Whole Hog Politics: The autopsy Democrats actually need
On the menu: GOP sours on revoking birthright citizenship; Harris takes heat in California about Biden; Don Jr. floats MAGA dynasty; Corpus Kristi; Kid lit, indeed
When it comes to Democrats winning the House of Representatives and maybe, maybe the Senate next year, Republicans are certainly playing their part.
Jamming through big, unpopular legislation? Check. Pushing policies that don’t align with what voters were asking for in 2024? Check. Ethical quagmires? Check.
Republicans in Washington are doggedly repeating the boom-and-bust cycle that has dominated our politics of late. One party wins a quadrennial election and has control of the White House and both houses of Congress, and then through a combination of overreach and incompetence, gets spanked in the midterms.
But it’s what’s been happening next that’s been different from most of our political past. For the first time since the end of the 19th century, we’ve seen three consecutive change elections for president. It’s rare for a party to keep the White House for 12 years, but even rarer to have it change parties three times in a row.
The midterm curse is as old as midterms. Smaller-turnout biennial contests conducted at the halfway point in a president’s term tend to bring out the voters who are most desirous of change. But what you might expect to happen after that — the party in power learns from the loss and takes a new tack — hasn’t been taking place.
Parties don’t win midterm elections so much as the other side loses them. Midterms are, as their name implies, referendums on the government in place at the time. Voters, especially the most active ones, like to put a check on uniparty power. And, much to the delight of the current Democratic Party, little is demanded of the party out of power other than to be a reasonable-ish alternative.
Indeed, about the only way to screw up a midterm election for the out party is to make it too much about itself, as was the case in 2022 when Republicans were just a mess, or in a similarly shambolic 1998 effort.
Though midterm wins are more windfalls than strategic triumphs, they do tend to impose some discipline on the out parties to get their acts together — or at least to paper over their kookiness — for a little while. And it's reasonable to expect that Democrats will again manage some degree of that next year.
But what happens next?
Recent history suggests that Republicans would take few lessons from even a stinging rebuke in the midterms. A party that stumbled through 2018, 2020 and 2022 without even a little course correction suggests that whatever the GOP is going through is not likely to be altered by the loss of even both houses of Congress. The insurgents have become the establishment, and the purpose of the establishment is always to protect itself. A populist movement that has successfully co-opted elites, or in this case, is co-opted by elites doesn’t have to worry too much about accountability.
But, contrary to whatever President Trump may be saying on any given day, Republicans will have to keep the permanent revolution rolling without the big man himself. The royal succession promises to be a matter of more palace intrigue than "Game of Thrones," but whoever survives will have an uncertain foothold as leader of the movement.
This should be good news for Democrats, who are in the midst of an autopsy of their 2024 defeat. Right now, the focus is on the "Emperor's New Clothes" phase, in which the townsfolk of Bluetopia ask each other how almost all of them managed to convince themselves and each other that it would be OK to nominate an 81-year-old Joe Biden for another four-year term.
Unfortunately for Democrats, the easiest conclusion for them to reach will be that they were tricked and that Biden’s handlers deceived them all, cunningly concealing the extent of his infirmity. But the then-president’s obvious unsuitability for another run wasn’t some kind of well-kept secret. The harder truth for Democratic leaders and tastemakers to confront was that they were afraid of their own voters.
The best argument for Biden’s candidacy and then its controlled demolition in favor of his vice president was that the Democratic electorate would demand a candidate who could not win a general election. Sure, if the Democratic elites could have had a moderate, popular governor to make the case against Trump, they would have jumped at it. But who thinks that’s what a robust Democratic primary in 2024 would have produced? And any normie candidate who could have survived it would have been forced to move so far left that it would have rendered her or him toxic in November. Kamala Harris, after all, still paid a heavy price for her leftward swing for the 2020 nomination more than four years later.
A Biden or Harris who would probably lose but might win looked more appealing to many Democrats than the idea of a grueling nominating process that could produce a transformational leader but might also deliver a surefire loser. The power of inertia and fear of a high-risk nominee kept Democrats from confronting Biden far more than any scheme by his family or palace guard.
The Biden blame game will have mostly been played out by the time we get to next year’s Democratic primaries. And by then, the cycle will have begun anew. The principle question for the 2026 primaries in competitive races will be simple: Who can best defeat the Republican incumbent or likely nominee? Unlike the GOP, which has been going through the dismal swamps of candidate quality on congressional and state elections because of the distorting effects of being a cult of personality, Democrats actually have a pretty good record of strategic voting. After a decade of hearing about the rise of the Democratic Tea Party from the Democratic Socialists, the revolution has yet to materialize.
Call it the sobering fear of Trump, an overhyped media angle or something else, Democrats have been generally better at candidate selection in recent cycles.
So let’s say that they can pull it off again, and win at least the House next year. If we assume that Republicans won’t take any cues from even a more robust knouting than that, what should we expect from Democrats?
