ACTUALLY, DEMOCRATS COULD USE A J.D. VANCE RIGHT NOW

Variety's Marlow Stern thinks Bill Maher got "played" by J.D. Vance on Maher's HBO talk show. What actually happened was that Maher had some genuine criticisms of the Trump/Vance administration, but -- like most American political interviewers -- he gave his interview subject endless time to respond to criticism, and when he did follow-up, it wasn't very pointed.

I know you all think J.D. Vance is a joke, but he's better at this than you realize. It's not just that he has a Yale law degree -- he approaches interviews like a courtroom lawyer. He knows that his job is to present an extremely one-sided case and make it sound reasonable. Repeatedly with Maher, he defended the indefensible in a way that wouldn't be at all convincing to anyone who understood the issue, but really might be convincing to a fence-sitter who wasn't particularly well informed. Or if he couldn't win over the fence-sitters, he at least persuaded some of them that his side isn't completely deranged.

So here's Vance on the Iran negotiations:

“You’re negotiating for America. I’m rooting for America... Why is this different? Why isn’t it bullshit this time?” asked Maher.

According to Vance, his negotiations have been successful because oil is “down to 73 dollars a barrel” and their “nuclear program is destroyed,” adding, “If they’re willing to change, we’re willing to change too; if they’re not willing to change, we still fundamentally have all the cards and I think that’s a good place to be.”

“But their nuclear program isn’t destroyed,” Maher replied.

“What part of it is not destroyed?” questioned Vance. “The thing that you have to destroy is their ability to enrich uranium, which has been destroyed.”

“How do we know that?” shot back Maher. “All the time it was, we gotta get in there and we gotta get the dust. And we didn’t get in there, so how do we get the dust?”

The vice president reiterated that the program was “functionally destroyed” ...

On ICE:

“ICE, all that shit. Too rough. Too mean. Too unnecessary,” offered Maher. “I’m not asking you to apologize... I’m just saying, you’d go a long way toward getting people who [have] just completely shut the door to you and your administration if you guys would just own that — that you guys went too far. You went too far, and you should own that like you owned ‘childless cat ladies.’”

Vance obfuscated, saying, “You can’t do a law enforcement operation like that without having some situations that are recorded like that... I don’t think there was an easy way to do this.”

And on Trump's claim that the 2020 election was rigged:

[Maher said,] “It’s either going to be you or Rubio. Here’s my dealbreaker for your side: Under Trump, you guys have two outcomes that an election can be, either we win or they cheated. That shit has to stop. And that means the person who has to stop it will be you, or Marco. Can you tell me you will do that?” ...

“OK, Bill, so this is where I’m probably going to lose ya here,” offered Vance. “I don’t think we should not concede elections, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on... The biggest criticism I had of the 2020 election is that you had technology companies that were quite literally censoring negative information about the left and promoting negative information about the right.”

Vance knows he's not going to win these arguments with Maher, but his job isn't to win -- it's to persuade at least a few viewers that he and Trump and the rest of their party have a point. His job is to suggest that these issues are gray, not black-and-white.

Maher -- who says he usually votes Democratic, and who's given large amounts of money to Democrats in the past -- told Vance that his presidential "vote is in play" in 2028. The apparent reason is Maher's contempt for one Democrat, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won a House primary in New York's 13th District on Tuesday and who's almost certain to win the general election in the very blue district. Avila Chevalier has expressed some offputting views, which Maher returned to repeatedly throughout the show, ascribing them not only to her but to the two other progessives who won New York primaries the same day, and to all her voters (and the Democratic Party in general).

In his opening monologue, Maher said:

This is big news in this country. I don't know if you saw what happened in New York. There were three candidates for -- these are the primaries, they are going to win the election, so they're going to be three Democrats in Congress. These are Mandami's [sic] people. These are democratic socialists, I think very different than the Democratic Party. What happened is, you know, for years we're asking young people to vote. Well, now young people are voting, and they're voting to abolish the police, abolish prisons, unlimited immigration, so no cops, no prisons, no borders -- proving for sure that eating Tide pods does cause brain damage.

