Today, we link to a podcast of TDS contributor Ruy Teixeira’s interview of Dan Wang, Canadian technology analyst and writer, focusing on modern China and author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

One of the big policy questions for the U.S. that emerges among viewers of the interview is, ‘Should America learn from China and build more stuff and have less regulation?” Never mind how just yet. This interview sheds rare light on that possibility and Wang describes what it is like to live in a society that moves fast to get things done.

President Trump and his fellow Republicans frequently stereotype China as a “Communist” country. But China’s edge may owe more to the practical philosophies of Confucius and the Tao than to Marx’s writings. When an American President wants to build something big that puts tens of thousands of people to work, he has to navigate through the caprices of 535 legislators, most of whom are quarrelsome lawyers. We call that ‘democracy.’ China’s President Xi meets with a couple of top aides and the project is launched soon afterwards. But let’s not pretend that these two nations are the only models we have. Scandinavian countries do a pretty good job of combining the best elements of representative and social democracies.

Due to a YouTube glitch, we can’t simply post the video interview here. but you can watch it on AEI’s web page.

With an incredible number of important things going on in Washington and around the world, the Trump White House is focused on base-pondering nonsense, as I noted at New York. It’s important for Democrats to understand what that means.

While Donald Trump is highly erratic, you can always rely on him pandering to his MAGA base on immigration-related issues. So it’s no surprise that the defeat in the U.S. Supreme Court of his bid to end birthright citizenship didn’t deter him from coming right back to the well on the subject. On Thursday he signed two new executive orders purporting to address abuses in the current immigration system. While his 2025 EO flatly repudiating the automatic right to citizenship of those born in the United States was struck down by the Supreme Court in the Trump v. Barbara decision on June 30, the new orders appear to nibble around the edges of the issue, as the Associated Press explains:

“[The first order]  was narrower in scope than the previous one shot down by the Supreme Court and appeared to focus on restricting automatic citizenship to specific categories of people, including children born to adults with connections to foreign embassies or organizations as well as anyone considered an “alien enemy” of the United States.

“It also aimed to restrict birthright citizenship to anyone whose parents ‘engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship.’

“A second order seeks to curb what Trump called ‘birth tourism’ by increasing restrictions on visitors to the U.S. who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country.”

The number of people ostensibly affected by these orders is pretty limited, notes the Washington Post:

“The new orders were certain to face legal challenges, and if they survive, would affect far fewer people than the original. An estimated 15 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., while only a few thousand people are foreign lobbyists registered with the Justice Department.

“No significant populations of U.S. residents are designated as alien enemies or foreign terrorists, making that provision largely symbolic. The administration faces ongoing litigation over whether it can deport alleged gang members by treating them as alien enemies. …

“There is no official data on ‘birth tourism.’ In 2024, fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses, out of 3.6 million total live births, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.”

When Trump announced the new orders Stephen Miller was on hand to offer some demagogic thoughts about “birth tourism,” a concept that fits in well with the presidential aide’s notorious subscription to conspiracy theories about immigrant efforts to rob American blind while rigging elections, as the BBC reported:

“’The idea (is) that people come here pretending to be a tourist, pretending to be a visitor,’ Stephen Miller, homeland security advisor and White House deputy chief of staff for policy, said while standing beside the president on Thursday.

“’But the real reason they’re here is to have a child, to make that child an automatic citizen, (to) leave our country and then have a US citizen child,’ he said, adding that those children then gain access to welfare benefits, the voting booth, and ‘all the other rights and privileges that belong solely to Americans.'”

While it’s unlikely these orders will ever be successfully enforced, they serve as a pre-midterms reminder to MAGA voters–and everyone else–that the administration hasn’t given up on radically restricting legal immigration even as it carries out the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. It’s as close to the core of Trump’s message and agenda as his related claims that Democrats are regularly stealing elections by deploying the many millions of swarthy illegal voters they’ve lured across the borders by promises of welfare payments and encouragement to commit crimes. Mere Supreme Court decisions won’t stop Trump and Miller from hammering away at this lurid and divisive theme.