That will, of course, depend on what kind of condition the Republicans find themselves in in 2027. If peace and prosperity reign in the land and Trump is spending his last two years in good odor with voters, big-name Democrats will be more likely to shy away from a presidential run. If Trump looks like he is limping out of office, though, the Democratic nomination will draw a crowded field.
It’s at that moment that it will be important for Democrats to have done a real exploration of their 2024 defeat, not just a finger-pointing exercise over the causes of the mass psychosis of the “Dark Brandon” era.
Working in their favor is that Democrats have a data operation that exists outside of the party itself. Since 2008, Catalist has been the data bank for Democrats and allied groups. Unlike Republicans who have torn down and rebuilt several data operations over the same time period, Democrats have outsourced and maintained the advantage of good, reliable and consistent data. And along the way, the company built a prodigious voter file that can tell them and us a great deal about how voters actually behaved, not what they told pollsters.
Catalist is out this week with its comprehensive accounting of how Trump won last year, and it’s an eye-opener. It gives depth and detail to the astonishing shift among younger voters, particularly Hispanic Americans and men. Indeed, the only significant demographic groups where Democrats held the line from 2020 were female, and the only one of those with any measurable improvement was a single point with white, married women — a group they still lost widely.
But we knew Democrats fell on the wrong side of the gender gap last year. Their big historical advantage with women only works if they don’t get crushed with men, and they surely did get crushed.
Of more lasting interest may be that the Democrats’ theory of the electorate was wrong. Here’s The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter:
“Harris wanted an electorate heavily populated with frequent voters, while the Trump team wanted an electorate filled with voters who have not participated as much in major elections. According to Catalist, the electorate was indeed more populated with frequent voters than at any point in the last three presidential elections. The share of the electorate that were so-called ‘super voters’ — those who voted in all of the last four major elections — was 47%, compared to just 38% of the electorate in 2020. More importantly, Harris did better among these voters than any previous Democratic nominee since 2016, capturing 50% of the vote, compared to Biden’s 49% and Hillary Clinton’s 47%. The least frequent voters also made up less of the electorate overall in 2024 (11%) than in 2020 (16%) and 2016 (15%). … So why wasn’t she [successful]? Because Harris not only underperformed Biden among those who were brand new to voting, but also among people who had voted in anywhere from one to three of the last four elections.”
One could say that these are the same kinds of problems expressed in two different ways: Men are generally less likely to vote than women, so a major shift among men will also be reflected in a shift among less likely voters.
But it was more than that, and it all points in the same direction: that Harris was the candidate of the status quo at a time when voters, especially the voters least attached to the existing political order, were strongly disinclined to stay the course. Her campaign got the electorate it wanted, but still lost because while they had maxed out their numbers with the affluent, college-educated, and upwardly mobile, Democrats still had farther to fall with the downscale electorate. It was, very much, another change election.
Now, America may be headed for an unprecedented fourth change election in a row. Voters may continue to toggle back and forth between the two parties like someone trying to get a computer on the fritz to reset. But it may also be that Republicans can keep together their coalition of the very rich and the working class and finally stop the seesaw.
And the surest way for that to happen is for Democrats to ignore these warnings. If they don’t find a way to convince a skeptical electorate that they are a party for ordinary people — economically and culturally — they may find themselves on the wrong side of a realignment two decades in the making.
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NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION
Trump Job Performance
Average Approval: 43.6%
Average Disapproval: 53%
Net Score: -9.4 points
Change from last week: +0.6 points
Change from last month: +0.2 points
[Average includes: Ipsos/Reuters: 42% approve - 52% disapprove; Echelon Insights: 46% approve - 52% disapprove; Marquette: 46% approve - 54% disapprove; Marist/NPR/PBS: 42% approve - 53% disapprove; NYT/Siena: 42% approve - 54% disapprove]
Republicans lose affection for ending birthright citizenship
Do you support ending birthright citizenship, which makes anyone born in the U.S. a citizen?
All adults: 28%
- February: 31% (-3 points)
Republicans: 48%
- February: 56% (-8 points)
[NPR/Ipsos survey of U.S. adults, 2025]
ON THE SIDE: WHERE THE TWAIN SHALL MEET
Writer John Jeremiah Sullivan goes exploring for Samuel Clemens amid the latest revival in interest in America’s most important author. Harper’s: “When we come to the essay that ran in the New Orleans Daily Crescent in 1859, we hear Mark Twain. He did not sign himself that way—his adoption of the pseudonym was still a few years off—but as ‘Sergeant Fathom’ (which is on its way to Mark Twain, thematically). Here he is, moving along the great American river, which he knows almost by muscle memory, mocking authority. ‘My opinion,’ he writes, ‘is that if the rise continues at this rate the water will be on the roof of the St. Charles Hotel before the middle of January. The point at Cairo, which has not even been moistened by the river since 1813, is now entirely under water.’ I started laughing when I read the word ‘moistened.’ It is no small thing to make a person physically laugh at the remove of 166 years.”
