On its website, Impact Research touts its ability to “elect Democratic candidates at all levels – from the White House and Congress to state houses and city halls.” It lists among its clients, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Sheldon Whitehouse. Their poll of the South Carolina race was done on behalf of Andrews’ campaign.

The non-partisan and highly regarded Canadian firm, Abacus Data, shows a very different state of play. Whereas, Impact Research shows Andrews narrowly leading 42 percent to 39 percent, Abacus Data has Graham comfortably ahead 55 percent to 42 percent.

Back in May, I predicted that then-incumbent Lindsey Graham could lose this seat to Andrews. I believe that is even more true of his little sister. But if I had to choose which of the above polls is more objective, I’d choose the non-partisan one even if it is Canadian firm. If Canada has a bias right now, it’s against Donald Trump’s Republican Party, so there is no incentive to artificially boost Darline Graham’s prospects.

Having said that, my instinct is that the race is competitive.

If Darline Graham were to win this election by 13 points, as Abacus currently predicts, very few people would be surprised given the Republican-leaning reputation of the Palmetto State. But consider that Lindsey Graham won reelection in 2020 by a mere 10 points. That wasn’t a great cycle for the GOP, but Trump did carry South Carolina by over 11 points. I don’t think if the president were on the ballot there this November he would do half as well as he did six years ago, and I doubt Graham would either.

In 2020, Lindsey faced Jaime Harrison, a Black candidate who had chaired the state’s Democratic Party from 2013 to 2017. Both Harrison’s race and his high profile as a Democratic partisan operative worked against him in conservative South Carolina. This time, Darline faces a white candidate who has no preexisting partisan profile in state politics.

In 2020, there was a third party candidate, Bill Bledsoe of the Constitution Party, but he attracted only 1.3 percent of the vote. This time there will also be a Libertarian Party candidate, Kasie Whitener, who received a more significant six percent in the Impact Research poll and appears to be part of the three percent who chose “someone else” in the Abacus Data survey.

One major question bearing on the outcome of this contest is what Republicans who don’t support Darline Graham will do. In the recent multi-candidate Republican primary, Graham won a weak plurality with 33 percent of the vote, meaning two-thirds of the voters preferred someone else. Second place went to Rep. Ralph Norman (25 percent). When a runoff was held between them, Graham narrowly won 52 percent to 48 percent.

Norman bitterly blamed Trump for his defeat and just asked his voters on Monday to write him in on the ballot rather than cast a vote for Graham.

Inevitably, a certain percentage of Norman’s supporters will do just that. Others will cast a ballot for the Libertarian or Constitution Party candidates. Some will stay home.

As for the broader right-leaning electorate of South Carolina, including all the folks who did not participate in the primaries, there will be more crossover votes to Andrews than there were for Harrison in 2020. This is in part because Andrews is a less polarizing candidate than Harrison was, but also because Darline Graham is not as compelling or as credentialed as her older brother. She’s a political novice, and it shows in her admitted lack of knowledge about foreign affairs and domestic policy.

Frankly, it would be shocking if she were able to do better against Andrews in 2026 than Lindsey did against Harrison in 2020.

Black turnout is one additional and critical factor to consider. With Harrison on the ballot six years ago, there was probably a bit of a boost in Black turnout, and perhaps that same enthusiasm won’t manifest for Andrews. But I have a feeling it will, primarily in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act and allow many southern states to do mid-decade redistricting for the sole purpose of eliminating Black-represented seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. While South Carolina Republicans didn’t take advantage of this opportunity, it is still a sore subject there that will galvanize voter turnout operations in the state’s Black community.

So, no I can’t take the Impact Research poll showing Andrews already in the lead as an objective and reliable measure of the current state of play in this contest. But I actually find their result a bit more plausible than the Abacus Data poll. The truth, I suspect, is somewhere in-between. I think the race is a toss-up and the factors that will ultimately decide it haven’t happened yet.

Normally, I’d warn against putting much importance on the cross tabs of a poll, since subsamples of a survey are usually so small that the margins of error are astronomical. But this poll has an exceptionally large number of respondents, and the point is to look at the subsamples.

The huge sample size can also give us more comfort about the accuracy of the top-line results.

In a way, I’m less interested in how various groups feel about the renaming of Lake Ontario than I am about what the cross tabs can tell us about how people answer political surveys in general.

But let me begin with the fact that you have to be some kind of special asshole to answer that you support the name change. I could give you a long presentation about how the lake got the name “Ontario” and what it means and why it matters, but I’d be telling you things most people didn’t know when they answered the question.

What people knew was that the name was imposed by Donald Trump as a way to intimidate and punish Canada. If you think Canada needs to be punished and intimidated, you’re an asshole. If you think renaming a lake is a good way to accomplish this, you’re a special kind of asshole. Full stop.

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Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia entered this election cycle with every reason to tack to the political middle.

He is the only Senate Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump carried in 2024, making him one of the most vulnerable incumbents in his party and an obvious Republican target from the start.

But Mr. Ossoff hasn’t moderated his votes or his message to appeal to a broader swath of voters, as Democrats in competitive statewide races often do in the conservative-leaning South. Instead, he has dived into his party’s efforts to thwart the president’s agenda in Congress, and sharpened his attacks on Mr. Trump and Republicans on the campaign trail.

President Donald Trump’s national approval numbers in August have seen him most often opposed by more than six in ten Americans and supported by fewer than four in ten. Sen. Jon Ossoff’s most recent polls show him leading his Republican opponent Mike Collins by eight or nine points.

A March survey from Emerson College Polling found Trump’s approval in Georgia underwater at 42 percent-51 percent. In May, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll found Trump down 40 percent-56 percent. A Fox News poll from May found that “Georgians are 6 points more likely to say they are extremely or very concerned that Collins is too close to Trump (53%) than that Ossoff is too liberal (47%).” The same survey in June, found Trump’s disapproval at 56 percent.

Fox News also found that “nearly a quarter of non-MAGA Republicans say they will back the Democrat compared to just 4% of MAGA supporters.”

I’m not saying Jamison is wholly off-base in making this statement:

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A better comparison to Trump is the 2nd Century emperor, Commodus, who ruled from 177 CE until he was strangled by his personal trainer on New Year’s Eve in 192 CE. The two have a shocking amount in common.

Commodus really should have turned out better considering that his father was Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic philosopher and generally considered both in his own time and in ours as one of the best of Rome’s emperors. Aurelius named Commodus, then only 15 years old, as his co-emperor in 177 CE and the son took sole possession of power in 180 when his father died.

At first, he had little interest in matters of state and relied on more experienced hands to tend to many administrative duties. But then something traumatic happened. In 182 CE, his older sister Lucilla led an assassination plot against him.

She recruited a young senator named Claudius Pompeianus Quintianus for the job. Knowing that Commodus would be visiting the Colosseum to see the games, Quintianus lay in wait inside a dark entrance tunnel the emperor and his entourage used to enter and exit the games without interacting with the public. Leaping out armed with a sword or dagger, he announced, "See! This is what the Senate sends you!" But the emperor’s bodyguards tackled and disarmed him before he could strike.

Under questioning, Quintianus quickly revealed the plot, including Lucilla’s role, and then was just as swiftly executed. Commodus’s response to nearly losing his life was immediate and brutal, but also transformative and long-lasting.

He banished Lucilla to the island of Capri, but soon after sent a centurion to kill her. Convinced that a Deep State elite cabal was against him, he had dozens of prominent senators, military commanders, and magistrates summarily executed without formal trials.

Thereafter, his behavior became increasingly erratic.

Believing that the Gods must have protected him from death and therefore favored him, he declared himself the reincarnation of Hercules, began wearing a lion skin and carrying a wooden club, and erected massive marble statues of himself throughout the empire as a god.

He renamed the twelve months of the year after his own titles, renamed the Roman Senate the “Commodian Fortunate Senate,” renamed the military legions the “Commodian Legions,” and officially renamed Rome itself “Colonia Commodiana.”

If this were not enough, he took on the role of a gladiator. He competed in the Colosseum, charging the state astronomical fees for every appearance. Sometimes he would slaughter exotic animals from a safe and elevated platform. Sometimes he would fight gladiators who were armed only with wooden or dulled weapons.

The historian Cassius Dio, an eyewitness, recorded that the Senate was forced to attend and chant divine praises to Commodus. On one occasion, the emperor decapitated an ostrich, walked over to the senatorial seating area and held up the bleeding head in one hand and his sword in the other, signaling that he could sever their heads just as easily.

