From the AP’s “Senate for first time approves a war powers resolution in a rebuke to Trump over Iran conflict” by Lisa Mascaro:

The Senate for the first time approved a war powers resolution Tuesday seeking to block U.S. military action against Iran, as lawmakers warily watch President Donald Trump’s efforts to resolve a conflict that the administration launched on its own and now needs Congress to fund.

It was the 10th time the Senate has tried to stop the war, and the outcome, on a vote of 50-48, was a stunning turnaround from past efforts. While the resolution is largely symbolic, and does not carry the full force of law, it reflects the growing concerns from a number of Republican lawmakers in both the House and Senate over both the war and the deal Trump struck with Iran to end it. The House approved the resolutionearlier this month.

“Time after time, the vast majority of Senate Republicans sided with Trump and his war instead of the American people,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

Schumer said Americans have paid the price for “Trump’s historic blunder in Iran. It’ll go down in the history books as one of the worst foreign policy forays America has ever made.”

In the past, as many as four GOP senators have voted for the war powers resolutions, and they did so Tuesday — Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. One Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted against.

More here.

The Hill, via Yahoo, has the “No Shit, Sherlock” headline of the week in “Former Trump Defense secretary: ‘I don’t see that the president is always getting good advice’,” an article by Tara Suter. Here’s some more of it:

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Sunday said he doesn’t think “that the president is always getting good advice” from his advisers.

“Do you trust that the president is being given advice by people who think their loyalty is to the Constitution?” NBC News’s Garrett Haake asked Esper — who served in President Trump’s first term — during Esper’s appearance on “Meet the Press.”

“I don’t see that the president is always getting good advice, and so I think that’s the question to ask. I think Republicans on Capitol Hill have asked that same question, ‘Is the president getting the best advice with regard to these strategic matters?'” Esper responded.

Ya think? The way things tend to go in the current White House, the Prez will probably double down on whatever his dim bulb advisors tell him to do, rather than surround himself with some really smart thinkers, like the successful presidents have done. The article continues:

A number of Republicans in Washington have expressed concern and frustration with some of Trump’s actions in recent weeks, particularly in Iran. Some Senate Republicans are “somber” and in “dismay” about the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran, which was finalized earlier this week.

Esper on Sunday said he some “serious questions” about the deal, which seeks to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

“I like the fact that we’ve extended the ceasefire. I like the fact that the strait is being opened up, that will provide economic relief to a lot of people, and I like the fact that we’re getting into nuclear talks,” he said. “But that said, when I look at the MOU there are many of the points that I have serious questions about and concerns about.”

Serious questions indeed. You can read more here.

Heather Digby Parton reports that “Trump’s “white working class” base may finally have had enough” at Salon. An excerpt:

The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found that Trump’s approval rating among his base rural voters is now at 50%, down from 60% in February, with a disapproval rating of 48%, up from 34%. That voting bloc that went for Trump by 40 points in the 2024 election, but are now feeling the pinch of tariffs, high gas prices and the soaring cost of living in general. They’re not too happy about the Iran war either, whether there’s a “deal” or not.

A new Fox News poll has similar findings. Trump’s approval rating among his white rural base is now all the way down to 44%, a startling 33 points lower than at the beginning of his term. Only 16% of respondents said their financial situation had improved in the last two years, while 49% said they are worse off. Almost two-thirds of those polled, or 64%, said the cost of living is the most important economic problem they face, and fewer than one-third (30%) said they thought Trump was handling the issue. And there wasn’t much faith that he’s likely to make things better: While 49% said Trump’s policies will hurt the country in the long run, only 39% said they were more likely to help. Maybe these folks should have paid more attention when he fatuously declared that he could solve all problems with tariffs and we’d see “growth” on the first day.

This discontent isn’t found solely among rural voters. Trump is in trouble with blue-collar workers across the board. A New York Times analysis by Shane Goldmacher showed “an extraordinary swing … among white voters without college degrees between his first midterm election and now.” Back then, “working-class white voters approved of his management of the economy by margins of 30 percentage points or even more. Now, recent polls show them disapproving by anywhere from 14 to more than 30 points.” He cites Trump’s downward-trending approval ratings among that demographic across a range of media polls, including Fox News (33% approval), CBS News (39%), NPR/PBS/Marist (40%), CNN (43%) and The New York Times/Siena College (47%).

