounts called “Dirt McGirk” with their friends, or dispense every stray thought on Reddit or Twitter, littered with hashtags.

In some ways, those days are over. Studies show that Gen Z social media users are much more private with their social media presences, less liable to overshare than the age cohort slightly older. Indeed, many of these candidates caught up in these scandals this year are from the same generation: McMorrow is 39, Crowley is 40, Platner is 41. All grew up on an internet that was much more casual, and their posts are, frankly, very Millennial. As social media becomes more polished, and not as much a place for random thoughts, it’s possible that (somewhat cutting against expectations) fewer young candidates will reckon with these scandals over time.

As an example, Brody noted 42-year-old JD Vance’s personal website (jdhamel1.blogspot.com) that resurfaced when he was running for vice president in 2024. “No one does a Blogspot anymore,” Brody said. “The idea that you would literally have this kind of personal diary online is horrifying to a lot of younger people, who are more cognizant of finding a job and stuff like that.”

“We are cresting a high point,” he added, “but Millennials are going to be running for a while. There’s still going to be this 15-to-20-year period haunting a lot of people.”

And there will always be ways for people to express thoughts that come back to bite them — just as they always have been. In his 1884 presidential campaign, James Blaine was haunted by a series of letters that were leaked to the press and appeared to link him to allegations of bribery. In 1934, when the author Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California, the Los Angeles Times (which was openly working to defeat him) placed a box on its front page every day, “Sinclair on ____,” which would contain an out-of-context quote from one of his novels saying something inflammatory, not unlike the ads that now broadcast old social media posts from Platner or Talarico.

Even if Gen Z candidates-to-be stop posting so openly on social media, many still vent their innermost thoughts in forums they think are more private.

“If you want to talk about things that are in their golden age right now, it’s the group chat,” Dennis said. “You’ve seen this time and time again across the right wing. As people have become more afraid of posting things on the open internet, things have moved to Discords, they’ve moved to group chats. They’ve moved to these smaller walled gardens that seem really safe, until the Achilles heel that we’ve seen: somebody inside the group chat leaks on you, and then you were just acting as if this is a safe space, and it is not.”

No matter the platforms people gravitate to, for opposition researchers, “Business is always booming,” Brody said. “People are always interested in this stuff.”

That’s about three months until 435 House seats, 33 Senate seats, 36 governorships, and thousands of state legislative seats are up for grabs. The fate of President Trump’s final two years in office and the future of the two parties are on the line.

With the primaries almost over and the general election starting to heat up, I thought now would be a good time to level-set and look at what we know about the 2026 midterms — and what we don’t. Here are the four questions I’m watching as campaign season kicks into gear:

1. Can Democrats win converts, not just preach to the choir?

At the highest level, the question is not really whether Democrats will win the House this November. They almost certainly will. Historical trends and voter enthusiasm tell us that much. (Democrats boast a 20-point edge among voters who say they are “extremely motivated,” per a new CNN poll.)

A combination of angry Democratic base voters rushing to the polls and disengaged Republicans staying home will likely be enough for Democrats to win the House gavel: if the party only wins the seats labeled “Lean,” “Likely,” or “Safe Democratic” by Split Ticket, that would be enough for a 223-seat majority, which is perfectly reasonable by modern standards. That’s about as many seats (222) as Democrats won in 2020 and Republicans in 2022. Republicans won 220 in 2024. (Anything after 218 is a majority.)

The real questions are how big a House majority can Democrats win and whether Democrats can flip the Senate along with it, both of which require more than just turning out the Democratic faithful. It requires playing in deep-red territory — like House seats in south Texas or rural Iowa, or Senate seats in Ohio or Alaska — and persuading voters who cast a ballot for Trump in 2024 (and maybe even in 2016 and 2020) to now pull a lever with a “D” next to it.

Luckily for Democrats, with the Iran war, Trump is giving his opponents a generational opportunity to win over his supporters. Four separate polls were released this week — by AP, CNN, Quinnipiac, and YouGov — showing that the president’s support has shrunk to just one-third of the country, a notably smaller contingent than the 40% that was thought to represent his polling floor in the first term.

Of particular interest has been his drop in support among white working-class voters, the key group that has powered Trump’s political success since 2016. According to averages calculated by the Cook Political Report, Trump is now at a nine-point deficit among white voters without a college degree, a stark turnaround from the 13-point advantage he boasted among this demographic at the start of his second term. It is the first time in Trump’s political career that polls have consistently showed a majority of white non-college voters step outside his camp.

But disapproving of Trump is different than voting for a Democrat. A recent Washington Post poll showed only 76% of Trump disapprovers planning to vote for congressional Democrats in November. (By comparison, 86% of Biden disapprovers voted for congressional Republicans in 2022, according to the exit polls, while 88% of Trump disapprovers voted for Democrats in 2018.)

To win more than just a slim House majority, and to flip the Senate, Democrats will need to persuade these former Trump supporters who are now disillusioned with the president but uncertain about voting for the Blue Team. The path to the Senate majority runs through these voters, especially because Democrats will likely have to win at least two states out of a quartet (Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Texas) where white working-class voters are so prominent.

The party still has work to do. Last month’s New York Times/Siena polls found that 48% of white non-college voters in Iowa disapprove of the president, but only 41% of the same demographic back Democratic Senate candidate Josh Turek. In Ohio, Trump’s disapproval among white non-college voters was at 40%, but Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown’s support was at 35%. In Alaska: disapproval of Trump is at 37%, support for Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola is at 32%.

Democrats will have to get those numbers closer together if they want an expansive House majority or an advantage in the Senate. Trump has taken the first step for them, by softening these voters up more and more as the Iran war continues. Democrats will have to do the rest.

2. Can the DSA play in purple territory?

We know that democratic socialists can win in upper Manhattan, and also lower Manhattan, and also Brooklyn. How about the Rust Belt?

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The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) received three tributes in Washington on Tuesday.

The first was a memorial in the Capitol Rotunda, where Vice President JD Vance, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), and other dignitaries saluted Graham’s career in public service. The second was a funeral at the National Cathedral, where President Donald Trump was among the eulogists. The third, fittingly, came from Graham’s home of 23 years: the Senate floor.

In a whopping 86-12 vote, the Senate voted to advance the bill now known as the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, which the South Carolina senator was working on right up until he died.

The measure was notable for several reasons: in relation to Graham’s legacy; because of the effect it will have on the wars currently being fought in Ukraine and Iran; and because it represents the first time in Trump’s presidency — after more than a year of tariffs being at the forefront of conversation — that Congress is poised to actually authorize new tariffs.

That’s right: a bill just advanced in the Senate to expand Trump’s tariff powers … and 77% of Senate Democrats voted for it. That seems like a bill worth digging into.

The latest version of the legislation is 61 pages long, but I can give you the quick-and-dirty. If enacted, the bill would:

• Impose sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders, oligarchs, companies, banks, and energy projects, as well as any other foreign individuals aiding the war against Ukraine.

• Extend a slew of sanctions on Iran (which are currently set to expire in December) for five more years.

• Prohibit Americans from investing in Russia.

• Impose tariffs of up to 500% on Russian goods.

• Impose tariffs of up to 100% on goods imported from countries that purchase oil or gas from Russia going forward, or were among the top five buyers of Russian oil or gas in the past year (a list that includes China, India, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union).

The bill offers a significant amount of leeway to President Trump. He is required to impose the sanctions and tariffs detailed in the legislation, but can terminate those levied on individuals or countries outside of Russia if he certifies in writing to Congress that he has “received reliable assurances” that they will no longer engage in the behavior they were being punished for. (Lifting the sanctions on Russians themselves will require the president to certify that Russia has signed a peace deal with Ukraine or “ceased all military hostilities” there.)

At several points, the measure also gives the president authority to decide exactly who to target: he is able to sanction any foreigners who “undermine the peace, security, political stability, or territorial integrity of Ukraine,” which is a pretty broad category. Determining which countries fit the bar for tariffs described by the bill is largely left to the president, as is setting the tariff rate anywhere between 0% and 100% (or between 0% and 500%, in the case of Russia itself).

However, Congress would still reserve some say in the process. The language of the bill says that the president “shall” impose the various sanctions and tariffs (not that he “may”), which means the default will be that the president must follow Congress’ will, unless he gives a specific reason to ease off. If the president does decide to lift the penalties, Congress would be able to override him by passing a joint resolution of disapproval within 30 days. Such a joint resolution would be subject to a presidential veto, but it would not be subject to the Senate filibuster.

In other words, the measure represents something closer to the normal push-and-pull between the legislative and executive branches.

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The legislative process is hard, and this bill has been no exception. Graham and a bipartisan group of colleagues worked on it for more than a year. The bill went through multiple drafts and iterations. When I first wrote about this measure last year (calling it the “Senate’s most popular bill,” since it had 80+ co-sponsors, almost unheard-of for a non-ceremonial piece of legislation), the tariffs on countries that buy oil and gas from Russia were able to go up to 500%. That has since been reduced to 100%, giving the president less room to punish other countries at his discretion.

The language about a joint resolution of disapproval has also been added in to assuage Trump’s critics, as well as an expiration date (five years after enactment, meaning this won’t be a permanent weapon handed from the legislative branch to the executive. If a future president wants to use these powers, Congress will have to re-up the law.) Trump had his demands too: to win him over, the bill was amended to include sanctions on Iran.

This was a long and jagged road, with many changes along the way. Ultimately, the bill’s advancement may have only been made possible by Graham’s death, and — less morbidly — a last-minute lobbying effort by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who met with Senate Democrats skeptical about giving Trump new tariff powers and convinced several of them that the bill would be necessary for him to win his war with Russia.

The revision process may not be done. The Senate vote yesterday was procedural; several more will be required for the chamber to pass the legislation. Somewhat unusually, that may include amendment votes: per Politico, Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ron Wyden (R-OR) are working on a proposal to rein in the tariff powers in the bill.1

Even if the measure passes the Senate, complications await in the House as well. As we know, there are two ways for a bill to pass in the House: 1) under a “rule,” which typically requires the majority party to be able to advance the bill on its own, with a simple majority, or 2) through “suspension of the rules,” which requires support from two-thirds of the chamber.

It’s not clear whether isolationist Republicans in the House would allow the measure to come to a vote through the first path, or whether enough House Democrats support the bill for it to pass through the second path. The top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee has come out against the measure, calling it a “massive backdoor authority for President Trump to impose more tariffs, including on our European allies, that hurt American families.”

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And so, the legislative process will continue, without clarity, at this point, as to how it will end. And that’s good! Tariffs are no small thing: it should take a long, drawn-out process to impose them, with input from Democrats and Republicans (and multiple factions within both parties) and a series of changes and revisions. If this bill does become law, it means that majorities of both chambers of Congress — representing a cross-section of the American people, with all their various differences and idiosyncrasies — will have debated the proposal and deemed it necessary.

Which happens to be exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote in the Constitution that “the Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” (“Duties” and “imposts” are what we now know as tariffs.)

The winding process behind the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act stands in stark contrast to the processes responsible for all of the other tariffs imposed during Trump’s second administration, which have been handed down without congressional input.

As a result, many of the tariffs have rested on shaky legal ground. Trump’s most ambitious tariff project, claiming the power to impose unlimited tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), was struck down by the Supreme Court. A lower court then found his back-up plan for global tariffs illegal. Last week, as I previewed a few days before, Trump moved on to Plan C: a law that allows tariffs on countries that engage in practices like forced labor. A group of small businesses have already sued, arguing that the tariffs were not brought in response to forced labor, but merely as a guise to replace the Plan B tariffs, which expired.

Trump surely did not help his legal case when he told Fox News yesterday that the new tariffs represented “other ways of doing the same thing” as the previous ones.

If the Graham Act becomes law, and Trump imposes tariffs as a result, they will not be vulnerable to these sorts of legal challenges. Long and tedious as working with lawmakers may be, no one can question whether your actions comport with the will of Congress if you’ve gone through Congress first. There’s a lesson there for Trump and future presidents.

Saudi Arabia has been working towards a civilian nuclear program for decades. The country first expressed interest in nuclear energy in the 1960s, and began developing research centers to pursue the goal in the 1970s and ’80s. In 2008, the George W. Bush administration signed a memorandum of understanding with the Saudis to offer American support.

A civilian nuclear program would help meet the country’s surging electricity demands — but it would also place Saudi Arabia in a position to pursue a nuclear weapon, if it ever chose to do so. (“Without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible,” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told “60 Minutes” in 2018.) For that reason, discussions about nuclear energy in Saudi Arabia have always been treated with the utmost sensitivity. Many analysts fear that a Saudi nuclear program could set off an arms race across the Middle East, with other countries rushing to catch up.

During the last administration, Saudi nuclear talks took on heightened geopolitical importance, as then-President Joe Biden attempted to ink a “grand bargain” that would have allowed the Saudis to jumpstart their civilian nuclear program in exchange for recognizing Israel.

At this point, the issue touches on many of the thorniest questions in Middle East policy, itself one of the thorniest areas on any president’s desk. So why was a decision reportedly made on such an important question without President Trump’s knowledge?