The breaking point came on New Year’s Eve, 192 CE, when he told his mistress Marcia that he intended to do something a little different at the traditional New Year’s Day parade.

The 3rd-century historian Herodian reported that Commodus told Marcia that he would break custom and not march out of the imperial palace in purple robes to join the Senate and other officials for the procession. Instead, he intended to sleep in the gladiatorial barracks and lead the parade directly from the Colosseum. He would dress as a gladiator and be surrounded by gladiators.

Marcia was appalled. She begged him to reconsider. She argued that he’d disgrace himself by associating in this way with slaves. But this only angered Commodus. He was further enraged when he discovered that his Praetorian Prefect and his chamberlain agreed with Marcia.

He then retreated to his bedroom and wrote down a hit list on a tablet. At the top of the list were Marcia, the Prefect and the chamberlain. Afterwards, he took a bath, leaving the tablet on his bed. A servant inadvertently handed the tablet to Marcia, and she realized that she was marked for death.

The three of them then came up with a quick plan. Marcia gave Commodus a cup of wine heavily spiked with poison, which he drank. But he quickly began vomiting and they worried that he would purge the poison before it could kill him. So, they went to a backup plan. They bribed Commodus’s personal trainer to strangle him, which he did.

Now, consider the case of Trump. He came to power much less interested in the workings of government than the trappings of power, and initially left most of the governing work to more experienced hands. But then a series of existential threats transformed him. He faced the Mueller investigation and two impeachment trials, convincing him that an elite Deep State cabal was out to get him. Then, once out of office, he faced a barrage of legal indictments from this cabal that threatened to land him in prison for the rest of life. Finally, while running for office again, he not only narrowly survived an assassination attempt but was reelected.

In combination, these threats and his ability to survive them convinced him of two things. First, he must smash the Deep State and exact harsh punishment on his enemies, and second that God must favor him or he would have been killed by his would-be assassin.

Since he could not trust experienced hands, he would govern through his own gut and with the assistance of sycophants. Since God favored him, he would erect monuments to himself, name things after himself, cover everything in gold, and force the people to view him as a living god.

Rather than playing the role of a dignified statesman to impress elites he could focus on entertaining and impressing the masses or plebians by hosting pro-wrestling matches and auto races, much like Commodus took on the role of a gladiator.

But this doesn’t alleviate his paranoia or his desire to hold absolute power over his enemies. He moves to purge his opposition within the military and Justice Department, and to seed loyalists throughout the civil service. He expects the judiciary to bend to his will, and he treats the Senate as his servants. He looks to rig the electoral system and openly muses about illegally running for a third term.

Whether in ancient Rome or a modern America, the dynamic here is identical. A leader, drunk with power, paranoia, a thirst for vengeance and a belief that he is favored by the Gods, dissolves into megalomania and foregoes the responsibility of governance in favor of self-aggrandizement and the pursuit of total control.

What so far distinguishes Trump from Commodus is that when he accuses someone of treason they are not executed without trial. When he seeks to rig elections or seek a third term, it doesn’t happen without a fight. He does not have the power of a Roman Emperor, and so he is still constrained. But this is not by his choice. Everything about him suggests he seeks the power of Commodus so that he can act like Commodus. There’s nothing about his character or his current mental health that suggests that he’d be any more restrained or responsible if given that power.

So, yes, he is not a modern-day Caligula. He is a modern-day Commodus.

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If you’re reading this newsletter, I am assuming you are generally familiar with the House Freedom Caucus. For this reason, I am not going to waste too time describing it. Suffice to say, it was founded in January 2015 with Rep. Jim ‘Gym’ Jordan as its first chief, and that one of its initial goals was to oust John Boehner as Speaker of the House. Boehner resigned that September.

Looking back two years later, Boehner told Vanity Fair:

"They can't tell you what they're for. They can tell you everything they're against. They're anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That's where their mindset is."

While that was a fair description of the group’s basic nihilism, it’s not entirely true that the Freedom Caucus believes in nothing. The group can fairly be described as deficit hawks, but that’s highly negotiable if it’s a Republican administration running up debts and deficits. They’re very socially conservative and have strange fixations, like drag queens reading to children in public libraries. And they hate immigrants with the heat of a thousand suns.

The nucleus of the original group was a driving force in the government shutdowns and near-defaults of the government’s credit rating during the Obama administration, a strategy that Boehner detested but was compelled to lead.

As bad as the Freedom Caucus was in the Obama Era, they morphed into something truly toxic when they merged with Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. Their antics caused two more Republican Speakers of the House, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, to come to grief, all for the sin of trying to govern with a minimal sense of responsibility which required at least some small measure of compromise with the Democrats.

At the end of President Joe Biden’s first year in office, the group sought to expand its influence to the states. A veteran Republican strategist named Andy Roth set up a national organization called The State Freedom Caucus Network. They now have caucuses in 15 state legislatures where members compete with “traditional” Republicans. The network formally got in involved in Wyoming in January 2023, but it found a preexisting organization to work with that was established in December 2020.

Conservative members of the Wyoming House of Representatives have created a caucus to negotiate with House Republican leadership, two members of the group told WyoFile this week.

The group calls itself the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, has somewhere between 18-20 votes in the 60-member House of Representatives and was formed at a September meeting in Story following the primary election, Rep. Tim Hallinan (R-Gillette) and Rep. Dan Laursen (R-Powell) said.

After the 2024 elections, the Wyoming Freedom Caucus gained a majority in the state’s House of Representatives and controlled every leadership position. It also gained control of the Wyoming GOP, putting it at odds with Gov. Mark Gordon.

This conflict became acute during the 2005-2006 legislative session.

Traditional Wyoming Republicans like Gov. Gordon are extremely conservative. They focus on coal, oil, and gas extraction, ranching rights, low taxes, and limiting federal oversight of state affairs. But they also support state-backed infrastructure projects, investment in public education and economic development agencies like the Wyoming Business Council.

The Freedom Caucus had a different approach. Heedless of the constitutional requirement for a balanced budget, they sought property tax cuts so deep that they necessitated massive cuts to state agencies, infrastructure investments, public education (including the university system) and public assistance programs. This agenda was opposed not only by the traditional Republicans who remained in the legislature and controlled the Senate, but also the governor.

The Freedom Caucus also brought a litany of socially conservative obsessions to the fore, many of which aligned with President Trump’s MAGA movement. These included attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs at the state’s universities, stricter voter registration and election rules, restrictions on books with LGBTQ themes in public libraries, the elimination of gun-free zones, and new strict abortion bans.

The conflict between the governor and the traditionalists on one side and the Freedom Caucus on the other devolved into a petty war. It was particularly heated on the Joint Appropriations Committee which had to produce a budget on a constitutionally-mandated timeline.

The Freedom Caucus-controlled House wanted to defund the Wyoming Business Council and strip $40 million from the University of Wyoming but this was opposed by the traditionalist-controlled Senate. Rather than trying to hash out these and other differences in conference, the Freedom Caucus chose to attack the traditionalists by introducing countless poison pill amendments on the floor of the House.

While the Freedom Caucus eventually backed down and the legislature ultimately met the deadline and avoided a disruption of vital services, the protracted fight meant that countless bills never got a hearing and uncertainty about possible cuts and other changes caused massive anxiety along business leaders and the general public alike.

Both sides left highly frustrated. The Freedom Caucus licked its wounds and focused on winning a majority in the Senate and a supermajority in the House, while the traditionalists organized to take on incumbent Freedom Caucus members in the upcoming primary election. One thing the traditionalists did that was smart was to make sure they settled on supporting one challenger so they could get a one-on-one contest against Freedom Caucus incumbents. This was important because Wyoming doesn’t do runoff elections so a politician can win even with a tiny plurality.

On Tuesday, the people of Wyoming rendered their verdict. The Freedom Caucus lost six caucus-aligned lawmakers in the Senate and was left with just five reliable votes. It lost 13 House incumbents, including a former chairman of the Caucus and their House floor leader. An additional nine Freedom Caucus-aligned challengers were defeated. This wasn’t even the full measure of its humiliation.

A number of Freedom Caucus-aligned lawmakers decided to leave their seats in the Legislature to run for state executive offices. [Rachel] Williams, the caucus chair, lost her race for secretary of state to Republican Robert Short. Rep. Scott Smith failed in his bid for state treasurer. And Rep. Tom Kelly, who is not a member but often votes with the group, came in second for state superintendent of public instruction. Non-Freedom Caucus candidates won in all of their districts.

