“As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin. And we won!
"Justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale!"
– Susan Crawford, newly elected Justice to the Wisconsin Supreme Court
Crawford narrowly carried Crawford county. It's at 51-49 with 99% reporting. This is one of the largest shifts from 2024 by county, at a 16 point shift in our favor.
LOL this came up on the Discord server last night! Someone was joking, "Crawford couldn't even carry the county that bears her name!" Quite an accomplishment that she did!
I was talking with a friend while I followed the results in the background, and had a bit of fun making commentary about Crawford county.
Crawford liked Crawford so Crawford went big for Crawford, causing Crawford's Crawford performance to be better than most non-Crawford counties for Crawford.
Bill Clinton won it in 1996 if I'm looking at the map right. Wikipedia's pages for 1992, 1996, and 2016 for Maine have a map of results by municipality. Unfortunately there are no raw numbers to go with the maps, as best I can tell.
Perot won it in 1992 and Clinton did in 1996. HRC lost it in 2016, no surprise there as our coalition had shifted rather substantially by over those 20 years. No idea if Clinton's 1996 win was a majority of the vote or if it was a case of Perot and Dole splitting a majority of the vote between them.
There are also 40 places in the US named Clinton. Bill Clinton won Clinton county, Pennsylvania, in both 1992 and 1996, with 43% and 49% of the vote, respectively. The last time a democrat won the county in a presidential election.
There's also a Clinton, Maryland, of which a 1990s vintage edition of the Almanac of American Politics says is "heavily Democratic, unlike most Clinton Counties." (This is in the entry on MD-05, then as now represented by Steny Hoyer.)
I spent a summer in Clinton, NY many moons ago. I don't know anything about its politics. Suburb of Utica and home of Hamilton College, which ironically is not in Hamilton, NY, some ways away.
I mean 45% there isn't too bad (60-37 Trump). Sidenote: Anyone know why Underly outperformed in the SW corner (Grant & Lafayette?) Those are some pretty red counties that Trump won by almost 20 and Crawford narrowly lost but Underly won each 52-48.
I just wrote Axios’ reporter. Incredibly, Alex Isenstadt published "3 takeaways from Wisconsin and Florida special elections" – and not a word quantifying the Democratic over-performances in FL-06 and FL-01! How is this possible??
If so, then we dodged a bullet narrative-wise with Wisconsin. Had Schmiel won, then there would probably be a lot of fawning over Trump and Musk's invincibility and how the GOP found the secret to winning purple states and districts at least as long as Elon keeps his checkbook open.
I never thought an actual Dem win in either Florida district was a realistic possibility, but the GOP's performance was sufficiently off from just five months ago to suggest that NY-21 might well have been close and maybe a Dem gain if Stefanik had left as planned.
Yes, this. Stefanik's seat easily could have had both a Republican and a Conservative candidate on the ballot. Throw a healthy Democratic over-performance into the mix and it's very plausible that her seat could have fallen.
Meanwhile Lauren Egan who's now employed at The Bulwark outright said last night that Democrats based off everything last night are in the ballgame to win any House district that Trump won by up to 10 points.
It's clear there's orders from upstairs at the Mainstream outlets to tell their reporters to sugar coat any negative reporting regarding Republicans so The Regime doesn't sick whatever is left of the Federal bureaucracy on them.
What I like about Axios is that it gives me a very quick overview of major stories – or soundbite news, as you call it. Lots of news sites intentionally give you insufficient info on their front page, forcing you to click on their various headline(s) if you want to see what each story is really about – sort of an internal "click-bait", if you will. (I suspect that inflates the page-view statistics they can show advertisers.)
One of my favorite news sites used to be Vox (not to be confused with Fox!), until Ezra Klein left for the New York Times.
That banger lives rent-free in my head! I didn't particularly associate it with Laesch, though. Is it possible that a few different candidates used it?
Indeed. The Democrats used it as a canned ad to go after quite a few House Republicans in 2006. I always remember the Laesch ad largely since Hastert was the Speaker, but there were probably a half dozen other examples.
This might be too much tea leaf reading from a single data point, but I did think it was interesting that the biggest shifts to Crawford from Harris were in the ancestrally Dem rural areas in Southwest WI. This gives me hope that such areas might be realizing that right wing politicians aren't looking out of them at all.
It was consistent with the big shifts in the Mississippi River Valley in Iowa legislative races. With those Iowa shifts in mind, I was actually a bit disappointed that so many of the Gore-Kerry-ObamaX2 counties held out for Elon Musk's version of the GOP (and democracy) when given such a binary choice.
