Perhaps living in Seattle should inure you to shock. This is the city where, in the name of the George Floyd riots of mid-2020, armed fanatics took over a four-block chunk of downtown, a development Seattle’s moonbeam mayor of the day said reminded her fondly of the Summer of Love, only for the good vibes to dissipate when the commune’s residents started shooting one another on a nightly basis. And the squalor: in recent years, the general look of America’s Emerald City has passed from one characterized by its backdrop of snow-capped mountains and sparkling lakes to something more like one imagines central Berlin to have been after a particularly hard night of bombing in April 1945.
Even so, the news that 43-year-old Katie Wilson had defeated the incumbent Bruce Harrell to become Seattle’s next mayor came as something of a jolt. The result of the race was only made known on November 13, nine days after the polls closed. It took that long because Washington is one of the states where people vote exclusively by mail, and it apparently takes a week or more for the USPS to successfully convey a ballot from one side of town to the other. Each day at 4pm we were given the latest running count, at which point election officials went home again before beginning their next grueling six-hour shift the following morning, with time off for holidays and weekends. This is how we do business in our part of the world.
For anyone not previously familiar with Mayor-elect Wilson, she’s the mini-Mamdani in these parts: against homelessness (is anyone in favor of it?), and having the police deal with ‘mental-health disturbances’, such as that occasioned by the raving lunatic who accosts you on the street; and all for something called news vouchers, which her campaign has said would extract another $9 million from Seattle taxpayers to create jobs for fifty new reporters to balance the well-known right-wing media bias in these parts. That works out at a salary of $180,000 per hack, so perhaps I should apply.
Wilson was raised in Binghamton, New York, where her college-professor father David Sloan Wilson once wrote a book by the title of The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, and another one called Atlas Hugged, his riposte to Ayn Rand. One dimly begins to see the picture: a household steeped in the belief that human nature is essentially benign, and that all it takes is sufficient community goodwill to beat the corporate greedheads. Katie went off to read philosophy and physics at Oxford, but, displaying that whimsical spirit we may all yet come to know, chose to drop out six weeks before graduation. After that she drifted out to the west coast, married a fellow activist who supported himself by busking on the San Francisco light-rail system, and embarked with him on a Greyhound tour of the country to determine where they might start their new life together. Somehow unsurprisingly, they hit on Seattle. It’s traditionally the place where generations of the nation’s failed, felonious, or fed-up have gone to disappear, and, perhaps not coincidentally, where there hasn’t been a Republican mayor since the days of the LBJ administration.
To make ends meet, Wilson painted boats, worked construction, and played her guitar around the Pike Place Market for spare change. A non-driver, she then started a group called the Seattle Transit Riders Union to improve services and lower fares on public transportation, paying herself a token $73,000 a year to keep the show on the road. Next it was campaigning for a payroll tax to subsidize low-income housing, one of several such initiatives to face the electorate each November. It’s a strange thing about the homelessness issue in these parts. The more politicians throw our money at the problem, the worse it gets. If you drive from my blue-collar suburb to downtown, as I do most days, it’s as if you leave a Norman Rockwell painting and abruptly enter one by Hieronymus Bosch. There’s an authentic touch of Dunkirk about the final stretch of the journey as you pass by bedraggled-looking campers hunched together around braziers or stretched out on army-surplus cots. It’s a dreadful prospect, on a number of levels, and one’s heart naturally goes out to the public-compassion zealots who display yard signs that read: ‘In this town we believe Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights are Human Rights, no Human is illegal’, and whose essential solution to the homelessness epidemic is, like our new mayor’s, for all of us to continue to spend much, much more on community-outreach services.
We’re always told that the outcome to each election is of “existential” significance, but perhaps Katie Wilson truly did have an opportunity for change during her recent campaign. She could have argued, for instance, that devoting more taxpayers’ money to Seattle’s destitution crisis is a snake-oil remedy that shows no signs of actually solving the problem. She might have added that pressing for a higher minimum hourly wage is good as far as it goes, but that someone has to pay for this munificence, and that the hardworking Seattle resident already faces the nation’s highest chain-restaurant prices and the second-highest gas prices, behind only California. She might even have found it in her heart to note that the city currently boasts a violent crime rate of 775 per 100,000 residents, which is more than double the national average of 359, and that one possible solution to this state of affairs might be to significantly enhance the local police force, instead of further defunding it, as she’s loudly proposed in the past.
Back in the mid-1970s, a couple of local real-estate agents paid to erect a huge billboard in downtown Seattle, in response to the city’s Boeing-led economic nosedive. ‘Will the last person to leave town turn out the lights?’ the slogan read. Fifty years later, its time may have come again.
Tag: Democrats
-
Mini-Mamdani is (finally) new mayor of Seattle
-
Trump is creating a political Frankenstein
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump depicted himself as synonymous with winning. “We’re gonna win so much,” he said, “you may even get tired of winning and you’ll say please, please, it’s too much winning we can’t take it anymore.” Lately, however, Trump has been losing – losing not only in the court of public opinion, but also the courts themselves.
The latest instance came with the decision of Utah judge Dianna Gibson to reject a congressional map that Republican lawmakers drew to try and ensure that a Democrat cannot win even a single seat in the state. Gibson ruled that the map “unduly favors Republicans and disfavors Democrats.” Utah Democrats rejoiced. This is a win for every Utahn,” they said on social media. “We took an oath to serve the people of Utah, and fair representation is the truest measure of that promise.”