These are the views of Avila Chevalier, not Mayor Mamdani's other two endorsees, Claire Valdez and Brad Lander. She's expressed these views in now-deleted tweets; she recently repeated her opposition to the police and to deportations in an interview with a group of journalists known as the New York Editorial Board.

But she primarily ran on other issues. Here's the "Day 1 Agenda" she posted on her campaign site:

This is all standard-issue progressivism. Some of it -- a path to citizenship for DREAMers, a $15 minimum wage -- is supported even by moderate Democrats.

Without mentioning Avila Chevalier by name, Maher brought her up again in his Vance interview:

“If this is where the Democratic Party is going... this obsession with Israel, with the Jew-hating, with they don’t believe in capitalism, no prisons, if this is where they’re going, my vote is in play,” Maher told Vance.

Maher changed the subject before Vance could reply.

Obviously, there was no opportunity for a Democrat to rebut Maher during his monologue or the Vance interview. But he returned to the subject in a follow-up panel with Larry Willmore, formerly of The Daily Show, and Senator Raphael Warnock. This is where Democrats needed an advocate -- a lawyer for the defense, someone who'd make the best possible case for them, someone who'd do for them what Vance did for Trump.

Maher said to Warnock:

Some of these people who've just got elected as democratic socialists -- and I assume you are not a democratic socialist, that you're more of a Democrat ... they want to abolish prisons. I mean, they say it outright: abolish the police, abolish prisons. I don't know how society could run that way.

Warnock repeated the message of his new book: that we need police and prisons, but that we over-incarcerate in America. But neither he not Willmore told Maher that this is the worldview of only one of the candidates. I don't expect Willmore, who's a comedian, to know this, but if Democrats are in a panic about the wins by the Mamdani candidates, why don't they all have a ready response to questions about them?

Here's what that response should be:

These are the view of one candidate only. She will be one of 435 members of Congress if she wins the general election. Her views on these issues are not representative of the Democratic Party as a whole, and if a bill to abolish the police or prisons or the border came before Congress, Democrats in Congress would oppose it overwhelmingly.

But why does every Democrat have to answer for intemperate statements made by one Democrat? We just had a Republican who posted on Twitter that gay people have "no place in America." We have a Republican candidate for statewide office in Texas who wants to deport 100 million people, which means literally all the immigrant and descendants of immigrants who have come to this country or were even born in this country in the past sixty years -- all of them, including the immigrants who came here legally and followed every rule. There was a Republican gubernatorial candidate a couple of years ago who called himself a "Black Nazi" on a porn site; after we learned about that, he still got more than two million votes on the Republican Party line. If you're going to ask me about Darializa Avila Chevalier, you should ask every Republican who comes on this show about those people.

Avila Chevalier's views will still be offputting to most people, but at least defend the party and call out our politcal double standard. Take your own party's side in the argument.

IF THE CRIMES OF WATERGATE OCCURRED TODAY, WOULD THEY EVEN BE ILLEGAL?

J.D. Vance is trolling us again:

Vance described his admiration for Nixon during a conversation Thursday at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California....

“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Vance said.

Some observers see this as a comment on modern attention spans. In The New York Times, Matthew Purdy writes:

... Mr. Vance ... speaks from experience about the current life cycle of scandals, which age like fruit flies.

Questions of impropriety — or worse — buzz around, then flutter off. Presidential stock trades are replaced by pardons to contributors, which are replaced by new presidential branding schemes, which are replaced by contracts to the connected, which are replaced by elective surgery to national landmarks.

Well, actually, we've been talking about a particular act of "elective surgery to national landmarks" -- the failed restoration of the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall -- for nearly two weeks. Scandals don't always have a twelve-hour lifespan.

But a modern Watergate might fail to break through as a scandal for a simple reason: most or all of it would probably be legal, or at least "presumptively" legal.

The event that set off the Watergate scandal was a break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex. Operatives associated with President Nixon's reelection campaign were caught burglarizing the office and planting listening devices. Another notorious act was a break-in at the office of a psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, a government analyst who'd become a folk hero for leaking the Pentagon Papers.

