From “Samuel Alito gained up to $2.9m from oil and gas assets since joining supreme court, analysis shows” by Dharna Noor at The Guardian: “The supreme court justice Samuel Alito gained up to $2.9m from his fossil fuel interests between 2005 and 2024, a new review of financial disclosures shows…The analysis from the non-profit advocacy group and judicial watchdog Court Accountability, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found that even at the lowest range of estimates, Alito gained almost $400,000 from his oil and gas interests since being tapped for the high court by George W Bush in 2005…The findings come as the supreme court prepares to take up a case in which the oil companies Suncor Energy and Exxon asked the justices to find that federal law prevents subnational governments from filing lawsuits against fossil fuel producers for the climate-warming effects of their products…The supreme court said this month it will hear oral arguments in the case on 5 October, the opening day of its new term. The Trump administration, which is siding with the oil companies, has asked for 10 minutes of argument time. Court Accountability and other groups have called for a Senate committee to investigate Alito, the sole supreme court justice with holdings in energy companies, and said he should recuse himself.” More here.

In”Four takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries in six states,” Maham Javaid writes at NPR.org: “Democratic primaries in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Connecticut signaled what the party’s base may want from new leaders: a harder line against President Trump’s immigration crackdown and younger, more progressive nominees, as a 14-term congressman was swept aside by a candidate under 50…On the Republican side, the night tested how far Trump’s endorsement still carries, even with his approval at a second-term low, and the answer was mixed. His endorsements won in some states and stumbled in others…The competitive Democratic Senate race in Minnesota was being looked at as a litmus test deciding if the party has enough spine to effectively oppose Trump’s immigration policies and enforcement operations…With Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s primary win against Rep. Angie Craig Tuesday night, in a race called by the AP, it appears the base wants their party leaders to oppose ICE and Operation Metro Surge, a large-scale immigration enforcement operation launched by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in December 2025 which heavily impacted the Twin Cities and shaped much of this Senate race…For weeks, Francesca Hong, a 37-year-old chef, state lawmaker and democratic socialist, had been leading the polls against David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive and more mainstream candidate, in a state that is purple in presidential elections. But after being locked in a tight race on Tuesday night, Crowley was declared the winner, in a call made by the AP early Wednesday…The tight race, despite Hong’s controversial track record of statements, which included canceling Thanksgiving, and lack of endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders, signals the Democratic base is looking for change…Hong’s high-energy grassroots campaign has been fueled by progressives who are drawn to her unusual background and left-wing politics. She backs Medicare for All and universal childcare, and has called for a moratorium on data centers, a key issue for midterm voters.” More here.

Oren Oppenheim, Gaby Vinick and Diana Paulsen saw it this way in “Primaries key takeaways: A centrist win, questions about Trump endorsement” at ABC News: “Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, a centrist Democrat, narrowly won the Democratic primary in a major upset in the race for governor, the Associated Press projects. He defeated Wisconsin assemblywoman Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, in what became a high-stakes test for progressives who pinned their hopes on winning a major party nomination in a crucial battleground state. A former state lawmaker, Crowley pitched himself as the candidate best-positioned to defeat Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany, endorsed by President Donald Trump, in November. He campaigned on his executive experience running the state’s most populous county. It’s the final shakeup in what became a messy primary and a major comeback for Crowley, who had quit the race on July 8 as his campaign struggled to gain traction. But with Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez’s exit days later, it set off a scramble for Democrats to coalesce around a moderate opponent to Hong. He rejoined the race on July 17, bolstered by late support from outgoing Democratic Gov. Tony Evers…Crowley’s narrow victory also suggests that division over the party’s direction — and the split over support for progressives or more moderate candidates this midterm cycle — remains ever strong. It follows a handful of electoral victories for progressives in congressional primaries in Colorado and New York and, most recently, in Michigan’s closely-watched Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. Hong branded herself as a fighter for the working class, advocated for universal childcare and called to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She argued voters were ready for “transformational change.” More here.