The pickle for Trump is that in demanding that Republican state legislatures tilt the election playing field in their direction, he may have created something of a political Frankenstein. Democrats, incensed by what they see as a decades-long effort by Republicans to employ legislative skulduggery to squeeze them out of office, whenever and wherever possible, are starting to respond in kind. Gavin Newsom gambled that he could upend California’s legislative map with Proposition 50 and won. He not only boosted the chances of Democrats to gain an additional five congressional seats, but also his own presidential chances. Elsewhere, Democrats are looking to pad their margins, including in Maryland. Meanwhile, Republicans are starting to get cold feet. In Kansas, for example, top Republican legislators are balking at redrawing their districts.
Some of it may be principle. And some of it may be cold political realities. Divvying up districts, as Trump is demanding, could backfire on Republicans. There is no guarantee that Hispanics will vote for the GOP in large numbers in Texas. So the very efforts the right is adopting to try and shore up Republican prospects in 2026 could inadvertently undermine them. Trump, in other words, may be too clever by half.
Crybaby Republicans like Utah state representative Matt MacPherson are trying to go a step further. He’s demanding the impeachment of Judge Gibson. “I have opened a bill to file articles of impeachment against Judge Gibson for gross abuse of power, violating the separation of powers and failing to uphold her oath of office to the Utah Constitution,” MacPherson announced on X. This dog won’t hunt. Impeaching judges simply because they issue judges that politicians don’t like isn’t a winning political issue, any more than it was when conservatives erected billboards demanding “Impeach Earl Warren,” after the Supreme Court Justice issued the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 that banned racial segregation in American schools.
Trump’s real problem remains the fact that his popularity rating continues to sink as quickly as the fortunes of the Washington Commanders football team. The Economist reports that 39 percent of Americans approve of his presidency while 57 percent disapprove. Its verdict is terse: “dissatisfaction with Mr. Trump is widespread even in states that voted for him just a few months ago. The numbers will make anxious reading for Republicans facing competitive races in next year’s midterm elections.”
Small wonder. As he threatens to prosecute what may well prove to be a disastrous war in the Caribbean against Venezuela, Trump is neglecting domestic issues in favor of playing battleship. No amount of gerrymandering can compensate for a presidency that is literally at sea. Trump must right the ship of state or the GOP will run aground in the midterms.
-
Has Trump finally shut down Schumer?
The end of the Democrats’ government shutdown is at last in sight, and so too is the final act of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
On Sunday night, eight Senate Democrats finally broke with Schumer and voted in favor of a procedural step necessary to eventually pass a continuing resolution to end the more than monthlong standoff.
“Democrats have been fighting for months to address America’s healthcare crisis,” tweeted Schumer, who vowed that they would “keep fighting.” It was the kind of weak, empty gesture that has come to define Schumer’s tenure at the helm of his conference.
Because regardless of what spin Schumer might like to put on this turn of events, the truth is that it represents yet another unambiguous failure on his part. The deal that his colleagues went around him to negotiate failed to extract the key concession that Democrats had professed to be holding out for: an extension of what were originally meant to be short-term Obamacare subsidies. Instead, their defectors settled for an agreement to force the Trump administration to rehire the federal workers it let go during the shutdown, as well as a promise that Republicans will hold a vote on the subsidies after the government is reopened.
That’s the bad news for Schumer. The worse news is that much of his party is blaming him for his failure to hold the Democrats together.
“Senator Schumer is no longer effective and should be replaced. If you can’t lead the fight to stop healthcare premiums from skyrocketing for Americans, what will you fight for?” asked Representative Ro Khanna.
“Chuck Schumer has not met this moment and Senate Democrats would be wise to move on from his leadership,” asserted Representative Mike Levin.
Representative Seth Moulton, who is challenging Senator Ed Markey for his seat in Congress’s upper chamber, declared that “Tonight is another example of why we need new leadership.”
“If @ChuckSchumer were an effective leader,” he argued, “he would have united his caucus to vote ‘No’ tonight and hold the line on healthcare.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom, quite possibly the next Democratic standard bearer, didn’t mention Schumer, but called the deal “pathetic” and characterized it as “surrender.”
This result should hardly be surprising, though. Even if the shutdown helped Democrats expand their margin of victory in last week’s off year election in November, Republicans were always going to hold the cards in this fight picked by Schumer. With control of Congress and the White House in hand, the GOP was never going to allow the Democrats to win by taking hostages.
Schumer picked it anyway, though, not only because his party demanded it, but because his party demanded it or else. The loss the septuagenarian suffered in this particular fight was not the first crack in his armor, but it could be among the final ones.
As a leader, Schumer leaves much to be desired. He’s among the worst orators in the Senate, and he’s compounded his grating voice and uneven delivery with shouting habit. As a pro-Israel senior, he is out of touch with the energetic, activist base of his party, which demands not only allegiance to the Palestinian cause, but is openly, if not self-awarely, antisemitic. And as a tactician, he was routinely routed by Mitch McConnell, and shows no signs of being able to best his successor, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, despite the fact that his caucus is far less ideologically diverse – and difficult –– than theirs.
For those reasons, polls indicate that Schumer finds himself in troubled waters not just nationally, but with the constituents he’s spent his entire career representing. Should Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decide to run for the Senate instead of the White House come 2028, she would be the favorite in a race against Schumer. A Data for Progress survey conducted in March showed her with a 19-point lead over the incumbent. Another poll conducted in May found that she had a 21-point advantage.