The WI race got a lot more money and attention. It basically got midterm turnout, while the IA races got more typical special-election turnout. In view of that, I think the WI result is more encouraging. It was the first test of the 2025-26 environment in midterm conditions, and we blew them out.
Probably. My take is that the young people coming into the electorate in areas like this are overwhelmingly MAGA. They'd be less likely to participate in an election for the state supreme court, meaning their legacy Democrat grandparents have more leverage to help keep the county blue in lower-turnout cycles.
It's par for the course though for young people to be the least likely to vote and for their politics to be shaped by the administration which they came of age into. A major reason why much of Gen X leans right is because many of them came of age when Carter and Reagan were in the White House. They associate the Democratic Party with Jimmy Carter and the Republican Party with Ronald Reagan. Reagan actually openly lamented poor youth turnout during the 1982 and 1986 midterms.
Right, but as you point out, my generation tends to be anti-Democratic because Carter was seen as a failure. It wouldn't have been a foregone conclusion that a president who was such a disaster and was then convicted would be seen so positively by young people.
I would agree with that if it weren't for the fact that one of the reasons that man is back in the White House is because the majority of Americans decided to pretend that COVID never happened. We Democrats are going to have to address men's issues because we are seen as "anti men" with Gen Alpha.
And also Reagan was seen as a success because he was having seen as restored strong economic growth without much inflation, leaving aside the question of how much credit he really deserved for that, and making for an easy contrast to Carter that Republicans pounded on for nearly a decade (until the economy slumped under Bush 41.)
If Trump's policies end up producing higher prices and stagnant at best growth, as many predict, then Biden won't look so bad in retrospect to young voters (or anyone else). Not to mention the fact that Trump is far less well regarded personally than Reagan was.
I think, fairly or not, it's more a case of them seeing Biden poorly than Trump positively.
Biden oversaw the majority of the difficult Covid years, inflation (which was global), Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and some inflaming of a forbidden topic.
Now, I think he did an exemplary job on the policy side of handling things. Of course I have room to critique but he did well. Voters don't care about that though. They care that the world seemingly went to shit under him and that he was constantly being attacked for his age (by republicans, independents, and democrats). Plus, with Harris not being elected to succeed him most of his big policy wins are going to be either undone completely or brazenly have the credit stolen.
I think there's strong-ish parallels to Carter here for Biden's historical legacy. We just have to hope that Trump doesn't end up with a Reagan-esque legacy. Fortunately I think that one is off the table with how the country is reacting to events so far.
No exit polls broke it down that closely specific to these rural jurisdictions, but I've found a useful tea leaf is the student voting done at high schools. The results often come with district-by-district maps, and I've found that a lot of these school districts in Obama-Trump jurisdictions typically go 2-1 for Trump int he student vote. This strikes me as pretty useful data points to telegraph how the young adult vote is trending.
If these regions are anything like the Rust Belt areas with which I'm familiar (western PA and northeast OH), many young people leave (e.g., to pursue higher education) and never come back, and the ones who remain tend to be quite different demographically.
A place like Youngstown, OH—which has a low cost of living and nice suburban areas outside the city—can't even attract a professional class anymore. Doctors/lawyers/university professors etc. choose to commute from Cleveland, Akron, or Pittsburgh instead.
It'd be tough to do, but fascinating to make a map showing what districts have been impacted by DOGE funding cuts and fed layoffs and to what extent. A lot of rural areas have been heavily impacted-won't help Republican turnout, especially in elections with Trump not on the ballot.
Makes me wonder if it's worth being cautiously optimistic about IA-Sen and OH-Sen next year. Both states have large segments of ancestrally dem voter before shifting more firmly into the R camp starting in 2016.
EDIT: "Optimistic" is too strong of a word. I should say cautiously hopeful, or cautiously intrigued, perhaps. Point being I think they're worth keeping an eye on at this stage if nothing else.
Mentally I've had them at Likely R and I'm keeping them there.
What I'm curious about is if they might start to shift towards us as the cycle goes on. I'm not betting on it, but it's not unreasonable if these kinds of shifts (who/where) are portents for the 2026 electorate.
OH-Sen could be said to be semi-open as the incumbent was appointed, but Husted is a known enough quantity statewide that he has at least some of the advantages of an elected incumbent. If he loses a primary to someone further right and/or lesser known than I could see it moving up further in terms of competitiveness.
IA-Sen could be more competitive than in recent years, but flipping it would probably require Ernst to run a really overconfident, lackadaisical campaign or otherwise mess up.
The big question is how big of a wave we get, assuming we get one as expected. Making those two states competitive will likely require that we see about as big of a swing as 2018 saw. Arguably modestly more. Then on top of that we'll need to rely on the swing towards us being stronger in the ancestral dem voters that both states have.
