I’m seriously putting the over/under at 2.5 State Legislators standing behind Julian Guridy when he announces his campaign for PA-22 tomorrow. I’m sure all the regulars will be there. But here’s the thing- Julian seems to have his own resume to sell though. He’s been an aide to State Senator Nick Miller and has a great reputation for that. He’s been building up for this. He seems like a very strong candidate and I think he’ll make a good representative for center city Allentown.
While the party will pick who runs in the special election to replace County Executive-Elect Siegel, there will be a primary in May, and it looks like it might be crowded. CeCe Gerlach, a city councilwoman who runs with the support of the Working Families Party, will be a formidable candidate in that race. CeCe has detractors, but I doubt anyone will say with a straight face that anyone will out work her as a campaigner. Allentown activist Jessica Ortiz also has a Facebook page for a campaign for this seat, but I haven’t seen a formal announcement yet. Ortiz has people who will show up to back her. Neither of these ladies will lay down and play dead for Guridy in this race.
There are already some hate merchants out there leading whisper campaigns here, and unfortunately this race could get ugly. I hope not though. I doubt we’ve heard anywhere near the end of this one.
Turnout was really high in this year’s election. Here in Northampton and Lehigh Counties we topped 90,000 voters for the first time in a municipal election. While Donald Trump carried the 7th Congressional district last year, this year high turnout was really bad for Republicans. Democrats won by damn near 20% in both Executive races and won every other county office too, in addition to winning every blue and contested municipal race too. Two years ago we were talking about 70-75,000 voters in each county. Democrats wildly seemed to over perform with the additional voters, whether they were Democrats or independents. Virtually all Democrats voted Democratic, and the margins among independents were wildly beyond the norm (at least from the most complete evidence we have, which was over performance beyond registration in the mail). Why was higher turnout pretty good for Joe Biden, bad for Kamala Harris, and amazing for Democrats basically everywhere this year?
For the most part since LBJ left Washington, the only Democrats who have won national elections were generally personally popular at the time (Carter and Biden were both popular when they won and not as popular when re-election time came). In general, midterms and elections where less personally popular Democrats lead the ticket had not been very good. Basically Democrats won elections where they could massively mobilize the electorate behind a charismatic figure, really until Trump became a political force. From 2017 forward, Democrats have actually done very well in lower turnout elections that they used to lose. Democrats have done remarkably well in special elections. Democrats are winning odd number year Governor races (Virginia, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Louisiana) at an 80% clip in the Trump years. Democrats won a landslide in 2018 and lost just single-digit seats in Joe Biden’s midterm. Democrats are doing really well in elections where only people who are super engaged and really care how government operates are voting. They’re doing less well in electorates with lower education levels and where voters are largely motivated by large scale cultural issues, and less by “how things will run.”
Even in 2024 we saw signs of this. Harris became the first Democrat to carry college educated white men for President in my lifetime. She did see declines among Black men and Latinos, but once you account for education levels, that is entirely confined to voters who had a high school education or less. The most important data point for guessing how a voter will vote is becoming education. Someone with a graduate degree is probably voting Democratic, regardless of race. Increasingly a high school educated (male in particular, but really in most female groups too) voter is probably not voting Democratic.
This is not about “smart vs. stupid,” which would be a lazy and overly simplistic way to break it down. This actually comes down to how important government *seems* to be in your every day life. Many people in jobs that require some sort of advanced degree, or in fields where a college degree is mandatory for entrance (You could think of this as doctors and lawyers, but I’d argue this gets down to some more traditionally blue collar jobs like nurses and teachers) either interact directly with or deal with regulatory decisions by the government. Almost everything in education, from busing and school lunch regulations, to minimum competency standards for teachers, to spending at research institutions involves the government. Everything in a lawyers world involves the government, from the courts they argue in to the laws they argue about, to the court system and it’s services for those involved in it, to their own ability to practice law, it’s set by the government. Even in the health care field, the government is involved in everything from minimum competency for doctors and nurses, to insurance companies and what they must cover, to research and development dollars that fund development of the drugs they use to save lives. People in fields that legally require a degree, or for that matter practically demand you have a certain level of education, interact with the government a lot. Some of the smartest people I know work as bartenders, or in retail, or in a trade- they’re savvy and they often times do pretty well at making money. The government is less ever present in their jobs, and many of them feel as though the government is a hinderance. Find me a bartender that loves when LCB comes around. Find me a guy that paves driveways that thinks the government helps their lives. Friends of mine who lay concrete frankly think the government takes their tax money too much, and gives them way less in return than they deserve. Many of these people don’t have overly positive interactions with the government at the times that they have to interact with it, and they’re not huge fans.