Kyle Kondik and J. Miles Coleman shared their view of the primaries at The Center for Politics: “Leading up to Election Day, polls showed Hong with a big lead, but Crowley rallied, leading by tenuous margins for much of Election Night before the belated release of Milwaukee’s absentee votes made it clear that Hong had no path to overtake his small lead. What exactly happened with the polls is hard to say: It may be the case that the white progressives who power left-wing candidates are responding to polls at greater rates, which may skew the results even with weighting. Wisconsin, like Michigan, does not have registration by party, so its primaries are open, and figuring out who is going to vote from year to year is a real challenge. This also was, as we just said, a crazy race, and there likely was a lot of change in the closing days. It may have even been the case that progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s (D) victory in the Michigan Senate primary, and subsequent Democratic handwringing about his electability, contributed to a shift toward Crowley in Wisconsin. Aside from the fact that Hong did not run any of her own television ads, the media hits that she did during the final stretch of the campaign did not dispel the notion that she would have been a very risky nominee for Democrats. All in all, the Democratic “establishment” has clearly taken some hits this cycle, but party leaders retain the ability to nudge voters…In what was reminiscent of how Rep. Haley Stevens (D, MI-11), another “establishment” Democratic candidate, held up much better than what her polling suggested last week, Crowley carried a majority of the state’s counties. Both Crowley and Hong carried their home counties, Milwaukee and Dane, respectively, although they each did so by margins that could be called underwhelming…Crowley’s coalition included the city’s Black wards, and he also posted a relatively strong showing in more established and monied neighborhoods along the county’s North Shore. Meanwhile—and in a way similar to how we found the aforementioned El-Sayed held up in Detroit—the pro-Hong coalition showed up in younger, whiter areas of the county as well as the city’s Latino pockets.” More here.

The following article stub by Jennifer Rubin is cross-posted from “How Democrats Win in 2026 and Beyond” at The Contrarian:

Democrats should not wait until Labor Day, the traditional kickoff of the midterm campaign, to pivot and begin sprinting toward November. No one who genuinely cares about the fate of democracy should be kvetching about primary polling (which partisans trolling for donor dollars, but not real voters, obsessively focus upon) or relitigating the relative electability of primary opponents after primaries are decided. (Kudos to Rep. Haley Stevens for fully embracing Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed in recognition of the stakes.) Fortunately, a batch of insightful Democrats have stepped forward to offer a pathway to win decisively on a populist economic message with broad-based appeal.

Leading the way, Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico delivered a speech last week that adeptly framed the argument for Democrats:

For fifty years, billionaire mega-donors and puppet politicians have been stealing from the American people. Stealing the wealth we created. With their bribes, their bailouts, and their billionaire tax breaks.

This “affordability crisis” isn’t something that happened in the last five years. This affordability crisis has been fifty years in the making.

Since the late 1970s, mega donors and corporate special interests have been buying politicians in both political parties, and then those politicians turned around and rigged this economy to benefit their wealthy donors at our expense.

We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.

Pushing back on the notion that Democrats despise capitalism, Talarico makes the case that the far right has destroyed free markets. Corruption, tariffs, and dark money have influenced regulatory favors and tax giveaways, and massive corporate consolidation are the antithesis of a competitive free market that would create wealth for a wide cross-section of Americans.

“[T]he idea behind capitalism was simple and revolutionary: people should get fairly compensated for their labor. We should get paid for our work. But that’s not what we have right now,” he argued. “You can’t tell me the market is working as it should when billionaires are becoming trillionaires — while the people who do all the work can’t afford the basics.” He added, “Adam Smith is rolling over in his grave. This is not capitalism; this is crony capitalism.”

Talarico’s proposed agenda, dubbed the New American Dream, includes raising the minimum wage, expanding overtime, repealing tax cuts for the super-rich, protecting labor organizing, and investing in college and vocational education. He also includes items that genuine fiscal conservatives used to favor — such as reducing the national debt (“closing tax loopholes, cracking down on tax cheats, and ending forever wars that send billions of our tax dollars overseas”) and removing red tape that impedes housing construction.

Talarico’s pro-worker proposals include universal childcare and paid family leave, an expanded child tax credit, and “cracking down on the data centers jacking up our utility bills and using up our water — and preventing new ones from being built unless they meet our demands.” Positions such as these, which legacy media would characterize as “progressive,” and MAGA operatives would denounce as “socialism,” are embraced by super-majorities of Americans. Here is where Talarico adeptly turns MAGA hacks’ rhetoric against them:

They’re going to claim this new dream is radical. They’re going to claim it’s extreme. They’re going to claim we’re socialists, or communists, or whatever sounds scariest in a headline. And we’ll say: Is that the best you can do?

These are the same old scare tactics. The same old politics of the past. The names they’ll call us only reveal how small their dreams are.

More here.

Cassidy’s cave lights up the corrupt heart of the Republican Party for all to see. There are a lot of articles you can read about it. Try “Spineless Republican Gives Jaw-Dropping Reason for Folding to Trump” for starters. Sen. Cassidy had the choice of providing a “profile in courage” his grandkids could one day be proud of. Instead he turned his back on honor and put his political career way ahead of any of the ethical or moral principles that America is supposed to be about. He chose the Hall of Shame that showcases political cowardice. But it’s too easy to blame just him. His entire party, with just a couple of exceptions, now stands well-lit in the bright light of corruption. He is just the emblematic example of all the Republican senators who decided that Todd Blanche, the guy who engineered Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer to a “country club” prison, was fit to rule over American justice. No doubt Cassidy didn’t want to be the front man for this tawdry drama. It makes you wonder, where is the grimy bottom of the Republican Party? Does it even have one? Many once thought Pam Bondi was as bad the DOJ could get. Somewhere she is breathing a long sigh of relief. The victims in the Epstein files will never cave like the GOP senators. They will continue their fight until a semblance of justice has been achieved. It could take a while. But Epstein enablers and the party that feeds them will not only have to answer to history. They will have to answer to the voters in November. Their short-sighted politics of distraction will not save them then. In just a few short months the bill for Republican corruption comes due.

