As Democrats react to the continuing atrocities associated with the mass deportation campaign, it’s important for them to understand that what they find most objectionable is a feature, not a bug, for Trump’s base, as I explained at New York.

If you get your information from mainstream media or progressive political outlets, the recent debate over ICE tactics and mass-deportation policies during the second Trump administration is one-sided. Whipped on by quotas and undermined by haste and poor training, immigration enforcement agencies are constantly overreaching and providing horrifying social-media content to their many critics, it seems. More generally, the administration’s mass-deportation efforts appear to be going far beyond its claimed focus on “the worst of the worst.” There’s plenty of evidence that law-abiding immigrants who have been here for years are being targeted and treated abominably.

It’s understandable, then, that ICE’s overseers periodically give the impression that they’re working to rein in the masked agents. And even Republican politicians urge better deportation targeting as though the current politics just need some fine-tuning.

But it all looks different from MAGA-land, as evidenced by the backlash to the recent suspension of ICE vehicle stops after two fatal shootings. This infuriated many pro-Trump social-media influencers, reported the Daily Beast:

“MAGA faithful are revolting against Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, accusing him of surrendering to Democrats on a recent ICE reform … after he ordered ICE to suspend traffic stops in the wake of two fatal shootings of men by federal agents this week.

“Fox News host Tomi Lahren fumed on X, ‘We are being betrayed in real time. If you want Trump voters to stay home in November, keep this up, Markwayne and co. …’

“MAGA influencer and self-styled citizen journalist Nick Sortor blasted the change in ICE policy as a ‘TOTAL CAPITULATION to the left’ and ‘WEAK’ in an X post.

“Laura Loomer, the Islamophobic far-right influencer and President Donald Trump’s ‘loyalty enforcer,’ simply wrote, ‘Deport Markwayne Muslim!'”

In Trump’s world, keeping his base energized is always Job One. So unsurprisingly, he un-suspended the vehicle stops and restated the MAGA catechism about the need for mass deportation at Truth Social:

“The men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job, one that has to be done. CRIME IS WAY DOWN IN AMERICA, in many cases with numbers that haven’t been seen in decades. The Open Border Policy of Sleepy Joe Biden allowed 25,000,000 people to pour into our Country, unchecked and unvetted. Many were Criminals, and we have to get them out. In order to do this, we must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch. I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job. Keep those Crime Stat Records coming! Remember, you are loved and respected in America. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”

This backlash against the apparently woke idea of reducing cruelty in ICE tactics stems from broader MAGA suspicions that opponents of mass deportation are lurking somewhere in the administration. It erupted even before Trump’s second term began in an intense battle over H-1B visas, beloved of the tech community (Elon Musk in particular). It continued in mid-2025 when there was talk of going easy on the immigrant farm workers who are so critical to U.S. agriculture. And when the general public began turning on ICE after high-profile shootings in Minneapolis, leading to bipartisan calls for reform, the hammer came down in the shape of GOP party-line legislation in Congress (signed by Trump last month) that pre-funds immigration enforcement for years with zero “guardrails” to prevent agent misconduct.

House Republicans are currently considering a tangible product of the MAGA backlash on immigration: legislation to “codify” the administration’s border and mass-deportation policies in order to make it somewhat more difficult for a future Democratic (or RINO) administration to change course. It’s called the Permanent Trump Secure Border Act, and the House Freedom Caucus is insisting it be passed before it will consider anything else (it’s dead on arrival in the Senate, of course, but this is about posturing for the base, not changing laws).

More and more, it’s looking like rational Republicans focused on swing-voter sentiments going into the midterms are being outgunned by those for whom base-voter mobilization is the exclusive and eternal formula for winning elections. That means making sure every single voter is aware that outrage over ICE agents dragging people from their cars and shooting them in the head is just a speed bump on the road to ridding America of as many immigrants as possible.

Like a lot of Democrats, I’ve been anxiously watching the topsy-turvy situation in Maine, but made it clear at New York that it’s not absolutely the be-all end-all race.

Now that Graham Platner has withdrawn his Senate candidacy, his supporters in Maine seem equally furious at their former nominee and at national Democratic operatives both left and center. The former seized on Platner as a bundle of male proletarian stereotypes without bothering to vet him thoroughly for precisely the sort of background and character issues that brought him down. The latter cleared the field of viable alternatives to the hapless Janet Mills, even as they worked behind the scenes to undermine Platner and then exulted in his humiliation. The national narrative, as my Maine-residing colleague Rebecca Traister put it, promoted a “cartoonish proxy war … pitting the oysterman Platner, working-class cosplayer and dirtbaggy avatar of the male left, against a hidebound Establishment.” So it’s understandable that the locals would just as soon be left alone to work out their own representation in the U.S. Senate.

But it’s also understandable that Democrats nationwide tend to believe that “as Maine goes, so goes the Senate,” to adapt the ancient slogan about that state’s bellwether status. Susan Collins is the only GOP incumbent up for reelection this year whose state Kamala Harris carried in 2024. In fact, Maine hasn’t gone Republican in a presidential election since 1988, when George H.W. Bush (whose family maintained a summer retreat in Kennebunkport for many decades) won the presidency. Collins got lucky with a weak opponent in 2020 and has been given considerable leeway to distance herself from Donald Trump. But still, she is a Trump enabler and represents low-hanging fruit for 2026 … or at least she did until Platner’s campaign imploded.