Last week, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman reached a civilian nuclear cooperation agreement. This wasn’t some behind-the-scenes development: it was publicly announced as a done deal. Here it is on the Energy Department’s website:

The department hailed the agreement as “historic”; further down in the press release, Wright said that it would deliver “prosperity at home and security to our allies abroad.” The text of the deal was not immediately released, although the Wall Street Journal reported that it was a 30-year, multibillion-dollar arrangement under which Saudi Arabia will have to use American companies as suppliers to build out its nuclear program.

Controversially, the deal laid out a timeline under which Saudi Arabia could eventually enrich uranium on its own soil (as opposed to relying on imported fuel). The agreement includes safeguards to try to prevent Saudi Arabia from using such enrichment for military purposes, though it wasn’t clear how rigorous the inspection regime would be to ensure this.

The U.S.’ 2009 nuclear deal with the United Arab Emirates, seen as the “gold standard” for such agreements, required the UAE to pledge to forgo any domestic uranium enrichment and to commit to tougher inspections. (As CNN notes, the UAE agreement also includes a clause allowing for renegotiation if the U.S. gave better terms to another country in the Middle East, one more way that this deal could have a butterfly effect across the region.) Only 14 countries are currently known to enrich uranium, nine of which have nuclear weapons (plus a 15th, Israel, which is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons as well).

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Obviously, anyone can debate the merits of adding another country to this small nuclear club — but the point for our purposes is that the agreement had been finalized. A formal signing ceremony was held at the Energy Department on Wednesday.

By Thursday morning at 7:52 a.m., the whole thing was thrown up in the air. President Trump announced on Truth Social that the nuclear deal was “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” the string of agreements from Trump’s first term that saw several Arab states recognize Israel. This had been a condition of President Biden’s during his administration’s nuclear talks with Saudi Arabia, but had not been a requirement set by the Trump negotiators (as evidenced by the fact that Trump’s own Energy Secretary had moved forward with an agreement that made no mention of the issue).

Such a last-minute reversal on such an important agreement (after it had already been signed!) was strange, but stranger still was the explanation that was given. CNN reported last week that Secretary Wright had not told Trump ahead of time that he was going to be announcing the Saudi agreement. The president hadn’t changed his mind so much as he hadn’t known that the deal wasn’t poised to include Israeli recognition, or that it was about to be unveiled.

Trump himself appeared to confirm this on Friday, when asked by a reporter about the Saudi deal after making an announcement about domestic nuclear energy in the Oval Office.

“Mr. President, did you authorize for Secretary Wright to sign the Saudi nuclear deal? If not, why did he sign it?” the reporter asked.

“Well, we didn’t talk about it, but it was always understood,” Trump said, with Wright standing behind his shoulder. “And Chris knew and Saudi Arabia knew that if they didn’t join the Abraham Accords, the deal’s not— I’m not going to do the deal.”

“So why did he sign it?” the reporter followed up.

“Because they understood that in order, you know, subject to Congress and everything else, in order for that deal to go through, they had to sign into the Abraham Accords,” Trump said, although CNN reported that Trump’s negotiators were not aware of the condition and it doesn’t appear that Saudi Arabia was either.

Of course, Donald Trump is not the most reliable narrator, and it’s always possible that he’s not telling the truth. Perhaps he did know that the agreement was going to be signed and had given his approval, but then changed his mind after it started getting criticism from Israel and its friends in places like the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

Indeed, CNN also notes that Trump’s 7:52 a.m. announcement came mere minutes after the deal was discussed on “Fox & Friends” (which Trump is known to watch), with several panelists unfavorably comparing the terms of the Trump-Saudi deal to those that Biden had been pursuing. (The possibility of a “late intervention” from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also raised by CNN, though the network did not have any sourcing to confirm that Trump and Netanyahu spoke about the deal.)

At this point, we don’t know which of these explanations is true. (It’s also possible that Trump didn’t know about the agreement beforehand, but that the discussion on “Fox & Friends” and elsewhere still is what convinced him to override Wright.) But the possibility that the president might not have been aware of a decision of this magnitude (shocking as it might be) is made more realistic by the fact that this pattern has played out before.

As I noted in two previous pieces on this dynamic, administration officials have reportedly made huge decisions without Trump’s sign-off throughout his second term, including cutting off Ukraine aid (twice). The Saudi deal wasn’t even the first time this had happened this month.

On July 14, days after ICE traffic stops led to fatal shootings in both Texas and Maine, the immigration agency issued a nationwide order telling its officers to stop pursuing people in vehicles, a major reversal of Trump administration policy.

By July 15, Trump had reversed the reversal. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump wrote on Truth Social at 6:45 a.m. “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch. I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job.”

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Once again, NBC News and the Atlantic reported that Trump had not been aware of the initial policy change in advance. As with the Saudi Arabia shift, some sources were skeptical: There’s “not a chance” that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin would have paused ICE traffic stops without telling the White House first, one DHS official told the Atlantic. “Someone got into the big boss’s ear,” the official added. The Atlantic noted that Trump’s reversal came after Steve Bannon, Tomi Lahren, and other conservative media figures criticized Mullin’s decision.

But it is revealing how sensitive the White House is to the implication that Trump might not be read into every policy decision. “Every Cabinet secretary knows that they have to come to the White House for major policy decisions,” an administration official told NBC. “The president sees, hears, reads everything.”

But clearly not every Cabinet secretary knows that: the same official also told NBC that Mullin had paused traffic stops without going to the president. And administration officials also said that Trump was unaware of the Saudi deal. The White House is trying to have it both ways: insisting that Trump is the “final dealmaker” (as Karoline Leavitt said in response to questions about the Saudi deal), while also distancing him from decisions as soon as they run into criticism from his allies.

Personally, I find either explanation to be plausible. (Both, of course, cannot be true.) But the fact that it’s at least possible that Cabinet secretaries feel enough leeway to freelance on major issues like Middle East geopolitics or immigration enforcement is a revealing window into how decisions are made in the Trump White House — and whether Trump really is at the center of them, as he claims.

Of course, he clearly is the final decider: as soon as he puts out a Truth Social post, he can kill a nuclear deal or upend ICE policy. But how much is sneaking through without his knowledge, being enacted by Cabinet officials who assume he isn’t paying attention (except for the rare times when conservative media critiques bubble up to the president, leading him to belatedly step in)?

Nobody expects any president to be involved in every single policy decision made by the United States. The U.S. government is simply too vast and complicated for that to be a reasonable goal. Presidents sign executive orders they’ve probably never read and give speeches they didn’t write. Just this past weekend, Trump frequently interjected surprise at the jokes he was delivering in his White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech, seeming to confirm that his stilted delivery of the address was because he hadn’t previously laid eyes on it.

“Who the hell wrote that line?” Trump said at one point, breaking the fourth wall a bit. “That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole fricking stupid speech that they wrote,” he said later on.

That’s the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Who cares. Frankly, a president in wartime has better things to do than to spend time preparing for a comedic roast.

But setting nuclear policy in the Middle East (the very region we’re at war in, over a nuclear program) or refining a policy on immigration enforcement that has led to multiple deaths in the United States? Those are the sorts of decisions that a president is very much expected to be involved in.

There’s reason to believe that Trump’s Cabinet secretaries don’t think they need to receive presidential signoff before making decisions on those issues, which raises the question of just how much else is slipping by without presidential input, as Trump rages about the SAVE Act and the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool and (seemingly) checks back into policy only after hearing about his own administration’s choices through conservative media.

• The legality of issuing subpoenas to reporters

• Whether Lindsey Graham’s death could make the South Carolina Senate race more competitive

• Why Kentucky’s Democratic governor couldn’t appoint an interim senator if Mitch McConnell dies or resigns

• How Trump is able to ask the Supreme Court for a do-over in the E. Jean Carroll case

Before we dive in, I always try to flag the latest movements coming out of Capitol Hill. This week, the Senate Health Committee approved the bipartisan INSULIN Act, which would cap the out-of-pocket cost of insulin at $35/month for Americans on private health insurance. The Senate Commerce Committee passed the bipartisan Connected Vehicle Security Act, which would ban vehicles from being sold in the U.S. that are made in China or use internet-connected vehicle technologies that are tied to China.

The House voted to approve a stopgap bill to fund the government through December, a budget resolution to set up the next GOP reconciliation effort, the annual defense policy bill, and a resolution to end the war in Iran. (All four were largely along party lines, though you can guess which one of the four saw Democrats in the majority and Republicans mostly in the minority.) The chamber also approved the Stop Insider Trading Act, which would prohibit members of Congress from trading individual stocks and require voters to provide photo ID in all federal elections. All Republicans and 13 Democrats voted for that one.

Also: Don’t forget to check out my latest YouTube video, on disappearing members of Congress…

Now, let’s answer some questions…

Q: Do you see any modest benefit to the Democratic candidate in the SC Senate race as a result of the decision by Darline Graham, a close relative with no political experience, to run? Do any past electoral precedents provide you with any indicators?

Let me start by saying that Republicans are heavily favored to win the South Carolina Senate race in November, no matter who their candidate is. But is it possible that the race could be a little closer with Darline Graham on the ballot instead of her late brother Lindsey? Yes, it is.

Appointed senators are typically not accorded the same incumbent advantage that elected senators are. According to a Wake Up To Politics analysis, in the 21st century, 87% of Senate incumbents who run for re-election win. (That stat is worth pausing on for a moment: once someone enters the Senate, it is very difficult to oust them until they die or retire.) Over the same timespan, if you shrink that universe to just appointed senators (a sample size of 18), the rate of re-election shrinks to 78% of those who sought another term, still very high but noticeably lower.

One recent parallel that could potentially be drawn is Kelly Loeffler, who was also appointed to the Senate (from Georgia) in 2019 with significant political connections (she was a top Republican donor) but no previous political experience. When she tried to run for Senate in her own right the next year, she was defeated by Raphael Warnock.

However, Georgia and South Carolina — though neighbors — are very different politically. South Carolina has a larger rural population (32% vs. Georgia’s 26%) and a smaller Black population (24% vs. Georgia’s 32%). It is a much redder state (Trump won South Carolina by 18 percentage points in 2024), enough so that any Republican on the ballot will probably win.

One other thing I’ll note, though, is that appointed senators also sometimes struggle to win primary elections. (One recent example is Luther Strange, who was appointed to the Senate in 2017, but lost the special Republican primary election that year to Roy Moore, who went on to lose the general election to Democrat Doug Jones.) Trump has endorsed Darline Graham, but that hasn’t stopped two Republican House members (Ralph Norman and Russell Fry) from running against her for the nomination.

We only have limited polling so far, but it doesn’t seem like Darline Graham is about to waltz right to the GOP nomination. In the three polls that have been conducted so far, Graham came in either second or third place. This might just reflect her low name recognition; perhaps once she runs an ad or two boasting about Trump’s endorsement, the tides will shift.

Then again, we don’t have to go back very far to see an example of Republican primary voters in South Carolina rejecting a Trump-endorsed candidate: just last month, his preferred gubernatorial candidate, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, was forced into a runoff with state Attorney General Alan Wilson. A few weeks later, Wilson beat Evette for the nomination. In between the first and second rounds of voting, Trump changed his endorsement to say he was actually backing both Evette and Wilson (the only two candidates in the runoff). But we can read between the lines: Trump saw that his candidate was going to lose, so he made it seem like he backed both options. The candidate he initially promoted (Evette) did not become the nominee.

(Also, for that matter, to go back to the Luther Strange/Roy Moore example, Trump endorsed Strange in that primary, and Republican voters ended up rejecting his preferred option.)

Lindsey Graham was already viewed with skepticism by some in the South Carolina Republican base; his sister, who has no voting record to speak of, may be seen with even more suspicion. If she does win her primary, however, she will be the overwhelming favorite to keep her seat — even if her race against Democratic nominee Annie Andrews might be a few points closer than if her brother was running, considering the penalty sometimes accorded to appointed incumbents.

Q: I’m curious about your thoughts on the investigation of NYT reporters who wrote about the president’s plane. Is that investigation into the free press the first of its kind, or have other administrations attempted it? Is the current administration’s relationship with the press the “worst” compared to any other?

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Hopping into your inboxes to see if anyone has questions you want answered for a mailbag issue tomorrow. Feel free to send in questions about Iran, reconciliation, the midterms, or any other broader, burning questions about American politics you want my take on.

You know the drill: questions can be submitted in the comments below this post, by email (you can just click “reply”!), or by using this link to send in a question anonymously. I’m excited to see what’s on your mind.

Send a question!

While you’re here: I have a brand-new video essay up on my YouTube channel!

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about missing members of Congress. But is this a new phenomenon? In the video, I dig into the history of absentee lawmakers, including a bunch of interesting (and mostly forgotten) historical episodes. I also talk about some potential solutions: even if this isn’t a new problem, that doesn’t mean we can’t start thinking about how we might want to fix it.

Give it a watch and let me know what you think! I’m new to the video game, so any feedback is welcome (as is subscribing to the channel!)