More here.

From “These are the Voters Who Can Keep Democrats From Going Off the Rails” by Will Marshall and Richard D. Kahlenberg at progressive policy.org:

Posing questions about the changing racial and ideological shifts within the Democratic coalition to Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, is like throwing meat to a hungry lion.

Kahlenberg immediately replied by email citing four major issues on which “Black voters have indeed become a moderating force compared with white liberals:”

Crime: A 2024 American Enterprise Institute survey found that nonwhite working-class voters opposed reducing police budgets by a 30-point margin, while white liberal college graduates favored reducing police budgets by a 20-point margin.

Elections and socialism: In the 2020 Democratic primary in South Carolina, Black Americans famously supported Joe Biden over socialist Bernie Sanders. In 2025, New York City’s Black voters supported Andrew Cuomo over socialist Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary. And in the 2026 Democratic primary for mayor in D.C., socialist candidate Janeese Lewis George leads among white voters by 25 points, while the mainstream Democrat Kenyan R. McDuffie leads among Black voters by five points.

Patriotism: Some 62 percent of Asian Americans, 70 percent of Black Americans and 76 percent of Hispanic Americans said they were “proud to be an American,” compared with just 34 percent of progressive activists.

Racial preferences: When asked if Black people should work their way up “without special favors,” white liberals were about 12 points less likely to agree than Black voters.

The pro-affirmative action stance among many white liberals, in contrast to the moderate positions of Black Democrats, is striking, as Kahlenberg pointed out:

The insistence of white liberals on racial preferences has a very negative effect on Democrats. In a recent study, the political scientists David Broockman of U.C. Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale tested potential policy shifts in 29 different issue areas — including immigration, transgender athletes in women’s sports, and Israel and Gaza — in an attempt to discern what might make skeptical voters consider choosing Democratic candidates.

They found that moving to the center on racial preferences in college admissions was the most electorally fruitful move Democrats could make and that doing so on racial preferences in government contracting was the second most important.

More here.

The following article stub  from “The Long, Slow Death of Social Democracy – Reconnecting with voters is going to be extremely difficult for the Brahmin Left” by Ruy Teixeira, author of major works of political analysis and non-resident senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, is cross-posted from Commonplace:

For three decades, social democracy was the most successful product of a working-class movement that had long contained both revolutionary and reformist elements. Between 1946 and 1973, United States GDP grew by 3.8% annually, and by 2.4% on a per-capita basis. Unemployment averaged 4.8%, and real median family incomes rose at a rate of 2.8% per year, more than doubling over the time period. What’s more, this growth was stronger at the bottom and relatively weaker at the top, meaning income inequality fell substantially.

The Keynesian economic consensus in Western industrial democracies during this period produced strong economic growth, low unemployment, rapidly rising living standards, and government action to provide protection and security for the average citizen.

Reflecting these positive developments, the social democratic-oriented Democratic Party received high levels of electoral support. In the six elections between 1932 and 1948, Democratic presidential support averaged 55%. After the liberal Republican Dwight Eisenhower won two terms in the 1950s, the Democrats again averaged 55% presidential support in 1960 and 1964. And during almost all of this period, the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.

But as the 1970s dawned, three factors converged and reinforced one another to undermine social democracy—and eventually lead to its death. First, the social democratic economic model lost effectiveness; second, the social democratic base got smaller; and third, the social democratic influence within the Left weakened.

Let’s start with the economic model. With the end of the post-war Bretton Woods system and the OPEC oil price shock of 1973, inflationary pressures that had been building up inside the U.S. and other advanced countries could no longer be contained, producing high inflation rates and high unemployment, or “stagflation.” Social democrats failed to develop an alternative to or extension of the postwar Keynesian system, leading to the end of the Keynesian consensus.

More here.

From “How to Get a Labor Rights Bill Through a GOP House. How scared are the Republicans of the lower chamber? They’re starting to support unions.” by Timothy Noah at The New Republic:

In Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, the epigram-spouting Lady Bracknell is told by Jack Worthing, her daughter’s suitor, that he’s lost both his parents. To this, the lady replies imperiously: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” I thought of Lady Bracknell this week on learning that Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has now let not one but two pro-union bills tiptoe past him to win a House floor vote. Even in a Democratic House, passage within a six-month period of two measures to expand labor rights would be a rarity.

