Pip: Every election cycle, someone promises the apocalypse is finally arriving on schedule — and every cycle, the map barely moves.
Mara: That's the territory Rich Wilkins has been mapping on Apocalypse Vibes — the structural limits on Democratic ambitions in 2026, the candidate quality problems making those limits worse, the progressive left's Israel politics, and what America's 250th birthday actually means when you're paying attention. Let's start with where the 2026 wave is, and isn't, headed.
The 2026 Map: Real Gains, Real Ceilings
Pip: The central argument in "Political Gravity in 2026" is that Democrats are probably winning the House, but the landslide narrative is running ahead of the actual numbers.
Mara: The post puts it plainly: "The best way to understand American politics is to understand that our country has been stuck in a 48-46% split for a quarter century or so now." That's the floor and the ceiling both.
Pip: Which means gerrymandering doesn't even need to work that hard — the electorate is doing most of the structural work already.
Mara: The post estimates roughly 400 of 435 districts are drawn so partisanly that even a wave doesn't move them, projecting a net Republican loss of fifteen to twenty seats. "The Delusions of the Progressive Populist Left" and "What Democrats Got Wrong" both reinforce why: the party is consolidating leftward while independents — now 45 percent of Americans — are calling themselves moderate, and they are not moving toward the Democratic Party as it shifts.
Pip: So the wave is real, the ceiling is low, and the party is spending energy debating whether to go further in the direction that's already not working.
Mara: That's essentially the argument. Which brings us to the candidates Democrats are actually fielding.
Crooksy Brooks: A Case Study in Self-Inflicted Damage
Pip: "Crooksy's Loose Lips" opens with a scene that pretty much writes the rest of the segment for us — Bob Brooks, at a private lunch, cracking jokes about a popular mayor's spelling while his own social media history is a liability archive.
Mara: The post is direct about the strategic problem: "The blueprint for Crooksy was written by literally the same people who created Nazi oyster farmer Graham Platner in Maine and John Fetterman here in Pennsylvania." Same consultants, same pitch, same early polling lead that is already shrinking.
Pip: A 47-43 internal in July, per "Bernie, Platner, Crooksy" — which also notes the NRCC didn't wait long to tie Brooks directly to the Fight Agency consultants behind Platner's campaign.
Mara: "Crooksy Goes to Court" lays out the financial record: money loaned in 2004, a signed promissory note from 2008, an appeal lost in 2022, and a reported hundred dollars paid to date. The post also notes an ethics complaint was filed with the House during the primary.
Pip: A hundred dollars. Over twenty-two years. That is a commitment to a position.
Mara: "The NRCC's File on Crooksy" details four lines of attack the Republicans have already assembled — unpaid workers' compensation insurance, racist social media posts, the mother-in-law lawsuit, and a pay raise Brooks took while cutting spending on actual union member advocacy. The post notes this probably is not everything they have.
Mara: Then there is the firefighter issue. "Bob Crooksy Brooks Doesn't Just Hate Barack Obama, He Hates the Folks Who Save Your Life" covers his social media posts calling IAFF members who also volunteer "scabs" and "shitbags." "Someone Ask Crooksy How Many Scabs Helped Fight Last Week's Massive Fire in Allentown" puts a concrete number on what that argument looks like in practice: over a hundred firefighters from as far as Carbon County, working for more than seven hours.
Pip: His pathway to victory, the post argues, runs through turning out the Susan Wild coalition — the very voters he most repulses.
Mara: And the through-line across all of this is candidate quality as a structural problem, not a one-race accident. Which connects directly to what's happening on the Israel and progressive politics front.
The Progressive Left, Israel, and the Limits of the Movement
Pip: "These Folks are Mentally Ill" is about the New York primaries, but the argument is really about where the progressive left can and cannot win.
Mara: The post draws the line precisely: "these embarrassing freaks are only winning certain kinds of races — very blue district, legislative races that usually have more than two candidates." Safe seats, low-turnout fields, places where you never have to acknowledge Republicans or moderate Democrats exist.
Pip: The Gaza politics driving a lot of these candidacies gets its own full examination in "For All the Talk About a Free Palestine, Nobody Has a Plan for Who Would Lead It."
Mara: That post walks through the practical obstacles — two separate governing authorities that do not recognize each other, Abbas whose term ended in 2009, Hamas, skeptical neighboring states, and an Israeli electorate that roundly rejected the idea after October 7th. The conclusion is that attaching conditions to foreign aid is reasonable; promising a functioning Palestinian state in the near term is not.
Pip: Serious conditions on aid — yes. Promising a flying cow — also apparently on the table, and the post is not more optimistic about one than the other.