When Trump ran for reelection in 2020, some people in his inner circle warned him against outrageous acts, or refused to execute such acts. Also, he didn't have the cover of the 2024 Trump v. United States decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that, as Oyez puts it, "A former U.S. President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority, [and] at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts."

Trump isn't permitted to run for reelection in 2028, and he (probably!) won't try to defy the Constitution by trying to run, so we don't know how far he'd go if he were running again, under what appears to be blanket immunity for official acts, and with a staff that never defies him. He's trying to win the midterms for congressional Republicans through acts of dubious legality -- seizing ballots from past elections, demanding voter rolls from states -- but he might reach Nixon levels of depravity if he were planning to run again himself.

But he wouldn't do it all surreptitiously, under the aegis of his camapign -- he'd do it as president. He'd claim he had to do what he did in the interests of national security.

I don't know how long the story would remain in the news. I don't know whether the targets of his acts would be able to find relief in the courts. But most of Nixon's crimes wouldn't even be treated as crimes if Trump ordered them now.

YOU DON'T REALLY HAVE TO DO A BIG ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY TO UNDERSTAND REPUBLICAN VOTERS

I agree with Philip Bump that you'll never understand why Donald Trump still retains the loyalty of nearly 40% of the country from the mainstream media's reporting.

Perhaps the hoariest trope in modern political reporting is the Diner Sitdown with a Trump Supporter. Between the ubiquity of them during President Donald Trump's first bid for his current position and the necessary superficiality of it — it is hard to take the measure of a person over the course of eating one slice of pie — such conversations became a source of derision or parody. Readers were often left with little to no insight, and the insights they were offered were often trivial and repetitive.

Bump correctly notes that most of these safaris come to no conclusion more edifying than "Trump voters like Trump." So what's the alternative? Bump recommends an academic study:

But what if you left the diner with those voters? What if you went to their homes, spent days with them? What if you tracked the media consumption and interviewed their friends and neighbors? What if it wasn't superficial? ...

In February, a team of researchers from ReD Associates, in partnership with the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, visited counties in three states — Michigan, South Carolina and Wyoming — to conduct the sort of in-depth research described above. Teams spent time with conservative Americans, getting to know them, getting to know their communities, getting to know their habits. They spoke with dozens of people in largely rural parts of the state, with the specific goal of understanding how Donald Trump supporters viewed the democratic institutions of the United States. What resulted was a thorough, if constrained, understanding of the set of beliefs and assumptions that correlates with support for the president.

The study appears to have some interesting insights, one of which is that these people are wary of democracy because they think it produces outcomes that conflict with their values. Here's an example:

They chafe at proscriptions that emanate from a federal government that is designed to service all 340 million Americans, often seeing conflicts between national and local priorities as examples of corruption....

One Wyoming resident dismissed the value of democracy through this lens: "Every single small town would be outvoted by every single city. We wouldn't be able to feed people cows. We'd all be eating seaweed."

We're told that they're not getting these ideas from the obvious sources. They don't have "a relentless dedication to watching Fox News." Instead,

The researchers found that the people with whom they spoke relied heavily on bespoke sources of information and ad hoc solutions for health problems. Diaries detailing their media diets include a range of YouTube channels, influencers and Facebook groups, few of which could be called media outlets in any real sense. They "do their own research," though that often means outsourcing their research to trusted, non-institutional voices....

This is worth knowing, but I think the message it sends is that it's really hard to find the source of these people's ideas, unless you're able to put together a team of researchers and conduct an ethnographic study like this.

I disagree. While I recognize that Fox is not the main source of news for younger right-wingers -- which is a consequence of the decline of print, television, and cable in the age of TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts -- Fox News is still part of the right-wing media ecosystem in which these "bespoke sources of information" operate. (They sources are not really "bespoke," i.e., custon-tailored for an individual. They're just more obscure than Fox.)

For as long as I've been blogging, I've been angry at the mainstream media for not paying attention to the narratives spread at Fox and elsewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem. For reporters (and Democratic politicians and consultants) who want to know why GOP voters hate Democrats as much as they do, Fox is in plain sight, just as, in the past, talk radio was in plain sight, and podcasters and video and Twitter influencers are in plain sight today. If you want to know what these people are thinking, you can still learn a lot just by looking at the top-rated right-wing oultlets in various media. Individuals voters might not get particular ideas from the top-rated outlets, but those ideas are circulating in and out of those outlets, and can be spotted in those places.