I’d begun to wonder when we’d see a third when I learned that the House Armed Services Committee last week adopted an amendment to this year’s defense authorization bill restoring collective-bargaining rights for civilian workers in the Defense Department, and that the same language last year cleared the House as part of that year’s defense authorization billbefore the Senate stripped it out in House-Senate conference prior to final passage. Clearly the legislative politics surrounding labor rights are shifting in labor’s favor.

Having said that, I advise you not to get too excited. The first of these labor bills, introduced by Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, would restore collective-bargaining rights to all federal workers; like the defense authorization amendment, the Protect America’s Workforce Act would reverse a couple of union-busting executive orders (here and here) from President Donald Trump. But after clearing the House in December, 231–195, it’s going nowhere in the Republican Senate. The second labor bill (text; summary) was introduced by Representative Donald Norcross, Democrat of New Jersey (who also sponsored the defense authorization amendment). The Faster Labor Contracts Act would make it easier for newly established union locals to win their first contract. But after passing the House on June 9, 230–193, Norcross’s bill faces similarly dismal odds in the Republican Senate.

Even if the Senate managed to pass one or both bills, it wouldn’t matter, because the dependably anti-labor Trump (who, bafflingly, increased his share of the working-class vote from 51 percent in 2016 to 56 percent in 2024) would veto it. Norcross’s defense authorization amendment, if it clears the House again, will attract less notice, and Trump might not bother to veto an entire Defense bill over a labor provision. But my guess is he won’t have to, because the Senate will likely strip it out again before it gets to his desk.

More here.

From “ Graham Platner shrugs off scandals to win Maine Democratic Senate primary” by David Smith at The Guardian:

Graham Platner, a Marine veteran, oyster farmer and progressive activist, has scaled a mountain of personal controversies to win the Democratic nomination for the US Senate in Maine.

Platner won 72% of the vote, defeating the state governor, Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April but remained on the ballot, and third-placed David Costello, based on early results reported by Reuters.

His victory on Tuesday caps a remarkable rise for a candidate who has never held elected office and whose campaign was shadowed by negative headlines that might have ended a more conventional political career.

Instead, in a result that would have seemed improbable only a year ago, Platner emerged battered but unbroken, convincing Democratic voters that his flaws were forgivable or unimportant in a year dominated by economic anxiety and anger at Donald Trump.

“If you believe, as I do, that we can change our politics and our country then you must also believe that people can change,” Platner, 41, told supporters in Blue Hill. “And the reason I believe is that is because I have lived it. And the reason I have lived it is because of my wife.”

The outcome sets up one of the most closely watched contests of the 2026 midterm elections. Platner will face the senator Susan Collins, a Republican running for a sixth six-year term, in November. The race is seen as a must-win for Democrats to take control of the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 majority.

Platner said: “The truth is, Susan Collins doesn’t serve us. She serves Donald Trump. She serves the Epstein class. She serves her corporate donors in the corrupt political system that has rigged the economy against us. She does not serve us and so we will defeat Susan Collins.” There were cries of “Yes!” from his supporters.

The primary-night watch party was held in a YMCA gym. A blue banner with a US flag, Maine state flag and the slogan “Graham Platner for US Senate” was erected behind a stage against a blue curtain backdrop. Guests were invited to hold signs that included “Families for Graham”, “Farmers and Fishers for Graham” and “Labor for Graham”.

…Platner responded with a mixture of contrition and defiance, openly discussing what he described as a troubled period marked by untreated PTSD and alcohol abuse after his military service. Voters who might once have recoiled from such disclosures instead appeared willing to view them as evidence of personal redemption.

…In a nod to his troubled past, Platner said: “Redemption is not just some simple or easy destination; it’s a journey. I’ve made mistakes in my life, mistakes I regret, that I live with, that I continue to learn from. I’m still far from perfect. But every day I wake up and I try to be a little bit better and a little kinder than I was the day before. And if you give me the chance, I will be a senator for the people who cannot afford to buy a senator.”

More here.

Some excerpts from Daniel Drake’s interview of Democratic strategist Joseph O’Neill in the current issue of the New York Review:

…This month I wrote to Joseph O’Neill—for the fourth entry of an ongoing conversation about what can be done to stop the devastations wrought by the president—to ask about the threats to the midterm elections and what he would do if he were Chuck Schumer.