Mara: From there, the question becomes what any of this means for a country about to turn 250.
America at 250: Pride Without Amnesia
Pip: "Happy Birthday America" is the outlier in tone — a genuine defense of patriotism that holds the country's failures and its achievements in the same frame.
Mara: The post names the failures directly — slavery, Japanese internment, Jim Crow, January 6th — and then pivots: "We're also the greatest country on Earth. There is a reason my friends in foreign countries want to come here." The argument is that a nation is more than the sum of its government and its worst moments.
Pip: Ho Chi Minh quoting Thomas Jefferson in Vietnam's own Declaration of Independence is the detail that earns that argument.
Mara: The post closes on that note — that the ideals in the Declaration of Independence matter more than the day-to-day failures, and that billions live in greater freedom today at least partly because of what this country did and inspired.
Pip: A structurally frozen electorate, a candidate class that keeps finding new ways to underperform it, and a birthday party anyway.
Mara: The through-line is the gap between what the moment calls for and what the parties are actually offering. That gap isn't closing before November — we'll see if it narrows at all.
Well, I’m home from eating hot dogs and hamburgers, drinking beers, and shooting off fireworks to celebrate America’s 250th birthday. No, I didn’t watch any of Trump’s speeches or freak show. No, I didn’t watch Mamdani’s speech either, because he’s not our leader. I divorced myself from real world politics today, and well, it was nice.
A lot of folks have suggested that Trump, and the issues facing our nation, made this July 4th less worth celebrating than past ones. Not surprisingly, I don’t agree. Part of celebrating America is celebrating the ideals of it, not necessarily the day-to-day reality of it. I also happen to think that a nation is a lot more than the sum of it’s government and laws. It’s worth noting that our Declaration of Independence was written years before our first real legal document, the Constitution, and is far more of an idealist document. It is a document that celebrates freedom, independence, and the idea of a country where all people are free to live as they want. It’s a beautiful document. It is a beautiful idea. And yes, we are a beautiful country.
The United States has a lot of failings. Slavery. The Trail of Tears. Japanese Internment Camps. Jim Crow. Segregation. The Immigration Act of 1924. The Iraq War. The Patriot Act. The War on Drugs. The way we treated Vietnam veterans when they came home from the war. I would argue January 6th and the current actions of ICE are not good moments. Our failings are pretty bi-partisan and very real. I suppose if you’re an absolutist, you could cancel us as a nation. Lord knows we’ve done it to plenty of people who we shouldn’t have.
We’re also the greatest country on Earth. There is a reason my friends in foreign countries *want* to come here. There’s a reason millions of people try to immigrate here illegally, or overstay visas, or try to float from Cuba, or even seek to marry to get here. It’s better here than it is there. Sure, it’s not *equally* better for all people, we don’t all have the same opportunities, and that’s a problem we should be trying to fix every day. No, I’m sorry though, there’s not really somewhere else I’d rather be. And you know, the rest of the world wants us at our best. The French maintain a cemetery at Normandy because brave Americans of all stripes were willing to sacrifice their lives for their freedom, as they did for us during the Revolution. We’re the country that lead the 20th century in innovation. We landed on the Moon. We won the World Wars. We built the interstate highway system. We built suburbia. We were a leader in the industrial revolution. Nations across the globe quote our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution in their own founding documents. Millions come see our musicians, actresses, and athletes when they come to their countries. Yes, sure, we did some shitty stuff in history that we should reckon with and avoid doing again. We’ve also done the greatest shit in world history. Like individual people, we should hang our head in shame because of our worst moments. Screw that, it’s no way to live. Billions live in freedom around the globe today, either directly because of what we did, or in part because of the inspiration of our own revolution. We fought a whole war with Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and he and his nation directly quoted Thomas Jefferson in the opening of their very own Declaration of Independence. We’re not perfect, we’re not even the only great nation in this world, but dammit be proud, we’re the best.
So yeah, I celebrated like a red blooded American today. The idea of this country, the great things we do, matters a lot more to me than the failings. I hope to hell all of you celebrated too. God bless America.
Don’t sleep with subordinates. Don’t sleep around with co-workers. Don’t get women drunk for the purpose of taking them home for sex. Pretty simple rules to keep in your personal life. Keeping them won’t insure that you won’t be accused of something, nothing can prevent that if someone else wants to accuse you, but it does a lot for your defense later when you don’t have a string of people coming along to claim that you did something wrong. Look, this can get dicey obviously, most people that were in college at one point or another might have slept with someone, or multiple someones, after a night of hard boozing. That’s college boy behavior though. When you’re a 40 or 50 something year old man, you better have out grown that a solid decade plus ago, or it’s going to bite you in the ass.