From “2026 is turning into a bloodbath for safe-seat House Democrats” by Andrew Solender at Axios: “A half dozen House Democrats in safe districts have lost their primaries so far this election cycle — and many more could soon follow suit…Why it matters: Many of these losses are the result of growing restlessness among the Democratic grassroots that has increasingly morphed into anger towards the party establishment…”I expected a lot of people to run because they didn’t know how to respond to Trump without just being active,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) told Axios…He added: “We’re seeing that and all the primary electorate voting right now.”…Reps. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.)…were all unseated by challengers running to their left…Freshman Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas) defeated longtime Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) after the two were drawn into a district together…And Rep. Julie Johnson (D-Texas) lost her primary to former Rep. Colin Allred…By the numbers: This is one of just four election cycles since 1994 in which at least half a dozen House Democrats have lost their primaries…The other three cycles — 2002, 2012 and 2022 — all came after congressional reapportionment, which often pits incumbent House members against one another…Only one Democratic primary ouster this year — Green’s loss to Menefee — has been the result of mid-decade redistricting…What’s next: Plenty more hurdles await Democratic incumbents, particularly those 70 and older who have had lengthy tenures in Congress…The bottom line: Pocan said the Democratic primary electorate’s anti-incumbency energy is “a good thing ultimately, because people will be ready for November and ready for change.” More here.

With all the attention being understandably focused on Michigan’s August 4 primaries, many may have missed what happened in Kansas the same day, which represented some potential good news for Democrats, as I explained at New York:

A “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party” raged on in Michigan during yesterday’s primaries. But the vibe was very different among Democrats in Kansas, which also held primaries on August 4.

Kansas is a resolutely red state where Republican extremism periodically gives Democrats an opening. The Democratic Party has won four gubernatorial elections dating back to 2002, when Kathleen Sebelius exploited GOP divisions to win; now two-term incumbent Democrat Laura Kelly, a tough-minded moderate in the Sebelius mode, is leaving office amid high Republican expectations that they will reimpose a one-party rule on the state.

But that plan might not work out. A robust Democratic primary to choose a Kelly successor, along with an equally robust Democratic primary to choose a challenger to Republican U.S. senator Roger Marshall, shows that the Sunflower State’s minority party is by no means throwing in the towel. And while the candidates in both primaries exhibited some distinctive appeals, there’s no evident intraparty ideological warfare, likely because Democrats know they must appeal to moderate Republican voters to win.

Kelly endorsed Johnson County (a wealthy Kansas City suburb, and the largest county in Kansas) state senator Ethan Corson as her successor. But he lost to his Johnson County colleague Cindy Holscher, who offset Corson’s financial and advertising advantage with an issue-oriented campaign focused on two people-pleasing themes. She favored a moratorium on data-center development generally and also opposed and a specific (and controversial) subsidy-laden deal to build a new stadium for the Kansas City Chiefs. She will now face Republican state legislative leader Ty Masterson, who rode a Donald Trump endorsement to the GOP nomination over a large field. She is sure to hit Masterson on his Trump-like benevolence toward data centers but will also deploy the not-so-secret weapon of all Kansas Democrats: resistance to GOP efforts to ban abortion.

Kansas was the very first state to hold a ballot initiative on abortion rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, when anti-abortion activists proposed a constitutional amendment to override state judicial decisions protecting the right to choose. It lost by nearly 20 points. This year some of the same people went after pro-choice judges from a different angle, as The 19th reported:

“Kansas voters rejected a ballot measure that would have made members of the state’s Supreme Court electable by popular vote — a seemingly technical issue that had become a proxy battle for the future of abortion rights in the state. …

“Conservatives in the state’s Republican-led legislature put forth the proposal in an effort to remake Kansas’ high court, which in 2019 issued a pivotal decision holding that the state constitution guaranteed the right to an abortion. Three years later, in 2022, Kansas voters rejected a measure that would have undone the court’s decision — securing the Sunflower State’s status as a destination for people seeking abortion from neighboring states such as Texas and Oklahoma, which have both banned the procedure.”

