Burn Him Before They Burn Him

Back in June 2025, I gave a bit of unsolicited advice to AIPAC and DMFI types.

If AIPAC/DMFI sorts were smart (they’re not), they’d be advising Dems to chain themselves to ICE gates bc D voters are ready to oust anyone who doesn’t seem to be fighting tooth and nail and I guarantee the primary challengers will be more hostile to Israel than any current incumbent D.

The current crop of incumbent Dems is the traditional pro-Israel coalition’s last hope for any progressive influence whatsoever, and those incumbents only will survive their next primary election if D voters truly believe they’re going to burn MAGA to the ground and salt the earth beneath it.

I won't say I'm always the best political predictor, but on this one I feel like I was spot on. AIPAC and DMFI are indeed not smart, and Democratic politicians who were not perceived as ready to rip MAGA apart with their bare hands struggled mightily in the primaries against progressive challengers who were almost universally more Israel-critical than the men and women they defeated.

Fast forward to the next cycle, and we've already got our first challenger to perhaps the most-reviled and (most pro-Israel) Democratic incumbent, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman -- a Palestinian-American writer named Ahmed Moor.

Let's get one thing clear. Fetterman is toast. If he does decide to run for reelection (not foreordained) as a Democrat (also not foreordained), he will be demolished in the primary. The only real question is who will end up taking him out. And the first benchmark any viable challenger to Fetterman must clear in a Democratic primary is that they must, once again, be perceived as someone ready to burn MAGA to the ground and salt the earth beneath it.

I do not know anything about Moor, and in particular whether he personally is a real viable candidate. But I do know that Fetterman's eventual vanquisher will not be a fellow pro-Israel hawk. AIPAC and DMFI need to accept that reality. Yet there certainly are degrees of distance from the old-style pro-Israel consensus that's rapidly crumbling -- a major difference between, oh, I don't know, Tom Malinowski versus Chris Rabb. So once again, if AIPAC and DMFI were smart -- which they are not -- they would be encouraging "moderate" Democratic politicians to absolutely come out guns blazing about being ready to flambe the MAGA movement from now until the end of time, and they would be providing every bit of backup possible to buttress said politician in that endeavor. Because if their guy doesn't do it, someone else on the farther-left will.

Do I think they've learned a lesson from this cycle? They almost certainly have not. To the contrary, I suspect they will try to Malinowski the next Malinowski and so open the door for someone far more troublesome than Malinowski to be the one to claim Fetterman's head. But I will be like Cassandra, and continue to pour my good advice out into the world where nobody will listen to it. Such is my curse.

It's Not ALL Donald Trump's Fault

The fallout from the 2026 midterms continues, and the knives are out. Many Republicans are blaming Donald Trump for the bloodbath endured by Team Red. For example, Eugene Volokh recommends this essay by Bill Otis as "worth reading".

There is plenty in Otis' essay which I think is just plain silly. The notion that Republicans would have performed better had they committed to a land war in Iran, and that Trump's main failing there was that he didn't have the "statesmanship" to sell such a war to the nation, is, shall we say, dubious. But that meat of Otis' argument, and the part Volokh excerpts, is, I think more line with a common conservative refrain sung over the past few days:

In an election where overwhelmingly the preeminent issue was affordability — in other and more candid words, the increasingly obvious decline in the standard of living huge numbers of people are feeling — what has Trump been occupying himself with? Here's a partial list: Building the White House ballroom (from which, in a tone deaf rendition that defies description) he gave his election post-mortem; re-doing the East Potomac Golf Course to make it a "premium" experience; building a Triumphal Arch no one asked for or thought about when they elected him; demanding prosecutions for imaginary vandalism at the Reflecting Pool; invading Greenland; making Canada the 51st state; re-naming Lake Ontario; re-naming the Gulf of Mexico; and perhaps most prominently, making sure his name gets put on the Kennedy Center even though he had nothing to do with its creation. Then there are numerous other items: Trump passports, Trump one-dollar gold coins, and "commemorative" $100 bills, to name three.

