Democrats
Subterms
More stories
- in US Politics
The Mamdani effect: how his win spurred more than 10,000 progressives to consider run for office
In mid-July, Erik Clemson signed on to a Zoom call from Honolulu, Hawaii, energized by a mayoral candidate in a city far across the country, to hear how he could run for office himself.Clemson, a 39-year-old machinist instructor who has a YouTube channel where he explains the economy, had long considered a political run some time in the future, but Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory provided a push off the sidelines.“After I saw Mamdani win the primary in NYC, I decided to stop wasting time and try to learn what I can as soon as I can,” Clemson said.Clemson is one of more than 10,000 people with an interest in running for office who signed up for Run for Something – a progressive political organization that helps younger candidates learn the ropes – after Mamdani won the primary. He’s part of a surge in young progressives who saw Mamdani’s win in June as hope for a different brand of politics and plan to learn from his example.Co-founder Amanda Litman called it the group’s biggest organic candidate recruitment surge ever.“They saw a young person who took on the establishment against the odds and was able to center the issues that young people really care about – cost of living, especially, housing, childcare, transportation – and talk about it in a way that felt hopeful and made people feel like maybe better things are possible,” Litman said.The Mamdani bump blends together excitement about the candidate, interest in leftist policies and zeal for shoe-leather campaigning, both on the ground and online. The organization recognizes that it’s not that Mamdani’s exact policy ideas should be the focus of campaigns nationwide, but that campaigns should be tailored to and inspired by the people they will directly serve.Clemson said he watched Mamdani in the New York Democratic primary debate, the first time he had watched a debate somewhere other than where he lives. He earned a degree in international business, and his career in blue-collar manufacturing led him to create a YouTube channel called Working Class Economics, where he explains the economy. He has a nine-year-old son, so he said he may run for a school board or the city council.He saw how Mamdani used man-on-the-street social media videos to talk to voters in a way that didn’t feel concocted by political consultants. The campaign and its policies didn’t feel tailored to the donor class – and the fact that Mamdani was running in the home of Wall Street felt like a rebuke to the system, Clemson said.“It just seems like he genuinely cares about his city and the people who live there, and it seems like they like him too, which sounds like it should be the case for everybody, but it seems like that’s rare,” Clemson said. “In politics, there seem to be so many people who have very little connection to the areas they represent.”Overall, about 10% of the people who sign up with Run for Something at any given time run for office, usually about a year or so out from when they sign up, Litman said. Run for Something often sees people sign up after elections, including after Democrats’ big loss last November. Fear and despair motivate people, but so does hope, she said. Mamdani’s win also came at a time of flagging enthusiasm for Democrats and amid soul-searching on the left for a path forward.“The policies that you campaign on in the New York City mayoral election and the policies you campaign on for literally anywhere else, they’re not going to be the same,” Litman said. “I think the point is that he really ran values-first, voter-first. His campaign wasn’t really about him. It wasn’t about his personal story, per se. It was about what it meant to be a New Yorker, what it meant to be someone who loves this city and wants to make it better, what it meant to really listen to voters about what they cared about. That is replicable, no matter where you are.”Existing campaigns with similarities to Mamdani – younger candidates, Democratic socialists, economy-focused campaigns – have benefited from comparisons to the New York mayoral hopeful.In Minneapolis, a state senator and Democratic socialist candidate for mayor, Omar Fateh, secured the city’s Democratic party endorsement in July after Mamdani’s win brought him more attention.Zara Rahim, a senior adviser to the Mamdani campaign, said the campaign resonated because it spoke to the “urgent need for leaders who will fight for working people” during a time when people are struggling with affordability.