“After a slew of wins in November, Democrats are entering 2026 feeling hopeful and ready to take back the House come midterm season,” Douglas Schoen and Carly Cooperman write in “Democrats are poised to take the House, but don’t expect a blue wave” at The Hill. “And while they’ll likely do just that, the looming idea of a 2018-style blowout seems to be getting further and further out of reach… To be sure, conditions certainly favor Democrats: historical trends, increasing frustration with the Trump administration and encouragement from the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia all point to a Democratic majority in the lower chamber…That said, it is critical not to overstate the depth of this so-called blue wave; while it may resemble 2018 at first glance, the simple fact is that it will be essentially impossible for Democrats to flip 40 seats as they did on that occasion…Indeed, the battlefield appears to be smaller than ever before. Thanks to partisan gerrymandering, once-competitive districts have now become easy targets that fundamentally prevent a truly massive seat haul from actually panning out…Looking back to 2018, about three-quarters of the seats that Democrats flipped were in the competitive zone where President Trump had won by less than 5 points. This time around, the competitive zone is not nearly as populated. There are only 14 Republican-held toss-up seats, so a 40-seat pickup should be barred from Democrats’ expectations altogether.” See also Ed Kilgore’s “A Democratic Wave Would Be Nice in 2026. But a Ripple Will Do” at New York magazine, via The Democratic Strategist.

Many New York lefties are still enjoying a sugar-high in the wake of Mayor Mamdani’s inauguration. In  San Francisco, the other city often bashed for its ultra-progressive political culture, however, a very different story is taking shape. At Politico, Dustin Gardiner writes in “As Mamdani rises in New York, San Francisco turns away from the left” that, “If Zohran Mamdani represents the rise of progressive politics in America, San Francisco is fast becoming the deflating counterpoint for the left…It isn’t just that liberal lion Nancy Pelosi is on her way out or that moderate Democrats, backed by wealthy tech investors, have trounced the left in election after election over the last five years. It’s that San Francisco progressives who have been lost in a fog here — paying the price for voters’ frustrations over street conditions, homelessness and a drug addiction epidemic — have seen liberals in another big city suddenly supplant them…“The takeover is classic: San Francisco is the jewel in the crown of the crypto and tech industries,” vented Aaron Peskin, a progressive former president of the Board of Supervisors who lost last year’s mayoral election. “They want this to be the symbolic elite tech capital of the world.”…In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie, an heir to the billion-dollar Levi Strauss fortune, has focused on austerity measures, beefing up policing, reviving a hollowed-out downtown core and supporting the booming artificial-intelligence industry.” Calling San Francisco “a lefty caricature and punching bag for conservatives, pundits and politicians on the right,” Gardiner quotes leading local Democrat on the changes underway on the left coast: “The message is you can take things too far,” said Nancy Tung, chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party and a moderate who’s helped lead the city’s centrist shift. She added, “Don’t expect that voters won’t notice forever.”…Tech investors have outsize influence in San Francisco, a city of less than than 850,000 people where a few million dollars can blanket the local airwaves with ads…Silicon Valley interests have poured tens of millions of dollars into San Francisco elections over the last five years, often propelling messages about the city’s pandemic decline and blaming progressives for crime in the city…,The contrast in San Francisco is glaring: After years of progressives gaining power, voters in 2022 recalled progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin and three school board members who had pushed to rename public schools even as classrooms remained empty during the pandemic. Moderates then won a majority on the city’s Board of Supervisors, including ousting socialist Supervisor Dean Preston in a district that includes the Haight Ashbury, one of the city’s liberal enclaves.”

On this anniversary of the January 6th insurrection/riot it seems appropriate to share the description of this event by the person who conducted the most thorough investigation of it. Read former Special Counsel “Jack Smith’s Closing Argument” at The New Yorker, shared by Ruth Marcus, in which she quotes Smith: “…the evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy. These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him. The other co-conspirators were doing this for his benefit. So in terms of why we would pursue a case against him, I entirely disagree with any characterization that our work was in any way meant to hamper him in the Presidential election. I would never take orders from a political leader to hamper another person in an election. That’s not who I am…If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today,” he said, “I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat” Smith has conducted investigations of Democrats, as well as Republicans throughout his career. Marcus adds, “Smith’s deposition was, in all likelihood, as close as he will get to making a closing argument. It marks, most likely, the unsatisfying conclusion of an unsatisfying episode, one that underscored the limitations of the criminal-justice system in dealing with a lawless President.”

Some insights from “Unsolicited advice for Democrats” by Jonathan P. Baird at the Concord Monitor: “It is not enough to simply be defined as against Donald Trump and his fascist regime. Democrats need a more affirmative identity…We have been losing elections with regularity, but I have not seen much soul-searching. Now the Democratic leaders hope to win with only minor adjustments…It is past time for Democrats to develop a far more progressive, economic populist identity. The billionaire class is buying elections like they would any commodity. We need a vision that can attract the American majority. The pieces of this vision should not be any great mystery but I will suggest some policy planks: Medicare for all. It is wildly popular and needed especially as we watch the disappearance of Obamacare subsidies, which will devastate 24 million people and make health care unaffordable. Universal health care is exactly the kind of value Democrats should embrace enthusiastically…Expanding the Supreme Court. Democrats should push to add four seats to the U.S. Supreme Court. That Court has been corrupted and it has acted like a tool of the Republican Party. Nothing prevents Congress from changing the number of seats on the Court. As currently embodied, Democrats can expect the Court to veto any legislation that helps the majority of the American people, just as it did when Biden was president…Democrats need to create a far more welcoming approach to all working people and we should get away from the snobbiness, disdain and moral judgmentalism that has characterized many college-educated Democrats. Politics is a game of addition, not subtraction. I think anger at Trump voters is stupid…The sociologist C. Wright Mills once wrote about “crackpot realism” and how ruling circles indulged in that type of thinking. That is exactly the kind of thinking too many Democrats indulge. Even if masses of people hate what the Trump regime is doing, there is no guarantee they will vote for Democrats. The Democrats need to give the people reasons to vote for them…”