…In our last conversation, you articulated a distinction between two kinds of politics (or, more broadly, two kinds of power): “technical politics,” which you defined as “electoral politics centered on the economy, jobs, health care, immigration, crime, and ‘affordability,’” and “the politics of raw power,” which is the effort to tactically advance your party’s political power and agenda at the expense of the other party’s. In the intervening four months, we have seen extraordinary gambits of “raw power” from the Republican Party and its deranged executive: starting a war without congressional authorization or even consultation, gerrymandering the electoral system to shreds, pursuing aggressive ICE and deportation operations despite majority opposition, gutting the US Forest Service, etc. These are, broadly, unpopular actions that weaken the public sector and help concentrate power under the president. What methods of raw power are available to the Democrats or to Americans, regardless of party, who want to stop the Republicans’ relentless drive toward domination and violence?

We’re in a deep political hole. The Republican Party is attacking and injuring the United States with malevolent kleptocratic determination. Technically, the courts have the power to stop or slow this down. Their technical power, however, is hardly designed to withstand the blitzkrieg you’ve described, which is supercharged by a corrupt Supreme Court exerting its own raw power to a historic degree. Deploying its self-created political tool, the shadow docket, and inventing facts and judicial principles, it has done its utmost to nullify the Voting Rights Act and to empower the Republican Party’s attempt to achieve something akin to one-party, one-race rule in red states. There is no recourse to the Department of Justice, itself transformed into an instrument of executive criminality in the realm of “homeland security,” certainly, but also in matters of antitrust, abuse of power, and profiteering from office. To take an absurdly brazen example, the Republican president has laid claim to $1.776 billion in a sham settlement with the IRS for nonexistent losses caused by a nonexistent tort.

So raw power has become very important. Raw power is somewhat indefinite, and it’s not only political parties who possess it. The putative fourth estate, wealthy autonomous institutions (corporations, universities, etc.), oligarchs, the citizenry—all can influence the distribution and effect of power in the US between elections. In very difficult circumstances, ordinary Americans have played their part admirably. The anti-ICE/CBP protests in Minnesota were extraordinarily brave and in many ways successful. The ActBlue coalition, with very little help from the national Democratic Party, has continued to organize, agitate, protest, and fundraise—and vote in great numbers in special elections. AIPAC’s decline as a corrupting influence on D.C. Democrats is largely down to pressure from the grassroots, as was the government shutdown over funding of the Department of Homeland Security (which, when it ended after more than ten weeks, was the longest shutdown in US history).

But it is in the nature of deep holes that they’re hard to dig out of, and for now there’s not much more that citizens can do about it except to keep pressuring Democrats to do the right thing. Things should improve in November, after the midterm elections, when Democrats will almost certainly capture the House (even allowing for the current spasm of gerrymandering) and quite possibly the Senate. We have a battle-hardened party base that knows how to donate and knows how to vote. The big question is whether the elections will go ahead normally.

…There is a real risk—in my view, a probability—that the Republicans will try to undermine the midterm elections to prevent Democrats from taking control of Congress. It’s impossible to predict the exact form of the coup, but one can foresee a presidential declaration of a national emergency (based on bogus claims of election fraud or foreign interference); an illegal executive order commanding state authorities to suspend elections; and compliance with the illegal order by corrupt red-state authorities. All of this against the possible background of riots in the summer provoked by ICE and pro-GOP propaganda obscuring and normalizing the end of US democracy. In that kind of scenario, most judges would most likely order state authorities to proceed with the elections and/or to respect their results, but there are no guarantees. You’d be left with a showdown—a decisive contest between Republican and Democratic raw power. How that would turn out is anyone’s guess. On the one hand, coups are hard to pull off. On the other hand, we saw what happened in Bush v. Gore. In the end, a lot will depend on Democratic Party leaders being willing and able to act with adversarial intent and imagination.

…If, somehow, the Democrats are successfully induced to act, what options are available to them while they remain the minority party?

While their technical power (on things like committees and votes) may be formally limited, there’s a lot that Democrats can and must do now to penalize, exploit, and disincentivize Republican misdeeds and the people who enable them. By adopting an agenda of principled opposition to the forces of the far right—forces that are as corporate and oligarchical and technological as they are political—Democrats would perhaps start gain the trust of younger voters. This sort of prescription only works if Democrats finally treat the Republican Party as the Republicans treat the Democratic Party: not as a partner in “bipartisanship” but as an adversary—an adversary, in the case of the GOP, that will not respect the rules of democracy unless it is forced to by political defeat. Incredible as it may seem, it remains a huge problem that many senior Democrats are intensely reluctant to face this truth.

