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It has been a long few weeks for the Slow Boring crew, so we are taking it easy today for the holiday weekend. Thank you all for being so gracious with us as Kate recovers from surgery.

Earlier this week, I wrote about my sadness over where this country stands at its 250th anniversary, and over the fractured state of American patriotism:

Bu…

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Almost all of the questions today were about Democrats’ ongoing tea party moment in primaries, which got me thinking about the actual Tea Party of the Obama years.

At the time, the Tea Party talked an enormous amount about government spending and budget deficits, and mainstream Republicans largely treated it as a movement about fiscal conservatism. A desire to harness Tea Party energy was part of why Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate and challenged Obama on a platform of steep spending cuts rather than Moderate Massachusetts Mitt pragmatism. Around this time, I worked with Vanessa Williamson’s husband and I knew Theda Skocpol from college, so I was aware of the book the two of them wrote in 2013 called “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” It was a sociological deep dive into Tea Party activism and featured the striking and contrarian claim that actually the number one issue motivating the movement was immigration. Very few people in 2013 agreed with that, but after watching Donald Trump’s 2016 primary win, I think everyone familiar with this literature reached the conclusion that Williamson and Skocpol were right all along.

I raise this because, while we’ve had a ton of takes about what is driving the restive left on the Democratic side, I don’t think we’ve had anything equivalent to Williamson and Skocpol in the sense of a genuinely good-faith, curiosity-motivated look at what’s going on. This is not to say I have my own secret theory. I also don’t want to overread the analogy. Just because the Tea Party seemed to be about one thing and turned out to be about another doesn’t mean the left insurgency is like that. It may just be that it’s actually a bad analogy. But I do want to draw the distinction between disinterested scholarly inquiry and factional or partisan combat. A lot of influential figures in right-wing politics really wanted it to be the case that the Tea Party was about widespread demand for entitlement cuts, and they successfully imposed that interpretation on the world for a period of years until it all blew up in their face.

lindamc: I’m a Common Sense Dem at the end of my tether. I split my time between DC, with an incoming socialist mayor, and Ann Arbor MI, where socialists are seeking to unseat the local government that has (as noted in a recent mailbag) finally started building here. Everyone knows about the Senate race 😩. Many/most youngs I know are self-described socialists with little/no understanding of what that means in historic terms, and the overwhelming majority of my fellow olds are Heather Cox Richardsonians. Virtually every social gathering I attend features someone making a glib, ignorant complaint about data centers. A “swing dancing in the park” event I attended a few days ago started out with pronouns and cultural appropriation and never made it to demonstrating actual dance steps. Things seem to somehow get worse and worse.

How do you cope with this? Despite fighting hard against it, I feel something like actual despair a lot of the time.

I’m feeling a little bit untethered myself this summer.

But one thing that I try to remind myself of is that a lot of what I am experiencing ambiently is not so much a real political trend as the output of the extraordinary New York-centricity of the national media.

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I was at a couple of education events in the spring that all featured very smart, very achievement-oriented people talking about how to address the national crisis in basic reading and math attainment. A common lament was that politicians and pundits are simply not focused enough on the question of whether kids are learning the basics, preferring to fire off hot takes about culture war topics.

This is a view that I very much sympathize with and have articulated over the years.

That said, I’ve also been in a bunch of conversations about things like Noah Smith’s essay on the need for a revival of American liberal nationalism or Jerusalem Demsas’s take about how you have to love America in order to save it.

I broadly agree with these takes. But I also find that they’re a little bit lacking in specificity.

I know that Rob Sand, who’s running for governor in Iowa, does things like open town halls by having everyone sing “America the Beautiful.” A friend described Sand as the Daniel Day-Lewis of politics: He understood quite some time ago that trends in Democratic Party politics were going one way and political trends in Iowa were going another, and he fully committed to a hyper-distinctive post-partisan Iowa-as-fuck persona. He never breaks character, and he not only performs the patriotic ritual, he makes it seem natural.

But if liberals want to embrace American patriotism, that has to mean more than just clicking “like” and “share” on columns that express a second-order thesis that it would be desirable to see more liberal patriotism.

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That cuts against the Constitution and all kinds of core American values in a way that is almost too boring to discuss. But Washington Post Columnist Shadi Hamid went viral with a response in which he offered a hot take of his own: “Muslims shouldn’t have to assimilate to belong.”

