Not that long ago it looked like Republicans might hold onto their trifecta next year by rigging U.S. House maps. Not so much any more, as I explained at New York:

At some point earlier this year, Donald Trump took a look at his shaky political standing and decided two things. First, he really wanted to hold on to the trifecta control of the federal government that made all his 2025 power grabs possible. And second, he recognized that keeping control of the U.S. House during the 2026 midterms would probably require a big thumb on the scales, which he could most easily achieve by quite literally changing the landscape. He went public in July with a national effort to get red states to remap their congressional districts immediately so that the GOP would go into the midterms with a cushion larger than the likely Democratic gains. And it all began with a blunt demand that Texas give the GOP four or five new seats in a special session that was originally supposed to focus on flood recovery.

Texas complied, and other red states followed suit, even as Democrats — most notably in California — retaliated the best they could with their own gerrymanders. But now, the original map-rigging in Texas has just been canceled (subject to U.S. Supreme Court review) thanks to the ham-handed incompetence of the Trump administration, as Democracy Docket explains:

“A federal court Tuesday delivered a devastating blow to Texas Republicans’ attempt at a mid-decade gerrymander. And the court found that a July letter sent by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — intended to justify the GOP’s aggressive redraw — effectively handed voting rights advocates a smoking gun proving it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. …

“Unless the U.S. Supreme Court reverses it — Texas has already said it will appeal — the state must use its 2021 congressional map for the 2026 elections, killing what had been the GOP’s biggest planned redistricting gain of the decade.”

The blow to Trump’s plans came from two federal district-court judges (one of whom is a Trump appointee) who were part of a three-judge panel. Their order made it clear that DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, under the direction of Trump appointee and longtime Republican operative Harmeet Dhillon, stupidly insisted on making its instructions to Texas Republicans revolve around the racial makeup of the desired new districts, which is a big constitutional no-no:

“’It’s challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors,’ the judges wrote. ‘Indeed, even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General — who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration — describe the DOJ Letter as ‘legally unsound,” “baseless,” “erroneous,” “ham-fisted,” and “a mess.”‘

“The judges noted that while Texas insisted the 2025 map was drawn for partisan reasons, the DOJ letter made no such claim and framed its demands entirely around race.

“That omission was pivotal.”

The grand irony is that this same DOJ Civil Rights Division subsequently sued California to invalidate that state’s voter-approved gerrymander on grounds that the legislators who drew the map had taken race into account in designing the new districts.

Trump’s whole map-rigging exercise seems to be unraveling all over the country. On the very same day as the Texas ruling, Indiana’s Republican-controlled state Senate killed a special session that Trump, J.D. Vance, U.S. senator Jim Banks, and Governor Mike Braun had all demanded in order to wipe out two Democratic U.S. House districts. Kansas Republicans have similarly balked at Trump’s orders to kill a Democratic district. Voters in Missouri seem poised to cancel that state’s recent gerrymander designed to eliminate a Democratic seat in a ballot initiative. Fearing litigation, Ohio Republicans cut a deal with Democrats to make two Democratic-controlled House districts a bit redder instead of flipping them altogether. And on November 4, voters in Virginia solidified Democratic control of that state’s legislature and elected a new Democratic governor, which greatly facilitated plans to remap that state’s congressional districts to flip as many as three GOP seats.

Republicans could still gain seats in Florida, and a U.S. Supreme Court review of the Voting Rights Act could create all sorts of chaos. But Trump’s gerrymandering crusade will soon hit the wall of 2026 candidate filing deadlines. As Punchbowl News observes, his party could actually lose ground overall: “It’s not impossible to imagine that [Democrats] end up netting more seats than the GOP in these mid-decade redraws, a stunning change of circumstances that didn’t seem possible only a few months ago.”

Trump opened a Pandora’s box in Texas, and he and his party — not to mention his bumbling and heavily politicized legal beagles — are now dealing with the consequences.

Without knowing what horrors may lie in the Epstein Files, you can pretty clearly see it’s dividing Trump from elements of his MAGA base, as I explained at New York:

November 12 was a very busy day in the White House as Donald Trump’s congressional allies worked overtime to end the longest government shutdown in history. But it does not appear the president was spending any time burning up the phone lines to Congress to ensure the reopening of the government. Instead, he was worried about something unrelated: trying to talk House Republicans into removing their signatures from a discharge petition forcing a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a mostly Democratic-backed bill to make the Justice Department disgorge all its material on the late sex predator and his associations.

Trump spoke with one signatory, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who also met with Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel on the subject in the White House. She did not change her mind. Trump also tried to reach another, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who sent the president a message explaining why she, too, would turn down his blandishments, as the New York Times reported: “Ms. Mace, who is running for governor, wrote Mr. Trump a long explanation of her own history of sexual abuse and rape, and why it was impossible for her to change positions, according to a person familiar with her actions.”

And so from the White House’s point of view, the worst-case scenario happened despite Trump’s personal lobbying. When recently elected Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn in after a long and very suspicious delay, she quickly became the 218th signature on the discharge petition, and House Speaker Mike Johnson duly announced the chamber would vote on the Epstein Files bill next week.

This is really odd for multiple reasons.

