Month: November 2025

It’s a strength, not a weakness

As long as we’re doing election postmortems I thought this point by Philip Bump was especially insightful:

In his victory speech, Mamdani challenged the Democratic Party and its leadership.

“If tonight teaches us anything,” he said, “it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution, and we have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they’ve been left behind.”

His latter point is obviously true. But it’s the highlighted part that’s interesting.

Mamdani is saying that the Democratic Party has been too timid. He’s echoing the argument that the party has tried too hard to triangulate its politics to public opinion, approaching campaigns the way a helicopter parent approaches a playground. He’s siding (as one would expect) with the left in the left-vs.-centrism bickering that’s consumed Democratic political discussions since 2024. Give or take a few decades.

One thing the results on Tuesday can show us, though, is that this is a false choice. Mamdani won while embracing left-wing policies and politics in New York City. Spanberger won while running a more moderate campaign in Virginia. Democrats won in a lot of places while running a lot of different campaigns. This was in part because, like in California, they provided an opportunity for voters to rebuke Trump. But they still won.

It is a reminder that democracy is centered on diversity. Democracy is the idea that people from various backgrounds can unite and decide on common leadership that represents them — meaning them in their town or their county or their state. Maybe the president isn’t someone you agree with or maybe your city councilman isn’t, but democracy provides the opportunity for everyone’s voice to be heard on the subject.

Particularly at the moment, this seems like a valuable idea for the Democratic Party itself to lean into. Trumpism is about homogeneity, about forcing Americans into his views and his systems. His panicky response to the results on Tuesday reinforces how uncomfortable he is with divergent viewpoints and centers of power. The Democratic Party could easily position itself as the home of diverse argument and diverse policy positions reflecting America’s diverse population — a rejection of the uniformity Trump wants to impose. It’s the party of Spanberger and Mamdani, not the party of Donald Trump and various Donald Trumps Jr.

He points out that centrists are always saying that candidates should tailor their messages to the electorate but notes that they end up muddying this message by insisting that candidates should downplay civil rights and follow a national message, which ends up being carried out on the field of Republicans choosing.

He writes:

If, instead, your approach and your party’s approach is that you are a big tent that is centered on democracy and diversity? You have a built-in response to efforts to nationalize your views: That’s New York, not Richmond. Our community’s priorities and theirs are different. Our party provides the space for Americans to make different choices in different places. I and many other have observed that the Democratic Party, needing to win with diverse populations in diverse places, has to be a big-tent party. So why not center that at the heart of the party’s rhetoric?

You can see how such an approach would work on nights like Tuesday. How it did work, if tacitly. But it has a broader advantage, given that it reflects the promise and values of America itself — or at least of the America that we understood to exist until noon on Jan. 20.

Ten million Californians came out to stand up to Donald Trump. A million New Yorkers voted for Mamdani. Two million backed Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia. Diverse candidates, diverse issues, overlapping but distinct priorities. It was a good night for big-D Democrats and for little-d democracy. Perhaps the party should sew those things together.

Democrats can come together nationally around values and certain priorities but it is, by necessity, a diverse party. The GOP is homogeneous and they want the entire country to either be exactly like them or bow down to them. There is no room for cultural variety or philosophical argument. Pluralism is a dirty word.

I guess they’ve made DEI their watch word and I’m sure Democrats will not have the nerve to embrace it now. They won’t even use the word liberal and they’restarting to run from progressive now too. But they should at least welcome the concept. It’s a strength not a weakness.

As an L.A. Dodger fan I had a few rare light and happy days over the past couple of weeks as my team won the world series. But one of the reasons I am such a fan, aside from geography, is that the team is the team of Jackie Robinson and Fernando Valenzuela and now this incredible contingent of masterful Japanese baseball players among many others. They’ve embraced diversity from the start, seeking talent from wherever it hails, and a lot of people didn’t like it. But a lot of people did.

They turned out an estimated 250,000 people to the parade to celebrate the win this week and if you looked at that crowd it couldn’t be more diverse. There was an especially heavy Latino presence, which makes sense since a huge part of the fan base is Hispanic. But there was every race and ethnicity in that crowd celebrating the team that looked just like them.