The initiative lost by 22 points (61 percent to 39 percent). It was backed by Masterson, unsurprisingly, and also by Marshall, a hammer-headed conservative known for his loyalty to Trump’s agenda.

Marshall’s general-election opponent is right out of Kansas moderate central casting. Kansas City megachurch founder Adam Hamilton is running a centrist-outsider campaign appealing to people across party lines. He is senior pastor at the largest United Methodist church in the country and has a national as well as a local following that fed his modest but still decisive victory over a huge primary field. His financial and political viability led the authoritative Cook Political Report to move the Kansas Senate race from the Safe Republican to the Likely Republican rating, which places the contest on upset watch. Republicans will now have to deal with the temptation to energize conservative evangelicals by attacking a religiously observant Democrat on theological as well as ideological grounds, much as they’ve done (with limited success so far) against the Reverend Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico.

Holscher and Hamilton offer Kansas Democrats about the strongest statewide ticket they could hope for in a year when a national anti-Trump wave could affect even deep-red states. And they won’t have to worry too much about intraparty conflict on the road to November.

What are the smart take-aways from the narrow victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic primary for U.S. Senate?  One lesson has to be that big money spent on ads doesn’t always win. “Overall, Stevens and her allies spent nearly nine times as much on advertising as El-Sayed and his allied groups did, according to AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm,” Henry J. Gomez writes at nbcnews.com. However, it does appear that the big money reduced the lead many expected from the most recent opinion polls. El-Sayed’s victory may lend some credibility to the notion that American voters are now more open to progressive candidates. Progressive organizer Will Lawrence also won his race for the Democratic nomination in a battleground congressional district in Michigan. As Grace Panetta writes at the 19th, “Lawrence, an original co-founder of the climate activist group Sunrise Movement, defeated former U.S. Ambassador  Bridget Brink and ex-Navy SEAL Matt Maasdam for the Democratic primary for Michigan’s 7th District, currently represented by Rep. Tom Barrett.”  El-Sayed, who has an M.D., is a strong advocate for Medicare for All and said so frequently. That may have resonated with Michiganders who are feeling squeezed by rising costs for health care. El-Sayed is a compelling candidate, who articulated clear and crisp policy positions in fairly stark contrast to Stevens, who used more words to say less in policy debates.  Stevens did win Michigan’s emblematically white working-class Macomb county by a margin of 51.8 to El-Sayed’s 44.3 percent. Now we will see how good Dr. El-Sayed is at expanding his electoral coalition and beating Republicans.

At Semafor, David Weigel argues in “An inconclusive Tuesday, in Michigan and beyond” that “The left hasn’t taken over the Democratic Party yet,” and notes: “Sunrise Movement co-founder Will Lawrence won his race in Michigan’s 7th District handily, over two vote-splitting center-left candidates. That was the only early, decisive win for a movement that just nearly unseated a senator in Colorado…In Missouri, former Rep. Cori Bush didn’t even come close to beating Rep. Wesley Bell, the Democrat who unseated her with heavy AIPAC support two years ago and didn’t need as much this time. Michigan state Rep. Donavan McKinney, the strongest challenger Shri Thanedar has faced in three House races, was leading by single digits. So was Abdul El-Sayed, whose Michigan Senate campaign radiated confidence in the final weeks, as public and private polling showed him besting Rep. Haley Stevens by close to 20 points…The left is still on the verge of historic wins in Michigan (though Kyle Blomquist, the Democratic Socialists of America’s candidate, flopped in the mostly rural 1st District, where Republicans are favored to win in November). But there were two stories in the state, of years of progressive organizing paying off and a historic amount of PAC money flowing in to stop it…That money wasn’t really there in Colorado, and it came late in New York. In Washington, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez faced a progressive challenger who channeled the anger of local activists at her votes with Republicans — and posed no threat whatsoever…None of this means the left has already peaked. It does suggest that Democrats who want to rally primary voters against left-wing candidates can do that, with enough time and money. That’s going to get noticed by Democrats in Wisconsin and Minnesota, who are trying to convince late-deciding primary voters to reject progressives like Francesca Hong and Peggy Flanagan.“Tomorrow we begin to mend fences,” El-Sayed told his supporters in Detroit. “If your instinct is to be like, ‘I told you’ — no!” That was a less triumphant, hubristic tone than his supporters were taking, up to 8 pm on Tuesday.”