First of all, one of the most important political stories of 2025 has been the abject subservience of congressional Republicans to Donald Trump. They’ve rubber-stamped nearly all of his appointees, even some they probably privately considered unqualified; devoted much of the year to developing and enacting a budget reconciliation bill that they officially labeled the “One Big Beautiful Act” to reflect Trump’s distinctive branding; stood by quietly as he and his underlings (at first DOGE honcho Elon Musk and then OMB director Russ Vought) obliterated congressional prerogatives in naked executive-branch power grabs; and regularly sang hymns of praise to the all-powerful leader. But the Epstein-files issue appears to be different. Politico reports that House Republicans expect “mass defections” on the bill forcing disclosure now that a vote cannot be avoided. That’s amazing in view of Trump’s oft-repeated claim that any Republicans interested in the Epstein-files “hoax” are “stupid,” or as he has most recently called them, “soft and weak.”

Second of all, Boebert and Mace are Trump loyalists of the highest order. Boebert always has been a MAGA stalwart. And after some earlier rifts with Trump, Mace has become a huge cheerleader for him, backing him over Nikki Haley in 2024 and receiving his endorsement for her own tough primary contest last year. Mace desperately needs and wants his endorsement in a multicandidate gubernatorial primary next year. That she spurned his request to back off the Epstein Files discharge petition speaks volumes about how important it is to her to maintain solidarity with Epstein’s victims right now. That seems to be the primary motive for Boebert as well, as the Times noted a couple of months ago:

“Ms. Boebert, who grew up moving around the country and living with different men her mother was dating, has been less vocal [than Mace] about her own experiences. But she has also alluded to abuse and trauma. In her memoir, Ms. Boebert wrote that one of the men she lived with for a time in Colorado when she was young was verbally and physically abusive to her mother.

“During her divorce last year, Ms. Boebert was also granted a temporary restraining order against her ex-husband, Jayson Boebert, after she said he was threatening to harm her and enter the family’s home without permission.”

Third of all, it’s important to remember that Epstein in particular, and the idea of a cabal of elite sex traffickers in general, are highly resonant topics for elements of the MAGA base. Boebert and a third Republican signatory of the Epstein-files discharge petition, Marjorie Taylor Greene, first came to Congress closely identified with the supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, in which Epstein and his global-elite friends are key figures. Indeed, as my colleague Charlotte Klein observed this summer, discussion of the Epstein files has for years served as a routine conservative dog whistle to QAnon folk:

“‘All of this gives more mainstream right-wing figures an opportunity to take advantage of some of that QAnon energy: They can use Epstein’s story as a way to nod to the QAnon theories of widespread Democratic child-sex trafficking and to bolster their own audiences,’ said Matthew Gertz of Media Matters. ‘You can run segments on it on Fox News in a way that you just can’t about QAnon, and so that makes it a much broader right-wing story.’”

Trump himself has often fed this particular beast, as Karen Tumulty reminds us in arguing that this is a “wedge issue” dividing the president from his otherwise adoring followers:

“Trump was stoking conspiracy theories about Epstein at least as far back as the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2015. Asked for his opinion of Bill Clinton, Trump replied, ‘Nice guy.’ Then he added: ‘Got a lot of problems coming up in my opinion with the famous island. With Jeffrey Epstein.’”

Interestingly enough, the president now seems to be going back to the idea that the Epstein Files isn’t a problem for him at all, as can be seen from a Truth Social post on November 14:

“The Democrats are doing everything in their withering power to push the Epstein Hoax again, despite the DOJ releasing 50,000 pages of documents, in order to deflect from all of their bad policies and losses, especially the SHUTDOWN EMBARRASSMENT, where their party is in total disarray, and has no idea what to do. Some Weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and foolish. Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem! Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Summers about Epstein, they know all about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a Country to run!”

This doesn’t just beg, but scream the question: If this is a Democrat Problem, why not release the files like your base wants you to do?

This is an issue for him that he cannot wave or wish away.

 

The CW has it that the government shutdown, at least the way it ended, was a setback for Democrats. I suggested otherwise at New York.

There’s a lot of ill-suppressed glee among Republicans right now, along with recriminations among Democrats, about the end of the longest government shutdown ever. Eight Democratic senators were able to undercut a few hundred of their colleagues by ending a filibuster against a bill to reopen government, exhibiting both weakness and disunity. (Though there’s no telling how many holdouts privately agreed with the “cave.”) Worse, Democrats failed to secure an extension of Obamacare premium subsidies they repeatedly demanded.

So were Republicans the “winners” and Democrats the “losers” in the shutdown saga? Maybe now, but maybe not later. As the New York Times’ Annie Karni observes, the short-term stakes of the shutdown fight may soon be overshadowed by more enduring public perceptions of what the two parties displayed:

“[Some Democrats] assert that in hammering away at the extension of health care subsidies that are slated to expire at the end of next month, they managed to thrust Mr. Trump and Republicans onto the defensive, elevating a political issue that has long been a major weakness for them.

“And in holding out for weeks while Republicans refused to extend the health tax credits and Mr. Trump went to court to deny low-income Americans SNAP food benefits, Democrats also honed their main message going into 2026: that Republicans who control all of government have done nothing to address voters’ concerns that the cost of living is too high”.

Trump’s clumsy and insensitive handling of the SNAP benefit cutoff was an unforced error and a gift to Democrats. But just as importantly, by “losing” the Obamacare subsidy–extension fight, Democrats may have dodged a bullet. A deal on that issue would have cushioned or even eliminated an Obamacare premium price hike that will now be a real problem for Trump and the GOP. Republicans appear to have no health-care plan other than the same tired panaceas involving individual savings plans that allow health insurers to discriminate against poorer and sicker Americans — precisely the problem that led to passage of the Affordable Care Act and has made Obamacare popular.