As Maine Democrats try to get their act together, it’s a good time to ask the question: Could Democrats possibly flip control of the Senate without taking down Collins? A fresh look at the math is in order.

With Vice-President J.D. Vance holding a tiebreaking Senate vote, Democrats need a net gain of four seats to gain control of the chamber. According to the authoritative Cook Political Report ratings of 2026 Senate races, there are five GOP-held seats other than Collins’s that are in a competitive range. North Carolina, where Republican Thom Tillis is retiring, is rated “lean Democratic,” with former governor Roy Cooper running very strong. Races to defenestrate Dan Sullivan in Alaska (with former statewide congresswoman Mary Peltola as the Democratic nominee) and topple appointed senator Jon Husted in Ohio (former three-term senator Sherrod Brown is running there) are rated toss-ups. Winning all the toss-ups against the White House party in a midterm election is not a big reach, particularly when the president is as unpopular as Trump. Then there are two more races rated as “lean Republican”: the Republican-held seats in Iowa (where Democrat Josh Turek is running even with Republican Ashley Hinson) and Texas (where Democrat James Talarico is running even with MAGA wild man Ken Paxton). And while it’s rated “likely republican,” GOP Senator Pete Ricketts’s Nebraska seat is in everyone’s peripheral vision, given the potential strength of independent (but Democrat-supported) Dan Osborn.

So even if Susan Collins wins, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas offer a path to a Democratic majority with Nebraska being a possible wild card. And of course, that assumes Democrats win their own competitive races in “lean Democratic” Georgia (where incumbent Jon Ossoff has a solid lead over Republican Mike Collins) and New Hampshire (Democrat Chris Pappas has a slim but steady lead over former senator John E. Sununu), plus the toss-up race in Michigan (an open Democratic-controlled seat where Republican Mike Rogers awaits the winner of a high-profile Democratic primary between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens).

Is it improbable that Democrats will win seven of nine competitive Senate races in November (not counting Maine)? Not necessarily. That’s how wave elections tend to work. Democrats netted six Senate seats in 2006 and eight in 2008, while Republicans netted nine in 2014. Yes, Trump carried Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, Georgia, and Michigan in 2024 — all but the last two by double digits — making them officially “red states” for the moment. But Democrats have unusually strong candidates in Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, and Georgia and an unusually weak opponent in Texas. If there’s any GOP ace in the hole, it could be a stash of national PAC money (the value of which was enhanced by a recent U.S. Supreme Court campaign-finance ruling) it can deploy strategically. But that’s hardly a guarantee of victory.

Besides, Susan Collins is by no means out of the woods; indeed, her best hope of survival might have been to run against a damaged-but-not-defeated Platner. If Maine Democrats can unite behind a viable and scandal-free substitute, there’s plenty of time to challenge this vulnerable incumbent. And if they know what’s good for them, national Democrats should try to keep a relatively low profile down east.

So a new possibility about the raging debate on the direction of the Democratic Party is emerging, and I gave it a stab at New York:

The big debate among Democrats this year is whether the renewed energy being exhibited by the progressive wing of the party reflects an ideological development or something else. Unsurprisingly, there are many voices suggesting a long-awaited “pivot to the left” by Democrats is finally underway, as Ben Davis, a Democratic Socialist who worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, wrote in The Guardian:

“After the last month, Democratic leadership should be seriously taking stock of their position. The energy is on their left. The people are on their left. Democrats want fighters, and they want a politics rooted in the collective struggles of the masses, not decided in smoke-filled rooms. We still need moderate Democrats to win those pesky median voters, for now. But the party’s leadership is deeply out of touch with its base. A leftist wave is cresting across the country.”

For many left-bent progressives, this trend, if it’s real, is long overdue. The recent history of the Democratic Party, in their minds, has been a long and terrible saga of centrist disappointment and even betrayal of the rank and file and their interests. From Carter to Clinton to Obama to another Clinton to the doddering Biden and the hapless Harris, centrists promoted a duopoly beholden to oligarchical elites and complacent with militarism and mass incarceration. The center-left gave us Donald Trump and then let him return to power, they reason, so why should centrists be trusted to turn the country around? Isn’t it the left’s turn to be in charge?

At the same time, Trump and his mouthpieces are promoting the same “Democrats pivot to the left” idea in luridly cartoonish Red Scare colors. Trump now routinely refers to progressives of any hue as “the communists.” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is singing the same song:

“It’s insane to see how far left the Democrat Party has moved to where now literally it’s a Bolshevik Revolution. I mean, the Communists have taken over. This is not your father’s Democrat Party, and it’s really the candidates that they’re nominating that are the far-left extremist lunatics.”

