THE MULTI-FRONT WAR TO DELEGITIMIZE DEMOCRATS AND BLUNT A BLUE WAVE

It doesn't matter how big the Democratic wave is on Tuesday -- our political culture will never acknowledge that the party deserves power.

We're already being told that a Democratic win won't really be a Democratic win. Here's a Ruy Teixeira op-ed in The Washington Post. Teixeira co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority in 2002 but has increasingly positioned himself as a Democrat-bashing Democrat.

Democrats are on course to have a stunningly good 2026 election....

But, paradoxically, the better they do in 2026, the more likely they are to ignore their party’s weaknesses with working-class and rural voters. Those weaknesses led to Trump winning the 2024 election, but they are likely to fade from the party’s memory as Democrats, buoyed by the fool’s gold of midterms success, attempt to placate an energized left.

Celebration is easy; confronting underlying problems is hard. Thus, when Republicans get shellacked on Nov. 3, expect Democrats to see the result as an enthusiastic endorsement of the party rather than a repudiation of the GOP — a far more plausible explanation.

But a Politico story suggests that Democrats, or at least Democratic politicians and operatives, won't see the result as an enthusiastic endorsement of the party. They've already internalized the "Sure, they voted for us, but they still hate us" message.

More than a dozen lawmakers, campaign operatives, strategists and pollsters warned in interviews that national Democrats risk drawing the wrong conclusions if they take back control of at least one chamber of Congress next week.

Those figures from across the party worry that the midterms, which have become a referendum on President Donald Trump, have done little to improve the Democratic Party’s brand. They caution that a favorable political environment has papered over persistent problems for a party still grappling with why it lost the 2024 presidential election. And they admit they are still sharply divided over what its message should be heading into 2028.

“Don’t confuse them losing with us winning,” said Morgan Jackson, the senior adviser to Democrat Roy Cooper’s Senate campaign in North Carolina....

“This is not an affirmation of the Democratic Party in any which way,” said one veteran Democratic pollster working on Senate campaigns, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “It is very much a rejection of Trump.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times, which sets the agenda for much of the media, is fixating on a fake outrage Republicans are promoting, while overlooking a breaking story that should be deeply damaging to President Trump. Jamison Foser writes:

... the national news media is doing everything they can to make the central story of the last days of this election season an alleged political maneuver by Alaska Democrats that was, by all accounts, legal, consistent with past behavior by both major political parties, and unlikely to have any real effect on the outcome of the Alaska Senate race. America’s dominant news companies, led by the New York Times, have literally ignored [a] new rape allegation against the president of the United States while breathlessly hyping the Alaska maneuver, giving Donald Trump the distraction he desperately seeks and a phony premise for his anti-democratic efforts to effectively cancel a Senate election that could determine control of the entire U.S. Senate....

At this writing, the New York Times has now run more than a dozen reports on this matter in just three days....

Meanwhile, the New York Times still has not told readers of a new rape allegation against Donald Trump that was made public on Monday in a report the New York Times dishonestly dismissed on grounds that “it largely cites allegations that have already been public.” The word “largely” is doing a awful lot of work in that sentence, given that the report includes a new rape allegation.

We know what the Times is doing, because the Times did this in 2016: It has concluded that the Democrats are likely to win this year, just as it concluded that Hillary Clinton was likely to win ten years ago, and has decided that the days just before Election Day are an excellent time to begin dragging the Democratic Party down, lest it get too uppity. I've said for decades here that the Times doesn't particularly like the far-right Republicans who rise to the top of the GOP, and often promotes Democrats who run against them or propose to clean up their messes, but it loathes Democrats once they've taken power -- and sometimes even when they're merely on the verge of accruing power. (The Times still yearns for a moderate Republican Party that hasn't existed in nearly half a century and will never exist again.)

And if all this isn't enough, we have the spectacle of Haley Stevens, an alleged Democrat who is clearly trying to defeat her party's Senate nominee in her home state because she's a ride-or-die Israel supporter and he's a Muslim and fierce Israel critic. Stevens, presumably under pressure, endorsed Abdul El-Sayed after he defeated her in the primary. But this week she began orchestrating a series of passive-aggressive attacks on El-Sayed, sitting by and insisting she still supports him even as her former campaign chair and her fiancé made headlines by expressing support for El-Sayed's Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. The fiancé also showed up at a Rogers rally.

And then it got worse. Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell got Stevens and El-Sayed to agree on a unity rally, scheduled for tomorrow at a Black church in Detroit, along with South Carolina congressman James Clyburn. But Stevens then made two demands: that El-Sayed condemn an ad from an outside group associated with podcaster Cenk Ugyur that had been denounced as anti-Semitic (with some justification), and that El-Sayed take down an ad cheekily placed by his campaign on Fox News and Newsmax broadcasts -- an ad featuring words of praise from right-wing media figures, among them Tucker Carlson (who is an anti-Semite, but says nothing anti-Semitic in the ad).

El-Sayed has now asked Stevens not to appear at tomorrow's rally. I worry that she'll show up and bum-rush the lectern like Kanye bum-rushing Taylor Swift at the 2009 Video Music Awards.

We can all envision the future of Haley Stevens. The carefully staged announcement that she's quit the Democratic Party. The book deal. The many, many appearances on Fox and CBS. The op-eds for The Free Press -- and, probably, The New York Times.

You can say that she's trying to prevent an electoral victory that will empower anti-Semites even if El-Sayed himself doesn't share their beliefs. But what Stevens is doing puts her in league with people who literally want to make Islam illegal in America.

Read some of what Texas Monthly has reported on Nate Schatzline, a top advisor to Governor Gregg Abbott on election security:

“The greatest threat to our Western society right now is the rise in Islam in the state of Texas,” Schatzline told the members of Texas First Conservative Alliance, a grassroots GOP group based in Lampasas County. “And by the way, I want you to notice something, because the governor agrees on this: I didn’t say ‘radical Islam.’ I said ‘Islam,’ because all Islam is radical.”

... Among his goals for the coming year: preventing mosques from serving as polling places; cracking down on what he claimed is a Muslim practice of casting votes on behalf of long-dead relatives; and working with Abbott and right-wing Texas House members to reclassify Islam as a political ideology—a move that the far right has long sought so that it can legally target Muslims without running afoul of religious-liberty protections.

Emphasis added. And by "religious-liberty protections," we mean "the Bill of Rights."

Schatzline isn't alone, of course:

Bo French, the nominee for a position on the Texas Railroad Commission, has argued that we must “round up” every Muslim.... And in June, at the Texas GOP’s convention, delegates openly celebrated the party’s lurch toward overt Islamophobia, pushing for Muslim Republicans to leave the party and branding Islam a “disease.”

This is the nationwide future of the Republican Party, a party Stevens will probably join soon. For now, she's trying to reduce her current party's power in the Senate, as are a lot of other nominally non-Republican figures, in many different ways.