The big takeaway from Democrats’ election sweep this month is that “affordability” is a message that accommodates candidates ranging from democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to centrist Abigail Spanberger and that plays on tangible public unhappiness with Trump’s broken promises to reduce the cost of living. That Republicans emerged from the government shutdown having abundantly displayed their lack of interest in soaring health-care costs and persistently high grocery costs positions Democrats exactly where they hope to be next November.

In addition, the election wins showed that rank-and-file Democratic voters and the activists who helped turn them out were not particularly bothered by the year’s many ideological and generational collisions over anti-Trump strategy and tactics. The Democratic “struggle for the soul of the party” that Republicans and Beltway pundits love more than life itself may manifest itself more visibly during 2026 primaries. But when general-election season arrives, there’s every reason to believe Democrats will stop fighting each other and focus on flipping the House — and in a big-wave election, maybe even the Senate — and destroying the governing trifecta that has enabled so many Trump outrages this year. It’s one thing to debate endlessly how to “fight” and “stop” Trump. It’s another thing to be given a clear opportunity to do just that at the ballot box.

The expiration of the shutdown deal on January 30 could in theory produce another government shutdown and another set of expectations to be met or missed. But “winning” the current shutdown won’t in itself improve Trump’s lagging job-approval ratings, or the incoherence of his economic policies, or the fears his authoritarian conduct instills. That’s the GOP’s problem and Democrats’ opportunity.

 

After a long evening of election watching on November 4, I offered this happy take at New York:

Last November, Donald Trump recaptured the presidency and helped his party gain control of both chambers of Congress. He and his MAGA backers heralded it as the beginning of a realignment that would give the GOP a long-standing majority and give the president a popular mandate to do many unprecedented and unspeakable things. Democrats largely believed this spin and fell into mutual recriminations and despair.

Just a year later, everything’s looking different.

Democrats swept the 2025 elections in almost every competitive venue. They flipped the governorship of Virginia and held onto the governorship of New Jersey, in each instance crushing their Republican opponents. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani won easily on a wave of high turnout and voter excitement. At the same time, Democrats stopped efforts to purge their judges in Pennsylvania and rig voting rules in Maine. One of their most vulnerable candidates, Virginia attorney-general nominee Jay Jones, beset by a text-message scandal involving violent fantasies about Republicans, won anyway. Everywhere you look, the allegedly unbeatable Trump legacy is, well, taking a beating. The tide even flowed down to Georgia, where Democrats won two statewide special elections, flipping two seats on the utility-rate-setting Public Service Commission.

Exit polls show that those elements of the electorate where Trump made startling gains in 2024 are now running away from him and from the GOP. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger is winning 67 percent of under-30 voters, 64 percent of Latino voters, 61 percent of Asian American voters, and 90 percent of Black voters. Up in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill is winning under-30 voters by better than 2-1, Latinos by exactly 2-1, Black voters by better than 10-1, and Asian American voters by better than 4-1. She’s also winning 90 percent of Black men and 57 percent of Latino men. These are also demographic groups that have begun turning their back on Trump in job-approval polls. And Trump got another very direct spanking as Californians overwhelmingly approved Prop 50, a measure to gerrymander the state to give Democrats more seats, meant to retaliate against Trump’s earlier power grabs. There, too, the issue became entirely a referendum on the turbulent president.

Some MAGA folk will argue Trump can’t be blamed because he wasn’t on any ballot. But Republicans everywhere embraced him fiercely and counted on his assistance to win the day. And no major party has ever so completely turned itself into a cult of personality for its leader, or been so eager to give him total power. Trump’s domination of political discourse throughout 2025 — right up until this week, when he’s rejected any compromises with Democrats in a gridlocked Washington, D.C. — means the election is inescapably a setback that bids ill for his efforts to maintain total control of the federal government in the midterms next year. Democrats may finally turn to the future rather than the past, the struggles for the party’s soul forgotten for a while.

We’ll soon see if Mamdani can redeem the hope he has instilled in so many discouraged and marginalized voters, and if the women chosen to lead New Jersey and Virginia can cope with rising living costs and terrible treatment from Trump’s administration. The GOP gerrymandering offensive isn’t done, and the Trump-enabling chambers of the Supreme Court could provide new setbacks for those resisting Trump’s creeping authoritarianism. And yes, in 2026 Democrats must more clearly articulate their own agenda while providing running room for different candidates in different parts of the country.

But for now, Trump and his party look far less invincible than before and far more likely to harvest anger and disappointment for his second-term agenda than to build anything like a permanent majority. The opposition can now emerge from the shadow of an especially cursed year and fight back.

I’ve been getting steadily more exasperated at Democratic opinion-leaders telling Democratic pols not to talk about Trump’s threats to democracy, and wrote about it at New York:

There’s a disconnect in the Democratic Party strategy for combating Donald Trump this year and in the 2026 midterms. Democratic elites and many activists (not to mention millions of No Kings protesters!) are convinced the 47th president is engaged in an authoritarian power grab that could entrench his kind of politics for a long time to come. But again and again, party strategists keep telling Democrats not to talk much about it.

The spanking new “Deciding to Win” report from the Democratic Establishment group Welcome PAC makes this prescription repeatedly:

“Convince voters that we share their priorities by focusing more on issues voters do not think our party prioritizes highly enough (the economy, the cost of living, health care, border security, public safety), and focusing less on issues voters think we place too much emphasis on (climate change, democracy, abortion, identity and cultural issues).”