Two big ifs to contend with. I expect getting strong enough numbers for one if is reasonable, but getting strong enough numbers for both ifs concurrently is much harder.
We'll see. I'll be keeping my eyes out for it even as I do not hold my breath.
Probably best to check back in on the status of these races come fall. There's still well over a year to go, which is a lifetime in politics. Given the toxicity and volatility of this current administration and it's ilk, any number of things could happen that could shake up the landscape within a year. Thus far I haven't heard any Democrats declare they're running in either Iowa or Ohio. There is JD Scholten in Iowa and Tim Ryan in Ohio, both who seem to have expressed interest, but I'll wait to see if that actually materializes.
I'm guessing that they are now waking up to the fact that giving up cuts to their VA and Social Security is not worth keeping a handful of transgender girls off of the high school softball team.
Richard Irvin, mayor of Aurora, Illinois, lost his reelection race to John Laesch, 52-48. Irvin was considered a strong general election Republican candidate for Illinois Governor in 2022 but didn't win the primary. Laesch is a union carpenter who was endorsed by state Democrats.
A union worker getting elected as mayor of a big city in IL after unseating a GOP incumbent. That gives me optimism of the possibilities of Democrats being elected throughout the country.
Yes, but let's remember that Illinois' biggest city is run by a teacher's union member, and the results apparently haven't been great in terms of either governance or political popularity--in part because voters apparently see him as the handmaiden of said union.
I re-edited my comment to show what I was originally trying to argue in the first place.
I wasn't aware about what you're describing about Aurora but as it relates to the unions, my hope is that more of these union workers get elected as Democrats nationwide, not strictly in cities like this. The Democratic Party needs to pull unions away from the GOP influence so that Trump does not have the influence on members like he's had in the past.
That said, it's fair to criticize teacher's unions and any unions in general if there are areas of disagreement we have. You don't have to be anti-union to offer constructive criticism to unions.
Union workers and veterans across the country seem to always over perform the baseline partisanship of a district. Doesn’t matter who’s in power or whether it’s a special or general. It’s very rare when they don’t (assuming they aren’t batshit insane or scandal plagued) On both sides. It’s why Luria lost in 2022 when most Dems held on, GOP were very smart to recruit Higgans (that maybe even saved them from being in a minority). It’s also why Tran won over Steel in a red electorate year.
With union workers and minority voters shifting to Republicans at an alarming rate recently, it’s a great way to win crossover voters and show to the working class, we are you and we fight for you. Democrats would be smart to recruit as many of these people as possible to run in 2026 imo. You want to shed the weak, not for men party image of the party? Do that.
The party seems to do the best in red/swing areas with unconventional political candidates that don’t neatly fit entirely within the Democratic Party policy/vibe. Golden, Peltola (yes she lost, but way over performed), Tran, MGP, Ojeda (yes lost again, but way over performed) etc etc. I know I’m missing a bunch more, but these were just the ones off the top of my head.
I’m going to save my money and instead use it on subscriptions to support a growing flora of good independent media: The Contrarian, Heather Cox Richardson, Hopium, Talking Points Memo, Bolts Magazine, The DownBallot, etc.
Skokie, Illinois passed a ballot initiative to use ranked choice voting for local elections 58-42. It joins Evanston and Oak Park in adopting RCV in recent years. FairVote Illinois was behind the initiative.
I always remember that Skokie, Illinois inspired the Illinois Nazi scene in the Blues Brothers movie. We should send Jake and Elwood to handle the Proud Boys today.
Which is also the last time Dems won it for the House, or probably any competitive statewide race. Hutto retired in 1994 and his successor was Joe Scarborough, who served until 2001 when he left for his MSNBC career.
After blowing more than $20 million on an election that he had claimed would determine the fate of Western civilization, Elon Musk is now saying that he expected to lose and that the most important item on the ballot was instead the voter ID amendment (which merely confirms what is already Wisconsin law). Musk's $20 million at least bought a victory for Schimel in Waukesha County.
Hold on, so did we just spend millions upon millions of dollars in FL-6 only to lose by roughly the same margin as in FL-1, a redder district where we spent considerably less money and which got less attention??
I’d say it was because we attracted too much attention to the race and Republicans turned out in response, but even with all of that additional attention only 23,000 more people voted in FL-6, and I’m sure at least a good portion of those people were Democrats.
I kept getting texts for both of them so I imagine some money went into FL 1 as well. The difference was that I don’t recall seeing any polling for FL 1. So it didn’t get the attention FL 6 did.
Hi, everyone. Have any of you suddenly started getting emails every time someone likes or replies to your posts? This started for me 2 or 3 days ago, and I can't see what I have to do to opt out of such notifications.
