washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Search Results for: radio

Can Dems Leverage Radio’s Power?

At Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson has an interview with Thom Hartmann, who reaches more Americans via radio every day than any other liberal political commentator. Some of Hartmann’s observations about the potential of radio for helping to build a pro-Democratic majority include:

….The number one talk radio show in America, in fact, prior to Limbaugh, was Alan Berg out of Denver. And he was doing a show that you could hear in 27 states. It was on a giant station, it was blowing a huge signal across the western states. And he was assassinated by a couple of skinheads in the parking lot of the radio station. And they made a movie out of it: Talk Radio….The number one show in America before he was assassinated was left-wing. And with the Alan Berg assassination, there was just this collective, oh my God, across America, where for several years nobody wanted to do talk radio. And then Limbaugh rolled out his show in, whenever it was—‘86, I think—and then there was this herd mentality that kicked in across broadcasting.

….when Air America [progressive talk radio network from 2004-2010] rolled out, I wrote the original business plan for Air America and when Air America rolled out, we leased stations, we leased time on—I think—54 Clear Channel stations around the country. And as I recall, when Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital took over Clear Channel, suddenly we started losing stations until basically it just bankrupted Air America.

On another occasion, there’s a another very large radio network with over 900 stations, and I met with the one of the two billionaires who owned that network in the offices of a United States Senator, and said “Why don’t you put”—and he had hundreds of right wing stations—and I said “Why don’t you put some left-wingers on?” I would offer myself, but just generically. And he simply said straight up, he said, “I’m never gonna put somebody on the air who’s gonna argue for raising my taxes.” This is a guy who owned 900 radio stations.

….we were on 54 Clear Channel stations. Clear Channel also had probably at that time 400 or 500 right-wing stations…..Every single one of the stations that we were on was part of a pod of stations owned by Clear Channel that also had a right-wing show. The right-wing shows had been on for years and years. So their sales guys had developed networks that were right-wing show friendly. They had gotten to know the movers and shakers in the local Republican Party. They had gotten in tight with the Chamber of Commerce. They’d gotten to know the car dealers who were big Republican donors. They even hired people out of that universe. So we were suddenly on 50 radio stations across the country. And every single one of those radio stations had a sales team that was almost entirely either made up of right-wingers or had a customer base that was largely right-wing friendly.”

Hartmann adds that “Half of America is Democrat, half are Republicans. It’s not like we’re wired differently in really major substantial ways. I realize there are arguments about authoritarianism and all that kind of stuff, but still, left-wing talk radio works. It worked before Limbaugh; it’s worked since Limbaugh.” Further

….what really made Limbaugh and what really made right-wing talk radio was the Bill Clinton presidency, when Bill Clinton got elected in 1992….They’re preaching a message of tax cuts and deregulation. And so, of course, the very, very wealthy and very powerful are going to be pouring money down their throats. And I’m preaching a message of “raise taxes on rich people.” And I don’t know how many rich people are therefore going to go out and buy a radio station to put me on.

That’s when they really took off. That’s when it became a multi, multi, you know, $100 million business rather than just a million dollar business. And left-wing talk radio never successfully went through that curve. It got halfway down the road. But when Air America started out, the guy who started it said that he had millions of dollars in funding and he had lied. The very first, you know, he was a con man. I did not know him. But it was a mess. And nobody has ever properly funded a progressive network in the United States.

….There are, at any given moment in the United States, hundreds of radio stations for sale, and they don’t sell for huge amounts of money, hundreds of 1000s to low millions at the very most. There’s also low-power FM, and there are increasing numbers of folks who are starting low-power FM stations. I’m on probably a dozen of them around the country right now….you can put together a low-power FM station for $25,000 and run it out of your basement for that matter, if somebody can get a decent antenna and tower location. So there is the possibility of growing a progressive network. It’s actually happening. We’ve been adding a couple of stations, four or five, six, or eight stations a year, every year steadily for four years.

Back around what must have been 2006 or thereabouts, Randi Rhodes and me and a bunch of other people from Air America went to DC to talk with a bunch of Senators, Democratic Senators, about talk radio, and we tried to convince them that that, you know, they’re raising billions of dollars every four years for elections, and with a fraction of that money, they could buy 400 or 500 radio stations or even 50 radio stations around the country. And it’s much more politically effective to have somebody 24/7 singing your praises on the radio in a way that has high credibility because people feel like they’ve built a relationship with you, than it is to buy ads every advertising cycle. And outside of Bernie Sanders, who totally understood what I was talking about, because for 11 years he had been on my show every Friday for an hour taking calls from listeners—outside of Bernie, we just got blown off, including by somebody who later became a candidate for president of the United States and lost. And I think they lost because right-wing talk radio just destroyed that candidacy.

….The Democratic Party constantly underestimated talk radio. And what’s happening right now is even more alarming. And I don’t recall if I got into that in the Nation article or not. But this is a phenomenon that has just been going on in the last four or five years. At any given moment there are a couple hundred radio stations around the country for sale, but there are also, at any given moment, probably 1,000 radio stations available for lease, where you just go in and say, I’ll rent your station for a year. This is how Air America did it with all the stations we leased from Clear Channel. And typically, on the lease stations, what you’ll hear is religious content or polka music or music that serves niche communities with niche advertisers just kind of hanging on. And what’s happening is that a group of deep-pocketed Hispanic right-wingers, mostly Cuban exiles, have been renting radio stations around the country, the best estimate is there might be 200 or 300 of them now, where they’re running some syndicated and some local Spanish language, right-wing talk radio, and in some cases, they’re playing music, but they’re hiring DJs who are delivering right-wing political messages, you know, snarky comments and things between songs. I saw an article like two weeks ago saying Democrats can’t figure out why the Hispanic vote has moved 7% towards the Republican Party in the last two years. And I’m yelling at the web page going, It’s the freakin’ radio, you know?

….You know, guys working on construction sites, listening to the music with the DJ coming on and going, “Oh my god, do you see what Joe Biden just did?” Well, here’s a new song in Spanish. The people listening are Spanish speakers. I’m telling you, you’re going to see by the 2024 election, you’re going to see Spanish language radio stations in every community in America with a significant Spanish-speaking population, pushing right-wing politics, and they’re already halfway there.

As regards the reach of conservative talk radio, Hartmann notes that there are “1,500 right-wing radio stations in this country, and probably fewer than 100 left-wing stations” and “what political radio there is, is entirely right-wing. It’s not healthy.”

Hartmann adds, “if you live in Wyoming, I mean, you might drive an hour to work, what are you gonna do, you’re gonna listen to the radio. And podcasts are great, and they’re growing rapidly, but they’re also growing rapidly in the 40 and under demographic. If you look at the 50 and over demographic, they still very, very heavily use radio. And those folks are more likely to be voting.”


Huck on Track to Rule Wingnut Radio

For an insightful read about the future of wingnut talk radio, check out The Daily Beast’s “Mike Huckabee Brings on Rush Limbaugh’s Decline” by former Bush II speechwriter David Frum. It seems that the 30 sponsors bailing in the wake of Limbaugh’s ‘slut’ tirade may not be his most worrisome concern, as Frum explains:

…On April 2, Limbaugh will face a more-serious challenge. That’s when the new Mike Huckabee show launches on 100 stations in Limbaugh’s very own noon-to-3 time slot.
Huckabee’s competition threatens Limbaugh not only because Huckabee has already proven himself an attractive and popular TV broadcaster, but also because Huckabee is arriving on the scene at a time when Limbaugh’s business model is crashing around him.
To understand the power of Huckabee’s challenge to Limbaugh, you have to understand the strange economics of talk radio. Most talk-radio programs offer radio stations this deal: we’ll give you three hours of content for free. (Some programs–cough, Glenn, cough, Beck–have actually offered to pay radio stations to accept their content.) Those three hours will include 54 minutes of ad time. That ad time is split between the radio station and the show: each gets 27 minutes to sell.

But Limbaugh, Frum notes, was able to charge for his content and rake in big bucks in advertising — until 2009, when his listeners began shrinking to the point where they are now about half as many as three years ago. Limbaugh responded by cranking up his “TSL” ratings, ‘time spent listening’ — by pandering to his hard core base, getting them to listen longer. Frum adds:

That imperative explains why Limbaugh kept talking about Sandra Fluke for so long. He was boosting his TSL to compensate for his dwindling market share. Few things boost TSL like getting the old folks agitated over how much sexy sex these shameless young hussies are having nowadays. (And make no mistake: Limbaugh’s audience is very old. One station manager quipped to me, “The median age of Limbaugh’s audience? Deceased.”)
……Limbaugh’s audience not only skews old; it skews male. It was already 72 percent male in 2009–more male than that of almost any other program on radio or TV. Advertisers are not nearly as interested in talking to old men as to middle-aged women. If Huckabee can draw such women to his new program, as he has drawn them to his TV show, he will reshape the market.
…Limbaugh’s advertisers and his stations had already begun to feel ripped off. To quote my station-manager friend again: “I don’t mind paying for content. But I do mind paying for trouble.” So advertisers revolted against the TSL strategy, with Sears, JCPenney, and many other sponsors dropping the show. Many of the local advertisers who buy their ads from the local stations rather than from the syndicators have been ordering that their purchased minutes be placed on some less-controversial program.

Enter Huckabee.

Limbaugh’s calculation that his core advertisers must return always rested on the assumption that there was nowhere else to go. Suddenly, in the worst month of Limbaugh’s career, somewhere else has appeared: a lower-priced alternative, with big audience reach and a host an advertiser can trust never, ever to abuse a student as a “slut” and “prostitute.”
The new Huckabee show’s slogan is “more conversation; less confrontation.” “I don’t want it to be a show that every day, every hour, pushes everyone’s buttons to raise their blood pressure,” Huckabee says. “I figure the cost of high blood pressure is enough already.”
Huckabee’s politics are emphatically conservative of course, both on social and economic issues. Yet his politics differ in important ways from those of the Limbaugh-influenced Republican electorate…The less-strident Huckabee approach arises both from his experience as a long-serving governor in a Democratic-leaning state and from Huckabee’s famously genial temperament. “I have to believe that there are people who are highly opinionated but who actually find it informative and engaging to find out what the other side is thinking,” he says. “And not through a shouting match, but through an adult-level, civil conversation.”