In a recent interview my colleague Benjamin Hart conducted with centrist Democratic super-strategist Lis Smith, she suggested the same thing with respect to what went wrong last year:

“[T]he biggest mistake we made in 2024 was not leading every single conversation by talking about the economy. When people feel like they are one accident, one incident, one layoff away from financial collapse, they do not want to hear us starting conversations by saying, ‘The most existential issue you should care about is democracy.’”

And despite the alarm often expressed by progressive activists about Trump’s authoritarian aspirations, progressive “populist” strategists almost invariably prefer appeals to voters’ material interests as opposed to such abstract matters as the U.S. Constitution or institutional barriers to a would-be tyrant like Trump. The standard leftist critique of Kamala Harris’s campaign held that all this pointy-headed talk about “democracy” was a donor-driven distraction from the class-warfare messaging that might have beaten Trump but also distressed rich Democratic elites.

To be clear, whatever you think of the credibility of Harris’s claims that Trump posed a “threat to democracy,” nine months into his second term we know for a fact that he does indeed represent a threat to democracy, and a near and present threat at that. Yet Democratic politicians are being told by their party’s wise heads to put a sock in it and instead focus public attention on Trump’s performance on kitchen-table issues. Apparently, Trump’s aggressive work toward creation of the most imperial presidency ever isn’t something discussed at kitchen tables, so it’s not worth a lot of attention.

You can see this disconnect in action right now during the government-shutdown crisis. In truth, Democrats chose to trigger the shutdown at the end of September because they were at a point of near-panic over Trump’s rapid construction of an imperial presidency. With both congressional Republicans and (so far) the U.S. Supreme Court offering zero resistance to Trump’s assertions of unlimited authority over national affairs, Democrats seized on their only leverage point: the need for Democratic votes to keep the government open. But to hear Democrats talk about it, all they really want is an an extension of Obamacare premium subsidies — a very worthy goal, but one they could have pursued without a government shutdown. And worse yet, if they succeed and (as his own pollster is advising him to do) Donald Trump imposes an Obamacare subsidy extension on his party, what Democrats will have accomplished is taking the issue right off the table for the 2026 midterms. In addition, the shutdown itself is making life miserable at many kitchen tables, including those of the members of public-employee unions that are now breaking solidarity with congressional Democrats.

Even as some Democrats pretend they aren’t that worried about threats to democracy, Trump is working overtime to thwart democracy in the midterms via a vast smorgasbord of measures to prevent and if necessary overturn adverse election results. Normally, given Trump’s persistent unpopularity, Democrats could be confident of breaking the GOP’s fragile governing trifecta next year. But instead the president has initiated an entirely unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering blitz that will become unstoppable if the Supreme Court responds to his demand to gut what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. He’s also effectively plotting another attempted insurrection with better tactics and a more united party behind him. If against all prior odds the GOP holds onto Congress in 2026 by such methods, America will have become what experts call a “competitive authoritarian” country, operating a hybrid system with elections but no real democracy. The consequences for those relying on a vibrant and viable opposition to represent their interests on kitchen-table issues against a powerful and corrupt oligarchy will be enormous.

You’d think this situation would be worth mentioning and perhaps emphasizing, unless Democrats truly believe swing voters are too stupid, selfish, or short-sighted to care. Are Americans committed to democracy only so long as it manifestly delivers more short-term economic benefits than an authoritarian alternative? If so, we have bigger problems than higher Obamacare health-insurance premiums, as we’ll discover when a future GOP regime wipes Obamacare, the Great Society, and the New Deal right off the books.

One of the worst habits of political types is the tendency to over-generalize. What works in one time and place, though, won’t necessarily work in others, as I argue at New York with respect to Zohran Mamdani:

The thing about off-year elections is that there are so few of them that it’s tempting to over-interpret their significance. That’s particularly true when the key races are viewed as tests for a Democratic Party that is terrified about its past and future and unsure of its identity.

Right now the four off-year contests that are getting the most national attention are the mayoral race in New York City, gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, and the Prop 50 retaliatory gerrymandering ballot initiative in California. Prop 50 seems to be gliding toward an easy win. Democratic advantages in New Jersey and Virginia seem fragile. So the really exciting story for Democrats, and particularly for self-identified progressives, is Zohran Mamdani’s upcoming mayoral victory.

It really is a great story: An obscure young Muslim socialist state legislator ran an upbeat, issues-oriented campaign and leapt over the many obstacles to change and reform posed by New York City’s byzantine political system. He beat the front-runner, former governor Andrew Cuomo, like a drum in the Democratic primary, overcoming Cuomo’s huge advantage in money and name ID. And despite an extraordinary deployment of attack ads and oppo research by a coalition of opponents that stretched from the city’s Democratic Establishment to the Trump White House, Mamdani has failed to self-destruct as many expected. That he positioned himself to win despite clear skepticism if not disdain from House and Senate minority leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer makes his success even sweeter for Democrats yearning for ideological or generational change. And Mamdani’s clear and disproportionate appeal to young voters who seemed so tuned out in last year’s disastrous elections has made his campaign an instant classic.

But it’s more than a bit of a reach to compare the excitement Mamdani has generated to the iffier campaigns of Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia, as this Wall Street Journal analysis appears to do:

“Democratic leaders hoping to revive the party’s fortunes this fall pinned their hopes on two gubernatorial candidates—Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia—betting on both women’s moderate pragmatism and experience in national security. …

“Spanberger and Sherrill still hold leads over their opponents, but their relative underperformance stands in contrast to what is shaping up to be a runaway victory in the New York mayoral election for the democratic-socialist assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who represents another vision for the party. Mamdani has been leading the race against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo by double digits. …

“Spanberger and Sherrill were backed by Democratic national leaders who saw them as more-suited for attracting suburban, swing voters than the populist alternative supported by the party’s progressive flank. Mamdani touts a rent freeze, free daycare and grassroots power, drawing endorsements from the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.).”