ICE and CPB didn’t have a presence at that event for obvious reasons. They wouldn’t dare Wade into that crowd of thousands of Latinos and Asians, women, Black people and white people all together enjoying the same shared moment of pleasure and excitement.

As I watched the team wend its way through downtown LA being cheered on by my city’s incredibly diverse population I thought to myself, “this is the future, Trump. You can’t hold back this tide.”

It’s both!

Greg Sargent has this 100% right. The carnage to our democracy and carnage to our economy require the same message:

The Democratic Party’s blowout wins on Tuesday night underscore a fundamental reality about the Donald Trump era: Anti-Trump politics is affordability politics, and affordability politics is anti-Trump politics. It’s not just that there is no need to choose between attacking Trump’s lawlessness and addressing the “price of eggs,” in the hackneyed shorthand for costs and inflation. It’s that the two missions are inseparable from one another.

In the weeks leading up to the elections—in which Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races by 15 points and 13 points, respectively—a strange, contrary media trope took hold. Various news analyses suggested that Spanberger and Sherrill were erring by obsessing over Trump rather than focusing on what actually matters to voters. Some Democrats fretted that while attacking Trump was “seductive,” an opportunity was being missed to offer a substantive “alternative.”

Tuesday’s results decisively refute that false-choice narrative.

Start with this finding in the updated exit polls: Both Spanberger and Sherrill entirely erased the GOP advantage with voters who lack a four-year degree. Spanberger tied her Republican opponent among them, with each getting 50 percent, a huge swing from four years earlier, when Glenn Youngkin won them by 59 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, Sherrill also tied her GOP opponent among non-college voters by 50 percent to 49 percent.

And here’s a striking nuance: While both Democrats lost non-college white voters by large amounts—a demographic the party continues to struggle with—Spanberger did reduce that margin relative to 2021. Critically, both made up for that by winning huge margins among non-college nonwhite voters: The spreads were 85–15 for Spanberger and 75–23 for Sherrill. Given that Trump’s 2024 victory unleashed a hurricane of analysis about his inroads with the nonwhite working class, those margins are heartening indeed.

True, there are nuances and caveats here. Virginia and New Jersey are blue-leaning; turnout differentials could help explain these shifts; they might not hold in a higher-turnout presidential election; exit polls are not the final word; and so forth. But still, such success for Democrats with non-college voters—relative to recent performances in the same states—suggests they may be starting to repair the damage Trump did to their coalition.

There’s a bizarre tendency in our political discourse to treat criticism of Trump—including his lawlessness and consolidation of authoritarian power—as somehow evading the “real” issues that working-class voters actually care about. Tuesday’s results sorely test this false dichotomy. On one front after another, the Democrats’ attacks on Trump were directly linked to voters’ material concerns.

For instance, many of Spanberger’s ads attacking Trump were also about the economy. One ad ripped her GOP opponent as a Trump stooge while decrying soaring costs and rising unemployment due to his policies. Another ad labeled her GOP foe a “MAGA Republican”—that’s just Resistance talk, right?—while decrying rising grocery prices and health care costs under Trump. Yet another ad attacked MAGA while casting Trump’s big budget bill as a giveaway to “billionaires.”

Meanwhile, Sherrill’s labeling of her opponent the “Trump of Trenton” was sometimes treated as little more than anti-Trump obsessiveness. But Democrats ran ads that tied her GOP opponent to Trump while also blasting Trump’s massive Medicaid cuts and his tariffs for the economic harms they’re inflicting. When Trump killed the tunnel project connecting New York and New Jersey, in an authoritarian move designed to inflict pain on only Democrats, the party’s ads blasted this as a job killer, and Sherrill also forthrightly called it “illegal” and vowed to “fight” it.

Trump’s tariffs, his killing of the tunnel project, his potentially illegal federal-worker firings, his DOGE bloodbath, and more show that the economic carnage he’s unleashed is inseparable from his consolidation of autocratic power. Democrats can say these things are bad because they’re both authoritarian abuses of power and have terrible economic consequences, while vowing to stand up to that lawlessness—and do well with the working class.