“This campaign showed what’s possible when you meet people where they are and offer a clear, bold message,” Rahim said. “That’s why it made history – with Zohran receiving more votes than any primary candidate in New York’s history – and why it’s inspiring so many others to imagine themselves in positions of leadership. We’re thrilled to see that energy spreading, because everyone deserves a government that truly fights for them.”Nick Sciretta, a 35-year-old from Valley Stream, New York, is running for Congress in the state’s fourth district, a long-shot bid to unseat an incumbent Democrat, representative Laura Gillen. Gillen has called Mamdani “too extreme” and “the absolute wrong choice for New York”.Sciretta, who canvassed for Mamdani in south Queens, feels the opposite. He was planning to run for office in April anyway – and then he heard about Mamdani’s campaign.“The first thought I had was, we need more regular guys running for positions of power,” said Sciretta, a longtime International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees crew member. “Ultimately, he’s doing something beautiful, which is getting the rank and file, the regular guys, regular New Yorkers, to believe in themselves more than anything.”Sciretta had “lost everything” twice, losing work during the writers’ strike and then the pandemic, and has moved back home. He is a one-man campaign operation: he’s gathering signatures to qualify for the ballot, setting up his own website, tabling in public or sitting in coffee shops with a sign that he’s running for Congress.Mamdani, who is a member of the state assembly, still felt like a regular person who you could sit next to on the bus, Sciretta said. That appeal helped others see they could run for office, too, because you didn’t need to be a certain age or pedigree to win.“The people who are like, ‘Zohran is bad for the city’ … they’re afraid of guys like me who want to follow in his footsteps,” Sciretta said. “Because if there are more Zohrans everywhere in the country, that’s when real change happens.” More
- in US Politics
Texas House reconvenes without quorum as Democrats flee state
Texas Democrats in the state legislature denied its speaker a legislative quorum Monday by leaving the state, forestalling plans proposed by the White House to redistrict Texas’s congressional lines to more greatly favor Republicans.When the legislature gaveled in at 3pm local time on Monday, Republicans fell short of a quorum by eight votes after Democrats fled to Illinois, a legislative conference in Boston, New York and elsewhere.In an extraordinary escalation, the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, said he he had ordered the Texas department of public safety to “locate, arrest and return to the House chamber any member who has abandoned their duty to Texans”.“There are consequences for dereliction of duty,” Abbott said in a statement on Monday, after the Republican-dominated House issued civil arrest warrants in an attempt to compel the return of the members who fled. “This order will remain in effect until all missing Democrat House members are accounted for and brought to the Texas Capitol.”Democrats hold 62 of the 150 seats in the legislature’s lower chamber, so as long as at least 51 members remain out of Austin, the Texas legislature cannot move forward with any votes, including a plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps to give Republicans five more seats in Congress.The Texas speaker, Representative Dustin Burrows, adjourned the house until 1pm on Tuesday after issuing a call for absent lawmakers and threatening their arrest. He cited pending legislation on flood relief and human trafficking – and not the contentious redistricting proposal before the chamber – in his call for Democrats to return.“Instead of confronting those challenges, some of our colleagues have fled the state in their duty,” Burrows said. “They’ve left the state, abandoned their posts and turned their backs on the constituents they swore to represent. They’ve shirked their responsibilities under the direction and pressure of out-of-state politicians and activists who don’t know the first thing about what’s right for Texas.”Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who fled his own impeachment hearings and refused a court order to release his travel records after speaking at the rally in Washington that preceded the January 6 insurrection, has described wayward Democratic legislators as “cowards”.Speaker Burrows said the house would not sit quietly. “While you obstruct the work of the people, the people of Texas are watching and so is the nation, and if you choose to continue down this road, you should know there will be consequences.”The Texas House Democratic Caucus said in response: “Come and take it.”“We are not fighting for the Democratic party,” state representative James Tallarico said in a video message recorded at an airport. “We are fighting for the democratic process, and the stakes could not be higher. We have to take a stand.”Most of the Democratic caucus absconded to Chicago, a city with a Democratic mayor and city council in a state with a Democratic governor and legislature.Illinois governor JB Pritzker, who owns the Chicago Hyatt hotel, announced on Monday he would provide free rooms to the Texas Democrats for as long as they are out of state.A special session of the Texas legislature lasts for 30 days, but Abbott can renew the call for a special session at will. Under new rules the Texas house adopted in 2021, each lawmaker will be fined $500 a day for each day they abscond from the state. More