Jerusalem’s parents are immigrants who assimilated — making sure she learned English before entering preschool, for example — and she thinks it’s important that America continues to promote and celebrate assimilation. She puts a lot of weight on the evidence, from Leah Boustan and others, that immigrants to the United States do in fact assimilate very well.

I am on board with all of this, but a little more worried than Jerusalem is that it’s not good enough for liberals to reassure voters that assimilation happens. I think we need to do our share of the work to make sure that it happens. You can’t just opportunistically invoke successful assimilation to defend immigrants when they are under attack; you need to actively promote and celebrate America as a good society that is worth assimilating into. That means getting beyond certain progressive hangups about race and American history. That does not mean denying the existence of ugly episodes in the country’s story, but it does mean denying the claim that this ugliness defines America or that it is somehow unique to our country rather than part of a perennial pattern of ethnic conflict in human history.

My ancestors immigrated well before Jerusalem’s and did so at a time when the borders were generally more open but there was also more comfort with heavy-handed assimilation measures. Some of these went too far — I remember my grandfather telling me about kids in his heavily Hispanic community being beaten at school for speaking Spanish to each other — but I think there was something to the combination of legal openness and forceful promotion of American identity.

Hamid argues for a kind of deep pluralism, insisting that the core of America’s founding is the idea that citizens never have to converge on foundational questions.

There is something to this. Is it true that there is one God or several? If one, is Muhammad God’s prophet? Is there a second testament to the Bible? A third? These are deep, profound questions that Americans should and will disagree about forever, and Ogles is dead wrong to insist that any religion is out of bounds. But part of a liberal society is promoting a culture of liberalism. If numerically small sects such as the Amish or Hasidic Jews want to form insular, illiberal faith communities, there’s no issue there. But the influx of very large numbers of people with illiberal values is a real topic for concern. That shouldn’t be an excuse for ethnic bigotry or exclusion, but it’s certainly an argument that people who come here should embrace American (or Dutch) values and that those values should be promoted.

Paid subscribers can watch the ad-free embedded video at the top of this post and read the full transcript below.

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In a couple of weeks, Jerusalem and I will be reviewing Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” so grab a copy and read along!

New episodes post every Thursday.

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More than a week after it passed Congress, President Donald Trump has still not signed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. His stated reason is that the Senate has not yet acted on the SAVE America Act, a b…

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I don’t feel like celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, and the fact that I don’t is pissing me off.

The semiquincentennial is the anniversary of a country that, whatever else is true of it, has functioned for a quarter millennium as a bet that people who show up with nothing can build something. Donald Trump and Trumpism have spent the past year and a half turning the anniversary into a branding exercise to further the inherently unpatriotic MAGA project.

You’d be forgiven for not following the inside baseball of the country’s 250th, because a nonpartisan anniversary should not be something to keep an eye on.

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Donald Trump does a lot of weird stuff.

Broadly speaking, he does a lot of unusual stuff. Much of that is shockingly corrupt, like the cryptocurrency scams or having his kids roam the world making various business deals while also serving as key advisors. And a lot of it is menacing and authoritarian, like pardoning the January 6 rioters.

Some of it, though, is just genuinely strange.

He keeps messing around with local affairs here in D.C., for example, often in ways that don’t serve any real ideological purpose or even offer opportunity for corruption. He’s just a guy who, I guess befitting his background as a real estate developer, likes naming things after himself, a kind of egomaniac who’s also interested in questions related to the built environment.

Part of the genuine eccentricity of Trump’s engagement with these local issues is that as someone who lives here, it’s been a real mixed bag on the merits.

To an extent, he’s pulled off what no Democratic Party president could get away with and devoted extra taxpayer resources to civic improvements in the nation’s very blue capital city. He’s also been extraordinarily wasteful and undisciplined and at times appallingly devoted to his own ego.

So as part of our celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, here’s my definitive and extremely objective ranking.

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The absolute worst

Trying to rename the Kennedy Center the “Trump Kennedy Center” is genuinely appalling.

I try to be a rational person. I love effective altruism. I think we should assess political leaders primarily through the concrete impact their choices have on the world. What name is on the side of the city’s premier performing-arts center doesn’t “matter.”

But what the fuck?

• It’s gauche in general to name things after living people.

• You can’t name something after yourself — that’s psychotic.