The implied message is that the “moderates” from New Jersey and Virginia are leaving voters cold and unmotivated, and that a hypothetical “populist alternative” might have emulated the excitement Mamdani is generating in New York.

That’s a big stretch. There wasn’t a “populist alternative” on the table in Virginia, where Democrats canceled their primary after no one filed to challenge Spanberger. And Sherrill, in her own primary, handily dispatched five viable rivals, including two running clearly to her left.

But more important is the broader context. New Jersey and Virginia are not much like New York City politically. For all the talk of Trump making gains in his native city — and he did gain roughly 7 percent in 2024 as opposed to 2020 — he still lost the NYC vote to Kamala Harris by a 68 to 30 percent margin. Harris won both New Jersey and Virginia by a less than 6 percent. The Democratic advantage in New York City, which has likely grown over the last year, is quite simply large enough to indulge a risky mayoral nomination that would not be possible in a more politically marginal jurisdiction. It’s no accident that Mamdani’s nationally prominent sponsors, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, represent overwhelmingly Democratic constituencies as well. And it’s also no accident that the conservative opposition to Mamdani has now coalesced not around a Republican but around the minor-party candidacy of the deeply flawed former Democratic governor of New York. It’s also worth noting that for all his merits, Mamdani has benefited a great deal from the intense unpopularity of his most prominent opponents, Cuomo and incumbent mayor Eric Adams.

None of this is to say that Democrats elsewhere can’t learn from Mamdani’s success. It’s been obvious that the cost of living absolutely had to be an emphasis for Democrats going forward, given its central role in Trump’s 2024 win. Spanberger and Sherrill have talked a lot about “affordability” on their own dime. But no one has succeeded in identifying a simple and deeply relatable affordability agenda quite like Mamdani. And the connection he has made with young voters should be of urgent interest to Democrats everywhere given the catastrophe they experienced with that segment of the electorate in 2024.

Mamdani has earned his success in this unique political space called New York City. But it’s not directly translatable to very different places with different electorates and political cultures. Yes, both progressive and centrist factions of the Democratic Party perpetually claim to have found the formula for political victory everywhere. But a party big enough to accommodate different strokes for different folks remains the best bet.

The wild parade of mid-decade re-redistricting that Donald Trump initiated this year has happened more in Republican than in Democratic states. But there’s a surprising late entry in the sweepstakes in Virginia, as I explained at New York:

With all the appalling things going on every day in Donald Trump’s America, it’s tempting to view the nationwide scramble to redraw congressional maps before the 2026 midterms as just another typical incident of partisan gamesmanship. But it’s actually quite unusual. Since at least since the beginning of the 20th century, states rarely conducted redistricting other than after the decennial Census and the subsequent reapportionment of U.S. House seats between the states. Court decisions occasionally forced a mid-decade redistricting (particularly during the sadly distant heyday of the Voting Rights Act). But when then–U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay engineered a redistricting of the Texas House delegation in 2003 to help Republicans reconquer Congress in 2004, it was a national scandal.

So when President Donald Trump ordered Texas Republicans to suddenly upturn the state’s congressional map because he knew his party was likely to lose control of the House in 2026, it was a very big deal. And when he subsequently ordered Republicans to do the same thing in every single state where they had the power to pull off such blatant, minority-disenfranchising power grabs, it touched off a wild arms race between the two parties that may not subside until candidate filing deadlines for 2026 have passed. Having flipped up to five House seats in Texas, and one in Missouri, Republicans are now looking at the possibility of rewriting maps in Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Democrats are retaliating with a big redistricting push in California, also aimed at netting five seats, which will be approved or vetoed by voters on November 4. Democrats in Maryland, Illinois, and New York are thinking about joining the gerrymandering jamboree.

But the best sign of how out of control the redistricting craze has become is the out-of-the-blue plan now emerging from Virginia, where Democrats are considering a truly mad dash to flip two or three House seats before the midterms, as the New York Times reports:

:The next front in the nation’s pitched battle over mid-decade congressional redistricting is opening in Virginia, where Democrats are planning the first step toward redrawing congressional maps, a move that could give their party two or three more seats.

“The surprise development, which was announced by legislators on Thursday, would make Virginia the second state, after California, in which Democrats try to counter a wave of Republican moves demanded by President Trump to redistrict states to their advantage before the 2026 midterm elections …

“Democrats now hold six of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats. Redistricting could deliver two or three additional seats for the party, depending on how aggressive cartographers choose to be in a redrawing effort.”

This is happening less than two weeks before a general election in Virginia in which every statewide elected office and every seat in the lower chamber of the legislature are up for grabs. Democrats have extremely narrow margins of control in both chambers, which isn’t expected to change on November 4. But the sudden gambit seems to have taken Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger by surprise. In Virginia, the governor (until January that’s Republican Glenn Youngkin) plays no role in the passage of constitutional amendments, which is what the Democratic plan will require.

The timetable is difficult. Democrats will need to approve the proposed constitutional amendment next week. Then they would have to pass it again in the next legislative session that begins in January. Only then can they schedule a referendum timed to enact the measure before candidate filing for the midterms ends. No telling when the actual proposed maps will be made public. There is absolutely no margin for error at any step. But that’s how frantic people in both parties have become to get control of the chain reaction Trump began with malice aforethought.