I don’t feel in the least bit sad for Eric Swalwell. I’m not in the camp that says believe every accusation reflexively, but I’m in the camp that says you should take it seriously and investigate the claims. Let’s be honest about the Swalwell case, you have four separate women in the initial article, with dates and locations that match their schedule and his, claiming similar things about him getting them trashed drunk and taking them home, or striking up conversations on the internet that turned overtly sexual from professional quickly, claiming fairly similar things. You also have video surfacing of him kissing some woman, reportedly a sex worker, who was not his wife. You have folks, mostly anonymous or at the staff level, in the Democratic Party saying it was an open secret that Swalwell was always hunting for his next fun night in the sack. The most charitable possible read you could grant Swalwell is that someone coordinated these accusations to come out as a political attack on him right in the middle of a run for Governor of California, and embellished his behavior beyond what it actually was. The problem for Swalwell is that his reputation of behavior suggests that the allegations are believable, not to mention the volume of accusations. He says he will fight the “untrue” accusations now, but that he made errors in judgment and so he is dropping out of the race. One would presume that if he’s serious about fighting back, he’ll file suit against his accusers. Let the courts figure that mess out, but my guess is he’ll never file a single lawsuit denying the accusations. The point that we know is that Swalwell’s inability to control his impulses made him a uniquely poor candidate for Governor of the largest state in the union, and he could not continue campaigning as a serious candidate. He made his bed, now he has to sleep in it.
Now, I didn’t just make “Swalwell” the headline, I added the words “Hypocrisy, and the Democratic Party.” There’s a rather deeper argument to be had here about when and how scandals happen, and why they happen. There’s also a much bigger argument to be had about when people should withdraw from public life. Al Franken was knifed up and left for dead (metaphorically) over a photograph in the early days of the #MeToo movement that showed him with his hands hovering over a passed out woman’s breasts. Ralph Northam got caught with an old photo of himself during med school wearing “blackface” and a Klan robe. Tara Reade accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her in the Capitol basement when he was a Senator and she worked on the Hill, an accusation that largely fell apart when some of the locations she described didn’t exist at all and other facts in the story didn’t match. Katie Hill was driven out of Congress for having affairs with staff after her ex-husband released intimate photos and text messages of her with staff members, in what appeared to be a revenge porn case (a judge threw her suit against him and the publishers mostly out, saying it was a public interest story). Andrew Cuomo was driven out of office as Governor of New York after the Attorney General’s office issued a report accusing him of sexual harassment and assault, and not a single prosecutor was willing to take the case, but he nevertheless resigned rather than be impeached and removed. And of course, there was the Bill Clinton case. None of these were handled the same, nor were they the same on their surface. Some of these were shocking and came out of nowhere. Some were well known Washington truths that everyone knew. (As an aside, one of these scandals quite literally partially happened in a room/apartment I used to occupy, at a time I was not in town living there. If you know me, you can ask in private)
I want to focus in on the cases where everyone in Washington knew about these guys, and everyone turned a blind eye until it was convenient to throw the person overboard. Everyone knew Bill Clinton was a dog when he was Governor of Arkansas, then acted shocked when he had an affair with an intern in the White House. Voters knew what they voted for. At least that was all fairly publicly litigated. Democrats in Washington knew about Al Franken’s drinking long before his scandal. Again, as other staff and even “anonymous” Congressional sources have said, they knew Swalwell tried to have sex with or sext any woman he could. Andrew Cuomo’s divorce happened long before he was Governor, and it was well known that he was getting around as a bachelor, and probably even once he was dating later. How did Democrats in Washington know about Eric Swalwell for years, but only 50 or so days before the primary for Governor it becomes public knowledge? So basically as long as he was holding a seat in the House and voting for a Democratic Speaker, no biggie? But when he was potentially problematic in a Governor’s primary we might screw up as a party, now we learn he committed assault. The timing stinks. And well, if he’s horrible now (and as I said above, yeah), why wasn’t he horrible last year, or five years ago, or whenever?
Now look, last point on this- unfortunately voters only mildly care. Bill Clinton had an affair in the Oval Office with an intern and his approval shot up over 60% because voters didn’t want to hear about it and thought Bill was a good President. Democrats have spent years calling Trump every bad name in the book- racist, rapist, traitor- and he has received more votes and a higher percentage of the vote in three straight elections. The truth is that most of America doesn’t really view Washington as an honorable place and is content with the fact that powerful men (and some women) sleep around and do things that they don’t really want their own spouse to do, but let’s be honest, many Americans don’t even leave their spouse anymore for sleeping around. Almost nothing is really a cancellable offense in our society now. You’re either criminally guilty, or you’re not. Some would even argue that getting a Nazi tattoo and stealing from your mother-in-law is A-OK with the voters today. I guess we’ll see about that.