What’s more, it’s always controversial to rename anything, but I do think we have a clear understanding that if you rename something that is already named for someone, that’s a deliberate act of disrespect.

When Yale decided it didn’t want a college named after John Calhoun anymore, Calhoun College became Grace Hopper College. Like that call or hate it, the point was to cancel John Calhoun. You can’t just call it “Hopper Calhoun College” as a compromise. That’s stupid.

The whole Trump Kennedy Center debacle is so dumb and so egomaniacal that it drives me insane.

Kat Rosenfield sometimes takes shit that she doesn’t deserve from progressives (I highly recommend her account of being canceled before it was cool), so I get where she was coming from emotionally when she scolded liberals for shunning the newly renamed Trump Kennedy Center.

But no.

This was some outrageous shit Trump pulled that violated all kinds of settled norms. It had extremely predictable consequences for the arts, all of which are Trump’s fault. Sometimes, the Orange Man is just bad.

Shitty, but I get it

Trump’s basic view that there ought to be something in Memorial Circle is clearly correct and, in fact, the original intent was to place large columns there. But the circle (and more notably the bridge that leads into it) was constructed in the 1920s and the columns got canceled to facilitate the then-new technology of airplanes having a safe flight path.

In this case, I’m not left wondering what this moron was thinking.

Every prior president was probably too busy focusing on the important parts of the job to dream up a specific monument for this location. And Trump too should probably be meeting with advisors and talking about the cost of living rather than drawing plans for arches.

I dislike the arch idea in particular because America doesn’t really have the kind of singular imperial military triumph that a triumphal arch traditionally celebrates. Also arches are really Paris’s thing: It’s not just the Arc de Triomphe — they have an entire axis of three monumental arches spanning the city. The United States should have its own thing.

But I get what Trump is doing, conceptually.

Similarly, while you cannot illegally construct a gaudy ballroom with corporate bribe money and then try to use an assassination attempt as political leverage to get Congress to bail you out, the idea of expanding the physical footprint of the White House makes perfect sense.

I don’t have any strong opinions about ballrooms, per se, but I have been in the West Wing several times over the course of my career, and what you have there is a lot of the people doing the most important jobs in the country dealing with cramped working spaces. I was also once invited to a White House social event that they did on the lawn because there wasn’t enough space in the East Wing, and it turned out to be one of those early June D.C. days when it’s 96 degrees and humid and everyone is out there in suits and you’re afraid someone is going to die.

I think the whole situation calls for something in the spirit of I.M. Pei’s famous addition to the Louvre to get a modern office facility on the White House grounds.

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Squarely in the middle

The fact that Trump drained the Reflecting Pool, repainted it, and then bragged that he’d solved an algae problem that has plagued the National Park Service for decades only to discover that he actually didn’t solve it at all is not important. But it is a potent metaphor for much of his administration — notably the war with Iran, which played out on a parallel timeline and similarly ended with Trump discovering that he in fact could not secure a better deal than the one the Obama administration had already bequeathed to him.

But in typical Trump fashion, he didn’t just say something like, “I tried but it didn’t work and now the question is whether Congress wants to appropriate money for a very expensive rebuild of the filtration system or if everyone should just learn to live with algae.” He’s gone off on a whole insane binge of lying about the situation, arresting people for touching the water, and so forth. Meanwhile, you have center-right people complaining that the media is too obsessed with the Reflecting Pool when it doesn’t matter. To which I say: Sure. But Trump made a huge deal out of this and now wants to wriggle out of talking about it because it’s an embarrassing failure, which is not only Trump’s approach to Iran but also the whole conservative movement’s approach to Trump!

Fine by me, albeit dumb

As a patriotic Washingtonian and a loyal member of the #resistance, you’re supposed to claim to hate that Trump has deployed uniformed National Guard personnel on the city streets.

The truth is that what Trump is doing here is pretty stupid, but its only concrete impacts are beneficial.

For months now, we’ve had small groups of National Guard members patrolling parts of the city, usually in groups of four or more. They seem to work mostly nine to five and in high-profile areas where they’re likely to be seen. There are a lot around Union Station, a lot on the Mall, and always a few strolling around 14th Street where there are a lot of restaurants. They’re often patrolling near downtown Metro stations. This is just not the tactical deployment pattern you would use if you seriously wanted to fight crime, which would involve sending people to high-crime neighborhoods at night.