Talk to you tomorrow,

Gabe

No, not Trump’s second impeachment trial — though that is a fascinating one. It’s from the days surrounding Trump’s lonely departure from Washington after Joe Biden’s inauguration, when he was reportedly giving serious thought to starting a new political party called the “Patriot Party.”

Unlike other people who have thought about starting a third party, like Andrew Yang, Tucker Carlson, or Elon Musk, Trump — even in his weakened, post-January 6th state — might have had enough electoral clout to throw an interesting wrench into our calcified political system. It would have been a fascinating experiment to watch.

Then again, if Trump was running his own operation intent on destroying the Republican Party, what would he be doing differently right now?

He has endorsed primary candidates, like Ken Paxton in Texas, who were opposed by the party’s leadership and have made it more difficult for the GOP to maintain control of the Senate. He has focused on priorities, like 2020 election denialism or the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” or the White House ballroom, that are broadly unpopular and wholly specific to his interests and desires.

He has basically set up a rival national party committee — his super PAC, MAGA Inc. — that has more cash on hand ($400 million) than the actual Republican National Committee ($129 million). The MAGA Inc. purse strings are controlled purely by Trump’s political team, and so far, he doesn’t seem to be in a rush to disburse any cash to Republican candidates. According to FEC filings, the super PAC has only boosted two candidates this year, and they’ve both been competing against other Republicans: $17,900 for Clay Fuller, Trump’s chosen candidate to succeed Marjorie Taylor Greene, in the first round of a special election in Georgia, and $560,000 for a group backing a primary challenge against Thomas Massie in Kentucky.

Meanwhile, MAGA Inc. has paid Trump properties six different times (for a total of more than $38,000) to rent them out for fundraisers. Republicans are reportedly starting to panic about how much money the super PAC is sitting on, with fewer than four months to go until the midterm elections.

On policy, polls show that this will be a cost-of-living election (although, really, what election isn’t?)

Trump has made Republicans more vulnerable on nearly every cost-of-living issue Americans care about. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 26% of voters say that health care is the most important cost on their mind. (Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill slashed Medicaid spending, and Trump let the enhanced Obamacare subsidies lapse.) 21% answered housing. (Trump canceled a signing ceremony for a major bipartisan housing bill, calling it “unimportant” and a “big yawn.”) 17% said food. (Trump’s tariffs have raised the cost of groceries.) And 14% said gas. (Trump’s war in Iran has raised the price of gas.)

In fairness to the president, he was aligned with Republican Party leadership on Medicaid cuts and the Obamacare subsidies. But on the other three issues, he has damaged the Republican Party’s political standing entirely by himself. Many White House advisers and GOP lawmakers urged Trump not to blow up the housing bill, or impose his tariffs, or go to war in Iran. He ignored them; in November, rank-and-file Republicans are likely to be the ones to pay the price.

This morning, I want to give an update on the last two issues: tariffs and Iran, both of which are surging back into the news this week. The Iran war has very obviously started heating up again; less attention-grabbing has been the fact that Trump’s trade wars are about to re-escalate. Neither is particularly welcome news for Republican candidates.

I’ll break down where things stand in the Middle East, and also give you a glimpse at the new tariff developments to watch out for. When we last discussed Trump’s trade war, the Supreme Court had dealt a fatal blow to his worldwide “reciprocal” tariffs. The president is now experimenting with new legal authorities to impose replacement tariffs, right in time for the midterms. Let’s dive in.

Iran

I’ve written before that voters way overestimate how much the president (any president) can do to impact the economy. It’s not as if there’s a big “MAKE ECONOMY BETTER” button on the Resolute Desk that the president can smash.

Except, in Trump’s case, there kind of is?

Here is GasBuddy’s chart of average U.S. gas prices over the last 18 months. It almost perfectly correlates with the state of the war in Iran. You can see prices chug along at the $3/gallon level (or even lower) for most of Trump’s first year in office. Then, they shoot up in March 2026 when the war starts. They drop slightly after a ceasefire was inked in early April, before spiking up again as negotiations stalled and attacks resumed. Prices then drop again as talks pick up and eventually produce a memorandum of understanding in June.

Finally, after attacks resumed in the last few weeks, gas prices started ticking up again. On Monday, the average price of gas in the U.S. went back up above $4/gallon for the first time since mid-June.

Trump’s approval rating moves according to the exact same pattern. When the war started, his net approval rating (per Nate Silver’s average) was about -12%. By mid-May, the peak of the gas price increase, Trump’s popularity had slid to a low of -20%. It started picking up a bit as attacks slowed, going back up to -16%. Now, with fighting back on, he is back down to -18%.

Every new round of attacks appears to drive gas prices ever so slightly up, and Trump’s approval rating ever so slightly down. Trump may not have it in his power to suddenly reverse the direction of the economy — but it does appear possible to make it at least a little bit better, which could be good for at least a few more House seats saved for Republicans. All he has to do is keep things quiet on the Middle Eastern front.

Unfortunately, now that Trump has opened this particular Pandora’s box, it is proving difficult to find a scenario under which a) the U.S. and Iran are not attacking each other; b) the Strait of Hormuz remains open and toll-free; and c) Iran makes enough nuclear concessions that Trump can credibly say the whole thing wasn’t a waste of time.

Trump is confident that he has leverage over Iran because of his ability to pummel the country with superior military might. Iran is confident that it has leverage over Trump because of its ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. And, for those reasons, neither is in any rush to make significant concessions, which places us in a stalemate with no clear end.

With the short-lived memorandum of understanding now officially ditched by both sides, and casualties mounting as fighting picks back up — three American service members have been killed and almost 100 have been wounded in the last two weeks — the next few days will present a critical crossroads to either return to a ceasefire or all-out war.

According to Axios, a group of regional mediators (Qatar, Egypt, Pakistan) have presented the U.S. and Iran with yet another 10-day ceasefire/open-the-Strait proposal. Trump is reportedly considering this, although the Wall Street Journal reported last week that he is leaning towards expanding military operations instead. He said Tuesday that he would be bombing the Pickaxe Mountain site, where Iran is believed to be hiding thousands of uranium-enrichment centrifuges, “pretty soon and very heavily.” The Journal said that Trump was also considering deploying ground troops to Iran’s Kharg Island, which would be a major escalation.

“From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran,” Trump threatened this morning on Truth Social.

According to the Washington Post, U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Iran is unlikely to change its negotiating position based on additional American attacks. Trump is in a trap of his own making, with no easy escape route. And Republicans, whose political fortunes are tied to gas prices, are stuck with him.

Tariffs

When the Supreme Court ruled in February that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) did not empower the president to impose tariffs, it removed the most powerful weapon (purported to be) in Trump’s tariff arsenal. There are many statutes in which Congress delegates tariff power to the president, but they all come with a catch: either a limit on how high the tariffs can go, or how long the tariff can last, or certain steps that an administration must take before imposing them.

IEEPA had none of that (except for requiring a national emergency declaration, which just means the president has to sign his name on a dotted line). Unfortunately for Trump, the Supreme Court said that the law didn’t apply to tariffs at all, so that statute was crossed off the list.

Plan B was Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which was appealing because it plainly allowed the president to impose tariffs and there were no steps that had to be taken before imposing them. The downside was that the tariffs could only go up to 15% and they could only last for 150 days.

On the day of the Supreme Court ruling, Trump used Section 122 to impose 10% tariffs on every country in the world. The one detail I didn’t mention: Section 122 tariffs can only be used to address a balance-of-payments deficit, a type of currency crisis that most experts agree the U.S. is not in the throes of. Several Democratic-led states sued on these grounds; a lower court ruled in May that the new tariffs were illegal, though an appeals court paused the ruling in June and allowed the tariffs to remain in effect during litigation.

The appeals court has yet to actually rule on the merits of the Section 122 tariffs, but the slow-moving nature of the legal system is about to be lapped by reality: the 150-day clock runs out on Friday, which means the tariffs expire anyway.

After that, Trump’s advisers have reportedly urged him to go easy on the tariffs, worried about the economic implications for November. Trump has overruled them.

The next tool up will be Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which has no limit on tariff rates and allows tariffs to be imposed for four whole years. They can only be imposed after an investigation by the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) into whether countries are engaging in practices like forced labor. Sure enough, the USTR completed such an investigation last month, recommending 10% tariffs on trading partners including Canada, Mexico and the European Union, and 12.5% tariffs on countries including China, India, Japan and South Korea. In total, the USTR said 59 countries (plus the 27-nation EU) would be impacted, covering 99% of U.S. trade.

Trump already moved last week to impose 25% tariffs on Brazil under Section 301, which will impact products including farm machinery, wood products, ethanol, and apparel, per Reuters. More Section 301 tariffs are likely to come soon, once the Section 122 tariffs lapse.

In addition, Trump also announced Monday that he was imposing 50% tariffs on Canada, using yet another legal tool: Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 (better known as the Smoot-Hawley Act), which allows tariffs of up to 50% for any amount of time and without any prior investigative steps needed, in order to retaliate against trade actions by other countries. Products including wine, hockey sticks, cement, and dairy products will be impacted.

These new tariffs will likely trigger new legal battles questioning whether Trump is using these statutes correctly. But whatever the result of those court fights, tariffs are about to be showing back up in headlines (and in consumer prices) after a period of relative quiet — which is more bad news for Republican candidates. Politico already has a report up about the troubles the new Canada tariffs could cause for the Maine economy, and thus for Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the GOP’s most embattled Senate incumbent.

“A lot of our blueberries, our potatoes, our lobster, our lumber are harvested in Maine, processed in Canada and then come back. I don’t want to see the tariffs on the books,” Collins told Politico, a sign of how these new duties complicate her political standing.

By writing about all this, I’m not actually suggesting that Trump wants Republicans to lose the 2026 midterms. Rather, it seems, he just doesn’t care. In the past, Trump has called it a “great compliment” that Republicans perform poorly when he’s not on the ballot. I don’t think he’ll mind running up that score, nor does he mind having his adversaries elevated: Trump is never stronger politically than when he has has an enemy to play off of. (There’s nothing he’d love more than another impeachment.) He is never weaker than when the spotlight, and the responsibility of governing, is all on him.

Trump does not seem especially attached to the idea of Republicans remaining in control of Congress, especially since he believes (rightly or wrongly) that his best path to getting things done runs through the White House. Republicans are likely to lose the House in November no matter what, but their ability to stave off deep losses there (and to keep control of the Senate) could hinge on Trump keeping his two wars — trade and Iran — in a holding pattern. He seems to be leaning towards the exact opposite.

Probably the most common question I receive from readers, in regard to all sorts of different news stories or events, is: Is this normal? It’s one of my favorite roles to serve at Wake Up To Politics: offering the historical context to be able to say whether something truly lacks precedent, or whether it just feels unusual.

In the 250-year annals of American politics, there is usually some parallel that can be drawn. History does tend to repeat itself.

This morning, I’ll be answering two such reader questions: one about family members being appointed to succeed their deceased relatives in the Senate, the other about whether this Supreme Court overturns more precedents than the court has in the past.

But first, some headlines:

• Three U.S. service members have been killed in the Middle East since Friday, two in an Iranian strike on a base in Jordan and one during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone in Iraq. That brings the total American casualties in the war with Iran to 17.

• Andy Burnham is the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the country’s seventh leader in 10 years.

• Former state Senate president Troy Jackson has emerged as the presumptive Maine Democratic Senate nominee, after several of his top rivals ended their campaigns once the Graham Platner-aligned candidate received the support of a majority of delegates to next weekend’s state convention.

• Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance welcomed their fourth child, Alec Neel Vance, on Sunday. Vance is the first vice president to have a child in office since Ulysses S. Grant’s VP, Schuyler Colfax, in 1870.

If you want to support my work bringing historical context to the news, you can click here to become a paid subscriber:

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Now, let’s dive in:

All in the family

Q: I’d love to hear more about what if any precedent there is for family members of deceased politicians being appointed to finish their terms. I remember there being movement to have Cindy McCain finish her husband’s term when he passed away but that never came to fruition unlike with Lindsey Graham’s sister being appointed to his seat.

When Darline Graham was appointed last week to finish the term of her brother, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), she was joining a long historical tradition of relatives (usually wives) being appointed to succeed deceased senators.

In fact, this practice (known as “widow’s succession”) was once the most common pipeline for women to enter the Senate. Of the first 14 women to serve in the U.S. Senate: six were appointed to succeed their late husbands, a seventh won a special election to succeed her late husband, and an eighth was a congresswoman whose political career started when she won her late husband’s House seat.

Two more were appointed to the Senate by their husbands (who were serving as governors at the time), and a third was the daughter of a former governor in her state, which means 11 of the first 14 female senators had some sort of political familial connection.

There are no interim appointments for vacant House seats, but 18 of the first 32 congresswomen similarly entered the House by winning seats previously held by deceased relatives.

Over the years, this sort of succession has elevated wives, daughters, sons, brothers, and grandsons. Darline Graham is the first sister to enter Congress in this fashion.