But there could be something else going on that has little to do with ideology, much less “socialism” or “communism.” That’s what G. Elliott Morris concludes in a deep dive on the polling data underlying the “progressive surge” in Democratic primaries:

“I think the data conclusively shows Democratic primary voters aren’t being drawn primarily to the leftism of these DSA candidate, but rather their anti-party orientation. …

“Among self-described moderates — just a fourth of the party — Schumer polls at just bare even and Jeffries lands at 61/100, effectively tied with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg.

“On a comparative basis, it’s worth emphasizing the finding that Bernie Sanders is viewed as the most favorable Democratic figure even among self-described moderate Democrats. In absolute terms, every left-wing ‘insurgent’ figure … lands above 50 with moderates: Mamdani, the highest profile Democratic Socialist in America, lands at 57 — seven points above Schumer.”

So even Democrats who self-identify as nonprogressive prefer progressive politicians to “moderates” like themselves. Why is that? Morris believes it’s clear Democrats of every hue are furious with “the Establishment,” and not just because “the Establishment” isn’t fighting Trump hard enough or successfully enough:

“In public statements Schumer, Jeffries, and Hickenlooper each put roughly two-thirds to four-fifths of their substantive rhetoric into attacking Trump or the GOP. For the left, their conflict is with the establishment. Looking at the language of these groups, it’s like candidates are living in different worlds.”

In other words, “the left” is winning support from voters who are indifferent toward or perhaps even opposed to its ideological agenda but who are now gravitating toward politicians who are demanding change. It’s the same impulse that fed the once-shocking rise of Donald Trump among Republicans. Voters are, if possible, less enchanted about the status quo than they were in 2016, but for obvious reasons Trump and his party can no longer fully harness that angry energy.

So if this analysis is correct, what should Establishment Democrats — or, for that matter, “moderates” — do about it? Yelling more loudly about “fighting Trump” has its limits; as we’ve learned over the last year and a half, promising to “fight” a party with trifecta control of the federal government can guarantee a disappointing result. But what Democratic voters seem to crave is a commitment to change that goes a lot deeper than getting rid of Trump and returning to the status-quo ante. Does that mean they need to all become “socialists”? No, not necessarily: There are “radical centrist” types of pro-change politics available too, like demanding more accountable government that gets things done. With the right tone, an “abundance” centrist enraged by bureaucratic and interest-group resistance to housing construction and infrastructure projects might strike some of the same anti-Establishment chords as a Democratic Socialist. What does seem clear is that today’s breed of Democratic voters are not longing for a return to “normalcy,” as Joe Biden famously offered in 2020. More important than moving left or moving right is just moving.

Support among Democrats for a single-payer health care system never went away. But it’s definitely front-and-center again, as I explained at New York:

With the recent upsurge of outspoken progressivism in Democratic primaries, Medicare for All has returned as a chief policy demand. M4A (as it’s often abbreviated) is the favored poll-tested moniker for a single-payer health-care system that would provide universal public insurance regardless of age or means. It has been associated strongly with Bernie Sanders, who first offered single-payer legislation in the House way back in 1993 and introduced what is now the gold-standard proposal in the Senate in 2017, right after his first presidential campaign. But more than that, support for M4A has been the policy proposal that instantly separates progressive sheep from centrist goats in the Democratic ranks.

In the crowded 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, support for M4A as opposed to incremental health reforms building on Medicaid or Obamacare was a topic all the candidates had to address. For at least one, future vice-president and 2024 presidential nominee Kamala Harris, waffling on M4A helped derail a once-promising candidacy.

While support for Medicare for All did not go away after 2020, it did take a back seat to the Biden legislative agenda that virtually all Democrats supported, which focused on non-health-care priorities, aside from efforts to shore up existing programs that had been scaled back during Trump’s first term. And after Trump’s return to the White House in 2024, Democrats were in the minority in Congress and very much on the defensive as the GOP hammered Medicaid in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and threatened to gut Obamacare this year.

But now that Democrats can envision themselves controlling Congress next year and reconquering the White House in 2028, they’re being forced to articulate policy goals more elaborate than resisting Trump and defending the status-quo ante. And as always, Medicare for All is attractive to Democrats as a relatively simple health-care policy panacea, and as a signal to left-bent activists and voters alike that the candidate embracing it is a true progressive unafraid of offending either centrist donors or private insurance companies and their investors. M4A is particularly catnip to insurgent Democratic candidates who want to show their anti-Establishment bona fides and their hostility to timid Democratic incrementalism. At a time when health-care costs are a critical component of an affordability crisis that remains the top voter concern for Americans across the political spectrum, expanding the wildly popular Medicare program to cover everyone seems less radical than ever.

Strong support for Medicare for All has become a must-have credential for candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and like-minded activists and influencers. And so, as Axios reports, it’s an old idea whose time has come round again:

Democratic socialist and progressives’ success in this year’s primaries is evidence of new enthusiasm for Medicare for All plans that many centrists have long dismissed as costly pipe dreams.

The health affordability crisis and widespread frustration with the medical system are fueling a new appetite for big-government solutions to address drug prices, insurance premiums and long-term care costs.

“This does feel like a moment where the Democratic base is looking for bigger ideas that go beyond incremental policies,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president of policy at KFF.