Of course, Schumer’s predicament is one not just of his own making, but his party’s. Democrats have been on a sprint leftward in the years since Donald Trump first won the presidency, leaving the Schumers of the world with no choice but to exhaust themselves trying to keep up. The demands – for both ideological conformity and no-holds-barred tactics – are either ill-advised, unrealistic, or both, yet men like Schumer who have made a career of their lack of principle are happy to comply if it means a few more years in the spotlight. Consider, as another example of his flexibility, his ill-fated call for the toppling of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year.
And so when Schumer gives up or is forcibly removed from his post – an eventuality that is surely in motion even if it’s not imminent – his downfall will be attributable not only to his shortcomings as a political talent, but his habitual appeasement of the progressives who revile him. -
Establishment Democrats win in Minneapolis
In the heartland of America, an inflection point has come to pass. Minneapolis was once immortalized in the 1970s television series The Mary Tyler Moore Show, when Mary Richards made her bright-eyed and optimistic journey there in search of opportunity and a new life. But now it is a relic; worn away, gritty and unwelcoming – with more empty storefronts than warm smiles. Of course, the decay didn’t happen overnight.
The failed policies of a series of Democratic leaders and a progressive city council have left the biggest city in the Minnesota Nice State a shadow of its former self. Minneapolis has had a Democrat mayor (Democrat-Farmer-Labor in this neck of the woods) every term since 1976 and hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Richard Erdall served one day on December 31, 1973. Out of the 15 candidates who ran for mayor this year, there were no Republicans.
This Election Day the choice was between the current mayor, Jacob Frey, who oversaw the disastrous “Summer of Love” 2020 riots in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, from which the city is still reeling, and Omar Fateh, the Ilhan Omar and Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed state senator who won reelection in 2022 and touts his work there as “transformative policy.”
Ultimately, Jacob Frey won his third mayoral term with 50.03 percent of the vote after the second round of ranked-choice voting (no candidate received more than 50 percent in the first round) was counted on Tuesday. But the contest was fraught.
Fateh’s state’s legislative session in 2023 was controversial and included a massive new state-run paid family leave program, free school breakfast and lunch for all K-12 students, regardless of family income, free college tuition and healthcare for illegal immigrants, free housing and free menstrual products in all school bathrooms, including boys. All this spending blew away previous state budget records, with the omnibus bill increasing spending by 40 percent – from $51.6 billion to $71.5 billion over two years.
For his part, Frey has tried to hold together a city at odds with itself – consistent with the divisions within the Democratic Party, not just in the city or the state, but the country at large, most notably in New York City. The battle is between radical-left progressives – who want males to participate in female sports and gender-affirming surgery for minors – and moderate Democrats who reject much of the woke ideology, language and radical policies that have run the political and cultural conversations of the last five years (think “defund the police” and not knowing what a woman is).
Frey branded himself as a “pragmatic progressive.” Considering the state of Minneapolis politics, this means he sounds more like an establishment Democrat; supportive of law and order, public safety, affordable housing (while addressing the city’s persistent homelessness problem) and green energy policies. He won the endorsements of U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, former U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Andrew Luger and two previous Minneapolis chiefs of police.
Fateh is one of a rising group of Democratic-Socialists running for office across the country this election cycle – not only against their immediate opponents, like Frey in Minneapolis, but against the party establishment and gatekeepers who they see as hindrances to their turn at power, all with a raised fist that combines elements of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, BDS and antisemitism.
From the outside, it looked like a left versus further-left fight. Still, one issue has really rubbed Minneapolitans the wrong way: a guaranteed minimum wage and worker protection for rideshare drivers like Uber and Lyft, which Fateh championed in the state senate. The effects have increased the cost of rideshare and delivery services in a city where “affordability” is a buzzword.
Further, the city was ground zero for the 2020 costly and deadly race riots in a state that might be the most corrupt in the nation, with $1 billion stolen from government coffers in fraud schemes, all with ties to the immigrant Somali community, including Fateh.
It turns out that Minneapolis had more pragmatic Democrats, Independents and Republicans, who held their nose to vote for Frey, than New York City did in voting for Mayor Mamdani.
And, zooming out from the mayoral race, the Minneapolis City Council appears to have leaned away from its previous progressive bloc and will no longer have a veto-proof majority. Frey’s “pragmatic” approach appealed to right-of-socialist voters and motivated them to turn out as well.
Taken together, voters in Minneapolis decided to keep limping along with the devil they know rather than to go all-in with a mayoral candidate who could put the final nail in the city’s coffin. Minneapolis might not make Mary Richards smile, but she might just make it after all.
-
Mayor Mamdani will terrify America
Zohran Mamdani is the mayor-elect of New York City, and the progressive wing of the Democratic party is Champagne drunk celebrating his ascension.
But should it be? Mamdani has only narrowly prevailed in a race with a clear spoiler candidate, Republican Curtis Sliwa, lead-blocking for him against a charmless opponent, former governor Andrew Cuomo. With tougher, more honorable competition, it’s possible – likely, even – that he may not have even made it to the general election, much less won it.
Only when compared to a corrupt, sleazy, nepobaby with blood on his hands, and a beret-clad, narcissistic cat-man whose own friends begged him to step aside, did voters view Mamdani as a much-needed alternative. Both the Republican and Democratic establishments in New York have much to reflect upon – and atone for. Mamdani’s victory is less a ringing endorsement of his agenda than it is an indictment of the lazy, complacent power brokers to whom he’s meant to be a middle finger.