Exactly what does this Adventure in Narcissism seem like to the voter — actually, the millions of voters — who feel like they're being stretched thin? You don't need a florid imagination to answer that one. They gave their answer last night.

I don't disagree that these Trumpian initiatives -- equal parts self-aggrandizing and utterly tone deaf -- played a substantial role in driving voter resentment against him and his party.

But here's the thing: Republicans could have stopped all of these things.

They had unified control of Congress. They had plenty of levers by which they could have pushed back. They exercised none of them. Acting like the Republican Party, as an electoral institution, had no agency at all in any of this is absurd. None of what Trump was doing was a secret, or activity that was wholly and totally insulated from political disapproval in spite of Congress' best efforts. To the extent that Trump was behaving like an "oaf" or a "child" or with "immaturity", it stands out that the consensus GOP response was to say "go right ahead sir" right up until the moment the election blew up in their faces. That's an independent moral failing by essentially every elected Republican, and one that voters could and did justly punish of its own accord. Why should any voter trust a Republican with power if they couldn't rouse themselves to oppose any of this?

In short, voters were not, in fact, just observing and rejecting Donald Trump. They were observing and rejecting the Republican Party for its fecklessness, obsequiousness, and subservience to Trump. And that all is indicative of basic character failings that go far beyond one man in the Oval Office.

2026 Was Not The Year

Every election cycle, commentators race to breathlessly declare that this will be the year that Jews stop voting Democratic. And then every year it doesn't happen. And then every year Republicans ... well, let me just reprint the chronology I identified way back in 2014.

1) (Non-Jewish) Republicans say they want to be Jews' best friends, particularly with respect to Israel.

2) Jews express policy positions with respect to Israel that differ from those advocated by Republicans.

3) Republicans, cognizant of the greater stakes Jews have in this issue and respectful of Jewish opinions generally, rethink their positions. Republicans accuse Jews of being delusional and/or betraying their own people.

4) Republicans express bafflement that Jews continue to vote Democratic.

We talked about it in 2014, and 2015, and 2017, and 2020. And so again today. 

Exit polling once again found that Jews voted overwhelmingly Democratic on their congressional ballot -- 72%, to be precise, against 24% GOP. That's a net 48 point margin, for those keeping track. It's also remarkably steady -- Democrats have been pulling at least seventy percent of the Jewish vote in every election since 2016 (they were in the mid-to-high sixties in the three before that). The absolute nicest silver lining you could give to the "Jexodus" narrative is that the Jewish Democratic vote didn't appear to spike this year in tandem with the broader Democratic wave. But the thing is that the Jewish vote is so overwhelmingly Democratic that it can sometimes be a bit countercyclical (for example, Jews voted Democratic at a slightly higher rate in 2016 compared to 2012 -- very much not in line with the national trend). And look -- at the end of the day, we're poking around the edges about electoral margins normally seen only by an Assad. There's only so much one can do to "complicate" the voting patterns of a 70+% Democratic constituency.

If we zoom in on Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed reportedly won 60% of the Jewish vote, against Mike Rogers 36%. That's still a crushing margin, albeit lower than the national average and far lower than the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Jocelyn Benson (who is Jewish) received. So if one wants to say that El-Sayed, specifically, underperformed with Jewish voters, I think that's fair enough, although again the difference is between overwhelming support and merely massive support. But it's also worth noting that El-Sayed underperformed Benson generally by about four points, so the gap there wasn't just among Jewish voters.

In any event, the point is that we go through this every year. And every year the results don't change, which somehow doesn't stop us from going through the same this will be the year rigamarole in the next year. Yet ultimately, the basic explanation for why Jews vote Democratic remains as simple as it ever was:

First, on every issue aside from Israel, Jews prefer Democrats to Republicans.