Steve Kornacki remains in the NBCUniversal family for NBC News and NBC Sports work, but he will not be with MSNBC under a new deal. This is at least partially due to MSNBC set to be split off from NBC.
Colin Allred ratio'd Cornyn on Xitter lmao. 7.3K likes to 331 likes.
Far right Pro Paxton and anti Coryn tweets have more likes in Cornyn's replies. They say that Allred winning would be much more palatable than Cornyn. I know many people think our hopes in Texas are over but I don't believe that Trump's coalition will stick at all or that one election is the end. We consistently cut into GOP margins in Texas until 2020. It's going to 2018 redux especially with his insane tariffs and deportations. Talarico can run for Governor to reduce ticket splitters like what unfortunately happened in 2018 and juice progressive turnout against the voucher and school defunding scam. I have a gut feeling that Allred will pull this off against Paxton with some tweaks. He ran 5 points (+9R) ahead of Kamala even with the depressed hispanic belt turnout. In any case, all primary polls point to the fact that Coryn is cooked.
With respect to Texas the question I keep coming back to is 2024. Was our markedly worse performance there in 2024 an aberration, or is it the new normal? It will take at least two cycles to firmly establish IMO.
Up until then I'd say Texas was clearly on track to be the next Georgia. A slow and steady shift in our direction, until suddenly it was unambiguously winnable. In Georgia's case this was established in as clear a manner as possible when we won in 2020.
If the our poor 2024 performance in Texas was an aberration then it should be competitive sometime around 2030-2036. Maybe in a big enough wave we could pull off a senate win like we nearly did in 2018, but that's more about the wave than it is about the state. If the 2024 swing against us in Texas is the new normal, then we'll need to reassess.
Florida has been a steady trend away from us since at least 2016 and arguably before that, hidden in part by Scott's weakness as a candidate.
Yeah Florida is super conservative, Republicans were sweeping the state house and the senate with good margins when Rick Scott was barely managing to win.
“As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin. And we won!
"Justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale!"
– Susan Crawford, newly elected Justice to the Wisconsin Supreme Court
I hope she didn't look at the map and see how she did in Chippewa Falls!
obviously you can lose Chip Falls and win the state of WI...which Dem candidate sure as hell better do in the future!
On the topic of parts of the state she won...
Crawford narrowly carried Crawford county. It's at 51-49 with 99% reporting. This is one of the largest shifts from 2024 by county, at a 16 point shift in our favor.
LOL this came up on the Discord server last night! Someone was joking, "Crawford couldn't even carry the county that bears her name!" Quite an accomplishment that she did!
I was talking with a friend while I followed the results in the background, and had a bit of fun making commentary about Crawford county.
Crawford liked Crawford so Crawford went big for Crawford, causing Crawford's Crawford performance to be better than most non-Crawford counties for Crawford.
I might have gone too far, but it amused me.
On a similar note: I wonder whether Bill or Hillary ever carried Clinton, Maine?
Bill Clinton won it in 1996 if I'm looking at the map right. Wikipedia's pages for 1992, 1996, and 2016 for Maine have a map of results by municipality. Unfortunately there are no raw numbers to go with the maps, as best I can tell.
Perot won it in 1992 and Clinton did in 1996. HRC lost it in 2016, no surprise there as our coalition had shifted rather substantially by over those 20 years. No idea if Clinton's 1996 win was a majority of the vote or if it was a case of Perot and Dole splitting a majority of the vote between them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_presidential_election_in_Maine
There are also 40 places in the US named Clinton. Bill Clinton won Clinton county, Pennsylvania, in both 1992 and 1996, with 43% and 49% of the vote, respectively. The last time a democrat won the county in a presidential election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_U.S._place_names#Clinton_(40)
I think Bob Casey won it in his first Senate run (yes, Rick Santorum was THAT bad). Sadly, it's hardcore MAGA country now.
There's also a Clinton, Maryland, of which a 1990s vintage edition of the Almanac of American Politics says is "heavily Democratic, unlike most Clinton Counties." (This is in the entry on MD-05, then as now represented by Steny Hoyer.)
Not far from here, you also find Peru, Mexico, Sweden, Norway, Poland and Moscow. That could be the basis for some eye-catching election headlines.
Burnt Porcupine, Industry, Friendship, Caratunk, Molunkus and Meddybemps are a bit farther away.
I spent a summer in Clinton, NY many moons ago. I don't know anything about its politics. Suburb of Utica and home of Hamilton College, which ironically is not in Hamilton, NY, some ways away.
