Family Succession

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  The sudden death of Lindsey Graham was a shock to the system.

A total of 48 women have been elected or appointed to fill congressional vacancies created by the deaths of their husbands, 8 to the U.S. Senate and 40 to the U. S. House of Representatives.

Less often, other family members have succeeded deceased lawmakers:  According to Claude:

Vetted father-son and father-daughter congressional successions, excluding edge cases

Here's a rundown, organized by relationship, of family members other than widows who directly succeeded a deceased House member or senator (via special election or gubernatorial appointment):

Sister succeeding brother: Darline Graham Nordone was appointed just this week (July 13, 2026) by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster to fill the Senate seat of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died suddenly on July 12. Graham never married or had children; McMaster's pick to serve out the remainder of his term, which runs through January 2027, is his adopted-and-raised younger sister. She's set to be the first woman to represent South Carolina in the U.S. Senate. CBS News 

• Sons succeeding fathers: John Dingell Jr. won a 1955 special election to succeed his father, John Dingell Sr., in Michigan's 15th District — beginning a Dingell family run in that seat that lasted decades. Wikipedia: John Dingell
• Donald Payne Jr. won a 2012 special election to succeed his father, Donald Payne Sr., in New Jersey's 10th District. Payne won the general election 56-44 percent and never faced a competitive race again. Wikipedia: Donald Payne Jr. Insideelections

Daughters succeeding fathers:

• Adelita Grijalva was elected in 2025 to succeed her father, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), after his death — though her swearing-in was delayed several weeks by Speaker Mike Johnson during a government shutdown. House.gov coverage / AP via WSB-TV WSB-TV
• Marcye Scott is currently running (special election set for July 28, 2026) to succeed her father, the late Rep. David Scott (D-GA), who died in April 2026 — not yet resolved, but worth flagging since it's live right now. WSB-TV

Daughter succeeding mother: Erica Lee Carter won a November 2024 special election to succeed her mother, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), after Jackson Lee's death from pancreatic cancer — the first (and so far only) daughter to succeed her mother in Congress. House.gov: Family Firsts U.S. House of Representatives

Changing Identity Pollitics

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it covers voter demographics.

Mike Madrid:

Pew Research is the gold standard of Latino public opinion research in this country. When Pew releases a new National Survey of Latinos, people in my line of work stop what they’re doing and read it. Their new report, “U.S. Hispanics Are Divided on Whether Their Identity Helps or Hurts Them in America,” is one of those studies. It confirms something I have argued for years, most fully in my book The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority is Transforming Democracy. Latinos are changing identity politics in this country. But they are not changing it in the direction either party wants to believe.

The topline numbers in the Pew study tell the story. Sixty-one percent of Hispanic adults say being Hispanic is an extremely or very important part of how they think about themselves. That is a real number. Identity still matters to most Latinos. But ask whether that identity helps or hurts their chances of getting ahead in America, and the answer splits three ways: 26 percent say it helps, 33 percent say it hurts, 40 percent say it makes no difference at all. There is no consensus here. There is no single Latino experience for either party to build a coalition around, whether that coalition is built on grievance or on advantage.

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Generation tells the same story from a different angle. Seventy-one percent of Hispanic immigrants say their identity is extremely or very important to them. That falls to 57 percent among the second generation and 51 percent among the third generation or higher. Ask if they consider themselves “a typical American,” and the numbers move in the opposite direction: 27 percent of immigrants say yes, 60 percent of the second generation, 72 percent of the third generation and beyond. Distance from the immigrant experience is doing more to shape Latino identity than party registration is.

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Equis surveyed 2,000 registered Latino voters in May 2026 and asked them, without prompting, what they consider the most important issue facing the country. The answer is not immigration. It is not close. Economy and jobs came in first at 29 percent. Cost of living followed at 24 percent. National security came in third at 14 percent, and concerns about the erosion of democracy and government overreach came in fourth at 13 percent. Immigration enforcement and ICE registered at just 6 percent. Border security, counted separately, came in at 7 percent. Even added together, the two immigration categories trail the top issues badly.

Social Media Oppo

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Oppo is part of the story.

Kellen Browning at NYT:

[Social media] uproars have become so frequent that the pattern of reaction to them now feels routine.

