A week ago I wrote about a new CNN poll and how it showed Democrats were pretty evenly divided over “left” vs “centrist” politics (should the Ds “move to the left” or “move to the center”) but very united over fight vs accommodation. So focus on the latter and agree to disagree on the former. I also noted however that these terms are wildly over-determined and mostly don’t mean very much. For this specific question, those polling results are still broadly valuable because those are the catchphrases by which a major intra-party debate is identified. So if that’s the language being used and people split roughly down the middle, you know it’s very divisive and no one side is going to beat the other. It’s a standoff, and what you really want going into a critical midterm is unity.
But it’s still important to remember how little these terms actually mean, and to consider the complexities and uncertainties they paper over. I was reminded of this when I saw Axios describing a Reuters poll which Mike Allen said showed that independents are “progressive-curious.” The evidence was that substantial majorities of independents support higher taxes on corporations and billionaires (64%) and government-provided health care for all Americans (60%). But 43% are less likely to vote for a candidate who identifies as “democratic socialist.”
The New York Times has a piece today with the title “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left.” Specifically it’s about the centrist pressure group Third Way and a plan with a budget of $15 million to, as the group’s president Jonathan Cowan puts it, “prepar[e] for the next war that is coming.” I’ll note that during the first two years of the Biden administration Third Way was notably and consistently supportive of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. It was a sign of the remarkable party unity that allowed Biden to push through a remarkably progressive agenda with a tied senate. I’ll also note that you place an article like this because you want to show the people who gave you the $15 million that you mean business. So talk of “going to war” is sort of what you want to show them.
That said, this is remarkably ill-conceived and a misunderstanding of the current moment.
When Graham Platner ran for Senate, he came with an irresistible, dream candidate profile: a plainspoken veteran and man of the people who was ready to change careers from oyster farmer to politician. Platner, who turned 40 during the campaign, found immense support from other male Democrats close to his age who saw his campaign as the breath of fresh air the party needed to stay relevant. Even when his many skeletons came tumbling out of the closet — the Nazi tattoo, the Reddit posts, retweeting far-right podcaster Stew Peters and others — they only doubled down in their support. Each scandal was followed by another high-profile endorsement from a senator or influencer. Only when women accused him of rape and sexual assault did they finally drop their support, leading to his exit from the race in July.
The Platner fiasco revealed how a subset of male Democrats show symptoms of a midlife crisis. Typically, a man’s mid-life crisis occurs between his 40s and 50s when, having achieved a stable economic and sociopolitical status, a new generation emerges that threatens to replace him. He becomes depressed, irritable and restless. The cultural stereotype is that rather than accept this as a natural consequence of aging, he seeks to recapture his youth with rash impulsivity by purchasing an expensive red sports car, or having an affair with a younger woman, or changing careers on a dime without any idea of the scrutiny that comes with those who make such a shift — i.e., from oyster farmer to senator.
Politically, the midlife crisis expresses itself as an attraction to ideological extremes, represented by the trope of men growing more conservative with age. Sen. John Fetterman, once a darling of the progressive elite who embraced him as the leftier-than-thou alternative to center-left Rep. Conor Lamb in the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate primary, has become every Democrats’ face on the dartboard for embodying this exact stereotype. Fetterman’s conservative shift could have stemmed from how his staunch support of Israel amid rising sentiment toward Palestine within portions of the Democratic base pushed him further away from the party, leaving him susceptible to Republican overtures. But given that he had already displayed signs of an erratic and hostile personality before arriving in the Senate, his change feels of a piece with his past behavior.
However, in today’s political climate, Fetterman’s rightward drift makes him something of an outlier, as the Democratic midlife crisis now expresses itself as a shift toward the far-left, even if it means compromising one’s previous positions and alienating the audience that brought them to prominence.
The most public examples of this are the “Pod Save America” hosts Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfeiffer — a.k.a. the “Pod Bros” — who first jumped on this bandwagon in November 2024 when they interviewed far-left streamer Hasan Piker on their podcast. Bringing on Piker — who, by coincidence, is the same age the Pod Bros were when they founded their parent company, Crooked Media — got people talking about them again, even if the talk was that the podcast had jumped the ideological shark by hosting someone who has been accused of caping for communists and terrorists.
Since his first “Pod Save America” appearance, Piker has traveled to China and Cuba to defend their regimes, and he recently deployed Vladimir Putin-like language when he called the Soviet Union’s collapse “a catastrophe” at a Yale political union meeting in April. But the Pod Bros have interviewed him multiple times, even inviting him to Crooked Con, their Washington, D.C., convention, in November 2025, where he appeared on a panel alongside MS NOW’s Symone Sanders-Townsend and Fox News’ Jessica Tarlov.
Given their embrace of Piker, it’s no surprise the Pod Bros were also among the most ardent backers of Platner, defending him like an expensive red sports car.