It is a false choice to say that Democrats should focus on “kitchen table issues.” Sure, they should talk about the shitty economy constantly — and place the blame on Trump’s corrupt, authoritarian, policies. People will get it. It’s not that hard. He’s destroying us, one self-serving, undemocratic decision at a time.

“This firewall that exists in the punditry between Trump and economic messaging—that is not how working-class voters thought about these issues,” a Democratic strategist familiar with strategic thinking in both gubernatorial races tells me. 

After 39 years in Congress

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, 85, announces her long-expected retirement with a six-minute video celebrating her work representing San Francisco with decades of accomplishments and challenges overcome. Not insignificant among them: being a woman in politics.

Thank you, San Francisco. pic.twitter.com/OP8ubeFzR6

— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) November 6, 2025

The New York Times (gift link):

“With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service as your proud representative,” she told her constituents in a nearly six-minute video posted on X early Thursday morning, with clips of San Francisco’s iconic cable cars and colorful Victorian homes flashing in the background.

“My message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power,” she continued. “We have always led the way, and now we must continue to do so by remaining full participants in our democracy and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear.”

Ms. Pelosi, who likes to use the phrase “resting is rusting,” led the House Democrats for 20 years, eight of which she spent as speaker. She has also been a prodigious fund-raiser and raised more than $1.3 billion for Democratic campaigns, according to her aides.

“You could argue she’s been the strongest speaker in history,” Newt Gingrich, former Republican Speaker from Georgia said in 2021.

“Speaker Pelosi is a hero, there is simply no leader like her…she was a state party chair knowing first hand the year-round organizing work we need to win elections. She reminds us all to ‘know your power’ — let’s win elections for her…and for the children,” tweeted Jane Kleeb, state chair in Nebraska, president of the Association of State Democratic Committees (ASDC) and a vice chair of the DNC.

Next come the paens to her career in politics. And already the scramble to replace Pelosi (I’m adding their ages in brackets):

The race to succeed Ms. Pelosi was already shaping up to be a fierce one before she announced her retirement. Scott Wiener [55], a Democratic state senator from San Francisco who is a champion of housing construction, and Saikat Chakrabarti [39], who worked as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, have already announced they were running for the seat — with or without Ms. Pelosi on the ballot.

Other possible contenders named by Politico last month “include Christine Pelosi [59], her daughter and a longtime party organizer; city Supervisor Connie Chan [47], a leader of the city’s progressive wing; and Jane Kim [48], a former supervisor and director of the left-leaning California Working Families Party.”

Pelosi is a towering figure if not a tall one (5′-5″). She’s due all the respect she’s earned and then some. But I added those ages to possible contenders to remind readers that Democrats have a gerontocracy problem that jaded younger voters recognize. Despite her accomplishments and skills, that is one challenge Pelosi has not addressed. She first ran for Congress at age 47 in 1987.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

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Any excuse to bust heads

ProPublica’s report from October documented more than 170 American citizens arrested and held by ICE. “More than 20 citizens have reported being held for over a day without being able to call their loved ones or a lawyer. In some cases their families couldn’t find them.”

Also, “Agents have arrested about 130 Americans, including a dozen elected officials, for allegedly interfering with or assaulting officers, yet those cases were often dropped.”

Charging protesters with felonious assault for any, even inadvertent, contact with an agent is the ICE equivalent of regular police yelling “Stop resisting!” while beating detainees already complying. It’s as though officers have been trained to use the phrase as legal cover. For ICE, it’s threats of up to 20 years in prison.

Harry Litman contends at The New Republic that violating American citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights “is very likely ICE’s general M.O.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, meanwhile and in spite of evidence, claims no Americans — zero — have been arrested or detained in the ICE sweeps of neighborhoods (Chicago Sun Times):

“There’s no American citizens that have been arrested or detained. We focus on those that are here illegally. And anything that you would hear or report that would be different than that is simply not true.”