To add some clarity to what the new A.G. is all about, read “Todd Blanche Wants to Finish What Dobbs Started” by Rachel Rebouche at The Nation. As Rebouche writes, “When the Supreme Court handed down Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, overturning Roe v. Wade, its defenders insisted the ruling was an act of judicial restraint and a decision that returned the question of abortion to democratic majorities in each state. The United States’ top lawyer, Todd Blanche, apparently has other ideas…On a July 30 conference call hosted by the White House Faith Office —not meant for public ears, though the audio later surfaced on YouTube—the acting attorney general told religious leaders that the administration is working to ensure that the Dobbs decision “becomes permanent in every single state.” He acknowledged that “we don’t have complete victory yet,” but promised the faithful, “Victory will be soon and it will be permanent.”…Blanche seems to have in mind a project that goes far beyond enforcing existing federal law or upholding current state abortion laws. Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department could use the agency as a tool to impose abortion restrictions on all states, even those that protect reproductive rights through their own democratic processes and state Constitutions…The confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general will represent a new facet of the post-Dobbs landscape. The debate over abortion access has been primarily a story of state-level politics: ballot measures, state constitutional amendments, legislative sessions, and court challenges fought state by state and county by county. That landscape could change…” More here.

If you had any doubts about where Republican leadership stood on the data centers issue, you can put them to rest in the wake of President Trump’s recent clarification. As Julia Manchester reports in “Trump: It’s a ‘mistake’ to go against data centers” at The Hill, “President Trump touted what he said were the benefits of data centers in an interview that was published Friday, potentially pitting himself against a number of Republicans and Democrats on the growing issue…“I saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers. I think it’s a mistake,” Trump told Punchbowl News…“I’m not taking positions,” he continued. “I just think it’s a mistake because there are other communities that want it. When a community wants it, it means a lot of money is going to come into that community.”…“Taxes are going to go way down because this is a tremendous source of income,” the president said…Trump also pushed back on criticism of the data centers, including that they’re unsightly…“I don’t think they’re unsightly. I mean, I’m looking at some of these data centers, the most incredible buildings I’ve ever seen,” the president said…“They are tremendously important for the economics. I mean, this is — for Texas to say no to data centers is a mistake in the sense that it could be bigger than oil,” he said.” More here.

In “The Disintegration of the U.S. Military Under Trump and Beyond,” Mike Lofgren writes at Washington Monthly,  “I have written before that even in a so-called “conventional” conflict at which it is supposed to excel, the U.S. military has serious deficiencies. The Pentagon’s habit of purchasing high-tech weapons that are too expensive, take too long to build, and are too few to be sustained amid normal attrition has left us with a force that will quickly run out of munitions. The ill-advised war against Iran greatly exacerbated this deficiency, confronting the Pentagon with the stark reality that conflict with China would empty the U.S. arsenal in a few days. It also became clear that our military was unprepared to deal with drone warfare: Ukrainian advisors were dispatched to the Persian Gulf to teach Americans the new realities of war…During Trump’s second term, his misuse of the military has accelerated. The employment of the National Guard, and occasionally active-duty military, for policing assistance in American cities has been justified by dubious emergency declarations. Still, the real reason appears to be an impressive show of military force to cow the politicians and citizens of Democratic-run jurisdictions…A meddling president with a history as a fly-by-night developer who stiffs his vendors, tolerates shoddy work if it has surface glitz, and declared six bankruptcies. In his second term, Trump’s fingerprints are all over Pentagon contracting…Trump’s sons have invested in more than a dozen tech startups that received at least $3.2 billion in direct government business (mostly with DOD) and $3.1 billion in future contract options. Five of the firms had never done business with the federal government until the Trumps invested after their father became president—a notable achievement because of the difficulty in qualifying as a first-time federal contractor, particularly with DOD.” More here.

Today, we link to a podcast of TDS contributor Ruy Teixeira’s interview of Dan Wang, Canadian technology analyst and writer, focusing on modern China and author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

One of the big policy questions for the U.S. that emerges among viewers of the interview is, ‘Should America learn from China and build more stuff and have less regulation?” Never mind how just yet. This interview sheds rare light on that possibility and Wang describes what it is like to live in a society that moves fast to get things done.