In “It’s Still a Blue Wave,” William Kristol writes at The Bulwark, “It would be nice to be able to draw some novel, surprising, or dramatic conclusions from last night’s election results. But sometimes the truth is messy and prosaic. The fact is that the results were a mixed bag. And they don’t seem to me to change anything much about what’s likely to happen in November…The highest profile race was the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. The polls suggested that the leftist insurgent, Abdul El-Sayed, would easily defeat the establishment candidate, Haley Stevens, perhaps by double digits. It looks early this morning that El-Sayed will likely eke out a victory by a percentage point or two..It’s a good reminder that polling in primaries can be unreliable. More importantly, it probably means Republican Mike Rogers, who almost won his senate race against Elissa Slotkin in 2024, has better odds than he otherwise would have had this November. But the national environment will still help the Democratic nominee, and it’s also the case that some swing voters may be more attracted to the change El-Sayed represents than put off by some of his left-of-the-mainstream views. So while this is a chance—very likely the only one—for a Republican Senate pickup, it’s by no means guaranteed…On the other hand, the continuing cascade of news about Rep. Max Miller’s horrifying personal behavior, combined with his determination to stay in the race for his Ohio congressional seat, makes me more convinced than ever that Democrats will have a better-than-expected cycle in that state—and that Sherrod Brown could very well win the Senate race there…Put that together with likely Democratic pickups in North Carolina and Maine, and decent opportunities for victory in Alaska, Iowa, and Texas, and I think Democrats have a pretty good chance—I’d say slightly better than 50-50—of controlling the Senate.” More here.

WaPo’s James Hohmann conducts a good interview with TDS contributor, Ruy Teixeira:

In his Q & A article at The New Yorker, “Will Left-Wing Democrats Reinvent the Party or Hurt Its Chances in November?,” Isaac Chotiner interviews Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’s 2020 Presidential-campaign manager and founder of the media nonprofit More Perfect Union. An excerpt:

Ahead of November’s midterm elections, Democrats are in the midst of a series of heated primaries across the country, pitting more centrist candidates, often backed by the Party establishment, against leftist opponents. Two Democratic House members have already lost primaries in New York to progressive challengers, and on August 4th the Michigan primary will decide whether the leftist doctor Abdul El-Sayed can defeat the congresswoman Haley Stevens in the race for an open Senate seat. In Wisconsin, another purple state, Francesca Hong—the progressive candidate for governor—has a wide lead on her opponents in the lead-up to the August 11th primary.

To try and understand the fissures in the Democratic Party, I recently spoke by phone with Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’s 2020 Presidential-campaign manager and founder of the media nonprofit More Perfect Union. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why so many Democrats are angry at the Party establishment, whether the Party is in danger of losing seats in swing states, and whether progressives, like Bernie Sanders, were right to stick with Joe Biden until the end of his reëlection campaign.

What do you see as the main division within the Democratic Party right now, and does it feel new?

I think it’s intensified. The division is over the desire of candidates to take on concentrations of wealth and power, and their willingness and desire to take on corporate greed and corporate power in general. There are people who were born for it, or desire it, and they are the candidates who tend to be doing quite well at this moment. They’re the ones who understand that part of your job in public service is to stand up to the power of moneyed interests, and how critical it is to speak out on behalf of people living paycheck to paycheck. There is friction against others in the Party who would say we don’t need that kind of tension with the moneyed élite. We have to raise money from them, we have to coddle them, we have to have public-private partnerships with them, we have to make them feel nice, and be kind to them.

I’m not saying tonally you have to be mean, but you have to acknowledge that there is friction and tension if you’re going to fight for working-class communities right now.