Moreover, while he may scratch every neurotic, fanciful itch to plague his party’s radical base, Mamdani’s mayoralty will most assuredly prove a failure. And on a scale that neither the nation, nor even the Democrats, will be able to deny.
The tragedy of it all, though, is that for the country to avoid falling into the hands of an explicitly anti-American socialist, its greatest city will have to do just that. For New Yorkers, it’s difficult to imagine Tuesday night’s results yielding anything but pain, and, indeed, suffering. Four years ago, Eric Adams swept into office amid not only the Covid-19 pandemic, but the crime epidemic that accompanied it. The intervening years have seen a partial recovery, with significant decreases in some of the most important categories.
Mamdani threatens to reverse what progress has been made. In 2020, amidst the pandemic crime wave, he declared that “police do not create safety,” and “actually create and amplify violence,” even going so far as to suggest that non-cops should be the ones to respond to domestic violence calls. In other comments, Mamdani smeared law enforcement as “racist,” “wicked,” and “anti-queer,” lamented the “boot of the NYPD” on residents’ necks, and reveled in officers’ tears.
The mayor-elect may have tacked to the center and apologized to the NYPD during his campaign, but the sheer number of prior statements expressing his vitriol in no uncertain terms suggests that his backtrack was one borne of convenience rather than a genuine change of heart. Not only can New Yorkers expect Mamdani to implement policies that will leave them and their loved ones less safe, but his presence in Gracie Mansion will send unmistakable messages to police and criminals alike – with terrible consequences.
Similarly, while Mamdani has succeeded, in large part, thanks to his focus on affordability, his agenda in action will make life anything but. Price controls have failed anywhere and everywhere they’ve been tried, but that hasn’t stopped Mamdani from touting them as the fix for the city’s housing crisis. What else? How about free transit and childcare, a ludicrous minimum wage hike up to $30 an hour, and, get this, city-owned and operated grocery stores.
These heavy-handed interventions into the free market, which are meant as stepping stones toward a seizure of the means of production, if Mamdani himself is to be taken at his word, are sure to have the exact opposite effect they’re meant to. It has been said that a rising tide lifts all votes. By driving wealth out of the city and punishing that which remains, Mamdani will lower the tide to the detriment of every boat on the Hudson, from the most magnificent yacht to the smallest dinghy.
New York’s fall is a moral one, too, of course. It isn’t just a city in America, it’s a symbol of it. Alas, there is little sign Mamdani has anything but resentment for his adopted country or the values for which it stands. Hence his shameless photo-ops with an unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and a far-left influencer who believes the United States had 9/11 coming.
And all of that is to say nothing of his undeniable sympathy for Hamas, or his obsessive hatred for the world’s Jewish-majority state, about which he has articulated conspiracy theories worthy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
So yes, New York has fallen, but not permanently. The good news is that David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio’s disastrous tenures both led to furious, righteous backlashes, and so too will Mamdani’s.
The better news is that Mamdani’s shortcomings will serve as a warning system for the nation.
The closest parallel to Mamdani on the national stage, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, lives in his city. Both rose to national prominence inside of blue bubbles where progressive politics are not just popular, but required. Both have proudly claimed, rather than run away from, the dreaded “socialist” descriptor. Both have been praised for their communications skills and social media strategies. And both defeated avatars of a complacent – even stultifying – Democratic establishment on their way to victory.
Ocasio-Cortez is among the early favorites in the 2028 Democratic primary, and was a vocal backer of Mamdani’s campaign. Ironically though, she may end up a victim of his success.
For the better part of a decade now, Ocasio-Cortez has been able to skate by as a congresswoman – one of 435 – whose unpopular, destructive ideas are never actually put into action. Now, those ideas will take centerstage as New York plays the role of a lab rat seemingly blissfully unaware of the toll the experiment took on its forerunners, let’s call them San Francisco and Chicago.
America as a whole is seemingly next up, but will have every opportunity to opt out after surveying Mamdani’s handiwork.
So enjoy that Champagne tonight, progressives. It isn’t the kind that ages well.
-
Democrats win New Jersey governorship with Trump scare tactics
The votes are in – and they’ve shattered any illusion that New Jersey is a swing state.
The Democratic Party will hold onto the New Jersey governorship, with governor-elect Mikie Sherrill beating Republican Jack Ciattarelli in his third attempt at the governor’s mansion.
While Sherrill was always the favorite, polls continued to narrow even in the final stretch of the race. This pushed both parties into increasingly aggressive, even desperate, tactics.
In mid-October, Sherrill accused Ciattarelli of “kill[ing] tens of thousands of people in New Jersey, including children” with opiates through a “misinformation” campaign pushed by a medical company he once owned.
When even The New York Times couldn’t dig up proof, the Democratic National Committee poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the state – in addition to the $3 million already committed.
And over the last weekend, bigwig Democrats including Barack Obama turned out to stump for Sherrill. “Let’s face it, our country and our politics are in a pretty dark place right now,” Obama said before rambling off a list of grievances against Donald Trump.
Democrats stuck to the same script: ignore Ciattarelli, and scare voters with Trump.
Yet Ciattarelli leaned into the Trump connection, incorrectly believing that MAGA political capital could pull him through.