The stakes are huge because of the literally incredible things Trump might do in the last two years of his presidency if his slavishly submissive party continues to hold a governing trifecta beyond the midterms. The longer implications are ominous too, if it becomes routine for parties to repeatedly change congressional (and ultimately, state legislative) maps in order to maintain or seize power regardless of the overall contours of public opinion. It will be quite the white-knuckle ride.

I know it’s close to Halloween, but the weird vibes emanating from Democrats about the New Jersey gubernatorial race seem too frightful to be real, as I explained at New York:

Off-year gubernatorial elections are often treated as major bellwethers for the next presidential or midterm elections. So there’s a lot of interest in this year’s contests in New Jersey and Virginia. Both states have leaned Democratic at the presidential level in recent years; Republicans last carried Virginia in 2004 and haven’t won New Jersey since 1988. But both states also have a recent history of swinging against the party controlling the White House in gubernatorial contests. The non–White House party has carried 11 of the past 12 governor’s races in Virginia and eight of the past nine in New Jersey. The exceptional winners were Democrats Terry McAuliffe in Virginia in 2013 and Phil Murphy in New Jersey just four years ago.

These states are different even though they often move in tandem. Virginia is the last state with a one-term limit on governors’ terms, which probably increases the “nationalization” of gubernatorial races since there are never any incumbents. They also have different demographics, though both states have significant non-white voting blocs and large and often political crucial suburbs. Until very recently, Virginia was thought to be a near lock for Democrat Abigail Spanberger, in part because she’s a suburban centrist running a well-oiled campaign against the erratic Republican lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears. But the other factor was Virginia’s heavy federal-employee presence, which hurts Republicans thanks to the unparalleled hostility of the second Trump administration toward the so-called deep state (made vivid first by DOGE’s Elon Musk and then by OMB director Russell Vought, both big-time bureaucrat-haters). Virginia Republican despair has been at least temporarily dispelled by a scandal involving violence-laden texts by Democratic-attorney-general candidate Jay Jones. But the damage probably won’t extend much beyond Jones himself.

There’s a more negative vibe in New Jersey, though, where Democrat Mikie Sherrill is facing Jack Ciattarelli in the governor’s race. Ciattarelli significantly exceeded expectations and polls in his 2021 challenge to Murphy. And the president he is now firmly embracing, Donald Trump, cut his losing margin in the Garden State from about 16 points in 2020 to just under six points in 2024. As Ron Brownstein notes, this is one place (others are Texas and Florida) where you could discern a general broadening of the GOP coalition:

“Trump somewhat improved his showing in 2020 over 2016 among minority voters nationwide, especially those without a four-year college degree. In 2021, Ciattarelli in particular advanced further from those beachheads. He significantly narrowed Murphy’s advantage from 2017 in Passaic and Hudson, the two New Jersey counties with the largest share of Hispanic residents, and improved even in Essex, the county centered on Newark, which has a large Black population. In 2024, Trump ran even better than Ciattarelli in all three of those counties, even becoming the first GOP presidential nominee in the 21st century to win Passaic.”

In 2022, Democrats lost one highly marginal U.S. House seat in New Jersey after redistricting made it “redder.” But they did relatively well otherwise, which complicates the “trending red” narrative, unless you accept the GOP rationalization that this particular election was dominated by an abortion issue that has since receded in significance.

More important, the idea that Ciattarelli will build on his gains in 2021 and Trump’s gains in 2024 to win in November involves ignoring the larger phenomenon of backlash against the party controlling the White House. Are Republicans in New Jersey somehow stronger now than Trump was in November 2024, when he lost New Jersey (albeit by “only” six points)? CNN’s Harry Enten uses favorability numbers to suggest that the always-unpopular Trump isn’t really more unpopular than he has ever been. But given the change of party control of the White House, it’s now Trump’s job-approval numbers that are more relevant, and they are not good, and that’s particularly true among the non-white voters who trended toward Trump in 2024. We don’t have that much publicly released New Jersey data, but nationally Trump’s 2024 gains were concentrated among the “low-propensity” voters least likely to turn out in a non-presidential election. It stands to reason that some of them won’t show up for an off-year gubernatorial contest.

There is some talk that Sherrill is either running a bad campaign or is unexciting to Democratic-base voters — or both. But as Brownstein points out, Sherrill, like Virginia’s Spanberger, is a strongly positioned candidate this year:

“Spanberger and Sherrill are both centrist Democrats with national security backgrounds who were elected to the House of Representatives as part of the 2018 blue wave. Both have run careful, disciplined campaigns that have drawn criticism from some Democrats for failing to ignite much enthusiasm or passion, but also praise from analysts in both parties for avoiding missteps …

“Sherrill and Spanberger have each maintained a predominant focus on the cost of living. That contrasts with their Republican opponents, who have attempted to revive several of the wedge issues that have benefited the GOP in recent years.”

So why is there such pessimism, bordering on incipient panic, about Sherrill among Democrats? She has been comfortably leading in polls other than those taken by the notoriously pro-GOP Trafalgar-InsiderAdvantage and Quantus Insights outfits, and she’s leading even in those. But some Democrats fear the polls never entirely capture Trump or pro-Trump votes. Beyond that, there is something I can describe only as a sort of superstitious belief that Trump has changed everything, repealing all the rules we used to understand about how elections are won and lost. Check out this take on Sherrill by Politico’s Michael Kruse:

“What at the outset of her political ascent was a formula that looked like a model — former Navy helicopter pilot, former prosecutor, suburban mother moderate in ideology and mien — at this messier, storm-the-gates moment marked by economic populism and TikTok histrionics, often can feel as if it falls flat. ‘She’s playing the politics,’ as twentysomething Jersey City mayoral candidate Mussab Ali put it, ‘of 2018.” And it’s 2025.'”

