IS IT POSSIBLE THAT SAM ALITO ISN'T RETIRING?

Okay, this is weird:

NPR on Tuesday retracted an article that said that Samuel Alito, an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, had retired.

The article, written by the veteran Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, said that Justice Alito had announced his retirement. He has made no such announcement about his role, and a Supreme Court spokesman on Tuesday called NPR’s article “inaccurate.”

By midmorning Tuesday, the article had been replaced with a taciturn editor’s note: “Earlier today we erroneously published a story saying that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. He has not announced his retirement and we have retracted the story.”

The retraction is here. The original story is here.

In February, Elie Mystal concluded that Alito is planning to retire, based on the fact that the publication date of Alito's forthcoming book would place his publicity tour in the opening week's of the Supreme Court's upcoming term. Alito probably won't want to delay publication of the book and he'll certainly want to publicize it, so I assume the retirement is going ahead, and he simply didn't want the news to break just yet. He knows that we might have a Democratic Senate next year, which means that a replacement as ideologically extreme as he is might not be confirmable for two years. And he knows that a Democrat might win the White House in 2028.

But is it possible he's not retiring after all?

Maybe he's not certain that President Trump will appoint an ideologically compatible replacement. Trump denounced the Federalist Society last month, after the Supreme Court ruled against his tariffs. The FedSoc is an ideological-conformity clearinghouse for right-wing judicial appointees, and Alito might be afraid that Trump will bypass it when he chooses the next High Court justice.

On the other hand, as The Hill has noted, "All but one of Trump’s confirmed circuit court nominees have appeared at a Federalist Society event.... The only exception is Emil Bove, one of Trump’s former personal lawyers whom he nominated to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit." Does Alito fear that Trump will pick one of his own mob lawyers for the Court?

Or does Alito fear that the increasingly erratic Trump might mismanage the process of getting a successor approved this year? Republicans presumably want the successor confirmed with the brutal efficiency they displayed when they rammed through Amy Coney Barrett's nomination in 2020. Or maybe they want to allow a little more time, in the hope that the pick will be controversial, and Democrats will overreact. Some Republicans think they benefited electorally from the Democratic reaction to Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Here's a NBC story from October of that year:

Republicans got everything they wanted from Brett Kavanaugh's hotly contested confirmation — a fired-up GOP base and a conservative Supreme Court justice for life....

Republicans celebrated the reaction to Kavanaugh's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee after limited polling suggested their voters had closed the enthusiasm gap with Democrats.

Republicans were trounced in House races that year, but they picked up two Senate seats. I've seen it argued that angry demonstrations against Kavanaugh in the halls of the Senate and allegations of sexual misconduct led to a backlash that helped GOP Senate candidates. I'm not sure it's true, but Republicans might think it is.

Maybe Alito doesn't trust that second-term Trump can manage a nomination fight well, or keep the Senate calendar clear for a confirmation process.

More likely, Alito and his fellow Republicans wants to keep non-Republicans guessing for as long as possible while the GOP gets its ducks lined up in a row. I assume we'll get the official announcement later this summer, unless the people running the GOP judicial machine conclude that Trump is too erratic and really can't be trusted.

PUNDIT SUDDENLY REALIZES THAT THE WHOLE COUNTRY DIDN'T CHANGE WHEN TRUMP WON BY 1½ POINTS

David Wallace-Wells of The New York Times just noticed something:

... between the July 2024 assassination attempt on [Donald] Trump in Butler, Pa., and the ignominious end of Elon Musk’s run at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in May 2025, it certainly looked as if ... Mr. Trump had managed a generational political realignment, pulling the country’s plutocratic elite in Silicon Valley into a new ideological alliance with his legacy base of the left behind in postindustrial states and drawing an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters into the fold, as well....

Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals.

Really, David? Ya think? You think maybe a Trump popular-vote victory by one and a half points might not have been a genuine sign that the entire country was now MAGA?

Some of us understood this in real time. Three days after the polls closed, I wrote:

And always remember: Kamala Harris got 48% of the vote. This was not a blowout. It was not a landslide. Harris's voters were close to half the country. If Trump had lost with 48% of the vote, pundits would be urging Democrats to be conciliatory to Trump voters.

Franklin Roosevelt won 57% of the vote in 1932 and more than 60% in 1936, after Republican Calvin Coolidge won a landslide of his own in 1928. That was a vibe shift. Ronald Reagan's two blowouts in 1980 and 1984 were vibe shifts, a few years after the downfall of Republican Richard Nixon and the 1976 victory of Jimmy Carter.

Trump eked out a win in 2024. Pundits thought it was zeitgeisty because they grade Republicans on a curve.

The "self-lacerating liberals" Wallace-Wells refers to include much of the punditocracy, who have learned to self-lacerate after decades of ref-working by Republicans. Republicans have persuaded most liberal pundits that Democrats are elitist outlier weirdos and Republicans are the only "real" Americans. There's one problem with that: Democrats somehow managed to win the popular vote in seven of the eight presidential elections that preceded 2024. The bar is so low for Republicans that when a Republican wins by an eyelash, it's seen as resounding confirmation of the GOP's status as America's normative party.

So even though Trump's popular-vote victory margin in 2024 was one-third the size of Biden's victory margin in 2020, and even though Trump's victory margin in 2024 was smaller than Hillary Clinton's victory margin in her 2016 loss, Trump's win was seen as a sign of a massive cultural shift.

Pundits thought this was a cultural shift because they wanted to believe it was a cultural shift. When "an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters" moved right for one election, pundits were thrilled at the prospect that these groups might now be joining "the left behind in postindustrial states" -- noble blue-collar white Republicans -- in abandoning the icky weirdo elitist Democrats.

It's been obvious for quite a while that the vibe shift wasn't real -- Trump's job disapproval rating began exceeding his job approval rating in March 2025, and the gap has just grown wider ever since. If it took pundits this long to realize that the vibe shift was illusory, it's because they wanted it to be real.

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.