After distancing himself in the 2021 campaign, Ciattarelli enthusiastically admitted that Trump has been “right about everything” (which Democrats turned into an attack ad) this time around. Trump endorsed him with equal enthusiasm in May: “Jack has gone ALL IN, and is now 100 percent (PLUS!)”
Republicans, meanwhile, pumped massive resources into the Garden State in the final stretch: five full-time staffers, 50 county captains and over 15,000 volunteers from attorneys to poll workers. They even rolled out a new app called VotePro, a voter mobilization tool to help more efficiently allocate last minute resources.
On the night before the election, Ciattarelli even held a heartwarming photo-op with his son, an Army Officer who returned from Kuwait.
But even election day bomb threats in North Jersey didn’t keep voters from the polls.
Off-year elections aren’t typically monitored in the national press, but a once deep-blue Jersey has drawn national attention as it turned increasingly purple in recent years. Trump only lost the state by six points in 2024, and Ciattarelli has gained ground with each campaign. With independents making up over one-third of the state’s voter pool, Republicans thought momentum was on their side.
Beyond the governorship, both parties clearly saw this election as an indicator for elections to come. The most salient question was whether New Jersey and its 14 electoral votes could potentially be up for grabs in 2028. But the broader strategic question remains: is Trump an asset to the party even when he’s not on the ballot, or is the specter of Trumpism just too scary for swing-voters?
Democrats will now surely double down, by tying everything they can to the Bad Orange Man. They may be right – but they also leave themselves vulnerable.
With his slicked-back hair and Jersey accent, Ciattarelli always leaned into being a goombah as much as he embraced Trump. Sherrill meanwhile – with her Navy service, Georgetown law degree, and pantsuits – was effectively designed in a lab to win elections. Perhaps Jersey voters simply appreciated her blandness over a goofy state caricature.
That bodes just as poorly for Republicans, as they race to see who the next big populist personality will be. A bland suit might just outperform a subpar personality, even in the age of populism.
But Democrats can equally hinder themselves if they continue to make everything about Trump even when he eases into political retirement. Trump derangement can easily turn into a personality itself – and it’s just as off-putting as anything the Republicans deliver.
In the end, the election will likely change very little in New Jersey. Sherrill will follow in the footsteps of incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy, another faceless politico.This election may just not have the national implications Democrats hope for. But Democrats will no doubt delude themselves into thinking Sherrill’s victory harkens a future beyond Trumpism.
-
How Republicans can win New York?
Is Maud Maron crazy? Bill Ackman certainly thought the Republican candidate for Manhattan DA was, she tells me, when she asked him for $2 million. While the billionaire hedge fund CEO said he could easily raise the money she needed to fund her campaign in a single night, ultimately he chose not to – and instead focused on backing Andrew Cuomo for mayor.
Ackman thought “oh, she’s a nice lady, but she’s crazy,” Maron recalls. “She’s running as a Republican in a Democratic city.”
Fast forward six months and Cuomo is on the brink of losing to Zohran Mamdani – and Ackman has cast a vote for Maron, who he now calls “great.”
“I’m not crazy, I’m just ahead of the curve,” says Maron, a former public defender “And I am trying to find the least obnoxious way to say ‘I told you so’ to all of the big donors in New York.”
Maron is fighting an uphill battle of her own against current DA Alvin Bragg. The Democrat is expected to win. But she contends that it is Cuomo’s anticipated loss that should change Republican calculus in the city – and end the failed strategy of always backing the least worst Democrat.
As a recent candidate herself in two Democratic Congressional primaries, Maron knows about New York Democrats. But her critical view of DEI (for which she was called a “racist”), of trans issues (on which she said “any dude who feels like a woman is supposed to be treated like a woman – that’s absurd”) and staunch support of Jews (over which she was suspended from her post as parent council president for criticizing a letter that defended October 7) put her out of step with the party that has been captured by its progressive wing. She was beaten on both occasions and switched teams.
Those losses, combined with Cuomo’s expected defeat, augur well, Maron argues, for Republicans.
“Donors in the past have put in a lot of money to convince Republicans to register as Democrats because they thought the Democratic primary decides the election. But if you felt like your vote would count whether you were registered as a Democrat or a Republican, you would see an exodus from the Democratic party.
“Cuomo has already started that process by standing as an independent. Once you get people to say ‘I’m not just going to vote straight Democrat, I’m going to go listen to both candidates and see who’s better,’ then there’s a vote to be gotten.”
That the blue and red tectonic plates have shifted is beyond doubt with a certain New Yorker now residing in the White House and with the very real prospect of a Republican moving into the Governor’s mansion in neighboring New Jersey for the first time since 2013. The most recent polls show a dead heat between Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli.
“Trump won all seven swing states and the popular vote really just by turning up and talking to people. Republicans win where Republicans show up and fight with some money and some infrastructure, that’s what we see in New Jersey too.
“And there’s something going on with the Democrat party. There’s a switcheroo happening where working class people are now finding themselves more drawn to and represented by the Republican party. You saw it with Robert F. Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard joining the Trump campaign. There’s a lot of Democrats out there who want something better than what the Democratic party is offering right now, which is far left extremism.”
But why should anyone listen to – let alone donate $2 million to – a candidate who is likely to lose on November 4 to a District Attorney so bad that the conviction rate has fallen every year since he took over in January 2022 and now stands at just 35 percent?
“Far left progressive prosecutors are winning because big donors like George Soros are funding the Democratic Socialists of America. But the backlash has started: Chesa Boudin was recalled in San Francisco and George Gascon was voted out of Los Angeles. When enough voters see what extreme leftism looks like in practice, they’re ready for an alternative.