Remember the “Bowling Alone” book? Well, it turns out that “Big Bowling” is literally trying to finish the story. Bowlero, the largest operator of bowling alleys in America, is basically buying bowling alleys and eliminating their local leagues to make room for higher income players. Sounds a lot like housing. Anthony Edwards didn’t start last night because he had to take a shit. No lie. Jason Kelce is working the Masters. Hell yeah. It’s Final Four weekend and Duke isn’t in it. That’s good. Arizona seems to be the favorite, but never count Hurley’s UCONN out. The UCONN women lead the women’s field, and they meet South Carolina in the annual war on the court, while UCLA and Texas meet in the other game. Baseball began with an opening night on Netflix. I actually liked it. I like NBC’s Sunday night set up too. Check back in a couple weeks for strong opinions of anything we’re seeing right now. If you look right now, Bryce Harper and Shohei Ohtani suck. Enjoy that if you’d like. Some guy named Wiemers started 10-for-10 for the Nationals. Move over, Mickey Mantle.
I didn’t mention Iran this week. It’s not going great for anyone. We’re bombing the shit out of them, they’re closing the Straight of Hormuz, so gas is way up, and they’re fighting back with drones. I mean, I wonder how long it is before Trump either loses interest or does something insane?
And finally, it is Easter Week. Whether you celebrate the holiday or not, enjoy the time.
If you’re still stumbling, you drank too much. Happy week after St. Patrick’s Day. They told me not to, but I did. I took Florida in some brackets, Arizona in others. Figures that the one who is the defending champions were the ones who burned me. March Madness gave us the expected, such as Duke, Arizona, Michigan, Michigan State, and UCONN, and little to no fun. For the second straight year, and second time in the modern era, all the teams in the Sweet 16 come out of The Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Big 12, and Big East. In the era of the portal and NIL, good players leave mid-majors after two years to go play on power programs. Hey, at least we have St. John’s. At least it’s not the women’s tournament either, which is basically just UCONN, UCLA, and South Carolina dogging teams until they get to each other. Texas and their enormous athletics budget arrived as a #1 in the women’s tournament too, and has lived up to it, while their men won three games last week. Local teams Lehigh, Villanova, and Penn all got run out of the men’s side as well. Villanova and Princeton’s women were both sent packing too. Unrelated, but I lost every parlay I tried.
Penn State won the NCAA Wrestling title in the least shocking result ever. Meanwhile, Venezuela beat the United States in the World Baseball Classic final. I guess we take their President, they take our trophy. Cuba probably won’t get to keep either for themselves. Despite some socialist white kids from the U.S. visiting, the country is imploding under it’s own weight. Yes, I know we’re blockading them, which we basically have for 70 years, to varying degrees. Anyway, back to sports, Opening Day for MLB is on Thursday. I’m obviously quite excited, but you’ll get my predictions later this week. I’ll be at a AAA game on Saturday to see Zack Wheeler rehab and the Phillies and Nats on Monday. I’m more excited for betting my pitcher strikeout parlays again. I win on those most days.
In case you were wondering, we’re still fighting the war we won a couple of weeks ago in Iran. The Straight of Hormuz still isn’t open and the national average of gasoline is $3.97 a gallon, because Joe Biden. Israel is still fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as kind of fighting Hamas in Gaza, and fighting Iran in Iran, which only makes sense when you realize the same people are funding Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. Here at home the Homeland Security Department government shutdown continues, and TSA is a mess. I mean, Al Jazeera calls it a crisis. Workers haven’t been paid in weeks, and some just don’t even show up for work now. Can’t say I blame them. President Trump wants to really fix this crisis, so he’s sending in his “A Team,” putting ICE at airports across America. In other mildly political news, Robert Mueller, the former FBI Director who investigated Russian interference in our 2016 Election and determined it happened and that the President couldn’t be prosecuted for it, died. Yes, Donald Trump celebrated it. He did not celebrate Chuck Norris dying though, though I doubt he knows he was a conservative Republican. It’s a real party in the USA these days.