Some of the “widow successors” simply finished the term of their late husband and then left Congress. Others went on to illustrious political careers in their own right, sometimes serving even longer than their husbands ever had. Margaret Chase Smith is one example of this: the Maine Republican was elected to her late husband’s House seat, then went on to serve nine years in the House and 24 more in the Senate, where she served in GOP leadership and became an early critic of Joe McCarthy with her famous “Declaration of Conscience.”

Another example is Edith Nourse Rogers, who won her late husband’s House seat in a special election and went on to serve for 35 years in Congress. Rogers was one of the first lawmakers to speak out against Nazism during Adolf Hitler’s early rise; she introduced a bill in 1939, shortly after Kristallnacht, that would have brought 20,000 Jewish children to the U.S. from Germany. The measure never passed. (Rogers also once talked down a gunman who entered the House chamber in 1932, using her training as a counselor to shellshocked World War I veterans.)

When Darline Graham was first appointed, it was assumed that she would serve merely as a placeholder until South Carolina elects a new senator in November. Now, however, it looks like she might stick around Washington for longer: President Trump has said if Graham runs for a six-year term in the seat, she would have his endorsement. She has not yet announced her plans.

GOP Reps. Russell Fry and Ralph Norman have both announced campaigns for the seat, despite Trump endorsing Graham. Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rick Scott (R-FL) have endorsed Norman, breaking with the president.

Although it used to be common for relatives to succeed deceased members of Congress, one reason the Graham succession might have struck some people as unusual is that, at least in the Senate, it hasn’t happened for a while. The last time it happened in the Senate was 1999, when Lincoln Chafee was appointed to succeed his late father, or 2001, if you count Jean Carnahan being appointed to fill the seat left empty by the death of her husband, a senator-elect who died shortly before Election Day (and still won!) but never technically held the seat himself.1

There are more recent examples in the House, including sitting Reps. Doris Matsui (succeeded her late husband), Adelita Grijalva (succeeded her late father), André Carson (succeeded his late grandmother), and Julia Letlow (her late husband was a congressman-elect).

One more thing to note. There is also a tradition in Congress known as a “death gratuity,” which is when a sitting senator or House member passes away and their colleagues pass a law giving their heirs a one-time payment equal to their full annual salary (generally $174,000).

This tradition dates back to at least the 19th century; according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation (NTUF), Congress has approved more than $7 million in these payments since 2000. As the NTUF notes, although this started as a way to help widows who were struggling to make ends meet after the death of their husbands, it now generally has the effect of helping families who are already multi-millionaires.

Sure enough, the new government funding bill proposed by House Republican leaders includes death gratuity benefits for the widow of the late Rep. David Scott (D-GA), who died in April, and for the “heirs at law of Lindsey Graham.”

If the funding bill passes, that means Darline Graham would be receiving a salary as a senator as well as an entire year’s salary of her brother’s. The death gratuity benefits are not considered taxable income.

The precedent of overturning precedent

Q: I’m interested to know more about the precedent in the Supreme Court with regards to overturning precedent. I understand that stare decisis is not an absolute and there are many examples (Brown v. Board, Citizens United, Dobbs) where prior decisions have been overturned. What I’m curious to know is how common it is.

It feels like the Roberts Court has overturned precedent quite a lot, but is that just because of the political nature of the cases overturned (e.g. Roe, Humphrey’s Executor) or is there something more there?

Stare decisis (Latin for “to stand by things decided”) is the broad principle that the Supreme Court will generally abide by its own precedents when substantially similar cases come before them — though, as the questioner notes, it is not absolute and there are exceptions in every generation.

This term alone, the justices overturned a 1935 case called Humphrey’s Executor when ruling (in Trump v. Slaughter) that the president could fire independent agency officials and a 2001 case known as Colorado II when ruling (in NRSC v. FEC) against limits on how much money political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates.

In recent years, the Roberts Court has also overturned major precedents like Roe v. Wade (on abortion rights, in 2022) and Chevron v. NRDC (on deferring to agency interpretations when ruling on regulations, in 2024).

However, the answer is that the Roberts Court does not overturn precedents any more frequently than other modern iterations of the court.

As this chart from Pew Research Center shows, since John Roberts took over as Chief Justice in 2005, 1.4% of Supreme Court cases have overturned an earlier decision. That is slightly less than the two 20-year periods between 1965 and 2004, and on par with the two 20-year periods between 1924 and 1964. It is more than was the norm in the 1800s and early 1900s, though in fairness, there were fewer precedents to overturn back then.

The point is, however: the Roberts Court overturns precedent at the same rate (or slightly less) as the court has for the last century.

There was also a 2024 study that looked at the court by chief justice, and came away with similar findings: the Roberts Court (2005-present) has overturned an average of 1.6 precedents per term, fewer than when the court was led by Chief Justices Earl Warren (3.1/term, 1953-1969), Warren Burger (3.4/term, 1969-1986), or William Rehnquist (2.4/term, 1986-2005). The study also noted that, in just the years between 2017 and 2024, the Roberts Court had overturned 2.2 precedents per term — representing a slight uptick since the conservative majority began to be solidified during the Trump era, but still down from previous chief justices.

If you’re wondering whether the difference is the salience of the overturned precedents, the study looked at that too. Measuring salience by whether the overturning of a precedent received front-page coverage in the New York Times (a fairly common political science measure), the overrulings were on salient cases 61% of the time during the Warren era, 28% of the time during the Burger era, 42% of the time during the Rehnquist era, and 41% of the time during the Roberts era.

So, again, the Roberts Court does not stick out as much of an outlier.

One thing I will note is that these stats are generally drawn from lists of cases where the court completely and explicitly overturned an earlier precedent (one such list is here). But the court can also substantially weaken or alter a precedent without entirely striking it down.

We saw several examples of that in recent terms, like when the Supreme Court (in Louisiana v. Callais this year) changed the framework for considering racial gerrymandering set by Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) without overturning the case outright. “This interpretation of [Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act] does not require abandonment of the Gingles framework,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. “We need only update the framework so it aligns with the statutory text and reflects important developments since we decided Gingles 40 years ago.”

Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, accused the court of overturning Gingles without admitting to it. “The upshot is that the majority, without any good reason, has overturned Congress’s studied determination—along with this Court’s precedents upholding it—about how to rectify racial inequalities in electoral politics,” she wrote, adding: “Under the guise of ‘updat[ing]’ the Gingles framework, the majority transforms it.”

A similar back-and-forth took place in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), when Justices Sonia Sotomayor (in dissent) and Clarence Thomas (in a concurrence) expressed their belief that the court was functionally overturning its precedents on affirmative action, even though the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts did not do so explicitly.

This is reason to believe that the number of decisions that overturn previous rulings might be slightly higher than the studies say (if you choose to include weakened precedents as well as formally stricken ones), but not necessarily a reason to believe it changes the analysis of which iterations of the court have been more likely to break with precedent, since the court engaged in this same practice under previous chief justices as well.

In general, if you’re wondering when the court overturns precedent and when it doesn’t, Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs pretty comprehensively lays out the five factors the current iteration of the court uses (or, at least, says it uses) when considering whether to put stare decisis aside. Keep in mind when reading this, if stare decisis is coming into play, the assumption is already that the current court thinks the previous court got something wrong (if they got the old case right, you wouldn’t need stare decisis, you would merely reaffirm the precedent on its own merits).

But the court uses these five factors to decide how wrong the previous court was, and whether that wrongness tips into needing to overrule the precedent:

1. “The nature of the Court’s error.” (How damaging has the wrongness been?)

2. “The quality of the reasoning.” (How badly did the court get it wrong?)

3. “Workability.” (Did the court set out a standard that can still be practically applied?)

4. “Effect on other areas of law.” (Has the court’s wrongness had negative effects on other case law?)

5. “Reliance interests.” (How many people have made plans or decisions that rely on the precedent remaining in place?)

According to the available stats, on average, about once or twice a term, the Roberts Court looks at those five factors and decides that a previous ruling is so egregiously wrong that it’s got to go.

President Trump addressed the nation in primetime last night, a format that previous presidents have used to discuss terrorist attacks and peace plans.

Trump’s topic was an election that he lost six years ago. The president declassified reams of documents to support his declaration that the U.S. election system is “worse than any third world country.” The documents are available for download at whitehouse.gov/election-integrity, and if you have some time today, I recommend you spend some time checking them out.

Once you do, you will see that few of Trump’s claims stand up to scrutiny:

• The president alleged that China acquired 220 million U.S. voter files during the 2020 election cycle and following years. But the documents do not show that China hacked its way to any of this information. In many states, voter files are freely available; the documents explicitly show that at least some of the data was in China’s possession simply because it downloaded it from public websites.

• The president alleged that China “fought like hell” to prevent him from winning in 2020. But the documents show that the intelligence community was divided on the extent to which China attempted to influence the 2020 election. The consensus view was that “Beijing has not deployed influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.” There was also a minority view among intelligence agencies that China had taken some steps to stage a social media campaign to harm Trump’s re-election prospects, though these officials also agreed that there was “no reporting to suggest that China” was “trying to compromise voting infrastructure or interfere with mail-in ballots.”

• The president alleged that “China’s activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.” But the documents show that this allegation came from a source who claimed they were told it by a source who claimed they were told it by unidentified Chinese officials. The claim was never corroborated, and in any event, there was never any indication that China followed through with this scheme (if such a scheme even existed).

• The president alleged that the “CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot” by the Maduro regime in Venezuela to “digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020.” The documents do show attempts by the Venezuelan government to meddle in their own elections, though it is not clear if the attempts were successful. To the extent Trump was mentioning this to try to imply that the U.S. is vulnerable to similar attempts — his allies have frequently noted that Smartmatic, the same voting machine company used in Venezuela, is also used in Los Angeles County — the CIA also concluded that the Venezuelan government’s efforts “rest in part on its ability to control every stage of the electronic voting process,” a level of control that it would lack “during an electoral process outside Venezuela.”

• The president alleged that the FBI was contacted about “alleged fraud by a large-scale voter registration operation in Michigan.” It is true that 8,000-10,000 fraudulent voter registration forms were delivered to a county clerk in Michigan in 2020, but this has been known about for years, and the applicants were never added to the state’s voter rolls because the scheme was caught before Election Day.

• The president alleged that a federal review had “identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” But the documents do not show evidence to support that claim, which was developed through a database that is known to produce false positives. He also did not allege that any of the alleged non-citizen registrants had successfully cast ballots.

There is also information in the documents that Trump did not see fit to mention in his speech, including intelligence assessments that Russia staged influence operations to hurt the Biden campaign in 2020 — though, as with China, there is no evidence that either country actually interfered with voting infrastructure or manipulated a single vote.

In sum, Trump’s speech serves as a convenient metaphor for his second term as I’ve described it over the last year and a half: a lot of hype and build-up — Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) said it would be the “most important Oval Office address since the Cuban Missile Crisis” — but little in the way of substantive policy change.

No new election policy or executive order was announced. Many of the executive actions Trump has previously taken in this area have been blocked by a judge, while the piece of legislation the speech was aimed around promoting (the SAVE America Act) remains stalled by the Senate filibuster.

In 2018, Special Counsel Robert Mueller produced a detailed indictment of the Russian nationals he alleged had meddled in the 2016 election. The Trump administration has, so far, released nothing about interference in the 2020 election that could be tested in a court of law. If they have information that could lead to a criminal conviction, they should put it in an indictment. Otherwise, Trump is simply speaking into the void.

While the focus of last night’s speech was election security, Trump also gave himself a brief progress report for his presidency (“we are the hottest country anywhere in the world”). In that spirit, I wanted to take this opportunity to give myself a progress report on covering his presidency. The events of the last few days — the speech, but also the latest developments in Iran and elsewhere — fit fairly neatly into the broader view of Trump’s presidency that I’ve been articulating. I want to hold that view up to scrutiny, looking at where I’ve been right about Trump 2.0, and where I’ve missed the mark:

What I’ve gotten right

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“Only Supreme Court justices and schoolchildren are expected to and do take the entire summer off,” Chief Justice John Roberts once joked, decades before he joined the bench and was able to reap the benefits of that annual vacation as well.

The court’s summer recess began at the start of this month, allowing the justices to go teach classes in Iceland and Hawaii or attend music festivals in Germany. But two unlucky justices stayed behind for one more tour of duty: testifying before Congress.

It was strange to watch Justices Elena Kagan, a liberal Obama appointee, and Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative Trump appointee, answer instead of ask questions for once.

“You’re in a different situation now,” Sen. John Boozman (R-AR) observed. “You’re not hearing an argument. You’re actually giving an argument, and I think so far you’re doing very well.”

“It’s easier to be up there,” Kagan replied, as she sat at a witness table and stared up at a dais not unlike the one she normally presides from.

Kagan and Barrett were engaging in a ritual that was once common, but has fallen into disuse. Every year, Supreme Court justices — like any other government agency — request that Congress set aside a certain portion of the federal budget for their use. Most government agencies then have to send a representative to testify before the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, to justify their piece of the pie.

Supreme Court justices used to do this, too. According to the Congressional Research Service, at least one justice testified before Congress at least once every year between 1960 and 2011. But that was the last time any of the justices faced questioning in the Senate; no justice has appeared before the House since 2019.