Second, on the issue of Israel, Jews prefer Democrats to Republicans.

The end. 

(Oh, and incidentally, if you're looking for this year's "all the Jews who vote Democratic aren't real Jews" entrant, Inna Vernikov has you covered).

Initial Thoughts After the Tsunami

It went better than we thought.

Certainly, my predictions -- which still had Democrats taking back the House and Senate! -- were far too conservative.

The final tallies are still in the air. But even with what we know so far -- boy howdy.

Democrats don't just win the Texas Senate seat -- they win essentially every contested statewide race there is. Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, Railroad Commissioner, four Supreme Court seats -- it's a wrecking ball.

Ohio? Flipped. South Carolina? Flipped. Iowa? Flipped. Kansas? Flipped. Mississippi?(!?!?) May well just flip. That doesn't even get into the races that we "expected" to win -- and isn't it fun to treat Georgia and North Carolina as "expected"? And let's not forget Maine. Perhaps Susan Collins should've been more concerned.

El-Sayed looks like he'll win Michigan, meaning my most pessimistic prediction (which I made pre-Stevens betrayal) didn't pan out. I'm glad to see it. Ironically, it kind of does seem like AES ran behind other Democrats in the context of this historic tsunami year (he's lagging Jocelyn Benson in the Governor's race by about four points), but it's still going to be enough for him to win.

Maybe there was still some meat on the bone. Florida and Louisiana were tantalizing close. Could some more national support have made the difference? Maybe. Hindsight is 20-20. I find it hard to wonder what could have been given the magnitude of the victory.

The House looks to be a complete landslide. A subtler pleasure of the evening was seeing Republican names I hadn't thought about for years pop up on the screen, only to learn they were losing races that weren't even seen as competitive. Scott DesJarlais, Ann Wagner, and Virginia Foxx, you're being paged.

Closer to home, there were fewer surprises. Tina Kotek's reelection was called early. My congresswoman, "Give 'em hell" Janelle Bynum, won reelection handily, as did Marie Gluesenkamp Perez across the river in Washington. We look set to reelect all our Portland city councilors, as I predicted. Shannon Singleton seems poised for an upset win to take the Multnomah County Chair, which I also predicted (probably my best "upset" prediction).

What am I still waiting on? Alaska, obviously; and the conclusion of the Mississippi race which seems almost sure to go to a recount (still can't believe that). Nevada hasn't reported any results for some reason. I'm really rooting for Scott Wiener to win his D-on-D matchup against Connie Chan to succeed Nancy Pelosi (he's up 10 with about half reporting).

But honestly? It's already a demolition derby. And the feels really good.

I do think we should take a moment to celebrate this outcome -- a victory shared by all factions of the party, from moderate to progressive. In terms of what's next, we're already hearing a lot of word salad about whether Democrats need to be bipartisan or "get things done" or cooperate or do this or that. My view is that Democrats need to be Democrats. Pass popular laws and dare Trump to veto them. Put Trump's criminal associates' feet to the fire. Show genuine oversight. Tackle corruption. And where Democrats have taken back power at the state level, do anything and everything possible to shore up democracy. These wins by no means show that the egregious attacks on our voting rights and our democratic system itself were irrelevant or overblown. 

The thing about once-in-a-generation tsunamis is that they don't typically last for an entire generation. Seize this opportunity to get things done, and show people that Democrats are a party worth voting for not in one election with one deeply unpopular president, but regularly, across many elections to come.

Your Huddled Masses Yearning To Wreck Free

Continuing on with the theme for the past few days, we can check in on what "Nonnegotiable" is up to in Michigan. For those who don't remember, Nonnegotiable is a group of Michigan Jewish Democrats who responded to Abdul El-Sayed's primary victory by sending him a list of five ultimatums nonnegotiable demands that are absolutely not ultimatums but only brook no argument or discussion and must be agreed to unconditionally before a conversation can even begin. This, unsurprisingly, did not engender a positive response, and Nonnegotiable has spent the ensuing weeks complaining about how they're being overlooked and marginalized while also promising to take their movement national.

