TRUMP'S BASE DOESN'T THINK HE WANTS TO CHEAT, AND TRUMP MIGHT BE SIMILARLY DELUSIONAL

In his speech at Mount Rushmore last night, President Trump said:

We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years.

You probably hear that as a Trump promise that Republicans will rig elections in their favor for a century. Trump's base hears it differently. Trump's base hears it as a Trump promise to un-rig elections for a century.

Trump's base lives in an information bubble, and a large percentage of Trump voters live in geographic bubbles, surrounded by people who look like them and think like them (and vote like them). They can see that America is full of people who aren't like them, but they believe these people either aren't Americans or shouldn't be Americans -- if you're not a Republican voter, you probably shouldn't be allowed to vote. Or they believe that there are large numbers of non-Republican voters, but not enough to win elections without fake ballots, rigged vote-counting processes, and the votes of non-citizens.

I don't know of anyone on our side who thinks this way. I know there are many people who believe Elon Musk rigged the 2024 election (I don't believe it was rigged), or who believe that Trump would have lost if non-voters had been persuaded to vote -- but I don't know anyone who believes that Democrats should be victorious nationwide in every fair election for the foreseeable future. This is what Republicans believe about their party. We know better. We know that Republicans are real, and that they vote legitimately. We know they win some elections legitimately. Republicans can't accept the same fact about Democrats.

Trump is a cynic and a crook, but I think, on some level, he believes that the SAVE America Act would merely rid the country of illegitimate votes, and that America has an overwhelming GOP majority that would legitimately give every subsequent election victory to the Republicans. Trump needs to believe this because of the gaping wound his soul suffered when he lost in 2020, not to mention the lesser but still painful wound he suffered in 2016 when he won the presidency but lost the popular vote.

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016

Maybe he knows better. Maybe he merely believes that he needs to con the world into thinking that he scored resounding victories in three straight elections, so that no one will ever again claim that he was a loser at any moment of his life. It's certain that he wants to rig future elections less out of loyalty to the GOP than because he wants to set up an electoral system that he can claim would have given him a victory if it had been in place in 2020 (and 2016).

I suspect that Trump doesn't believe that there's any such thing as objective truth -- truth is whatever people can be persuaded to believe, and he can make something true by first persuading himself that it's true and then persuading the country. So maybe he doesn't even have an opinion on whether the SAVE America Act produced clean elections or rigged elections -- he thinks it will produce elections won by Republicans, which is what he wants, and therefore the results must be legitimate. And his base has a different delusion -- that Democratic voters aren't real -- so they want what he wants.

"WE WANT CANDIDATES WHO AREN'T WOKE! ... NO, NOT LIKE THAT"

According to two new polls, Graham Platner is struggling in his race against Senate Susan Collins. Greg Sargent writes:

Two major polls of the Maine Senate race dropped this week, and they told the same story: The race is incredibly close, and Democrat Graham Platner has real work to do among the working class....

The [New York] Times survey has Platner up two among likely voters overall, 49–47, and the Fox poll has Collins up three, 50–47. It’s a dead heat—it’s winnable, but he should probably be leading by more given the state’s Democratic lean, which is being outweighed by the brutal press he’s sustained over his Nazi-like tattoo and alleged violence against women.

You might think the Fox poll has an anti-Democratic bias, but as I've said many times over the ycears, Fox surveys are surprisingly unskewed. A survey released the same day shows Democrat Jon Ossoff leading the Georgia Senate race by double digits.

Sargent focuses on Platner's apparent failure so far to win blue-collar Mainers over with economic populism:

But note this: In the Times poll, Platner trails among voters without a college degree, a proxy for the working class, by 37–58. In the Fox poll, that’s 41–56.

... [Platner] speaks in a left-populist idiom that seeks to connect with working people’s struggles. So his numbers among them are concerning.

But Sargent also notes this:

The Times poll has working-class voters saying Platner has “good character” by 37–57 and “the right kind of moral values” by 36–57.

Many Democrats thought that the way to appeal to voters who work with their hands is to run a candidate who works with his hands. That's not working in Maine. But we were also told that rough-hewn voters with dirt under their fingernails are turned off by the prissy moral scolding of ordinary Democrats, and that in 2024 they responded well to Donald Trump's frequent appearances on podcasts hosted by bros who aren't feminist and use a lot of slurs.

At one time, I thought the unsavory stories about Platner's past might actually be helping him. In early June, I wrote:

Do you remember the moment, about a year ago, when Democrats were talking about the need to find a "liberal Joe Rogan"? Many Democrats felt that the party lost the 2024 election because Donald Trump and other Republicans were eager to sit down with podcast bros who aren't "woke" and don't self-censor.... Personally, I never wanted Democrats to cozy up to podcasters who demean women or gleefully use slurs, but many very smart people thought the party should embrace them....