Do you think progressives should be focussing on running these types of candidates in safe, Democratic areas and states, so that the caucus in the House and the Senate is more left-wing and pushes for more left-wing ideas? Or do you also think they need to be pushing these types of candidates across the map?

I certainly come at this from a desire for persuasion. And, in order to be persuasive, I do tend to think that the candidates who are going to perform best across the board clearly define their desire to address concentrations of wealth and power, and the issues around corporate greed. And, if they are defined in that way, they can succeed in the reddest parts of this country. I do tend to think those candidates should start to reflect their geographies a bit, if they’re doing it the right way. So a New York City candidate who’s doing this may look and sound different than a Montana candidate who’s doing this.

You hear people like Senator Sanders, and yourself, say that the common thread for winning in diverse places is fighting for working people on economic issues. But, with candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, in Michigan, or Francesca Hong, in Wisconsin, you see left-wing campaigns running on very liberal social platforms. For example, El-Sayed has gotten tripped up over questions about defunding the police. I’m curious how you see that tension.

Many candidates run on liberal social-justice platforms. I don’t think you’re wrong that there are elements of that in this wave of progressive candidates. But what often happens is people look at their tweets from six years ago and miss how they are campaigning right now.

Look at how different candidates are talking about ice: some use the word “abolish,” some say “reform,” some say “move funding to different agencies.” Those are all part and parcel of what I was suggesting—that you are attuned to the geographies in which you’re representing, and you are close to the people you’re representing. If you go talk to a lot of these working-class people, they are three-dimensional human beings. They know when somebody is being honest and levelling with them. And I see in a lot of these progressive candidates that, while they may have views on things that don’t one hundred per cent align with every working-class person in their district, there is a benefit because people understand the candidate is telling them what they really believe. And there’s points for honesty.

I thought you were saying that there was some need for candidates to change their pitch based on where they are running, though.

When you’re in Montana, the issues of housing play out a bit differently than the housing issues of New York City, right? The density of renters in New York City is very high. Montana, obviously, they’re going through tenant unions; they have their own issues, but there are a lot of people being squeezed out of their opportunity to own their own homes. I’m just arguing that economic justice, the way in which you talk about those affordability crises, will have geographic dimensions to them that matter to your relatability.

I see, so the issue is not that you need to moderate or change your pitch on social issues, depending on where you’re running.

Well, I agree with that, too. So if you’re running in Montana, you’re running in Idaho, you’re running in Ohio, I do think that a good candidate who is trying to appeal to the working class has to be aware of what the attitudinal views are of the community, and the candidate has to be interested in them and want to have a conversation about them. What are their views on trans kids? How’s the community feeling about immigration raids?

More here.

Andrew Mangan argues that “Abdul El-Sayed may just prove a progressive can win a purple state” at Daily Kos: “In this year’s midterm elections, the hardest Senate seat for Democrats to defend probably isn’t what they expected a few months ago. Polls show Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff handily leading Republican challenger Mike Collins, noted friend to white supremacists…Rather, the seat most at risk sits in Michigan, and this Tuesday’s Senate primary will see Democrats making a familiar, if especially high-stakes, choice: centrist or progressive?… As is the case with Wisconsin’s gubernatorial contest, polls suggest the left-most candidate will prevail in the Democratic primary. But unlike in the Badger State, early polling in Michigan hints that the most progressive may also be the best positioned to win in November…Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, leads centrist Rep. Haley Stevens by an average of 11 percentage points in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, according to nine public polls conducted since July 5, when moderate state Sen. Mallory McMorrow dropped out of the race. (Polls were collected as of Friday at 5 PM ET.)…Progressives have rallied around the metro Detroit native. A strong advocate of Medicare for All, El-Sayed has racked up endorsements from superstars like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. He’s also managed to win support from a broader coalition that includes a major nurses union, the president of the state board of education, and United Auto Workers, a labor union with deep roots in Michigan and around 127,000 local members as of 2023…Meanwhile, Stevens has the support of The Detroit News as well as various Democratic establishment figures, like Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Sen. Gary Peters, whose retirement kicked off this primary.” More here.