“Republicans need to copy the DSA because they did a really smart thing. They invested a ton of money and recruited candidates when nobody took them seriously. You have to show up and you need money and you need infrastructure. In New York, that just has not been happening.
“As a Republican I haven’t been able to raise the millions of dollars that you would need to have a real fighting chance.” In the end Maron raised $500,000, still four times more than the last Republican DA candidate.
The further left the Democrats track, Maron says, the greater the opportunity for Republicans.
“Moderates can’t win in the Democratic primary, that’s why we have Mamdani. Democrats have lurched so far to the left because every single Democrat in office is worried about a challenger from their left. So they all tack left with their loony legalized prostitution, legalized marijuana, safe injection sites, they don’t arrest people for jumping the turnstile or beating up a cop. They are not worried about a challenger from the Republican party.”
Maron laughs at the thought of standing for mayor herself – “not a job I’m after” – and says the city needs another Michael Bloomberg. “I don’t think Curtis Sliwa will run again. New Yorkers won’t be put off by voting Republican if it’s somebody like Bloomberg who knows how to run things and turn things around.”
Politics is a contact sport these days, which is perhaps one of the reasons Maron, a mother of four who lives in Manhattan, wouldn’t seek the mayor’s office. Recently her nine-year-old son asked her why people were calling her racist. “It can get kind of nasty sometimes. But it does make the kids a little bit tougher and stronger.”
Maron predicts that under Mayor Mamdani “New York is about to have a rude awakening.” But, if her analysis is correct, when the contest is held again in four years time the Big Apple will be also low-hanging fruit, ripe for the plucking by Republicans. -
Kamala 2028 by default?
Kamala D. Harris, the career mediocrity who fell backward into a major party presidential nomination before ceding every swing state in the Electoral College to Donald Trump last fall, isn’t ruling out yet another bid for the big chair.
Harris has been making the rounds to promote her newish campaign memoir, 107 Days, and, during a recent sit-down with the BBC, indicated that she’s considering an encore.
“I am not done,” declared the former vice president. “I have lived my entire career a life of service and it’s in my bones.” Whether collecting taxpayer-funded paychecks while opening the country’s borders, advocating on behalf of the fanciful Green New Deal and lying to the American people about the mental acuity of their commander-in-chief qualifies as a “life of service” in the same way that, say, a veteran, police officer, or firefighter’s might is dubious, but it’s true enough as far as the expression goes.
Still, even the most loyal, masochistic of Democratic partisans must be flabbergasted by Harris’s presumption. This is a woman who nearly lost her first statewide race in California to a Republican, flamed out in her first White House campaign, was handed the vice presidency in large part because she checked the correct demographic boxes, played the role of right hand in a widely-reviled administration, was named her party’s presidential nominee without earning a single vote four years later because her boss was no longer compos mentis, and then was soundly defeated by an eminently beatable candidate.
Why anyone, least of all herself, would hold that she has something more to give in politics, is a mystery if you look only to virtues intrinsic to Harris herself.
She isn’t a smooth or savvy operator. Quite the opposite, she’s a walking word-salad station who has staked out positions far to the left of the median American. She doesn’t have a core electoral constituency to whom she appeals and can fall back on when the going gets rough. Indeed, Trump made significant gains among black and hispanic voters – and more modest ones among women – in 2024. And worst of all, she’s a proven loser. There is absolutely nothing in her electoral track record to suggest that she’s anything but a below average political talent who produces below average outcomes for her party.
And yet, despite her plentiful deficiencies and the decided lack of enthusiasm for a Harris redux among her fellow Democrats, there is some reason for Harris to believe that come 2028, she could actually win the nomination she was bequeathed in 2024.
The Democrats’ failure to build a palatable, center-left bench could lead them, by default, back to Harris
At the moment, the wind is at the back of the radical left in the fight for the soul of the Democratic party. Zohran Mamdani’s rise in New York City, as well as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders’s Beatlemania-like tour across the country, demonstrates that its activist wing has all of the energy and momentum it could ever want behind it. Moreover, while the Biden administration failed in large part due to its embrace of unpopular progressive policies, many continue to labor under the misimpression that the Joe Biden who ran his approval rating into the ground was the tough-talking, Blue Dog-adjacent Democrat that he was back in the 20th century, rather than the legacy-chasing, left-wing airhead that he turned into in the White House.
It is also only this faction that has a clear favorite to be its champion in the primary fight to come. Ocasio-Cortez is the best pure political talent in the entire party. As a young, true-blue believer in the cause with a knack for communicating and connecting who will have spent nearly a decade in the national spotlight by the time she’s launching her campaign, Ocasio-Cortez will quickly consolidate Sanders’s coalition around her – and is well-equipped to build upon it.
All that renders her a favorite to land the nomination, but some Democrats rightly fear that the general electorate would resoundingly reject her.
She has no equal in the party’s establishment, the cohort of empty suits who would implement a diluted version of her agenda, though. This group seeks to saddle Americans with much of what they’ve already rejected – gender ideology, anti-growth climate policies, and a laissez-faire approach to border security – but without explicitly embracing the socialist label, or the language of the average Middlebury campus activist.