That seven-year drought was broken Tuesday when Kagan and Barrett sat for back-to-back hearings in the House and Senate, defending a Supreme Court budget request that has ballooned, from $100 million in Fiscal Year 2019 to $228 million for Fiscal Year 2027.

As the two justices explained, the change is mainly due to increased security needs coming from the skyrocketing level of threats they are receiving. Barrett recounted an episode from May, when she was the victim of a “swatting” (meaning someone falsely called the police saying there were gunshots in her house, which often leads law enforcement to rush in, causing fear and chaos).

“Maybe I lack imagination, but I didn’t expect that performing this service was going to put me in the position of explaining to my children what a bulletproof vest was and why I had to wear one,” Barrett also said.

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The justices live in “an entirely different world” today than they did when Kagan joined the court in 2010, she said. “I just walked out on the street,” Kagan explained. “I had no security with me at any time. I drove back and forth to work by myself.” The director of the Office of Personnel Management, a fairly obscure officeholder who is essentially the government’s HR person, had more security than Supreme Court justices, she said.

After Justice Antonin Scalia died while on a hunting trip in 2016 — with the nearest federal marshals two hours away — and again after threats began to rise in the aftermath of the Dobbs leak, the court began to get more serious. The justices now live encased entirely in a bubble, with security details that follow them wherever they go, which unfortunately appears to be the modern price to be paid for public service, as all three branches of government clamp down in response to violent incidents.

Just this week, a man with a gun was arrested while asking for directions to the Supreme Court building. In 2022, one month after the Dobbs leak, an armed man called 911 on himself and admitted that he was planning to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There has also been a wave of “pizza doxxings” against federal judges, where unsolicited pizza deliveries show up at jurists’ homes, often with the orders listed as being for Daniel Anderl, who was killed in a 2020 shooting at his family’s home. The gunman’s intended target was his mother, a federal district judge.

“The message that these pizzas and other things that are sent to us is fairly clear,” Barrett said Tuesday. “They’re often sent to members of our immediate extended families as well. They’re meant to intimidate and they’re meant to harass… Justices and judges throughout the country continue to do their jobs without fear or favor, but it is a very threatening environment.”

I was in the press section during the justices’ appearance before the Senate, intrigued by this unusual collision between the legislative and judicial branches. It was a rare opportunity to see the justices tread ever so slightly into commenting on matters beyond the individual cases before them.

Both Kagan and Barrett spoke openly and frankly about the toll that now comes with serving in the public eye. Kagan also offered her condolences on the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), recalling the moment from her confirmation hearing when he teed her up for a perfect joke about where she was on Christmas Day. (“Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant,” she said.)

Kagan expressed appreciation for Graham’s support during her confirmation, noting: “It is not very often that a Republican votes for a nominee from a Democratic president. Similarly, it’s not very often that a Democratic senator votes for a nominee of a Republican president. Those are the times we live in.” Justices rarely break the fourth wall and acknowledge the rising tide of partisan polarization.

Lawmakers were instructed to only ask about the court’s budget, but inevitably a few took the chance to press the justices on other matters.

Democratic members asked about the court’s so-called “shadow docket,” which it uses to consider emergency requests that set the status quo while cases work their way through the courts. (Kagan, who has criticized the secrecy of the docket in the past, said she thought the court was doing a better job explaining itself.) Republican members asked about the foreword Kagan wrote to a judicial manual that included a controversial section on climate science. (Kagan said she never read the chapter, which has since been withdrawn.)

Asked about adding an enforcement mechanism to the ethics code that all nine justices agreed to, Kagan said she believed the court would be “better off” with one (though she said there are “real complexities” about how to do it), while Barrett said she was “less certain” about the necessity. At another point, Barrett let slip that the court had begun requiring employees to sign nondisclosure agreements, something the court had declined to confirm when the New York Times reported it in February. (The Dobbs leak repeatedly came up throughout the hearing, which was especially interesting since I was sitting next to Politico’s Josh Gerstein, one of the two reporters who broke that story, as the lawmakers and justices discussed it.)

We also heard that rarest of things from a Supreme Court justice — an apology — when Kagan expressed remorse for a $30 million request for extra security funding that the court sent earlier this year (and Congress approved), outside of the normal budget cycle. “We apologize if we did anything procedurally improper,” Kagan said, explaining that the sudden request came because the U.S. Marshals Service had informed the court that it no longer had the funds to protect the justices’ homes, which meant the Supreme Court Police needed more money to pick up the slack.

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What we were witnessing used to be a fairly normal interbranch dialogue between Congress and the Supreme Court. “Unlike federal departments, the Supreme Court is not a creature of Congress, but it’s a creature of the Constitution itself,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) said on Tuesday. Still, he added: “The judicial branch is not wholly insulated from Congress,” if only because judges rely on legislators for funding.

In his Supreme Court newsletter “One First,” Georgetown’s Steve Vladeck has noted the other ways in which Congress used to frequently intervene in the court’s operations. Some of these were flagrantly political (in 1802, the Democratic-Republican-led Congress passed a law that effectively blocked the Federalist-majority court from meeting for over an entire year; in 1869, lawmakers reduced the size of the court to prevent Andrew Johnson from replacing any justices, and then grew it again as soon as Ulysses S. Grant took office). But others were more neutral ways of keeping the court in check, like the 1978 law which created financial disclosure requirements for justices or statutes that used Congress’ power (per the Constitution) to structure the court’s docket and ensure the justices hear certain types of cases that are in the public interest to be taken up.

There is probably a middle ground the modern Congress could take, between passing laws to shape the Supreme Court for partisan purposes (which would decrease judicial independence and trust in the courts) and absenting itself from this once-active back-and-forth entirely (and therefore making the court much less accountable, which also isn’t great for public trust).

Gabe Roth, executive director of the non-partisan judicial reform group Fix the Court, told me that there is growing awareness in Congress about the need to jump back into these interbranch conversations, after years of mostly letting its powers atrophy and allowing both the president and Supreme Court to largely run freely in their domains (even though the Constitution gives Congress significant power to rein in both).

“I think that there’s been a lot of frustration from Congress on all sorts of issues, not just with the court, about the the abrogation of power of Article I and the arrogation of power that Article III is pulling in,” Roth said. “And when you see those things across the spectrum, also with the immense power that the Trump administration is trying to wield, I think Congress is getting frustrated. So it’s not just in the SCOTUS context. It’s across the board.”

In recent months, lawmakers have introduced bills requiring the Supreme Court to include explanations in its “shadow docket” decisions, creating a rotating panel of judges that would help decide which cases the Supreme Court hears, adding an enforcement mechanism to the ethics code and toughening the court’s rules on gifts, and mandating that the justices spend 10 days a year sitting in on circuit court panels (reviving the old circuit-riding practice, as an attempt to ensure that the justices aren’t insulated from the rest of the court system or the country).

All of those measures have been introduced by Democrats, though Roth noted “there’s nothing liberal about an ethics framework, there’s nothing liberal about a gift ban. They would apply equally to the justices who are appointed by Republicans and those appointed by Democrats.”

In past years, Republicans have introduced various judicial reform bills as well, Roth pointed out. “Inspector General for the judiciary? That was a Chuck Grassley idea. Inspector General for the lower courts? That’s a Chuck Edwards idea…Recusal explanations? That was a Darrell Issa bill.”

Currently, there is one bipartisan court-related bill moving through Congress, the Cameras in the Courtroom Act, which would require the Supreme Court to permit TV cameras in all of its sessions unless a majority decides against it for a specific case. The measure unanimously passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, although Roth said it was unlikely to pass the full chamber this Congress, since Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is not expected to bring it up for a vote and it lacks the support from all 100 senators needed to bring it by unanimous consent.

The issue came up only briefly during the House hearing, when Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) noted that Congress has cameras “everywhere.”

“Is that good or bad?” Kagan shot back. “It’s very good! It’s called transparency!” DeLauro responded. Having interbranch conversations doesn’t mean that lawmakers and judges will always see eye to eye.

Oh, to be a safe-seat senator.

Out of the last 100 Senate elections, only 16 were decided by five percentage points or fewer. Races in states like Michigan or North Carolina are closely contested battles that grip national attention. Meanwhile, away from the spotlight, the other 84 senators more or less glide to victory without a problem. (Did you even know that there are Senate races this year in, say, Idaho or Rhode Island?)

These senators have pretty much won a life-long sinecure: a golden contract that they can keep renewing, without much obstacle, every six years until they die or retire. In exchange, it isn’t expected that they do anything in particular — we all know that legislative output has significantly shrunk — so much as that they not do anything. Because of the composition of their state’s electorate, they have more to fear from a primary challenge than the general election, so the key is mostly not to step out of line.

As long as one of these senators doesn’t rock the boat too much, they can continue to rattle around the Capitol, flashing their member’s pin and voting “yea” or “nay” when told.

At least, that’s the path of least resistance. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) chose another path.

In a Senate that encourages conformity and rewards anonymity, Graham — who unexpectedly died Saturday night from a tear in his aorta, two days after his 71st birthday — unapologetically planted himself at the center of the action. He was the rare modern senator who used the chamber to build a national (indeed, international) platform, well-known by viewers of the Sunday talk shows and in capitals around the globe.

Graham’s influence ranged widely, leaving an imprint on many of the most important issues of our time. As chairman of the Judiciary Committee in President Trump’s first term, Graham helped remake the federal bench. As chairman of the Budget Committee in this term, he shepherded Trump’s two biggest legislative achievements (the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the Secure America Act) through the budget reconciliation process. He was a throwback to a time when Congress sought a coequal role in world affairs, going on countless CODELs (“congressional delegations”) and acting as one of the key advisers pushing Trump towards a more internationalist and hawkish foreign policy. And Graham participated in several rounds of (unsuccessful) bipartisan immigration talks.

“Lindsey Graham was invoked in nearly every piece of legislation that moved in the Senate,” former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) wrote on X. “Part of every gang, involved in virtually every discussion.”

True to form, Graham died just one day after returning from his 10th visit to Kyiv, Ukraine, where he announced that he had inked a deal to secure White House support for a Russian sanctions bill (backed by a bipartisan coalition of 84 senators) that he had spent a year trying to get Trump’s blessing on. He was due to discuss the measure on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, what would have been his 64th appearance on the program.

As that last legislative effort shows, Graham played a crucial bridge role in the Senate, between factions of the GOP (as I noted last year, there aren’t many people who could get away with golfing with Trump and attending his critic Dick Cheney’s funeral in a single week) and between Democrats and Republicans. The Venn diagram overlap of people who counted Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, Elizabeth Warren, and Benjamin Netanyahu as friends is probably pretty tiny.

That is not the type of thing that primary voters appreciate anymore, and Graham’s decision to actually legislate did come at a cost. Even before Trump came on the scene, Graham was facing primary challengers from the right and critics who called him “Lindsey Grahamnesty” and “Lindsey Gomez” for his controversial (in conservative circles) work on immigration reform. According to the political scientist Seth Masket, Graham holds the record for the most censures of any Republican by local Republican organizations.

To be clear, Graham was not above making the grubby political sacrifices required for survival. The most notable was his embrace of Trump, whom Graham called a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” while briefly running against him for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, before becoming one of the president’s closest allies (and golf buddies) in the Senate.

In recent years, Graham went through the same 180 a second time. “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey,” Graham said on the Senate floor after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. “I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it.” But, he added: “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.” The journey wasn’t over: two years later, in January 2023, Graham became one of the first senators to endorse Trump’s 2024 presidential comeback bid.

Graham was also careful to attenuate his bipartisan legislating when primary season rolled around. In fact, although he is often remembered as the sidekick to John McCain, this was a game they played together, effectively trading spots as the foremost dealmaker depending on who was facing primary voters next. When McCain was trying to avoid a Tea Party primary challenge in 2010, it was Graham who took the lead on working with John Kerry on a climate bill and with the Obama White House on a potential deal to close the Guantanamo Bay prison. (Notably, neither deal came to fruition. Perhaps Graham did need his Arizona mentor.)

“John’s got a primary. He’s got to focus on getting re-elected. I don’t want my friend to get beat,” Graham told the New York Times in 2010, explaining why he was suddenly at the center of so many bipartisan negotiations while McCain was staying silent. Asked if he would be working so closely with Democrats if he were the one on the ballot that year, Graham acknowledged, “The answer’s probably no.”

Indeed, this weekend, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) recalled going up to Graham during the 2014 cycle and seeing whether he wanted to work together to address mass incarceration. “Cory, do you understand?” Graham replied, according to Booker. “I’m in a primary right now, and I’m running against a guy who is batshit crazy. I can’t even so much as talk to you right now. Get out of here, man. Come back to me after my primary.”

But Booker did go back to Graham after the primary, and the result was the First Step Act of 2018, the most significant criminal justice reform bill in a generation.

Graham was a member of the Bush-era Gang of 14, which saved (for the time being) the filibuster for judicial nominations, and the Obama-era Gang of 8, which ushered a bipartisan deal to strengthen border security and offer a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants through the Senate (though it failed in the House).