This was a total wipeout. The voters of Wyoming got an opportunity to see what the Freedom Caucus would do if given actual power and they were absolutely repulsed.

Now, some might say this was all about local politics and has no implications for the 2026 federal midterm elections. In support of this, they might point out that at the same time Wyoming voters were annihilating the state Freedom Caucus, they were also nominating a Freedom Caucus-aligned member, Chuck Gray, for the state’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and Rep. Harriet Hageman, a Trump-endorsed MAGA-type for the U.S. Senate.

That’s a flawed argument. Gray won the nomination with 75 percent of the voters supporting other candidates. Because the traditionalists didn’t settle on one opponent, they lost this battle, but that doesn’t mean the people wanted Gray any more than they wanted the more than two dozen Freedom Caucus candidates on the ballot that they rejected. As for Hageman, she may not be too distinct from Wyoming Freedom Caucus members on many things, but while serving in DC she has not been a member of the Freedom Caucus. She is a well-established and well-funded political with strong name recognition and her own political brand.

Perhaps it’s true that Wyoming Republicans hate the Freedom Caucus at home where their radicalism is disruptive and gores their ox but don’t mind its tactics when applied in Washington DC because they feel insulated from the fallout and it annoys people they dislike.

However that may be, I do believe that this emphatic rejection of the Freedom Caucus by one of the most conservative electorates in the country (Wyoming Republican primary voters) is a massive warning sign for MAGA-aligned Republicans running nationally in the midterms. It indicates a deep frustration among even very conservative Republican voters with their lack of effectiveness and their ideological extremism.

This will manifest itself most likely in low turnout. We already know there are a lot of voters who are members of the Cult of Trump and simply won’t participate if he’s not on the ballot, but there are a lot of mainstream or “traditional” Republicans who have supported MAGA and Freedom Caucus members in the past but are not going to do it again. They’ve seen the results.

Looking past the midterms, there’s one additional lesson from Wyoming that I think is important. The traditionalists there lost control of their legislature because they were complacent and never saw the Freedom Caucus threat coming. But they quickly got organized in conjunction with state business leaders and they were very smart and strategic about how the recruited challengers and cleared the field for them. They rooted out the infection very thoroughly, and on the first try.

As the GOP moves beyond Trump and MAGA in 2028, this can be a national model for their primaries. They can help the rest of us root out these bastards. I hope they do.

Yet even as he made this promise, his grasp of the subject looked purely aesthetic. He’d pause mid-rally to treat the word “groceries” like a shiny new object he’d just stumbled upon, marveling at it as an “old-fashioned” and “beautiful term” that “sort of means a bag with different things in it,” as if explaining the concept of food shopping to an alien.

Then came the victory lap. Right after the election, during a December Meet the Press interview, Trump laid out his “grocery” campaign strategy with breathtaking candidness. He openly boasted about using the word like a magical political cheat code, telling host Kristen Welker: “I went on groceries. It’s a very simple word, groceries. Like almost, you know, who uses the word? I started using the word—the groceries... And I won an election based on that.” In his mind, repeating a three-syllable word endlessly on the stump wasn’t just a rhetorical tactic; it was the key to defeating Kamala Harris. I’m not sure he was entirely wrong.

The trouble, of course, is that chanting a word he barely understands like an incantation isn’t the same thing as understanding global supply chains and other causes of food inflation. We are now nearly two years into his second term, and the magic has completely worn off. Groceries aren’t cheaper. If anything, basic staples, especially ground beef, which has been hovering near $7 a pound, are burning an even bigger hole in voters’ pockets. The White House’s own internal polling tells them the electorate is furious about food affordability, and the president’s team is growing increasingly anxious about this ahead of the midterms.

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The data I looked at was demographic. I began by looking at the racial makeup of the state and how different racial groups were voting in the present. Then I looked at estimates of racial growth over time, with Latinos obviously projected to become a greater share of the electorate in each new four-year presidential cycle. Finally, I looked at turnout differential among racial groups. Latinos turned out at much lower rates than other races. This was a variable I could tinker with to see how much Latino growth would need to grow to accelerate the flip.

I long ago lost track of this research, but I remember the conclusion. I projected Texas would turn blue in 2028, with 2024 being possible if Latino turnout began to match that of whites.

I remember my motivation for doing the study. I wanted an absolute end date for the conservative takeover of the Republican Party. In my mind at the time, despite the so-called “browning of America,” the GOP would continue to move to the right for as long as it could. It would even keep on that trajectory through multiple presidential election defeats in a row. Initially, their response to defeat would be to racially polarize the electorate as much as possible to maximize their share of the white vote. This might or might not work, but they’d keep it up until it no longer had any Electoral College viability.

The end of its viability as a strategy would be undeniable when Texas fell to the Democrats. At that point, the GOP would have to begin a process of reinventing itself by moving away from modern conservatism.

The 2028 projection was solid but it was dependent on the Democrats maintaining the same level of support in the Texas Latino community that they were getting in the first decade of this century. I figured this was a safe bet if the GOP was focused less on asking for their support than demonizing them to increase their share of the white vote. I turned out to be wrong about that, and Donald Trump made major inroads with Latinos in Texas in his 2024 reelection bid. As a result, he romped to victory in the state by a 56 percent to 42 percent margin over Kamala Harris.

If Texas Latino voting preference doesn’t snap back toward the historical norm, based on that variable alone, the Democrats won’t meet my 2028 projection. In that case, to win, the Democrats would need a much higher share of the white vote. However, everything now predicts that this voting preference has already snapped back.

In any case, as we approach the 2026 midterms, we’re right in the sweet spot I identified for a political red/blue flip. I don’t know how well differential population growth matched what I projected, and I assume it turned out at least somewhat different than expected. But I am not surprised that we’ve entered the zone where a statewide election in the Lone Star State is a considered a toss-up. I thought it would happen in 2028 but could happen as early as 2026.

I wasn’t considering midterms when I did this analysis because I didn’t think the GOP would abandon modern conservatism based simply on losing control of Congress. But, truth be told, I did see control of Texas as the tipping point.

There are obvious limits to this kind of long-term projection. Elections are not decided solely through some kind of racial determinism. Candidate quality, economic conditions, technological change, the state of the world and other unknowns are factors that can change racial voting patterns. But as a blunt instrument, I think I did okay using this method to predict the future.

I certainly nailed that the GOP would not respond to an ever-increasing growth in minority populations by making concessions to racial pluralism, but instead would focus on increasing their share of the white vote by encouraging whites to behave as an identity group that aligns with them. In this sense, I predicted the MAGA movement before it ever occurred to me that Trump might become a serious politician.

What I couldn’t quite see is that the party would have to contort itself to pursue this strategy, such that it has already drifted away from a lot of traditional modern conservatism. It become more economically populist, lost interest in reforming entitlements or limiting debt and deficits, and (until the Iran intervention) began to pursue a more isolationist foreign policy.

Some of this actually helped it gain a greater share of the minority vote and extended (if only temporarily) the life of conservatism even as they attacked diversity with more fervor.

But here we are. Nate Silver is discussing whether Texas could turn blue in 2026. In the U.S. Senate matchup between Democratic state Rep. James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton, Silver’s model gives Talarico a roughly 60 percent chance of victory.

Depending on the day, our midterms model, FLIPR, characterizes the Texas Senate race this year either as “toss-up” or as “leans Democratic”. We employ these buckets because some of our readers seem more comfortable with them than with percentages, but they are defined mathematically. We describe a race as a “toss-up” when neither party has greater than a 60 percent chance of winning. Texas has been teetering right around that threshold, with Talarico bouncing around within the 59 to 61 percent range since model launch.

His model combines polling data, fundamental economic and political indicators, and qualitative expert ratings. It certainly matters that Paxton is a flawed candidate and Trump has abysmal approval ratings. It matters that gas and food prices are high and we’re in an unpopular war with Iran. It matters that Talarico is a telegenic and likable personality who doesn’t shy away from his strong Christian faith and has raised an ungodly amount of money. It matters that we’re in the midst of an artificial intelligence technological revolution that is of great concern to the electorate. These are factors specific to this time or this contest that could not have been predicted nearly 20 years ago.

I don’t know when Texas will turn blue but it’s already purple. It may fall to the Democrats in 2026 or it may take a little longer. It may flip back and forth through a couple cycles. But when Texas finally leaves the red column for good, it won’t come back. It will be like Virginia. Not un-winnable for the GOP in a perfect storm kind of year, but generally safer and safer for the Democrats with each passing cycle until the GOP stops its white identity project and pivots into a party that accepts diversity as a fait accompli.