While it is gratifying to see Limbaugh tank, Dems should hold the high-fives for a while. Huckabee is a shrewder reactionary than Limbaugh, and may be even more aggressive about pushing the wingnut agenda in electoral politics, albeit with more subtlety. In addition, Huckabee does have a certain gift for the soundbite put-down, as evidenced by his “We’ve had a congress that spends money like John Edwards in a beauty shop” zinger (this and other Huck quips here) during the early ’08 campaign. It’s not hard to imagine Huckabee besting the four current GOP presidential contenders, had he decided to enter the fray. His comments to the contrary, he may be laying the groundwork for a 2016 run.
Huckabee’s Achilles’ Heel, however, is his tendency to blather, a weakness which has damaged many ‘shock jock’ careers, from Imus to Limbaugh and a host of lesser-knowns in between. Last fall, Huckabee ‘jokingly’ (wink, wink) suggested creating confusion about election day at a pancake breakfast/rally in Mason, Ohio, as Molly Reilly tells in her HuffPo report::

“Make a list,” said Huckabee, referring to supporters’ family and friends. “Call them and ask them, ‘Are you going to vote on Issue 2 and are you going to vote for it?’ If they say no, well, you just make sure that they don’t go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date. That’s up to you how you creatively get the job done…The crowd laughed at Huckabee’s remarks. In 2009, he made a similar joke in Virginia, saying, “Let the air our of their tires … keep ’em home. Do the Lord’s work.”

Whether Huckabee refrains from advocating voter suppression on the air waves in his new gig remains to be seen. It’s good that Limbaugh is beginning to fade away like Glenn Beck. But Dems have always had a weaker talk radio echo chamber than Republicans — and the GOP’s edge may soon get even sharper.


Radio Key for Motivating New Voters

Excited as all Dems should be by recent reports of dramatic increases in voter registration benefitting our party, it’s time to give serious thought to GOTV strategies to maximize turnout of these new voters on November 4th. Registration percentage is the most reliable predictor of voter turnout — the more voters registered, the higher the turnout. So we have already gained a significant edge, assuming the Republicans don’t produce an equivalent uptick in registering their base in the months ahead. But that doesn’t mean we can’t gain an additional edge with a concerted effort to get more of these new voters to the polls.
We don’t know precisely who these new voters are. But many of the registration campaigns in different states have targeted young voters, particularly college students. Other registration campaigns have targeted African and Latino Americans. The motivated voters in all demographic groups are going to get to the polls without much encouragement. But if previous patterns prevail, as many as 40 percent of the newly-registered voters won’t vote — if nothing is done. In 2004, for example, nearly 60 percent of registered voters went to the polls, according to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. If we can increase their turnout/rv ratio up to 70-75 percent, it just might make the difference in a close race.
Many newly registered voters who may not vote on election day have transportation problems. The polls may be too far away and/or they don’t have a car. or they don’t know where the poll is located. Others may be time-challenged — having to pick-up the kids, fix dinner, work late etc. Some may be energy-challenged, just too dog-tired to make the effort.
Early voting can help get around such ‘convenience’ issues, provided the voters are informed about how they can do it with a minimum of hassle. There should be a major push — make that an unprecedented effort — to inform new voters in the 28 states that permit no-excuse absentee voting by mail about early voting opportunities.
The internet is a great medium for reaching many of these voters, especially college students. In a recent Pew poll, 42 percent of young people said they learn about political campaigns from the internet, up from 20 percent in 2004. Internet ad revenues are expected to surpass radio ad revenues for the first time this year, reports Rudy Ruitenberg of Bloomberg.com. Yet, television still rules as a source for political information, and 60 percent of respondents in the Pew poll said they get “most of their election news from TV,” although it’s down from 68 percent in ’04 and ’00.
But television time is expensive, and not all young people or low-income voters have daily access to the internet. Radio may be the most cost-effective medium for reaching newly-registered voters, not only for informing them about early voting opportunities in their communities, but also to motivate them to get to the polls on election day. Radio reaches more than 210 million voting age listeners every week, according to Jeff Haley, president of the Radio Advertising Bureau, and, more so than TV, it reaches voters at useful times — the wake-up alarm, driving to work, at work, at lunch and driving home — pretty much all day, until the polls close.
High as we all are on the power of the internet as a tool for transmitting political information and motivation, a more substantial investment in radio ads could hold the key to victory in November.


February 6: Democrats Have Wised Up and Stopped Trying to Cooperate With Trump

This has been quite the chaotic week or so, and one of the byproducts of the nihilistic conduct being displayed by Donald Trump and his allies has been a decided end of Democratic cooperation, and I welcomed that development at New York:

Following the time-honored ritual of giving a new president a “honeymoon,” a good number of prominent Democrats made friendly noises about their nemesis after Donald Trump’s November election victory. Some, like Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, seemed inclined to cross the partisan barricades whenever possible, praising Trump’s dubious Cabinet nominations, calling on Joe Biden to pardon Trump to get rid of his hush-money conviction, and even joining Truth Social. Others, notably Bernie Sanders, talked of selective cooperation on issues where MAGA Republicans at least feigned anti-corporate “populism.” Still others, including some Democratic governors, hoped to cut deals on issues like immigration to mitigate the damage of Trump’s agenda. And one congressional Democrat, the normally very progressive Ro Khanna, promoted cooperation with Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, at least with respect to Defense spending.

This made some sense at the time. After all, Democrats, having lost control of both Congress and the White House, didn’t have much power of their own, and there was always the chance that having achieved his improbable comeback, Trump would calm down and try to become a normal chief executive in his final term in the job.

Now it is extremely clear that is not the case. The past chaotic week or so has convinced most Democrats that Trump has zero interest in compromise, bipartisanship, or even adherence to the law and to the Constitution. Musk and his Geek Kiddie Corps are ravaging agency after agency without the slightest legal authorization; OMB is preparing its own unilateral assault on federal benefits that don’t fit the Project 2025 vision of a radically smaller social safety net; and congressional Republicans are kneeling in abject surrender to whatever the White House wants. Democrats are resigning themselves to the mission of becoming an opposition party, full stop, making as much noise and arousing as much public outrage as they can. They shouldn’t be credited all that much for courage, since the new regime has given them little choice but to dig in and fight like hell.

OMB’s January 27 memo freezing a vast swath of federal programs and benefits, inept and confusing as it was, kicked off the current reign of terror. It reflected (and was likely dictated by) the belief of Trump OMB director nominee Russell Vought that the president can usurp congressional spending powers whenever he deems it necessary or prudent. Yet Congressional Republicans went along without a whimper. House Appropriations Committee chairman Tom Cole, who would have gone nuts had a Democratic president threatened his role so audaciously, said he had “no problem” with the freeze. The federal courts stepped in because OMB’s order was incoherently expressed, but there’s no question the administration will come back with something similar. As a sign of belated alarm over OMB’s direction, Senate Budget Committee Democrats boycotted Vought’s confirmation vote in reaction to this challenge to the constitutional separation of powers. After Republicans gaveled him on through without a whisper of dissent, Senate Democrats held an all-night “talk-a-thon” to recapitulate past and present concerns about Vought, a self-described Christian Nationalist and one of the principal authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a radically diminished federal government. He will be confirmed by the full Senate anyway.

Musk’s guerrilla warfare on the federal workforce and the programs they administer made the OMB power grab unfolding at about the same time look like a walk in the park. Even as his landing teams of 20-something coders took control of multiple agency IT systems and fired anyone who got in their way, Musk himself was on X making wild charges about the programs he was short-circuiting and all but cackling like a cartoon villain over his unlimited power. When Ro Khanna upbraided him for his lawlessness, he responded as you might expect, tweeting at Khanna: “Don’t be a dick.”

Khanna’s centrist Democratic colleague from Florida, Jared Moskovitz, had actually signed up for service on the DOGE oversight panel Mike Johnson created, despite its clear purpose as an ongoing pep rally for Musk. Now he’s out, as Punchbowl News reports:

“I need to see one of my Republican colleagues in the caucus explain the point of the caucus, because it seems that Elon doesn’t need them, because it seems what Elon is doing is destroying the separation of powers. And I don’t think the DOGE caucus at this moment really has a purpose … Whether I stay in the caucus, I think is questionable. I don’t need to stay in a caucus that’s irrelevant.”

Meanwhile, as all this madness was unfolding from the executive branch and its outlaw agents, congressional Republicans have been laboring through the process of putting together budget legislation to implement whatever portion of Trump’s agenda that wasn’t rammed through by fiat. Democrats are not being consulted at all in these preparations to produce a massive bill (or bills) that is expected to pass on a party-line vote and that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because of the immense leverage of the House Freedom Caucus over this legislation, the plans keep shifting in the direction of deeper and deeper domestic spending cuts at levels never discussed before. Per Punchbowl News:

“Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republican committee chairs initially proposed between $500 billion to $700 billion in spending cuts as part of a massive reconciliation package. Yet conservative GOP hardliners rejected that, saying they wanted more. They’re seeking as much as $2 trillion to $5 trillion in cuts.”

Democrats can’t really do anything other than expose the extent and the effect of such cuts in the forelorn hope that a few House Republicans in particularly vulnerable districts develop their own counter-leverage over the process. But whatever emerges from the GOP discussion will have to be approved by OMB, where Russell Vought will soon be formally in charge. There’s just no path ahead for Democrats other than total war.