In the 1990s, as a congressman, he helped lead the Bill Clinton impeachment effort — though he also voted against one of the four proposed charges, the only Republican impeachment manager to do so. In 2003, he joined members on both sides of the aisle to ink a “ceasefire” on Social Security, jointly pledging that they would not attack any congressional candidate (Democrat or Republican) who took unpopular political stances in the name of protecting Social Security for the long term.

A former Air Force lawyer, Graham crossed swords with George W. Bush on post-9/11 treatment of terrorist suspects. He worked with Booker on a bill to protect Special Counsel Robert Mueller during the first Trump administration. During the Biden interregnum, he was among the minority of Republicans to vote for the bipartisan infrastructure and gun control bills (the latter would not have passed without his support, its Democratic sponsor said this morning) and also sponsored the most significant bill to come out of the #MeToo era.

Graham was also the last senator to uphold the tradition of voting for judicial nominees, no matter their ideology, as long as they were qualified for the role. He was one of nine Republicans to vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, and one of five to support Elena Kagan. (Graham did vote against Ketanji Brown Jackson, after urging Biden to nominate a different liberal judge, one from South Carolina.)

This Axios chart from 2022, recapping the first year of Biden judicial nominees, tells the story: almost all Republican senators blobbed around voting for none or almost none of their confirmations; only Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowksi, and Graham stick out.

Over the years, after McCain died and Graham’s alliance with Trump grew thicker, there were a lot of articles asking, What happened to Lindsey Graham?, to which he would invariably offer a simple answer.

“Well, OK, from my point of view, if you know anything about me, it’d be odd not to do this,” he told Mark Leibovich for a 2019 profile. What’s “this?” Leibovich asked. “‘This’ is to try to be relevant,” Graham responded.

It’s an answer that’s easy to mock: a senator who would do anything to try to seem important, to try to get another hit on “Meet the Press.” But, really, in an age when most senators blob together with their party, forgettable yes-men-and-women, is striving for relevance really so bad? There are surely toxic ways to achieve relevance in politics, in the way that Matt Gaetz or George Santos were once “relevant,” but hardly for productive reasons. But if, to Graham, “relevant” meant breaking with his party and working with the other side long after it became unfashionable, trying to achieve outcomes towards his preferred policy ends, maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if more senators had that as their goal.

While many senators act as though they’re in a perma-primary, sitting like potted plants for six years — too scared (or lazy) to inch out of line — Graham wasn’t afraid to frustrate his more extreme constituents every once in a while. He always knew when to retreat, which stoves not to touch (he did not participate in the 2024 border security negotiations, for example, and also dropped his longtime support for the DREAM Act last year). But his record will reflect that he stuck his neck out more than most, playing a central role in legislative accomplishments on a striking range of issues. Unfortunately, the place that sort of record is most likely to be found nowadays is an obituary.

Graham could be a partisan knife-fighter (perhaps most famously with his impassioned speech in defense of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018), and a bipartisan dealmaker the next day, a dual role that many of the now-departed giants of the Senate played with gusto. “He had a unique ability,” President Trump said yesterday. “He was able to deal with Democrats and Republicans. If I had a problem — a real problem, I wouldn’t often ask — but if I had a problem with a Democrat, he could work it out.”

Graham’s rise to the Senate was unlikely, having grown up in the back of a bar, to two parents who died by the time he was 21, leaving him to take care of his little sister. (He would later attribute his passion for maintaining Social Security to his and his sister’s reliance on the program’s survivor benefits.) Perhaps that is why he opted to milk the role for all it was worth. “What’s the point in having the job if you don’t do something with it?” Graham would often ask, according to his former campaign manager.

In an age when many lawmakers prefer to take a backseat, we would do well with a few more senators trying to be relevant.

Good morning, friends. I asked for questions yesterday and you all responded with a bunch of great ones — so many that I’ll soon be returning to some of the ones I didn’t get to.

For today, many of the questions revolved around two people — Graham Platner and Mitch McConnell — so we’re going to focus our attention there.

I’ll be answering:

• Why Democrats didn’t have a better nominee than Platner to begin with

• What happens to Platner now

• Whether Platner is right that he wouldn’t have been able to wage a campaign without support from the national party

• Why it always takes so long for the media to report on congressional absences

• Whether there’s a way for McConnell to be replaced if he never returns to work

As always, thank you so much for supporting Wake Up To Politics. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, I hope you’ll consider signing up and unlocking all of today’s edition. Even if you can’t, you can help out by sharing WUTP with your friends and family: word of mouth is the No. 1 way this newsletter spreads. If you think non-partisan, level-headed, nuanced political analysis is important, I hope you’ll click the “forward” button and encourage your friends to sign up.

Let’s dive in!

Platner

Q: Wasn’t there a better candidate than Platner from the start?

All year, Democrats have been asking themselves, Why is no one else running for Senate in Maine? They aren’t asking that now!

Democrats have gone from despairing over their limited options to being overwhelmed with potential candidates: Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, former Maine Senate president Troy Jackson, former public health official Nirav Shah, former congressional aide Jordan Wood, social worker Paige Loud, and brewery owner Dan Kleban have all announced bids in the last 48 hours.

Where were all these people a few months ago?

Well, mainly running for other offices: Bellows, Jackson, and Shah all ran in this year’s gubernatorial primary (and lost). Wood and Loud both ran in a House primary (and lost). Kleban briefly ran for the Senate seat but was crowded out of the race.

There are a few reasons why none of these people ran for Senate (until now). First, everyone in Maine politics is terrified of Susan Collins, an electoral dynamo who has dispatched every rival who has tried to pick her off (including Bellows, who Collins beat by 37 points in 2014). The open governor’s race (which a Democrat is virtually guaranteed to win, unlike the Senate race) seemed like a much more inviting opportunity.

Second, Democratic leaders froze the field for Janet Mills, the incumbent governor, who took months to decide whether she wanted to run. In the meantime, the party tried to push other candidates (like Kleban) out of the race.

Third, there was probably really only room for one anti-Mills candidate, and Platner quickly captured all of that momentum. This is not unlike the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, where there ended up being significant room for a candidate to soak up support from those dissatisfied with the establishment favorite — but only room for one. (Sorry, Martin O’Malley.)

As it turned out, the two candidates who emerged from this process (Mills and Platner) were both deeply flawed, including in ways that directly undercut what was supposed to be their main appeals.

Mills was supposed to be the electability candidate, but the truth was that she was not especially popular in the state of Maine. Per Morning Consult, Mills’ approval rating is only 51%, which makes her one of the least popular governors in the country.1 She was not some electoral dynamo waiting in the wings. She is also 78 years old at a time when voters are more skeptical than ever of aging candidates, a stereotypically establishment pick at a time when voters are skeptical of establishment picks, and it was clear from the start that she didn’t really want the job: she ran a lackluster, low-energy campaign.

Platner, meanwhile, was supposed to be the working-class candidate, but the truth was that he held no particular appeal among working-class voters. According to a New York Times poll, he was losing to Collins among non-college-educated voters, 37% to 58%, and beating her among college-educated voters, 66% to 32%. Democrats don’t exactly need help winning college-educated voters; in the end, Platner wasn’t bringing that much to the table they didn’t already have, except for a whole lot of baggage.

But because Democrats froze the field for Mills, and Platner was the only outsider candidate willing to buck leadership, they were the only two options presented to Democratic voters. In the end, they may also have been the two worst candidates to face off against Collins, and — bizarrely — Democrats may just be better off having had their nominee implode, since it was probably the only way to get someone not named Graham Platner or Janet Mills on the Senate ballot.

Q: Have we seen the last of Graham Platner?

Well, for starters, it’s worth noting that Platner is still technically a candidate for Senate. He has announced plans to end his campaign, but has yet to file the paperwork to make it official. Per Axios, Platner has told aides he won’t file his withdrawal until Monday — the very last day, under state law, that he can do so and still be removed from the ballot.

The delay is causing heart palpitations in Democratic circles; it’s one final middle-finger to the party establishment, and gives a good idea of where Platner’s head is at as he (probably?) exits the race.

From there, I’ll be interested to see what role he plays in the fall campaign. All of the potential Democratic candidates (even Troy Jackson, his former ally) have made clear that they are uninterested in his endorsement or in campaigning with him. But Platner does still have money in his campaign account; will he donate it to the eventual nominee?2

After this campaign is over, he’ll likely disappear into obscurity. Maybe he’ll start a podcast if he wants to monetize his newfound fame and (in some small corners, at this point) popularity.

I keep seeing Democrats calling Platner “selfish,” and certainly there’s something to that: his decision to run, despite the scandals lurking in his past, jeopardized his party’s chances of winning the Senate. But the reason I hesitate to use that label is that his decision to run, despite the scandals lurking in his past, also completely ruined his life in a completely inevitable way.

Before this, Platner was entirely anonymous. Now, these allegations will follow him for the rest of his life, no matter what he tries to do. His neighbors say they look at him differently. Who knows the state of his marriage.

Launching a campaign like this when you knew there were skeletons in your closet is something darker than selfish. It’s self-destructive. There’s a delusion there and a willingness to gamble with your own life for power, even if there was just a 20% chance of getting power and an 80% chance of ruining your life, that is awfully striking.

Q: Platner said he was only dropping out of the race because it would be impossible to run a campaign without the DNC’s support. But is that historically true?f

In an 11-minute video on Wednesday, Graham Platner denied the allegations of sexual assault that had been leveled against him. But he said he was ending his campaign anyway, because:

Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign. We are going to lose our ability to fundraise. We are going to lose our ability to access voter data. We are going to lose all of the things that any campaign needs on the basic level simply to function. Larger organizations, the national-level party, the bigger donor networks: they have all committed to spending no money in this race if I’m in it.

When Platner says this, he is not referring just to the Democratic National Committee (DNC); he is also talking about the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, and Senate Majority PAC (SMP), the Senate Democrats’ top super PAC, both of which had pulled their resources from Maine after the most recent allegations and said they would only re-invest if there was a different nominee.

These groups can have a huge impact on a Senate race. To see how, let’s use Maine’s last Democratic Senate nominee, Sara Gideon, as an example. In 2020, Gideon’s campaign spent $62.9 million running against Susan Collins. That’s a lot of money.

But basically the same amount — $61 million — was spent by other pro-Gideon groups in that election. That means, out of all the money that poured into Maine that year to elect Gideon, only half of it was raised by her campaign. The other half came from outside groups. The top group spending on Gideon’s behalf? Senate Majority PAC. In second place? The DSCC. Senate Majority PAC alone plowed about $28 million into the race.

So the DSCC and SMP pulling out of the Maine race deprived Platner of about half the funds he otherwise would have received. Per the New York Times, by the time he dropped out, Platner’s campaign had only $1.3 million in the bank, compared to Collins’ $9.7 million. Platner was going to need the outside groups spending on his behalf in order to stay competitive with Collins.

There’s more than money at play here. As Platner hinted at, the national Democratic Party and its state affiliates generally control access to what’s known as the “voter file,” which is the master database that contains information for every voter, whether they’ve voted in the past, what party they likely lean towards, and the party’s past communications with them. No modern campaign can function without it, and state parties have cut off access to disfavored candidates in the past.

Parties also provide all sorts of help organizing, canvassing, communications, digital, get-out-the-vote, and strategic assistance (and even more now after a recent Supreme Court decision). And beyond cutting a candidate off from outside funds, party leaders wield a lot of influence with the sort of “donor networks” that Platner references, and could discourage them from donating to Platner or other organizations supporting his campaign.

Going back to Gideon, she also received outside spending from groups like EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood, and the League of Conservation Voters. These are the “large organizations” Platner is talking about: Democratic interest groups that would probably also pull their money out if Democratic leaders told them to.

Finally, even if you strip away all the outside spending, Democrats could have hobbled Platner’s ability to raise small-dollar donations for his own campaign. Most Democratic campaigns are powered by the fundraising platform ActBlue, which theoretically could have banned Platner from using their infrastructure. (That’s what happened to Andrew Cuomo before he resigned.)

So, yes: running a modern campaign is about more than just your own campaign apparatus. You also need access to a fundraising platform, a voter file, and outside spending from interest groups and party committees, all of which Platner could have lost. Running a competitive Senate campaign would have been practically impossible without them.

McConnell

Q: Why is the “media” always so far behind on absenteeism? Most recently McConnell: been in the hospital since June 14th but “we” just hear about it beginning of July. The rep from NJ was running for reelection in a primary and most didn’t know he had been out for months. I woman I think in CA was living in a “home.” When a sports figure or famous person checks into a hospital, we find out immediately, yet with our politicians sometimes we never know!

Read more

It’s been way too long since we’ve done a mailbag edition! So I’m sending this email as an invitation to send questions you want answered.

Feel free to ask anything about stories in the news cycle — Platner, Iran, McConnell, SCOTUS — or broader questions on your mind about the political system.

You can send a question by leaving a comment, clicking “reply” to this email, or by dropping a question anonymously here.