First: Long-ago social media posts or video clips by political candidates get exposed online, prompting a backlash from rivals.

Second: The candidates downplay the comments and distance themselves, often insisting their views have changed.

Third: In some cases, voters and the news media tire of the topic and move on. Or they don’t.

With a new generation of candidates who were active on X, Reddit and YouTube years before announcing political careers, it’s unsurprising that so many are seeing their past statements come back to haunt them. (It has become so common that Ms. McMorrow is not even the only Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan to deal with such a controversy: Abdul El-Sayed, 41, also faced backlash for deleted posts from 2020, in which he had described the police as “standing armies we deploy against our own people.”)

Opposition researchers have never had more content to draw from. Yet they say that voters also seem more willing than ever to forgive past unsavory viewpoints and social media misdeeds — spurred in part by President Trump, who has proved that voters can overlook outrageous statements.

“Before Trump, you could be really surprised by something you saw in the news about a politician,” said Pat Dennis, the head of American Bridge, a Democratic opposition research firm. “After Trump, everything is kind of boring in comparison, compared to the level of scandal.”

Emilio Perez Ibarguen at POLITICO:

[Abdul] El-Sayed, for one, has repeatedly emphasized that he isn’t interested in litigating the past — which opponents have sought to do over his since-deleted 2020 posts lamenting that police departments are overfunded relative to other social services and referring to them as “standing armies.”

He told POLITICO that “the idea that you stand by everything you ever said, out of context, is an insane thing to assume about anybody.”

But El-Sayed’s shifting recollection of the past has put him in bind. After telling the Detroit News that he “actually never, never called for defunding,” CNN reported that he said “we do need to defund the police” in a June 2020 interview with Detroit Public Radio. In that interview, the former health official said that he considered defunding to mean reducing funding for prisons and police while investing more in “the means of educating and empowering, engaging communities with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty.”

El-Sayed has characterized such reporting as superfluous to the actual issues present in the campaign.

 

AI and Oppo

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Oppo is part of the story.

 Joe Rodota:

Today, oppo researchers can provide quite a lot of value for less than $20,000 and month of digging. Just ask Dan Barkhuff, a former Navy Seal and founder of Civly.

While attending Harvard Medical School, Barkhuff started a Facebook group he named Veterans for Responsible Leadership. Following Trump’s election in 2016, the group morphed into a Super PAC. Barkhuff met Sarah Longwell, founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, and befriended fellow Vermont resident Stuart Stevens, who officially joined the Lincoln Project in May 2020. Barkhuff recorded two videos for the group - “Betrayed” and “Conservative” - that racked-up three million views on YouTube alone. (You can read more about Barkhuff’s pre-Civly career in this December 2020 New Yorker profile by Paige Williams.)
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He and his friend Matt Haunauer, a data scientist with a Ph.D. from Indiana University, asked themselves: What if we looked at this from the other direction? What if we could learn more about candidates by mining their campaign finance reports, using AI?

“Lo and behold, we became an opposition research firm,” Barkhuff told me in an interview earlier this year.

The goal of his new firm, Civly, is to “democratize oppo.” Using Claude, the company can make sense of vast fields of data hovering on the Internet, from YouTube videos to the Ashley Madison client database.

The firm generates the first cut of an oppo research report using a proprietary tool trained on actual oppo research books prepared the old-fashioned way. Then an experienced oppo researcher reads through the draft, checking every item manually. In a few days, Civly can deliver a 20-page oppo research book for $7,500.

To build on that and support a campaign through Election Day, Civly offers a subscription-based service it calls the Command Center. Civly can also source and manage an oppo research “concierge” for campaigns that don’t have such capability in-house.

Among veteran oppo researchers, the Platner campaign’s $6,250 investment in a limited vetting of the now-famous oyster farmer prompted eye-rolls and guffaws. But it may point to the new economics of oppo research, for candidates and consultants alike..

Trump v. Free Elections

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. 

Erica L. Green at NYT:

The Trump administration has forced out the three remaining members of an independent, bipartisan commission that supports states in administering their elections, the White House confirmed on Thursday. The move comes as President Trump seeks to cast doubt on the outcome of the upcoming midterms and impose control over how ballots are counted.