Given their embrace of Piker, it’s no surprise the Pod Bros were also among the most ardent backers of Platner, defending him like an expensive red sports car. When the news broke about his Nazi tattoo, they invited him on the show to explain himself. Ben Rhodes, the former Obama aide and host of the Crooked Media podcast “Pod Save the World,” even penned a lengthy New York Times op-ed on Platner’s rise, lauding him as a voice of the anti-war movement. In the wake of the rape allegations, Favreau issued an apology for his defense of Platner; Rhodes, as of this writing, has not. (Rhodes did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Other elected officials within this age bracket have dunked their big toes in populist waters despite being elected as moderates in red states, such as Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, or as so-called center-left “Normie Democrats” in blue states, such as Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy. Both men have been mentioned as contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination, but absent a campaign announcement, their leftward shifts are the equivalent of focus group testing on a national scale. Granted, neither Gallego nor Murphy have alienated their constituencies with these ideas, but it’s a far cry from their personas when they were first elected.
Since arriving in the Senate in 2025, Gallego has gone on the lash against big corporations and monopolies. In a speech for the American Economic Liberties Project, a left-wing think tank, in September 2025, Gallego said “anything that empowers the consumer, the everyday person, is going to be a very popular message . . . It can win in any cycle, in almost any state, or environment.” He has continued this crusade, recently endorsing a $20 minimum wage and speaking out against the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.
Murphy, who entered the Senate only a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, made a name for himself as one of the body’s most outspoken gun control advocates. But in a May 2025 interview with “The Atlantic,” he seemed a bit sheepish over this, arguing that by emphasizing social issues over economic ones, Democrats risk losing voters who might be more receptive to economic messaging. “I own part of that responsibility,” he said.
In addition to being spoken of as a potential 2028 contender, speculation is rampant that Murphy is positioning himself to lead the Democratic caucus after the midterms. Once known as a bipartisan negotiator, he has pivoted to a harder line, telling the Connecticut Mirror in November 2025, “I just don’t think that’s the job right now . . . I think I would be committing sort of political malpractice if I was operating this year like I’ve operated in the past.”
The psychological phenomenon of the midlife crisis masquerading as populism does not occur in a vacuum. Social media has exacerbated it, with algorithms making it easier to gain popularity by taking extreme viewpoints, as Piker has, than to represent the center-left, as the “Pod Save America” crew did for years. Moving toward extremes also has the potential to produce rewards. For pundits and influencers, that could mean boosting their voices and incomes. For politicians, it means the chance to swell their campaign coffers — even though he isn’t up for reelection until 2030, Murphy’s campaign PAC, Friends of Chris Murphy, had $11.5 million cash on hand as of June 30 — and, better yet, position themselves for future elections, regardless of whether the shift is sincere.
However, the less sincere that shift is, the greater the fallout when it turns out to be for naught. Watching Graham Platner’s campaign implode was like watching that expensive red sports car get totaled. You felt bad for anyone who got harmed. But if you’re honest, you also loved watching the guy dumb enough to buy it fume over the futility of his impulses. But the harder you laugh, the more you have a responsibility to not do what he did. Otherwise you could wind up behind the wheel.
On Wednesday morning, shortly after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the hotly contested Michigan Democratic Senate primary in a slender victory, the Republican Party let slip the dogs of war. Barely 15 minutes after the Associated Press called the race for the unabashed progressive and first-time candidate for federal office over the centrist Rep. Haley Stevens, Donald Trump was crowing on Truth Social that the 41-year-old El-Sayed’s win was “great news for the Republican Party.” The newly minted Democratic nominee, he wrote, is “a Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel.”
As he has for 10 years, the president set the tone for the rest of the GOP.
By the noon hour, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had fired off an attack ad that led with Islamophobia and recalled the attempts from some quarters to define a certain Illinois senator who carried the name Barack Hussein Obama. “Abdulrohman Mohamed El-Sayed,” the ad began, making a point to use the candidate’s full name, an obvious move to launch the process of otherizing him to voters in Michigan and across the country, “[is] the most radical Senate candidate in America.”
But the day’s vilest moment came three hours later when Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who has always demonstrated a willingness to go there, invoked the T-word in a brief interview.
But the day’s vilest moment came three hours later when Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who has always demonstrated a willingness to go there, invoked the T-word in a brief interview as he boarded an elevator after voting to confirm Dr. Erica Schwartz, Trump’s controversial nominee to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The guy was basically a cheerleader for 9/11,” Tuberville told me, linking El-Sayed to a comment made by the popular far-left streamer Hasan Piker, with whom the candidate campaigned, that “America deserved 9/11.” (When asked in April by POLITICO about Piker’s remarks, El-Sayed characterized the question as a “gotcha game” and said “I’m not here to disavow people’s views”; Piker later apologized for the comments, calling them “inappropriate,” “messed up” and a failed attempt at satire.) “I mean, come on,” Tuberville continued, “the country’s changed, but it hasn’t changed this much to put people in [office] that are basically terrorists.”
When I asked if he was calling El-Sayed a terrorist, the senator replied, “I say he’s got the ability to become one.”
Tuberville has the political incentive to make such inflammatory remarks; they will play well to Republicans in Alabama, where he is running for governor, and he has no grand designs on national office. But they and the GOP’s larger response to El-Sayed’s win reflect another emotion that is running throughout the party. Although Republicans got the Democratic opponent they professed to want for former Rep. Mike Rogers, who lost a Senate race to Elissa Slotkin in 2024 only by the thinnest of margins, they are also scared — and with good reason.