- in US Politics
Illinois governor says Texas Democrats who left will be protected amid arrest threats
The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, has vowed to protect the Democratic members of the Texas house of representatives who left the state in an attempt to block Republican efforts to redraw Texas’s congressional maps.“We’re going to do everything we can to protect every single one of them and make sure that – ’cause we know they’re doing the right thing, we know that they’re following the law,” Pritzker said at a press conference on Sunday in Illinois alongside some of the the Texas Democratic lawmakers.The Texas Democrats fled the state on Sunday in an effort to prevent the Texas house from reaching the quorum on Monday needed to vote on a newly proposed congressional map.In response to the Democrats’ actions, Greg Abbott, the Republican Texas governor, threatened to expel the Texas Democrats from the state house if they do not return by Monday at 3pm CT – when the legislature is set to resume. Ken Paxton, Texas’s Republican attorney general, also condemned their actions on Sunday and threatened their arrest.“Democrats in the Texas House who try and run away like cowards should be found, arrested, and brought back to the Capitol immediately,” he said in a statement. “We should use every tool at our disposal to hunt down those who think they are above the law.”But Pritzker, who said he will support the Texas Democrats, described their actions as “a righteous act of courage”, saying that they “were left no choice but to leave their home state, block a vote from taking place, and protect their constituents”.Pritzker, a billionaire and potential 2028 presidential candidate, is reportedly helping the Democrats find lodging and meeting spaces, but is not assisting with the $500-a-day fine that each lawmaker will have to pay under new rules the house adopted in 2021, according to the Texas Tribune. The outlet reported that the Democrats have been fundraising from large Democratic donors to help pay that fine.The redistricting plan, unveiled last week by Texas Republicans, could allow Republicans to gain as many as five additional US House seats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Currently, Republicans hold 25 of Texas’s 38 seats, and in the overall House of Representatives, Republicans hold a small majority of 220-212.The proposal came after pressure from Donald Trump, who urged Texas Republicans to redraw the maps.“There could be some other states we’re going to get another three, or four or five in addition. Texas would be the biggest one,” Trump told reporters in mid-July. “Just a very simple redrawing, we pick up five seats.”Abbott called a special session this summer and included on the agenda the redrawing of Texas’s maps in addition to proposals to aid victims of the 4 July Texas flooding and other matters.Many of Texas’s 62 house Democrats have gone to Illinois, with others attending the National Conference of State Legislatures in Boston this week and others meeting with the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, in Albany.“We’re leaving Texas to fight for Texans,” Gene Wu, the Texas house Democratic caucus chair who fled to Illinois, said in a statement on Sunday.“We’re not walking out on our responsibilities; we’re walking out on a rigged system that refuses to listen to the people we represent” he added.During the news conference in Illinois on Sunday, Pritzker criticized the redistricting proposal, saying it would “steal five congressional seats, silencing millions of voices, especially Black and Latino voters”.“Let’s be clear, this is not just rigging the system in Texas, it’s about rigging the system against the rights of all Americans for years to come,” he added. More
- in US Politics
Talking politics has bartenders on edge in Trump’s Washington DC
Deke Dunne relocated to Washington DC from Wyoming in 2008 to pursue a career in politics. Though a progressive himself, he worked as a legislative aide for the Republican senator Mike Enzi and spent many nights at local watering holes, guzzling $10 pitchers and eating wings with fellow broke staffers from both sides of the aisle. Long before he began moonlighting as a bartender, he learned that talking politics in DC bars was always a recipe for disaster.“When I used to work in politics, I would spend a lot of time in bars near Capitol Hill,” said Dunne, “so I was exposed to more political professionals. In those spaces, you often find yourself witnessing knockdown, drag-out arguments about politics.”Today, Dunne is one of DC’s most influential mixologists, having abandoned politics almost a decade ago for a hospitality career. Serving drinks in a city that is more ideologically divided than ever, Dunne says he exercises more diplomacy behind the bar now than he ever did working in politics.There has always been an unspoken rule among Washington DC bartenders, according to Dunne, that political conversations across the bar should be avoided at all costs. It is generally understood that maintaining neutrality is critical to ensuring that guests of all political persuasions feel welcome. But the partisan rancor in Washington during the early stages of Donald Trump’s presidential encore has created palpable tension in hospitality spaces, placing undue strain on staff to manage the vibes.