They do have their own leverage over two pieces of legislation Trump needs: an appropriations bill to keep government running after the December stopgap spending bill (which Musk nearly torpedoed in an early demonstration of his power) runs out, and a measure increasing the public debt limit. These bills can be filibustered, so Senate Democrats can kill them. There are increasing signs that congressional Democrats may refuse to go along with either one unless Trump puts a leash on Vought and Musk and perhaps even consults the Democratic Party on the budget. If there’s a government shutdown, it couldn’t be too much worse than a government being gutted by DOGE and OMB.

Republicans hope that Trump’s relatively strong popularity (for him, anyway) will keep Democrats from defying him. But they may not be accounting for the 47th president’s erratic character. On any given day, he may do something completely bonkers and deeply unpopular, like, say, suggesting the United States take over Gaza, expel its population, and build a resort development.


Democrats Have Wised Up and Stopped Trying to Cooperate with Trump

This has been quite the chaotic week or so, and one of the byproducts of the nihilistic conduct being displayed by Donald Trump and his allies has been a decided end of Democratic cooperation, and I welcomed that development at New York:

Following the time-honored ritual of giving a new president a “honeymoon,” a good number of prominent Democrats made friendly noises about their nemesis after Donald Trump’s November election victory. Some, like Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, seemed inclined to cross the partisan barricades whenever possible, praising Trump’s dubious Cabinet nominations, calling on Joe Biden to pardon Trump to get rid of his hush-money conviction, and even joining Truth Social. Others, notably Bernie Sanders, talked of selective cooperation on issues where MAGA Republicans at least feigned anti-corporate “populism.” Still others, including some Democratic governors, hoped to cut deals on issues like immigration to mitigate the damage of Trump’s agenda. And one congressional Democrat, the normally very progressive Ro Khanna, promoted cooperation with Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, at least with respect to Defense spending.

This made some sense at the time. After all, Democrats, having lost control of both Congress and the White House, didn’t have much power of their own, and there was always the chance that having achieved his improbable comeback, Trump would calm down and try to become a normal chief executive in his final term in the job.

Now it is extremely clear that is not the case. The past chaotic week or so has convinced most Democrats that Trump has zero interest in compromise, bipartisanship, or even adherence to the law and to the Constitution. Musk and his Geek Kiddie Corps are ravaging agency after agency without the slightest legal authorization; OMB is preparing its own unilateral assault on federal benefits that don’t fit the Project 2025 vision of a radically smaller social safety net; and congressional Republicans are kneeling in abject surrender to whatever the White House wants. Democrats are resigning themselves to the mission of becoming an opposition party, full stop, making as much noise and arousing as much public outrage as they can. They shouldn’t be credited all that much for courage, since the new regime has given them little choice but to dig in and fight like hell.

OMB’s January 27 memo freezing a vast swath of federal programs and benefits, inept and confusing as it was, kicked off the current reign of terror. It reflected (and was likely dictated by) the belief of Trump OMB director nominee Russell Vought that the president can usurp congressional spending powers whenever he deems it necessary or prudent. Yet Congressional Republicans went along without a whimper. House Appropriations Committee chairman Tom Cole, who would have gone nuts had a Democratic president threatened his role so audaciously, said he had “no problem” with the freeze. The federal courts stepped in because OMB’s order was incoherently expressed, but there’s no question the administration will come back with something similar. As a sign of belated alarm over OMB’s direction, Senate Budget Committee Democrats boycotted Vought’s confirmation vote in reaction to this challenge to the constitutional separation of powers. After Republicans gaveled him on through without a whisper of dissent, Senate Democrats held an all-night “talk-a-thon” to recapitulate past and present concerns about Vought, a self-described Christian Nationalist and one of the principal authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a radically diminished federal government. He will be confirmed by the full Senate anyway.

Musk’s guerrilla warfare on the federal workforce and the programs they administer made the OMB power grab unfolding at about the same time look like a walk in the park. Even as his landing teams of 20-something coders took control of multiple agency IT systems and fired anyone who got in their way, Musk himself was on X making wild charges about the programs he was short-circuiting and all but cackling like a cartoon villain over his unlimited power. When Ro Khanna upbraided him for his lawlessness, he responded as you might expect, tweeting at Khanna: “Don’t be a dick.”

Khanna’s centrist Democratic colleague from Florida, Jared Moskovitz, had actually signed up for service on the DOGE oversight panel Mike Johnson created, despite its clear purpose as an ongoing pep rally for Musk. Now he’s out, as Punchbowl News reports:

“I need to see one of my Republican colleagues in the caucus explain the point of the caucus, because it seems that Elon doesn’t need them, because it seems what Elon is doing is destroying the separation of powers. And I don’t think the DOGE caucus at this moment really has a purpose … Whether I stay in the caucus, I think is questionable. I don’t need to stay in a caucus that’s irrelevant.”

Meanwhile, as all this madness was unfolding from the executive branch and its outlaw agents, congressional Republicans have been laboring through the process of putting together budget legislation to implement whatever portion of Trump’s agenda that wasn’t rammed through by fiat. Democrats are not being consulted at all in these preparations to produce a massive bill (or bills) that is expected to pass on a party-line vote and that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because of the immense leverage of the House Freedom Caucus over this legislation, the plans keep shifting in the direction of deeper and deeper domestic spending cuts at levels never discussed before. Per Punchbowl News:

“Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republican committee chairs initially proposed between $500 billion to $700 billion in spending cuts as part of a massive reconciliation package. Yet conservative GOP hardliners rejected that, saying they wanted more. They’re seeking as much as $2 trillion to $5 trillion in cuts.”

Democrats can’t really do anything other than expose the extent and the effect of such cuts in the forelorn hope that a few House Republicans in particularly vulnerable districts develop their own counter-leverage over the process. But whatever emerges from the GOP discussion will have to be approved by OMB, where Russell Vought will soon be formally in charge. There’s just no path ahead for Democrats other than total war.

They do have their own leverage over two pieces of legislation Trump needs: an appropriations bill to keep government running after the December stopgap spending bill (which Musk nearly torpedoed in an early demonstration of his power) runs out, and a measure increasing the public debt limit. These bills can be filibustered, so Senate Democrats can kill them. There are increasing signs that congressional Democrats may refuse to go along with either one unless Trump puts a leash on Vought and Musk and perhaps even consults the Democratic Party on the budget. If there’s a government shutdown, it couldn’t be too much worse than a government being gutted by DOGE and OMB.

Republicans hope that Trump’s relatively strong popularity (for him, anyway) will keep Democrats from defying him. But they may not be accounting for the 47th president’s erratic character. On any given day, he may do something completely bonkers and deeply unpopular, like, say, suggesting the United States take over Gaza, expel its population, and build a resort development.


Skelley: The Key Elections of 2025

The following article, “Key elections to watch in 2025” by 538’s Geoffrey Skelley is cross-posted from abcnews.go.com:

The 2024 election may be over, but the electoral hamster wheel will keep on spinning in 2025. In the past, elections that occur the year after a presidential race have often presented opportunities for the party that lost the White House to make gains or hold onto power in places it already controls, and 2025 is no different.

Statewide races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey sit at the top of the 2025 marquee, and Democrats and Republicans, respectively, will hope that recent trends in those states point to success this fall. Meanwhile, Wisconsin will host a race that will determine whether liberals or conservatives control the state’s highly contested Supreme Court. Millions of other voters will also decide on the next mayors of their cities, including the country’s largest city, New York. Lastly, we can already anticipate at least three special elections in the House. Here then is an early look at what’s to come now that the calendar has turned to January.

State elections

Virginia

Virginia’s gubernatorial elections are unique because the Old Dominion is the only state that prevents incumbent governors from seeking immediate reelection. As a result, these races are always open-seat contests that test each party’s strength just a year after the presidential contest — which has usually benefited the party not in the White House. Dating back to 1977, that party has won all but one of 12 gubernatorial contests in the state, with Democrats’ narrow win in 2013 serving as the lone exception. And in each of those contests, the national opposition party has gained ground relative to its statewide performance in the presidential election a year earlier.

This trend could spell bad news for Republican hopes of holding onto Virginia’s governorship. In 2021, now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin only narrowly won by 2 percentage points after President Joe Biden had carried the state by 10 points in the 2020 presidential race. And while competitive, Virginia presently has a blue lean: Outgoing Vice President Kamala Harris carried it by just shy of 6 pointswhile President-elect Donald Trump won nationally by about 1.5 points. All of this could make the GOP’s path to victory even thornier in 2025.

When it comes to the candidates, we already know who’ll likely face off in November — and that history will probably be made. On the GOP side, Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears looks set to be her party’s nominee after another potential contender, state Attorney General Jason Miyares, announced he will seek reelection instead (unlike the governorship, Virginia’s LG and AG posts do not have a one-term limit). Democrats, meanwhile, have mostly coalesced behind former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who announced her retirement ahead of the 2024 election to focus on her gubernatorial bid. Dissatisfaction among Black party leaders with Spanberger’s campaign has left open the remote possibilitythat longtime Rep. Bobby Scott could challenge Spanberger in the Democratic primary. But otherwise, Sears and Spanperger look likely to meet in the general election, which would all but guarantee that Virginia will elect its first woman governor — and first Black woman if Sears can break the commonwealth’s recent electoral trend.

The result in the gubernatorial race could help determine if Virginia will continue to have divided government or if Democrats will claim a “trifecta” — control of the governorship and both chambers of the legislature. All 100 of the seats in the state’s lower legislative chamber, the House of Delegates, will also be on the ballot in November, and Democrats won just a 51-to-49 seat advantage in 2023, so it could be a very tight affair. (The state Senate isn’t on the ballot until 2027, but Democrats’ narrow majorities there and in the House will also have to survive a cadre of low-turnout special elections later this month, albeit mostly in blue-leaning seats.)

Additionally, Virginia will elect its next lieutenant governor and attorney general. Considering the lack of split-ticket voting in recent years, one party is likely to carry all three statewide offices — Republicans swept them in 2009 and 2021, while Democrats did the same in 2013 and 2017. In the lieutenant governor’s contest, Democrats have a crowded field of five contenders, while the Republican race has been slower to develop. Meanwhile, two Democrats are vying to run against Miyares for the AG slot in November: former state Del. Jay Jones, who ran a pretty competitive primary race against then-incumbent Attorney General Mark Herring in 2021, and Henrico County Commonwealth’s Attorney Shannon Taylor.