El-Sayed has got game. When I approached his campaign for comment on Tuberville’s remarks, I was directed to an exchange he had on Wednesday night with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, in which he addressed the Republican onslaught.
“There are people like J.D. Vance or Donald Trump or Mike Rogers, who want to define America as being too small to include some kinds of people, and they point to my name, they point to my faith, they try to insinuate that somehow I’m less American because of those things,” El-Sayed said. “They want America to be small. I believe that America is big. It’s open-minded. It’s big-hearted. It can include any of us, regardless of how we pray, regardless of where our families come from, regardless of who we love or how we identify. That’s the America we’re building. And I think America, in Michigan in particular, has an opportunity to remind us just how big we are.”
Although El-Sayed has never run for federal office, these are not the words of a political novice. He is a gifted communicator, able both to make open-hearted, aspirational appeals and channel anger at billionaires and elites, a needle Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for all of his influence on the Democratic Party, has never quite been able to thread.
But unlike eloquent politicians known to be showhorses, enjoying the social media clips from their media hits, El-Sayed is a workhorse, and this combination makes him formidable. One reason for his primary win is that he simply outworked Stevens, visiting over 110 cities, according to his campaign, holding over 500 public events and, in the process, building a genuine movement. This tenacity, along with rallying cries of “Medicare for All” and getting money out of politics, helped him overcome the opposition of the Democratic establishment and over $60 million in spending by super PACs supporting Stevens.
Nevertheless, after the race was called for El-Sayed, the Democratic Party quickly coalesced behind him and he was reportedly fielding calls from former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Transportation Secretary — and Michigan voter — Pete Buttigieg and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
The stakes are high. Polls taken before the primary showed El-Sayed trailing Rogers by a larger margin than Stevens. Democratic control of the Senate runs through Michigan, and as many have pointed out, El-Sayed’s win has teed up a first-of-its-kind test: whether a progressive can win in a swing state that narrowly voted for Trump in 2016, went for Biden four years later and returned to Trump in 2024. El-Sayed will need to be even more nimble than he already is and avoid giving the GOP talking points.
Despite generous overtures to Stevens and assurances to the Jewish community El-Sayed made in remarks on Wednesday morning after the race was called, there are intraparty divisions left to heal. He must set to work convincing centrist and moderate Democrats, Black voters in urban areas and suburban voters, all of which Stevens carried, as well as disaffected independents, that he is worthy of their vote. The race will be tough, but it is winnable, even as he continues to face GOP efforts to define him on their terms.
Responding to a reporter who asked about how Republicans are deploying his name in their attacks, El-Sayed said, “That’s the only play they got.”
Whether that’s true or not, between now and November, we’ll see if it works.
Abdul El-Sayed isn’t worried about Islamophobic attacks on the campaign trail.
The progressive Democrat who just won a hotly contested primary in Michigantold reporters on Wednesday that he’s willing to take smears on the chin, saying that name-calling and bigotry is “the only play” in his opponents’ playbook.
“That’s the only play they got,” he said. “They’re going to point at me. They’re going to point at my name like, ‘Well, he’s different.’ That’s the best you got?”
The former public health director has stuck to a platform centered on affordability at home and an end to foreign entanglements. He said that Islamophobia is a cop-out because his opponents don’t want to debate substantive issues.
“You can’t actually talk about what you want to do?” he said. “My name is not raising your gas prices. My name is not taking us to war. My name is not the reason you can’t afford groceries.”
El-Sayed will face Former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in the upcoming midterms. He encouraged Rogers to come up with a better line of attack than his identity, because he doesn’t think his Michigan voters will bite.
“I’ve been an Abdul in Michigan my whole life. This is the best place in the world to be Abdul,” he said. “Michiganders are big-hearted, they’re open-minded… [They’re] sick and tired of BS politics coming in to divide us.”
On July 26 in Pennsylvania, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries introduced the party’s Fighting for an Affordable America agenda to mark 100 days until November’s midterm elections. The plan, according to the Associated Press, calls for “restoring healthcare cuts, bringing the cost of living down and ending the war in Iran to beat Republicans and hold President Donald Trump accountable.”
Democrats always want to run on kitchen table issues, and this time they have an opening you could drive the Titanic through. Even among Trump’s most fervent followers, the war in Iran is unusually unpopular; it’s the first time I can ever remember Republicans not rallying around a war started by a GOP president. In fact, the party used to rally around so-called “Democrat wars” too, at least most of the time, even as they condemned them for being mistakes. Trump, though, seems to have broken that knee-jerk reaction, which, if it lasts, may end up being one of the only things he has done right, even if it was by accident.
After Trump and the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, there are no Democrats — and vanishingly few independents — who are clamoring for a “return to normal,” if anyone can even remember what that looks like.
“Holding Donald Trump accountable” is obviously a necessary goal, and we can only hope that if they take back the House, and perhaps the Senate, Democrats will spend the next two years hammering Republicans on corruption, malfeasance, criminality and incompetence, pounding as many nails into the MAGA coffin as possible in anticipation of a hard-fought 2028 campaign. After Trump and the GOP’s anti-democracy turn, there are no Democrats — and vanishingly few independents — who are clamoring for a “return to normal,” if anyone can even remember what that looks like.