I mean 45% there isn't too bad (60-37 Trump). Sidenote: Anyone know why Underly outperformed in the SW corner (Grant & Lafayette?) Those are some pretty red counties that Trump won by almost 20 and Crawford narrowly lost but Underly won each 52-48.
I think she’s from that area - Iowa county, I believe?
Chippewa Falls itself actually did vote for Crawford. Unfortunately, every other municipality in Chippewa County voted for Schimel.
Thanks for checking and clarifying.
I just wrote Axios’ reporter. Incredibly, Alex Isenstadt published "3 takeaways from Wisconsin and Florida special elections" – and not a word quantifying the Democratic over-performances in FL-06 and FL-01! How is this possible??
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/02/wisconsin-florida-special-elections-trump
It’s increasingly clear that mainstream journalists need the help of good data journalists such as David Nir and Jeff Singer of The Downballot.
The talk of an upset in FL-6, which was never more than a slim possibility, made the actual results underwhelming to "narrative" driven journalists.
If so, then we dodged a bullet narrative-wise with Wisconsin. Had Schmiel won, then there would probably be a lot of fawning over Trump and Musk's invincibility and how the GOP found the secret to winning purple states and districts at least as long as Elon keeps his checkbook open.
I never thought an actual Dem win in either Florida district was a realistic possibility, but the GOP's performance was sufficiently off from just five months ago to suggest that NY-21 might well have been close and maybe a Dem gain if Stefanik had left as planned.
they were never concerned about FL...they were very concerned about Stefanik...and the msm won't dwell on "much closer margin" stuff.
Yes, this. Stefanik's seat easily could have had both a Republican and a Conservative candidate on the ballot. Throw a healthy Democratic over-performance into the mix and it's very plausible that her seat could have fallen.
I'm convinced they were never really worried and were trying to inflate D chances to narrative-offset the inevitable overperformance.
Meanwhile Lauren Egan who's now employed at The Bulwark outright said last night that Democrats based off everything last night are in the ballgame to win any House district that Trump won by up to 10 points.
It's clear there's orders from upstairs at the Mainstream outlets to tell their reporters to sugar coat any negative reporting regarding Republicans so The Regime doesn't sick whatever is left of the Federal bureaucracy on them.
https://youtu.be/GVlgp33KsaA?si=KJfoy_2-u8Xzj8Ut&t=176
Politico especially, NYT and MSNBC were quite critical of the Republican performances across the board for a change though.
I never much cared for Axios. To me, it's watered-down soundbite news.
When I was still on Twitter I enjoyed trolling Josh Kraushaar with this: https://www.axios.com/2022/10/23/republican-wave-midterms-congress
What I like about Axios is that it gives me a very quick overview of major stories – or soundbite news, as you call it. Lots of news sites intentionally give you insufficient info on their front page, forcing you to click on their various headline(s) if you want to see what each story is really about – sort of an internal "click-bait", if you will. (I suspect that inflates the page-view statistics they can show advertisers.)
One of my favorite news sites used to be Vox (not to be confused with Fox!), until Ezra Klein left for the New York Times.
As a point of comparison, how did Obama do in FL-06 in 2008 and 2012? Or were the lines too different back then to realistically compare?
You can compare it in Dave’s redistricting. Romney +12.8, McCain + 6
This is Florida though. People lived and voted within these lines 16 or 12 years ago, half of them are probably gone.
What percentage of Floridians are actually over 65?
21.7%.
Oh I don’t mean half of them aged out. If you go with each year about 1-1.3% of Floridians passed, that would only be about 20% ish after 16 years.
There is also much higher turn over rate than many Midwest states. Esp mid aged folks move out, and newer retirees moving in.
When I saw the name "John Laesch" in the Digest, it immediately took me back to this little number.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAkEdWXwRaE
That banger lives rent-free in my head! I didn't particularly associate it with Laesch, though. Is it possible that a few different candidates used it?
Indeed. The Democrats used it as a canned ad to go after quite a few House Republicans in 2006. I always remember the Laesch ad largely since Hastert was the Speaker, but there were probably a half dozen other examples.
This might be too much tea leaf reading from a single data point, but I did think it was interesting that the biggest shifts to Crawford from Harris were in the ancestrally Dem rural areas in Southwest WI. This gives me hope that such areas might be realizing that right wing politicians aren't looking out of them at all.
It was consistent with the big shifts in the Mississippi River Valley in Iowa legislative races. With those Iowa shifts in mind, I was actually a bit disappointed that so many of the Gore-Kerry-ObamaX2 counties held out for Elon Musk's version of the GOP (and democracy) when given such a binary choice.
The WI race got a lot more money and attention. It basically got midterm turnout, while the IA races got more typical special-election turnout. In view of that, I think the WI result is more encouraging. It was the first test of the 2025-26 environment in midterm conditions, and we blew them out.
