Democrats' Generational War

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

Maeve Reston and Dylan Wells at WP:

Democrat Saikat Chakrabarti decided to challenge Rep. Nancy Pelosi for her San Francisco congressional seat when he watched in disbelief last year as his party chose a 74-year-old member she had backed to lead the House Oversight Committee over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his 35-year-old former boss and one of the party’s most powerful communicators.

For Chakrabarti — a 39-year-old software engineer turned political operative who ran Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 upset primary campaign in New York — it was another sign that the Democratic Party is dominated by an older generation of leaders who he says have lost touch with Americans’ day-to-day struggles. Though Pelosi, 85, stepped down from leadership in 2022 to elevate the next generation, he argues that nearly four decades in Congress “is enough” and that the party needs younger leaders who can do away with a “culture of caution.”

“People are looking for fighters,” said Chakrabarti, who rankled many House Democrats with his confrontational tactics while briefly serving as Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff in 2019. “This old generation of leadership, they’ve been around for so long that they don’t recognize that this Republican Party is a completely different Republican Party. They’re just hoping that the backlash of Trump will build up and we’ll let the pendulum swing back our way.”

Chakrabarti is just one in a growing group of Democratic candidates who are launching 2026 campaigns rooted in those themes — and forcing the party to face an uncomfortable conversation about the role that its gerontocracy has played in its declining popularity.

Midterm Risks for GOP

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

Unless Trump backs down on tariffs, his party will have political hell to pay.

Nate Cohn at NYT:

There might not have been anyone marching in pink hats, and congressional Democrats might have been “playing dead,” but the Democratic special election strength looks just as large as it did in 2017 and 2018, before the so-called blue wave flipped control of the House.

Perhaps this shouldn’t necessarily be a surprise: It’s what happened the last time Mr. Trump won. But it’s not what triumphant Republicans or despondent Democrats had in mind in the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory, when there was seemingly no “resistance” to Mr. Trump and the “vibes” seemed to augur a broad rightward cultural shift.

The tariffs announced Wednesday, however, introduce a political problem of an entirely different magnitude for Mr. Trump and his party. No party or politician is recession proof. Historically, even truly dominant political parties have suffered enormous political defeats during major economic downturns.

In none of those cases — not even with the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff — could the president be held responsible for the downturn as self-evidently as today. And whatever it may have felt like after the election, the Republican Party is not even close to politically dominant.

If anything, Mr. Trump and the Republicans today could be especially vulnerable, as so much of his political strength is built on the economy. Throughout his time as a politician, he usually earned his best ratings on his handling of economic issues. He’s benefited from his reputation as a successful businessman and from effective economic stewardship in his first term. He won the last election, despite enormous personal liabilities, in no small part because voters were frustrated by high prices and economic upheaval that followed the end of the pandemic.

In New York Times/Siena College national surveys last fall, more than 40 percent of voters who backed Mr. Trump in 2024 but not 2020 said that the economy or inflation was the most important issue to their vote.

The Trump Slump and the Team of Yessirs

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

 Michael Wilner at LAT:

A second day of market devastation shook Washington on Friday, vanishing more than $5 trillion in value in one of the largest 48-hour losses on record — an extraordinary rout caused not by pandemic, war, terrorism or bank failure, but by policy set by the American president.

The policy, announced by President Trump on Wednesday, would levy steep tariffs on nearly every nation in the world in the coming days, starting with a base tariff rate of 10% but climbing higher for some of the largest U.S. trading partners, including China, South Korea, Japan and the European Union.

The market drop has prompted a small but influential group of Republican senators to partner with Democrats in a nascent effort to wrest back control over tariff policy from Trump.

Natalie Allison et al. at WP:

“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,” said a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f---. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”

In Trump’s first term, top aides including Gary Cohn, then the director of the National Economic Council, and Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, successfully constrained Trump’s tariff agenda.

Aides frequently sought to steer Trump in particular directions during heated Oval Office conversations, according to current and former officials. Trump’s White House then was beset by internal quarrels that spilled into public view, his team of advisers not just clashing on matters of personality but over deep ideological differences.

“In the first term,” a senior White House official said, “everyone thought they were president.”

This time, there was far less internal fighting. The president’s team mounted remarkably little dissent to a sweeping overhaul of trade policy, according to interviews with more than a dozen people inside and outside the administration, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect private talks.

 

 

 

Unforced Errors

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic:

Trump would not be the first president to encounter economic turbulence. But he might become the first one to kill off a healthy economy through an almost universally foreseeable unforced error. The best explanation for why Trump is intent on imposing tariffs is that he genuinely believes they are a source of free money supplied by residents of foreign countries, and nobody can tell him otherwise. (Tariffs are taxes on imports, which economists agree are paid mostly by domestic consumers in the form of higher prices.).