But in any case: what follows a noncomprehensive list I’ve devised of some concrete actions Democrats could take immediately. No doubt others will have further, better ideas.

More here.

Will Democrats take the Senate majority win November? That’s the big political question right now, and it makes sense to check in with one of the top analysts to see what he is thinking in his latest post, “The Races That Made the Senate Majority: A Three-Cycle Story” at The Center for Politics. As Kyle Kondik writes:

Because of the cyclical nature of the Senate, in which only a third or so of the body is contested every two years, it can be hard to get a handle on the races that truly “decided” the majority.

This is easier in the House, because all of the seats are on the ballot every two years, so one can just look at the closest races and determine how close (or not close) the minority party was from winning the majority. In 2024, Republicans won a 220-215 majority, and that included winning three races decided by about a point or less. Had those races gone the other way, Democrats would have won the majority. But Democrats actually did better in the closest races, winning four of the five races decided by less than 0.7 points. So it would not have taken much for Republicans to have won a bigger majority.

The Senate, ultimately, is similar: Had a few close-ish races gone differently over the last three election cycles, Democrats could conceivably hold the majority. However, Democrats have also been likelier to win the nailbiters than Republicans have, so one could also say that the GOP majority could be bigger than it is now.

This makes sense given the overall structure of the Senate. As we’ve discussed previously, 2024 represented a turning point in the Senate, as Republicans eliminated Democratic Senate representation from red states: Republicans now hold all 50 Senate seats in the 25 states Donald Trump won all three times he was on the ballot. Democrats hold 37 of the 38 in the 19 states that never voted for Trump: The lone exception is Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who has trailed leading opponent Graham Platner (D), although negative stories about the newcomer Platner mount. And Democrats hold 10 of the 12 seats in the six states that voted at least once for each party in the last three presidential elections (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin).

Map 1 shows the current Senate breakdown. The bottom line is that there are just more red states than blue states, giving the Senate map an overall GOP skew even as Democrats have done well in the true battlegrounds.

What follows is a look at the 100 Senate seats, categorized by how each voted in its most recent election, either in 2020, 2022, or 2024. Some of these seats were on the ballot more than once over the last three cycles: For instance, Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Raphael Warnock (D-GA) won special elections in the 2020 cycle and then regular elections in 2022, and both did better the second time than the first time (we used those more recent regular results in this analysis). If there was a runoff, as there was in both of Warnock’s victories, we used the runoff results.

More here.

At Semafor, Nicholas Wu reports that “Emanuel dings Democrats for missing corruption messaging ‘gem,’” and writes:

For Rahm Emanuel, it’s more than the economy, stupid.

The likely 2028 presidential candidate, who served as House Democratic campaigns chief during the party’s successful 2006 midterms, told Semafor that Democrats should sharpen their arguments about President Donald Trump’s self-dealing while in office — by hitching them to affordability-focused messaging.

“This is a gem sitting there. I think the Democrats … have been episodic in touching it, rather than front and center,” Emanuel said. “Corruption as part of the affordability narrative is more chess, where affordability alone is more checkers.”

Many Democratic candidates have homed in on inflation and affordability-focused messaging this cycle, especially after some in the party chalked up their 2024 losses to voters punishing them for the post-pandemic spike in inflation.

With polling generally showing cost-of-living issues rank among voters’ top concerns, Democrats are confident they can turn this fall’s midterm elections into a referendum on Trump and Republicans’ handling of the economy.

Top Hill Democrats contend that they’re already pairing the arguments together. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has targeted Trump’s $1.8 billion fund of taxpayer money for people allegedly victimized by the government and has singled out purple-district Republicans like Reps. Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania and Mike Lawler of New York for alleged ethical issues.

“Vulnerable Republicans have destroyed the economy and raised costs on almost everyone, all while self-dealing and lining their own pockets,” said DCCC spokesperson Viet Shelton. “Republicans will lose the House majority, because the DCCC and House Democrats are exposing their shameless corruption and failure to deliver on their central campaign promise to lower the high cost of living.”

More here.