PRIME CUTS
Harris rival takes shot at former veep over Biden claims: Politico: “The Democratic finger-pointing set off by a buzzy new book on former President Joe Biden’s declining fitness during his presidency is now sloshing into the California governor’s race. … Antonio Villaraigosa tore into two other home state Democrats — former Vice President Kamala Harris and former health Secretary Xavier Becerra … accusing the two Biden administration officials of being complicit in a ‘cover up.’ … ‘Voters deserve to know the truth, what did Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra know, when did they know it, and most importantly, why didn’t either of them speak out?” Villaraigosa said in a statement. “This cover up directly led to a second Donald Trump term — and as a result, all Californians are paying the price.”
Former Biden primary campaign manager warns of left-wing capture: Slow Boring: “While Democrats and Republicans both operate within expansive ecosystems of outside organizations, Democrats face a painful truth: their infrastructure is not primarily built to win elections. … These structural misalignments lead candidates, elected officials, and organizational leaders to prioritize niche debates and narrow ideological framing over practical governance. The result is a weakened party brand, reduced electoral competitiveness, and diminished governing capacity. … While the far left often grabs headlines, the real damage to the party’s brand increasingly comes from the Mostly Safe Middle. Rather than acting as a ballast against ideological excess, the safe middle often amplifies it, creating a perception that the Democratic Party is more extreme than the electorate it needs to win.”
Trump Justice Department goes after Cuomo after giving Adams a pass: New York Times: "The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation of Andrew M. Cuomo, a front-runner in the New York City mayoral race, after Republicans accused him of lying to Congress about decisions he made during the coronavirus pandemic as governor, according to two people familiar with the matter. The inquiry, begun about a month ago by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, comes after senior Justice Department officials in February demanded the dismissal of an indictment of the city’s current mayor, Eric Adams, on corruption charges. That puts the Trump administration in the unusual position of having ended a criminal case against the leader of the nation’s largest city and opened one into his chief rival in the span of a few months. Mr. Adams is running for re-election as an independent, and Mr. Cuomo is leading the Democratic primary field in the polls.”
Musk, who threatened to bury GOP dissenters in primaries, steps back: The Hill: “Elon Musk said he plans to pull back on his political spending after flowing millions of dollars into the 2024 presidential election and other campaigns. Musk said during a discussion at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday that he made his decision because he feels he’s ‘done enough’ but left the door open to future spending. ‘In terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,’ the Tesla CEO said. ‘If I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it,’ he added. ‘I do not currently see a reason.’ Musk has been one of the dominant forces in U.S. politics over the past year, with filings showing that he spent at least $250 million to help get President Trump elected to a second term, including three contributions of $25 million in the final two weeks of October.”
SHORT ORDER
Trump Jr. feels “calling” to be president—The Hill
DCCC banks more cash than NRCC by a tight margin, but still struggles with 2024 debt—Punchbowl News
Former Ryan challenger tries again for Wisconsin House seat—Wisconsin Public Radio
With Gerry Connolly’s death, House Dems likely to be down another member until November—Washington Post
Potential Pelosi retirement sets up struggle in San Francisco primary—San Francisco Examiner
Dems keep New York state Senate seat with easy win in Trump-leaning district—The Hill
TABLE TALK
Ad absurdum
“Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country.”—Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem when asked by Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) to define the Latin phrase that describes the judicial power to compel the government to bring prisoners before a court.
And he only had to work until July…
“Pay Mike what he wants.”—Then-President Biden’s instruction to his 2024 campaign staff to meet the demand of top adviser Mike Donilon for a $4 million salary, according to a new book about Biden’s failed campaign.
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FOR DESSERT
Yeah, that’s definitely the problem…
Newsweek: “Russia is going after TV series Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, and the Harry Potter franchise in an effort to purge what it claims is the promotion of ‘childfree ideology.’ The development comes months after Russia passed a bill banning what state-run news wires describe as the ‘public propaganda of the ideas of voluntarily choosing not to have children.’ It comes as Russia grapples with a dwindling birth rate and as President Vladimir Putin scrambles to encourage women to have children. … On September 1, an order by Russia's telecommunications regulator Roskomnadzor will come into effect which will ban ‘childfree ideology,’ local media reported. … ‘Even in the harmless Harry Potter saga, as it seems to us, one can find a hint of childfree [ideology]: Professor McGonagall did not have children. However, it is unknown whether this was a conscious choice or something did not work out,’ the publication said.”
Chris Stirewalt is the politics editor for The Hill and NewsNation, the host of The Hill Sunday on NewsNation and The CW, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of books on politics and the media. Aliza Jane Fassett contributed to this report.