Protasiewicz also won that area in 2023. Might just be a turnout thing rather than a mass movement back to liberals.
Probably. My take is that the young people coming into the electorate in areas like this are overwhelmingly MAGA. They'd be less likely to participate in an election for the state supreme court, meaning their legacy Democrat grandparents have more leverage to help keep the county blue in lower-turnout cycles.
That's really sad about young people. Is that based on exit polling from the general election?
It's par for the course though for young people to be the least likely to vote and for their politics to be shaped by the administration which they came of age into. A major reason why much of Gen X leans right is because many of them came of age when Carter and Reagan were in the White House. They associate the Democratic Party with Jimmy Carter and the Republican Party with Ronald Reagan. Reagan actually openly lamented poor youth turnout during the 1982 and 1986 midterms.
Right, but as you point out, my generation tends to be anti-Democratic because Carter was seen as a failure. It wouldn't have been a foregone conclusion that a president who was such a disaster and was then convicted would be seen so positively by young people.
I would agree with that if it weren't for the fact that one of the reasons that man is back in the White House is because the majority of Americans decided to pretend that COVID never happened. We Democrats are going to have to address men's issues because we are seen as "anti men" with Gen Alpha.
And also Reagan was seen as a success because he was having seen as restored strong economic growth without much inflation, leaving aside the question of how much credit he really deserved for that, and making for an easy contrast to Carter that Republicans pounded on for nearly a decade (until the economy slumped under Bush 41.)
If Trump's policies end up producing higher prices and stagnant at best growth, as many predict, then Biden won't look so bad in retrospect to young voters (or anyone else). Not to mention the fact that Trump is far less well regarded personally than Reagan was.
I think, fairly or not, it's more a case of them seeing Biden poorly than Trump positively.
Biden oversaw the majority of the difficult Covid years, inflation (which was global), Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and some inflaming of a forbidden topic.
Now, I think he did an exemplary job on the policy side of handling things. Of course I have room to critique but he did well. Voters don't care about that though. They care that the world seemingly went to shit under him and that he was constantly being attacked for his age (by republicans, independents, and democrats). Plus, with Harris not being elected to succeed him most of his big policy wins are going to be either undone completely or brazenly have the credit stolen.
I think there's strong-ish parallels to Carter here for Biden's historical legacy. We just have to hope that Trump doesn't end up with a Reagan-esque legacy. Fortunately I think that one is off the table with how the country is reacting to events so far.
No exit polls broke it down that closely specific to these rural jurisdictions, but I've found a useful tea leaf is the student voting done at high schools. The results often come with district-by-district maps, and I've found that a lot of these school districts in Obama-Trump jurisdictions typically go 2-1 for Trump int he student vote. This strikes me as pretty useful data points to telegraph how the young adult vote is trending.
Yeah, that's interesting.
If these regions are anything like the Rust Belt areas with which I'm familiar (western PA and northeast OH), many young people leave (e.g., to pursue higher education) and never come back, and the ones who remain tend to be quite different demographically.
A place like Youngstown, OH—which has a low cost of living and nice suburban areas outside the city—can't even attract a professional class anymore. Doctors/lawyers/university professors etc. choose to commute from Cleveland, Akron, or Pittsburgh instead.
It'd be tough to do, but fascinating to make a map showing what districts have been impacted by DOGE funding cuts and fed layoffs and to what extent. A lot of rural areas have been heavily impacted-won't help Republican turnout, especially in elections with Trump not on the ballot.
Great idea! Perhaps also a version with the DOGE impact quantified per capita.
Makes me wonder if it's worth being cautiously optimistic about IA-Sen and OH-Sen next year. Both states have large segments of ancestrally dem voter before shifting more firmly into the R camp starting in 2016.
EDIT: "Optimistic" is too strong of a word. I should say cautiously hopeful, or cautiously intrigued, perhaps. Point being I think they're worth keeping an eye on at this stage if nothing else.
Races to watch or likely R at best.
Mentally I've had them at Likely R and I'm keeping them there.
What I'm curious about is if they might start to shift towards us as the cycle goes on. I'm not betting on it, but it's not unreasonable if these kinds of shifts (who/where) are portents for the 2026 electorate.
OH-Sen could be said to be semi-open as the incumbent was appointed, but Husted is a known enough quantity statewide that he has at least some of the advantages of an elected incumbent. If he loses a primary to someone further right and/or lesser known than I could see it moving up further in terms of competitiveness.
IA-Sen could be more competitive than in recent years, but flipping it would probably require Ernst to run a really overconfident, lackadaisical campaign or otherwise mess up.
Yeah, that's close to my assessment.