And when this happens, it will happen for the whole party nationally, because there is no version of the Electoral College map that works for the Republicans if Texas is not red. This is the day that I began pining for back around 2008, and I just hope to live to see the day that what began with Barry Goldwater and broke through with Ronald Reagan can finally reach its end point and maybe we can stop suffering as a country.

The headline writers at the Grey Lady got the basics right: “Can Democrats Win Back the Senate? Why Their Chances Are Improving.” Balk, however, did not nail the basics.

A graphic that accompanies the piece is telling. It includes only nine competitive races. This accurately reflects Balk’s analysis in the article. Here’s the list: Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, Maine and Alaska.

Now, I am going to stipulate two things up front. First, polls during primary season for the midterms have been atrocious, and there are a lot of bad faith polls floating around that should be discounted or outright dismissed. Just because one poll exists showing a race closer than expected doesn’t mean a race is necessarily competitive. And polls of Senate races have been sparse. In some cases there are none and in other cases the most recent is months old.

Second, technically, there are races (e.g., Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho and Montana) where the Republicans’ most serious opponents are not to members of the Democratic Party but instead independents. These candidates can be cagey or even outright deny that they will caucus with the Democrats if they win, but they will all caucus with the Democrats if they win unless they don’t want any committee seats. If any of these races can be considered competitive, they should be on any list considering the Democrats’ chances of winning control of the Senate. Still, I recognize that these candidates, like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Angus King, are not formally members of the Democratic Party.

With those caveats out of the way, Balk’s selection of states makes little sense based on the polling that we have.

For example, why are New Hampshire, Georgia and North Carolina on the list but not Minnesota? Two August polls have Democrat Peggy Flanagan leading Republican Michele Tafoya by a mere 5 points in Minnesota.

In New Hampshire, an August 20th St. Anselm College poll has Democrat Rep. Chris Pappas leading Republicans John E. Sununu 48 percent to 41 percent and Scott Brown 49 percent to 37 percent. In Georgia, incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff leads Republican Mike Collins by seven points in the most recent poll. In North Carolina, three August polls show Democratic challenger Gov. Roy Cooper leading Republican Michael Whatley by five, seven and 13 points. There’s no objective reason to consider Minnesota less competitive than these three states and to not include it.

But let’s run through some other states that aren’t included on the list or discussed in the article.

The only August poll out of Kansas has Independent Adam Hamilton trailing incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall by a single point. The most recent poll (from May) out of Nebraska, has independent Dan Osborn leading incumbent Republican Pete Ricketts by five points. An August poll out of Mississippi has Democratic challenger Scott Colum trailing incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by three points. The most recent poll (late July) out of Louisiana has Democratic challenger Jaime Davis trailing Republican Rep. Julia Letlow by four points. In Arkansas, there are two widely divergent August polls, one showing incumbent Republican Sen. Tom Cotton beating Democratic challenger Hallie Shoffner by 15 points and the other showing him trailing her by three.

There’s an argument (in some cases, tenuous) that all of these races are closer than some that Balk discussed.

And there are potentially even more states that should at least be in the conversation. The situation in South Carolina is unsettled. Lindsey Graham died on July 11th. Polling prior to his death showed him in a somewhat tight (five-to-six point) race with Democrat Annie Andrews. Graham’s sister Darline was appointed as his replacement and she’s matched up with Rep. Ralph Norman in an August 25 runoff for the Republican nomination. It’s hard to say which would be easier to defeat but also hard to argue that either of them will be more of a challenge than Lindsey would have presented.

In Florida, I’ve argued that the Democrats have probably lost a chance to seriously contest the seat by passing over Alexander Vindman in favor of Angie Nixon to challenge a very weak Republican incumbent in Ashley Moody. Still, the most recent poll (from mid-July) found Nixon doing modestly better against Moody than Vindman. This race may never have been realistic under any circumstance, but it still bears watching.

Finally, there are weird situations in both Montana and Idaho. In Montana, the race would be a dead heat if it were a two-way race between Republican nominee Kurt Alme and Independent Seth Bodnar. But, unlike in Kansas and Nebraska where there will be no Democrat on the ticket to divide the anti-Republican vote, in Montana Democrat Alani Bankhead stubbornly refused to remove herself from consideration. Her opportunity to do so passed on August 10th. This was almost certainly a fatal blow to the prospect of taking this seat away from the GOP as the most recent poll shows Alme at 45 percent, Bodnar at 30 percent and Bankhead at 15 percent. For this reason, I understand why Balk did not include Montana in his analysis, but the fact that this race is polling the way it is bears on other races in the region. It shows the Republicans’ vulnerability in the prairie states and Mountain West.

That’s important for Nebraska and Kansas, but maybe even for Idaho. Historically, Idaho is one of the most reliably Republican states in the country. In 2024, Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris there 67 percent to 33 percent. Incumbent Republican Sen. Jim Risch won his 2020 reelection bid 63 percent to 33 percent.

After David Roth won the Democratic primary on May 19, the Ada County Democrats sent a letter “warning him that it would consider endorsing [Independent Todd] Achilles if Roth’s campaign didn’t raise $50,000 and put together an election plan by Aug. 12.” Roth dropped out of the race on July 28th, consolidating the anti-Risch vote.

An August 19 memo from the Bullfinch Group states:

Newly released polling data from a statewide survey of likely 2026 voters in Idaho shows Independent candidate Todd Achilles jumping to a 5-point [38 percent to 33 percent] lead over incumbent Republican Senator Jim Risch when voters are offered a direct head-to-head choice.

Take this with a shaker of salt, however. First, this survey was commissioned by Achilles and is therefore highly suspect. Second, even within this survey, it finds Achilles losing by four points to Risch when the choice includes Libertarian candidate Matt Loesby who will be on the ballot. Not included is Natalie Fleming, a software developer who will also be an option for voters and attracted nine percent in a Risch-sponsored August poll that showed the incumbent with a more expected commanding lead over Achilles.

Idaho remains the longest of shots, but since Risch isn’t facing a Democrat, who knows how it will shake out? Discontent with the Republican Party is off the charts even in red states.

Of all the states discussed above, the most egregious omissions from Balk’s discussion are probably Kansas, Nebraska, Mississippi and South Carolina. If I were betting my own money, I’d bet on Nebraska and Kansas falling to the independents.

As for Mississippi and South Carolina, it should be kept in mind that the southern Black community is tremendously motivated to vote in response to the Supreme Court allowing the Repubicans to redraw maps to exclude Black officeholders from the U.S. House of Representatives. They may not be able to salvage these lost House seats with high turnout, but it will have a big effect on statewide Senate elections even in southern states that didn’t redistrict.

Discussing these kinds of defeats for the GOP might seem fanciful until you look at actual election results that have already come in.

A great example came in last week in Butler County, Pennsylvania. This is where Trump was famously shot in the ear. There was a special election for a vacant seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives created when the incumbent Republican, Stephenie Scialabba, resigned to spend more time with her family. There was no hint of scandal. Scialabba won the seat in 2024 by a 65 percent to 35 percent margin while Trump was defeating Kamala Harris 66 percent to 33 percent.

The Democratic candidate Brandon Dukes defeated Republican Scott Timko by 97 votes. Whatever good will Trump had in Butler County after he almost lost his life, it has vanished.

Longtime Butler County resident Susan Collier said she wasn’t completely surprised that voters chose a Democrat over a Republican in a recent special election — even in the traditionally red area.

“I think people are frustrated at the top and so they’re voting this way,” she said Thursday while at the Zelienople library with her two grandchildren. She added some people she knows in the area are so frustrated they either don’t want to discuss politics or become argumentative when they do.

It’s true that discontent with Republicans won’t automatically translate to support for Democrats, particularly in places where the Democratic Party’s brand remains toxic. But that didn’t matter in Butler County, and in races between independents and Republicans, it’s much less of a factor.

So, yes, as Balk reports, the Democrats’ chances of retaking the Senate are improving but they’re improving by a lot more than his reporting indicates. And that assumes that things won’t get worse for the GOP between now and when the voting starts. But I think we all know that things will almost certainly get worse for the GOP.

I get why prognosticators like Charlie Cook and Larry Sabato are cautious about rating historically red Senate seats as competitive based on uneven-quality polling during the summer. But I believe even they will admit that the playing field has the potential to be a lot broader than they’re signaling to reporters like Balk at the moment. And, while Nate Silver is already giving the Democrats a 57 percent chance of taking the Senate, I bet he’s privately more bullish, too.