It would be a mistake to think this is the only factor. I know plenty of professors who have a negative point of view of the government, even if they do interact with it a lot. God knows that can be true of teachers, nurses, doctors, and lawyers too. The thing is, again, they’re in fields that there is no choice but to care about what the government does, it impacts their every day life. Of course they’re going to vote more, and they’re going to be motivated to do so even in relatively “minor” (bullshit term) elections, because many of them care about the consequences. Now, add on that people with college degrees and even more so graduate degrees are increasingly voting Democratic, and what you have is a world in which Democrats are winning the voters with the highest engagement in the political system. This is helping them in “low turnout” elections. It’s also helping them even when turnout goes up in those elections, because the additional people who show up are much more alike to their voters than the GOP’s current base.
This doesn’t mean Democrats are going to win every non-Presidential election moving forward, or that their electoral problems in rural America will take care of themselves (less of their voters live there), or that they can’t win Presidential elections anymore. In 2020, Joe Biden won as a really old white man, who leaned into identity politics quite a bit, but was generally viewed as a moderate. That’s probably a pretty good place for a Presidential candidate to be if they want to win, but it’s a really hard space to occupy. There is no candidate for 2028 that really makes it to that spot. For what it’s worth, I think Biden might have reached peak saturation for Democratic voters running at least somewhat under the Obama paradigm. Any more voters we may find will cause us to turn off an equal number of people and turn them out for Republicans. We probably have to offer someone for President who is not a generic Democrat. I’m not suggesting this as a midterm strategy, or even as a regular strategy to win seats in the Senate, the House, or Governor’s mansions. What I mean is that maybe giving our base everything they can ever dream of has a ceiling in a national election, where a lot of voters have varying degrees of animus towards the government. The base Democratic voter may not be moving forward more “like” the median voter in a Presidential race than a Republican base voter. It’s too early to say that with absolute certainty, I’d like to see how things look after Trump is gone. It does seem though that Democrats are becoming the party of the engaged, and that is quite a change from even a few decades back.
This is just who these guys are. They run these populist campaigns and get people to give them $10 at a time until it adds up for them. If they win, great. If they lose, it’s another lake house, right?
It feels like a lifetime ago, and maybe it was now, that I worked as Field Director for Bonnie Watson Coleman. It was 2014 and she was running for her first term in the Congress to replace Congressman Rush Holt. She had served in the New Jersey State Assembly for years by that point, holding the same seat as her father before her, and rising to be the Majority Leader of the Assembly from 2006 to 2010. When she won, I am fairly certain she represented the whitest Congressional seat of any CBC member. She also made history when she won. She became the first African-American woman to represent New Jersey in the Congress. Yes, that’s New Jersey, one of the original 13 colonies. That night in Trenton when she declared victory was extremely satisfying.
I’m going to mostly gloss over the politics of that campaign because they’re the least important thing I’ll write here. The 12th Congressional District at that time was quite different than it is today. Parts of four counties- Union, Middlesex, Somerset, and Mercer- were in the district. While they were areas that voted fairly blue for President, Chris Christie had done decently well in them, Trump hadn’t happened yet, and we had to be concerned about some of the demographic politics of Central Jersey, one of the most diverse places in the country. Cory Booker was running for his first full term at the time too, and our ground operations were, for lack of any better way to put it, entirely coordinated. I came on after the primary and Bonnie had an incredible campaign operation already in place. I built out a general election field team. She got 61% and won all four counties that year, so everything went well.