What’s more, the Guard can’t really fight crime, because they don’t have any arrest authority.

That being said, despite the lack of arrest authority or appropriate deployment, the Guard has impacted crime in D.C.

Erich Battistin, Richard Hahn, Samantha Pérez-Dávila, and Borui Sun released a report about recent crime declines in Washington and found that the reduction in shootings and murders is due almost entirely to an increase in the intensity of police activity. Cops started making more proactive arrests — narcotics sweeps, traffic stops, warrant enforcement — and this accomplished what good preemptive policing tends to accomplish. People got caught carrying illegal handguns, which led to some bad guys getting locked up and others deciding it was more prudent to leave the guns at home.

The Guard deployments, by contrast, are associated with a decline in opportunistic property crimes in the times and places where the Guard was deployed.

I think there’s some reason to believe they could’ve been much more effective at combating serious crime had they been in the right places. But they weren’t. They did reduce crime where they were, though.

Local media coverage of this finding has been quite negative for Trump, highlighting the researchers’ finding that the cost-effectiveness of using the National Guard like this is terrible. Guard troops are much more expensive than regular police officers, but also less effective at fighting crime.

So this is a pretty dumb idea all things considered.

That said, as a D.C. resident, if Trump wants to waste federal dollars on reducing petty theft in my neighborhood, I’m not going to object too strongly.

Good, actually

Last but not least, Trump has seriously spruced up some of the aforementioned National Park Service-run urban parks.

I don’t want to exaggerate this. In typical Trump fashion, rather than taking a comprehensive look at the federal government’s genuinely extensive landholdings in the city, he focused a lot on a handful of fountains that tourists are likely to see.

But the fact that these fountains languished in disrepair for years was a real source of frustration to a lot of people in the city, and a number of friends were quietly asking me at one point if I understood how Trump had managed to finally get the Interior Department to care about this. Speaking as someone who was pretty impressed with Doug Burgum’s tenure as governor of North Dakota, who praised him when he was selected for the cabinet, and who has felt burned by his cartoonish behavior around energy issues since taking office, I was really hoping there was a Burgum Redemption Arc here.

The actual answer here turns out to be more banal.

The Park Service needed extra money to make those repairs, but since D.C. is not represented in Congress, Congress kept failing to appropriate the money.

But the N.P.S. collects fees at many national parks, and that money is used to support repairs, among other things. Traditionally that’s meant cycling the money back into the parks that the fees are collected from. But Trump’s idea was that he could poach fee revenue generated by Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and other popular parks and use some of it to fix up the urban parks here in Washington.

As someone who lives in D.C. and is not really much of an outdoorsman, I strongly endorse this course of action.

I also strongly suspect that if Barack Obama or Joe Biden had taken fee revenue away from our patriotic heartland parks and used it to make my neighborhood nicer, they would have ended up impeached. Instead, Republican members of Congress are silent on Trump taking money away from their states to dedicate to local activities in D.C., and there are 10 Democratic senators1 issuing low-key complaints about it.

Fundamentally, though, for all his many flaws, Trump is America’s first urbanist president. He’s a born and raised New Yorker like me, a Knicks fan, a guy who spiked global oil prices for months with his war in Iran, made cars more expensive with tariffs, and fundamentally understands that urban parks are more important than rural recreation.

So as America heads toward the semiquincentennial, I want to thank Trump for that.

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There are just over four months until Election Day, and the fundamentals haven’t moved much: Democrats still hold a generic-ballot edge, President Donald Trump’s approval rating is still underwater by historic margins, and the par…

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At one point the group was meeting with one of the junior PvdA ministers in the fourth Balkenende cabinet, and he said that immigration is a more challenging issue for European social democrats than for Americans. His explanation was that America has a streak of explicit propositional nationalism to it — Superman can talk about “truth, justice, and the American Way,” but there’s no Dutch Way.

I was genuinely taken aback by this and said to him of course there’s a Dutch Way.