The guy who's afraid city slickers will ban meat and force him to eat seaweed? I'm not sure precisely where he got that notion, but you can easily find the idea, or variations of it, at Fox. Here a just some of the Fox headlines I found when I Googled "world economic forum ban meat foxnews.com":

* Davos speaker calls for one billion people to 'stop eating meat' for 'innovation' and the environment

* GOP rep introduces resolution condemning UN for calling on Americans to stop eating meat

* UN wants Americans to cut back on eating meat. And that's only the beginning

* UN climate summit serving gourmet burgers, BBQ as it calls for Americans to stop eating meat

It doesn't have to be Fox. It could be Twitter, or (in the past) Infowars. It could be any number of prominent podcasters. I'd even recommend Reddit communities like Forwards from Grandma, where you can find a wide range of right-wing memes, including memes reflecting the right-wing view that liberals are unalterably opposed to meat:

This one isn't even particularly obscure -- you may have seen it in a parking lot.

What reporters and other interested parties need to know is that the right-wing media diet, from all sources, is chock-full of paranoid, alarmist ragebait, and that the alarmist talking points are fairly easy to discover if you put a little effort into looking for them. Even just a daily glance at Fox's red-meat headlines will tell you more about the mindset of right-wing voters than a series of questions about grocery prices in an Ohio diner.

DEMOCRATS SHOULD HAVE MESSAGING THAT'S STRONG ENOUGH TO WITHSTAND SOME QUESTIONABLE CANDIDATES

Progressives aligned with Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America won three primaries in New York City on Tuesday, and James Carville is flipping out about one candidate in particular.

Democratic strategist James Carville called for a “schism” in the Democratic Party, stating that he wants nothing to do with the likes of three candidates who won their Democratic primaries in New York....

On Wednesday’s Politicon podcast, Carville ... noted that [Darializa] Avila Chevalier, who was born to Dominican immigrants, once said white people should not be in interracial marriages.

“Lady, I ain’t in the same party as you,” Carville said. “I’m sorry. I’m just not. And I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the ‘s’ word: schism. I really do. Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no. We’re a coalition. We’re a big tent. And there’s just some sh*t I can’t be in the same tent with.”

Carville then insisted that despite winning their Democratic primaries, “these people are not Democrats.” ...

“But I’m done,” he continued. “I’m not in that f*cking political party. I am totally comfortable in a political party that spends time questioning the policies of the government of Israel. In fact, I’m enthusiastic about that. I don’t want to be in a political party that denies the right of the state of Israel to exist. That’s just not– I just can’t do that.”

Avila Chevalier did disparage some interracial relationship -- she

slammed men of color for engaging in interracial relationships in a Feb. 2019 post on Twitter, now X.

“Black men [handshake emoji] Arab men fetishizing ugly colonizer women,” the post stated.

And on Israel:

In August 2020, Avila Chevalier reposted a tweet responding to a social media prompt that asked, “Israel suddenly disappears, your third emoji is your reaction.” The reposted tweet replied, “Trick question – Israel doesn’t exist!”

She's called for abolition of the police, prisons, and the U.S. border, in now-deleted tweets.

I'm to Carville's left, but I understand why he's not pleased. Still, he's helping Republicans when he denounces Avila Chevalier. He's worried that Republicans will try to make her the face of the party, but right now he's doing that for them.

Maybe her views haven't moderated at all and she'll continue to come off as a crackpot. So what? The Democratic Party should be strong enough to withstand that. Other Democratic candidates' messages should be strong enough that they're defined by what they say, not by what she says.

Republicans always manage to avoid being defined as the party of their congressional crackpots, whether it's Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert or George Santos. Bizarrely, congressional Republicans seem to be only partly defined by the Crackpot in Chief, Donald Trump -- their polling isn't great, but it's much better than his.

How do Republicans who aren't Trump avoid being defined by the party's crackpots? In a few ways: (1) by putting out a lot of messaging on other subjects, (2) by demonizing Democrats much more than Democrats demonize them, and (3) by not constantly drawing attention to party members they find embarrassing, which is exactly what Democrats are doing now.