New Jersey

New Jersey’s recent electoral trajectory has whetted Republican appetites for a gubernatorial win in 2025. In 2021, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy only won reelection by just over 3 points despite being an incumbent in a fairly blue state. Then this past November, Harris only edged Trump by about 6 points, the smallest Democratic margin of victory in a presidential race since Bill Clinton carried the Garden State by 2 points in 1992. Still, with a Republican entering the White House, Democrats may end up facing a friendlier electoral environment come November 2025 than they did in either of those previous elections.

Murphy is term-limited, so the open-seat contest has attracted a cornucopia of candidates, starting with a crowded field of Democratic aspirants. Leading the way may be Democratic Reps. Mikie Sherrill, a Navy veteran who came on stageby flipping a House seat during Trump’s first midterm, and Josh Gottheimer, a fundraising dynamo with a centrist reputation. But four other Democrats are also running: Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, former State Senate President Steve Sweeney and New Jersey Education AssociationPresident Sean Spiller, who each have their own notable backers in state politics. Two November surveys conducted on behalf of Sherril’s campaign and a pro-Sherrill group found her with an early primary lead, but there are many months to go until the state’s June primary.

Republicans may once again turn to the candidate who came close to defeating Murphy in 2021: former state Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli. He has a mixed record when it comes to supporting Trump, but that’s potentially allowed Ciattarelli to position himself as the candidate who can best unite the party against the eventual Democratic nominee. It’s not immediately obvious who might pose the greatest threat to Ciattarelli, either. Former state Sen. Ed Durr, who upset Democratic contender Sweeney in a 2021 state Senate race, will bring a louder pro-Trump bent to his campaign, as will conservative radio host Bill Spadea. On the other side of Ciattarelli, state Sen. Jon Bramnick offers a moderate and Trump-skeptical approach, which hasn’t exactly been a ticket to success in GOP primaries.

New Jersey’s 80-seat General Assembly, the state’s lower legislative chamber, will also be on the ballot in 2025. However, Democrats won a 52-to-28 advantagethere in 2023, leaving little reason to think that the GOP can possibly flip the chamber.

Wisconsin

But before New Jersey and Virginia vote, Wisconsin will dominate the 2025 electoral headlines. That’s because control of the state’s closely divided Supreme Court will be up for grabs in April. The same was true in 2023, when liberals flipped a conservative-held seat to take a four-to-three majority in the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history. That narrow liberal advantage has already made waves, with the court overturning Republican-drawn state legislative maps ahead of the 2024 election. But the upcoming retirement of liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley will leave open a seat that could determine the court’s upcoming decisions in key cases on abortion and labor rights.

Liberals will hope that recent shifts in the electorate, along with a potential reaction to Trump, can once again give them an upper hand this year. After all, liberal candidates have won three of the past four Supreme Court races, helped out in part by Democrats’ improved performance among voters with a four-year college degree, who are more likely to cast a ballot in lower-turnout contests like these.

And we can expect it to be a relatively low-turnout election because spring elections in Wisconsin have far lower participation rates than a typical November general election. Based on estimates from the University of Florida Election Lab, about 70 percent or more of Wisconsin’s voting-eligible population cast ballots in each presidential election from 2008 to 2024, while at least 52 percent voted in each midterm from 2010 to 2022. By comparison, less than half of the VEP has voted in Supreme Court races in that time period. And even that’s complicated by the fact that the spring election sometimes coincides with high-profile presidential primaries that drive turnout. The highest turnout outside of those years came in 2023, when 42 percent voted.

With this race now only three months away, the candidates are just about set. Although the candidate filing deadline is Tuesday, only two contenders have entered, and each has the machinery of their associated political party behind them. On the liberal side, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford has the state Democratic party’s endorsement as well as support from all four liberal justices currently on the court. Former state Attorney General Brad Schimel, a Republican who lost reelection in the blue wave year of 2018, has coalesced support on the conservative side via endorsements from all Republicans in the state’s congressional delegation as well as many law endorsement officials.

Mayoral elections

Not to be overshadowed by statewide races, 19 cities with at least 300,000 residents will hold mayoral elections this year. The most notable of these is definitely New York City, the nation’s largest municipality, but plenty of other notable cities will also choose their next executive leader. Among them, Oakland, California, whose voters recalled Mayor Sheng Thao in November, will hold a special election on April 15 that could feature a retiring member of Congress. Elsewhere, an open nonpartisan mayoral contest in San Antonio has drawn a crowded field, while incumbent Democrats in cities like Minneapolisand Pittsburgh are gearing up for potentially tough primary challenges. These races will take place throughout the year, starting in the spring and stretching into the fall.

Understandably though, the New York race has garnered the most national attention. There, incumbent Democratic Mayor Eric Adams plans to seek reelection while facing felony charges for bribery and fraud. While the Big Apple shifted to the right this past November, it remains a Democratic stronghold, so Adams’s future likely hinges on the result of the party’s June primary. A lengthy list of Democrats have announced their intentions to challenge Adams, including the city’s current and former comptroller and four current or former state legislators. However, Adams can’t count on a divided field aiding him because New York City uses ranked-choice voting to decide most municipal elections. Adams came out on top when this system debuted in 2021, but it could make it harder for him this time around.

Special elections

Last but not least, we can already expect at least three special elections for the U.S. House of Representatives early in 2025 due to vacancies in the 435-seat chamber. Two Florida districts will host primary contests on Jan. 28, followed by special general elections on April 1: The state’s 1st District, vacated by Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, and the 6th District, from which Republican Rep. Michael Waltz will resign shortly. Gaetz announced his resignation when he was nominated by Trump to serve as attorney general, from which he later withdrew amid a frenzy over a damning, now-released ethics report. Waltz, meanwhile, is set to become Trump’s national security adviser. Additionally, the U.S. Senate appears likely to confirm Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik as Trump’s ambassador to the U.N., which would precipitate a special election this spring in New York’s 21st District.

Each of these districts is pretty solidly Republican, so even a special election boost for Democrats akin to what they saw in 2017 during Trump’s first go-round may not be enough to flip any of these seats. Still, these races will get attention because the House is so narrowly divided — in light of these vacancies, Republicans will hold just 217 seats to the Democrats’ 215 not long after the new Congress begins — making their timing and, especially, any surprise results that much more impactful.

Finally, it’s worth noting that neither of the anticipated special elections for Senate will occur in 2025. Upon taking office, Vice President-elect JD Vance will leave behind a vacant seat in Ohio, while the expected confirmation of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as Trump’s secretary of state would create another vacancy. However, the governor in each state will appoint a senator to fill the vacancies, with special elections to fill the remainder of Vance’s and Rubio’s Senate terms not taking place until 2026 (both senators’ seats are next up for regular election in 2028).


January 2: RIP Jimmy Carter

As a longtime Georgian and longtime observer of the 39th president, I wrote an obituary of the remarkable Jimmy Carter for New York:

Jimmy Carter was America’s oldest ex-president and had by far the longest former presidency. Indeed, his remarkable life — which ended today after 100 years — can be divided into the stretches before (38 years) and after (43 years) he held public office, with a comparatively short stretch of public service (four in the Georgia state senate, four as governor, and four as president, plus a couple of stints of campaigning) between those two eras. While his ascent to the presidency was in many respects astonishing, his record as a politician was at best mixed: He won one statewide political contest in Georgia and lost one, then won one presidential election and lost one. Assessments of his presidency never quite turned positive in hindsight, and for many years he continued to hold controversial positions on the ultimate hot-button international concern, the Middle East. Most recently, the return of inflation in the early 2020s brought back memories of one of the more painful aspects of his administration’s record.

Yet the man always known by the informal name of Jimmy became and remained a beloved figure in his postpresidency, owing in no small part to his dogged efforts to combat such basic scourges of the human condition as war, disease, political corruption, and homelessness.

Carter was born in 1924 on a large family peanut farm near the hamlet of Plains in southwestern Georgia, the son of an experienced farmer and entrepreneur, Earl, and a trained nurse, Lillian, the remarkable woman who eventually found fame by joining the Peace Corps at age 68 as her son ran for governor. He helped in his family’s agricultural and commercial ventures while growing up. (One, which he was later to revive and expand, was wine-making, unusual for rural Baptists at the time.) Though a dutiful son of the land, Carter longed for travel, and after some preliminary higher education, he gained admission to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1943, graduating in the top 10 percent of his class in 1946, shortly after World War II ended. Around the same time, he married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s from Plains, and the couple soon began a family that ultimately included three sons and a daughter.

Carter was well embarked on a naval career (notably serving on the research staff of Hyman Rickover, the “father of the nuclear Navy,” whose hands-on taskmaster management style made a deep impression on the young officer) when his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, leading Carter to secure a discharge and return to Plains to take over the family farm and businesses. By the end of the 1950s, he was both prosperous and restless, and he became involved in civic and political life. He entered politics at the larger tail end of Jim Crow, when it didn’t take much to get a reputation as a relative liberal on racial matters. Carter quietly qualified by supporting the desegregation of his own Southern Baptist congregation and refusing to join the militantly racist White Citizens’ Council movement when it reached his county. By the time he got to the state senate in 1962 (a judicial intervention aimed at a rival’s fraud forced a second election), he was known as a strong supporter of President John F. Kennedy.