From “Black voters, divided on progressives, are pivotal in Michigan Senate primary” by Erin Cox at The Washington Post: “Michael Sutton, 18, is new to politics, but he says he’s convinced they’re broken…Sutton walked this working-class neighborhood of bungalows near Detroit last week armed with literature, trying to sell his elders on Abdul El-Sayed, the surging progressive in Michigan’s intensely competitive Senate race…Sutton, a young canvasser trying to build up the coalition of progressive Black voters, said he believes a candidate like El-Sayed will disrupt politics for the better…He asked Barbara Lawton, 51, as she pulled into her driveway, “Do you know who you’re voting for in the Senate race?”…Lawton glanced at the flier…“Not that dude,” she replied…She later said her gut told her political disruptions usually make things worse…Michigan’s bruising Senate primary has laid bare the Democratic Party’s divisions, and it could chart a course to what it might become in a post-President Donald Trump world…Black voters like Lawton and Sutton will be crucial to defining that trajectory. In doing so, they will either hand progressives their biggest win of the election cycle or fortify a Democratic establishment that has been on the defensive…When they cast their ballots in Tuesday’s primary election, Michigan Democrats will choose between the liberal El-Sayed, who has caught fire in recent polling, and Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate three-term congresswoman with a record of flipping red districts…The winner will face Republican Mike Rogers, the former congressman who narrowly lost his first Senate bid two years ago. The Michigan race could be crucial to which party controls the Senate…El-Sayed, a former public health official, has built a broad grassroots coalition and campaigned in communities that turned to Trump in the face of economic stress. Stevens is the establishment pick who has sought to build deep ties with churchgoers as she courts Black voters.” More here.

In “Thirteen House Rating Changes Toward Democrats as Seat-by-Seat Assessment Better Aligns with Our November Expectations,” Kyle Kondik write at The Center for Politics: “We’re revamping our House ratings this week, which has the effect of bringing the number of seats at least leaning to each party to rough parity after redistricting helped Republicans build an edge in our ratings a few months ago…Our overall topline assessment is basically unchanged, though: Democrats remain favored to flip the House majority in November, but Republicans have a path, too…The number of House Toss-ups expands from 15 to 20 as part of this week’s update…The overall race for the House appears fairly steady, with an overall national Democratic lead that doesn’t seem quite as robust as 2018’s was, although the lead may eventually get there by the end of the cycle…Following today’s changes, the new ratings show a much tighter spread overall: Republicans have 208 seats at least leaning to them, Democrats have 207, and there are now 20 Toss-ups. This gives both parties pathways to a majority, but we’d still expect Democrats to do better among the Toss-ups. Our best guess at this point would be Democrats winning a majority in the low-to-mid 220s.” More here.

“For decades, the right-wing forces set on steadily eroding our democracy have worked in tandem with a pro-corporate movement that has increasingly marginalized organized labor, creating a ballooning crisis for the working class,” Stephen Lerner and Joseph A. McCartin write in “How Resisting Trumpism Could Revive the U.S. Labor Movement” at In These Times. “Yet this politically hazardous moment also represents an opportunity to overcome deep-seated institutional inertia, drawing elements of a cautious labor movement out of their defensive crouch, and helping unions devise forms of struggle that might both revive the labor movement and renew American democracy…President Donald Trump’s second term has, in a way, broken a spell. For years, the pre-Trump status quo kept labor locked in a pattern of slow decline even as democracy was increasingly stifled and abridged by voter suppression, gerrymandering, filibusters and the overweening power of organized money. But the decades-old dysfunctional status quo that gave rise to Trumpism is now crumbling under the weight of the most lawless, antidemocratic, rights-trampling administration this country has seen since the 19^th century…While our democracy’s crisis deepens, the national labor movement has yet to play a leading role in the resistance against ascendant authoritarianism. By seizing the opportunity to play such a role in the year ahead, labor has the opportunity to reverse its decades-long slide toward irrelevancy by taking up an indispensable role in preserving, expanding and deepening rights-based democracy…There is no doubt that democracy and workers’ rights are facing down an existential threat. Yet that very threat and the sense of urgency it has spawned have created an opportunity we could not have engineered on our own. It has roused growing numbers to the defense of democracy, glaringly exposed the dangers of unchecked corporate power and catalyzed actions within pockets of the labor movement that have a potential to spread and become transformative.” More here.