The Bachelorette was canceled for this season. Apparently Taylor Frankie Paul, the star for this upcoming season, beat the living shit out of her ex/baby daddy, and the video leaked. Look, shit no one is proud of happens sometimes, but hear me out. A few dozen (?) “men” were going to go on a show and share a girlfriend for a few weeks, begging for love from a woman who will kick their ass when she’s pissed. The cucked American male is simply wildly out of control. Like, don’t you have any respect for yourselves? Don’t answer that. Apparently some guy who was on the show named Brad Ledford was actually the driver of the car that crashed into former North Carolina Congresscritter Madison Cawthorn and put him in a wheelchair. Seriously, first you picked the violent mom from “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” as the prize of the show, then you put these clowns on the show? This show wouldn’t be crazier if it were cast in a halfway house.
If you want to know where you’re going, you need to know how you got there. The Democratic Party is in a seeming civil war right now. This week it was Illinois, last week it was Texas. On one side, the Biden/Clinton coalition of voters from 2016/2020 and on the other, the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren wing. The actual policy differences in the two are only marginal, really. Both favor expanding health care access, fighting climate change, funding things like public education, and access to reproductive health care. The disagreement is largely based on details and how far to go, from a policy standpoint. Philosophically they are different though. The Bernie/Warren wing of the party wants to build a Democratic Party that resembles a European Green/Social Democratic Party, or British Labour under Corbyn. The Clinton/Biden voter wants a more center-left party. How did we get here and how do you square the two?
To understand the modern Democratic Party I think you need to go backwards and start at there different dates- 1966, 1992, and 2006. They are actually not similar elections at all. Two are midterms, one a Presidential. Democrats won in 2006, while 1966 and 1992 are a mixed bag in many ways. So why these years? I’ll start with 1966, because to me it’s the beginning of all modern politics (not that nothing mattered before that, but nothing should really be viewed as modern). 1966 was the first election after the passage of LBJ’s Civil Rights agenda in Congress. It was the beginning of Democrats decline among white voters that truly culminates in the Reagan years, then relatively stabilizes with Clinton. Democrats started to see some losses in 1966. Many folks like to attribute Johnson’s fall in popularity with Vietnam, but any honest analysis tells you it was mostly otherwise. In 1968 the nation would move to electing Nixon on such themes as “the silent majority,” “law and order,” and eventually “peace with honor.” White voters began their move in 1966, but accelerated it in 1968 and especially 1972. Watergate did interrupt Republican dominance in 1974 and 1976, but by 1980, 1984, and 1988 Republicans were carrying Catholics, running 60% neighborhood numbers with White voters, and carrying the Midwest. They also began eroding the “Solid South” Democrats had enjoyed since the Civil War, which ultimately culminated in the 1994 takeover of Congress, but really took hold under Reagan. In fact, 1966 was the “canary in the coal mine” that foreshadowed Republicans winning five of the next six Presidential elections. Obviously that takes me to 1992 and Clinton. Clinton was the first Democrat to truly reap the benefits of the growing support the party had from Black voters. He also made gains with “soccer moms” and other “normie” voters who were alarmed by the “Christian Coalition” and other culture warrior conservatives. Bill Clinton pulled in white moderate voters and majorities with most non-white groups. Clinton largely abandoned the ideological left of the 1960’s politically. Clinton’s White House was less progressive dogma than his Democratic predecessors, even if that is a bit embellished by some (see his 1993 budget). Sure, Clinton invested heavily in education, the environment, and “built a cabinet that looks like America,” but he also did welfare reform, balanced the budget, was a free trader, and had “Sista Soulja.” Clinton aimed for broad appeal that made him less popular with left-wing academics, ex-hippies, and ideological leftists. He was really popular too, sitting in the 60’s through the end of his term amidst an economic boom. Clinton was personally problematic though. He had the Lewinsky affair. His Vice-President ran for President and lost a very, very controversial election. And probably most importantly of all, his wife became the first ever First Lady to run for office herself after the White House, winning a U.S. Senate seat in New York, which was of course not Bill’s home state. Of course we know the early 2000’s after Clinton were a tumultuous time as well, with 9/11 and the Iraq War dominating much of the discourse through the 2004 Election. And that pretty much takes us up to modern times.