But in Carter’s initial and subsequent campaigns prior to his election as governor, he was hardly a profile in courage on racial matters. In his first gubernatorial bid, in 1966, he cleverly positioned himself between the self-described liberal ex-governor Ellis Arnall and the notorious segregationist Lester Maddox. (I was a kiddie volunteer for that first statewide Carter campaign.) He narrowly missed making a Democratic runoff against Arnall mostly because of Republican crossover votes for Maddox, who was deemed the Democrat that GOP nominee Bo Callaway could most easily defeat. When write-in votes for Arnall forced the election into the legislature under Georgia’s archaic and poorly written Constitution, Carter joined most (but not all) Democrats in casting a party-line vote for the buffoonish racist Maddox. I was shocked to hear my hero’s voice clearly announcing a vote for “Lester G. Maddox” on the live radio broadcast of the balloting, and I did not support his subsequent gubernatorial effort.

Carter barely stopped running between 1966 and 1970, and he confirmed his twin reputations for cautious ambivalence on racial issues and impressive (if cynical) political skills. This time, his principal opponent was former governor Carl Sanders, who had earned the loyalty of Black voters during a relatively enlightened first term. While Carter was quietly wooing some of the same Black civil-rights leaders who would later spearhead his presidential run, his public campaign focused on a populist appeal to white rural and small-town voters who disliked “Cufflinks Carl” for his corporate ties and his racial moderation. Most notoriously, Carter supporters widely distributed photos of Sanders celebrating a victory with Black players from the Atlanta Hawks, the NBA team he partially owned. Carter also went out of his way to express solidarity with Alabama’s George Wallace, who was running an overtly racist campaign in 1970 to recapture power in Montgomery. Carter consolidated conservative white voters and nearly won a majority against Sanders in the first round of primaries, then dispatched the former governor handily in a runoff.

But upon taking office (after a pro forma general-election victory over Republican TV newsman Hal Suit), Carter engineered a sharp left turn on racial issues, making this blunt statement in his 1971 inaugural address:

“I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over … No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”

Thanks to his reputation for quiet decency on racial matters and the strength of his outreach to civil-rights leaders, his campaign demagoguery, not this new departure, was widely viewed as tactical and disposable.

While racially enlightened, Carter’s governorship (limited at the time to a single term) was to a significant extent focused on the dry process issue of government reorganization. He successfully proposed to consolidate 300 state agencies into 22. He made small but politically significant gestures in areas ranging from the equalization of public-education revenues to prison reform and environmental protection.

Meanwhile, like most southern (and not a few northern) politicians in both parties, Carter opposed busing to achieve school desegregation. He nonetheless kept himself in the national political news as an exemplar of “New South” Democratic governors (whose ranks included Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Reubin Askew of Florida, and John West of South Carolina) who were outmaneuvering the old segregationists of their own party while heading off Republican gains in the region that threatened Democrats’ national viability. They were the first truly “national” Democrats in the South since the party had fully abandoned its ancient willingness to support, or at least tolerate, Jim Crow.

Carter’s astonishing rise to the presidency just two years after a meh single term as governor of a Deep South state was a testament to both his unique positioning in a Democratic Party struggling with realignment and the political skills he and his advisers often showed even as they were being mocked as backwoods rubes. Team Carter exploited the emergence of the Iowa caucuses as a pre–New Hampshire nominating contest and out-organized the field there. He then took advantage of national Democrats’ desire for someone to end the threat of Wallace’s presidential candidacy by securing support for one-on-one contests with the Alabaman in the South, which Carter won with the regionally resonant slogan “Don’t send them a message. Send them a president.” He used crucial support from the Atlanta-based King-family network of civil-rights stalwarts to head off attacks on his dubious background on racial matters and turned criticism of his lack of experience into an asset among voters still furious at Watergate-era Washington. Even his Baptist piety became a selling point among both Evangelicals (who had not yet begun their mass exodus to the GOP) and voters inclined to believe his “I’ll never tell you a lie” pledge.

But it was in the general-election contest against Gerald Ford that Carter’s unique regional political appeal became crucial, as I explained in a meditation on the 2020 revival of the southern Democratic Party:

“[Carter] defeated Wallace in most southern primaries and then gained his endorsement, subsequently putting together a mind-bending coalition of Black and conservative white voters united by regional pride (between Andrew and Lyndon Johnson, no president was elected from a state that had been part of the Confederacy). Carter won every state of the former Confederacy (producing huge swings compared with Hubert Humphrey’s performance in 1968 and George McGovern’s in 1972) except Virginia; he won the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri as well as southern-inflected areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania that helped keep those states in the Democratic column.”

It is unlikely that any other Democrat could have won the presidency in 1976, and Carter won by an eyelash. Yet like other regional or ethnic-racial pioneers, his peak of support among the home folks was a thing of the past once he took office. Thus began a troubled four years.

Carter’s one-term presidency had its ups and downs and was rarely stable or predictable. Yes, he inherited a lot of economic trouble from the Nixon and Ford administrations, but his response to double-digit inflation (involving some austerity measures and a lot of austerity talk) divided Democrats, particularly when the Carter administration deprioritized full employment and put in place a Federal Reserve Board chairman (Paul Volcker) determined to use a tight monetary policy to tame inflation, triggering a recession.

This economic turbulence and a closely associated energy crisis (both kicked off by the Arab oil boycott of 1973–74 and a subsequent huge price spike in petroleum products) led Carter to indulge his inner Baptist deacon and sternly lecture Americans about the need for belt-tightening and self-discipline. For one famous week in 1979, he holed up at Camp David summoning advisers and elected officials in preparation for what was later known as the “malaise speech” (though he did not use that term). He struggled regularly with congressional Democrats, who joined with Republicans in sufficient numbers to kill his proposals for a stepped-up federal consumer-protection effort, standby gas-rationing powers, and canceling major water projects he deemed unnecessary. As he had in Georgia, Carter emphasized government-reorganization schemes and did succeed in creating new Cabinet-level Departments of Education and Energy.

But foreign policy was an unusually large focus for Carter as president, leading to some of his biggest triumphs and setbacks. He invested enormous amounts of capital and personal time into engineering the 1978 Camp David Accords, the landmark Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement signed by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. (It has, extraordinarily, held for more than four decades.) Earlier that year, after a long, tense negotiation, he secured Senate ratification of a treaty to relinquish the Panama Canal to Panama. Beyond establishing any individual bilateral relationships, Carter introduced human rights as a key consideration in U.S. foreign and defense policy, modifying the strict anti-Communist priorities of his immediate predecessors.

Carter’s interactions with Iran characterized the ambiguities of his presidency, helping him beat Ted Kennedy in the 1980 Democratic primaries but putting an exclamation point on his general-election defeat.

Kennedy had been leading Carter two-to-one in primary polls in mid-1979 when the Massachusetts senator all but decided to run; Carter’s combative streak was engaged, and he went out of his way to tell journalists that if Kennedy ran, “I’ll whip his ass.” But a few days before Kennedy’s official announcement, Iranian student revolutionaries took 66 Americans hostage in Tehran in response to Carter’s decision — against the caution of his advisers — to let the deposed Shah of Iran into the U.S. for cancer treatment. The hostage-taking launched a simmering crisis that did not end until the last day of Carter’s presidency. The international emergency did bolster the incumbent’s public standing, particularly among Democrats, and Carter’s “Rose Garden strategy” of running for renomination without holding personal campaign events worked, at least initially. He won 14 of the first 15 caucuses and primaries (losing only Massachusetts), in part by rebuilding his biracial coalition of support in southern and southern-inflected states.

Kennedy made a comeback in the later primaries, and voters grew tired of the hostage crisis (particularly after a rescue attempt went bad in April) and the country’s chronic economic problems. Kennedy won New York, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey, but it wasn’t enough to defeat the incumbent. Still, he didn’t concede until the convention and managed to avoid the traditional arms-raised unity gesture with Carter as the proceedings ended.

Carter had his moments in the general-election contest with Republican Ronald Reagan (and his low points, as when he briefly slipped behind independent candidate John Anderson in the polls), managing to keep the race competitive until late in the campaign despite an assortment of ongoing crises in domestic and foreign policy. There were persistent rumors then and later (and recently, spurred by Carter’s transition to end-of-life care, a confession from an associate of Republican power broker John Connally) of Republican efforts to talk the Iranian regime out of a hostage release prior to the election, but the outcome was probably sealed in any event.

In their one debate, Reagan famously called for voters to make the election a referendum on “the last four years,” and right at the end of the race, Carter’s numbers collapsed. Reagan won by nearly ten points, carrying 44 states.

Although he left office at only 55, Carter never gave a thought to running again. His vice-president, Walter Mondale, won the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination but lost 49 states in the general election, which proved the country was undergoing a partisan realignment. Carter’s strength in the South had masked it earlier, keeping Democratic losses from being much worse. But Carter didn’t brood about his difficulties as president and embraced a simple if robust postpresidential agenda that kept him in good stead for over four decades.

His principal vehicle was the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization created in 1982 in partnership with Atlanta’s Emory University; he and Rosalynn Carter served as co-founders. Its three main international programs have centered on conflict resolution (in areas ranging from North Korea–U.S. nuclear cooperation, to the restoration of democracy in Haiti, to disputes between Sudan and Uganda and between Colombia and Ecuador), election monitoring (in 39 countries), and health initiatives. The center has led efforts to eradicate deadly diseases like Guinea worm and to help diagnose and treat others like river blindness and trachoma. It has also fought to reduce the stigma of mental illness in the U.S. and beyond. In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the Carter Center’s efforts to “find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” He also continued his work for Middle East peace, leading to the one big controversy surrounding his postpresidential years: allegations that he was hostile to Zionism and to Israel itself, which grew stronger with the publication of his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Another postpresidential commitment of Carter’s (and Rosalynn’s) involved Habitat for Humanity, a Georgia-based NGO that had long been doing modest work to build housing for the homeless. The Carters began working with Habitat in 1984 and over the years helped it expand its programs to all 50 states and to 70 countries. We’ve all seen those celebrated photographs of Carter framing up walls. During the 1992 presidential campaign, I was having dinner at the Atlanta political hangout Manuel’s Tavern, and I asked a waiter about all the security loitering around a back room. “Jimmy’s back there showing Clinton and Gore how to drive a nail,” the waiter replied; sure enough, the next day, the three men held a Habitat event nearby and nary a nail was missed.