Non-incumbent Democratic Senate candidates like Juliana Hatton of Illinois (who won a highly competitive primary in March) and Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan (the current front-runner in that key race) have used support for M4A to differentiate themselves from ho-hum Democratic Party foes. And several House insurgents sponsored by DSA (Pennsylvania’s Chris Rabb, New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, and Colorado’s Melat Kiros) or Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution outfit (California’s Aisha Wahab, Mai Vang, and Randy Villegos) have made strong Medicare for All advocacy a key differentiator from other Democrats. It seems certain that if Democrats do flip either congressional chamber in Congress, there will instantly be a demand for proactive health-care reform legislation, and M4A is likely to have more support than ever.

The cost of Medicare for All remains its biggest problem — perhaps even a bigger problem than ever given the recent explosion in health-care costs. It’s not just the cost of expanding Medicare eligibility to non-seniors that’s a huge cost center; most proposals like Sanders’s also expand the medical services covered, and most crucially, eliminate copayments and premiums. In that respect, it’s not Medicare for All we’re talking about, but Medicare for Free for All, which is another proposition entirely.

Still, as the clearest and most coherent health-care reform idea on the table, and no more “socialistic” than the health systems already in place in most of the world (and less than many), M4A remains the progressive default position on a topic that grows more urgent every year. It’s Democratic centrists who need a reboot of their mostly reactive thinking on health-care policy going into the post-Trump era. Perhaps some hybrid of subsidized private health insurance with a robust “public option” — what Texas Senate candidate James Talarico cleverly calls “Medicare for Y’all” — will become the lower-cost alternative to Medicare for All, but not just because it’s less ambitious and closer to the status quo. That’s not a good message for Democrats right now.

I’ve been doing a little history search about wave elections, which led me to this commentary at New York on the Senate landscape for 2026:

It says a lot about the evolving conventional wisdom on the 2026 midterm elections that professional contrarian Harry Enten of CNN felt the need to explain that Democrats don’t exactly have a lock on flipping control of the U.S. Senate in November:

“Right now, Dems have a math problem in taking back the Senate. They need a net pickup of 4 seats & lead in 1 GOP held seat (NC). Rest are ties or GOP ahead. Problem is the fundamentals…. Median of key 6 states: GOP with +6 on generic ballot. 53% say Dem party too far left.”

I might quibble a bit with his specific analysis. The generic ballot is hardly a reliable guide to Senate races. It mostly just confirms what we already know: Democrats need to flip some red-state Senate seats to gain control thanks to an adverse landscape. So it means winning in places where swing voters lean Republican. It’s doable only with the right overall environment (a midterm election with an unpopular Republican in the White House) and a state-by-state advantage in candidate quality.

But it is doable, as recent history has shown. And you don’t have to go back to those times in the 20th century when widespread ticket splitting meant tons of senators could hold seats in enemy territory, thus becoming vulnerable to the occasional intense partisan wave or realignment.

Even this century, “wave” elections have made the “fundamentals” Enten cites largely irrelevant, or at least limited. In 2006, an election year when a second-term Republican president had become very unpopular (sound familiar?), Democrats executed a net gain of six Senate seats and flipped the chamber. More remarkable is that, two years later, when the Bush presidency ended and the country sank into a financial crisis, Democrats won another eight net seats. For a brief moment, Democrats held a Senate supermajority (hard even to imagine today) until Republican Scott Brown won a special election in Massachusetts in early 2010. If that seems like a million years ago to you, consider that the 2006 Ohio winner, Sherrod Brown, is back this year as the Democratic nominee seeking to flip the seat of appointed senator Jon Husted, while Scott Brown is running for the open Senate seat of Democrat Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire.

Then in 2014, Republicans returned the favor by flipping nine Senate seats and regaining the Senate control they lost in 2006.

What all these Senate-wave years have in common is that the winning party didn’t lose any seats at all. Similarly, the key to Democratic prospects in 2026 may depend as much on whether they successfully defend potentially vulnerable seats in Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire as on their ability to win tough races in Alaska, Maine, Ohio, and Texas. Failure to hold their own turf explains why Democrats actually lost ground in the Senate races of 2018 even as they gained 41 House seats and flipped the chamber. Conversely, in 2022 as Democrats lost control of the House, they managed to hang on to Senate control by successfully defending three vulnerable seats and flipping a GOP seat in Pennsylvania.

It all reinforces the fact that Senate races occupy their own political universe in which the broader dynamics — particularly, which 33 or 34 seats happen to be on the ballot in any given election — matter a lot but individual contests do as well. The landscape still favors the GOP in November, but a wave on the level of 2006 (again, an eerily similar moment when you compare the job-approval levels of Republican presidents then and now) wouldn’t be that surprising and could restore Democratic control of the upper chamber.