Thus saith the puppy shooter. Litman counters with the ProPublica report:

ProPublica’s report chronicled a series of ICE arrests that would be hard to believe if they weren’t backed by official complaints and eyewitnesses. In one, masked agents pointed a gun at, pepper-sprayed, and punched a young man whose only offense was filming them as they searched for his relative. In another, they tackled a 79-year-old car-wash owner, pressing their knees into his neck and back. The man, who had just undergone heart surgery, was left with broken ribs and was denied medical attention for 12 hours. In a third case, agents handcuffed a woman on her way to work and held her for more than two days—without any contact with the outside world.

All Americans, even those for whom immigrants are instinctively “other,” should be disgusted by these abominations, which make clear that there is no foolproof protection for anyone, Americans included, from ICE’s rabid tactics.

At least 50 of the cases were never charged, Litman observes. He outlines “three core limitations” the Fourth places on police behavior. “These three guideposts mark the difference between a democracy and a police state. And yet, in case after case, ICE agents are blowing through those guardrails.”

One might see these abuses as “tragic anomolies,” Litman offers, but:

They are not. They are the predictable consequence of a political project that conflates law enforcement with warfare and citizens with suspects. Each time a citizen is wrongly detained or beaten by federal agents, the injury extends beyond the individual: It erodes the shared understanding that government power must answer to the Constitution.

But the fish rots from the head, the saying goes, and we all know whose rotting, blow-dried head that is: the one repeatedly sneering at court orders and encouraging police violence.

Tax cuts may not trickle down, but authoritarian followers need little encouragement to follow the king’s lead.

In North Carolina, for example:

Three North Carolina Republicans are asking the governor to send the National Guard to Charlotte, embracing President Donald Trump’s use of the military for local law enforcement.

Reps. Pat Harrigan, Mark Harris, and Chuck Edwards all signed the letter asking Gov. Josh Stein to deploy the North Carolina National Guard to the state’s largest city. The Republican lawmakers’ letter to Stein is in support of a request from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Fraternal Order of Police.

The police union wrote a letter to local leaders last month asking the city’s mayor, Stein and Trump to send in National Guard troops “due to the ongoing failure of city and police leadership to address the severe staffing crisis within the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, which we believe has led to a violence crisis in Charlotte.”

Violence crisis? What violence crisis?

Crime in Charlotte and North Carolina at large has been a consistent focus of these three members since a man fatally stabbed Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on the city’s public transit in August. Zarutska’s death gained national attention, and her death was often cited by conservatives as a reason for Trump’s tough-on-crime agenda. 

[…]

The Republican House lawmakers’ letter cites a 200 percent uptick in the murder rate in Uptown Charlotte. The Charlotte Police Department reported that there was a 8 percent drop in overall crime citywide and a 20 percent decline in violent offenses during this year’s third quarter. 

But any excuse to bust heads.

In Chicago this weekend.Trump's thugs beat the hell out of this young guy who was just standing there.He is now in the hospital. The thug who beat him was doxxed by the female activist who Border Patrol shot on Saturday.He went from the scene of the shooting to this.@democrats.senate.gov

— Denise Wheeler (@denisedwheeler.bsky.social) 2025-10-06T19:10:07.485Z

Litman offers this warning:

A government that flouts the Fourth Amendment and then lies about it to courts and the people has already crossed a moral and legal frontier. The question is whether the country will fight back before the border between law and lawlessness disappears altogether.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Donald Trump poked the bear. And the bear roared back. pic.twitter.com/HQI1h7KBgt

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) November 5, 2025

The first internal poll for Gavin Newsom’s redistricting ballot measure was, as one senior strategist saw it, as palatable as “warm spit.”

Just 38 percent of voters supported having the Legislature redraw the state’s congressional maps, according to the previously unreported mid-July survey. Forty-five percent were opposed. The California governor’s maneuvering to take on President Donald Trump wasn’t simply on slippery ground. It was underwater.

“It would have felt irresponsible to walk back into the room and to look people in the eye and say, ‘We should move forward with this,’” recalled Jim DeBoo, the campaign’s de facto quarterback.

A loss here would reverberate well beyond Sacramento: Trump could point to California — the state that sued, defied and mocked him — as proof that even a blue-state bulwark was no match for his drive to rejigger the midterm playing field, while Newsom would own a massive whiff against his favorite foil. It would be the Fox News chyron Democrats most fear: “TRUMP BEATS CALIFORNIA.”