This was true even in the pre-Trump era. Remember 2010? Republicans ran quite a few candidates who seemed beyond the pale, candidates such as Christine "I'm not a witch" O'Donnell, and Carl Paladino, who had a long history of posting and forwarding racist emails. Republicans distanced themselves from some of these candidates, but then they went right back on message, criticizing Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress, and they shellacked the Democrats in the midterms.

Make your case for yourself and your party. Attack the GOP incessantly. And for crissakes, stop drawing attention to people you think are embarrassing the party.

WHY DOES JAIME HARRISON HATE HIS OWN PARTY'S VOTERS?

A former chair of the Democratic National Committee has some thoughts about yesterday's primaries in New York:

I say this with no ill will or animosity: if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination. Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.

— Jaime Harrison (@jaimeharrison.bsky.social) June 23, 2026 at 7:58 PM

Harrison is peeved because three candidates aligned with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America won their primaries yesterday, defeating two incumbents and the candidate endorsed by a retiring congresswoman.

U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who leads the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was defeated by Mamdani's most polarizing pick, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist who once helped organize pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman, a two-term incumbent, was beaten by the Mamdani-backed former city Comptroller Brad Lander, who has often aligned himself with the democratic socialist movement. And another Mamdani ally, democratic socialist state Assembly Member Claire Valdez, defeated the handpicked successor of retiring U.S. Rep. Nydia Velazquez.

I can't really fault Harrison for feeling some bitterness about the victory by Avila Chevalier, whose Twitter history includes tweets in 2020 calling President Biden a "war criminal" and a "rapist." But Valdez is a Democratic state legislator, while Lander is a normie New York City politician, a middle-aged progressive who worked at housing nonprofits (that's normie here) and then served as a Democratic city councillor and comptroller for fifteen years.

These candidates inspired voters at a time when Democrats often fail to do that. Harrison could have embraced them, or said nothing. He could have recognized that Democrats need to motivate a wide range of voters, from the center to the left, if they ever want power again. But as I said yesterday, there are just too many Democrats who think DSA is a greater threat than the Heritage Foundation.

I'm not sure why Harrison is so grumpy. Outside of a few left-friendly enclaves of New York City, corporatist and pro-Israel Democrats did just fine yesterday, regrettably:

Maryland Democrat Adrian Boafo, for example, benefited from more than $5 million in super PAC spending connected to the crypto organization Fairshake....

Boafo, the preferred successor of retiring former majority leader Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, was also boosted by another $5 million from an AIPAC-aligned super PAC.

Independent expenditures from crypto money in Maryland also boosted Rep. April McClain Delaney (D) as she fended off a comeback bid by former congressman David Trone....

In a Utah district that Democrats are poised to flip because of court-ordered redistricting, AI-related groups spent $400,000 trying to elevate former congressman Ben McAdams from a field of more liberal challengers. McAdams, who was also a former Salt Lake City mayor, won.

And the race in my district, New York's 12th, became a tech billionaire proxy battle between Micah Lasher (who won) and Alex Bores.

Major industry players spent millions targeting Bores, who finished in second place, in part because of his work spearheading one of the country’s landmark laws establishing guardrails for AI....

In all, a whopping $27 million was spent just by groups both supporting and attacking Bores. Think Big, a super PAC in the Leading the Future network, which is backed in part by leaders at OpenAI and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, spent $8 million against Bores.... Pro-Bores super PACs — many of which were backed by people in the industry who favor AI regulations, like crypto billionaire Chris Larsen and those with ties to Anthropic — dropped more than $19 million to boost him.

This is the party Jaime Harrison is comfortable with. It's still better than the GOP -- neoliberalism is preferable to neofascism -- but it's dispiriting to the base, and polls suggest that it's not very inspiring to middle-of-the-road voters. The Democratic Party should be as popular as Donald Trump is unpopular, but it isn't.