“It’s always been an accepted truth in DC that every four to eight years, you get a whole new swath of people in from a different political ideology and if you want to have a strong, viable business, you don’t talk politics,” said Dunne. “Trump broke that rule.”According to local bar professionals in the nation’s capital, the “tending” part of bartending has never been more challenging. “Politics in DC is not only something that a lot of people care about, but it’s also a lot of people’s livelihoods,” said Zac Hoffman, a bar industry veteran who until recently managed the restaurant inside the National Democratic Club near the Capitol. “When you’re talking about work, you’re talking about politics. That’s just the reality of where we live. It’s a company town.”At Allegory, where Dunne oversees the beverage program, the bar has always taken a progressive approach, which occasionally provokes more conservative-minded guests who stay in the Eaton, the boutique hotel and cultural hub in downtown where the bar opened seven years ago. Its aesthetic and cocktail menu reimagines Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, but featuring a young Ruby Bridges, the iconic civil rights activist who faced a jeering mob when she desegregated a Little Rock elementary school.“Our very presence as a mission-based bar has sparked many conversations surrounding our concept, but also gender-neutral bathrooms, provocative art and advocacy,” he said. “We’ve had people that are clearly uncomfortable with our concept leave and then post a negative review but frame it about something else.”The resurgent, and often strident, brand of conservatism that dominates the political sphere in Washington today has many of the city’s more progressive bar owners on edge. At The Green Zone, a Middle Eastern cocktail bar in Adams Morgan on the city’s north side, politics have always been integral to the bar’s identity since it opened in 2018. Bar owner Chris Hassaan Francke, whose mother is Iraqi, has earned a reputation for being outspoken about political conflicts, especially those in the Middle East.But since Trump’s return to office, he admits to having toned down some of the rhetoric. “We changed the name of one of our most infamous cocktails [which contained an incendiary reference to the current president],” said Francke. “It kills me that I can’t always say everything I want to say, but ultimately the safety and wellbeing of my staff [are] more important than that.”While the city may be under Republican rule at the moment, DC itself is still overwhelmingly liberal (Kamala Harris won over 90% of the vote in the 2024 election), which means that a majority of its hospitality workers are liberal, too. “I know some bartenders who will say the opposite of what they believe around customers they don’t agree with politically,” said Hoffman. “There are plenty of socialists who make great tips talking shit about liberals with Republicans.”It isn’t only the more progressive venues around town that have become targets. After recent articles in the New York Times and Washington Post championed the upscale Capitol Hill bistro Butterworth’s as a haven for Maga sympathizers, backlash ensued. According to chef and co-owner Bart Hutchins – who, like Dunne, also left a career in politics to work in hospitality – being perceived as pro-Trump has attracted crowds to his fledgling restaurant, which opened last fall. But it’s also created some unwanted operational challenges. For one, a serial provocateur with an air-horn routinely disrupts his weekly dinner service by sounding it through the front entrance, often multiple times a week.Despite Butterworth’s reputation for being a sanctuary for high-profile Trump supporters such as Steve Bannon, not every political conversation at the bar is peaceful. “I’ve broken up at least three political arguments since we opened,” said Hutchins. “It always starts with somebody who’s really, really insistent that everyone agrees with them, someone who’s watching way too much cable news who’s really determined to have their Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow moment.”View image in fullscreenAnother unfortunate byproduct of being known as a right-leaning restaurant in a left-leaning town, Hutchins says, has been difficulty hiring and retaining staff. “There have been times where it’s been really hard to hire people,” he said. “Early on, we had some servers self-select out and say: ‘I don’t want to serve these people.’ But a lot of those people have moved on.”Over time, the staff has found ways to put their political convictions aside for the good of the restaurant. “Our No 1 rule that’s written on a door in the back is: ‘Everybody’s a VIP,” said Hutchins. “We’re not interested in using politics as a measuring device for whether or not someone deserves great service.”For DC bars, proximity to Capitol Hill has historically increased the likelihood that the conversations inside them will revolve around politics. And while some bars on the Hill may welcome these spirited conversations, many older, legacy bars prefer that patrons leave their partisanship at the door.View image in fullscreenTune Inn, a well-loved dive bar that originally opened a few blocks from the Capitol in 1947, outwardly discourages political conversations of any kind. “You can always tell the newbies because they want to come in and immediately start talking about politics,” said Stephanie Hulbert, who has worked as a bartender, server and now general manager at the bar for more than 17 years. “They get shut down very quickly.”To keep the peace and maintain non-partisan decorum inside the bar, she and her staff regularly intervene and admonish guests to keep their politics to themselves. These interventions occur at least two or three times every week, according to Hulbert, which is why the TVs inside the bar are deliberately set to sports channels rather than news outlets. “I’ll argue about sports all day long with you,” she said. “But I won’t argue about politics.”Despite the heightened anxiety in Washington, Dunne is optimistic that healthy dialogues in more progressive bars including Allegory can effect positive change. In January, Trump’s inauguration drew conservative revelers to the Eaton, where inclusivity and multiculturalism is essential to its brand and mission. That led to some uncomfortable conversations with Republican patrons about the bar’s progressive ethos.“I don’t know how effective the conversations were, but they were constructive,” he said. “We found middle ground about the fact that what Ruby [Bridges] went through was tragic. It’s common ground you don’t find very often around here any more.” More
- in US Politics
Now’s the time for Democrats to hammer Trump on the economy | Lloyd Green
“Economic Growth Shatters Expectations as President Trump Fuels America’s Golden Age,” the White House announced on Wednesday. But within 48 hours, the data told a very different story, giving the Democrats a badly needed opening if they can muster the competence and focus to seize upon it.On Thursday, the US commerce department announced that inflation had ticked up to 2.6%. A day later, the labor department reported that unemployment had risen to 4.2% in July, and that the US had actually gained 258,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.From the looks of things, Donald Trump and his tariffs are damaging the economy. Suddenly, things aren’t looking so hot.Rather than copping to a screw-up, however, the president immediately laid blame elsewhere. In a barrage of posts on social media, he lambasted Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, attacked his intelligence and again threatened his tenure at the Fed.The president trashed Powell, who he appointed, as “a stubborn MORON”. Adding insult to injury, Trump brayed: “IF HE CONTINUES TO REFUSE, THE BOARD SHOULD ASSUME CONTROL, AND DO WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS HAS TO BE DONE!”But things didn’t end there. The tantrum continued unabated.Hours later, Trump grabbed another page from the strongman playbook and fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He suggested that she had cooked the books and was essentially giving aid and comfort to Joe Biden, the man who first appointed her.As we know, there is reality and then there is Trump’s version of reality.At Friday’s final bell, the Dow had dropped more than 540 points and the Nasdaq was down 2.24%. The ghost of Trump’s so-called “liberation day” had returned to haunt the markets, giving the Democrats ample material to work with.Already, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act places Trump and the Republicans at odds with their base and with swing voters. According to a Wall Street Journal poll, 70% of the US believes the act benefits the rich. Beyond that, the tax plan is underwater with the public, 42-52, and is disfavored by a majority of independents.Practically speaking, the Congressional Budget Office projected in June that nearly 8 million people would lose their insurance under the Trump-backed bill. For the current iteration of the GOP, that’s a problem. These days, Republican voters tilt working class. Many of them break economically liberal and socially conservative.This why House Republicans danced around the issue of coming Medicaid cuts. They stand to harm their own voters. And they know it.Take Mike Lawler, a representative from New York’s Hudson Valley. More than 200,000 of his constituents receive Medicaid benefits. Town halls in his district have become rowdy events, with the police hauling out a constituent.Lawler claims to have “fought extensively to make sure that there were not draconian changes to Medicaid”.