I’m always alert to historical analogies, and the cult of Nixon isn’t a new one for MAGA folk, but it’s telling J.D. Vance is embracing it, as I noted at New York:

One of the odder quirks of MAGA movement devotees is a decided soft spot for Richard Nixon. That’s right: the disgraced 37th president of the United States, forced to resign to avoid almost certain impeachment and removal from office, is a not-so-secret heartthrob for devotees of the 45th and 47th president.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Vivek Ramaswamy raised some eyebrows by insisting that Nixon (you know, the president who opened diplomatic relations with Red China, promoted détente with the Soviet Union, and perpetuated a forever war in Vietnam) had forged the original America First foreign policy. He was far from alone in his nostalgia for The Tricky One. Highly influential culture warrior Christopher Rufo has treated Nixon as Trump’s progenitor on a broad range of issues, from law-and-order appeals to the demonization of academia and the liberal media, with special emphasis on Nixon’s battles with the federal bureaucracy he inherited from the New Deal and Great Society initiatives:

“The question that troubled Nixon during his presidency was the basic one of politics: Who rules? He saw that the deepest conflict in the United States was not along lines of class, race, or identity but between the bureaucracy and the people.”

Rufo is one of multiple right-wing theoreticians to view the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down as a “coup” by leftist elites rather than the product of Nixon’s own arrogance, hubris, and paranoia. The parallels to the alleged persecution of poor, brave Donald Trump are as obvious as they are ludicrous to people outside the MAGA cult.

So it’s not too surprising that a politician who wants to be viewed as the living embodiment of the post-Trump MAGA movement, J.D. Vance, is going out of his way to identify with Nixon. As part of his tour promoting his latest memoir (that’s now two for the 41-year-old veep), Vance stopped off at the Nixon Presidential Library in California and offered some pithy thoughts on Nixon, Trump, and himself, as the Associated Press reported:

“Vice President JD Vance on Thursday said the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon would have been a blip in today’s news cycle, and he drew parallels between Nixon and President Donald Trump — arguing that both were targeted by ‘deep state’ forces. …

“’If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,’ Vance said.”

That’s the “coup” hypothesis in a nutshell. It suggests that today’s environment, in which the president says things every hour that would have destroyed the reputation of his predecessors, is what’s normal.

But Vance did something interesting that went beyond comparing Trump to Nixon. He compared himself to Nixon:

“’Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media,’ he said. ‘It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.’”

There are indeed some superficial similarities. Both were 39 years old and less than two years into a Senate term when they were tapped for vice presidential nominations by presidential candidates who wanted some youth on the ticket to balance their own advancing years. Both were thought to represent the most conservative wing of their conservative party. But beyond that, the Nixon-Vance identification is a reach. Nixon didn’t write any “bestselling books” until after he lost the 1960 presidential election and was reinventing himself for another bid in 1968. Vance wasn’t always “hated by the media;” indeed, he was a media darling when Hillbilly Elegy was first published. Nixon developed a reputation for foreign policy chops as vice president. So far Vance’s big foreign policy accomplishments are lecturing Europeans to be nicer to the fascists in their midst, and serving as errand boy in negotiations with Iran that may yet come a cropper.

But the more significant thing at the moment is that Vance wants to be seen as the New Nixon, embracing the mantle of a man who might have done prison time had his successor not pardoned him in an act that probably cost Gerald Ford reelection in 1976. Perhaps this is Vance’s way of assuring MAGA folk that despite his time rubbing elbows with billionaires on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, and his charmed political life, he’s still a bad boy and a bad-ass at heart. The current veep has a ways to go in forming a clear persona for his presumed 2028 presidential bid. But he might well settle on depicting himself as a hillbilly who’s done good just like Dick Nixon, the classic middle-class striver who bested his snooty disparagers and obtained supreme power.

While it’s all well and good to analyze Democratic prospects for the 2026 midterms along conventional lines, it’s increasingly clear Donald Trump has unprecedented turbulence in his plans, as I explained at New York:

As the clock ticks down toward the midterm elections, Republicans are desperate for the Trump administration to focus on advancing an affordability agenda that might bring back some of the voters they’ve lost since the 2024 election. Sure, there’s the possibility of a housing bill finally being enacted, not that anyone believes it will have an immediate impact on the cost of shelter. And yes, the president’s Iran peace deal, if it sticks, will relieve upward pressure on energy prices, especially the gasoline prices politicians follow obsessively. But with all the chaos currently afflicting the GOP legislative and messaging machine, it’s likely too late for the party to put together a compelling argument that Trump is keeping the promises he made to bring back pre-pandemic prices and place a steady hand on the national tiller.

So, sooner rather than later, Republican candidates will have to give up their dream for a Trump pivot and accept whatever message the president is offering. And what might that be? Politico has an answer:

“President Donald Trump believes he handed Republicans a winning playbook for the midterms — if only they’d follow it.

“Gerrymander everywhere possible, get rid of the filibuster, fire the Senate parliamentarian and pass the SAVE America Act.”

This strategy reflects an understanding of the midterms as being strictly about which party controls the landscape, rather than what either is saying to persuadable voters. Democrats will try to rig the midterms, Trump believes (or claims to believe), by deploying many millions of illegal votes. So the way to beat them is to counter-rig the election while doing everything possible to suppress Democratic voting, which is to a significant extent “fraudulent.” It’s a straight-out power play, and Trump is furious that his troops care about stupid traditions like the filibuster or the Byrd Rule (the basis of the Senate parliamentarian’s objection to a party-line vote on the SAVE America Act), rather than crushing the opposition with an iron fist.