The big question is how big of a wave we get, assuming we get one as expected. Making those two states competitive will likely require that we see about as big of a swing as 2018 saw. Arguably modestly more. Then on top of that we'll need to rely on the swing towards us being stronger in the ancestral dem voters that both states have.
Two big ifs to contend with. I expect getting strong enough numbers for one if is reasonable, but getting strong enough numbers for both ifs concurrently is much harder.
We'll see. I'll be keeping my eyes out for it even as I do not hold my breath.
If things keep going in the current direction, I think they will have a decent shot in both races.
Probably best to check back in on the status of these races come fall. There's still well over a year to go, which is a lifetime in politics. Given the toxicity and volatility of this current administration and it's ilk, any number of things could happen that could shake up the landscape within a year. Thus far I haven't heard any Democrats declare they're running in either Iowa or Ohio. There is JD Scholten in Iowa and Tim Ryan in Ohio, both who seem to have expressed interest, but I'll wait to see if that actually materializes.
I think they're worth tracking, particularly if Brown runs again in OH. These do seem like the types of seats that could be in play in a big wave...
I'm guessing that they are now waking up to the fact that giving up cuts to their VA and Social Security is not worth keeping a handful of transgender girls off of the high school softball team.
Richard Irvin, mayor of Aurora, Illinois, lost his reelection race to John Laesch, 52-48. Irvin was considered a strong general election Republican candidate for Illinois Governor in 2022 but didn't win the primary. Laesch is a union carpenter who was endorsed by state Democrats.
Aurora is the second largest city in Illinois.
Party time! EXCELLENT!
(For those who don't know or remember, Aurora, IL, was the setting of "Wayne's World".)
A union worker getting elected as mayor of a big city in IL after unseating a GOP incumbent. That gives me optimism of the possibilities of Democrats being elected throughout the country.
Yes, but let's remember that Illinois' biggest city is run by a teacher's union member, and the results apparently haven't been great in terms of either governance or political popularity--in part because voters apparently see him as the handmaiden of said union.
I re-edited my comment to show what I was originally trying to argue in the first place.
I wasn't aware about what you're describing about Aurora but as it relates to the unions, my hope is that more of these union workers get elected as Democrats nationwide, not strictly in cities like this. The Democratic Party needs to pull unions away from the GOP influence so that Trump does not have the influence on members like he's had in the past.
That said, it's fair to criticize teacher's unions and any unions in general if there are areas of disagreement we have. You don't have to be anti-union to offer constructive criticism to unions.
Union workers and veterans across the country seem to always over perform the baseline partisanship of a district. Doesn’t matter who’s in power or whether it’s a special or general. It’s very rare when they don’t (assuming they aren’t batshit insane or scandal plagued) On both sides. It’s why Luria lost in 2022 when most Dems held on, GOP were very smart to recruit Higgans (that maybe even saved them from being in a minority). It’s also why Tran won over Steel in a red electorate year.
With union workers and minority voters shifting to Republicans at an alarming rate recently, it’s a great way to win crossover voters and show to the working class, we are you and we fight for you. Democrats would be smart to recruit as many of these people as possible to run in 2026 imo. You want to shed the weak, not for men party image of the party? Do that.
The party seems to do the best in red/swing areas with unconventional political candidates that don’t neatly fit entirely within the Democratic Party policy/vibe. Golden, Peltola (yes she lost, but way over performed), Tran, MGP, Ojeda (yes lost again, but way over performed) etc etc. I know I’m missing a bunch more, but these were just the ones off the top of my head.
Books out about Biden, Harris and the ‘24 campaign.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/02/biden-ron-klain-trump-debate-prep-book-chris-whipple
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/27/biden-dropping-out-kamala-harris
I think rather than read these, I will save time and money and just beat my head into the wall for awhile.
I'll read those after I finish the books about the 2016 campaign.
(Which, with the exception of Hillary's "What Happened", I have not started after eight years....)
I’m going to save my money and instead use it on subscriptions to support a growing flora of good independent media: The Contrarian, Heather Cox Richardson, Hopium, Talking Points Memo, Bolts Magazine, The DownBallot, etc.
Skokie, Illinois passed a ballot initiative to use ranked choice voting for local elections 58-42. It joins Evanston and Oak Park in adopting RCV in recent years. FairVote Illinois was behind the initiative.
I always remember that Skokie, Illinois inspired the Illinois Nazi scene in the Blues Brothers movie. We should send Jake and Elwood to handle the Proud Boys today.
Escambia County turning blue (for the special) was the big upset of Florida last night.