Some of this angst about Sherrill could simply reflect intraparty tension that has little to do specifically with New Jersey, as younger and more outspokenly progressive Democrats yearn for the candidate nominations they feel centrists have squandered (though Sherrill dispatched a couple of leftward rivals in the June primary). But you could also argue that Democrats are still in trauma over what happened nationally in 2024. Since they can’t believe a convicted felon campaigning on a pledge to seize authoritarian powers to pursue vengeance against his enemies actually won the presidency, they fear anything’s possible now, particularly if their candidates aren’t as loud and vicious as the president their opponents adore.

Like Virginia, New Jersey is competitive enough that upsets are possible on November 4. But its Democrats should stop spooking themselves once Halloween has passed.

All our debates over Democratic strategy are strictly dependent on protection of our right to oppose the current administration at all, as I explained at New York:

When looking at judicial review of Trump 2.0’s many audacious power grabs, it’s easy to get bogged down and tangled up in legalisms. Constitutional law is complicated. Federal court procedures are not designed to cope with unprecedented assertions of presidential power advanced almost hourly in places all over the country.

But now a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in a ruling that halted a National Guard deployment in Chicago, wrote some sentences that cut through the fog like a powerful search light and reached the real point of contention:

“Political opposition is not rebellion. A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest. Such conduct exceeds the scope of the First Amendment, of course, and law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrators accordingly. But because rebellions at least use deliberate, organized violence to resist governmental authority, the problematic incidents in this record clearly fall within the considerable day-light between protected speech and rebellion.”

In other words, the judges (one of whom was appointed by Trump, another by George H.W. Bush) slapped down as absurd the administration’s claim that protests against ICE’s activities in Chicago constitute a “rebellion” that warrants otherwise illegal deployments of military force in a U.S. city. And neither Donald Trump nor Pete Hegseth nor Kristi Noem nor Tom Homan nor Pam Bondi can turn these protests into the equivalent of the Whiskey Rebellion, the Civil War, or a foreign invasion. Nor can Texas governor Greg Abbott, who is eager to send his own National Guard units to Democrat-governed Illinois in what amounts to a war between the states.

It’s increasingly clear that treating political opposition as a rebellion is at the heart of the administration’s legal case for the militarization of political conflict that goes well beyond protests against ICE raids. In MAGA-speak circa 2025, the “Democrat Party” is now the “Radical Left,” and everything it does is presumptively illegitimate and probably illegal. Just yesterday White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt bluntly asserted that “the Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” Earlier this week House Speaker Mike Johnson said the peaceful No Kings rally in Washington planned for October 18, which will feature massive displays of Old Glory and countless patriotic gestures, is insurrectionary: “This ‘Hate America’ rally that they have coming up for October 18, the antifa crowd and the pro-Hamas crowd and the Marxists, they’re all going to gather on the Mall.”

This follows onto the threats of repression broadcast by the president and by his top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Both men blamed this crime by a deranged individual on Trump opponents writ large, with Miller going so far as to suggest that calling his boss “authoritarian” was an illegal incitement to the kind of violence that murdered Kirk, and an act of “terrorism.” Trump’s subsequent executive order called for a literal war on “antifa,” the shadowy and scattered network of protesters, that is useful in the ongoing clampdown precisely because it’s nowhere and everywhere. Meanwhile, his so-called secretary of War called in the entire leadership of the U.S. armed forces to mobilize them for duty against the “enemy within.” This entire escalation of rhetoric, to be clear, is the logical culmination of the president’s relentless campaign of demonization throughout the 2024 campaign that treated opponents as anti-American, anti-Christian crooks who were deliberately destroying the country and importing millions of criminals to steal elections.

Suffusing this militant attitude is the pervasive belief in MAGA circles that Trump’s narrow 2024 victory represents a mandate to do whatever he wants. It’s unlikely, in fact, that the swing voters who pulled the lever for Trump because they wanted lower gasoline or grocery prices or better border control bought into the full Trump 2.0 agenda, which is why his job-approval numbers are well underwater. But even if they did buy the whole enchilada, the 49.8 percent of voters who backed Trump do not have the right to revoke the constitutional rights of the remaining 50.2 percent. That would be true, moreover, had the 47th president actually won the “historic landslide” he keeps mendaciously claiming.

The words of the Seventh Circuit judges really do need to become a rallying cry against the administration’s efforts to use every bit of power it can amass to silence and intimidate opponents and critics. Political opposition is not a rebellion and doesn’t justify a repression that turns half the country into suspected terrorists. This president has more than enough power to pursue his policies without ruling like a king. Enough is enough.

There’s a lot of strange impatience among Democrats about receiving an official DNC “autopsy report” about 2024, but at New York, I made an argument that it won’t be that helpful until the next presidential cycle arrives.

Look, I get it: There are many reasons Democrats feel the need to look back at the electoral calamity of 2024. The Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, has books to sell. Joe Biden loyalists feel they must rehabilitate his tarnished image. Operatives and donors who were knee-deep in the Biden or Harris campaigns naturally have scores to settle and grudges to air. And above all, the ideological warriors of the Democratic left and center want to blame each other for the debacle, just as they’ve blamed every Democratic defeat large or small on each other since about 1968.