Yet the nongovernmental entity to which Carter devoted the most years was probably the Baptist Church. He taught Sunday school off and on at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains from its founding in 1977 as a church that welcomed Black worshippers. As the Southern Baptist Convention became militantly conservative in the 1980s and ’90s, Carter eventually broke any identification with the SBC (especially objecting to its refusal to ordain women as ministers) and became a leader of the moderate spinoff group the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Carter’s legacy as a president and a politician is substantial but not entirely settled. He was prescient in a number of policy areas, notably the search for a comprehensive energy strategy and his strong stance on human rights as a touchstone of U.S. foreign policy. He was also a personal diplomat of great courage and skill. From a political perspective, he was the key bridge figure between the Jim Crow era of southern politics and the biracial Democratic coalitions that followed; the Democratic victories in Georgia in 2020 — including the election of a Black U.S. senator — must have gratified him immensely. But Carter also exemplified centrist and even conservative strains in the Democratic Party that persisted while white Democratic racist politics largely vanished.

What made Carter’s postpresidential career so popular, however, was the simple sense, shared far beyond his own region or party, that he was a fundamentally good man who eschewed riches and power for a more humble path to righteousness.


RIP Jimmy Carter

As a longtime Georgian and longtime observer of the 39th president, I wrote an obituary of the remarkable Jimmy Carter for New York:

Jimmy Carter was America’s oldest ex-president and had by far the longest former presidency. Indeed, his remarkable life — which ended today after 100 years — can be divided into the stretches before (38 years) and after (43 years) he held public office, with a comparatively short stretch of public service (four in the Georgia state senate, four as governor, and four as president, plus a couple of stints of campaigning) between those two eras. While his ascent to the presidency was in many respects astonishing, his record as a politician was at best mixed: He won one statewide political contest in Georgia and lost one, then won one presidential election and lost one. Assessments of his presidency never quite turned positive in hindsight, and for many years he continued to hold controversial positions on the ultimate hot-button international concern, the Middle East. Most recently, the return of inflation in the early 2020s brought back memories of one of the more painful aspects of his administration’s record.

Yet the man always known by the informal name of Jimmy became and remained a beloved figure in his postpresidency, owing in no small part to his dogged efforts to combat such basic scourges of the human condition as war, disease, political corruption, and homelessness.

Carter was born in 1924 on a large family peanut farm near the hamlet of Plains in southwestern Georgia, the son of an experienced farmer and entrepreneur, Earl, and a trained nurse, Lillian, the remarkable woman who eventually found fame by joining the Peace Corps at age 68 as her son ran for governor. He helped in his family’s agricultural and commercial ventures while growing up. (One, which he was later to revive and expand, was wine-making, unusual for rural Baptists at the time.) Though a dutiful son of the land, Carter longed for travel, and after some preliminary higher education, he gained admission to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1943, graduating in the top 10 percent of his class in 1946, shortly after World War II ended. Around the same time, he married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s from Plains, and the couple soon began a family that ultimately included three sons and a daughter.

Carter was well embarked on a naval career (notably serving on the research staff of Hyman Rickover, the “father of the nuclear Navy,” whose hands-on taskmaster management style made a deep impression on the young officer) when his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, leading Carter to secure a discharge and return to Plains to take over the family farm and businesses. By the end of the 1950s, he was both prosperous and restless, and he became involved in civic and political life. He entered politics at the larger tail end of Jim Crow, when it didn’t take much to get a reputation as a relative liberal on racial matters. Carter quietly qualified by supporting the desegregation of his own Southern Baptist congregation and refusing to join the militantly racist White Citizens’ Council movement when it reached his county. By the time he got to the state senate in 1962 (a judicial intervention aimed at a rival’s fraud forced a second election), he was known as a strong supporter of President John F. Kennedy.

But in Carter’s initial and subsequent campaigns prior to his election as governor, he was hardly a profile in courage on racial matters. In his first gubernatorial bid, in 1966, he cleverly positioned himself between the self-described liberal ex-governor Ellis Arnall and the notorious segregationist Lester Maddox. (I was a kiddie volunteer for that first statewide Carter campaign.) He narrowly missed making a Democratic runoff against Arnall mostly because of Republican crossover votes for Maddox, who was deemed the Democrat that GOP nominee Bo Callaway could most easily defeat. When write-in votes for Arnall forced the election into the legislature under Georgia’s archaic and poorly written Constitution, Carter joined most (but not all) Democrats in casting a party-line vote for the buffoonish racist Maddox. I was shocked to hear my hero’s voice clearly announcing a vote for “Lester G. Maddox” on the live radio broadcast of the balloting, and I did not support his subsequent gubernatorial effort.

Carter barely stopped running between 1966 and 1970, and he confirmed his twin reputations for cautious ambivalence on racial issues and impressive (if cynical) political skills. This time, his principal opponent was former governor Carl Sanders, who had earned the loyalty of Black voters during a relatively enlightened first term. While Carter was quietly wooing some of the same Black civil-rights leaders who would later spearhead his presidential run, his public campaign focused on a populist appeal to white rural and small-town voters who disliked “Cufflinks Carl” for his corporate ties and his racial moderation. Most notoriously, Carter supporters widely distributed photos of Sanders celebrating a victory with Black players from the Atlanta Hawks, the NBA team he partially owned. Carter also went out of his way to express solidarity with Alabama’s George Wallace, who was running an overtly racist campaign in 1970 to recapture power in Montgomery. Carter consolidated conservative white voters and nearly won a majority against Sanders in the first round of primaries, then dispatched the former governor handily in a runoff.

But upon taking office (after a pro forma general-election victory over Republican TV newsman Hal Suit), Carter engineered a sharp left turn on racial issues, making this blunt statement in his 1971 inaugural address:

“I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over … No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”

Thanks to his reputation for quiet decency on racial matters and the strength of his outreach to civil-rights leaders, his campaign demagoguery, not this new departure, was widely viewed as tactical and disposable.

While racially enlightened, Carter’s governorship (limited at the time to a single term) was to a significant extent focused on the dry process issue of government reorganization. He successfully proposed to consolidate 300 state agencies into 22. He made small but politically significant gestures in areas ranging from the equalization of public-education revenues to prison reform and environmental protection.

Meanwhile, like most southern (and not a few northern) politicians in both parties, Carter opposed busing to achieve school desegregation. He nonetheless kept himself in the national political news as an exemplar of “New South” Democratic governors (whose ranks included Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Reubin Askew of Florida, and John West of South Carolina) who were outmaneuvering the old segregationists of their own party while heading off Republican gains in the region that threatened Democrats’ national viability. They were the first truly “national” Democrats in the South since the party had fully abandoned its ancient willingness to support, or at least tolerate, Jim Crow.

Carter’s astonishing rise to the presidency just two years after a meh single term as governor of a Deep South state was a testament to both his unique positioning in a Democratic Party struggling with realignment and the political skills he and his advisers often showed even as they were being mocked as backwoods rubes. Team Carter exploited the emergence of the Iowa caucuses as a pre–New Hampshire nominating contest and out-organized the field there. He then took advantage of national Democrats’ desire for someone to end the threat of Wallace’s presidential candidacy by securing support for one-on-one contests with the Alabaman in the South, which Carter won with the regionally resonant slogan “Don’t send them a message. Send them a president.” He used crucial support from the Atlanta-based King-family network of civil-rights stalwarts to head off attacks on his dubious background on racial matters and turned criticism of his lack of experience into an asset among voters still furious at Watergate-era Washington. Even his Baptist piety became a selling point among both Evangelicals (who had not yet begun their mass exodus to the GOP) and voters inclined to believe his “I’ll never tell you a lie” pledge.

But it was in the general-election contest against Gerald Ford that Carter’s unique regional political appeal became crucial, as I explained in a meditation on the 2020 revival of the southern Democratic Party:

“[Carter] defeated Wallace in most southern primaries and then gained his endorsement, subsequently putting together a mind-bending coalition of Black and conservative white voters united by regional pride (between Andrew and Lyndon Johnson, no president was elected from a state that had been part of the Confederacy). Carter won every state of the former Confederacy (producing huge swings compared with Hubert Humphrey’s performance in 1968 and George McGovern’s in 1972) except Virginia; he won the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri as well as southern-inflected areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania that helped keep those states in the Democratic column.”

It is unlikely that any other Democrat could have won the presidency in 1976, and Carter won by an eyelash. Yet like other regional or ethnic-racial pioneers, his peak of support among the home folks was a thing of the past once he took office. Thus began a troubled four years.

Carter’s one-term presidency had its ups and downs and was rarely stable or predictable. Yes, he inherited a lot of economic trouble from the Nixon and Ford administrations, but his response to double-digit inflation (involving some austerity measures and a lot of austerity talk) divided Democrats, particularly when the Carter administration deprioritized full employment and put in place a Federal Reserve Board chairman (Paul Volcker) determined to use a tight monetary policy to tame inflation, triggering a recession.

This economic turbulence and a closely associated energy crisis (both kicked off by the Arab oil boycott of 1973–74 and a subsequent huge price spike in petroleum products) led Carter to indulge his inner Baptist deacon and sternly lecture Americans about the need for belt-tightening and self-discipline. For one famous week in 1979, he holed up at Camp David summoning advisers and elected officials in preparation for what was later known as the “malaise speech” (though he did not use that term). He struggled regularly with congressional Democrats, who joined with Republicans in sufficient numbers to kill his proposals for a stepped-up federal consumer-protection effort, standby gas-rationing powers, and canceling major water projects he deemed unnecessary. As he had in Georgia, Carter emphasized government-reorganization schemes and did succeed in creating new Cabinet-level Departments of Education and Energy.