Well, now there's a candidate who, in the past, demeaned women, Blacks, and others on Reddit, and who thought it was badass to get (and keep) a Nazi symbol tattooed on his body -- and polls say the voters of his state are embracing him....

Platner has not been well behaved for much of his life -- but not being well behaved is what a lot of Democrats seemed to like about the podcast bros, or at least what they thought their fans liked about them. Now there's a badly behaved candidate in a statewide race, and he's leading in the polls.

But now he's struggling, and making no inroads with blue-collar voters -- which tells me that these mostly right-leaning voters decide whether to forgive politicians' transgressions by first looking at the transgressors' party affiliation.

We knew that, obviously. For years, blue-collar whites eagerly recited the latest Fox talking points on the mid-level corruption of Hunter Biden -- but now Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. are engaged in corrupt activities on a massive scale, and they don't care. We knew that Trump voters were upset about the Epstein files when they thought only their political enemies were implicated, and now that that's clearly not true, they're a lot less interested.

So they think Platner has bad moral character, but apparently they don't believe that people they like who have spoken or behaved the way Platner has, and have expressed much less remorse for it, have bad moral character. Many of them will reject Platner while casting a House vote for Paul LePage, the Trump-like former governor with a long history of offensive and racist remarks, because they like his politics. They'll condemn Platner's reported rough treatment of former girlfriends while shrugging off Donald Trump's sexual assaults; they'll believe Trump's denials, but not Platner's.

So economic populism doesn't appeal to the people who'd most benefit from it if the economic populist is a lefty, and having poor values (now or in the past) is only relatable to right-leaning voters if the current or former bad boy is right-coded. Which we probably should have guessed.

THE NEXT TRUMP MIGHT JUST BE A COLLECTION OF GRIEVANCES

Quick -- who was the leader of the Tea Party?

You probably don't remember any particular person being a leader of the movement that effectively took over and rebranded the Republican Party in the years after George W. Bush left office. Maybe you remember Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder and president of the Tea Party Patriots, but she never became a household name, and the group she led was just one of many Tea Party organizations.

In fact, there was no well-known, charismatic leader of the Tea Party. There was no single Republican in Congress who was regarded as the movement's leader, the way Newt Gingrich was clearly the leader of the Republicans who seized Congress in the 1994 midterms.

The Tea Party -- and the Republican Party -- didn't have an obvious leader in the Obama years. Yet that didn't prevent Republicans from having a fairly successful eight years. Sure, Barack Obama won two presidential elections. But Republicans did just fine downballot, as this report noted during Obama's last few weeks in office:

... the Democratic Party has lost a net total of 13 Governorships and 816 state legislative seats since President Obama entered office, the most of any president since Dwight Eisenhower....

President Obama entered the White House with his party touting a 60 seat majority in the Senate and 257 seat majority in the House. Democrats now hold a 48 seat minority in the Senate and 194 seat minority in the House — a net loss of 12 and 64 seats respectively....

The midterm elections delivered significant blows to Congressional Democrats. In 2010, Democrats lost 6 seats in the Senate and 63 seats in the House, costing them the chamber. In 2014, Democrats lost another 13 seats in the House and a staggering 9 seats in the Senate; this time losing them the Senate and completing a Republican takeover of Congress.

We're told that Republicans will be adrift once Donald Trump leaves office or dies, because the GOP is nothing more than a personality cult focused on a charismatic leader. The Obama years tell me that Republicans don't necessarily need a charismatic leader. Without such a leader, they can reorganize themselves around a collection of grievances.

(What were their grievances in the Obama years? Um ... they didn't like Obamacare? And ... um ... the president was Black? Also ... oh, yeah! Benghazi! ACORN! The Ground Zero mosque!)

As Donald Trump's first term was ending, you could see the GOP attempting to reorganize around a collection of grievances. Notice when Chris Rufo first appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show to talk about DEI: September 2, 2020. At that time, Joe Biden had been leading Trump in the polls all year, and led by 7.2 points in the Real Clear Politics average. The election looked like a blowout -- time to get the Fox audience worked up about something other than the issues being discussed on the camapign trail!

The Fox war on Drag Queen Story Hours started in 2019; over the next few years, this evolved into a war on trans youth that, along with the war on DEI, helped elect a Republican governor in seemingly blue Virginia a year after Biden defeated Trump.

At a time when it appeared that Trump was a spent force in American politics, GOP propagandists made sure that the party (and the conservative movement) still seemed to be on offense. That's what they'll do when Trump is gone.