It’s easy now — with 15 weeks of hindsight — to see Proposition 50’s decisive win as expected, even anticlimactic. The election was called as soon as the polls closed.

But the outlook was anything but certain back when Democrats were still clinging to hope they could bluff their way out of a precarious and costly redistricting arms race. The sobering initial poll was a fork-in-the-road moment for Newsom and his political inner circle. Perhaps, some on the team suggested, getting voter approval was too heavy a lift.

Nevertheless, they plowed ahead, building up a daunting cash advantage, unifying a bruised party and galvanizing voters around an anti-Trump message — all in a matter of weeks.

Their win will echo across the national political landscape — an unambiguous rebuke to Trump from the nation’s most populous state and for Newsom, a springboard in his likely presidential campaign. With Prop 50’s passage, Democrats could net as many as five additional House seats, which will be crucial to their party’s chances of flipping the House in the face of GOP gerrymandering efforts in several red states. And while California stood alone for months as the sole blue state to press ahead with mid-decade redistricting, now Democrats in other states such as Virginia are poised to jump into the fray.

As California goes …

Our country is under threat from a tyrannical president and a fascist movement and if we’re going to survive as a democracy we have to take risks.

Aaaaah. I should have known:

With 10 naval vessels and 10,000 troops already deployed to the Caribbean—the largest military buildup there since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis—and a carrier strike group led by the USS Gerald R. Ford taking up position, some sort of military attack on Venezuela appears imminent. U.S. President Donald Trump’s rationale for this aggressive military action is that Venezuela is a hub of drug trafficking and that supplying drugs to U.S. consumers is the equivalent of an armed attack on the United States, justifying a military response.

But the real aim is to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government and then, by cutting off the flow of Venezuelan oil to Cuba, fulfill the Republican right’s decades-long dream of collapsing the Cuban government. It’s a strategy that John Bolton, national security advisor in the first Trump administration, tried without success in 2019, but Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio now intends to try again.

This explains Rubio’s obsession. But their plan may not work any better than all the ones that came before:

If Washington manages to unseat Maduro, then his successor would very likely cut off oil shipments to Havana, striking another blow to an already reeling Cuban economy. U.S. success in Venezuela could also threaten Cuba’s national security if the Trump administration, intoxicated with the win, decided to expand its aggressive military interventionism.

But Havana is no longer as dependent on Venezuela as it was a decade ago.

The alliance between Havana and Caracas was formed in 1998, when Chávez was first elected as Venezuela’s president, advocating “21st century socialism.” Chávez and Fidel Castro developed a strong personal bond even before the election. Chávez saw Castro as his mentor; Castro saw Chávez as his protégé.

In 2000 and 2003, the two countries signed cooperation agreements for Venezuela to provide Cuba with petroleum at subsidized prices in exchange for the services of Cuban medical personnel deployed to Chávez’s working-class constituencies. At the peak of this trade, from 2008 to 2015, Cuba received more than 100,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd) while nearly 30,000 Cuban doctors and technicians served in Venezuela

But beginning in 2016, Venezuelan oil production began to decline due to mismanagement and poor maintenance. By the middle of 2018, it had fallen by half. Over roughly the same few years, the global price of oil also fell by about half, drastically cutting Venezuela’s revenue. Oil shipments to Cuba declined as Venezuela sold more production for its own benefit. By 2024, shipments had fallen to 32,000 bpd and have been even lower this year.

The shrinking supply of Venezuelan oil has exacerbated its perennial shortage of foreign exchange currency. Power blackouts have become routine and domestic production is suffering from lack of fuel. But there’s a silver lining for Cuba in these dark clouds: Havana is less dependent on Venezuelan oil now than it was a decade ago.

In 2014, Cuban economist Pedro Vidal estimated that the sudden, complete loss of Venezuelan oil would knock 7.7 percent off of Cuba’s GDP. But since Venezuela’s largesse has already fallen by almost three-quarters and the price of oil is now roughly half of what it was then, Cuba has already absorbed most of the shock that Vidal predicted. Moreover, as Cuba’s energy crisis has worsened, Mexico and Russia have been willing to increase their oil shipments at concessionary prices to fill at least part of the deficit.