Anyway, what they're proposing is that Jews cast a protest vote by writing-in "Emma Lazarus" on their Senate ballot. This is an interesting gambit, in large part because I can't see any universe in which it doesn't blow up in their faces. Let's run through the plausible outcomes.

Possibility 1: As polling predicts, AES wins handily in spite of this maneuver. People learn Nonnegotiable was all bark and no bite. Moreover, because Nonnegotiable helpfully suggested an identifying mark for its protest votes, we can see just how irrelevant they were when the final results come in and "Emma Lazarus" has some 850 votes out 4,500,000 cast.

Possibility 2: Mike Rogers wins, and Nonnegotiable gives him his margin of victory. It is subsequently showered with all the adoration and praise that flowed from Democrats to Ralph Nader and the Green Party in 2000 after they provided the margin that let George W. Bush win Florida and the presidency. I'm not sure how people haven't internalized this lesson yet, but "we're the reason why your mortal enemies are in office" does not result in Democrats wanting to appease you, it results in Democrats hating you with an incandescent fury and wanting to put your heads on spikes outside the castle walls.

Possibility 3: Mike Rogers wins by more than the "Emma Lazarus" margin. Then we're going to get some weird two-step where they simultaneously insist that they mattered to the outcome, but also that it's totally unfair to blame them for the outcome. This incoherency will not go well for them.

The broader point, and this something Scott Lemieux (I think, I can't find it) has argued, is that in broad coalition politics a faction gains influence by showing it can win races, not by sabotaging other members of the coalition and thereby losing races. "[T]hrowing a tantrum and 'withholding your vote' by refusing to support democrats just makes everyone mad at you and diminishes your influence." The near-uniform Democratic reaction (including by very pro-Israel Democrats) to Haley Stevens of "screw Haley Stevens"? Nonnegotiable can expect a similar reception, ameliorated solely by the fact of their comparative irrelevancy.

Likewise, one might also learn a lesson that engaging with fellow coalitional stakeholders via ultimatum (protestations notwithstanding, yes, that's what Nonnegotiable did) is not a good strategy either. Nonnegotiable, in particular, made the especially counterproductive choice to frame its ultimatums in the most confrontational language possible, and expressly sought to evade the possibility of agreement by preemptively deriding any plausible steps El-Sayed might take to try and create consensus or reassurance as a sort of cheating ("cleverly worded arguments"). Of course El-Sayed was not going to talk to these people, and I don't blame him -- they've made it quite clear they're uninterested in having a conversation on anything other that purely supplicatory terms.

Return of the Wrecker

Well, Haley Stevens crossed the Rubicon, officially endorsing Republican Mike Rogers in the Michigan Senate race.

One doesn't need to say much more than what Chuck Schumer did: "A despicable betrayal." Stevens' Democratic career was already dead, but now it's ... extra dead? Dead-dead? Whatever. I find myself not caring about the verbiage.

A few more notes:

First, we should not downplay Stevens' tacit decision to give approval to the despicable Islamophobia that Republicans have been thrusting out against AES. That choice is made more salient, not less, by the fact that Stevens is framing her choice around opposition to antisemitism. Remember: the same logic that tells some it's okay to endorse Islamophobes in order to fight antisemitism, also licenses others to endorse antisemites in order to fight Islamophobia. This approach to "fighting antisemitism" remains one of the most obviously bone-headed and shortsighted political strategies I've ever encountered.