They can all see how the president is acting. He almost seems to be intentionally hurting his own party’s chances. And he knows he’s in trouble. While campaigning for Darline Graham in South Carolina, he pleaded:

“The problem that we have is, they say that Trump does great when he’s on the ballot, but when he’s not on the ballot, his people don’t come and they don’t vote for senators, congressmen and other Republicans,” Trump said.

“So what I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot. Just come and vote. It’s so important,” he said.

That’s not going to happen. And it won’t help much even if it does, because too many MAGA voters are “frustrated at the top” and the results are already arriving in former massive GOP strongholds like the site of the Trump assassination attempt.

Good analysis won’t tell you who will certainly win, but it will at least give you a full picture of who could. Balk failed this test in a big way.

The new Talk Business & Politics-Hendrix College Poll of 1,217 likely voters shows [Hallie] Shoffner with 47.4% support compared to Sen. Tom Cotton’s 44% and Libertarian Jeff Wadlin’s 3%. Undecided voters stand at 5.6% in the latest statewide survey, which was conducted Aug. 11-12, 2026.

I immediately found something interesting.

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I was initially livid when I saw that State Rep. Angie Nixon had won the primary. This wasn’t because I have any personal animosity towards her but, rather, that she could have been grown in a lab to have the absolute worst possible political profile to win a statewide race in the Sunshine State.

Unlike most political prognosticators, I have believed for at least a year that the Democrats could win this seat. Yes, Florida has drifted so far to the right in recent years that it’s no longer purple. But this is an incredibly bad cycle for the GOP, and their candidate, Sen. Ashley Moody, was appointed to replace Marco Rubio when he resigned to become the Secretary of State. She’s not a seasoned politician with an established successful political machine behind her. She’s beatable.

The reason she has been so heavily favored to win is that the Democrats developed crippling weaknesses in Florida that are difficult to overcome. One is that they actually do not do particularly well with the Latino vote. This has long been the case with the Cuban-American population primarily because the Republicans have traditionally taken a harder line on communism and the communist government in Havana. But hostility to socialism is also a trademark of other Latino exile groups, particularly the growing Venezuelan population.

In 2024, there was a stunning result in Miami-Dade County when Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris 55-44 percent. No Democrat can win statewide in Florida without flipping those results on their head. Someone like Nixon, who associates herself with the socialist label is not going to get that done.

Another traditional source of strength for the Democrats is the Jewish community, especially retired transplants from the northeast. But, particularly among the older Jewish population, there is concern that the Democrats no longer support Israel.

Nixon has done little to alleviate their concerns. In November 2023, she introduced a resolution in the Florida House of Representatives urging an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the safe release of all hostages held by Hamas. It was overwhelmingly rejected by both Republicans and all but two of her fellow Democrats. My point is not that there was anything wrong with Nixon’s resolution, but that her position was a massive outlier at the time.

It’s worth pausing here to allow her to explain her motivation for bringing the resolution:

“I wanted to address the continual demonization of the entire Palestinian community, I filed a resolution denouncing not only Islamophobia, but antisemitism, racism & ethnonationalism as well. It’s literally in the resolution,” Nixon added. “How can I, a Black Woman that is a part of a marginalized and demonized community, sit around and not speak up for innocent lives that had nothing to do with the horrible terroristic actions of Hamas. The entire Palestinian People do not represent Hamas.”

I happen to agree with everything she says here. But that doesn’t mean that I believe she is well-positioned to get a Democrat’s traditional share of the Jewish vote in Florida.

Finally, as a Black candidate, Nixon faces a challenging history. After Reconstruction, there have been only two Black candidates elected as either a senator or a governor in the Deep South: Republican Sen. Tim Scott in South Carolina and Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in Georgia. Unfortunately, whites in the Deep South have rarely been willing to be represented by Blacks. That’s beginning to change and it looks likely that Florida may elect Republican Rep. Byron Donalds as the first-ever Black governor in the Deep South.

Still, it is just an unfortunate fact that racial prejudice will prevent Nixon from having any hope of winning over many otherwise persuadably voters who are deeply unhappy with how the GOP has been running the state and the country.

If being Black in the Deep South, the most prominent advocate of Palestinian rights in that state legislature and a proud socialist weren’t big enough hurdles for Nixon, she also has no money and little hope of raising the kind of money she’ll need to run in an expensive state like Florida.

Some of these things may be unpopular to say out loud, but they’re still true.

The reason I initially hesitated to say them out loud wasn’t fear of being attacked. There was a voice in my head that told me to find out more about Nixon and how she pulled off this gigantic upset. I knew that she must have talent and a good strategy, and that turned out to be absolutely true.

As an old community organizer for ACORN, I have nothing but respect for how Nixon attacked the primary. She put her nose to the grindstone and organized. She was outspent 18-1 by her opponent, retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, and she not only defeated him but actually drubbed him. And she did it in a way not seen by other Democratic Socialist candidates. She didn’t draw primarily from college towns and highly-educated suburbs like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. She did best in the poorest and least educated counties. These are the counties where Democratic Socialism should excel but almost never does.

A second thing I had to reconsider was the comparative electability of Vindman. On paper, he’s vastly better-suited to winning a statewide race than Nixon in Florida. But the primary exposed his weaknesses. First, he’s a transplant who hasn’t done the work to build relationships and loyalty. Second, he did well raising money but he completely misused it by taking the primary for granted and focusing on a general election matchup against Moody. This is also true of his overall messaging, which wasn’t designed to attract the electorate he was actually facing. This shows a degree of hubris and bad judgment, as well as a poor campaign team. Everything else being equal, Nixon proved to be a much better politician with a vastly better staff. When it comes to a general election matchup, these things matter.

So, maybe Vindman wasn’t much of a better alternative and I was overrating his chances.

This could be cold comfort. It most likely means that both Nixon and Vindman were doomed from the beginning.

But I don’t actually believe that. I think the conditions for the Republicans are so bad and are so likely to get worse over the next couple of months, that they should not be favored to win statewide elections in all but the reddest of states. The Democrats don’t need perfect candidates or genius campaign strategists. They just need to be acceptable alternatives. I still think Vindman could have passed that test. With Nixon, I believe it’s all but impossible.

But, if there is a sliver of hope, it comes from witnessing what she just pulled off. No, her primary campaign messaging isn’t translatable to the general. But her organizing prowess and ability to function without money absolutely will be.

Do I think the Democrats just blew a ripe opportunity to win a Senate seat? Yes.

But I’m not nearly as mad about it as I was before I took the time to investigate. Nixon has won the right to give this election her best effort, and I will be rooting for her all the way. I would love to be wrong about how Floridians think and to discover that they actually can get beyond race and labels to support policies that will benefit them.

World War One began in the summer of 1914. The first major battle fought with U.S. troops occurred in May 1918 and the war ended that November. We can argue about whether America got a good deal out of its limited investment considering that a larger much costlier war came later, but one benefit was the massive diminishment of monarchy as the organizing principle of nation-state power. This represented a major step forward for the principle of representative government based at least in part on American principles.

World War Two began in the summer of 1939 and the U.S. didn’t engage in a major combat until three years later at the Battle of Guadalcanal. The war ended just over three years later, with the last combat in August 1945. During the war, the Soviet Union lost 7-9 million soldiers killed in action and including civilian deaths perhaps over 20 million people total. The U.S. lost under 300,000 killed in action and suffered somewhat over 400,000 total military deaths. Civilian casualties were minimal.

In both wars, the US role was critical to success, but the bulk of the fighting was done by our allies. In both cases, our country remained largely intact while the others suffered devastating damage to infrastructure.

After World War Two, America emerged as the most powerful country on Earth and was in a position to set global rules that entrenched and expanded that power. But we quickly discovered some limits, first in Korea and then in Vietnam. One reason our power was limited was because we were not willing to suffer the kind of casualties that our European allies (particularly the Soviet Union) had experienced in the world wars. We’ve never actually mobilized our entire country to fight a war since World War Two, and we won’t unless we’re invaded or bombed.

One thing we got right after World War Two was that we were not going to send millions of our children to Europe to defend against a possible Soviet invasion, and therefore we needed to build military alliances both there and in the Far East to defend against potential warmongering by the USSR. In the latter case, possible Chinese aggression was also a major consideration.

Because this by-and-large worked as a deterrent, America got an inflated sense of its own power. Even getting our butts kicked in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq did not diminish our sense of security. That was only dented, temporarily, by the 9/11 attacks which actually goaded us into exposing our hubris.