Are Republicans rejecting their more extreme primary winners? The entire party has rallied around Ken Paxton in Texas. And in an upstate New York district that borders Canada -- the district currently represented by Elise Stefanik -- we'll see what happens with this jamoke:

Anthony Constantino, the sticker magnate who erected a 12-foot-high “VOTE FOR TRUMP” sign atop his company’s headquarters, won the Republican nomination for an open House seat in New York’s North Country, according to The Associated Press.

His victory is a major blow to the state’s Republican Party, which had taken the unusual step of endorsing his opponent, Robert Smullen, a state assemblyman and former Marine.

Trump endorsed Constantino, in defiance of the state party. And right-wingers might not come together in this race:

In his short time in the public eye, Mr. Constantino has made enemies of many local Republicans and other party leaders. He is embroiled in a lawsuit with Gerard Kassar, the leader of the state Conservative Party, who Mr. Constantino says threatened to kill him.

The Conservative Party has provided its backing and ballot line to Mr. Smullen, potentially splitting the Republican vote come November.

Mr. Smullen has attacked Mr. Constantino, calling him unfit to hold office, and vowed to continue his campaign through the general election.

Constantino is an ex-boxer who's made rap videos, including this one, in which he calls Zohran Mamdani -- whose name he can't pronounce -- a terrorist.

Terrorists aren't flying planes into buildings anymore. They're coming at us different, trying to install fake politicians who aren't even from our country in our government to hurt our citizens. One is named Zohran Mandami [sic]. First off, fuck you, bitch....

Actually, Constantino seems like an ideal match for Stefanik, whose pinned tweet on X is this:

Because he is. https://t.co/bAL6ZURrLE

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) October 17, 2025

Stefanik remained neutral in the primary, but she's endorsed him now, as has the chair of the state GOP. (Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani, and Jim Jordan had already endorsed him in the primary,k in addition to Trump.)

But will Smullen stay in the race and split the right-wing vote? I bet he won't.

Asm. Smullen already secured the Conservative line on the ballot in November, leading to a potential for a split ticket in November. Though, to secure the seat in Congress for the Republican party in the midterms, sources say Smullen could be pressured to back off in the coming weeks.

There are divisive fights on the right, but they generally end when primary season is over. It's usually Me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, and all of us against the stranger. For "the stranger," substitute "the evil Democrats." (Constantino calls Mamdani "a demon" in that rap song.) In the end, they prioritize winning power for their party, no matter which wing of the party comes out on top in a particular race. Too many establishment Democrats don't.

DO DEMOCRATIC CONSULTANTS EVEN WANT DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES TO WIN?

Last night I clicked on an MS NOW story about the Texas Senate race:

James Talarico has a new ad — with millions behind it

Texas Democrat James Talarico is jumping headlong into his Senate bid against Republican Ken Paxton with a multi-million dollar ad buy, MS NOW has learned.

The Senate candidate, who is hoping to become the first Democrat to win statewide in Texas since 1994, is launching what his team is labeling his first “major” ad of the general election....

Not just a new ad, but "his first 'major' ad of the general election," "with millions behind it"? Wow! Talarico's team must have worked really hard on the ad, right? With this kind of investment, and with the campaign proudly displaying the spot to the national media, the results really ought to be special!

They aren't. The ad is terrible. It's generic Chuck Schumer/Hakeem Jeffries-style mush.

In the 30-second spot, shared first with MS NOW, Talarico talks straight to camera while exiting a Red & White food store, a brown paper bag of groceries in hand. The campaign notes that the truck on screen is his own.

“Too many Texans feel like they’re drowning. The cost of groceries, gas, health care,” he says, pledging — if elected to the Senate — that he will “keep fighting to lower your costs.”

We're told, "The spot notably doesn’t directly mention Talarico’s general election rival — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton." Talarico does say, "I'll take on corruption," which we're supposed to understand as an extremely subtle jab at Paxton, but why not mention his name? Instead, Talarico brags about how bipartisan he is: "In the state house, I brought both parties together to make life more affordable."

Are the consultants who created this ad and decided to spend millions on it releasing it to show Democrats nationwide how hard they're fighting to win this seat? Or did they create and promote this ad to reassure billionaire Democratic donors that Talarico isn't one of those Democrats -- the ones who want to tax the rich and stir up (justifiable) populist anger?