Cuba is an old fashioned right wing, anti-communist, white whale that seems weirdly anachronistic in 2025. I guess the fact that they’re using the word “communist” to describe everyone who opposes them shows some kind of resurgence on the MAGA right, but I really don’t think any of the rank and file see Cuba as the enemy. They don’t even know what the word really means. It’s the woke libs they want to vanquish.

Having said that, I will be surprised if Trump doesn’t get a huge rally round the flag effect if he starts bombing and regime changing. It is not natural for the right to be pacifists — they are a bloodthirsty lot. Maybe the America First thing is real this time. But I’m skeptical.

TPM:

The risk in drawing aggressive gerrymanders, as Republicans did in a few red states and plan to do in several more, is that your candidates inherently get put in more competitive districts. In wave elections, those newly vulnerable lawmakers can get swept away. 

“Tonight is such a blowout so far that I wonder if it gives some Rs pause about redistricting in states that are still pondering it,” tweeted Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at UVA. “They already needed to ‘stress-test’ the districts (and they did in TX-NC-MO, I think, even considering tonight), but still.”

If Tuesday is a sign of where the midterm winds are blowing, the Republican gerrymanders may lead to bigger Democratic gains — on top of the big Democratic (Gavin Newsom) win, as voters approved a defensive California gerrymander by almost 64 percent.

As we all were schooled relentlessly after the last election, not all Hispanic voters are the same. So, maybe all those Texas Latinos are now permanently Republican no matter what Trump and his henchmen do. But if they were actually voting on the economy last time as everyone says and didn’t realize that Trump would have masked thugs racially profiling and brutalizing them, citizen or not, they might not be so anxious to vote GOP again. We’ll see.

I’m not going to predict election outcomes anymore because I’ve obviously very bad at it. I can’t understand why anyone would vote for these fascist morons no matter how hard I try so neither reason or instinct can be relied upon to guide my thinking. But I do believe that last night’s results in the Latino districts in Virginia and New Jersey says something:

Trump made significant inroads with Latinos during the 2024 presidential election. In fact, no Republican presidential candidate won a higher percentage with Latinos — ever.

But there have been signs that Latinos were moving away from Trump. Poll after poll has shown that, and Tuesday night was the first time it showed up at the ballot box in a significant way. Spanberger and Sherrill, the governors-elect from Virginia and New Jersey respectively, both won Latinos by 2-to-1 margins, according to the exit polls.

Going deeper into New Jersey specifically, Trump won Passaic County in North Jersey, a county that is nearly half Latino, according to the census. He was the first Republican presidential candidate to win it since 1992. Trump won it by 3 points, but Sherrill won it by 15.

There are 10 counties in New Jersey where Latinos make up at least 1-in-5 people, per the U.S. census. Sherrill not only won them all, she expanded Democratic margins and flipped three Trump had won.

Maybe that’s just a fluke. But if I were a Republican I’d be worried.

All the races yesterday were good news for the Democrats, even some that went completely under the radar. Check this out:

The shift in Connecticut tonight is seismic. Possibly unprecedented. Loads of towns flipped from Republican to Democratic control.

A partial list:

Ansonia
Bethany
Branford
Bristol
Brooklyn
East Granby
Ellington
Enfield
Farmington
Milford
New Britain
New Fairfield
Norwich…

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) November 5, 2025

Unexpected victory in an unexpected place:

After 13 years, Mississippi Democrats have broken the Republican Party’s supermajority in the Mississippi Senate. Voters elected Democrats to two seats previously held by Republicans, reducing the number of Republican senators in the upper chamber from 36 to 34—one fewer than necessary to constitute a supermajority.

When a party has supermajority status in the Mississippi Senate, it can more easily override a governor’s veto, propose constitutional amendments and execute certain procedural actions.

The Mississippi Democratic Party called the victory “a historic rebuke of extremism.”