He didn’t know what I was talking about, so I told him that I was taught in school very specifically that New York City’s traditions of tolerance and diversity are Dutch values that were passed down to us by the settlers of New Amsterdam. We’re not, like, running around speaking Dutch in New York and certainly not promoting an ethnic state of Dutch-ancestry people. But we celebrate our understanding of Dutch culture and Dutch values, and if we can tell wave after wave of immigrants to New York that they are welcome in the city for Dutch reasons but also must learn to practice open-mindedness and tolerance for Dutch reasons, then surely they can do it in the Netherlands!1

This guy probably thought I was putting him on. Dutch values in New York? So I started talking like crazy conspiracy guy about how the Mets wear orange and blue because the Dodgers wore blue and the Giants wore orange, and orange and blue are the colors of the flag of New York City because those are the colors of the Netherlands. The Knicks, too, wear orange and blue. And of course, Knicks stands for Knickerbockers, which is some kind of long-obsolete ethnic term for people of Dutch ancestry.

The only American president not to be a native English speaker was New York’s own Martin Van Buren, a native Dutch speaker. Brooklyn is named for Breukelen in Utrecht, and Harlem is named for Haarlem in North Holland. New York defines itself as somewhat distinctive from the rest of the United States of America and chooses to do so specifically with reference to a certain notion of Dutch-ness.

I don’t think he bought it.

This was an interesting experience for me, though, because it was a powerful reminder of the extent to which these national or sub-national identities are simultaneously very real and also totally made up.

Imagined communities

There are such things as historical facts. But the idea of history is linked to the idea of storytelling. Good history should be accurate (or at least avoid inaccuracy), but it also involves narrative choices that are beyond questions of fact.

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President Donald Trump’s effort to enact the SAVE America Act, his proposal to overhaul federal election rules, has run into a series of setbacks over the past week. Frustrated by the bill’s lack of progress in the Senate, he…

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I don’t want to exacerbate the tendency for everything that happens in New York to attract more attention than it deserves by writing a post specifically pooh-poohing the Democratic Socialists of America’s big primary wins there. What I do want to say is that part of what makes the wins such an impressive organizational flex is that the people they beat are themselves very left-wing. Even on Israel, it’s not like any of the losers were big pro-Israel outliers. Ritchie Torres, the actual noteworthy moderate among the New York City delegation, won his primary easily. So I don’t know what the stakes are here. I think people will discover that replacing House members who are to the left of the median Democrat with members who are somewhat further left doesn’t actually change anything — and I would caution moderates against getting too emotionally invested in this kind of race.

Another thing that happened this week is that the Adam Gray/Tom Suozzi Promise to America movement signed up eight new members of Congress. They include Vicente Gonzalez, Don Davis, and Laura Gillen, who are holding down some of the caucus’s toughest seats, along with Kristen McDonald Rivet, an electoral superstar who should have been the establishment’s choice for the Michigan Senate race.

They also picked up some congressional candidates including Bobby Pulido, who is going to be a huge star if he manages to win a tough race in a gerrymandered seat in South Texas, and Jamie Ager, a farmer running in North Carolina who is actually practicing a kind of throwback rural politics rather than just marketing that kind of politics to college graduates. I saw some speculation on Twitter about why the leftist insurgency isn’t gaining ground in Chicago, but the obvious answer is the left already won power in Chicago and voters have hated it, so the left doesn’t talk about Chicago anymore. In the Bay Area, Matt Mahan and Dan Lurie are leading a wave of pro-growth reformist mayors who represent what comes after left-wing failures, and I think we’ll see a movement like that emerge in Chicago too. That doesn’t mean failure is inevitable — you can always pursue the Zohran Mamdani path of keeping his predecessor’s key policies on crime and education in place, not raising taxes on city residents or city businesses, and focusing on zoning reform and foreign policy.

But it’s just to say that the real work is not fighting rear-guard actions on behalf of lifelong progressives who’ve just fallen out of step with the fashions of the time. It’s building the next thing.

Amos Karlsen: A couple of (maybe) contradictions about public opinion I’ve been wondering about lately: (1) People are loathe to acknowledge tradeoffs, eg wanting to cut taxes but not spending, yet also excessively zero-sum, eg thinking Trump must be solid on economics to balance out his poor character/corruption/election stealing attempts. (2) Everyone is super negative/pessimistic about politics, and yet also seem to believe unrealistic promises like Biden unifying the country or Trump lowering prices — or at least believe them enough to be disappointed when they don’t come to fruition. Not sure if there’s an explanation here, or if I’m just mischaracterizing the situation, but feels like maybe something weird going on.

These are shrewd observations on your part, and I think it’s largely all downstream of the stealth democracy phenomenon that gives rise to these populist paradoxes.