Ok, so here’s the part I want to tell you about- Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman was an awesome person with one of the best teams of people I ever worked with. Her first two Chiefs of Staff, James Gee and Kari Osmond, were incredibly smart and two of the best people you could work for. It was easy and fun to go to work every day and work long, hard hours for them all. I don’t try to make friends in this business. I would tell you that even on the worst day they were some of the best people I ever worked with. When she said she wanted to serve and be an advocate for her community, she meant it. Not once did I have to say one thing about her to activists, party leaders, or voters, that I did not consider to be 1,000% truth. That was one of the easiest hard jobs I ever had.
With her announcement today that she is retiring, she has decided to end her incredible political career on her own terms. As with any member of Congress, she took positions I liked and I didn’t like, but she always stayed true to who she is. I suspect there will be an incredibly vibrant primary to replace her in the solidly Democratic seat. That can wait for another day. For today I salute her incredible career and service.
I’m an OG Bernie hater. When his online weirdos put me on their hate list in 2017, it was a badge of honor. I knew then that he was a grifter. His campaign, his super pac (Our Revolution), and his institute (Sanders Institute) all employed his family. Some of his organizations bought his books (great for royalties). He made a profit off of running for office. So he kept running for President in a political party that he slams repeatedly and isn’t a member of. It’s a great existence, for him. He disowns all the stuff that is inconvenient for him, vaguely claims the populist stance, and makes a lot of money off of it. It’s easy to see the guy isn’t real.
I also never trust the people he elevates as our “future.” He has given us some real doozies. Bernie gave us Tulsi Gabbard (who literally had an internal campaign “hate” list that they put me on too). Tulsi Gabbard told us Assad in Syria was “not an enemy,” essentially blaming the U.S. for Russia invading Ukraine, and that Hillary Clinton is drugged and refusing to back her over her foreign policy and cheating Bernie out of the nomination. Today, Tulsi Gabbard is Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, claiming that Russia did not seek to help Trump in 2016 (they did), contradicting a GOP lead Senate report saying they did. Gabbard’s revisionist history is the backbone of the government’s case that former Obama era intelligence leaders lied to Congress and tried to frame Trump. In short, Tulsi Gabbard is a psychopath. Bernie Sanders told us she’s not. Of course, she got her rise by being a trusted friend to Bernie.
There are apparently 10 8 Senate Democrats ready to vote to re-open the government. After 40 days, they’re going to cave on health insurance subsidies for the promise of a future vote that will never happen, and even if it did, Republicans will vote it down. Yes, they’re going to vote to re-open the government, in exchange for nothing. Useless pile of human waste, Senator John Fetterman appears to be one of the ten. That’s no shock. He was ready to sell out 20 million Americans from the start.
What was the point of the 40 day shutdown? Americans weren’t mad at Democrats on Tuesday, but now they’re caving for nothing at all. A Democrat not willing to fight for health care is not really a Democrat at all. If this wasn’t a fight worth winning, why start it? I mean really, they’re giving the subsidies away anyway. They could have done that 40 days ago if there was an expiration date on their spines.
Chuck should retire. These Senators should be primaried. Sure, some bums will emerge in the new group, but less us be disappointed then, with a few scalps in hand.
Happy Saturday, friends… and enemies too! You see, I have a very, very good idea of my audience on this blog, and well, that impacts what I write here. I’d love to write my thoughts on the Sixers, or next year’s Foo Fighters tour, or the Phillies off-season. I write about how Bernie Sanders sucks and what’s wrong with Ryan Crosswell and Bob Brooks, and you read it though. Yesterday, I talked about how the Allentown crew put self preservation over what’s right, and you read it. You know who you are. A couple thousand hits in the immediate hours after can be confusing, but I still know who most of these readers are. Readers in Arlington, in Washington, in Philadelphia, in Rockville, in Ashburn, in Brooklyn, in White Plains, in Allentown, in Bangor (ok, this one slightly confuses me), in Easton, in McKeesport, in Bethlehem, in Princeton, in Camp Hill, in Braddock, in Phillipsburg, in Hazleton, in Harrisburg… shit, I’m going to be honest, some of you read this so much that I actually am like 99% I know who each of you are. I know who my daily reader from Nazareth is. I also know why you read this, because I pretty much know who you are. And look, that’s great. I write this so someone reads it. I don’t write it to read myself.