Ask a question

Also, while you’re here: if you haven’t checked out my video interview with Sen. Gary Peters about how to make Congress work, I think you’ll enjoy it! Take a look:

Talk to you tomorrow,

Gabe

Remember the infant formula shortage from back in 2022? Once the issue subsided, the media attention largely fell away — but, behind the scenes, legislators have been working on a bipartisan bill that would prevent a similar crisis from happening again. The Protect Infant Formula from Contamination Act recently passed the Senate unanimously.

In the first video for my new YouTube channel, I speak with Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), the author of the bill, about what it’s like working across party lines to actually get something like this done in Congress, even when it takes years. Who do you talk to? How do you get them on board? We also discuss the future of bipartisanship in Congress, and whether or not responsible governing efforts like this one are soon to be a thing of the past.

Check out the video here:

And now, let’s take a trip to Maine…

It appears that the Graham Platner subplot in American politics is almost over.

Platner rocketed onto the scene nearly a year ago as an unknown, outspoken, progressive oysterman who quickly caught fire and — against all odds — ended up driving Gov. Janet Mills, a fixture of Maine politics, out of the state’s Senate Democratic primary race.

Democrats stood by him through the Reddit posts, and the tattoo of a Nazi symbol, and the sexting with women who were not his wife, and after an ex-girlfriend accused him of being physically threatening toward her, still believing that the scandal-plagued upstart was their best hope at fulfilling a long-held dream: unseating Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

They don’t believe that now. In a Politico report on Monday, a woman who previously dated Platner accused him of entering her home uninvited in 2021 and raping her. The Washington Post then reported Tuesday that the first ex-girlfriend said he would repeatedly remove condoms without her consent when they were having sex.

In response, the Democratic National Committee and the Maine Democratic Party called on Platner to drop out. So did Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), his foremost backer. The Senate Democrats’ campaign arm has pulled its spending from the state, and said they will not invest in the race unless Platner steps away.

Under Maine law, if Platner withdraws by “5 p.m. of the 2nd Monday in July preceding the general election” — this coming Monday — the state party can replace him with a new nominee. Virtually isolated within the party, Platner is apparently grasping for one last bit of leverage, attempting to negotiate over who his replacement will be and threatening to stay in the race if an “establishment” candidate is anointed. Many in Platner’s camp are promoting former Maine Senate president Troy Jackson, who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination this year with Sanders’ support.

The executive director of the state party said in a statement last night that Platner’s advisers have “repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale” in picking a replacement nominee. “We’ve repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, nor in determining what this process looks like,” the party official added.

According to the New York Times, the state party (which would have until July 27 to name a replacement) is considering holding a pop-up convention or statewide caucus in late July to select a new candidate if Platner does withdraw. Jackson (who came in third place in the gubernatorial primary) has already filed paperwork to seek the nod; two of his former rivals, ex-public health official Nirav Shah (who came in second in the gubernatorial primary) and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (who came in fourth), are also seen as possible contenders. Bellows previously ran against Collins in 2014, losing by 36 percentage points.

Some Democrats are reaching even further afield: one firm polled the popularity of Patrick Dempsey, the Maine native who played Derek “McDreamy” Shepard on “Grey’s Anatomy.” (His net favorability rating was +43%, compared to Platner’s -7%, Shah’s +10%, Jackson’s +6%, and Bellows’ +1%.)

How does it typically go for political parties when they pull off this sort of late-in-the-game candidate swap?

Obviously, we all saw a party try it and come up short in 2024, when Democrats subbed in Kamala Harris for Joe Biden. Another modern example is the 2004 Illinois Senate race, when businessman Jack Ryan won the Republican nomination and dropped out four days later, after his divorce records were unsealed and showed that he had taken his ex-wife to sex clubs and tried to pressure her to perform sexual acts while there. The state GOP replaced Ryan with right-wing commentator Alan Keyes, who went on to lose to a young state senator with a funny name.

That’s right: Barack Obama first arrived in Washington as a result of a failed candidate swap.

On the other side of the ledger, there’s the 2002 Senate election in New Jersey, when incumbent Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli withdrew in late September due to a campaign finance scandal. Democrats replaced him on ballot with former Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who won the race after about a month-long campaign.

Lautenberg died in 2013, and neither Harris nor Obama were likely to speak to me. But I found another candidate swap veteran who would.

“World’s greatest guy speaking,” Arne Carlson said when I reached him by phone Tuesday. Carlson is 91 years old and lives in Hopkins, Minnesota. More than 30 years ago, he engaged in a successful last-minute political rescue mission — and he thinks his experience is an encouraging sign for Maine Democrats.

“The prevailing opinion is that when a candidate comes in at this time, that candidate is at a disadvantage,” Carlson acknowledged. He thinks that conventional wisdom is wrong.

Back in 1990, Carlson was serving as the state auditor of Minnesota when he decided to throw his hat in the ring for the state’s governorship. A moderate Republican, he entered the GOP primary, but an outsider businessman named Jon Grunseth outflanked Carlson from the right and “beat the daylights” out of him (his words). “This was the Christian right taking over the Republican Party, that’s really what it was,” Carlson told me, recounting how Grunseth leveraged support from “pro-life, pro-gun” voters to defeat him.

About a month before the election, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported that Grunseth had skinny-dipped with his daughter and other teenage girls at a 1981 pool party at his home. Two other girls who attended the party alleged that he encouraged them to swim naked as well; when they refused, they said, he tried to take their swimsuits off and touched one of them inappropriately.

Like Platner, Grunseth denied the allegations and insisted that they were politically motivated. Grunseth initially rebuffed the mounting calls for him to drop out, which led Carlson to launch a write-in campaign (which “realistically had virtually no chance,” he admitted yesterday, if only because voters were unlikely to spell his first name “Arne” correctly, without an “i”).

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In many countries, political parties exert tight control over who their candidates for office are. In America, because of our more democratic primary system, parties play a secondary role: voters pick a nominee, and the party can generally only make a change if that nominee then decides to call it quits. Even though the nominee is running on the party’s ballot line, the party has already rented it out to the candidate, and they can’t get it back unless the nominee gives it up voluntarily.

This gives the democratically selected nominee all the leverage in these situations, for better or for worse, and allows a controversial candidate to effectively hold their party hostage. That’s arguably what Platner’s doing now. Grunseth did the same thing. At one point, he even called a press conference to announce his withdrawal from the race, but his supporters started protesting (“tossing chairs on the floor against the wall, saying, you have got to stay in this race, and if you don’t think you can win, you owe us a good fight,” as one adviser recalled).

Like something out of a movie, Grunseth went to the podium and tore his withdrawal speech in two. “I came here tonight to withdraw from this race,” he said. “But there has been just an incredible outpouring of love… We are going to press forward no matter [what].” Call that the Maine Democrats’ nightmare scenario.

On October 28, the Star Tribune dropped another bombshell, reporting that Grunseth — who had promised that nothing more was out there, and that his “wild years” ended when he married his wife — had, in fact, engaged in a years-long extramarital affair with a woman named Tamara Taylor.

“The Star Tribune broke the story about his so-called mistress, and she was absolutely gorgeous,” Carlson recounted. “If there are two and a half million men in Minnesota, and they were asked by the Star Tribune, ‘Did you sleep with her?’, every one of them would have said, ‘You bet,’ and there was only one dissenter: Jon Grunseth. I mean, Tamara Taylor was absolutely one of the most lovely creatures ever put on this planet.”

The image Grunseth had tried to build in the public eye was punctured. “It’s a little hard to run on a Christian values platform and then have all this tawdry stuff going on,” Carlson pointed out. This time, Grunseth agreed to drop out.

At this point, there was only one week left in the race. Grunseth, like Platner, wanted to have a say in who his replacement would be. At the would-be withdrawal press conference, he had been planning to announce who he wanted as the next nominee, a state legislator who was in Grunseth’s “exact same mold” ideologically, as Carlson put it. Grunseth did not want the much more moderate Carlson to take his place.

But it was too late. He had waited too long, and lost too many allies, to wield any influence. The state party determined that there simply wasn’t enough time to pick a new candidate from scratch and gave the nomination to Carlson, as the primary runner-up, by default.

After all the mud-slinging that had taken place between Grunseth and the Democratic candidate, incumbent Gov. Rudy Perpich, Carlson said that voters were relieved to have a fresh face.

“I was in the auditor’s office, and hundreds of people just gathered under the windows, [chanting] ‘We want Arne, we want Arne,’” he recalled. “It was very seductive.”

“It was an unbelievable upheaval,” Carlson added. “I remember my first flight was down to Mankato, and I swear to God it was a scene right out of Charles Lindbergh landing in Paris, of people cheering. I kept saying, ‘I’d like to get this campaign back to the issues,’ and they kept cheering and cheering and cheering, and many of these stops I was never able to give a talk because they were cheering so much.”

“There was a tremendous outpouring of support. I would go downtown and people would stuff money in my pockets. That’s no exaggeration. We raised more money in the first few days of this new campaign than we raised in the prior primary.”

The short campaign, and the enthusiasm unleashed by finally being rid of Grunseth, worked. Carlson beat Perpich in November and went on to serve two terms as Minnesota’s governor. “I was a surfer who caught a beautiful wave,” he told me.

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Carlson predicted that whoever replaces Platner will benefit from the same feeling of relief. “All that has taken place so far is like two battleships lobbing shells at each other, and after a while, the public is tired of it… A nice new fresh face comes in, the public invariably welcomes it.”

Indeed, it’s possible that the best-case scenario for Maine Democrats is having a nominee who is not Graham Platner and not Janet Mills — and since they were the only two viable candidates for the nomination, the only possible way for that to happen was for Platner to drop out now, after the primary.

When the New York Times recently polled six Senate battlegrounds, and asked voters which candidate they planned to vote for and which party they would prefer to control the Senate generally, they found all the Democratic candidates running ahead of where they “should” be … except Platner, whose vote share was 10 points behind the percentage of Maine voters who wanted Democrats to win the Senate.

Part of this was Collins’ unique strength, built up over five terms. But part of it was Platner’s unique vulnerabilities: his favorability rating in the Times poll was lower than Collins’.

If Platner drops out, the new nominee Democrats put forward will still face a tough road — but, at least, that candidate will likely be more popular than either Platner or Mills, their previous two options, and possibly more popular than Collins as well.

Carlson, the former Minnesota governor, acknowledged that his situation didn’t perfectly parallel the one in Maine. His timeline was much shorter, which he believed worked to his advantage (less time to get down in the muck with his opponent and lose the sheen of riding above it). He says that he didn’t have to worry as much about losing Grunseth’s supporters as the next Democrat will likely have to worry about losing Platner’s. While Grunseth and Carlson drew from different voter bases, a Democrat likely won’t beat Collins without winning the bulk of Platner voters. To that end, because Carlson and Grunseth were so clearly opposed to each other, he didn’t have to worry about the stink of Grunseth’s scandal rubbing off on him, which a Democrat might have to if they are seen as a close Platner ally.

Still, he said, the mission of any last-minute candidate remains the same.

“[There is a] wave of enthusiasm that the public is going to give this new entry, and then the question is, can you ride that wave successfully?” Carlson said. “They’re going to give this new person the benefit of the doubt, and that person then has to live up to that expectation. If that person comes out and smells like a politician? Goodbye.”

Kamala Harris, he noted, benefitted from the same wave of enthusiasm in her early days as a replacement nominee, but ultimately proved unable to ride it once the initial excitement wore off.

It’s unknown whether Platner will remain in the shadows, making life difficult for a replacement nominee (as Biden did). For his part, after dropping out, Grunseth would later sue a fellow Minnesota Republican, alleging that they promised to pay down his campaign debts if he exited the race, and the Marriott hotel chain, alleging that a hotel employee gave records to the Star Tribune revealing his stay with Tamara Taylor. He lost both lawsuits, and later moved to Australia, where he started a cherry farm. He now lives in Scotland.

Carlson, meanwhile, has since been effectively expelled from the Minnesota Republican Party, which has continued moving to the right. He now considers himself an Independent, he told me; he endorsed Hillary Clinton, Biden, and Harris in the last three presidential elections.

Reflecting on his week as a political pinch-hitter, Carlson acknowledged that it’s a “very difficult assignment,” though he believes it can be easier than slogging through the pitfalls of a long campaign. When I asked if he believes he would have won the governorship in 1990 if he had been the nominee from the start, he admitted that he wasn’t sure.

“I truthfully can’t answer that question,” Carlson said. “I think either way it would have been close.”

The Democratic establishment has been knocked back on its heels.

Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette was defeated in a primary challenge last Tuesday, the third House Democrat in two weeks to be ousted by a rival to their left. DeGette was bested by Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old lawyer and PhD student backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The 15-term incumbent has been in Congress longer than Kiros has been alive.

Kiros’ primary victory followed those of Darializa Avila Chevalier and Brad Lander, who beat Democratic Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman, respectively, last month in New York. Chevalier and Lander were both endorsed by New York City’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, as was Claire Valdez, a DSA member who won an open primary race in New York.

Also last Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet became the first senator in the post-World War II era to be defeated in an open gubernatorial primary when he lost in an upset to Colorado state attorney general Phil Weiser. His Senate colleague John Hickenlooper only narrowly survived a primary challenge from a progressive rival.