But foreign policy was an unusually large focus for Carter as president, leading to some of his biggest triumphs and setbacks. He invested enormous amounts of capital and personal time into engineering the 1978 Camp David Accords, the landmark Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement signed by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. (It has, extraordinarily, held for more than four decades.) Earlier that year, after a long, tense negotiation, he secured Senate ratification of a treaty to relinquish the Panama Canal to Panama. Beyond establishing any individual bilateral relationships, Carter introduced human rights as a key consideration in U.S. foreign and defense policy, modifying the strict anti-Communist priorities of his immediate predecessors.

Carter’s interactions with Iran characterized the ambiguities of his presidency, helping him beat Ted Kennedy in the 1980 Democratic primaries but putting an exclamation point on his general-election defeat.

Kennedy had been leading Carter two-to-one in primary polls in mid-1979 when the Massachusetts senator all but decided to run; Carter’s combative streak was engaged, and he went out of his way to tell journalists that if Kennedy ran, “I’ll whip his ass.” But a few days before Kennedy’s official announcement, Iranian student revolutionaries took 66 Americans hostage in Tehran in response to Carter’s decision — against the caution of his advisers — to let the deposed Shah of Iran into the U.S. for cancer treatment. The hostage-taking launched a simmering crisis that did not end until the last day of Carter’s presidency. The international emergency did bolster the incumbent’s public standing, particularly among Democrats, and Carter’s “Rose Garden strategy” of running for renomination without holding personal campaign events worked, at least initially. He won 14 of the first 15 caucuses and primaries (losing only Massachusetts), in part by rebuilding his biracial coalition of support in southern and southern-inflected states.

Kennedy made a comeback in the later primaries, and voters grew tired of the hostage crisis (particularly after a rescue attempt went bad in April) and the country’s chronic economic problems. Kennedy won New York, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey, but it wasn’t enough to defeat the incumbent. Still, he didn’t concede until the convention and managed to avoid the traditional arms-raised unity gesture with Carter as the proceedings ended.

Carter had his moments in the general-election contest with Republican Ronald Reagan (and his low points, as when he briefly slipped behind independent candidate John Anderson in the polls), managing to keep the race competitive until late in the campaign despite an assortment of ongoing crises in domestic and foreign policy. There were persistent rumors then and later (and recently, spurred by Carter’s transition to end-of-life care, a confession from an associate of Republican power broker John Connally) of Republican efforts to talk the Iranian regime out of a hostage release prior to the election, but the outcome was probably sealed in any event.

In their one debate, Reagan famously called for voters to make the election a referendum on “the last four years,” and right at the end of the race, Carter’s numbers collapsed. Reagan won by nearly ten points, carrying 44 states.

Although he left office at only 55, Carter never gave a thought to running again. His vice-president, Walter Mondale, won the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination but lost 49 states in the general election, which proved the country was undergoing a partisan realignment. Carter’s strength in the South had masked it earlier, keeping Democratic losses from being much worse. But Carter didn’t brood about his difficulties as president and embraced a simple if robust postpresidential agenda that kept him in good stead for over four decades.

His principal vehicle was the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization created in 1982 in partnership with Atlanta’s Emory University; he and Rosalynn Carter served as co-founders. Its three main international programs have centered on conflict resolution (in areas ranging from North Korea–U.S. nuclear cooperation, to the restoration of democracy in Haiti, to disputes between Sudan and Uganda and between Colombia and Ecuador), election monitoring (in 39 countries), and health initiatives. The center has led efforts to eradicate deadly diseases like Guinea worm and to help diagnose and treat others like river blindness and trachoma. It has also fought to reduce the stigma of mental illness in the U.S. and beyond. In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the Carter Center’s efforts to “find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” He also continued his work for Middle East peace, leading to the one big controversy surrounding his postpresidential years: allegations that he was hostile to Zionism and to Israel itself, which grew stronger with the publication of his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Another postpresidential commitment of Carter’s (and Rosalynn’s) involved Habitat for Humanity, a Georgia-based NGO that had long been doing modest work to build housing for the homeless. The Carters began working with Habitat in 1984 and over the years helped it expand its programs to all 50 states and to 70 countries. We’ve all seen those celebrated photographs of Carter framing up walls. During the 1992 presidential campaign, I was having dinner at the Atlanta political hangout Manuel’s Tavern, and I asked a waiter about all the security loitering around a back room. “Jimmy’s back there showing Clinton and Gore how to drive a nail,” the waiter replied; sure enough, the next day, the three men held a Habitat event nearby and nary a nail was missed.

Yet the nongovernmental entity to which Carter devoted the most years was probably the Baptist Church. He taught Sunday school off and on at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains from its founding in 1977 as a church that welcomed Black worshippers. As the Southern Baptist Convention became militantly conservative in the 1980s and ’90s, Carter eventually broke any identification with the SBC (especially objecting to its refusal to ordain women as ministers) and became a leader of the moderate spinoff group the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Carter’s legacy as a president and a politician is substantial but not entirely settled. He was prescient in a number of policy areas, notably the search for a comprehensive energy strategy and his strong stance on human rights as a touchstone of U.S. foreign policy. He was also a personal diplomat of great courage and skill. From a political perspective, he was the key bridge figure between the Jim Crow era of southern politics and the biracial Democratic coalitions that followed; the Democratic victories in Georgia in 2020 — including the election of a Black U.S. senator — must have gratified him immensely. But Carter also exemplified centrist and even conservative strains in the Democratic Party that persisted while white Democratic racist politics largely vanished.

What made Carter’s postpresidential career so popular, however, was the simple sense, shared far beyond his own region or party, that he was a fundamentally good man who eschewed riches and power for a more humble path to righteousness.


Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez on How She Won in Trump Country

In “The Democrat who won in Trump country,” Noel King interviews Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez, cross-posted here from Vox:

The Democratic Party struggled in the 2024 elections, losing control of the Senate and the presidency, and failing to regain the House. The party is still assessing what went wrong in those defeats — but one bright spot is in southwestern Washington, where Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez pulled out a win in Trump country for the second election in a row.

In 2024, Gluesenkamp Perez, a moderate Democrat and member of the House’s Blue Dog Coalition, defeated her 2022 opponent in a rematch and widened her margin of victory in the process. She credits her win to her working-class, rural roots and authentic connection to her home district, as well as a focus on issues with bipartisan support, such as “right to repair” laws.

Gluesenkamp Perez and her husband live in unincorporated Skamania County, a wooded region with a population of about 12,000. She co-owns an auto repair and machine shop with her husband, Dean, which he still runs.

Gluesenkamp Perez sat down with Today, Explained to discuss her win, where she thinks her party went wrong, and what she hopes to focus on in the next Congress. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Noel King

Tell me a bit more about yourself.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

I live in a really rural part of a rural county. We get our internet from a radio tower. We get our water from a well. My family’s been in Washington state for generations. My dad immigrated here from Mexico and met my mom at Western Washington University. I’m just incredibly honored to have a heritage of people who believe in making things that last and who understand the value and the necessity of what we have in Washington state and southwest Washington and a loyalty to a place that is so necessary, and that we’re increasingly alienated from culturally.

Noel King

What inspired you to go into politics?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

I was not inspired by politics. My predecessor was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. And I knew everybody that had her yard signs up like clockwork. And they started putting up this guy Joe Kent’s yard signs. And I started watching his YouTube and was like, “This guy’s got good hair and bad ideas.” I remember watching a Republican primary candidate forum on YouTube and somebody asked all of the candidates to name just three lakes in southwest Washington, and he couldn’t do it. If you’re not doing this because what we have is precious and worth fighting for, why are you doing it? Having a political agenda imported from somewhere else that is so far from our values and our community and our priorities…

Noel King

Let’s talk about the place. Washington’s Third is a swing district. It was held by a Republican for 12 years before you won in 2022. Donald Trump backed your opponent, Joe Kent, in a big way. Why do you think you won?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

What we want in southwest Washington is to see our priorities and our culture reflected in Washington, DC. We don’t want a national agenda or a culture from somewhere else, imported and replacing our community, our values, our priorities. And so just a real focus on what my community needs, what our values are, who we are. You know, the district went for Trump by 7 points in 2016. And last time I won by two votes in each precinct. And this time we were able to point to my record. I’m in the top 3 percent of most bipartisan voting members of the US House and I’m not here to play partisan football. I’m here because I see and value what we have, and I know it’s worth fighting for. I’ve never felt entitled to people’s votes. I’m not here for an agenda from a think tank somewhere.

Noel King

Why do you think bipartisanship played so well back in Washington Third District? What were you pointing to exactly?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

I was talking to the director of one of our largest labor and delivery wards, and she told me that right now 40 percent of the babies born in her hospital have at least one parent addicted to fentanyl. Forty percent — this is generational carnage and it’s everywhere. People want to stop the flow of fentanyl. I think a lot of us have felt like if this was a thing in the lives of people with more money and influence, it would have been addressed sooner.

Noel King

And so [you’re talking about] immigration, right?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

We’re talking about border security. For so long they’ve been married, but together there’s two issues: immigration and border security. And we’re saying we cannot wait for a perfect immigration policy to have a secure border to stop the flow of fentanyl. And so that was a big point for me.

You know, on the student student loan forgiveness, I looked at the data. My district only holds 3 percent of the federally issued debt. This was a regressive tax policy. If you support progressive tax strategies, you should do that consistently, not just when there’s party favors. And I had people protest our auto shop.

Noel King

Just to clarify, you voted against President Biden’s student debt relief. People looked at you and said, “You’re a Democrat, how dare you?” Talk to me about how that affected you back home.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

They were really aggressive on our online reviews. We take real pride in the quality of work we do. People were just bombing it who’d never been customers. But I was hearing from my community, “We don’t want the trades to be considered an afterthought. We don’t want to be second fiddle” — really challenging the idea that academic intelligence is the thing that we should be supporting. We want a level playing field for the trades, for all of the forms of intelligence. We want good jobs that don’t require a college degree. We want honors-level shop class in junior high. Those are the things that reflect our values and our priorities. And so that’s how I vote.