As we get further into Trump’s second term, the rise of the progressive left, generated at least in part by the desperate need for generational change, is bringing some longstanding issues to the surface. Younger Democrats aren’t talking about politics in technocratic terms, as the party’s politicians have been doing for the last 30 years, offering up 10-point economic plans and telling the public how they can work the system more efficiently. They see politics in largely moral terms, and they are ready to address some of the thorniest moral issues we face.
Oligarchy is at the top of the list, an issue that has animated the left since at least the Occupy Wall Street movement began in 2011. Fifteen years later, a global backlash against billionaires who have outsize influence over politics — and who do not pay their fair share — is taking shape.
The left also rejects America’s global role as security guarantor, particularly in light of the tragedy taking place in Gaza, which has been aided and abetted by the U.S. government. The party’s mainstream has moved substantially in their direction, leading to an unprecedented split in the House caucus in July that saw over a hundred House members vote to cut off aid to Israel. Whether it was done out of genuine desire to end the blank check or simply to allow members a symbolic vote going into the midterms, it’s clear that the intense opposition to Israel’s actions have made a difference, despite the ongoing debate about the scope of the policy.
These moral issues are animating a significant faction of the party, and they are having an impact. But I find myself wondering why another moral issue, much closer to home and shocking almost beyond comprehension, isn’t getting much play on the campaign trail.
The treatment of immigrants of all statuses, and sometimes American citizens who happen to look “foreign,” is an abomination. But aside from perfunctory nods to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it seems to have become background noise.
Masked federal agents are killing people with impunity. They are splitting up families without compunction, throwing people in camps and deporting them to countries they have never even visited. Now, with the permission of the MAGA-compliant Supreme Court, the Trump administration is in the process of deporting Haitians who have been here legally for decades by forcing them to leave immediately or wear an ankle bracelet in anticipation of being sent to a country which our own State Department says is too dangerous to visit. These are people who own property and businesses, and many of them have American-born children. They also happen to be Black.
This is not a popular policy. While most congressional Republicans still approve of Trump’s immigration agenda, many of them aren’t thrilled with the administration’s deportation policy. According to Strength in Numbers, most Americans are appalled and prefer a path to citizenship for non-criminals. Trump’s cruel priorities clearly work for many rank-and-file Republicans, and this seems to have some timorous Democrats spooked. But if there has ever been an issue that the left should be screaming about every single day, it’s this.
Many Americans are out in the streets protesting and putting themselves on the line. In fact, average voters may be more up in arms than Democratic politicians. If the progressive left wants to consolidate the party behind a more virtuous set of values, this is the issue that will rally the entire spectrum of ideologies. Jeffries and party leaders should move it to the very top of the agenda, and make Trump’s abuses a rallying cry across the country.
The Democratic Party should not play politics with this; the president’s abuses are happening right here on our own streets, in our own communities. It is the moral issue of our time.
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s second election, voting for legislation to boost immigration enforcement could have seemed like a safe choice to some Democrats, who tied Donald Trump’s second presidential victory to a rejection of their party’s handling of immigration.
Right-wing media looks to have made a profound miscalculation. They put Hunter Biden through an unrelenting public pressure cooker, convinced that by turning a private citizen’s darkest personal rock bottom into a daily political circus, they could break both the man and his family. Now, seven years into his sobriety, Biden has picked up a podcast mic and won’t stop talking. The man whom the right spent years trying to destroy is now walking into rooms they open up for him — and setting them on fire from the inside.
For the better part of the past decade, conservative media made a concerted effort to turn Biden into the ultimate avatar of political corruption: the degenerate failson as a symbol of Democratic rot. During his father Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, the right devoted extensive attention to Hunter’s overseas business dealings, particularly his role on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma and allegations stemming from a laptop Hunter owned that surfaced in GOP hands shortly before the election. The laptop story became a defining example of modern media dynamics after the major social media companies temporarily limited distribution of an October 2020 New York Post article that included information taken from the laptop, a decision that conservatives still cite as evidence of a massive, multi-institution coverup. Republican lawmakers spent endless congressional hours investigating his digital footprint, but were ultimately unable to establish that the elder Biden had engaged in a criminal bribery scheme tied to his son’s business activities.
Right-wing media turned Hunter Biden into a household name to hurt his father, and now that notoriety is precisely what gives him leverage.
The meandering story is what makes the current public rehabilitation of Hunter Biden one of the stranger spectacles in American politics. Right-wing media turned him into a household name to hurt his father, and now that notoriety is precisely what gives him leverage.
Having emerged from severe addiction, public humiliation and federal prosecution, Biden is now truth-telling about his past and single-handedly roasting the right wing’s bad-faith outrage ecosystem on its own home turf. This year alone Biden has sat for hours-long interviews with independent outlets that cater to the very audience the GOP spent a decade cultivating against his family. He talked to Andrew Callaghan’s Channel 5, whose YouTube following runs past three million and skews toward people who trust almost nothing coming out of U.S. institutions. He talked to Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who spent years amplifying allegations against him. Ryan then hooked him up with MAGA podcaster Candace Owens, who once called him a degenerate who belonged in prison.