The only lesson we seemed to have learned from all of this is that we’re even less inclined than ever to commit our children to foreign conflicts. That’s all left up to volunteers.

My point is that America is and has been powerful, but it’s partly a mirage. And, insomuch as it has been real, it has been dependent on the strength of our military alliances.

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If it happens, and the polls indicate that it will, it will be an example of history rhyming more than repeating.

In April 1932, months before Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the Free State of Anhalt was the first Weimar state to elect a local parliament with a Nazi leader. The Nazi Party won 41 percent of the vote and Anhalt elected Alfred Freyberg as its prime minister in May. It was the beginning of a trend, as Nazi ministers took over in Oldenburg in June, Mecklenburg-Schwerin in July and Thuringia in August, all as precursors to Hitler’s ascension in January 1933.

Freyburg joined the Nazis in 1925, earning the relatively high membership number 5,880. After Hitler’s election, Freyberg joined the Schutzstaffel (SS) with the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer. He served as Anhalt’s top minister until 1939 when he was promoted to Oberbürgermeister of the city of Leipzig mere days before Germany invaded Poland.

Below, you can see a picture of him, his wife and his daughter in his Leipzig office after they all took cyanide to avoid capture by the advancing Soviet army in April 1945.

Once in power, the Nazis vastly reduced unemployment in the region by introducing IG Farben plants to produce synthetic gasoline, rubber and armaments, as well as a plant to produce Junker airplanes. They introduced elite boarding schools designed to train future Nazi leaders and the area was considered exceptionally stable and loyal by the regime right up until its collapse.

Today, Saxony-Anhalt’s nine percent unemployment rate is substantially higher than the national average and the state has the second lowest income in Germany. It’s part of a more general trend of former East Germany parts of the country doing poorly after reunification compared to former parts of West Germany.

For Americans, the present outlook may have an unsettling and familiar feel:

For the AfD’s youthful state leader, Ulrich Siegmund, facts and figures have no place in his campaign, which has been run on feel-good and feel-bad emotions.

The 35-year-old, born a year after the Berlin Wall fell, has 640,000 followers on TikTok, the most of any German politician, and his feed shows why. A particular hit have been clips of rides on vintage Simson-branded motorbikes, once manufactured in East Germany.

“We want to bring back the old German strength,” he promised this week. “A Germany where Christmas markets don’t have to be refashioned as fortresses, where we are safe and where things get better.”

Never mind that Siegmund’s campaign promises are estimated to “blow a €2 billion hole in the annual state budget, €1,000 extra debt per citizen.” No one seems to care if his promises are practical or possibly ruinous. Too few people in the region cared that Hitler’s promises were impractical and possibly ruinous. In both cases, they weren’t happy with the status quo and were willing to listen to any kind of happy talk and scapegoating that promised a better economic future. In some cases, they were willing to overlook obvious signs of evil and in other cases it was the evil itself that attracted them.

There’s really nothing unique about Nazis. They emerge under certain conditions whatever names they might use or particular grievances they might exacerbate and exploit.

Here, it is called MAGA. There, it is called Alternative für Deutschland. It’s all the same, and the results are always disastrous.

But he’s just written an extensive article asking whether or not Dr. Abdul El-Sayed could cost the Democrats a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, without once mentioning that race or religion might play a factor, and that’s inexcusable.

The subtitle of the piece (“Not all progressives are equal: Candidates of the activist left typically don’t perform as well as other Democrats.”) accurately describes his analytical approach.

The piece is rife with throat-clearing caveats, which I think is necessary to avoid obvious criticisms. After all, if the theory is that candidates who are far to the left of center fare worse in general elections, then you have to explain how you categorize candidates. Cohn spends most of his column arguing about these definitions and explaining that statistical models are highly sensitive to them.

In particular, he focuses on three Democratic senators: Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. To his mind, these three are all inarguably progressive, but they each have a different style and therefore present differently to the electorate.

For Cohn, Baldwin is an example of someone who has a very progressive profile but keeps that profile fairly low and doesn’t engage in some of the hot rhetoric you might see about Israel or ICE or the police from members of “The Squad” or aspiring Democratic Socialist candidates. There is no indication that she does worse in elections than a more centrist Democrat would.

By contrast, Warren is very prominent in the media, both legacy and social, and engages is a lot of hot rhetoric. She traditionally does substantially worse in Massachusetts elections than expected.

I’m not sure why Booker is included at all, both because most progressives consider him a centrist and because Cohn doesn’t really develop a theory of his electoral performance.

In any case, his general point is that having a progressive voting record is distinct from having a progressive brand, and that some progressives take unpopular positions that other progressives downplay or avoid. The importance of Warren is that she gets away with underperforming because Massachusetts is so blue that it gives her a margin, but this margin wouldn’t be available to someone like Baldwin who represents Wisconsin, a much more competitive state. Likewise, El-Sayed might not have the margin in Michigan to campaign in Warren’s style.

And that’s a fair point. But it’s a fair point that would apply to a white, Christian Democratic candidate named Bob Smith or Amy Jones. The Associated Press reacted more realistically to El-Sayed’s successful nomination:

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Essentially, he’s making a fine-grained distinction between how young and old Democrats feel about insurgent versus establishment party figures on the one hand, and how they divide up from an ideological perspective on the other hand.

Morris is fighting back against the narrative that the success of insurgent candidates (or, I guess we could call them “socialist”candidates) is driven by the youth vote.

What he finds in the data is that older Democrats are pretty much just as positive about figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani as younger voters. What’s starkly different is how these two age groups feel about establishment figures like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. The older voters are much less dissatisfied with the party’s current leaders than the younger voters.

So, I guess this comes down to mood over ideology. Older Democrats are fine with socialist candidates. They give them good marks on the 0-100 “feeling thermometer” scale. But they also are comparatively warm on more mainstream or traditional Democrats. I think we can intuit from this that older Democrats are less inclined to vote on a “throw-the-bums-out” basis, so they are friendlier to incumbents and long-serving politicians than younger voters. But that doesn’t mean that they’re hostile to newcomers or people on the far left. It just means that their decision-making when choosing between candidates from both factions is a bit more balanced.

Younger voters may be seem more socialist-friendly, but that may be more about age and newness than ideology. They look at the present landscape and they don’t have much reason to place their faith in the same old leadership that failed to prevent us from getting to this point. They don’t value experience or seniority the way older voters do, and they want people from their generation to represent them in government.

I suspect that young voters would turn against a long-serving socialist in favor of a fresh-faced centrist based on the idea that new is better than old.

I guess the importance of Morris’s finding is that the idea that socialism is much more popular with young voters than old isn’t really validated when you look at how older voters feel about specific socialist politicians.

We can also look at this in a slightly different way. Morris finds “among self-described moderate and conservative Democrats” that Sanders “rates higher than any other current party figure we tested — Obama excepted.”

Those figures are odd. Lowest on the list among moderate and conservative Democrats are Schumer (37 percent), Mamdani (44 percent), Ocasio-Cortez (45 percent) and Jeffries (45 percent). Obviously, Schumer and Jeffries are lumped at the bottom because they’ve been in charge, not because of their perceived ideology.

But why is Sanders so high compared to Mamdani and AOC?

Maybe it’s a New York thing. Perhaps New York politicians are paying some kind of hidden penalty. I don’t know.

But the key for me is that ideology isn’t that predictive of how Democratic politicians are viewed by Democratic voters.

In the most recent high-profile elections, we saw socialist candidates Abdul El-Sayed and Francesca Hong badly underperform their polling numbers, indicating that a lot of Democrats changed their votes late based on perceived electability concerns. Electability is the very opposite of ideological preference. We’re seeing a lot of Democratic voters think in practical terms, and that’s weakening the socialist surge.

This doesn’t mean that voters are opting against socialists because they disagree with their priorities but because they worry that others will reject them. It might be that older voters are more likely than young voters to take this precaution, but I haven’t seen any data on that either way.

Everything about this information indicates that Schumer’s time as a party leader should be at an end. Just as party leaders Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn were forced out of leadership once they reached their eighties, Schumer will face the same fate. What’s interesting is that Jeffries is young and fairly new to leadership, but his time might also be over. Democratic voters don’t seem to driven by anything particularly coherent except a desire to hit the reset button and start over with a whole new crew of leaders.

Mystal is a strong supporter of El-Sayed, but he’s miffed that the Michigan pol can’t seem to articulate a plan for ending conservative control of the nation’s highest court. And the reason this is chafing Mystal so much is because he understands that the Roberts Court, as presently constituted, will kill any progressive legislation that it encounters.