Mr. Trump terminated, effective immediately, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, two members selected by congressional Democrats to serve on the Election Assistance Commission, and accepted the resignation of a Republican member, Christy McCormick.

The board has no other remaining members, as its fourth commissioner resigned this spring.

An unidentified White House official issued a statement saying that Mr. Trump reserved the right to remove individuals who “may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.” The White House official cast the dismissals as part of the federal government’s strategy to work across agencies to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse.

The official pointed to the recent decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump had the authority to fire most independent regulators for any reason, ushering in a vast expansion of presidential power. Mr. Trump had hailed the decision as “the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years.”

Mr. Trump has been laying the groundwork for months to claim that Republicans would face a tough midterm election, not because of the broadly unpopular war in Iran and plummeting approval ratings on the economy, but because the country’s election system is fraudulent.

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Last year, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that calls on the Election Assistance Commission to require people to show government-issued proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and directs state or local officials to record and verify the information. It also seeks to require states to count ballots by Election Day. A judge permanently blocked the order, saying the president exceeded his authority.

Michael Waldman, the president and chief executive of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, in a statement called the terminations “deeply concerning in light of President Trump’s relentless efforts to try to interfere in elections.”

Platner Plotzes

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

The Guardian:

Graham Platner, the embattled Democratic nominee for US Senate in Maine, has been accused of trying to influence the process of picking his replacement amid a chorus of calls for him to withdraw from the race.

Platner has publicly said he is “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward” after an allegation of sexual assault, which he denied, was published on Monday.

A wave of prominent Democrats, from the progressive senator Bernie Sanders to the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, urged him to stand aside.

The Maine election is seen as a key component of the party’s effort to regain control of the US Senate in November’s midterm elections. Platner remains in the race, for now.

A senior state Democrat declared on Tuesday evening that Platner’s campaign would have “no role” in selecting his replacement, claiming that his team had tried to sway the process.

Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic party, said: “Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the US Senate, nor in determining what this process looks like.

Hans Nichols and Holly Otterbein at Axios:

Republicans are preparing to welcome a potential Graham Platner replacement in Maine's Senate race with $8 million in negative ads, aiming to introduce a new Democratic nominee to voters on their own terms before Democrats can.

Why it matters: Republicans are doing something Democrats wish they could: Move on from Platner.

The progressive candidate, who said Monday he is taking time to "reflect" on his next steps, remains officially in the race and is looking to leverage his status as the Democratic nominee to influence who could replace him.

Republicans, meanwhile, see an opening: three weeks to prepare a campaign against a Democratic nominee who will have little time to introduce themselves to voters.

Driving the news: Pine Tree Results, the super PAC backing Republican Sen. Susan Collins, raised $10.5 million during the first half of the year — matching what it raised during the same period in 2025, according to a person familiar with the matter.The group pulled its anti-Platner ads Tuesday and has $8 million in cash on hand to define a likely fresh Democratic nominee for voters during a compressed campaign.

Among the donors to the pro-Collins super PAC is Blackstone president Jon Gray, a longtime Democratic donor. He contributed $250,000 well before Politico and CNN reported sexual assault allegations against Platner.

Anti-Incumbency 2026

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Alexander Bolton at The Hill:

A sour, anti-incumbent mood is sweeping across the nation on its 250th anniversary in what political analysts say is an especially troubling sign for Republican control of the House and Senate, given President Trump’s slumping approval rating.

Rising voter anger with the status quo has hit both parties, with eight House incumbents — five Democrats and three Republicans — losing primary races this year in addition to two GOP Senate incumbents, Sens. Bill Cassidy (La.) and John Cornyn (Texas).

Republicans on Capitol Hill fear the antiestablishment mood could cost them control of the House and perhaps the Senate as well.

National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Tim Scott (S.C.) has warned Senate GOP colleagues privately “about how bad polling is, currently, for Republicans and how bad the president is losing ground among all groups,” said a senior Republican aide.

Senate Republican Conference Chair Tom Cotton (Ark.) also shared polling with Senate Republicans at a recent lunch meeting that showed independents moving in large numbers away from the GOP and toward Democrats, according to a GOP senator who attended the presentation.