Those who might run in this lane all face significant headwinds. Former mayor and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg is the most gifted, but black voters are allergic to his smug, McKinsey shtick. Governor Gavin Newsom of California can bob, weave, dip and dodge with the best of them, but his ambition and inauthenticity shines through in every syllable. Senator Cory Booker’s Spartacus act is a running gag. Senator Chris Murphy is Wonder Bread with Iranian flag packaging. Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois is a big nepo-baby whose case for a promotion collapses at the first mention of his state’s largest city.
Should no one else emerge, the Democrats’ failure to build a palatable, center-left bench could lead them, by default, back to Harris. Her existing name recognition – and the months-long astroturf campaign to build her up last year – arguably sets her apart from the field; and there is precedent for coalescing around imperfect establishment candidates. Look no further than 2020, when the entire party got behind Biden to stop Sanders.
Ultimately, though, Harris is more a symptom of Democrats’ maladies than a cure for them. The only question is whether that matters, given her competition.
-
Will SCOTUS strip seats from Democrats?
The headwinds facing Democrats in Congress have been blowing powerfully for some time now. On culture, the economy, law enforcement and immigration the party is on the defensive as it casts about not only for a winning message, but leaders able to persuade the public the party remains relevant in the age of Trump.
Add to that list of hurdles the Supreme Court.
The court’s conservative majority has delivered one blow after another to treasured progressive causes including transgender rights, maintaining the federal workforce and presidential authority. Now the court is contemplating changes to the Voting Rights Act that could, if carried out, cause Democrats to lose a dozen or more seats in the House, all of them held by minorities.
Further losses for House Democrats couldn’t come at a less opportune time. While the Republican House majority is razor thin, Democrats have yet to hit on a theme that could plausibly drive a campaign to take back control. Off year elections typically favor the party out of power, but with opinion polls showing historically low ratings for Democrats nationally, the picture is bleak.
That is why the case before the Supreme Court is so problematic for Democrats. During oral arguments Oct. 15, Republican appointed justices seemed to suggest they were open to restricting and perhaps even ending a provision of the Voting Rights Act that permits state legislatures to consider race when drawing up congressional districts. It’s not at all clear that the court, if it decides to strike down or dramatically change the law, will issue a ruling in time for next year’s congressional elections, though the possibility cannot be ruled out.
Most of the vulnerable districts are in the south. Were the court to curtail the act, some 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus, might lose their seats.
The case, Louisiana v. Phillip Callais, centers on a redistricting battle in Louisiana following the 2020 census. Population changes forced the state Legislature to redraw the state’s seven congressional districts to ensure that the state’s voters were evenly distributed among them. A group of black voters challenged the plan, arguing that by creating only one black majority district, the state had intentionally discriminated against African American voters, who composed one third of the state’s residents.
A federal district court judge agreed and in response, Republican leaders preemptively came up with a new plan that created a second black majority district while at the same time protecting the seats of House Speaker Mike Johnson and majority leader Steve Scalise, both Republicans.
Deploying a dash of Constitutional finesse, the Republican authors of the new map declared that even though they had created the state’s second black majority district, the primary goal was not to redress a racial injustice, but rather to insure the Republicans’ advantage in the upcoming congressional elections. In the abstruse and often murky precincts of Constitutional law, the Republican map drawers seemed to be creating a defense against a line of attack that they had impermissibly used race in their redistricting plan.
It didn’t work. A group of white voters sued, alleging the map breached the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment by engaging in racial stereotyping to design the district, and they asked the court to throw out the redistricting plan.
During oral arguments, the court’s conservative justices appeared open to the idea of restricting or perhaps even overturning section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which in broad terms restrains state legislatures from engaging in the practice of racial gerrymandering, or intentionally distributing minority voters among multiple districts in a way that leaves them short of a majority.
Over time, the Supreme Court has interpreted the law to mean that state legislatures may consider race among a number of other factors, including incumbent protection and geographic consistency, so long as the purpose of the plan is to remedy past discrimination.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh queried Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who argued in favor of keeping the second black majority district, on whether section 2 ought to be time limited in some way. The implication of course was that maybe the time had come to end the practice.
“As you know… this court’s cases in a variety of contexts have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time, sometimes for a long period of time, decades in some cases, but that they should not be indefinite and should have an end point,” Kavanaugh said. “And what exactly do you think the end point should be or how would we know for the intentional use of race to create district.”
Later in the hearing, Justice Neil Gorsuch pointedly asked whether creating a black majority district would require that a state intentionally discriminate on the basis of race by excluding white voters.
At another point, Justice Samuel Alito seemed to imply that apportioning white or black voters from one district to another might not have anything to do with racial stereotyping but rather the result of partisan politics, since in many jurisdictions whites overwhelmingly vote Republican while blacks vote largely for Democratic candidates.
Under those circumstances, what might look like racial stereotyping instead is simply one party or another seeking to pack a district with their voters.
“If it happens to be that people of one race or another race overwhelmingly prefer one of the political parties, does that transform the situation into racial voting, or is that just partisan voting?” Alito asked.
Gerrymandering, the practice of creating congressional districts to capture certain voting blocks and gain partisan advantage, dates back to former Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry, an early master of the art. In 1814, Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, signed off on a redistricting plan with a state legislative district so misshapen that critics said it resembled a salamander. It wasn’t long after that “gerrymandering” entered the political lexicon.
The Supreme Court has periodically weighed in on the practice, usually giving great deference to state legislature. In the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause, it even declared that there was no role for federal courts in restricting or controlling most gerrymandering disputes, since it was fundamentally a political function and a prerogative of state legislatures.