In wallowing in the 2024 defeat, Democrats are avidly assisted by Republicans experiencing intense Schadenfreude at their misery. The GOP is deeply invested in spinning the close 2024 results into an irreversible realignment that will make Donald Trump and his heirs masters of the universe until the end of time.

So Democrats will not be able to eschew 2024 reminiscences altogether. But they should give it a try. The Washington Post reported earlier this week that the Democratic National Committee was slow-walking its official “autopsy report” on 2024 until 2025 elections are over, out of concern that negative discussion of the party (and, for that matter, of the accuracy or inaccuracy of the “autopsy” itself) might affect organizers’ morale or even voter turnout. Here’s a better idea: Democrats should put off any official 2024 “autopsy” until late November 2026, when the midterms are done.

This recommendation does not stem from a preoccupation with vibes or a belief that Democrats can’t handle bad news or division over what happened in 2024. The more basic truth is that much of what happened in 2024 is probably irrelevant to what will happen in 2026, and revisiting it all is just a big, fat waste of time, at least until the next presidential election cycle arrives. Here’s why.

Different elections, different electorates

Midterm elections are fundamentally different than presidential elections in multiple ways. Basically, different electorates show up for each. Presidential election turnout is invariably higher (it was 67 percent in 2020 and 64 percent in 2024). Voters who participate in presidential but not midterm elections are often referred to as “low-propensity voters.”

Until very recently, Republicans had an advantage among the “high-propensity voters” most likely to show up for midterms. But in the Trump era, that advantage has shifted to Democrats. So a lot of the endless debate over Trump’s gains among low-propensity voters in 2024 might not even be relevant to the 2026 electorate.

Comparative versus referendum elections

Presidential elections are mostly comparative, i.e., a choice between two candidates representing the two major parties (although perceptions of the party controlling the White House have a significant effect on that choice). Midterm elections are mostly referenda on the party in power, particularly when that party has trifecta control in D.C., as Republicans do today. So polls showing that voters favor one party or the other on certain issues can be a bit misleading; their perceptions of the president’s performance on those issues is more germane.

This is why at least some of the fretting about the supposed weakness of the “Democratic brand” coming out of 2024 is probably excessive. In a first-past-the-post system dominated by two major parties, the “out” party will benefit from any and all misgivings about the “in” party. Trump’s persistently underwater job-approval numbers help explain why he’s trying to rig the midterms through gerrymandering and voter suppression.

There is also a tendency, which is real but hard to quantify, for voters who are aligned with or even support the agenda of the president’s party to vote against it once it’s in office as a “check against presidential power.” This helps explain why the party controlling the White House almost always loses congressional seats (and often governorships and state legislatures) in midterms. And no president has tried to grab more power than Donald Trump.

The 2024 election was extremely unusual

The situation facing voters next year isn’t going to resemble the one that existed in the very strange 2024 election. Whether their “brand” is weak or strong, Democrats are not going to be led by 81-year-old Joe Biden and then by a relatively untested Kamala Harris. Yes, some Democrats believe they have too many old politicians in office or running for office, but it’s a different problem from a historically old man being the accepted head of the party and the most powerful person in the world.

Similarly, it makes a world of difference that Democrats will not control the White House and Congress in 2026. There is an ineradicable group of voters (growing larger with younger cohorts) who are profoundly unhappy with the status quo and will swing between the two parties based on who controls the country. This “I hate everything” vote was a millstone for Democrats in 2024. It won’t be in 2026.

The midterm battlegrounds are different

The 2024 election was fought over seven battleground states that were seriously contested by both parties: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump carried all of them, which created the mirage of a landslide (as though all those 75 million Democratic votes didn’t actually count). In the 2026 midterms, the big battle will be over competitive Senate and especially House races. Of the nine Senate races deemed competitive by Cook Political Report, just three are in 2024 battleground states. Thirty-nine House races are rated as competitive by Cook. Eleven are in 2024 battleground states. Different strokes (and messages) may be appropriate for different folks.

Some political lessons are timeless

Without a deep dive into the particulars of 2024, Democrats clearly made some mistakes that you don’t need an “autopsy” to identify. It’s been obvious at least since the swiftboating of John Kerry in 2004 that falling silent in the face of relentless opposition attacks is almost always a very bad idea — see the Harris-Walz campaign’s decision to look the other way or change the subject as the Trump-Vance campaign relentlessly pounded her using clips from the bizarre 2019 interview in which Harris appeared enthusiastic about spending taxpayer dollars on gender-assignment surgery for prisoners who were also illegal immigrants. I’m reasonably sure future candidates won’t make that mistake.

The threat posed by Trump is no longer hypothetical

The single biggest reason 2024 is relatively useless as a model for 2026 is that Trump won in no small part because a significant slice of voters simply did not buy Democratic claims that he was dangerously authoritarian, cruel, and indifferent to the suffering he wanted to inflict on noncriminal immigrants and people dependent on government help to make ends meet. Some remembered his first term as relatively benign (aside from a pandemic for which he was not blamed), while others, particularly younger voters, thought all politicians were pretty much the same.

We’ve now had more than nine months of dramatic proof that Democratic warnings about Trump 2.0 were, if anything, understated. That won’t matter to Trump’s MAGA base; indeed, their own anger and hostility to democracy seem stronger than ever. But it will matter to many of the same swing voters who opened the door to Trump’s return to power.