Most of you reading this enjoy it. Some of you (hey opposition researchers!) send me into to post here. When I’m reasonably sure it’s true, I post it. Some of you wonder why, and even are critical of me doing it, as if Rich Wilkins not posting something a.) makes it untrue, b.) means it won’t get out. It is a uniquely poor trait of Pennsylvania politicos, more so than any of the other states I’ve been in, that we think we can keep secrets. We can’t. I’m not on any of the campaigns right now, I’m not paying for this stuff, it’s so easy to find that any idiot could do it. Which gets to my other point here- most of you enjoy reading this blog, but yesterday the smoke coming from Allentown looked like a mushroom cloud. One subject was sending the post around complaining, one actually complained to me personally (one talked to me and we actually joked about it, but I’ll leave that for another time), and one is probably already reading this and fuming. I could hear the words that I’m sure came out of one of their mouths- “Rich is a nobody anyway and no one cares what he says.”- while literally talking about what I wrote. Hey, I like irony. The truth is, there’s lots more to come on Crooksy and others. I already have some of it. I’ll print it when I want to. Assuming I want to. And you should be glad I do. If I’ve found all this on a zero dollar budget, don’t you think Ryan Mackenzie has this and more (he does)? At least by me writing it, you know about it now, not when it’s hitting you in the face.
Look, I’m not your boss. I’m not your dad. I’m not your Governor. I give you information, if you don’t care about that, it’s fine. If you’re fine with racism, fine. If you’re fine with extremism, fine. If you’re fine with political violence, that’s not fine, but you can be. If you’re fine with being untrustworthy, fine. Look, if you think Kaepernick was an ass for kneeling during the national anthem, that’s your choice. Bob Brooks agrees with you. Just own that though. Don’t claim he’s changed, because now he’s telling you he did because it’s good politics. Don’t claim it was “just a messy divorce,” when he didn’t pay his mother-in-law back one penny for over 14 years before she sued him. She had him sign a contract after four years of not being paid, and he still didn’t pay her. Just own it. If you’re fine with this because the guy’s union gave you a few bucks for your re-election, I actually totally get it. Just be real with yourself. He doesn’t dispute that he got sued and lost, hell he appealed it and lost. He doesn’t claim he didn’t post racist and extremist memes, he just says that was then. Hell, Ryan Crosswell at least tries to claim he wasn’t “really” a Republican, even though he re-registered in multiple states, and that he only worked on non-competes, not union busting as a private lawyer. Crooksy pretty much admits everything. Or just says it doesn’t matter.
Blogs aren’t the real world. This blog will not move voters next year. Maybe a few of you won’t vote for one candidate or another over something I show, but my audience is in the thousands, and as I stated above, you live in lots of different districts. Basically 90% of you are here reading for politics. A few of you are here reading about the other topics, and you’re my favorites. Most of what I write on this blog is for my audience’s interest though, a bunch of politicos. Sometimes it really reaches a broader audience, of politicos who never met me before. That’s great. This blog can only serve as a guide to how to win an election, it’s not going to get it done on it’s own. That takes money and mass communication with voters. That is not happening here on this page.
I think Matt Tuerk is a pretty good Mayor of Allentown. Mike Schlossberg and Pete Schweyer do a fine job representing their districts. I don’t think any of them are racists or anything. None of them are religious radicals or gun nuts either, in fact they’re pretty far left on those issues. In fact, none of them would stiff their mother-in-law either. I would be surprised if any of them actually, personally approve of the behavior that Bob Brooks has displayed. I’m frankly shocked they’re not endorsing Carol Obando Derstein, who they have all known for years. They all supported Susan Wild for years, but they are breaking with her to back a random guy from Northampton County. They’re supporting a guy who has a demonstrated history of racial insensitivity and represent a majority-minority city. It’s rather surprising.