The court, however, has from time to time stepped into redistricting disputes that involve racial discrimination and that are brought under the Voting Rights Act. After the 2020 Census, when South Carolina state legislators redrew the boundary lines of Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace’s coastal district and removed about 30,000 black voters to make it more reliably Republican, the court upheld the new map saying the challengers had not proven that race was a predominant factor.
The Supreme Court agreed that the redesigned district’s purpose was to maximize Republican votes, not exclude blacks.
Earlier, in a 2013 opinion, chief justice John Roberts, wrote the court’s majority opinion overturning section 5 of the voting rights act, which required certain states with a history of discriminatory behavior to get preapproval from the Justice Department for changes to voting procedures.
Each decision marked an incremental change, but the overall effect has been to ratchet back judicial oversight of elections. If the Supreme Court curtails or eliminates section 2 of the voting rights act, the effect will be to further diminish the federal role. -
The Clinton curse
Democrats have almost lost hope. Nearly a year after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, the party is rudderless. It opposes Trump, of course, but it can’t afford to oppose Trumpism. Denouncing the President for a short war against Iran’s nuclear program or for negotiating a Gaza ceasefire wouldn’t be smart. Criticizing his tariffs is safer – yet Democrats don’t want to be branded the party of free trade. Likewise, while they’re prepared to condemn the way the President is getting immigration under control, they know it would be suicidal for them to campaign for more immigration.
Even on cultural questions, Democrats are Trump’s prisoners. They remain devoted to the idea that men can be women, and vice versa, if only they want to be, but the public backlash against what that means for women’s sports and their safety in private places has forced Democrats into hypocritically insisting on transgenderism in principle while saying they’re prepared to curb its practical applications.
The party has no policies to sell and fears its own ideologues. What could possibly overcome these debilities?
The answer, say pragmatic Democrats and some Trump-averse Republicans, is simple: the party needs another Bill Clinton, a charismatic leader to move it back to the political middle. Clinton copied Republicans and rebuked progressives whenever he thought it expedient, and by doing so he delivered Democrats from the wilderness in which they had wandered during the 12-year tenure of presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
The decoupling of the working class from the Democrats is one of Clinton’s enduring legacies
The 1980s saw Democrats in doldrums not unlike today’s. Then, they were captive of left-wing economic orthodoxies that compelled them to be the party of higher taxes. Even as Reagan revived American confidence in the final phase of the Cold War, his opponents, like Trump’s today, could only carp about his actions. And then, too, Democrats appeared unable to get their coalition’s left wing, epitomized by Jesse Jackson and radical feminists, under control. The trouble with this view of Clinton as his party’s centrist savior is that he was the opposite – Clinton inaugurated today’s Democratic woes by shunting the party to the left. By doing so, he brought an end to 40 years of Democratic control in the House of Representatives. Never in history had a party enjoyed such a long run in national power. Clinton destroyed the most successful political coalition America has ever known, and the Democrats have never recovered. The New Deal coalition that Clinton wrecked was even more successful than a glance at its hold on Congress suggests. Although Democrats had an interrupted run in control of the House from 1955 to 1995, their dominance actually began in 1931 and was only interrupted briefly for two discrete two-year intervals during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. What was fatal about the Clinton years wasn’t just that Democrats lost the House but that, for the first time in 64 years, they couldn’t win it back.
Clinton attacked the left in the 1992 Democratic primaries, but he was no centrist. In his first two years in the White House, when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, he signed into law a flurry of progressive legislation expanding government, raising taxes, circumscribing the rights of abortion-clinic protesters, banning firearms deemed “assault weapons” for purely cosmetic reasons and much more. He pushed for homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces – the first major engagement of the culture war that would ultimately lead to same-sex marriage and, subsequently, the Democrats’ transgender quagmire. The result of all this was that Clinton alienated key parts of the New Deal coalition while polarizing many constituencies that had previously been content to be represented by pro-gun or culturally conservative Democrats. The decoupling of the working class from the Democrats is one of Clinton’s enduring legacies.
“A true revolution should be seeking a minimum of 12 years in power,” the New York Times’s Ross Douthat recently wrote. He’s wrong. The last “true revolution” in American politics was the creation of what was effectively a new regime in the 1930s. Democratic presidents – Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman – held power without interruption for 20 years, but again the actual magnitude of Democratic political success was much greater. There was only one Republican president between 1933 and 1968 and that single exception, president Eisenhower, was hardly a Republican at all.
What ended the Democrats’ lock on the White House was the rise of a radical young New Left, which would ultimately bring leaders like Clinton to the fore. The ideology of today’s Democratic party was already hatched, if not fully grown, in the late 1960s. Clinton brought that ideology to power and thereby cost the Democrats the second of the bastions of government they had controlled for decades: Congress. Nor did he succeed in getting another Democrat elected as his presidential successor.
Since the Clinton era, Democrats have typically needed the aid of a crisis to reclaim power from the Republicans: during the Iraq War in 2006, the financial meltdown in 2008, Covid in 2020. Voters have rejected such Clintonite Democrats as John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris time and again. There simply is no national constituency for the party whose identity Clinton redefined in the 1990s – a party of ever more radically progressive cultural attitudes and an economic agenda keyed to urban professionals. Combine this disastrous record with the stagnation and depopulation of blue states relative to the booming demographics of red states such as Texas and Florida, and Democrats have cause for despair. Republicans can still lose elections, but Democrats don’t really win them.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.