Noel King

This is where the pushback comes in, when you’re in national office and you vote on something that affects everybody in the country. Not many people in your district ended up in a lot of college debt. But all across the United States, many, many, many young people did. You’re in national office. You don’t just vote for this little corner of Washington because your vote — as one of 435 — affects the whole country. How do you respond to that?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

My job is to represent my community. And I think the way that you arrive at good policy is by having everyone show up at the table with the unique perspectives of their community and loyalty there. And that is how you end up with better policy in the end. You don’t get good legislation without having people who are driving trucks and changing diapers and turning wrenches at the table — not as an afterthought, but in the inception of the legislation. There are ways that that proposal could have been much more progressive. You know, things like Pell Grants or focusing on the bigger, systemic issue of why college tuition has increased 481 percent since I was born. That’s the systemic solution that I think we need to be considering and evaluating, like how are we going to provide a level playing field for everyone?

Noel King

Let’s talk nationally. There’s another two years to look forward to, in which Democrats will be in the minority in both the House and the Senate. They lost the presidency. How do you think the party moves forward? People are looking at you as the face of a new kind of Democratic politics. Whether you like that or not, people say, “We should look at this gal because she seems to be saying something. She won in a Trump district. She seems to be saying something that people who voted for Donald Trump can get behind.” Where do the Democrats go?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

Well, again, look, I’m not a strategist, but I think 90 percent of Americans agree about 90 percent of the issues. And they have found the 10 things we disagree about to drive a stake through the heart of our community.

Noel King

Like what?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

Pick anything. Anything that’s in the national ads and instead, say, it is not partisan to want to be able to fix your own car; “right to repair” laws are not partisan; wanting to own a home, not partisan. One of the things I really love about living where I live — we don’t have trash service. So every six weeks, we go to the dump and take our stuff, and so you have to see everything you bought. There is nowhere else, right? You should have to see all of the tiny little yogurt cups you bought, and have accountability, and not have an idea of the woods as a terrarium or as something that’s just a recreational asset, but as something that is living, breathing and relevant. I think we’re consuming like half the lumber per capita that we were in the ’70s. And the reality is a lot of that has been replaced by petroleum-based products. By thinking about things in this hyper-local way, by seeing the trash that you bought, you are able to arrive at a better national and global solution.

Noel King

Do you think that’s what Republicans did in 2024? Because whether you support Donald Trump or you’re a critic of his, one thing that you can say he successfully did is he turned local issues national. Springfield, Ohio, was struggling with an influx of immigrants. There is no reason that somebody in Maine or Florida or Texas should have cared at all about Springfield, Ohio. That was a local issue. Donald Trump took that little local issue, made it a national issue. Some analysts say that is what helped him win. It seems counter to what you’re saying, which is that a local issue is a local issue, and we shouldn’t make it national because it won’t let us win.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

People want to be heard. I had a lot of people, colleagues, saying, “How do we get people to understand that the economy’s actually great?”

Noel King

This was a Democratic line.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

Don’t do that. People are putting their groceries on a credit card. You go to Albertsons or whatever, your grocery store, and you feel like you’re in a game of chicken with the CEO. Nobody cares about your spreadsheets. I don’t know that any political party is doing this very well. But I think there’s a lot of work to be done on conveying cultural respect and regard for the people that are building our country, that are growing our food, that are keeping the wheels on the bus and conveying that respect sincerely and thinking and listening with curiosity. That is how we get our country back, how we build community again.

We are all very lonely and feeling isolated. Some people think it’s their civic duty to unfriend somebody on Facebook [over how they voted] — that is such an impoverished view of the world. It’s isolating, and it’s lonely. I think getting back to a place where we are finding nonpolitical ways of conveying our values — that’s progress, that is how you grow the field of people who feel real, that is how you build a coalition that can actually pass useful legislation.

Noel King

Do you think there’s a kind of snobbery within the Democratic Party where maybe the heroes that the party is choosing are the wrong heroes?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

It feels like everybody [in Washington, DC] is under 40 and has at least two degrees. And, you know, that’s not what the country looks like. That’s not what the value system is everywhere. There are fewer than five members of Congress who actually have a child in day care. That’s why there’s not a sense of urgency around the affordability crisis. I was talking to a constituent. She works in child care. She told me she is not legally allowed to peel a banana or an orange, [because] that is considered food prep. They are not a licensed food prep facility. So they can open a bag of chips [but] can’t peel a banana. And I went round and round and round for like four months and I had my office talking to local regulators and licensors and elected officials. And they kept saying, “She’s dumb, she doesn’t understand the rules.”

Noel King

Does she understand the rules?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

Yes. Their licensors said they would need six more sinks before they were legally allowed to be engaged in food prep. And I don’t think this is a small thing. I have a toddler. I know how durable food preferences are. So I introduced a bill that creates a positive right to serve fresh fruits and vegetables. It says, if your state is taking federal dollars for child care, you will not infringe on the right to serve fresh fruits and vegetables. And this is the long work of building strong local agriculture and national health.

Noel King

It is also, if we’re being honest, in a tradition that more closely hews to what Republicans think. You’re pointing to overregulation and you’re saying this is ridiculous. And I can imagine Democrats saying, but what about listeria? Every time you turn on the news these days, there is listeria in something, there’s E. coli in something, you’re going to give it to the kids. How do you square the party that you’re in and the historical positions that it’s taken on things like regulation?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

I don’t know if it’s necessarily partisan. Parents know that food preferences and children are very durable, so my experience as a young mom is what’s driving that, not a partisan agenda. But I think that this is absolutely one of the reasons that there’s one licensed day care facility in my entire county. Think about the overhead of installing six different sinks.

Noel King

Do you look at legislation like that legislation as something that bridges a partisan divide? The thing that you’re looking at for the next two years is Democrats either work with Republicans or get nothing done. And I’m wondering if what you’re saying here is that, if we have some compromise ideas, at least we can get some things done.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

Yeah, I think these issues are too urgent to be delayed. We have got to find some common ground here to work and deliver value to our communities. And so I think there’s a lot of work that can be done that is not partisan. That’s good for the country.


November 22: RFK Jr. May Be Denied Confirmation for Being Formerly Pro-Choice

There are no actual Democrats in Trump’s Cabinet so far, but he’s hoping to appoint an ex-Democrat to run HHS. As I noted at New York, RFK Jr. is in trouble for not abandoning abortion rights far or fast enough.

Donald Trump’s shocking nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head up the vast Department of Health and Human Services led to a lot of concerns about his suitability and ideological compatibility with the MAGA folk that would surround him at the Cabinet table. Kennedy’s reflexive hostility to vaccines puts him at odds with many Republicans. His complaints about Big Pharmaagribusiness giants, and use of pesticides by farmers have earned him some enemies who are very influential in the Republican Party. And his denunciation of processed foods as child-killing evils has to personally annoy the Big Mac aficionado of Mar-a-Lago.

But even if none of those longtime controversies surrounding the former Democrat make him radioactive among the Senate Republicans who would have to confirm him for HHS, he’s also in considerable trouble with one of the GOP’s oldest and most important allies: the anti-abortion movement. Suspicion of him in that quarter is natural, since Kennedy for many years maintained a standard Democratic position favoring abortion rights, though it was never an issue that preoccupied him. Then, as a presidential candidate who drifted out of the Democratic primaries into an independent bid, he was all over the place on abortion. He made remarks that ranged from unconditional support for the right to choose even after fetal viability to support for a three-month national ban to various points in between.

At a minimum, anti-abortion activists would like to pin him to an acceptable position, but they also seem inclined to secure concessions from him in exchange for declining to go medieval on his confirmation, as Politico explains:

“Abortion opponents — concerned about Kennedy’s past comments supporting abortion access — have two major asks: that he appoint an anti-abortion stalwart to a senior position in HHS and that he promise privately to them and publicly during his confirmation hearing to restore anti-abortion policies from the first Trump administration, according to four anti-abortion advocates granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. And Kennedy, according to a fifth person close to the Trump transition, is open to their entreaties.”

He’d better be. Despite Trump’s abandonment of the maximum anti-abortion stance during his 2024 campaign, the forced-birth lobby remained firmly in his camp and has maintained even more influence among Republican officeholders who haven’t “pivoted” from the 45th president’s hard-core position to the 47th president’s current contention that abortion policy is up to the states. Indeed, you could make the argument that it’s even more important than ever to anti-abortion activists that Trump be surrounded by zealots in order to squeeze as many congenial actions as possible out of his administration and the Republicans who will control Congress come January. And there’s plenty HHS can do to make life miserable for those needing abortion services, Politico notes:

“At a minimum, anti-abortion groups want to see the Trump administration rescind the policies Biden implemented that expanded abortion access, such as the update to HIPAA privacy rules to cover abortions, as well as FDA rules making abortion pills available by mail and at retail pharmacies. … The advocates are also demanding the return of several Trump-era abortion rules, including the so-called Mexico City policy that blocked federal funding for international non-governmental organizations that provide or offer counseling on abortions, anti-abortion restrictions on federal family-planning clinics and a federal ban on discriminating against health care entities that refuse to cover abortion services or refer patients for the procedure when taxpayer dollars are involved.”

Anti-abortion folk could overplay their bullying of Kennedy and annoy the new administration: The Trump transition team has already vetoed one of the Cause’s all-time favorites, Roger Severino, for HHS deputy secretary, though it may have been as much about his identification with the toxic Project 2025 as his extremist background on abortion policy. It probably doesn’t help that objections to Kennedy for being squishy on abortion were first aired by former vice-president Mike Pence, who has about as much influence with Trump 2.0 as the former president’s former fixer Michael Cohen.

As for Kennedy, odds are he will say and do whatever it takes to get confirmed; he’s already had to repudiate past comments about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, including a comparison of his new master to Adolf Hitler (a surprisingly common problem in MAGA land). Having come a very long way from his quixotic challenge to Joe Biden in 2023, Kennedy really wants to take his various crusades into the new administration, at least until Trump inevitably gets tired of hearing complaints from donors about him and sends him back to the fever swamps.