In recent weeks, Democratic voters have snubbed the picks of Democratic leaders in House primary contests in Maine and California, while the scandal-plagued oysterman Graham Platner emerged from nowhere to defeat a sitting governor in Maine’s Senate primary.

Still to come: Michigan’s Senate primary on August 4, where progressive public health official Abdul El-Sayed is currently favored to beat Rep. Haley Stevens, Chuck Schumer’s chosen candidate. A rematch between moderate Rep. Wesley Bell and his progressive predecessor Cori Bush will take place the same day. Then, one week later: Minnesota’s Senate primary will pit centrist Rep. Angie Craig against progressive lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan. Other generational and ideological clashes loom.

What does this mean for the future of the Democratic Party?

The democratic-socialist left has been on a victory lap since its Colorado victory, attempting to flex its muscle and capitalize on the momentum from their series of wins. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made her first Senate endorsement of the cycle last week, attempting to circle the wagons around El-Sayed. Mamdani counterprogrammed Donald Trump with a speech marking America’s 250th birthday that sought to cement his status as a national leader. And their shared political mentor, Bernie Sanders, boasted on X that his movement “may be on the brink of the political revolution we have been fighting for.”

But if this is the Democrats’ Tea Party moment, as commentators on the left and right have said, then it is instructive to look at the original — the 2010s-era version on the Republican side, not the 1770s version in Boston — to see the unexpected places where a political movement of this sort can lead.

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The 2010 GOP and 2026 Democratic Party rebellions started from roughly the same position, with political parties whose moderate standard-bearers lost the White House to a hated rival.

In both cases, the party bases quickly lost faith in their party leadership’s ability (or willingness) to stand up to the new president. Polls showing widespread discontent within the party soon gave way to primary races where incumbents were defeated in a wave of anti-establishment fervor.

From here, there are two strands to consider what the Republican Tea Party of the 2010s can tell us about the Democratic Tea Party of the 2020s.

The first is in Congress. In 2010, Republicans won a sweeping House majority, with some members aligned with the Tea Party and some not. The party’s then-leader, John Boehner, was easily elected speaker of the House. It would be, as former House GOP aide John Leganski recently pointed out, the last time a House speaker would be elected with the unanimous support of their party at the start of a Congress.

Boehner quickly began facing unrest from his more combative members, which has arguably never stopped: Boehner’s deputy, Eric Cantor, was defeated by a Tea Party rival in 2014; then Boehner himself was forced to resign in 2015; then his successor Paul Ryan stepped down in 2019; then his successor Kevin McCarthy was ousted in 2023; now the next man up, Mike Johnson, has effectively lost control of the House. (If Johnson lasts another Congress in charge of the House GOP, it will be the first time in the post-Tea Party era that House Republicans have kept a leader for longer than four years.)

If you want to know what it looks like for a House majority to feature a small group of extreme members, look no further than Capitol Hill right now, where Johnson has now scrapped his plans and sent lawmakers home early two weeks in a row because Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) and others are holding the floor hostage until they see progress on the election bill known as the SAVE America Act.

If Democrats have a House majority come January 2027, unlike Boehner in 2011 — but like McCarthy in 2023 and Johnson in 2025 — Hakeem Jeffries will likely have a relatively narrow margin. (If Democrats win every seat that the Cook Political Report has labeled as leaning, likely, or solidly Democratic, plus every tossup, that would still only land them with 223 seats, five more than a majority.)

Of the progressive candidates listed above, Lander has committed to voting for Jeffries for speaker, but Kiros, Avila Chevalier, and Valdez have not. If Democrats win only a two-seat majority (meaning they lose three of the 18 Cook tossup seats, far from an unthinkable occurrence), that would be enough to either defeat Jeffries, or extract some serious concessions from him. And that’s not even factoring in the additional left-wing candidates who could win primaries this cycle (Cori Bush has also refused to commit to backing Jeffries), plus the so-called “Squad” members who are there already, like AOC, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.

In 2023, Kevin McCarthy was forced to promise that his allied super PAC would not take sides in open-seat primaries in safe Republican districts as a concession to win the speakership. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Squad+, if you will, makes a similar demand of Jeffries — or even tries to get the party to unilaterally disarm when it comes to accepting money from corporate PACs. (Kiros said this week that she will not support “anyone for leadership who takes corporate PAC money.”)

You could also see DSA-aligned lawmakers demand Jeffries promise floor votes that might divide the Democratic caucus, like on a Trump impeachment effort or bills related to Israel. (The Block the Bombs Act, restricting weapons sales to Israel, has become a litmus test on the left that these members could insist Jeffries hold a vote on.)

On the Senate side, despite having more candidates (including Platner) explicitly say they won’t support him, Chuck Schumer will have a somewhat easier road to keeping his position, since Senate leaders only need support from half their caucus, whereas House speakers need support from half the chamber (which is to say, in this era of small majorities, basically their entire caucus). There is a reason Mitch McConnell remained atop the Senate GOP from 2007 to 2025, even as House Republicans cycled through four leaders in that time; Schumer can suffer many more defections than Jeffries and still skate by.

That said, it isn’t only newcomers who are dissatisfied with Schumer: a group of Democratic senators including Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy have started back-channeling against Schumer as part of a group they call the “Fight Club.” In 2019, to win the speakership, Nancy Pelosi had to promise to only serve two more terms in the position. Perhaps Schumer will be forced to say that he’ll retire come 2028.

Don’t necessarily put much stock in promises from candidates that they won’t vote for a given leadership contender — 21 Democrats voted for Pelosi for speaker in 2019 after pledging not to, gambling that their constituents weren’t paying close attention — but do expect members on both sides of the Capitol to put a price on their vote, especially (on the House side) in a razor-thin majority.

In theory, leading a majority when the other party is in the White House should be less challenging. You have the security of knowing little that you pass will ever become law, which lessens the pressure somewhat and typically allows a party to focus on the one thing that unites them: investigating the other side. Then again, such unity wasn’t exactly McCarthy’s experience under Biden.

Speaking of: I haven’t seen any Democrats mention their plans for the motion to vacate (the procedural tool by which McCarthy was ousted from the speakership) if they retake the House majority. When Democrats last held the majority, they changed the rules so that a vote to oust a speaker could only be forced by a majority of a party caucus (in fact, moderates insisted on raising the threshold before electing Pelosi speaker). McCarthy then agreed to allow such a vote to be triggered by a lone member in 2023 (which ultimately proved his undoing). The threshold was raised slightly to nine members in 2025, where it remains today.

Will the Squad+ vie to keep the threshold low, to subject Jeffries to the same sword of Damocles that dangled over McCarthy? That will be one easy test for whether the left-wing Democrats are more willing to play ball with their party’s establishment, or if they’re just as scorched-earth as their right-wing counterparts in the House Freedom Caucus. If they opt for the latter route, expect a Democratic majority that suffers through some of the same struggles that have plagued Republicans since the emergence of the Tea Party.

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That brings us to our second area of analysis: the presidential level.

District-level and national elections are very different, and the latter requires the ability to compete on different types of terrain. In 2010, candidates like Marco Rubio in Florida and Ron Johnson in Wisconsin were able to successfully use Tea Party backing to win Senate races in battleground states.

So far, the wins scored by the Democratic Tea Party have largely been in primaries in deep-blue territory, like New York City (which Kamala Harris won by 38 points in 2024) and, in the DeGette/Kiros race on Tuesday, Denver (which Harris won even more comfortably, by a 56-point margin). These are very progressive voters picking very progressive candidates.

Platner’s primary victory will offer a test of the left’s ability to play in more contested races, although that contest is still playing out in Maine, hardly a battleground state (Harris won the state by seven points). If El-Sayed wins his primary in Michigan — where he is favored, even after the last-minute exit of state Sen. Mallory McMorrow — that will be a better testing ground. A democratic socialist state legislator, Francesca Hong, also has a shot at Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial nomination, potentially setting up another glimpse at the left’s ability to compete in an evenly divided state.

Then again, if we’re trying to game out the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, that’s getting ahead of ourselves a bit, since the operative question will still be the mood of the Democratic primary electorate (though in more places than just deep-blue terrain), not necessarily who would perform well in a general election.

Interestingly, so far, the anti-establishment fervor seen in primaries in Colorado and New York doesn’t really show up in 2028 Democratic primary polls. According to the Race to the White House average, the top three contenders right now are establishment-aligned Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Pete Buttigieg, who combine for 53% of the vote. Ocasio-Cortez is in fourth place, with 10.8%. These surveys are much too early to be predictive of 2028, but they still give a decent snapshot of where the party stands in 2026; if the national party, not just in certain cities, was itching to “throw the bums out,” you might not see the former vice president and governor of California in the lead.

By comparison, at this point in the 2012 Republican primary cycle, there were polls showing the more Tea Party-aligned Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee running even with or ahead of establishment darling Mitt Romney.

Of course, the end of that story, though, is that Romney ended up winning the 2012 GOP nod. Just two years after the Tea Party wave of 2010, the movement fractured between different candidates and didn’t end up being much of a force in the 2012 primaries. In fact, for all the power the Tea Party once wielded in the GOP, there has never really been a Tea Party-aligned presidential nominee — and at this point, there likely never will be. At the presidential level, time mostly passed them by, a cautionary tale for the DSA left this time around.

In the 2016 Republican primaries, many Tea Party leaders — including the group Tea Party Patriots, a key movement vehicle — endorsed Ted Cruz. Republican voters who identified with the Tea Party split roughly evenly between Cruz and Trump, despite the fact that Trump bucked against many of the movement’s tenets.

The Tea Party was all about limited government, cutting taxes, and balancing the budget; in his 2016 campaign, Trump was not shy about his vision of a strong central government, repeatedly spoke about raising taxes on the wealthy, and pledged to protect deficit-busting entitlement programs. He attracted support from much of the Tea Party despite diverging from the Tea Party ideologically.

The lesson here is that voters can come to a movement for all sorts of reasons. Many Tea Party voters undoubtedly believed in the ideological program of the movement — but many, clearly, did not, and were there more because of general, non-ideological dissatisfaction with the Republican Party leadership and a desire for a candidate who would fight more strenuously with Democrats.

As Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) memorably put it in 2017, after discovering that many voters he expected to support Rand Paul in the GOP presidential primaries were now supporting Trump: “All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”

It’s possible that a similar dynamic is true on the left, that some of the voters fueling recent primary victories are genuinely ideologically aligned with the victorious candidates, and some are merely hoping to signal their displeasure to the Democratic Party leadership as they throng to more combative candidates.

This would help explain the seeming disconnect between the recent victories by left-wing candidates, and the fact that, while a majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said they were dissatisfied with the party in a recent New York Times poll, that dissatisfaction didn’t seem to be rooted in an urgent desire for the party to move to the left ideologically.

According to the survey, just 25% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents want the party to move to the left, compared to 52% who want the party to move to the center. The same is true on most — but not all — issues. Although a plurality of Democrats want the party to move to the left on health care, and more than one-third say the same about the economy, the poll results on social issues do not suggest that the DSA’s proposed platform (calling to abolish the “carceral forces of the capitalist state” and for open borders) would be popular among Democratic voters.

This data suggests that Democratic primary voters are voting for insurgent candidates and are fed up with their party, but aren’t necessarily looking to move in an ideologically extreme direction — not unlike Republicans a decade ago, when Tea Party leaders thought their voters wanted smaller government and a balanced budget, but it turns out many were just backing “the craziest son of a bitch in the race,” and jumped ship to an equally combative, but less ideologically orthodox, standard-bearer as soon as one became available.

When you whip up anti-establishment fervor among voters, it doesn’t always lead to the policy direction that activists expect. It sometimes spirals out of the activists’ control, and gets channeled (or co-opted) into something slightly different. “The Tea Party still exists, except now it’s called Make America Great Again,” Trump told journalist Tim Alberta for his excellent book “American Carnage,” which chronicles this evolution.

For Democrats, could this look like a Stephen A. Smith or Mark Cuban pulling a Trump? Maybe. Trump still shared at least one major policy critique of the establishment GOP with Tea Party activists (on immigration), and any insurgent outsider on the Democratic side would probably have to do the same (here, Israel policy is probably the most obvious ticket for admission).

Yes, it’s hard to imagine Democrats like Zohran Mamdani or AOC signing on with a Smith or a Cuban just because they share their anti-establishment sentiment — but, then again, many Tea Party politicians never fully embraced Trump either. Think of Massie, or Rand Paul, or Justin Amash, all of whom went from Tea Party politicians to some of Trump’s top critics in the GOP. Trump basically drove Charles Koch, who bankrolled much of the Tea Party and was once the most powerful donor in the GOP, out of partisan politics.

To return to the available 2028 polling, it is revealing that Cory Booker’s stock jumped in April of last year, after his 25-hour stemwinder against Trump, while Newsom spiked last August, as he began trolling Trump on social media.

This offers more of an attitudinal message than an ideological one: above all, Democratic voters (like Republican voters a decade ago) are looking for a fighter. We know from experience that, even if that fighting spirit temporarily aligns ideologically rigid activists with these disaffected voters, their paths could soon diverge — and lead to all sorts of unexpected places.