The Supreme Court is the first thing that must be addressed. Because if it is not addressed, then the Supreme Court can and will kill the entire rest of the progressive agenda. El-Sayed supports Medicare for All. So do I. Do you know how quickly the current Supreme Court will overrule a Medicare for All bill passed by Congress? Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch will get into a fistfight in the high court cafeteria over who gets the honor of punting Medicare for All into the sun…

…The Supreme Court, as currently constituted, will not allow Democrats to tackle this country’s problems. If you don’t believe me just read literally any of its rulings this decade when it comes to voting rights, labor rights, women’s rights, gun rights, or the limits on presidential power. The Supreme Court is not hiding the ball on its agenda. At some point, Democrats must read the memo the court has repeatedly sent them.

The reason it makes sense for Mystal to make an example of El-Sayed is because it’s important to get everyone focused on the fact that we can’t keep any campaign promises or make any sweeping legislative reforms if they’ll just be arbitrarily and dishonestly ruled unconstitutional by a rabidly right-wing court.

But the reason I think Mystal is picking on El-Sayed too much is because it’s really not vital that he personally develop the plan for reform, or even that he’s particularly conversant on the options.

Let’s start at the beginning.

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In 2020, Collins defeated her Democratic challenger Sara Gideon by a healthy 51.0 percent (417,645 votes) to 42.4 percent (347,223 votes) margin. This was an upset, as Collins had trailed in the polls all year long. The final average of polls for Real Clear Politics had Gideon ahead by 5.5 percent, while FiveThirtyEight had Gideon leading by 4.1 percent. That Collins won was a bit surprising but not a shock. But no one foresaw her drubbing Gideon by nearly nine points.

A lot of effort went into trying to figure out why the pollsters were so wrong. One leading theory had to do with the differing responses to the COVID-19 crisis between conservatives and everyone else. Voters who trusted public institutions and isolated at home skewed heavily Democratic were substantially more likely to pick up the phone or participate in survey panels. This exacerbated a preexisting problem with Trump-aligned conservatives being less likely to answer pollsters dating back to 2016.

Another factor, discovered by pollsters for Colby College, was that split-ticket (Biden-Collins) voters also turned out to be less responsive than average. I’m not sure there’s a developed theory that explains that phenomenon, but it showed up in the polling autopsy.

Sampling error was also responsible. Overall telephone response rates have collapsed in recent years, leading to more reliance on opt-in online polls, which also seem to skew Democratic. To account for this, pollsters adjusted using age, gender and educational attainment, but not geography within the state of Maine. This led to an under-sampling of northern Maine which is rural, conservative and Collins’ home base.

Same-day registration is allowed in Maine, which turned out to be consequential. The reason is that pollsters tended to discount the likelihood that presently unregistered voters would cast a ballot, but there was larger than expected last-minute participation, and it skewed very heavily in Collins’ favor. In general, late deciders went her way to a degree that was couldn’t be predicted based on data alone.

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I don’t care if you consider yourself a moderate or radical. Maybe you want the workers to own the means of production or maybe you just want some kind of return to normalcy. Maybe you care about whether or not biological boys can play women’s sports or what bathroom they use, or maybe that’s somewhere near to last on your list of concerns. Maybe you want a universal health care system or maybe you think that’s impractical or unrealistic.

I have my own ideological preferences and pet causes, but I generally write little about them because my focus is on something more consequential. I believe there are almost no issues, social, economic, military, diplomatic or legal that won’t get worse under Republican leadership.

I have been writing about American politics since the beginning of President George W. Bush’s second term, and the entire time I have been warning that the conservative movement is undemocratic and fascist in its trajectory, and that it will only get worse and worse until everything breaks.

My allies are the people who are willing and able to put every other threat and every other interest aside, at least for a time, to join the fight against modern-day conservatives. In return, I don’t pick on people on the left who hold positions I don’t agree with unless I think they are seriously imperiling the cause. I take this so seriously that I believe even longtime readers, some of whom have been with me for two full decades, have no idea that I have some unorthodox ideas that don’t align with progressive politics. So far, it hasn’t served my interests to share them as I have no interest in division in this fight.

There’s an entire type of progressive writer that takes an entirely opposite approach, constantly haranguing others on the left for impurity, unorthodoxy, radicalism, or some other perceived sin. I can assure you, based on long experience, that this is the better way to get more attention, more followers (including haters), more clicks, more influence and more revenue.

I’d like all those things (except the haters) but I’m not in this for anything other than the fight.

One thing I like about Robert Reich is that he gets up every morning and wades into this fight. And, despite not agreeing with him on many things, I don’t go after him because we need dawgs in this fight and he’s a dawg.

In his latest newsletter, Reich attacks part of the left (sort of ), which ordinarily would strike me as a misuse of time. But this is an exception. He’s actually defending the left against attacks from Third Way, which is only nominally on the left.

The New York Times describes Third Way as “a leading centrist Democratic group.” But, as Reich points out, the organization is funded almost entirely by its Board of Trustees, and the Board of Trustees is made up almost entirely from powerful and extremely rich people in the world of high finance. Reich provides a list, and it’s just a bunch of hedge fund managers, venture capitalists and big time bankers.

It should surprise no one that they’re readying to go to war with Democratic Socialists.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism.

As you might expect, I consider this a gigantic misuse of time and resources. Instead of focusing on winning the midterm elections by going after Republican office-seekers, Third Way is focused on starting a big fight within the anti-Republican coalition.

Maybe you don’t like Democratic Socialists either. Maybe you think some of their more radical positions will cause the Democrats to lose winnable seats.

But do you think the country will be better off if a few of these candidates go to Congress next year and help create anti-Republican majorities, or better off if they lose and the Republicans keep those majorities?

For Democratic Socialists who have already won their primaries, they’re on the ticket. Are they more likely to win if you pick on them and highlight the things you disagree with them about?

Third Way isn’t in my fight. They’re in a fight to create a kind of uni-party system where their financial interests are protected no matter how the people vote.

That doesn’t mean they’re always wrong or wrong about everything. They study voter sentiment and how various messages resonate, and they can sometimes provide valuable insight into the reasons people choose not to support candidates on the left.

But this value is limited for a simple reason. If a study shows something that doesn’t serve their interests, they won’t share the results. Sometimes it’s even worse, as Reich explains:

In 2020, Third Way claimed that Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan would add more than $13 trillion to the federal deficit, although most other analyses — including one by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center — found that Sanders’s plan would save trillions while providing healthcare to millions of uninsured Americans.

Well, of course Third Way attacked Bernie’s plan. Among Third Way’s donors are pharmaceutical giant Amgen, pharmacy benefit manager CVS Health (which acquired health insurance giant Aetna in late 2018), and health products and drug company Baxter International.

I’m not here to tell you the correct budget impact of a Medicare-for-All system. But when Third Way is more pessimistic than the Koch Brothers, that is pretty suspicious.

I don’t think these bankers are really vested in some of the things they complain about. I doubt they care much about denying trans-athletes their rights or funding the police or ICE. But they do care about their money and they don’t seem to give too much of a shit about yours except to the extent that they might extract it from you.

I don’t think their top concern is that the Republicans might benefit from some unpopular messaging from a few far left candidates. They’d rather have Republicans in charge than see the for-profit health insurance industry go into the dustbin of history.

Don’t get me wrong. I want the Democratic Party to be primarily a worker’s party. I want it to aggressively enforce antitrust laws and regulations, break up monopolies and fiercely encourage small businesses. I want it to doggedly protect civil rights, particularly for our most vulnerable communities and groups. I want real progress on the climate change front, and I have a whole vision for a different kind of foreign policy and diplomatic posture.

Ideological fights are worth having and cannot all be put off for some future date. But Third Way runs afoul of my principles on two fronts. First, they’re more interested in policing the left than fighting the right. Second, they’re on the wrong side of most of the intraparty disputes.

On this, Robert Reich and I are in perfect agreement.

This is the context of Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu’s decision to outright reject President Trump’s peace plan for Gaza. To remain Israel’s prime minister (and possibly to stay out of prison), Netanyahu must cobble together a coalition of 61 or more Knesset members after the October election. But recent polling suggests this will be a challenge. The current governing bloc is projected to max out at 49-52 seats.

More troubling for Bibi is that there are some serious strains within the coalition. It’s an awkward assemblage of his own Likud party with Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) parties and far-right, ultranationalist political parties. The Haredi parties resist military conscription for religious students, while the ultranationalist parties resist any concessions to Hamas for peace.