From Trump’s point of view, the only reason Republicans have any chance to maintain control of the U.S. House is the audacious gerrymandering campaign he initiated last summer. As he would put it, “Nobody’s seen anything like it.” Yes, he needed an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court, whose late-April Callais decision unlocked a whole new avenue for partisan gerrymanders in the South. And no, southern Republicans didn’t max out on their opportunities as Trump preferred (leaving majority-Black congressional districts in place, for now at least, in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina). But the unapologetic exercise of raw partisan power has served the GOP well, and Trump’s prescription is more of the same.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that John Thune surrenders to the constant pressure from the White House, or is overwhelmed by a Trump-inspired revolt from his own conference, and finds some way to pass the president’s “full version” of the SAVE America Act, which includes a ban on no-excuse voting by mail and some nasty transphobic provisions. The House, which in February passed an earlier version limited to proof-of-citizenship voter ID, would have to pass the full bill. If that really happened, and the legislation survived a blitz of legal challenges, its fruits would be the most chaotic run-up to a national election since the 19th century. Voter-registration systems would be turned upside down as the new and very onerous requirements were implemented. Millions upon millions of citizens might have their right to vote challenged as Republicans pursued voter-roll purges to get rid of “unqualified” election participants. The 37 states that currently have no-excuse voting by mail — including 13 of the largest 14 by population — would have to completely overhaul all of their election plans overnight. For the seven states where voting is virtually all done by mail, the switch would be catastrophic.

If the midterms are a game, tossing this toxic legislation into the mix at this late date is the equivalent of flipping the board.

If, alternatively, the SAVE America Act fails or is held up in the courts, Trump has a plan B: Run on it, and on the core MAGA proposition that the fiendish plot by Democrats to import criminals from around the world to vote illegally is a lot more urgent a problem than high living costs.

From the perspective of swing voters, particularly those who might have voted for Trump in 2024 because they were upset about inflation or thought Democrats weren’t governing very effectively under their octogenarian president, this pitch is questionable. It’s basically an effort to convince them that Trump has been right all along and that they should join the MAGA cause and come to rallies and hoot “USA! USA!” and learn to appreciate the golden age this president has given us. It’s a swing-voter message only Donald Trump could settle on, and its abiding advantage is that it will immensely please his confirmed MAGA base, promising no compromise with the hated foe and lots more of what he’s been offering since 2015.

Republican political professionals and candidates running in swing states or districts may not be jazzed about this approach, yet they have no choice but to get with the program. Nearly all of them have made a devil’s bargain to follow this man, and as he often reminds them, his coattails are responsible for the power they now hold. And if it doesn’t work in November, there’s always the kind of postelection overtime effort Trump showed himself willing to undertake in 2020 and 2021.

For a Juneteenth holiday during a particularly tough year for the rights of Black people, I offered this meditation at New York:

Juneteenth, the celebration of the good news in 1865 that the great abomination of slavery had ended, is a contradictory holiday. It’s joyful in that it commemorates the emancipation of millions of Americans from subhuman legal status. It is sorrowful in that its promise of full citizenship for Black people took so long to realize and still faces so many challenges.

It’s been this way since the original Juneteenth. No sooner had the battle cry of freedom fallen silent than the defeated rebel states devised new laws and customs to tie ex-slaves to the land and subject them to the whip of the overseer and the burning cross of the ex-Confederate terrorist. The Civil Rights Amendments to the Constitution, still controversial today, on paper gave ex-slaves citizenship rights. And Congressional Reconstruction placed the boots of Union soldiers on the necks of the ex-rebels so that Black people could vote and serve in public office. But, eventually, the white people of the North grew tired of Reconstruction and largely hostile to ex-slaves, who were often denied the right to vote in the North and South alike.

By 1877, many white people across the two regions had reconciled. They began framing the terrible war that had liberated the slaves as really a misunderstanding about states’ rights, which meant ex-slaves had no claim on the fruits of victory. With federal protection withdrawn along with sanctions against ex-Confederates, the southern states began to disenfranchise Black (and sometime poor white) voters and institutionalize strict racial segregation (as validated by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision). By 1910, the white-supremacist regime known as Jim Crow reigned in southern state constitutions and daily practice.

It would take more than half a century before Jim Crow began to collapse. It was an era of occasional advances and frequent reversals of rights and opportunities for Black Americans. For every positive step forward (the New Deal programs, the FDR and Truman equal-employment initiatives, the Supreme Court decisions outlawing segregated public schools, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 dismantling Jim Crow, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 reenfranchising Black southerners) there were stops and turns and reverses. And with every advance came a national white backlash, which eventually became a calling card for the party of Lincoln. Along with desegregation of schools came “anti-busing” measures and tax-supported “segregation academies.” Along with civil rights and voting rights came ghettoization, militarization of police forces as agents of racial control, mass incarceration, and constant racially fraught battles over government assistance to low-income people. Every token of respect Black people were able to secure was offered grudgingly, contingently, and often with plain bad faith whitewashed by bromides about a color-blind society.