Biden’s media strategy is dangerous and fascinating. He has described his media blitz as partly about addiction recovery and partly about strategy. Independent podcasts and YouTube channels have replaced the legacy media gatekeepers that used to referee these fights, and Biden figured out faster than most Democratic operatives that the audience he needed to reach was sitting in exactly the media ecosystem built to hate him. “No one gives a shit with what anybody says on CNN,” he told one interviewer, arguing that years of investigations and public scrutiny had lowered expectations to the point where audiences were surprised simply to hear him speak coherently at length. His approach appears designed to replace years of secondhand portrayals with direct exposure.
Biden’s rapid growth on X further underscores this tactical evolution. Joining Elon Musk’s platform just days before his interview with Owens dropped, Biden began tweeting with relentless energy, sometimes authoring over 100 posts a day. Commentators quickly dubbed him a “MAGA whisperer” as he systematically dismantled right-wing talking points and exposed media figures he accused of building careers off bad-faith attacks. When CNN anchor Jake Tapper published a scathing review of Jill Biden’s memoir — which defended the former president’s fitness for office — Hunter immediately went on the offensive, blasting Tapper and corporate media for what he viewed as complicity in weaponizing personal family dynamics for television ratings.
Biden’s new approach mixes vulnerability with nuclear-grade anger. Instead of avoiding controversy, he frequently addresses it head on. On a Barstool Sports podcast this week, he joked about signing a laptop and openly discussed his struggles with crack cocaine addiction. For a movement that has invested years in hyping “Hunter’s laptop” as a civilization-ending scandal, seeing the man himself turn it into a potential merchandising opportunity should be humiliating.
On that same Barstool appearance, he delivered an expletive-filled rant about Donald Trump’s entire family: “F**k him. F**k his sons. F**k his daughter. I mean it, all of them, the whole family, down to the grandchildren. I hope for the rest of time that I am on this earth, that their names live in ignominy.” Biden backed that rage up with a substantive critique, pointing out that the Trump sons received $3.2 billion in Defense Department contracts in just 18 months and that son-in-law Jared Kushner, despite holding no government position, is reportedly receiving more than $110 million from the Saudis, tied to nuclear enrichment authorization and billions in investment funds.
But Biden is also reaching out beyond the right-wing media ecosystem. He has appeared on NPR’s “Newsmakers,” podcasts hosted by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Don Lemon, and the “I’ve Had It” podcast with hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie “Pumps” Sullivan. Yet his aggressive, unapologetic posture does not spare Democrats. He has openly torched party leaders who pressured his father to abandon his 2024 reelection bid following the president’s disastrous debate performance, specifically calling out Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as a “piece of s**t” for his role in pushing his father aside. “I’m not running for anything, so I can say whatever the f**k I want,” Hunter Biden declared, giving voice to millions of frustrated progressives who are sick and tired of watching Democratic leaders play by polite, outdated rules while right-wing extremists burn down democratic norms.
It makes you wonder: Had the party embraced Biden’s willingness to fight back early on, perhaps they could have deployed one of the most effective anti-MAGA communicators in the country to stop Trump’s return.
It makes you wonder: Had the party embraced Biden’s willingness to fight back early on, perhaps they could have deployed one of the most effective anti-MAGA communicators in the country to stop Trump’s return.
To be certain, Biden’s media strategy has generated intense criticism, especially his decision to sit down with the extreme, far-right activist Nick Fuentes. The interview, filmed in a Philadelphia studio dressed up to resemble a seedy motel in a wink at the laptop scandal, quickly became a viral sensation, generating millions of views. During the interview, which reportedly nearly escalated into a physical confrontation, the two found common ground, trading skepticism about American support for Israel, with Fuentes framing his objections as political rather than religious, a distinction that will comfort no one who has watched what he actually says about Jews. When discussing their public reputations, Biden joked, “I’m a crackhead,” to which Fuentes replied, “I’m a racist,” prompting Biden to shoot back, “Mine is true!”
Biden defended the pairing on social media in terms that sound almost reasonable — until you remember who he is talking about. He argued that people who profit from keeping Americans separated have built a business model on it, and that he would sit down with anyone who sees Trump as an enemy, regardless of what else they believe. He was explicit that Fuentes’ views on race and women are indefensible, and that what Fuentes has said about the Holocaust and Nazism cannot be defended. But he argued that one issue — stopping Trump — mattered more than any daylight between him and a man who leads an online movement built substantially on racial grievance.
This is a coherent argument. It is also the argument every troll counts on succeeding, because it leads and allows audiences to conclude that platforming extremist speech and views like Fuentes’ is a savvy tactical maneuver rather than what it actually is: a laundering operation. In this particular wash cycle, Fuentes needed laundering a great deal more than Biden needed an outlet.
The instinct to give Fuentes and people like him a bigger microphone under the banner of anti-Trump unity deserves more skepticism. There is no common ground with someone whose political project is ethno-nationalist authoritarianism, and treating a two-hour conversation as evidence that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” echoes the bad faith politics that lets extremists claim they were misunderstood or “just joking” the whole time. It’s just whitewashing bigotry for clicks.