Bolts points to this one, which will be very important for the next elections as long as Trump and his minions are on a jihad against voting rights:

Three Democratic justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court have defeated an unusually high-profile Republican bid to unseat them. They secured large statewide victories on Tuesday, following an historically expensive campaign centered largely on the court’s role in defending voting and abortion rights.

The results preserve Democratic control of this all-important court for at least two more years. Barring any unexpected retirements, Democrats will enjoy a 5-2 majority until the next Pennsylvania Supreme Court elections, which are slated for 2027. 

And Tuesday’s results mean that Republicans are now unlikely to win an outright majority until 2029 at the earliest; the best they could hope for in two years is to force a tie on the court.

Conservatives made no secret that they were hoping to take back the court in time for the next presidential race. In this most populous of swing states, the supreme court has in recent years ruled against Republicans in several high-stakes election lawsuits. Since flipping the court in 2015, the Democratic majority has struck down a Republican gerrymander, upheld mail-in voting against conservative attacks, and rejected every one of Donald Trump’s Pennsylvania lawsuits to invalidate the 2020 presidential election. 

“The projected victory for the three of us speaks well of our democracy,” one of the winning justices, David Wecht, told Bolts on Tuesday night. “We all campaigned on the basis of vindicating the Pennsylvania constitution’s free and equal elections clause, and we’re all committed to continuing to vindicate that right.”

Democrats may have a blue wave building. But a lot of what has to happen is just grinding it out in state and local races like these.

By the way, if you haven’t seen all the results go on over to Bolts. They have it all. Reading it is like a tonic after the last years of self-flagellation and second guessing. Democrats won big everywhere just a couple of weeks after 7 million people showed up to protest in the streets.

We ain’t dead yet.

The Democrats won big last night. There were probably a lot of reasons unique to each race. But this was the biggie:

And that’s Real Clear which includes a number of GOP polls that artificially raise Trump’s average.

How about this?

Now let’s see what the Republicans do. Let’s see what the institutions do. Let’s see what the media and the corporations do. We’re going to find out if they really like being Trump’s little minions or if they just bought the hype that he was invincible.

For someone who was so powerful in his day, the tributes that have come after the death of former Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday at the age of 84 have been muted. Save for a perfunctory statement issued by the White House and noting that flags over government buildings should be lowered to half-staff, as of Wednesday morning President Donald Trump has said nothing in tribute — although he owes Cheney a debt of gratitude.

But as one of the most consequential politicians of his era, Cheney left a mark on American politics and government that has changed the system forever. His legacy is much more complicated than anyone would have expected when he left office in 2009 as the most unpopular vice president in American history. 

According to a New York Times/ CBS News poll, during his last year in office, Cheney’s approval rating dipped as low as 13%. The country had soured on what he and President George W. Bush had wrought, including the “War on Terror” and the Iraq war, both of which Cheney had championed, pushing the limits of presidential power from the vice president’s office. While his approval ratings would rise slightly over time, in the end Cheney remained a unique figure in American politics, unpopular on both sides of the aisle.

There was a time when this would have been unthinkable. He had been part of the Republican establishment for decades before he became vice president, having served in politics since he took a one-year fellowship in Washington, D.C., for a Wisconsin GOP congressman in 1968. The following year, he met Donald H. Rumsfeld, who had recently been appointed to helm President Richard Nixon’s anti-poverty office. Under Rumsfeld’s patronage, Cheney’s ascent to power began. By 1975, at the age of 34, he was named chief of staff to President Gerald Ford — the youngest in history.

After Ford’s defeat in 1976 by Jimmy Carter, Cheney returned to Wyoming and was elected as the state’s lone congressman for ten years, becoming a highly influential Reagan Revolutionary. In 1989, President George Bush appointed him secretary of defense, and from his perch in the Pentagon he oversaw controversial military operations in Panama and the Gulf War. Cheney left government following Bush’s defeat to Bill Clinton in 1992 to become CEO of the oil services company Halliburton until 2000, when he was called upon to help his old boss’s son, GOP nominee George W. Bush, select a vice president — and he recommended himself. 