An excerpt from “Jon Ossoff’s 2028 Chances Compared to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez” by Andrew Stanton at Newsweek:

Senator Jon Ossoff’s chances of winning the 2028 Democratic presidential primary surged past Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on prediction markets, as speculation about who could jump into the race continues.

The 2028 presidential field could begin coming into view in the months ahead with candidates potentially announcing their campaigns as early as next year after the midterms. On the Democratic side, prospective candidates are already testing their messages and heading to key primary states to build up their name recognition and make inroads with voters. Ossoff, who represents Georgia in the U.S. Senate, has been named as a potential candidate as he runs for reelection this year.

Although the first votes won’t be cast for more than a year, polls and prediction markets can signal which candidates have early momentum among the electorate. Donors and voters can use these early signals to gauge whether a candidate is viable, so the numbers matter to a candidate’s ability to fundraise and garner media attention. They also measure initial name recognition of potential candidates.

Ossoff has downplayed talk of a 2028 presidential run, but his chances have increased on prediction markets in recent weeks. On Friday, his chances rose to 16 percent, surpassing Ocasio-Cortez’s 14 percent on Polymarket. Only California Governor Gavin Newsom had a higher chance of winning the nomination at 20 percent.

One month earlier, Ossoff had a 9 percent chance of winning the nomination; he had less than a 4 percent chance of winning at the start of the year on January 1, according to Polymarket.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris had a 7 percent chance of winning, while former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro had a 5 percent chance.

Ossoff’s chances have also increased on Kalshi, where he had a 16 percent chance of winning on Friday compared to Newsom’s 18 percent and Ocasio-Cortez’s 15 percent.

More here.

I normally confine myself here to discussing electoral strategies for Democrats. But unfortunately, this year they will need a strategy for ensuring that an election victory is recognized, as I explained at New York:

Knowing what we know now about Donald Trump’s willingness to interfere with adverse election results on January 6, 2021, the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections feels ominous in a familiar way. If anything, the 47th president is more adamant than the 45th about the impossibility of legitimately losing an election and has the benefit of past experience in dialing up havoc to ensure the “correct” outcome.

Trump has done about all he can to move the goal-posts on the midterms, most notably by encouraging a wildly unprecedented and mostly successful wave of hyperpartisan gerrymandering of U.S. House districts. It’s possible something will yet come out of his monomaniacal push for the enactment of the SAVE America Act, which would throw preparations for the midterms into total chaos and dramatically reduce turnout among pro-Democratic voting groups. But for now, the odds remain high that his party is about to lose control of the U.S. House and with it the trifecta control of the federal government that makes it possible to enact pure party-line legislation like last year’s landmark One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

All his flailing around in support of conspiracy theories about massive noncitizen voting has predisposed his MAGA base to defend or even demand a GOP refusal to accept defeat in November. As David French noted last week in a New York Times column, there is little doubt about Team Trump’s willingness to conduct another, more successful version of January 6. So the question is, French says, what is the “actual mechanism for reversing the election?” What is the current counterpart to John Eastman’s strategy for getting Mike Pence to reject Joe Biden’s certification as president during the congressional counting of electoral votes?

To be clear, the situation isn’t at all identical, as legal beagle Jeffrey Toobin points out in a subsequent Times column. Under the Eastman scheme, the constitutionally established presiding officer of the joint congressional session charged with confirming the electoral vote count, the vice-president, could arbitrarily rule out state-certified electors, and/or require state recertification. Pence famously refused to play his assigned part in the election-reversal script, and then the newly constituted Congress (with Democratic majorities in both chambers) failed to override state certifications as well.