President Trump and his fellow Republicans frequently stereotype China as a “Communist” country. But China’s edge may owe more to the practical philosophies of Confucius and the Tao than to Marx’s writings. When an American President wants to build something big that puts tens of thousands of people to work, he has to navigate through the caprices of 535 legislators, most of whom are quarrelsome lawyers. We call that ‘democracy.’ China’s President Xi meets with a couple of top aides and the project is launched soon afterwards. But let’s not pretend that these two nations are the only models we have. Scandinavian countries do a pretty good job of combining the best elements of representative and social democracies.

Due to a YouTube glitch, we can’t simply post the video interview here. but you can watch it on AEI’s web page.

With an incredible number of important things going on in Washington and around the world, the Trump White House is focused on base-pondering nonsense, as I noted at New York. It’s important for Democrats to understand what that means.

While Donald Trump is highly erratic, you can always rely on him pandering to his MAGA base on immigration-related issues. So it’s no surprise that the defeat in the U.S. Supreme Court of his bid to end birthright citizenship didn’t deter him from coming right back to the well on the subject. On Thursday he signed two new executive orders purporting to address abuses in the current immigration system. While his 2025 EO flatly repudiating the automatic right to citizenship of those born in the United States was struck down by the Supreme Court in the Trump v. Barbara decision on June 30, the new orders appear to nibble around the edges of the issue, as the Associated Press explains:

“[The first order]  was narrower in scope than the previous one shot down by the Supreme Court and appeared to focus on restricting automatic citizenship to specific categories of people, including children born to adults with connections to foreign embassies or organizations as well as anyone considered an “alien enemy” of the United States.

“It also aimed to restrict birthright citizenship to anyone whose parents ‘engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship.’

“A second order seeks to curb what Trump called ‘birth tourism’ by increasing restrictions on visitors to the U.S. who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country.”

The number of people ostensibly affected by these orders is pretty limited, notes the Washington Post:

“The new orders were certain to face legal challenges, and if they survive, would affect far fewer people than the original. An estimated 15 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., while only a few thousand people are foreign lobbyists registered with the Justice Department.

“No significant populations of U.S. residents are designated as alien enemies or foreign terrorists, making that provision largely symbolic. The administration faces ongoing litigation over whether it can deport alleged gang members by treating them as alien enemies. …

“There is no official data on ‘birth tourism.’ In 2024, fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses, out of 3.6 million total live births, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.”

When Trump announced the new orders Stephen Miller was on hand to offer some demagogic thoughts about “birth tourism,” a concept that fits in well with the presidential aide’s notorious subscription to conspiracy theories about immigrant efforts to rob American blind while rigging elections, as the BBC reported:

“’The idea (is) that people come here pretending to be a tourist, pretending to be a visitor,’ Stephen Miller, homeland security advisor and White House deputy chief of staff for policy, said while standing beside the president on Thursday.

“’But the real reason they’re here is to have a child, to make that child an automatic citizen, (to) leave our country and then have a US citizen child,’ he said, adding that those children then gain access to welfare benefits, the voting booth, and ‘all the other rights and privileges that belong solely to Americans.'”

While it’s unlikely these orders will ever be successfully enforced, they serve as a pre-midterms reminder to MAGA voters–and everyone else–that the administration hasn’t given up on radically restricting legal immigration even as it carries out the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. It’s as close to the core of Trump’s message and agenda as his related claims that Democrats are regularly stealing elections by deploying the many millions of swarthy illegal voters they’ve lured across the borders by promises of welfare payments and encouragement to commit crimes. Mere Supreme Court decisions won’t stop Trump and Miller from hammering away at this lurid and divisive theme.

From “2026 is turning into a bloodbath for safe-seat House Democrats” by Andrew Solender at Axios: “A half dozen House Democrats in safe districts have lost their primaries so far this election cycle — and many more could soon follow suit…Why it matters: Many of these losses are the result of growing restlessness among the Democratic grassroots that has increasingly morphed into anger towards the party establishment…”I expected a lot of people to run because they didn’t know how to respond to Trump without just being active,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) told Axios…He added: “We’re seeing that and all the primary electorate voting right now.”…Reps. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.)…were all unseated by challengers running to their left…Freshman Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas) defeated longtime Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) after the two were drawn into a district together…And Rep. Julie Johnson (D-Texas) lost her primary to former Rep. Colin Allred…By the numbers: This is one of just four election cycles since 1994 in which at least half a dozen House Democrats have lost their primaries…The other three cycles — 2002, 2012 and 2022 — all came after congressional reapportionment, which often pits incumbent House members against one another…Only one Democratic primary ouster this year — Green’s loss to Menefee — has been the result of mid-decade redistricting…What’s next: Plenty more hurdles await Democratic incumbents, particularly those 70 and older who have had lengthy tenures in Congress…The bottom line: Pocan said the Democratic primary electorate’s anti-incumbency energy is “a good thing ultimately, because people will be ready for November and ready for change.” More here.