Second, we also should not at all accept Stevens framing her treason around finding antisemitism unacceptable, because she doesn't. It bears repeating once more that just a few days ago one of Rogers' top surrogates, Ohio GOP Senator Bernie Moreno, told a crowd at a GOP rally that anyone who does not recognize that "Jesus came here for our salvation ... should be nowhere near Washington, D.C.." That is, to be clear, a declaration that no Jew (or Muslim) should be allowed to hold higher office in this nation. Even on the metric of "most antisemitic thing said by a surrogate" that dwarfs anything Hasan Piker has said -- and I say that with no love lost for Piker, but rather to underscore just how outrageous Moreno's comments are that they cleared even the bar Piker had set. And that doesn't even get into all the other standard-issue ways the MAGA movement threatens Jews.

Haley Stevens is not taking a stand against antisemitism and she's not trying to protect Jews. She is taking a stand for antisemitism -- and Islamophobia, and anti-democratic fascism -- to salve her own bruised ego. Don't get it twisted.

Third, over the past few days -- before the endorsement but while the Stevens/AES rift had exploded -- Rogers had started lavishing Stevens with praise ("courageous leader", "conducted herself with nothing but class"), and obviously that feting paid big dividends. From a campaign strategy standpoint, of course, this was very smart by Rogers. And one might notice that I'm not seeing a lot of angst from Rogers' voters mewling about "how dare he praise a Democrat" and "monoparty!" Cf. Liz Cheney. 

Finally, perhaps the most salient thing Stevens has "accomplished" is to completely invert the valence of who is a "wrecker" in Democratic politics. Up until a few days ago, if you had played word association around "which nominal progressives sabotaged Democratic chances in Michigan by refusing to support the Democratic nominee because of their views on Israel/Palestine", the general answer would have been Uncommitted sorts and other pro-Palestine activists. To be honest, in an era of nose-diving support for Israel, residual rage at that cadre for said wrecking behavior in 2024 might have been the main brake on burgeoning anti-Israel support. But now Stevens has turned that on its head and re-associated anti-Democratic (and anti-democratic) sabotage with pro-Israel and anti-antisemitism activists. Heckuva job, Haley!

Anyway, we should absolutely blame Haley Stevens for Haley Stevens' bad and immoral choices. The end.

The Empire Wrecks Back

The fallout from the deliberately inflammatory Rebellion PAC ad continues, as it seems to have created a massive rift between Michigan's Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, and his vanquished primary opponent Haley Stevens. Stevens, whose fiancé Jason Turkish already publicly announced he was endorsing AES' Republican opponent, came out with a lengthy list of demands for El-Sayed before she'd deign to appear with him. El-Sayed, who'd already disavowed the ad and was reportedly ready to more explicitly condemn it, bristled at Stevens' ultimatums. Now the unity event is off, and Republicans are salivating at another Dems-in-disarray opportunity.

First thing is first. While I agree with those who attribute this whole cascade to the fallout from that terrible ad, that in no way excuses Stevens' wretched choices here. She's responsible for her own choices, and these choices are pure wrecking behavior. It's all the more frustrating because Stevens' initial concession and endorsement after a bitter and disappointing primary loss to AES were model behavior, and earned plenty of justified praise by appearing to prove that "blue no matter who" wasn't just a demand put upon the left by the center, but applied reciprocally as well. Even many of her critics were lauding her and holding her up as a contrast to, say, Jasmine Crockett. For her to backslide now, so late in the game, is an act of pure ego. As far as I'm concerned, she and Turkish are no better than any other Michigan "progressive" who -- whether by explicit endorsement or tacit foot-dragging -- functionally sabotages the Democratic nominee in a progressive race (yes, I continue to think that the right analogue for these people are the folks who refused to back Biden/Harris in 2024, and yes, that comparison is meant to be a supremely negative one).

At the very least, I'd hope that Stevens (and Turkish) have rendered themselves personas non grata in Democratic politics going forward. Whether that actually will happen -- who's to say (Darializa Avila Chevalier didn't even vote for Biden in 2020 and now she's headed to Congress, so, you know, memories can be short). But for my part -- and I say this as someone who probably would have voted for Stevens over AES in the primary (albeit McMorrow over both of them) -- Stevens is dead to me, and I very much hope her career is indeed over.