But Hunter Biden’s choice to sit with Fuentes exposes something crucial about our current media environment. At a moment when fascism is organizing through podcasts and X feeds, he has stumbled into a role Democrats should have desperately filled: that of a loud, media-savvy fighter who doesn’t care about decorum. By owning his flaws and speaking directly to the public, Biden has stripped the right-wing outrage machine of its primary power source.
Were she to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, Kamala Harris would enter the race with formidable advantages. Thanks to four years as vice president and two presidential bids, her name identification is universal, and she has demonstrated the ability to raise mounds of money. But she would not clear the field.
The list of possible contenders for the Democratic nomination is a mile long and includes governors (California’s Gavin Newsom, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, Maryland’s Wes Moore, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro and Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker), lawmakers (Arizona Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and California Rep. Ro Khanna), former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, to name a few. In an Emerson College poll released July 23, Harris came in fifth with 8%, trailing Buttigieg (19%), Newsom (17%), Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff (13%) and Ocasio-Cortez (13%).
But as she weighs a third presidential bid, Harris stands to face a bigger and more formidable opponent: herself.
Harris was done dirty by the Biden White House. It was nothing short of political malpractice to handicap and undercut a loyal veep who, according to actuarial tables, could have easily been elevated to the Oval Office in the event of the aging president’s death. (Considering Joe Biden’s post-presidency diagnosis of aggressive metastatic cancer, his staff’s treatment of Harris looks even more outrageous in hindsight.) This was particularly true because, after enduring brutal press cycles in her first two years as vice president, Harris ended up becoming a secret weapon of sorts for Biden, passionate and nimble on the stump in defending reproductive rights in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, and making skillful strides on the world stage.
But if she was not set up for success by the administration while in office, Harris now appears to be falling into a trap of her own making, even as she is “holding lengthy, closed-door meetings” with progressive activists and groups.
In a recent New York magazine feature, a supporter of the vice president — identified as someone “who had recently spoken with her and came away convinced [she] is running in 2028” — inadvertently revealed what, if accurate, looks likely to be her Achilles’ heel. “She is looking for where the wave is going and is determined to ride it,” they said.
Left unsaid was that this is what Harris has long been accused of doing — again and again.
But charges of flip-flopping cling to other politicians like barnacles on a sailboat, becoming a drag on their campaigns and threatening long-term structural damage to their brand. This is where Harris is at right now.
There’s a balance every politician must strike: retaining one’s authenticity while remaining open to recalibrating policy positions in response to new evidence or simply evolving, or to match shifts in the public mood. Some, like Biden, are particularly skilled at this. But charges of flip-flopping cling to other politicians like barnacles on a sailboat, becoming a drag on their campaigns and threatening long-term structural damage to their brand.
This is where Harris is at right now. Despite her national profile, there remains a nagging suspicion that she lacks an internal compass and the courage of her convictions. Since she was first elected to public office as San Francisco district attorney in 2003, she has sometimes shifted positions according to which rung of the political ladder she was climbing.
As the junior senator from California, a progressive state, Harris was vocal in her support for Medicare for All. Famously, in a June 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate, she raised her hand when the moderator asked candidates if they would support eliminating private insurance. Her campaign quickly attempted to walk back her response, and she began softening her position by releasing a plan that called for expanding access to Medicare while maintaining private insurance options. As Biden’s running mate, she supported his position of expanding the Affordable Care Act.
Harris’ shifts on healthcare, while anathema to some progressives, are easier to justify: Her core value of wanting universal healthcare didn’t change, she might explain, only her approach did. But her shift on fracking is much harder to square.
During her 2020 presidential bid, Harris expressed support for an outright ban on fracking, and she brought along a record as California attorney general of investigating oil companies for environmental abuses. But in the face of heat from Donald Trump and Republicans, and needing to put Pennsylvania in the Democratic column on election night, Harris clumsily reversed her position while claiming her “values have not changed” and that she was “seeking consensus.” The explanation didn’t seem to ring true for many voters, and she lost Pennsylvania to Trump by 1.7%.
There have been other policy reversals as well, ranging from the death penalty and cash bail to marijuana and immigration, which have left her vulnerable to Republican attacks and made some Democrats wary.
The New York magazine story indicated that Harris was blaming political consultants for her loss in 2024. “Her mindset is that I should have won,” a supporter told the outlet, “and I am going to do it my way because my way would have won, and it was all these consultants that were telling me to take this position or that position, and it was their fault.”
The problem is that this mindset further adds to the perception of Harris as a political opportunist, and should she eventually enter the primary, it will raise questions about her judgment and management that she will have to confront.
The Democratic Party has changed in the two years since her presidential campaign. The ideological fissures are more apparent, with democratic socialist candidates winning primaries — and elections, in the case of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom Harris notably called in June — and nearly two years into the Trump’s second term, the party has become much more restive and angry.
For 2028, Democrats aren’t wanting someone who is searching for a wave to ride to victory. They want someone to instead be that wave.
When you’re allegedly throwing phones at the desks of junior aides, there’s a problem that goes deeper than unmanaged anger.
According to a damning story published in Sunday’s New York Times, embattled Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin has descended into rage, fear, isolation and — according to his own supporters — ”a growing sense of paranoia” about his tenure atop the party.