With all the attention being understandably focused on Michigan’s August 4 primaries, many may have missed what happened in Kansas the same day, which represented some potential good news for Democrats, as I explained at New York:

A “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party” raged on in Michigan during yesterday’s primaries. But the vibe was very different among Democrats in Kansas, which also held primaries on August 4.

Kansas is a resolutely red state where Republican extremism periodically gives Democrats an opening. The Democratic Party has won four gubernatorial elections dating back to 2002, when Kathleen Sebelius exploited GOP divisions to win; now two-term incumbent Democrat Laura Kelly, a tough-minded moderate in the Sebelius mode, is leaving office amid high Republican expectations that they will reimpose a one-party rule on the state.

But that plan might not work out. A robust Democratic primary to choose a Kelly successor, along with an equally robust Democratic primary to choose a challenger to Republican U.S. senator Roger Marshall, shows that the Sunflower State’s minority party is by no means throwing in the towel. And while the candidates in both primaries exhibited some distinctive appeals, there’s no evident intraparty ideological warfare, likely because Democrats know they must appeal to moderate Republican voters to win.

Kelly endorsed Johnson County (a wealthy Kansas City suburb, and the largest county in Kansas) state senator Ethan Corson as her successor. But he lost to his Johnson County colleague Cindy Holscher, who offset Corson’s financial and advertising advantage with an issue-oriented campaign focused on two people-pleasing themes. She favored a moratorium on data-center development generally and also opposed and a specific (and controversial) subsidy-laden deal to build a new stadium for the Kansas City Chiefs. She will now face Republican state legislative leader Ty Masterson, who rode a Donald Trump endorsement to the GOP nomination over a large field. She is sure to hit Masterson on his Trump-like benevolence toward data centers but will also deploy the not-so-secret weapon of all Kansas Democrats: resistance to GOP efforts to ban abortion.

Kansas was the very first state to hold a ballot initiative on abortion rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, when anti-abortion activists proposed a constitutional amendment to override state judicial decisions protecting the right to choose. It lost by nearly 20 points. This year some of the same people went after pro-choice judges from a different angle, as The 19th reported:

“Kansas voters rejected a ballot measure that would have made members of the state’s Supreme Court electable by popular vote — a seemingly technical issue that had become a proxy battle for the future of abortion rights in the state. …

“Conservatives in the state’s Republican-led legislature put forth the proposal in an effort to remake Kansas’ high court, which in 2019 issued a pivotal decision holding that the state constitution guaranteed the right to an abortion. Three years later, in 2022, Kansas voters rejected a measure that would have undone the court’s decision — securing the Sunflower State’s status as a destination for people seeking abortion from neighboring states such as Texas and Oklahoma, which have both banned the procedure.”

The initiative lost by 22 points (61 percent to 39 percent). It was backed by Masterson, unsurprisingly, and also by Marshall, a hammer-headed conservative known for his loyalty to Trump’s agenda.

Marshall’s general-election opponent is right out of Kansas moderate central casting. Kansas City megachurch founder Adam Hamilton is running a centrist-outsider campaign appealing to people across party lines. He is senior pastor at the largest United Methodist church in the country and has a national as well as a local following that fed his modest but still decisive victory over a huge primary field. His financial and political viability led the authoritative Cook Political Report to move the Kansas Senate race from the Safe Republican to the Likely Republican rating, which places the contest on upset watch. Republicans will now have to deal with the temptation to energize conservative evangelicals by attacking a religiously observant Democrat on theological as well as ideological grounds, much as they’ve done (with limited success so far) against the Reverend Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico.

Holscher and Hamilton offer Kansas Democrats about the strongest statewide ticket they could hope for in a year when a national anti-Trump wave could affect even deep-red states. And they won’t have to worry too much about intraparty conflict on the road to November.

What are the smart take-aways from the narrow victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic primary for U.S. Senate?  One lesson has to be that big money spent on ads doesn’t always win. “Overall, Stevens and her allies spent nearly nine times as much on advertising as El-Sayed and his allied groups did, according to AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm,” Henry J. Gomez writes at nbcnews.com. However, it does appear that the big money reduced the lead many expected from the most recent opinion polls. El-Sayed’s victory may lend some credibility to the notion that American voters are now more open to progressive candidates. Progressive organizer Will Lawrence also won his race for the Democratic nomination in a battleground congressional district in Michigan. As Grace Panetta writes at the 19th, “Lawrence, an original co-founder of the climate activist group Sunrise Movement, defeated former U.S. Ambassador  Bridget Brink and ex-Navy SEAL Matt Maasdam for the Democratic primary for Michigan’s 7th District, currently represented by Rep. Tom Barrett.”  El-Sayed, who has an M.D., is a strong advocate for Medicare for All and said so frequently. That may have resonated with Michiganders who are feeling squeezed by rising costs for health care. El-Sayed is a compelling candidate, who articulated clear and crisp policy positions in fairly stark contrast to Stevens, who used more words to say less in policy debates.  Stevens did win Michigan’s emblematically white working-class Macomb county by a margin of 51.8 to El-Sayed’s 44.3 percent. Now we will see how good Dr. El-Sayed is at expanding his electoral coalition and beating Republicans.