“At the end of the day, this is about strengthening the program,” Lawler added. Uh, that’s why he needed the cops.More than 64 Republican House members represent districts where Medicaid rates exceed the national average, according to CNN. In those seats, five incumbents won last November by five points or fewer.But the GOP’s problems don’t end with Medicaid. These days, social security, the most sacrosanct legacy of the New Deal, may be in the crosshairs of Team Trump.On Wednesday, Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, acknowledged the so-called “Trump accounts” created for kids by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act were actually a “back door for privatizing social security”.The accounts are designed as a vehicle for Americans to build and accumulate wealth as soon as they are born. Under the new law, newborns will be eligible to receive $1,000 from Uncle Sam.“Social security is a defined benefit plan paid out,” Bessent explained. “To the extent that if all of a sudden these accounts grow, and you have in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for your retirement, then that’s a gamechanger.”As a candidate and then again in office, Trump had pledged to leave social security untouched. Now that pledge is in doubt.In 2024, the Republicans made the economic failures of the Biden-Harris administration central to their campaigns. The Trump-Vance campaign raked the Democrats over the coals over inflation. In politics, turnabout is fair play. It is time for the Democrats to show that they actually care about the average voter.
Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More
- in US Politics
‘There’s an appetite for this brand of politics’: the independent politician making a bid for US Senate
Dan Osborn is a man who does not like to lose, and if you had asked him on election night last year whether he would run again as an independent for a US Senate seat representing the very Republican state of Nebraska, Osborn would have told you to, in his words, “pound sand”.Yet the results of his first bid for elected office were alluring, so much so that he has decided take another stab at becoming only the third current member of the US Senate who is not in either of the two parties. While he did not beat the Republican senator Deb Fischer last November, he did narrow her margin of victory to the single digits in a state that Donald Trump won by 20 points. Next year, Osborn will challenge the state’s other Republican senator, Pete Ricketts, in a contest he characterizes as a struggle between the working class and the wealthy.“I think there’s an appetite for this brand of politics,” Osborn told the Guardian by phone from Omaha. “It’s so important they see the value in having somebody like me, who knows what it’s like to put Christmas on a credit card, I suppose, versus somebody like Ricketts, who is probably just in it for himself.”Osborn’s campaign last year was a rare bright spot for many in an election that saw voters pummel candidates who were not on Trump’s team.Nebraska has only elected Republicans to the Senate since Democrat Ben Nelson’s victory in 2006, but Osborn managed to outperform Kamala Harris by more than any other non-Republican Senate candidate. In next year’s elections, Osborn may get a boost from the anti-incumbent sentiment that so often pervades midterms, but Ricketts, a former governor who is running for a full term after winning a special election last year, is one of the best-known Republicans in the state.“I do think he’s going to have a much tougher task this time around,” Dona-Gene Barton, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln who focuses on polling, said of Osborn. Compared to Fischer, Ricketts is “much more popular in the state. He has incredibly deep pockets, and he’s the sitting incumbent.”Osborn believes he has a compelling argument. As a union leader, he organized Nebraska workers during a nationwide strike at the cereal giant Kellogg’s, and now balances campaigning with his day job as an industrial mechanic. The working class may have broken for the real estate mogul Trump last year, but he believes that further down the ballot, they will vote for a candidate who is one of them.“Our government doesn’t look like me, so that’s certainly what I want to get in there and change. And I think that’s what’s on most people’s minds as well,” he said. Osborn draws a particular contrast to Ricketts, whose father founded stockbroker TD Ameritrade and whose net worth is estimated at $184m by the stock tracker Quiver Quantitative.View image in fullscreenAnother potential advantage: he’s not a Democrat. Last year, Osborn wrote in the United Auto Workers president, Shawn Fain, on the presidential ballot, and said that if he was elected, he would not caucus with either party.Independent lawmakers are rare in Congress. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine are the only two in the Senate, and both caucus with the Democrats, while the House has not had one since 2021. The last time Nebraska elected an independent federal lawmaker was in 1936.Voters, Osborn believes, are looking for a candidate who will break the two-party logjam in Washington, stand up to the rich and not clash with Trump simply on principle.“I’ll work with anybody … the problem, I think, inherently, with our government right now, is they don’t seem to want to work together,” Osborn said. Though Trump has bashed him on social media repeatedly, Osborn said: “I’m not just going to be anti just for the sake of being anti.”He criticizes how Joe Biden handled the influx of immigrants during his presidency, and repeats Trump’s aphorism that “without a border, we don’t have a country”. Yet he does not like everything he sees from the new administration, such as the way it celebrates new detention centers for deportees, or how Elon Musk pirouetted with a chainsaw at the outset of his so-called “department of government efficiency” initiative.“I just don’t understand the whole bragging about hurting people,” Osborn said.While his relationship with the state Democratic party last year was touchy at times, this year, the party has decided to support his campaign, though a Democratic candidate could also still jump into the race. Jane Kleeb, the state party chair, said in an interview that they view Osborn as an ally for their causes.“On the vast majority of issues, like the core issues that matter to working- and middle-class families, Dan is on the same side of where I think any of those votes would be,” Kleeb said.“Protecting Medicaid, Medicare – he’s not going to side with Republicans on that. Middle-class tax cuts, bringing back childcare credits, making sure that our American energy is diversified … protecting unions, name the issue.”Ricketts’s campaign responded by arguing that Osborn was essentially a Democrat. “Fake Dan Osborn can continue pretending to be an independent, but he is endorsed by the Nebraska Democratic party, funded by Democrats, and backs Democrats’ most extreme policy positions,” said spokesperson Will Coup. (Kleeb said the Nebraska Democratic party does not endorse candidates, and had not endorsed Osborn.)Now, Osborn’s candidacy has prompted the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics to change its rating of the race from “Safe Republican” to “Likely Republican”. Another prominent forecaster, the Cook Political Report, kept their rating unchanged at “Solid Republican”, but noted they may re-evaluate “if Osborn’s blue-collar messaging gets some traction”.On the campaign trail last year, Osborn said he found himself appearing before crowds at campaign events where half of those in attendance were wearing Trump gear, and the other sported shirts from the Harris campaign. He sees recapturing that spirit as key to his victory.“I would see people with both style shirts, grabbing yard signs before they left,” Osborn said. “So I made it not about red versus blue. It’s about uplifting everybody in the communities.” More
- in US Politics
With Trump wreaking havoc, a question for the US Democrats: when will you ever learn? | Timothy Garton Ash
Nothing is more insufferable than someone saying “I told you so”; so please forgive me for being insufferable. On 29 September 2023, after a couple of months spent in the US, I published a column that was well summarised in its Guardian headline: “Unless Joe Biden stands aside, the world must prepare for President Trump 2.0”. We can never definitely say “what would have happened if …?”, but there’s a very good chance that had Biden cleared the way for a Democratic primary in autumn 2023 the strongest candidate could have defeated Trump. The entire world would have been spared the disaster now unfolding.“No use crying over spilt milk,” you may say. Yes, but it’s always worth learning lessons for the future. I’m back in the US now, and a recent poll for the Wall Street Journal found that 63% of voters hold an unfavourable view of the Democratic party. To put it mildly, the Democrats have a way to go.So what, given all that is happening and everything we now know, are the right lessons? The point of mentioning my old column is not to boast of some special insider insight into Washington high politics; the point is precisely that I had none. It was just obviously crazy to put up a visibly old and frail candidate who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. For comparison, the leaders of the Soviet Union who we think of as the epitome of decrepit gerontocracy were, at their respective moments of unlamented demise, 75 (Leonid Brezhnev), 69 (Yuri Andropov) and 73 (Konstantin Chernenko).It required no special knowledge to see this and most Americans already did. By the time I wrote my column, an opinion poll had found that 77% of Americans thought Biden was too old to be president for another four years. It was only the political insiders, the liberal commentariat, the Democratic establishment, who went on agreeing with the president, his family and what was (you