By the time Juneteenth finally became a federal holiday in 2021, the long struggle for racial justice had become a topic of national conversation — but only for a moment. And now we are in the grip of the mother of all white political backlashes. The federal government that waged the Civil War, that freed the slaves (or helped them free themselves), that enacted the Civil Rights Amendments, that overcame the Ku Klux Klan, that slew Jim Crow, that restored the right to vote, is now controlled lock, stock, and barrel across all three branches by people who are working to undermine those achievements.

An institutional crown jewel of the civil-rights movement, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, is now devoted almost exclusively to the tasks of combating alleged anti-white discrimination and defending the right to discriminate against minority populations on religious grounds. The Congress that passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts is now focused on facilitating the mass deportation of non-native Americans, mostly nonwhite immigrants and refugees, and transferring resources as rapidly as possible from social programs sustaining the life and health of low-income people to the Pentagon and to wealthy individuals and corporations. The president who lives in the same residence as Abraham Lincoln now rages around the clock at “fraudsters” and “lowlifes” who are allegedly terrorizing our cities and robbing taxpayers, echoing racist demagoguery throughout the ages. And the same U.S. Supreme Court that handed down Brown v. Board of Education is now busy emptying the Voting Rights Act of its meaning and urging on efforts to return the South to one-party rule.

As with any great movement, the cause of racial justice will always have its good moments and bad, its days of triumph and of retreat. On this Juneteenth, it’s probably too much to ask that the people running the country — including the president, who is prone to complain that people should not get a day off from work for a holiday commemorating the end of involuntary servitude — share the aspirations of a civil-rights movement they clearly loathe. But at the absolute least, they can give it a rest. Let’s have a day without fresh insults to Black people; a day without a gerrymander, an attack on DEI, a subversion of public schools, a whine about “welfare,” a paean to white nationalism, a call for police or military crackdowns on urban citizens, a celebration of the European peoples “who built this country.” Let the celebrants of Juneteenth take a day to appreciate their accomplishments and their dreams for a better future.

With all the terrible things happening thanks to the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, it’s good to see at least one southern state hesitating before wiping out majority-Black districts, as I noted at New York:

When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark Louisiana v. Callais decision in late April, it looked like southern Republicans might engage in an immediate and unprecedented frenzy of judicially sanctioned partisan and racial gerrymandering. The Court’s six-justice conservative majority swept away long-standing Voting Rights Act limitations on drawing blatantly partisan congressional and state legislative maps in ways that decimated majority-Black districts and Black representation generally. Egged on by the Trump administration and frantic to mitigate likely midterm losses, GOP governors and legislators (who have trifecta control of most of the states of the former Confederacy) quickly jumped on gerrymandering opportunities. Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee each hastily redrew congressional maps to extinguish a preexisting majority-Black district, effective immediately. Florida used Callais as a legal justification for a major partisan gerrymander it was already planning.

The timing of the decision, however, meant the worst didn’t happen right away to Black representation. Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina all decided it was too late in the election year to redraw districts for use in 2026. But all three states looked likely to go back to the till before the 2028 elections to flip some more districts from majority-Black and Democratic to mostly white and Republican. And in Georgia, the state with the largest Black congressional delegation, Republican governor Brian Kemp signaled he would add pre-2028 redistricting to the agenda of a June 17 special session that he had already called to make an essential change to the state’s ballot design. Initial reports were that Georgia Republicans would defenestrate two Black members of Congress (Sanford Bishop and, probably, Lucy McBath) and perhaps undermine others.

But then … they hit the pause button, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported:

“Georgia Republican leaders won’t redraw the state’s political maps during a special legislative session that starts Wednesday, retreating from a proposal that had threatened to ignite one of the state’s most explosive political fights ahead of the November election.

“The decision comes after weeks of mounting pressure from Democrats, voting rights groups and even some uneasy Republicans who warned that reopening redistricting could energize Democratic voters and overshadow a pivotal stretch of the campaign season.”

The (at least temporary) abandonment of the gerrymandering plan came the day after GOP runoff elections that set up competitive general elections for governor and U.S. senator. And coincidentally or not, the two biggest losers in those runoffs were Governor Brian Kemp (whose endorsed candidates for both offices lost) and the presiding officer of the Senate, Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones (who lost his own bid to succeed Kemp). Kemp and Jones may not have been in the mood for a big and controversial power move right after having their butts handed to them by voters. It’s hard to say. The original impetus behind drawing 2028 maps in 2026 was the fear that Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms might win the governorship in November, bust up the GOP trifecta, and thwart any gerrymandering plans. Now Bottoms is facing billionaire Rick Jackson in the general election. If he wins, GOP rule is safe for at least two years (Democrats aren’t currently in striking distance of control of the legislature). And even if Bottoms wins, Republicans could call a lame-duck session late this year and ram through a gerrymander before the new governor is sworn in.

But no matter what happens down the road, it appears Georgia Republicans currently fear the voters they’d love to (at least partially) disenfranchise. So, perhaps, did the Republicans of Alabama and Louisiana, who could have chosen to extinguish two majority-Black districts instead of just one. Despite the swaggering talk MAGA folk were encouraging in the immediate aftermath of Callais, there is an emerging sense of realization among southern Republicans that they might overplay their hands and invite an angry-voter mobilization drive the likes of which no one has seen since the original voting-rights push of the 1960s. For all the terrible news inaugurated by Callais, this is an encouraging development.