Elected by DNC membership in February 2025 after a fractious race, Martin nonetheless took office with high expectations, seen as someone in the mold of former chair Howard Dean who would rebuild the party and devise a strategy to, if not win back rural voters, then at least mitigate Democratic losses. Instead, Martin’s tenure has been an ongoing series of fumbles, including a high-profile feud with party activist David Hogg and the bungled handling of the DNC’s 2024 election autopsy.
Now, with the midterms now only 100 days away, the RNC has banked a war chest of $128.5 million, and the DNC is reportedly $2 million in debt. According to NOTUS, in 2025 the DNC used its headquarters in Southeast Washington as collateral for a $15 million line of credit used to bolster its investments in off-year elections. As the Times story and a recent report in the Wall Street Journal make clear, Martin is also hemorrhaging the party’s confidence and loyalty.
The implications for Democrats in the midterms are potentially serious. But part of Martin’s remit is to pave the way for a Democratic win in the 2028 presidential election, when the DNC’s role becomes even more powerful and critical. So far, he has shown few signs of being able to do so, leaving the party at a disadvantage in a political environment that should favor them. When everything else is stripped away, that alone typifies Martin’s failure of leadership.
A few days ago I wrote about popular constitutionalism and Slate’s new podcast series on that topic. This is a critical civic topic because it is probably the only and certainly the proper path back from systemic corruption of the current Supreme Court and the broader problem of judicial supremacy. (If this is fuzzy or if it’s unclear what I’m talking about see that earlier post.) But what that Slate discussion quickly arrived at is that to have that kind of popular constitutionalism, the ability of the people to make decisions about what the U.S. Constitution requires or forbids, you need robust and functioning political parties. And one of the key features of American politics over the last 50 years is that parties really don’t exist anymore in the sense they did for upwards of a century and a half in American politics.
In Maine, sexual assault allegations against former Senate nominee Graham Platner prompted his abrupt exit from the race against Sen. Susan Collins. His departure has kicked off an impromptu race for the Democratic Senate nomination that could well be resolved before the convention even takes place, as campaigns make last-minute pushes to elect their preferred slate of delegates at the county level — and progressives believe they have the advantage.
In the primary election, Platner won 71% of the vote running on a progressive platform, including campaign finance reform, universal healthcare, ending mass deportations and ending billionaire welfare, among a broad slate of other policies. He also enjoyed the endorsement of prominent party leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. However, his campaign was dogged by scandal, most notably including the revelation that he had a Totenkopf tattoo and allegations of “unsettling” behavior from past girlfriends. Platner also faced questions from fellow progressives regarding the time he spent employed as a security contractor associated with the mercenary force Blackwater.
Last week, Platner announced his withdrawal from the race, following an allegation of rape from a former girlfriend, Jenny Racicot. His exit from the race has, in turn, set off a flurry of political organizing from Democrats. The new nominating process will see the 16 county parties elect slates of delegates, 601 in total, who will in turn vote to select the new nominee at a July 25 convention in Bangor.
Ahead of this new process, a handful of candidates have gained the most traction, including Troy Jackson, the former president of the Maine Senate; Nirav Shah, the former principal director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Secretary of State. Significant attention has been paid to Jordan Wood, former chief of staff to former Rep. Katie Porter, D-Ca., brewery owner Dan Kleban and environmental policy consultant David Costello.
However, the upcoming convention will look more like the sort of nominating conventions that dominated party politics prior to the widespread adoption of the primary election nominating process. The organizing around the convention process looks different, too.
The name of the game for the moment is for a candidate to get as many of their supporters at their respective county delegate elections as possible.
Whereas canvassing, mailers, rallies and TV advertising might rule in typical primaries, the short race ahead of the convention is currently focused on getting supporters to show up at the county-level delegate elections slated for July 18 and 19. To do this, campaigns have leaned on both digital ads and phonebanking, as well as pre-existing political relationships.
For example, the Shah campaign has been attempting to recruit former Platner supporters behind the scenes, while making clear publicly that they have a place in this campaign, according to Politico. Similarly, the group Our Revolution, which was founded as a way to carry forward the grassroots organizing behind Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, has thrown its organizing capacity behind Jackson’s candidacy.
The name of the game for the moment is for a candidate to get as many of their supporters at their respective county delegate elections as possible in order to elect the friendliest slate of delegates for their candidacy. The Jackson campaign, for example, has rolled out slates of delegates who promise to vote for Jackson at the convention in all of Maine’s counties.
One of the delegate candidates in Androscoggin County, Kiernan Majerus-Collins, who is also running for a state house seat, told Salon that he believes the current process benefits the four candidates — Jackson, Shah, Bellows and Wood — who already had campaigns in 2026, as well as those who already have connections in Maine politics. Considering Jackson and Bellows have the most experience in Maine politics, it likely means they’ll have a leg up, according to Majerus-Collins.
“Troy and Jenna have decades of relationships with those people that Dr. Shah, Wood and Kleban just don’t have,” Majerus-Collins said. “And it’s not to say that the political newcomers can’t make their case and don’t have a chance to win. They absolutely do, but it absolutely is going to be helpful to the candidates who are more familiar to the 600 most politically connected Democrats in the state.”