When it comes to determining control of the U.S. House in 2027, the previous House and its leadership are not a factor; the old House literally ceases to exist on January 3. The key figure in the interim is House Clerk Kevin McCumber, who prepares a roster of duly elected House members based on state certifications, swears them in, and then fades back into the woodwork when the new House elects a Speaker. McCumber, a totally nonpartisan professional (much like the Senate parliamentarian), is extremely unlikely to pay any attention to claims (even if they emanate from the White House) that state-certified elections should be disregarded. But as Toobin notes, McCumber could be fired and replaced by Mike Johnson before the old Congress expires:

“One disaster scenario … would be this: After results show the Democrats winning a majority in the House, the president declares that the election is full of fraud and the winners don’t need to be certified. Mr. Trump could then demand that Speaker Mike Johnson fire Mr. McCumber, which Mr. Johnson has the legal right to do.

“Under the procedures of the House, the speaker can install a more compliant successor — that is, a G.O.P. toady. In this scenario, Speaker Johnson’s designee, at Mr. Trump’s instigation, would produce a roll of new House members that included Republicans in races that Democrats believed they had won.”

For this coup to succeed, however, the full House would have to confirm the new clerk that Johnson was seeking to install, which would require extraordinary GOP party discipline. The same is true, by the way, in the Senate, which does not go out of business before the new Congress convenes on January 3 and where the chamber itself is the master of its own membership. If, say, Democrats won a narrow majority per state certifications and a majority of the senators already in office voted not to seat the key Democratic winner, Republicans could maintain control, at least temporarily.

These scenarios arguably explain why Trump is putting so much emphasis on making support for the SAVE America Act and its underlying conspiracy theories a litmus test for Republicans. He’ll need monolithic party backing to prevent a state-certified Democratic takeover of either congressional chamber.

Without much question, Trump is also laying the groundwork for challenging certification of Democratic winners on the front end of the process. But in the recent past, the federal courts have been very aggressive about forcing certifications absent concrete evidence of fraud, Toobin notes:

“Since 2020, more than 30 local officials in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina and Pennsylvania have refused to certify election results, many in hopes of forestalling Democratic victories.

“If there are similar delays and refusals after Nov. 3 — and there probably will be — [Democrats have] a simple answer: sue. In past years, Democrats have had success in winning court rulings that force local officials to certify results, and they’ll probably win these kinds of cases again — albeit with the usual delays and uncertainty that always accompany litigation.”

So this year, as in 2020, unless Republicans beat the odds and retain control of both the House and Senate, we can expect guerrilla warfare in the courts, on the airways and the internet, and perhaps even in the streets before a climactic final battle in January. Because of all the hurdles Team Trump would need to overcome to flip the results, the 2026 edition of election denial will probably amount to just another opportunity to store up manufactured grievances for the next election cycle. The extraordinary energy the president is putting into efforts to discredit an election that hasn’t even happened yet, however, should serve as a warning of a possible crisis well on its way.

From “The Left-Wing Unicorn Hunt for the White Male Working-Class Voter” by Victor Davis Hanson at townhall.com:

The last Democratic candidate to appeal to the white working-class voter was Bill Clinton. He needed every one of those voters in his 1992 and 1996 races. Yet he still failed to win 50 percent of the popular vote because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy.

Since then, the Democratic brand has lost the white working-class vote in nearly every presidential election. Yet this demographic still makes up 40 percent of the electorate and registers and votes at much higher rates than non-white groups.

Apparently, during the Biden-era influx of 10 million illegal aliens, Democrats really believed their own slogans about an “Emerging Democratic Majority” and how “Demography is destiny.” They therefore confidently abandoned most efforts to recruit white working-class voters.

In 2017, the then-neocon—and now leftist Zohran Mamdani supporter—Bill Kristol (who has advocated abolishing ICE altogether) spoke of the need to open the borders to replace the “lazy” American worker: “Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in?”

Kristol then characterized this apparently dispensable group as “decadent, lazy, spoiled.”

And yet, until the novelty of Barack Obama’s candidacy and the demographic overconfidence it inspired, Democrats regularly lamented that, aside from the moderate Bill Clinton interlude, their steady leftward turn was becoming both irreversible and electorally costly.

More here.