Aaron Blake at WP:

The big storyline coming out of Tuesday’s elections was that Elon Musk’s decision to insert himself into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race looks like a massive unforced error. Republicans not only lost the race by 10 points, but they actually did better in the race that Musk didn’t play or spend heavily in: state schools superintendent.

Musk spent political capital that’s already in short supply for him, and it turned out to be counterproductive, if anything.

This has led to all kinds of speculation about what happens to Musk from here. Politico has even reported that President Donald Trump told his Cabinet that Musk will soon depart his high-profile role, with the White House offering something of a non-denial denial.

But whatever happens next, the writing has been on the wall for some time that the Elon Musk experiment is failing politically. Tuesday’s elections just made it so Republicans could no longer ignore what was in front of their faces.

Vibe Shift

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

Tal Axelrod at Axios:

The verdict is in: President Donald Trump's voters are lively when he's running for the White House. They're downright lethargic when he's not.

Why it matters: This is not just the assessment of Democrats. It's coming straight from the vice president and leaders of the MAGA movement. And it can have massive implications for the results of key gubernatorial races this year and for next year's midterms.

Catch up quick: Brad Schimel, the conservative candidate in Wisconsin's Supreme Court race, lost by 10 points in a 50-50 state. Trump endorsed Brad Schimel, and Elon Musk bankrolled millions of dollars in ads and events, swooping into Wisconsin the weekend before Election Day to juice turnout.While Republicans won two House special elections in Florida by about 15 points, those were drops from over 30-point margins in the same districts just last November.

Zoom out: Low-propensity, working-class voters helped fuel Trump's 2024 win.But MAGA luminaries are fretting that those same voters only turn out when Trump's name is on the ballot, making the GOP base less intimidating in off-year races and putting narrow congressional majorities at risk.

Vice President Vance wrote on X: "The political problem on the Republican side of the aisle is how to get our base to vote in off-cycle elections. We've seen the establishment (finally) accept Donald Trump's leadership of the Republican Party. Now it's time to try to actually learn from his political success."

Holly Otterbein at Politico:

While many of the president’s allies are sympathetic to his argument that the tariffs will encourage companies to invest in domestic manufacturing and production, they fear that imposing new trade barriers will cause short-term economic harm, drive up prices, potentially throw the U.S. into a recession, and jeopardize Republicans’ chances of hanging onto control of Congress in the midterms.

Just four in 10 voters view Trump’s handling the economy and trade favorably, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in late March.

 

Wisconsin and Florida: Bad Signs for GOP

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

Alex Isenstadt at  Axios:

The GOP also survived a late scare in a Florida special election. But losing in Wisconsin — letting Democrats keep their 4-3 court majority — has major ramifications for voting and abortion rights, along with future House redistricting.Republicans kept the House seat in Florida formerly held by national security adviser Mike Waltz, with Randy Fine holding off Democrat Josh Weil.

Republicans also held the Florida seat formerly held by Rep. Matt Gaetz before he resigned from Congress in November. Jimmy Patronis defeated Democratic candidate Gay Valimont.

1. 2026 looks scary for MAGA without Trump on the ballot.Republican House candidates in Florida fell far short of Trump's performance in November. The margins of victory for Patronis and Fine were about half of the margins for Waltz and Gaetz.

...

Republicans lost in Wisconsin, even with $25 million poured in by Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world and the face of DOGE. Musk campaigned in Wisconsin and cast the race in apocalyptic terms.

2. Democrats are flooding cash into races

In FL-1, Patronis was outraised 3-1.
In FL-6, Fine was outraised by nearly 10-1.
In Wisconsin, Crawford outraised Schimel nearly 2-1.

3. Republicans dodged a bullet in Florida. Last week Republicans were sweating the race for Waltz's seat, where a poll conducted by Trump strategist Tony Fabrizio showed Fine narrowly trailing. But Fine won by 15 points.  Florida defeat would have raised alarms among Republicans about the political impact of Trump's agenda. Speaker Mike Johnson's narrow House majority won't shrink, and there won't be headlines about a special election shocker.

The Great Grovel

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

John F. Harris at Politico:

Prestigious law firms have cowered at his threats to tank their business; Paul, Weiss, which fought against Trump in his first term, pledged $40 million in pro bono legal services to issues Trump has supported. And Skadden Arps, one of the largest law firms in the world, reached a deal with Trump to provide $100 million in free legal work to administration-friendly causes — before Trump had taken any action against them.

One of the country’s most storied news networks, ABC News, settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump for $15 million that will go to his future presidential library, and another, CBS News, appears poised to settle for millions more. The Washington Post and the LA Times, both legacy papers owned by Trump-friendly billionaires, have adjusted the content of their editorial pages in ways that pleased the White House. And Columbia University, alma mater to Alexander Hamilton, agreed to nine policy changes in an effort to unfreeze $400 million in federal funding. Other universities hired Republican lobbyists to stay on the president’s good side.