Majerus-Collins added, however, that there are some complicating factors in the race as well. For example, while Jackson’s campaign is rolling out slates of delegate candidates, not every campaign is. And, though many delegate candidates are explicitly running on the basis of supporting a specific Senate candidate, others are running on a promise to use their best judgment at the convention, or on pre-existing political relationships with their communities. The races are also crowded. In Androscoggin County, 188 candidates put their names forward for just 31 county delegate roles.
“A lot of the delegate candidate statements are something like, ‘Susan Collins is terrible, and it’s very important to defeat Susan Collins,’ which, from just a perspective of someone voting, is not that useful,” Majerus-Collins said.
John “Jak” Raymond, a delegate candidate in Hancock County, also underlined how the county delegate electorate differs from the primary electorate. Maine runs what are called semi-open primaries, in which unaffiliated voters can choose to vote in either major party’s primary. This nominating process, however, will include only Democrats who were registered with the party as of June 9.
“He found a way to pull those woods hippies out of the woods, and if we can keep them moving out of the woods, then that’s what’s needed, because we’re a purple state and it’s only becoming more purple every year,” Raymond said in an interview with Salon.
Jackson, in Raymond’s view, stands the best chance of keeping the coalition that supported Platner in the primary together, mostly because his platform has the most in common with what Platner ran on.
“Troy, I think, is the strongest. He’s got six years as president of the Maine Senate and another four years serving before that, so he has the tools and he knows the system,” Raymond said. “But he’s also a progressive with a platform that pretty much mirrors Platner’s, and Platner grew the grassroots.”
American voters desperately want relief from rising prices — especially the increasingly unaffordable cost of healthcare. Democrats have a plan for that.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently introduced the Break Up Big Medicine Act with Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., a bill that would split up the huge conglomerates that have made the current healthcare system so expensive and frustrating to navigate. Businessman Mark Cuban recently quipped that breaking up these near-monopolies could bring costs down by 40%.
If Democrats run on this healthcare affordability agenda, we stand a good chance of flipping not just the House, but the Senate too.
Insurers like UnitedHealth or Cigna don’t just sell coverage. They’ve consolidated power over virtually every part of our healthcare system, operating hospitals, clinics and pharmacy networks. And they use that control to generate billions in profits — by pushing patients toward care at the facilities they control.
UnitedHealth Group, for example, generates about 40% of its revenue — about $180 billion — from transactions between its thousands of subsidiaries. Its insurance branch steers patients to its roughly 90,000 affiliated doctors, and pressures those physicians to refer patients to its affiliated hospitals and clinics rather than lower-cost independent providers. And that’s not all. The company’s pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) arm pushes patients to affiliated pharmacies. Those pharmacies frequently upcharge patients for medicines, sometimes by 10 times the acquisition cost.
UnitedHealth Group is the largest of these conglomerates, but it’s hardly the only firm that operates this way. CVS Health owns Aetna, one of the nation’s largest insurers, in addition to the more than 9,000 CVS pharmacies it’s best known for. It also owns CVS Caremark, one of the nation’s largest PBM.
In theory, PBMs exist to save employers money by overseeing all the drug-related details of health insurance plans, and using their bulk-buying power to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for big discounts and rebates. PBMs often tell employers that they pass along all the discounts and rebates they receive to the employer, minus a small fee for their services.
What they typically don’t mention is that many PBMs are affiliated with foreign-based entities called “group purchasing organizations.” In 2025, the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into whether PBMs are using these overseas entities to skirt government oversight. Lawmakers have raised concerns that these arrangements allow PBMs to retain rebate-related revenue and fees within opaque corporate structures, rather than transparently passing those savings on to employers and patients.
Meanwhile, insurers continually deny coverage for treatments and procedures that patients need. They often force doctors to get insurer approval — known as prior authorization — before prescribing, or they force patients onto less effective drugs. That places an immense administrative burden on physicians, who can spend an average of 12 hours per week completing prior authorizations, time that they’d certainly rather spend with patients.
Prior authorization can have dire consequences for patients. More than eight in 10 patients that face prior authorization simply give up on treatment. About a quarter of doctors say that prior authorization delays have led to a serious adverse event for a patient in their care — whether that’s hospitalization, permanent damage or death.
Breaking up the healthcare conglomerates that have enriched themselves by immiserating patients and cheating employers is good policy.
Polls show that voters overwhelmingly support bold healthcare reform. According to a recent poll, nearly seven in ten insured Americans identified either lowering out-of-pocket costs or nixing prior authorization as the single most important change they want from their health insurance. It would be a mistake for Democrats to content themselves with merely tweaking the Inflation Reduction Act, the party’s last major healthcare reform, which primarily focused on reducing the federal government’s pharmaceutical spending.
That kind of incrementalism won’t work — Democrats cannot win by being Republican-lite. We need to target the insurer and PBM practices that directly drive up Americans’ out-of-pocket costs and force too many people to choose between filling their prescriptions and filling their gas tanks.
If Democrats are looking for a 50-state strategy for the midterms — something I insisted on as chair of the Democratic National Committee during the 2006 blue wave — Sen. Warren’s bill offers a great place to start.
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