Let’s be honest, the Allentown Fire Fighters are essentially Crooksy’s political shop, and they’re going to make supporting him a litmus test. Look, I get it. It’s much easier to work with them than against them. I’m sure the Governor’s minions are also making clear they want them to do this. It’s much better to have other people do the endorsing, after all. Endorsing Crooksy is the easy way out, and it makes people happy in powerful places. The insiders want to pick this guy, not because he can win (he can’t), but because it helps their aspirations. It’s not about you and your life, it’s about them and their future aspirations.
Populism isn’t a winning strategy, and the numbers on Tuesday again bare that out. Mamdani did considerably worse, against lesser opposition, than say Mikie Sherrill did. None of these people can seriously argue that an inexperienced candidate with personal baggage, a history of racism, and outlier views on guns and school prayer, is going to be a good Congressman. At best, he’s Fetterman. At worst, he’s a loser. Unfortunately, people are being rewarded for doing things they don’t believe in right now. That’s a real shame. Bob Brooks showed you who he is before he decided to run for public office. Anything he says now is candidate speak and shouldn’t be trusted. According to the Pennsylvania Superior Court, Bob “Crooksy” Brooks shouldn’t be trusted either.
No, this isn’t a real person, really for real here.
A socialist was elected Mayor of New York City. That’s really not shocking. Trump had 69% disapproval amongst NYC voters yesterday, and the only other real option was Andrew Cuomo. I don’t need to add to that. 50.4% selecting Zohran Mamdani given that Donald Trump was backing Andrew Cuomo and the other guy was a vigilante, is not all that impressive. If Mamdani wasn’t a socialist and didn’t make it clear he doesn’t like Jewish people, he’d probably have reached 69%. The fact that he didn’t means a lot of anti-Trump voters couldn’t come around to backing him. In fact, only a little better than 7 in 10 anti-Trump voters selected him, and I assume the rest probably voted for Cuomo. When you think about it that way, it’s not so wildly impressive.
Ok, here’s the small reality check, if you need one. Yesterday definitely suggested 2026 could be a really good year for Democrats. Joe Emrick might finally lose. We should beat Ryan Mackenzie if we nominate the right candidate. Let’s go back to the Mamdani example for a moment, and treat him as charitably as we can. Let’s assume he’d still get 7 in 10 anti-Trump voters in the Lehigh Valley and everywhere, even though most of the places we are going to discuss are less liberal than the Big Apple. 55% of New Jersey voters didn’t approve of Trump. If Mamdani got the same 73% of the anti-Trump vote there, he would be at 40.15%. Mikie Sherrill got 56.3% in the actual New Jersey race, or a bit more than 100% of those votes. How about in Virginia, where 56% of voters didn’t approve of Trump? That comes out to 40.88%. Abigail Spanberger got 57.2%, or also just north of 100% of anti-Trump voters. Sherrill and Spanberger got about 102% of the anti-Trump vote and Mamdani got 73%. More of the country will have Trump’s negatives in the 50’s and maybe low 60’s next year, as opposed to New York City’s 69%. Since Mamdani literally got a bare majority of the vote with Trump at 69% disapproval, you would basically need Trump’s actual disapproval to be at 68% in any district to be able to win with a candidate like Mamdani. That’s not going to be the case in any competitive race. For argument’s sake, California had Trump’s disapproval at 63% last night. If Mamdani got that same 73% of anti-Trump vote in California, he’d be at 45.99%. There are going to be a lot of races on the board in California next year. A socialist candidate viewed as friendly to Hamas/oppositional to Israel, like Mamdani, would probably lose in many California seats. For what it’s worth, Proposition 50, the re-districting question, got 63.9% of the vote, or roughly 101% of anti-Trump votes.
Here in the Lehigh Valley, Nadeem Qayyum won a seat on the Northampton County Council. Let me be clear, I didn’t support him. I waited until after the election to say this because it’s not my place, but Qayyum told members of the Lehigh Valley Labor Council in an endorsement interview that he planned to announce after he was elected that he was the first socialist elected in Northampton County. Even Nadeem knew he had to hide some things. Even as Nadeem lied about being a socialist, he still only got 85.25% of what Tara Zrinski received with the same voters. We know even less about Theresa Fadem. Never the less, they won in spite of plenty of other problems. All of the Democrats beat all of the Republicans though, and by a lot (almost 10,000 votes out of 91,000 votes cast). I’ll get deeper into this later, but the key to the Democratic victory *appears* to not just be vote-by-mail, which was up by close to 5,000 votes in the end, but actually the Election Day surge of anti-Trump voters. Election Day voting was up by 14,000 votes from 2023 to 2025. It’s rather clear by the margins that these people were voting for Democrats, and Democrats only.