Despite his own lack of military experience — like President Donald Trump, he had deferments throughout the Vietnam War — Cheney was an unreconstructed hawk, rarely seeing a war he didn’t want to fight. During his hiatus from government after serving as secretary of defense, he became a prominent member of the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank whose goal was “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.”

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a whole world of opportunity opened up to the claque of neoconservatives in Bush’s orbit, who had been agitating to go back into Iraq to depose its leader Saddam Hussein. Under the rubric of War on Terror, Cheney spearheaded a propaganda campaign to gain political support for attacking Iraq — which had nothing to do with 9/11 — and helped the CIA manipulate intelligence to imply that Iraq was actively producing weapons of mass destruction. We all know the results of that horrific decision. 

Uniquely for a vice president, the effects of his decisions and influence are still being felt. Cheney believed in the unitary executive theory before it became de rigueur among Republicans. He and other Reaganites believed presidents had been dangerously constrained by what they saw as an overreaction to Nixon’s criminal behavior. Cheney set out to reverse that trend, advising Bush to push the limits of executive power. 

He was an unrepentant believer in torture, and years after leaving office he continued to claim its legality, saying it should be employed as necessary. Cheney even went so far as to argue that the office of the vice president was essentially a fourth branch of government, completely immune from oversight because of its dual role as a member of the executive branch and president of the Senate, which meant that neither branch had the authority to question him. Democrats cried foul, but Republicans went along with him. The public shrugged. 

As historian Rick Perlstein, the preeminent historian of the conservative movement, has written in his forthcoming book “The Infernal Triangle: How America Got This Way,” which is expected to be published in 2026, Cheney literally believed that a president should have the power of a king. In the 1980s, Cheney was the ranking Republican on the committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal, which was essentially about the president usurping the will of Congress to pursue his own policy goals. The committee ultimately recommended that Congress make it harder for the president to break the law. Cheney, in charge of the minority report, objected to that idea.:

“Chief Executives are given the responsibility for acting to respond to crises or emergencies,” his draft text read. “To the extent that the Constitution and laws are read narrowly, as Jefferson wished, the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law.”

Based on those words, Dick Cheney should be one of Donald Trump’s favorite people — and the entire MAGA universe would be overcome with grief and praise at his passing. 

But that’s hardly the case. Beyond Trump’s lack of tribute, the paeans that have been given by Republicans have only been short and stilted. There certainly is not the widespread glory and acclaim one would normally expect for such a central figure in the Republican Party. 

We all know why Trump and MAGA aren’t shedding any tears over Cheney’s passing. Sure, Trump ran against the Iraq war in 2016, asserting that Bush and Cheney were stupid for going in, and then for not keeping the oil once they did. Trump pretended to be against all the “forever wars,” but his rhetoric was mostly in service of his image as someone who could obtain world peace simply through the “art of the deal.” 

No, the crime that cannot ever be forgiven was that Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, a hawk as conservative as her father who became congresswoman from Wyoming and ascended into the House Republican leadership, committed political treason when they dared to stand against Trump after Jan. 6 and refuse to back down. And unlike most of their fellow Republicans, they even endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, in 2024. Nothing could be more disloyal in Trump’s eyes. 

Much of what is being written about Cheney on the occasion of his death presents him as a man of principle, someone who never wavered in his beliefs, even when it required him to buck his own party. That would be admirable if it weren’t for the fact that most of his beliefs were abominable. And it must be said: As laudable as Cheney’s rejection of Trump was, we never heard him reject the premise that has made Trump the most dangerous president in American history, someone who is on the precipice of bringing the entire American experiment in democracy down. 

The irony is that Cheney’s decades-long dream of a unitary executive has been achieved. The president is now acting with the “monarchical prerogatives” he believed was needed — and Cheney was appalled by what he is doing with them. But it shouldn’t have taken a real-life demonstration of how that could happen. After all, the country was founded by people who had already lived that experience. They had put their lives on the line to create a democratic republic, answerable to the people and not a king. 

Cheney’s legacy would have been somewhat redeemed if he had admitted that the philosophy he espoused and the work he did for decades laid the groundwork for the destruction of democracy we are witnessing. 

But he didn’t. And Donald Trump would be nowhere without him.