I’ve written about this before, but, to briefly recap, the thesis of the book by Elizabeth Theiss-Morse and John R. Hibbing is that most of the public is fundamentally hostile to what political scientists would consider the normal operation of a democratic republic. That is to say, voters view the existence of sharp partisan conflict as evidence that key actors in the system are not on the level. If people of goodwill and integrity sit down around the table, they should be able to just work things out and solve problems. This is not true. But if you keep in mind that most people think that it’s true, a lot of other phenomena snap into place.

Notably, this reconciles the aversion to acknowledging tradeoffs with the tendency toward an excessively zero-sum worldview.

A tradeoff-acknowledger says that generous pensions and medical care for the elderly sound good because the elderly are broadly sympathetic, but also that dedicating large amounts of resources to this is bad for economic growth. One reason that political conflict exists among people of goodwill and integrity is that wanting to take care of the elderly and wanting to ensure economic growth are both totally reasonable ideas, but there is a conflict, so reasonable people disagree about what to do.

But the stealth democracy framework rejects that. It can’t possibly be the case that democratic disagreement exists among people of goodwill due to genuine tradeoffs.

What can be the case is that corrupt or malign forces are appropriating resources to clearly illegitimate ends. So we get people adopting a very zero-sum view of immigrants or billionaires or believing that if we eliminate USAID or stop giving money to Israel that somehow all these tradeoffs will vanish.

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Not to be melodramatic, but I really believe the future of American democracy has been hanging in the balance the past few years.

January 6, as it played out, was more farce than tragedy. But normally, a president who becomes unpopular and loses power is discredited within his own political party. The fact that Donald Trump was able to survive not only electoral defeat but the specter of a failed putsch was an ominous portent for the country.

His ability to recapture the presidential nomination and then recapture the office itself is terrifying. And his second term has been a true “no guardrails” presidency.

It’s not that he’s suddenly a political superman who’s capable of anything; he remains quite constrained in his ability to accomplish all kinds of things. But the entire Republican Party has proven, time and again, that it will indulge Trump in essentially limitless levels of inappropriate conduct.

We have flagrantly unfit leadership at the F.B.I. We’ve seen repeated purges of senior military commanders. Bill Pulte is not only abusing power at the Federal Housing Finance Agency in previously unthinkable ways, but that willingness to abuse power was essentially his qualification for promotion to serve as director of national intelligence. With his pardons, Trump has made clear that there will be no legal accountability for any crimes conducted by his political allies, and he’s had many appointees across a range of agencies make clear that the White House can and will order prosecutions and regulatory crackdowns on his enemies.

The bad news for Americans’ well-being — but good news for the long-term future of the republic — is that Trump also massively fumbled the bag.

Rather than following a template for political success that would have allowed him to consolidate power, Trump has chosen overreach in almost every domain. And while his opportunistic promise to deliver a lower price level was never achievable, he was absolutely not forced to exacerbate inflation across multiple dimensions. These were voluntary blunders that have given the opposition a chance to beat him.

And the opposition has really needed good luck, because despite widespread alarm about these threats, the entire progressive movement has done less than nothing to respond to them.

While a hearty few souls have been organizing No Kings protests, the vast majority of activist energy has gone into a series of blue-on-blue primaries in safe districts, typically pitting an “establishment” politician whose views are already well to the left of the median voter against an insurgent whose views are identical on 90 percent of salient issues but who also says oligarchy and hates Israel. Even outside the circles of hardcore insurgents, the broad left-of-center media has displayed about 1,000 times more curiosity about what it takes to win primary elections in New York City than what it takes to beat Republicans in red-leaning areas.

But winning in red-leaning areas is what Democrats need to do.

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If they can avoid blowing relatively easy races in Maine and Michigan, the decisive Senate race will be in Iowa or Ohio. With the Voting Rights Act gone, Republicans have been able to score a decisive advantage in gerrymandering and skew the House map heavily in favor of Trump, as the Senate already was. Democrats could easily win 52 percent of the vote nationally and see a Republican trifecta confirmed in place — except with Bill Cassidy and Mitch McConnell replaced by MAGA cultists.

The actual outlook, though, is better than that. Trump’s blundering and unpopularity, plus some good House and Senate recruiting, have put Democrats in a reasonable position to win.