Talarico has campaigned at times like an economic populist. If you go to his campaign site, the first video you see is one he posted in September, in which he says the following:

The biggest divide in our country is not left versus right. It's top versus bottom. Billionaires want us looking left and right at each other so that we're not looking up at them. The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power. So, their social media algorithms and their cable news networks tear us apart. They divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion so that we don't notice that they're defunding our schools, gutting our healthcare, and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It is the oldest strategy in the world. Divide and conquer. But we will not be conquered.

The consultants might say that this was a good message for a Democratic primary, but the affordability mush in the new ad is a better message for a general election in a Republican-dominated state. That's nonsense. Every voter now thinks there's a powerful "they" in charge of everything. Solidly Republican voters believe the powerful "they" are sinister Democratic elitists, but everyone else in the electorate is up for grabs. They know someone is thriving while they're drowning. Talarico has a chance here to speak to that anger, but the consultants don't want him to.

I've begun to believe that the Democratic consultant class thinks the greatest danger facing America is not corpo-authoritarian Republican extremism, but rather the possibility that left-populists might win real power in a Democratic White House or Congress. They fear the Democratic Socialists of America more than they fear the Heritage Foundation. They want Democratic candidates to suppress populist anger, because the rich donors whose interests they serve are afraid of where that anger might lead.

Or maybe they just have an outdated view of what swing voters want: nothing unsettling, nothing bold, just empty talk about affordability. And while they insist that they're trying to solve the problem of the Democratic Party's broad unpopularity in America, it seems clear that they're a main reason for that unpopularity. So they might be leading the party into a period of sustained powerlessness, squandering the opportunity to persuade voters that Democrats are the party of real change, at a time when the leader of the other party is the most widely despised politician of the century.

THE HOTTEST NEWS IS MURDOCHLAND IS ABOUT TWO PEOPLE WHO AREN'T EVEN IN OFFICE ANYMORE

Republicans obviously want the 2026 midterms to be about anything other than Donald Trump's presidency, so it's no surprise that at 9:00 Monday moring, the lead story at Rupert Murdoch's Fox News and the lead story at Murdoch's New York Post were about two guys who aren't even working in the government anymore.

At Fox:

And at the Post:

The Fox story focuses on Lindy Li, a former Democratic fundraiser who's been flipped by the GOP and is now a professional Democrat-hater. Her upcoming book, Unburdened: A Former Democrat Insider’s Shocking Account of Political Power, Betrayal, and Party Collapse, will be published (by Murdoch's book-publishing company, HarperCollins) on September 15, just around the time early voting starts in the midterms. That's how the Republican media machine wants to motivate voters -- not just by saying Democrats are evil, but by saying Democrats were evil two years ago.

Or according to the New York Post, six years ago -- that's the point of the lead item there. Anthony Fauci, who is Democratic-coded in the eyes of Republicans even though he served presidents of both parties, is (according to the Post's Miranda Devine and outgoing director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard) linked to a lab leak that brought us COVID (even though we still don't really know where the COVID virus originated, and even though Republicans have long insisted that COVID is no worse than the flu). This is meant to motivate Republican voters who never feared COVID in the first place, and who are sure that it can be easily cured with ivermectin in any case. And it will motivate them.

The average D.C. Democrat will denounce Trump and his or her election opponent, but not Republicans as a whole, and certainly not a wide range of Republicans. Republicans, by contrast, incessantly denounce Democrats (and figures presumed to be Democrats), not just for what they're doing now but for what they did many years ago. Republicans stir up grievances, then sustain those grievances forever.

And this works. The GOP is a party with a hugely unpopular president, but it might survive the midterms with minimal damage.

The Dems midterm warning sign is pretty clear:

There are high quality polls (Ipsos, MU Law, & NBC), which show Dems shy of their generic ballot benchmark in past wave years.

Their Dems avg. lead is just 3 pts... & Dems need a 3-4 pt win to take the House given redistricting. pic.twitter.com/qPy5CsxFZS

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) June 15, 2026

Some Democrats are doing a decent job of directing voters' rage, but Republicans have a huge head start -- and a massive back catalog of grievances.