There is also an emerging split within Likud itself.

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Tom Smith, a former General Motors engineer who dropped out of the Republican primary last month, holds a 50-33 advantage over Navy veteran Amir Hassan, Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate to take on Democratic Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet.

This is not quite as bad as 2000, when Republican senator from Missouri John Ashcroft lost his reelection bid to Mel Carnahan who had died in a plane crash, but it’s close. Getting absolutely blown out by a guy who dropped out a month earlier is embarrassing, especially when you have President Trump’s endorsement in your front pocket. This GOP primary result provides a strong indication of how resistant Michigan’s conservatives are to electing Arabs to serve in Congress.

But of course, Amir Hassan was not the most prominent Arab on the ballot Tuesday in Michigan. That honor goes to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed who was declared the narrow winner of his contest with Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.

Looking at the bits of purple and green on that map gives me a great deal of concern about El-Sayed’s prospects for winning a statewide election. On the positive side, it looks like he has generated a lot of enthusiasm in college towns. A winning Democrat running statewide certainly wants to get good turnout and high margins from places like Ann Arbor, Lansing and Kalamazoo.

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For this reason, you might expect the description of Jesus to be more reliable. But it’s interesting that something as seemingly straightforward as the date of his birth and death is hard to pin down. After seeing the conservative freakout over a Black Helen of Troy, can you imagine the conservative freakout if someone made a movie depicting a gray-bearded Jesus in his fifties?

Growing up in a churchgoing family, it was always my understanding that Jesus only lived to be 33 years old. I was also taught that he was born during the rule of Herod the Great who died in 4 BCE. That created a problem with the calendar.

We have a Scythian monk named Dionysius Exiguus to thank for it currently being the year 2026. Around the year 525 CE, Dionysius was living in Rome and working as a scholar for the Vatican. The Pope wanted him to calculate the future dates of Easter so the church could maintain a unified liturgical calendar. This got Dionysius thinking.

It bothered him that Rome was still counting the years starting from the reign of Emperor Diocletian in the 3rd Century who was one of the most severe persecutors of Christians in history. So he decided to try to calculate the birth of Jesus and count the years from there. After a couple more centuries, Europe adopted his new dating scheme.

But he made mistakes. One of his mistakes arose from the simple fact that in the 6th-Century, Romans still had no conception of zero. When we are born, we not 1 year old. But he assigned the number one to Jesus’s year of birth rather than his first birthday. This simple blunder is still a massive source of confusion today, for example, when we have to decide when a new millennia has started.

Still, his calculations were pretty good. Today, the scholarly consensus is that Jesus was crucified on either April 7, 30 CE or April 3, 33 CE (both Good Friday candidates). If Jesus really did die at 33, then Dionysius was close to the mark, but neither case is consistent with Jesus being born during the reign of Herod the Great.

Outside of the Gospels, most of what we know about the time of Jesus comes from 1st-Century historians like Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus. In the 1st Century, Romans used consular time. So, for example, Tacitus would refer to the year 30 CE as “In the consulship of Marcus Vinicius and Lucius Cassius Longinus...” and the year 33 CE as “In the consulship of Servius Galba and Lucius Sulla...” Alternatively, Romans also used the beginning of an Emperor’s reign.

Year 30 CE was the 16th Year of the reign of Tiberius and 33 CE was the 19th year of the reign of Tiberius. This is helpful because the Gospel According to Luke dates the beginning of John the Baptist’s ministry to the fifteenth year (29 CE) of the reign of Tiberius.

We have two further puzzle pieces to add here. One is that the Gospel of John says that the respective ministries of John the Baptist and Jesus overlapped, and that Jesus’ ministry included three separate Passover celebrations. If we take this as true, then Jesus was more likely executed in 33 than in 30 CE.

And this where we get the idea that he lived to be 33 years old.

Of course the other three Gospels imply (but do not specify) that Jesus’s ministry only included one Passover and so his ministry only lasted one year. These types of discrepancies, even within the Gospels, make exact dating impossible.

But there are some other markers that confirm that these dates are at least in the ballpark. For example, we know Jesus was crucified when Pontius Pilate was the Prefect of Judea between 26 CE to 36 CE and when Joseph Caiaphas was the High Priest of Jerusalem between 18 CE and 36 CE.

But we really don’t know when he was born. If he was truly born under Herod the Great and lived to be 33, he would have died no later than 29 CE, which is when John the Baptist was just getting started. Perhaps he lived to a slightly older age.

One thing we know is that exact ages weren’t calculated as rigorously in the 1st Century as they are today. Someone might be described as in their thirties rather than by their precise age which often was not known. This is consistent with the Gospel According to Luke which says Jesus was “about thirty years old" when he began his public ministry.

Another thing we can surmise is that quite a few people witnessed or heard about Jesus’s death when it happened, but very few people were around when he was born. Not only that, but the earliest Gospel, attributed to Mark, says nothing about Jesus’s birth or childhood. The nativity stories were added by Matthew and Luke 10-20 years later. And those stories served to paint Jesus’s birth as the fulfillment of some Old Testament prophesies, so they always had a more mythical than historical purpose.

If we can’t rely on these late accounts of Jesus’s early life or have much confidence in Luke’s vague description of Jesus’s age when he began his ministry, then a longer life for Jesus is possible.

Some scholars crinkle up their face at John 8:57, where religious authorities in Jerusalem accuse Jesus of being possessed of a demon and berate him for having the temerity to speak for Abraham: “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?”

If he were only in his thirties, why not say he’s not yet forty instead of not yet fifty? But, again, reference to age wasn’t rigorous at the time. On the other hand, if we can take this quote at face value, we can be sure that Jesus wasn’t a gray-bearded man over fifty.

So, if we make a movie depicting Jesus as that old, we can expect some valid criticism from both unhinged conservatives and rigorous scholars.

I’ll finish with one more thing to note.

There’s actually a pretty big difference to the story of Jesus depending on whether he died on April 7, 30 CE or April 3, 33 CE.

The reason comes from Rome. Emperor Tiberius left Rome in 26 CE and took up residence on the island of Capri in 27 CE, where he served out the remainder of his reign. Initially, matters in Rome were handled by a notorious character named Sejanus who was also a renowned Jew-hater. He had been responsible for giving Pilate his position in 26 CE, and probably encouraged him to deal harshly with the people of Judea.

But Sejanus was executed in 31 CE for plotting against Tiberius’ life, and a massive purge began to eliminate his associates for the crime of treason. Following the initial purge, Tiberius issued strict directives to provincial governors including Pilate to restore traditional Roman (pre-Sejanus) religious protections for Jews.

In April 30 CE, Pilate was secure in his position and had authority to govern Judea without respect for religious sensibilities.

But if we assume the trial of Jesus occurred in April 33 CE, Pilate was under suspicion and orders not to be too heavy-handed with religious authorities. High Priest Joseph Caiaphas would have known this and could have used it as leverage against Pilate.

They both knew that a formal complaint from a provincial council sent to Tiberius on Capri might trigger his recall, trial for treason, and execution. They also knew that any riot requiring troops from Syria to put down was likely to result in Pilate’s recall and potential death.

In this context, Pilate’s reported behavior at the trial of Jesus would make some sense. He initially expressed hesitation to execute Jesus, viewing him as an internal religious nuisance rather than a military threat. But John 19:12 says the religious authorities threatened Pilate, accusing Jesus of proclaiming himself a king.

“If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.”

“Friend of Caesar” was actually an official honorific title granted to elite Roman administrators. If an emperor stripped a governor of this status it might be a prelude to a treason trial. In other words, the words had perhaps a more biting tone than it first appears.

Pilate capitulated and ordered the crucifixion. In doing so, he avoided a potential riot and upheld Tiberius’s honor.

The situation would have had a very different flavor if it occurred in 30 CE before the fall of Sejanus. Pilate would still have been keen to avoid a riot, but he would have acted with more confidence and freedom of action. The religious authorities would have been less likely to make threats since there was no of sign of vulnerability for Pilate at that time but rather a pattern of him acting with violence and intolerance.

These are some of the reasons the 33 CE date is slightly favored over 30 CE date by modern scholars.

In either case, it’s fascinating that the emperor of Rome was relaxing at his fortified estate on Capri when this earth-shattering trial and execution took place. He took little notice, consumed as he was, with getting his revenge on Sejanus.

I think we could make several movies out of this story that would make conservative heads explode.