The third year I put in there was 2006, and 2006 is truly the beginning of what the Democratic Party is now. George W. Bush was deeply unpopular by 2006. Iraq, Katrina, a failed Supreme Court nomination, and an attempt to privatize Social Security had worn him down. The Democratic Party was almost identity-less at that point though. The party’s last two Presidents, Carter (defeated) and Clinton (problematic personally) were memories by then. The last two House Speakers who had been run out of office in defeat (Jim Wright of Texas had been forced to resign and Tom Foley of Washington was defeated in his re-election). Tom Daschle’s brief period as Majority Leader in the Senate was a bad memory (Iraq, the Patriot Act, his own defeat in 2004). The Supreme Court had been narrowly conservative since the Reagan-Bush period. The party had no recognizable national leader really. And yet, the party won, and won a lot. Democrats took both houses of Congress in a wave election. Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to lead Congress as Speaker. Moderate mormon Harry Reid, a marginally pro-life Nevada Senator took over the Senate. Democrats took the House winning in places like Suburban Pittsburgh, took the Senate by flipping states like Missouri, Montana, and Virginia, and won Governorships in places like Ohio. This wave in non-traditionally blue areas set the stage for 2008 and the birth of today’s Democratic divisions, in part because the Democrats basically won Congress without a real ideological direction. They ran talking about the minimum wage, the war, health care, and ending corruption. It wasn’t exactly a far left manifesto.
A lot of people have revised the history of the 2008 primaries to fit their narratives that emerged after 2016. First off, the race was essentially a one-on-one race from New Hampshire on. Barack Obama’s coalition was built largely on Black voters, young voters, and progressive white voters. Hillary Clinton dominated among rural voters, older voters, and Hispanic voters. These coalitions dramatically changed by 2016, and even again by 2020. While Clinton won women on the whole pretty solidly, she lost young women in her 2008 run, and Black women. Obviously that was different in 2016. Obama’s coalition didn’t really crack based on age at all. Hillary continuously won in primaries, Obama won caucuses. Opposition to the Iraq War was a huge selling point for Barack Obama, particularly with lefties and young people. Obama’s coalition more closely actually resembled Bernie Sanders campaigns, and yet he was able to win. That was largely a product of Black voters sticking by him loyally. That’s about the only theme from that primary that holds up moving forward though. The rest of his primary coalition essentially forms the backbone of today’s populist left.
I think it’s fascinating to guess as to why most of the groups in the Obama coalition moved from him in 2008 to a more combative populist by 2016. There’s not really an obvious reason. Barack Obama, even today, polls as the most popular Democratic politician in the country pretty easily, and across most ideological spectrums. Some surmise that he wasn’t tough enough on Wall Street after the 2008 crash, or that he didn’t deliver a “public option” in Obamacare, or that he didn’t get out of Afghanistan and close Guantanamo, or all kinds of other theories of his shortcomings, and yet there’s not an ounce of data in polling that suggests these voters soured on Obama even a bit in his Presidency. Interestingly it does seem that Clinton’s coalition did crack quite a bit on their support of her. The more rural Democratic voters who had supported her in places like West Virginia and South Dakota joined young voters and progressive white voters in backing Bernie Sanders in 2016, while Black voters joined older voters and Hispanic voters in backing Clinton’s 2016 primary campaign. While Obama’s poll numbers stayed strong, something clearly had moved within his original base by 2016. Not only did a lot of his coalition move to Bernie, a fatally sizable portion of progressive whites, young voters, and even Clinton’s 2008 rural base either moved to Donald Trump or didn’t vote for her. While she got virtually the same amount of votes as Obama got in 2012, and won the popular vote, Clinton lost the election. Florida, Ohio, and Iowa moved comfortably right into Trump’s coalition. Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin moved towards Trump by the skin of his teeth. Clinton narrowly hung onto Maine, New Hampshire, and Minnesota. Obama had won all nine of these states both times, and rather convincingly for the most part.
The thing I find interesting about 2016 is that it really wasn’t supposed to happen. The progressive champion of the moment in 2015 was Elizabeth Warren, and she simply missed her moment in time to try and run for President. Joe Biden was probably the most bullet proof candidate the Democrats would have had at that time, and most of official Washington dismissed him as a candidate. There were some dead-ender “normies” that thought Martin O’Malley was a real alternative to Hillary, but basically the Beltway was ready to hand her the nomination. Bernie Sanders had some real people in Iowa and New Hampshire, but his national campaign apparatus didn’t read like a powerhouse. Republican operatives thought they were going to get a battle between Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Chris Christie, almost all of them thought Trump was a joke. Bernie and Trump were literally no one’s idea in DC. Then our politics turned on it’s head.
Of course 2018 did happen, but it now looks more like an anomaly than a sea change in our politics. Democrats made a real pivot towards nominating women for Congress in the aftermath of Hillary’s defeat and managed to take the House this way. Of course, Democrats had cultivated no new leaders in the time from 2006 until 2018 though, and Pelosi was back in the Speaker’s office. Pelosi is probably the closest thing to middle ground between the left and center in the Democratic national leadership, but even that isn’t neutral. 2018 brought a new majority in the House of Obama/Clinton Democrats, but also brought about “The Squad,” and did little to assuage the oncoming 2020 nomination fight.