At Semafor, David Weigel argues in “An inconclusive Tuesday, in Michigan and beyond” that “The left hasn’t taken over the Democratic Party yet,” and notes: “Sunrise Movement co-founder Will Lawrence won his race in Michigan’s 7th District handily, over two vote-splitting center-left candidates. That was the only early, decisive win for a movement that just nearly unseated a senator in Colorado…In Missouri, former Rep. Cori Bush didn’t even come close to beating Rep. Wesley Bell, the Democrat who unseated her with heavy AIPAC support two years ago and didn’t need as much this time. Michigan state Rep. Donavan McKinney, the strongest challenger Shri Thanedar has faced in three House races, was leading by single digits. So was Abdul El-Sayed, whose Michigan Senate campaign radiated confidence in the final weeks, as public and private polling showed him besting Rep. Haley Stevens by close to 20 points…The left is still on the verge of historic wins in Michigan (though Kyle Blomquist, the Democratic Socialists of America’s candidate, flopped in the mostly rural 1st District, where Republicans are favored to win in November). But there were two stories in the state, of years of progressive organizing paying off and a historic amount of PAC money flowing in to stop it…That money wasn’t really there in Colorado, and it came late in New York. In Washington, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez faced a progressive challenger who channeled the anger of local activists at her votes with Republicans — and posed no threat whatsoever…None of this means the left has already peaked. It does suggest that Democrats who want to rally primary voters against left-wing candidates can do that, with enough time and money. That’s going to get noticed by Democrats in Wisconsin and Minnesota, who are trying to convince late-deciding primary voters to reject progressives like Francesca Hong and Peggy Flanagan.“Tomorrow we begin to mend fences,” El-Sayed told his supporters in Detroit. “If your instinct is to be like, ‘I told you’ — no!” That was a less triumphant, hubristic tone than his supporters were taking, up to 8 pm on Tuesday.”

In “It’s Still a Blue Wave,” William Kristol writes at The Bulwark, “It would be nice to be able to draw some novel, surprising, or dramatic conclusions from last night’s election results. But sometimes the truth is messy and prosaic. The fact is that the results were a mixed bag. And they don’t seem to me to change anything much about what’s likely to happen in November…The highest profile race was the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. The polls suggested that the leftist insurgent, Abdul El-Sayed, would easily defeat the establishment candidate, Haley Stevens, perhaps by double digits. It looks early this morning that El-Sayed will likely eke out a victory by a percentage point or two..It’s a good reminder that polling in primaries can be unreliable. More importantly, it probably means Republican Mike Rogers, who almost won his senate race against Elissa Slotkin in 2024, has better odds than he otherwise would have had this November. But the national environment will still help the Democratic nominee, and it’s also the case that some swing voters may be more attracted to the change El-Sayed represents than put off by some of his left-of-the-mainstream views. So while this is a chance—very likely the only one—for a Republican Senate pickup, it’s by no means guaranteed…On the other hand, the continuing cascade of news about Rep. Max Miller’s horrifying personal behavior, combined with his determination to stay in the race for his Ohio congressional seat, makes me more convinced than ever that Democrats will have a better-than-expected cycle in that state—and that Sherrod Brown could very well win the Senate race there…Put that together with likely Democratic pickups in North Carolina and Maine, and decent opportunities for victory in Alaska, Iowa, and Texas, and I think Democrats have a pretty good chance—I’d say slightly better than 50-50—of controlling the Senate.” More here.

WaPo’s James Hohmann conducts a good interview with TDS contributor, Ruy Teixeira:

In his Q & A article at The New Yorker, “Will Left-Wing Democrats Reinvent the Party or Hurt Its Chances in November?,” Isaac Chotiner interviews Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’s 2020 Presidential-campaign manager and founder of the media nonprofit More Perfect Union. An excerpt:

Ahead of November’s midterm elections, Democrats are in the midst of a series of heated primaries across the country, pitting more centrist candidates, often backed by the Party establishment, against leftist opponents. Two Democratic House members have already lost primaries in New York to progressive challengers, and on August 4th the Michigan primary will decide whether the leftist doctor Abdul El-Sayed can defeat the congresswoman Haley Stevens in the race for an open Senate seat. In Wisconsin, another purple state, Francesca Hong—the progressive candidate for governor—has a wide lead on her opponents in the lead-up to the August 11th primary.