First time in a House race since 1992! Earl Hutto! https://bsky.app/profile/yeargain.bsky.social/post/3lls5fmamm224
Which is also the last time Dems won it for the House, or probably any competitive statewide race. Hutto retired in 1994 and his successor was Joe Scarborough, who served until 2001 when he left for his MSNBC career.
After blowing more than $20 million on an election that he had claimed would determine the fate of Western civilization, Elon Musk is now saying that he expected to lose and that the most important item on the ballot was instead the voter ID amendment (which merely confirms what is already Wisconsin law). Musk's $20 million at least bought a victory for Schimel in Waukesha County.
I mean, Peter Thiel got JD Vance elected to the US Senate.
What is Musk's track record now?
Theil also, let's remember, was a major backer of the disaster known as Blake Masters.
I guess the lesson is that these tech oligarchs can win, but only if they meddle in states that are already red.
JD vance was independently a much better candidate than Blake Masters was, and his primary opponents were lightweight compared to him.
Hold on, so did we just spend millions upon millions of dollars in FL-6 only to lose by roughly the same margin as in FL-1, a redder district where we spent considerably less money and which got less attention??
I’d say it was because we attracted too much attention to the race and Republicans turned out in response, but even with all of that additional attention only 23,000 more people voted in FL-6, and I’m sure at least a good portion of those people were Democrats.
I kept getting texts for both of them so I imagine some money went into FL 1 as well. The difference was that I don’t recall seeing any polling for FL 1. So it didn’t get the attention FL 6 did.
Hi, everyone. Have any of you suddenly started getting emails every time someone likes or replies to your posts? This started for me 2 or 3 days ago, and I can't see what I have to do to opt out of such notifications.
If you go to your account settings under Notifications -> Engagement, you can turn email notifications off!
Notifications are set to off! I never changed that, but I'm somehow getting notifications, anyway.
Huh, weird.
I did get these notifications all the time on DKE but then they stopped and have not resumed here
Steve Kornacki remains in the NBCUniversal family for NBC News and NBC Sports work, but he will not be with MSNBC under a new deal. This is at least partially due to MSNBC set to be split off from NBC.
Kornacki is allowed to dabble with projects on other networks and media platforms, provided that they are as long as they are unrelated to politics and sports. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2025-04-01/steve-kornacki-exits-msnbc-lands-new-deal-with-nbc-news-and-nbc-sports
well, down to one reason to watch MSNBC election night coverage (the lovely Ms. Wallace)
So who’s going to run the big board on MSNBC now?
Colin Allred ratio'd Cornyn on Xitter lmao. 7.3K likes to 331 likes.
Far right Pro Paxton and anti Coryn tweets have more likes in Cornyn's replies. They say that Allred winning would be much more palatable than Cornyn. I know many people think our hopes in Texas are over but I don't believe that Trump's coalition will stick at all or that one election is the end. We consistently cut into GOP margins in Texas until 2020. It's going to 2018 redux especially with his insane tariffs and deportations. Talarico can run for Governor to reduce ticket splitters like what unfortunately happened in 2018 and juice progressive turnout against the voucher and school defunding scam. I have a gut feeling that Allred will pull this off against Paxton with some tweaks. He ran 5 points (+9R) ahead of Kamala even with the depressed hispanic belt turnout. In any case, all primary polls point to the fact that Coryn is cooked.
https://x.com/ColinAllredTX/status/1905043569951539489
I would never base any hopes on *itter ratios.
I am basing it on polls and those say that Cornyn is cooked in the primary. The MAGA base hates him.
That's actual data.
Paxton is very unpopular in the state and was impeached too. Trump's approval is coming down in Texas too based on the limited polling available.
I'm not very high on Texas. We'll see.
Texas is becoming the new Florida (in terms of Lucy and the football).
With respect to Texas the question I keep coming back to is 2024. Was our markedly worse performance there in 2024 an aberration, or is it the new normal? It will take at least two cycles to firmly establish IMO.
Up until then I'd say Texas was clearly on track to be the next Georgia. A slow and steady shift in our direction, until suddenly it was unambiguously winnable. In Georgia's case this was established in as clear a manner as possible when we won in 2020.
If the our poor 2024 performance in Texas was an aberration then it should be competitive sometime around 2030-2036. Maybe in a big enough wave we could pull off a senate win like we nearly did in 2018, but that's more about the wave than it is about the state. If the 2024 swing against us in Texas is the new normal, then we'll need to reassess.
Florida has been a steady trend away from us since at least 2016 and arguably before that, hidden in part by Scott's weakness as a candidate.
Yeah Florida is super conservative, Republicans were sweeping the state house and the senate with good margins when Rick Scott was barely managing to win.
Unpopular but not enough to lose elections unfortunately.
We'll see.