Texas Republican Ken Paxton has often worn the black hat in his scandal-plagued extremist political career. But as I explained at New York, he may have picked the wrong cause at the worst possible time.

As any college-football fan can tell you, the sport is in the midst of all sorts of revolutionary changes. Federal courts have steadily eroded the old system treating college athletes as amateurs bound to one school and governed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Players in all the major college sports are being openly paid (some of them so much that they are delaying entry into the professional leagues) and have won virtually unlimited transfer rights. Football, by far the biggest revenue generator for college athletics, is now governed less by the NCAA than by teams and the sprawling conferences to which they belong and the media networks paying for the whole show.

But in this time of college-football iconoclasm, there are a few things still considered holy. Chief among them are norms deemed essential to “the integrity of the game,” which is code for the fair competition between teams that is supposed to go on no matter how much off-field chaos surrounds it. And that’s why, for all the mockery the NCAA draws these days as a toothless tiger in a dangerous jungle, people in the sport totally lined up behind its decision to ban participation in the 2026 season by Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby, who got caught doing some pretty heavy sports gambling, including the biggest no-no of all: gambling on his own team’s games (actually a couple of transfers earlier, when Sorsby was at Indiana). There was a general sense that if the NCAA couldn’t enforce that norm, the sport would collapse from a general loss of faith in the central myth of young athletes giving their very best in fair competition.

And so when a state judge in Texas intervened to slap a temporary injunction on NCAA sanctions against Sorsby, which effectively guaranteed he’d get to play for Texas Tech in 2026 while his case was litigated (earning, according to most reports, several million dollars), the reaction was intense, as ESPN reported:

“The reaction around college sports was nearly unanimous, with the idea of Sorsby playing in 2026 after admitting to thousands of bets on sports — including 40 on his own team — representing the latest crossroads for an industry that has faced a dizzying number of them in recent years.

“ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told ESPN the ruling represents a ‘horrendous pattern’ that is ‘eroding the integrity of our process.’ A Big 12 athletic director told ESPN that they are ‘disgusted’ and added: ‘We officially lost our soul.’ TCU coach Sonny Dykes told ESPN: ‘How is anyone ever going to trust the outcome of a game again?’”

Texas Tech, expected to be a National Championship contender this year (in no small part because of heavy spending on players financed by billionaire donor Cody Campbell), chose to play the outlaw in the unfolding drama. The school argued that Sorsby was an addict undergoing treatment for his gambling habit and pointed out that he had never, so far as anyone knew, gambled on a game in which he was playing. It also offered to bench him for two early games as a slap on the wrist.

As Texas Tech’s own Big 12 conference discussed sanctions on the player and the program, the school suddenly drew one ferocious ally: Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who is also the Republican nominee in a red-hot U.S. Senate race. Paxton jumped into the fray with spurs flashing, as Bloomberg Law explains:

“The Big 12 Conference and its schools were threatened with $200 million in damages by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) if they move to sanction Texas Tech over the participation of star quarterback Brendan Sorsby this season.

“Any sanction against Texas Tech for acting consistent with a court’s injunction that reinstated Sorsby’s eligibility on June 8 would violate state and federal antitrust laws, Paxton said in a letter to Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark and board of directors chair Douglas Girod.

“Additionally, any sanction that results in a change to Texas Tech’s scheduled games through cancellations would constitute a breach of the Big 12’s contract with the school, Paxton said. Such an action could also unlawfully interfere with the school’s sponsorship arrangements, ticket sale commitments, alumni contributions, and other commercial relationships, the letter said.”

You can argue that Paxton felt some responsibility to defend a Texas judge’s order against out-of-state interlopers. But still, he could have easily stayed out of it until some actual sanction was imposed instead of threatening Tech’s critics preemptively.

Legal arguments aside, the political risk looks formidable. Sure, the Red Raider fan base (which probably overlaps with Paxton’s ultra-MAGA following to some extent) will be thrilled. But as FootballScoop observed, some of the Big 12 programs Paxton is threatening are also located in the very football-mad state: “Tech now has the state’s chief law enforcement officer on its side in [its] presumptive fight; one must wonder how that’s going over on the campuses of Baylor, Houston and TCU, whom Paxton also represents.”

You also have to wonder if Paxton is troubled by the borderline-woke arguments Texas Tech is making about Sorsby needing to be left alone with his millions so that he can get along with his gambling-addiction treatment.

All in all, it’s quite the gamble Paxton is taking at a time when he’s in a very tough contest with squeaky-clean Democrat James Talarico. Maybe the scandal-plagued Paxton is happy to wear the black hat consistently as the scourge of hypocritical rules-observing elites in politics and now sports. Perhaps he expects a very nice thank-you check to his cash-strapped campaign from Cody Campbell, a heavy contributor to other Texas Republicans. But as the Sorsby saga unfolds in the fall not long before Election Day, he may discover he’s bet on the wrong bettor.