To try and understand the fissures in the Democratic Party, I recently spoke by phone with Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’s 2020 Presidential-campaign manager and founder of the media nonprofit More Perfect Union. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why so many Democrats are angry at the Party establishment, whether the Party is in danger of losing seats in swing states, and whether progressives, like Bernie Sanders, were right to stick with Joe Biden until the end of his reëlection campaign.

What do you see as the main division within the Democratic Party right now, and does it feel new?

I think it’s intensified. The division is over the desire of candidates to take on concentrations of wealth and power, and their willingness and desire to take on corporate greed and corporate power in general. There are people who were born for it, or desire it, and they are the candidates who tend to be doing quite well at this moment. They’re the ones who understand that part of your job in public service is to stand up to the power of moneyed interests, and how critical it is to speak out on behalf of people living paycheck to paycheck. There is friction against others in the Party who would say we don’t need that kind of tension with the moneyed élite. We have to raise money from them, we have to coddle them, we have to have public-private partnerships with them, we have to make them feel nice, and be kind to them.

I’m not saying tonally you have to be mean, but you have to acknowledge that there is friction and tension if you’re going to fight for working-class communities right now.

Do you think progressives should be focussing on running these types of candidates in safe, Democratic areas and states, so that the caucus in the House and the Senate is more left-wing and pushes for more left-wing ideas? Or do you also think they need to be pushing these types of candidates across the map?

I certainly come at this from a desire for persuasion. And, in order to be persuasive, I do tend to think that the candidates who are going to perform best across the board clearly define their desire to address concentrations of wealth and power, and the issues around corporate greed. And, if they are defined in that way, they can succeed in the reddest parts of this country. I do tend to think those candidates should start to reflect their geographies a bit, if they’re doing it the right way. So a New York City candidate who’s doing this may look and sound different than a Montana candidate who’s doing this.

You hear people like Senator Sanders, and yourself, say that the common thread for winning in diverse places is fighting for working people on economic issues. But, with candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, in Michigan, or Francesca Hong, in Wisconsin, you see left-wing campaigns running on very liberal social platforms. For example, El-Sayed has gotten tripped up over questions about defunding the police. I’m curious how you see that tension.

Many candidates run on liberal social-justice platforms. I don’t think you’re wrong that there are elements of that in this wave of progressive candidates. But what often happens is people look at their tweets from six years ago and miss how they are campaigning right now.

Look at how different candidates are talking about ice: some use the word “abolish,” some say “reform,” some say “move funding to different agencies.” Those are all part and parcel of what I was suggesting—that you are attuned to the geographies in which you’re representing, and you are close to the people you’re representing. If you go talk to a lot of these working-class people, they are three-dimensional human beings. They know when somebody is being honest and levelling with them. And I see in a lot of these progressive candidates that, while they may have views on things that don’t one hundred per cent align with every working-class person in their district, there is a benefit because people understand the candidate is telling them what they really believe. And there’s points for honesty.

I thought you were saying that there was some need for candidates to change their pitch based on where they are running, though.

When you’re in Montana, the issues of housing play out a bit differently than the housing issues of New York City, right? The density of renters in New York City is very high. Montana, obviously, they’re going through tenant unions; they have their own issues, but there are a lot of people being squeezed out of their opportunity to own their own homes. I’m just arguing that economic justice, the way in which you talk about those affordability crises, will have geographic dimensions to them that matter to your relatability.

I see, so the issue is not that you need to moderate or change your pitch on social issues, depending on where you’re running.

Well, I agree with that, too. So if you’re running in Montana, you’re running in Idaho, you’re running in Ohio, I do think that a good candidate who is trying to appeal to the working class has to be aware of what the attitudinal views are of the community, and the candidate has to be interested in them and want to have a conversation about them. What are their views on trans kids? How’s the community feeling about immigration raids?

More here.

Andrew Mangan argues that “Abdul El-Sayed may just prove a progressive can win a purple state” at Daily Kos: “In this year’s midterm elections, the hardest Senate seat for Democrats to defend probably isn’t what they expected a few months ago. Polls show Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff handily leading Republican challenger Mike Collins, noted friend to white supremacists…Rather, the seat most at risk sits in Michigan, and this Tuesday’s Senate primary will see Democrats making a familiar, if especially high-stakes, choice: centrist or progressive?… As is the case with Wisconsin’s gubernatorial contest, polls suggest the left-most candidate will prevail in the Democratic primary. But unlike in the Badger State, early polling in Michigan hints that the most progressive may also be the best positioned to win in November…Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, leads centrist Rep. Haley Stevens by an average of 11 percentage points in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, according to nine public polls conducted since July 5, when moderate state Sen. Mallory McMorrow dropped out of the race. (Polls were collected as of Friday at 5 PM ET.)…Progressives have rallied around the metro Detroit native. A strong advocate of Medicare for All, El-Sayed has racked up endorsements from superstars like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. He’s also managed to win support from a broader coalition that includes a major nurses union, the president of the state board of education, and United Auto Workers, a labor union with deep roots in Michigan and around 127,000 local members as of 2023…Meanwhile, Stevens has the support of The Detroit News as well as various Democratic establishment figures, like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Sen. Gary Peters, whose retirement kicked off this primary.” More here.