They're already hard at work ginning up anger. I told you yesterday about the campaign to make the continued existence of birthright citizenship into a major right-wing grievance. Right-wing cartoonists and memers are really working this angle:

And, of course, it's all part of the Elon Musk-driven global campaign to purge America and Europe of non-white people:

Pretty much. It’s not promoted in any other countries …

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2026

The right is working all kinds of angles these days. The New York Times has recently reported on campaigns to make same-sex marriage illegal again and prosecute women who have abortions. Those will probably alienate swing voters, but Republicans might get a more positive response to their renewed Muslim-bashing -- Texas Republicans in particular seem to believe that the most important issue in their state is a nonexistent push for "sharia law" -- and to denunciations of "communism" in the Democratic Party, which will probably resonate with some of the Hispanic voters Trump has alienated with his anti-immigrant extremism. And there's always sexism, which I suspect wins over more swing voters than you'd think:

The worst Supreme Court Justices of all time have all been women. That’s just a fact. Republican presidents should take the hint. https://t.co/hMHwMBVx5J

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 30, 2026

None of this is a substitute for a real party leader, but it will all sustain GOP solidarity in the post-Trump era until that leader comes along.

RIGHT-WINGERS HAVEN'T BUILT A POPULAR MOVEMENT TO ELIMINATE BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP, BUT THEY SEEM TO BE WORKING ON THAT NOW

Three Supreme Court justices have concluded that birthright citizenship isn't a right granted by the 14th Amendment. A fourth justice is on the fence. It's clear now that the Court could take birthright citizenship away in the not-too-distant future. The pseudonymous Bluesky poster who uses the name Richard M. Nixon is right:

Barring changes to the Court you will see another go at birthright citizenship within 10 years.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dicknixon.bsky.social) June 30, 2026 at 10:41 AM

Dave Weigel responds:

If Rs win in 2028 and replace Sotomayor, it's gone.

In a video essay, Jamelle Bouie agrees, saying, "A 5-4 decision means that this isn't over, that this is only the beginning." But in the following posts, he questions whether the right has laid all the necessary groundwork to make this happen:

i will say that although this is the beginning of the right’s assault on birthright citizenship, one difference with roe v. wade is that the latter was fueled by a mass movement with a broad, institutionalized base in the nation’s evangelical and catholic churches. the question, i think…

[image or embed]

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) June 30, 2026 at 6:34 PM

…is if there is a similar mass base to organize and sustain a campaign against birthright citizenship and, on the other side, is there a mass base to organize and sustain a campaign in its defense?

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) June 30, 2026 at 6:34 PM

I'm not sure the right needs a popular movement analogous to the anti-abortion movement in order to win on this issue. The current Supreme Court does a lot of radical-right things for which there's no popular groundswell.

But it appears that right-wing propagandists are trying to inspire the formation of an anti-birthright citizenship mass movement right now. Here's Matt Walsh (original tweet here):

"Use whatever force is necessary."

[image or embed]

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) June 30, 2026 at 12:29 PM

And here's Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist (original tweet here):

Quite the meltdown on the postliberal right today....

[image or embed]

— Paul Graf (@paulginva.bsky.social) June 30, 2026 at 3:56 PM

These people are telling their followers that drastic action is needed, immediately, to effectively reverse this decision.

And please note they're talking about the ruling as if the Court changed citizenship law in America yesterday, rather than merely preserving the status quo. Here's Matt Walsh again:

I at least got to live for 40 years in a country that looks and functions something like America. The fact that my children are having that opportunity stolen from them fills me with rage so deep I can’t describe it. I truly hate the people who have done this to us.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 30, 2026

But Matt, you didn't get to "live for 40 years" in a country without birthright citizenship. You got to live in a country with the same birthright citizenship provisions we have now.

I think Walsh and Davis know this, but they know that most of their followers don't. They know that Look what they took from you is one of the most potent messages on the right. So Walsh pretends that he "got to live for 40 years in a country that looks and functions something like America," and Davis pretends that John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett joined with the Court's liberals "to nullify the 14th Amendment and extra-constitutionally replace it with their own language."

A cynic would say that this is all part of the long game for the Court's Republicans, and for Republicans in general:

* Trump issues an executive order eliminating birthright citizenship.

* The Supreme Court preserves it but points the way to its elimination.

* The entire process puts the subject on the national agenda and turns it into an issue that drives Republican voters to the polls.

* Until the Court finally overturns birthright citizenship, support for it is now painted as one of those weird, elitist ideas they have in the Democrat Party, rather than the law of the land since the nineteenth century.

Even if Democrats score a trifecta in 2028 and expand the Supreme Court so it's no longer an unelected far-right legislature, this can be a lingering grievance for Republican and right-centrist voters. Abolishing birthright citizenship will now be down-the-middle mainstream Republicanism, a demand that will be a huge applause line in the convention acceptance speech of the party's 2028 presidential nominee.

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.