couldn’t make this up) actually known informally as the “politburo” of his closest advisers that he was the only man for the job.In their recent, much noticed book, Original Sin, two leading Washington journalists, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios, argue that there was, as their subtitle suggests, a cover up. Biden’s family and the politburo tried to hide his precipitate cognitive decline, confining most of his meetings to between 10am and 4pm. Even cabinet members did not see him up close for many months and in-depth media interviews were as rare as a Pride parade in the Vatican.The authors generously apportion blame to the president, his wife, other family members and his closest advisers, but there’s one set of people they curiously spare: themselves and their fellow Washington insider journalists. Now, I haven’t gone back over all their reporting on CNN and Axios, and there are certainly some pieces that should be cited to defend their journalistic record. But there is no doubt that American political journalists in general, and the liberal commentariat in particular, were slow and late to say what most “ordinary” Americans had long since seen.Why? The New York Times writer Ezra Klein digs into this in an episode of his excellent podcast. Frankly acknowledging that his own February 2024 call for Biden to stand aside was “late”, Klein explores in conversation with Tapper why most others were even later. The answer seems to be a mix of ingredients: journalistic fear of losing access; the vindictive tribalism of the Democratic establishment; deference to an imperial presidency; fear of Donald Trump; worry about Kamala Harris as the presumptive alternative candidate.Fear of losing access is a professional disease of journalism. “You felt like you were destroying all of your relationships with the White House all at once,” says Klein, recalling his February 2024 demarche. “Yes, not just with the White House but the Democratic party,” adds Tapper. My own September 2023 notebook sums up a private conversation with a Washington-based columnist: “Yes, Biden should stand aside. He [the columnist] can’t say it.” (My note continues: “Jill Biden could, but she likes it.”)I know, also from other sources, just how threatening the Democratic establishment could be when trying to close down any questioning of Biden’s fitness to serve a second term. Even in the critical articles that did appear in US media there was a kind of residual deference to the presidency, almost as though they were asking a king to abdicate rather than just another politician to stand aside. Partly this stems from the 237-year-old US constitutional device of rolling your prime minister and monarch into one. In Britain, we confine our residual deference to the monarch while the prime minister gets roasted every Wednesday at prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons. Someone in Biden’s 2023 state of dotage wouldn’t have survived two weeks in Westminster.Then there’s the fact that people were already panicking about Trump and it was somehow thought, especially after Democratic successes in the 2022 midterm elections, that Biden was the only guy to beat him. The more so since the presumptive alternative was Harris, who was seen as a relatively weak candidate. And so, for fear of getting Harris and then Trump, they got Harris and then Trump.Some lessons, then, are clear. Tapper and Thompson open their book with a quotation from George Orwell: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” But Orwell also calls on us always to say what we do see, even if – no, especially if – it’s uncomfortable for our own side. There’s the double test for journalists: see it and say it.For the Democratic establishment: don’t try to intimidate the media into self-censorship with the argument that they are giving succour to the enemy. You would have been better served by journalists just doing their job, in the spirit of Orwell. Then: change out your old guard. Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic caucus in the Senate, is older than Chernenko and rapidly catching up on Brezhnev. Oh yes, and simply listen to the people you’re meant to represent.The tragedy of this whole story is that the Democrats have a profusion of talent in younger generations – from Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom to New York’s new star, Zohran Mamdani. They don’t yet have the shared platform that could win a presidential election, but thinkers such as Klein and Derek Thompson, co-authors of Abundance, the other book of the moment, are already working up some good ideas. The Democrats can probably swing the House of Representatives in the midterm elections next year with a few fresh faces – and by focusing on the already visible negative consequences of Trump for working- and middle-class Americans. But by 2027, in the run-up to the next presidential election, they will need everything they so spectacularly failed to produce in 2023.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist More