From “Black voters, divided on progressives, are pivotal in Michigan Senate primary” by Erin Cox at The Washington Post: “Michael Sutton, 18, is new to politics, but he says he’s convinced they’re broken…Sutton walked this working-class neighborhood of bungalows near Detroit last week armed with literature, trying to sell his elders on Abdul El-Sayed, the surging progressive in Michigan’s intensely competitive Senate race…Sutton, a young canvasser trying to build up the coalition of progressive Black voters, said he believes a candidate like El-Sayed will disrupt politics for the better…He asked Barbara Lawton, 51, as she pulled into her driveway, “Do you know who you’re voting for in the Senate race?”…Lawton glanced at the flier…“Not that dude,” she replied…She later said her gut told her political disruptions usually make things worse…Michigan’s bruising Senate primary has laid bare the Democratic Party’s divisions, and it could chart a course to what it might become in a post-President Donald Trump world…Black voters like Lawton and Sutton will be crucial to defining that trajectory. In doing so, they will either hand progressives their biggest win of the election cycle or fortify a Democratic establishment that has been on the defensive…When they cast their ballots in Tuesday’s primary election, Michigan Democrats will choose between the liberal El-Sayed, who has caught fire in recent polling, and Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate three-term congresswoman with a record of flipping red districts…The winner will face Republican Mike Rogers, the former congressman who narrowly lost his first Senate bid two years ago. The Michigan race could be crucial to which party controls the Senate…El-Sayed, a former public health official, has built a broad grassroots coalition and campaigned in communities that turned to Trump in the face of economic stress. Stevens is the establishment pick who has sought to build deep ties with churchgoers as she courts Black voters.” More here.

In “Thirteen House Rating Changes Toward Democrats as Seat-by-Seat Assessment Better Aligns with Our November Expectations,” Kyle Kondik write at The Center for Politics: “We’re revamping our House ratings this week, which has the effect of bringing the number of seats at least leaning to each party to rough parity after redistricting helped Republicans build an edge in our ratings a few months ago…Our overall topline assessment is basically unchanged, though: Democrats remain favored to flip the House majority in November, but Republicans have a path, too…The number of House Toss-ups expands from 15 to 20 as part of this week’s update…The overall race for the House appears fairly steady, with an overall national Democratic lead that doesn’t seem quite as robust as 2018’s was, although the lead may eventually get there by the end of the cycle…Following today’s changes, the new ratings show a much tighter spread overall: Republicans have 208 seats at least leaning to them, Democrats have 207, and there are now 20 Toss-ups. This gives both parties pathways to a majority, but we’d still expect Democrats to do better among the Toss-ups. Our best guess at this point would be Democrats winning a majority in the low-to-mid 220s.” More here.

“For decades, the right-wing forces set on steadily eroding our democracy have worked in tandem with a pro-corporate movement that has increasingly marginalized organized labor, creating a ballooning crisis for the working class,” Stephen Lerner and Joseph A. McCartin write in “How Resisting Trumpism Could Revive the U.S. Labor Movement” at In These Times. “Yet this politically hazardous moment also represents an opportunity to overcome deep-seated institutional inertia, drawing elements of a cautious labor movement out of their defensive crouch, and helping unions devise forms of struggle that might both revive the labor movement and renew American democracy…President Donald Trump’s second term has, in a way, broken a spell. For years, the pre-Trump status quo kept labor locked in a pattern of slow decline even as democracy was increasingly stifled and abridged by voter suppression, gerrymandering, filibusters and the overweening power of organized money. But the decades-old dysfunctional status quo that gave rise to Trumpism is now crumbling under the weight of the most lawless, antidemocratic, rights-trampling administration this country has seen since the 19^th century…While our democracy’s crisis deepens, the national labor movement has yet to play a leading role in the resistance against ascendant authoritarianism. By seizing the opportunity to play such a role in the year ahead, labor has the opportunity to reverse its decades-long slide toward irrelevancy by taking up an indispensable role in preserving, expanding and deepening rights-based democracy…There is no doubt that democracy and workers’ rights are facing down an existential threat. Yet that very threat and the sense of urgency it has spawned have created an opportunity we could not have engineered on our own. It has roused growing numbers to the defense of democracy, glaringly exposed the dangers of unchecked corporate power and catalyzed actions within pockets of the labor movement that have a potential to spread and become transformative.” More here.