The early portion of the 2020 primaries was a mirage. Joe Biden eventually was nominated by dominating with a coalition of Black, Hispanic, rural, and older Democratic primary voters that was both more moderate and yet more broad than Clinton’s. In the early going states of Iowa and New Hampshire though, he struggled while splitting his electorate with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar. Once he edged them out in Nevada for second though, he consolidated his electorate in South Carolina and ran away with the nomination by the widest margin since Kerry in 2004. Bernie Sanders had some early success before fading, building largely off of a coalition of younger Hispanics, younger voters in general, and progressive white voters. Bernie also faced problems early on with splitting his vote, particularly the progressive female portion of it, with Elizabeth Warren. The other obvious weird part was Covid essentially interrupting the primaries shortly after Super Tuesday and making the primary seem to be over. Even so, Biden had built a substantial lead after Super Tuesday and lead every poll at that point.
Biden went on to win the 2020 election with the broadest coalition in American history, getting 51%, over 81 million votes, and 306 electoral votes. Democrats won the Senate and made Chuck Schumer the Senate Majority Leader along with Pelosi still leading the House. From there, things sort of went down hill. In 2021, Roe v. Wade was overturned, setting off rage within the Democratic ranks. In 2022, despite rising inflation and Biden’s unpopularity, Democrats lost single digit seats in the House, despite losing the popular vote by over 2 million votes and ultimately narrowly losing the House. Frankly, the defeat looked way better than it actually was, and the loss was foreshadowing of what was to come. Biden’s popularity continued to drain over economic concerns and worries about his age. He ended up dropping out in the middle of the 2024 Presidential race, despite what was essentially a margin of error deficit in the polls. He was largely pushed out by major donors, many of whom had been fans of his as Vice-President and even as a Senator. He was replaced by his Vice-President Kamala Harris, who immediately attempted to moderate her image more towards that of what Biden’s had been in 2020. She talked about her time as a Prosecutor, talked about fighting inflation, attacked Trump as an unacceptable, authoritarian figure, and tried to appeal to moderate voters with endorsements from former Republican electeds like Liz Cheney. Harris leaned into the image of a tough prosecutor type, something she had leaned far away from in 2020 when supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren called her a “cop.” Republicans pushed back, seeking to use her 2020 campaign statements to cast her as a far left liberal and continuation of Biden’s policies, which by then they had cast as more liberal than he ran as. They hammered her on support for transgender people, support for a liberal border policy, and support for Biden’s economic policies. Data says it worked. While Harris bled out less votes from her own base than Hillary had in 2016 (it’s true, the left really did vote for her), she lost a lot of moderate Biden voters. Some flipped. More didn’t show up.
All of this brings us to today. The Democratic Party’s “brain trusts” in DC seem to be moving the party in a very different direction suddenly. They seem to think the way to bring back the “missing” Biden voters is to move which voters they are prioritizing with their messaging. Most of the front-runners for the 2028 Presidential race that are being created by DC consultants and the media are white men, many of them Governors. So in this group, think Shapiro, Newsom, Pritzker, Beshear, Gallego, and Murphy. The other group getting attention are non-white populist progressives such Ro Khanna and AOC, and while he’s not a Presidential contender, Zohran Mamdani is a figure they are pushing. Then there is a whole other element of candidate rising amongst the consultant class- the “white masculine man” that is going to bring back appeal to white men. This is a solution in search of a problem. as Kamala Harris actually did better with white men than Biden, Clinton, or Obama, even winning the college educated white men. Even so, we’re seeing the rise of candidates like Graham Platner, Bob “Crooksy” Brooks, and James Talarico. Even worse, the white guy governors seem to be embracing this crap too. Newsom is going to go on human pile of dogshit Hasan Piker’s podcast to talk. Shapiro is endorsing Brooks. Senators such as Gallego, Murphy, Heinrich, and Whitehouse are embracing Platner. The fix is in. They want to go all in on “manly” white men as their path forward. What problem does it solve? I’m not sure. They’re doing it though.