So what does all of this mean here? Let’s assume for a second that Tara Zrinski and Josh Siegel got an even 100% of the anti-Trump votes last night in the County Executive races. That’s 59.38% in Northampton County and 60.61% in Lehigh County. A Mamdani-like candidate would get 43.35% in Northampton County and 44.25% in Lehigh County. That’s also assuming next year’s electorate is exactly like this year’s, and well, look at the 2022 numbers (which probably won’t be exact either, but still much closer) in Northampton and Lehigh. You go from just shy of 187,000 votes in the two counties to well over 260,000. The GOP, even if they’re doing awful, will do a little better than this year, and I’m not including Carbon, which actually voted NO on retention for the Supreme Court Judges last night, so Trump may still be in the positive there. I’ll go with the average in Northampton and Lehigh County though today, 60% anti-Trump voters. That’s 43.8%.
Where am I going with this? Well first off, Mark Pinsley basically has the same policy views as Mamdani (I don’t consider him to be as bad of a guy), so nominating him is very likely to end in a loss. Then there’s Bob Brooks, a guy who has deep flaws that cut across party lines, and has the same consultants as Mamdani, and is supported by Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, a large cadre of the Mamdani supporters on the national level. Assuming Democrats can stomach the racism and other issues, he doesn’t deteriorate further than Mamdani’s share of the anti-Trump vote, Brooks is probably not doing much better than 44% because his policies and rhetoric is Mamdani’s rhetoric. I’m sure he’ll try to distance himself, like say John Fetterman, but does anyone want to send another version of Shrek to Congress. And what if he does fool people into thinking he’s not a bad guy, like Fetterman? Maybe he gets the more like 85% of the anti-Trump vote and gets to 51.15%, not factoring in Carbon and increased Republican turnout? He still probably narrowly loses. Candidates like Bob Brooks are gigantic risks to maybe lose a winnable race, or be the next John Fetterman. He should be DOA in the PA-7 Democratic Primary, and any efforts to push him by the state Democratic Party are emphatically stupid. We don’t need the Harrisburg insiders pushing their candidate.
As for Ryan Crosswell? Maybe he could win a general election running as a union busting, Trump Democrat. Why would you want that?
Candidates like Zohran Mamdani are fine for New York City. I wish he had lost, and I think the result was bad for New York, but they chose him. Candidates like Zohran Mamdani are not going to win us seats like NJ-7 or PA-7. Candidates like Mamdani wouldn’t represent upgrades in state legislative races in the Lehigh Valley either. We need to reject these folks. Failure to do so will not be unlike Tea Party Republicans nominating the “witch lady” for Delaware Senate in 2020, but they also have the longterm impact the Tea Party had on the GOP as well. I don’t want the Democratic Party to simply be a liberal flip side of the Trump coin. It won’t win, and it’s bad for America.
I struggle with this every day- am I still supporting the same party I have grown up supporting. The answer is yes, from the standpoint that Democrats are still the party protecting labor unions, the environment, access to health care, protection of the environment, and Civil Rights, to name some things. That doesn’t mean it’s the same party, and I think the image above nails how it’s changed. Did we support Native Americans in 2012? Yes. But what the hell is this? Rather than being for concrete things that help people, we’re now very into virtue signaling and appeasing activists and organizations. People like Graham Platner, Bob Brooks, AOC, Bernie Sanders, John Fetterman, and even Zohran Mamdani, may marginally agree with some parts of the Democratic platform, but they want a more extreme version that represents something totally different than Obama or Bill Clinton’s America. I prefer Obama and Clinton to this. So did America.
Apocalypse Vibes 