I think the clear thing to understand is this isn’t the party’s top problem, but the party’s lack of appeal to white people is a problem. If states like Ohio, Iowa, and Florida are out of reach, and states like North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and Nevada aren’t firmly in the win column, the map tilts conservative. The reality is that further erosion could take Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin out of the Democratic column for good. Even more succinctly, while half the country is going to live in like 8 states that will be more diverse, the other 42 states are going to be decidedly white. The Democratic Party’s decline with white voters largely has stabilized for a quarter century though, and Kamala Harris did better with white guys than one might have guessed. I’m not sure what in our modern history suggests that we need to nominate Neo Nazis, crooked “every” men, and people who go on conspiracy podcasts in order to win? We got more votes than anyone in history in 2020 by running a moderate guy who had solid appeal to Black voters and didn’t seem like an extremist nut to white and rural voters. We’re risking our strongest bases of support- Black voters, Jewish voters, and educated White women to appeal to who exactly? The descendants of people who moved away from the party between 1966 and 1994? The last few Dixiecrats who ran away in 2010? People who came out of nowhere to vote for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, or 2024? Do we really think going on Hasan Piker’s ridiculous podcast is going to make us look normal? Didn’t we learn our lesson from thinking normal people listened to Charlamagne? What in the last 60 years of the party makes us think we can get votes from people who don’t vote for us by being more like a New York City Mayor who won’t oppose saying “Globalize the Intifada?” Sure, I do think Democrats overreached with trying to normalize and formalize DEI, #MeToo, and other social movements that the country wasn’t ready for at this time, but are we now going to embrace terrorists and Nazis to chase mythical votes we haven’t received in decades? It should be worth noting that the only group to support eversuccessful Presidential candidate in recent times on the Democratic side are Black voters. Jewish voters are the only other group to support every Democratic Presidential nominee in recent history. Wouldn’t any modest gains made with guys with Nazi tattoos chopping wood in the rural South be offset with the losses we’d take with our base? Seems so to me.
Anyone to study recent American political history understands that the ideological left Democratic Party broke up as the electorate included more and more women, and Civil Rights finally let Black voters vote. Race and gender simply trump ideology in the American electorate. One that wants an ideological party could put in the time to organize and build support for their positions, maybe even try to pass some legislation that moves the ball forward towards their position. Instead, some think the right idea is to wholesale try to turn 60 years of political movement around by embracing lunatics and bigots. It’s a horrible strategy. It’s tone deaf. It’s historically ignorant. It’s a path to losing the 2028 Presidential election. Tread wisely, friends.
You know how sometimes a lot of stuff happens in a week, but really nothing stands out so you really don’t remember anything? Good times. It’s almost Spring. It’s St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow. No matter how bad life is, it’s good right now. Or it could at least be worse. It could still be early February and there could be snow on the ground. Lots of snow, frozen solid because it’s too cold to melt.
So March Madness is here. Locally, Lehigh University is in the big dance, as are two Philly schools, Villanova and Penn, while St. Joe’s is in the NIT. It seems like most of New York City is in, with St. John’s, LIU, and Hofstra in. I haven’t filled out my brackets yet (that’s tomorrow morning), but I think I’m split between Florida and Arizona at the moment, but also considering Duke. Here in Easton, PA, we celebrate March Matness religiously, with this week’s NCAA Division I Wrestling Championships almost being a religious holiday. I’m taking Penn State to win by a million. In the World Baseball Classic this week the United States and Venezuela have advanced to play a championship game tomorrow night filled with geopolitical irony this year. Phillies Cristopher Sanchez, Aaron Nola, and prospect Dante Nori have all stood out for their teams in this tournament, while Phillies Americans Brad Keller, Kyle Schwarber, and Bryce Harper will play in tomorrow’s final. I’m enjoying it. This past weekend was the New Jersey State High School Wrestling Championships, and while the wrestling was good, two tweets stood out- this one about the best Italian names in each weight class and this photo of an amazing scene at the end of a semi-final match on the IBEW Local 102 mat. Peak stuff. Also if you ever thought of giving up on something, 33 year old Izzy Balsiger became an All-American 13 years after previously achieving the honor at the NCAA Division III Wrestling tournament.
Last night was the Oscar’s. I watched Conan’s opening monologue and thought it was pretty funny, but Conan O’Brien is funny. “One Battle After Another” won best picture. Jessie Buckley won best actress for her role in “Hamnet.” Michael B. Jordan won best actor for his role in “Sinners,” officially making him the second most famous Michael Jordan. “Sinners” won four Oscars as a movie, while “One Battle After Another” won six. Nicole Kidman showed up Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez on the Red Carpet. And in my favorite win, “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” won best documentary feature, a big fuck you to Vlad. I still couldn’t sit there and watch the whole show though, ADHD gets in the way.
Well it’s just about St. Patrick’s Day. Go drink a green beer or some Guinness, throw on your Birds jersey for the day, and blast the Dropkick Murphy’s. Oh, and eat all of the corned beef and cabbage that I don’t get to first.