Flipping both houses of Congress — and thus delivering a clear sign to American elites that this is not the time to surrender to authoritarianism — is not the most probable outcome, but it is on the table. To seize this chance, though, requires Trump opponents to focus on the thing that actually matters: not whether safe seat Democrats can be compelled to be even more uncompromising, but whether Democrats can win the key races.

The House is the states

Democrats have long been favored to flip the House, and their lead in the generic ballot is so large that all the gerrymandering probably won’t make a difference.

It is worth flagging, though, that with Virginia Democrats’ effort to gerrymander thrown out by the state’s own court and a bunch of red states in the South unleashing aggressive new gerrymanders thanks to the Supreme Court killing the Voting Rights Act, the landscape is now genuinely quite skewed. It would be historically unusual for an unpopular incumbent to see a big recovery between now and Election Day. But if Republicans can depress the Democrats’ generic ballot edge from its current range of six or seven points to something like four, the G.O.P. could potentially win the House.

The big issue here, though, is really 2028.

There are basically two things that could happen between this November and the end of the next cycle. First, there are several blue states that are not currently gerrymander-maxed but whose own state rules made it impossible to redraw maps in the time between the Supreme Court’s ruling and Election Day 2026. Over the course of two more years, though, Illinois will almost certainly draw an additional blue seat. New York will likely draw one and perhaps two additional blue seats. Maryland will probably create one.

But to get to within striking distance of even, Democrats will also need action from Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota, and Washington state, all of which are less certain for various reasons, including the fact that their ability to act likely depends on the midterms. Slow Boring is working with collaborators on some future donation recommendations that will include strategically targeted state legislative races to try to help with this, so stay tuned!

But another factor in play is Georgia.

Georgia did not join the red-state gerrymandering party, but it will have a new governor next year. If that governor is a Republican, Georgia will probably redraw. If the governor is a Democrat, it won’t. Democrats had a couple of strong contenders in the field, but the voters seem determined to go with former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who isn’t a terrible nominee but seems like clearly the worst option. Nonetheless, Trump is unpopular enough that Bottoms has a decent shot at winning. There are also secret stakes in this race where if Bottoms wins, Jon Ossoff can run for president or V.P. without giving away a seat.

The Senate paradox

In the upper house, we have an odd situation in which Democrats seem to be in an unexpectedly strong position in some of the more challenging states, while a relatively easy race in Maine has become complicated and what ought to have been a layup in Michigan has turned into a clusterfuck.

First the good. Mary Peltola is genuinely favored to win Alaska’s Senate seat. Without her, the whole landscape would look very different. Peltola’s life would’ve been a lot easier if she’d run for governor, but she chose to run for Senate.

More than anyone else, she has “met the moment” in a real way, and Chuck Schumer talking her into it was a huge win. Every progressive NGO leader who ever gave her a hard time about anything while she was in the House should (but won’t) acknowledge that all their hopes and dreams hinge on her and make their apologies.

In Iowa, by contrast, the best candidate (Rob Sand) did run for governor, but Democrats still ended up with a really good candidate in Josh Turek, a Paralympian who holds a red seat in the state legislature. Zach Wahls should have done the right thing and stood down rather than turning this into a pointlessly expensive primary, but the voters chose correctly and the Sand-Turek ticket should have some complementarities and mutually reinforcing strengths.

In Texas, what I’ve seen so far from James Talarico suggests he is taking the obligation to win seriously. He’s seized the center ground on energy — touting “all of the above” in contrast to Trump’s efforts to kneecap renewables — and he’s moved toward the center on trans issues. He also appears to be collaborating with South Texas moderate Hispanics on a tactical level in a way that will hopefully unlock a good border message. This is a tough race that will cost a fortune and probably end in the election of crooked scumbag Ken Paxton, but the case for hope is real.

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Ohio is the tough Senate race that I feel the most queasy about. Re-running Sherrod Brown makes some sense on paper but also strikes me as a little uninspired. Brown has moderated on cryptocurrency, which is good in the sense that it’s good to move to the center, but I think it’s a bit odd to treat his 2024 defeat as all about crypto spending. I was not a huge fan of his prior stance on this, but there are legitimate criticisms of the crypto industry and being anti-crypto was deeply consistent with Brown’s longtime populist persona.

To me, what separates the Sherrod Brown who won repeatedly in Ohio from the one who lost in 2024 is that the earlier Brown was a moderate on energy, while the 2024 Brown seemed like a deer in the headlights on Biden-era immigration issues. He’s polling okay in this race and I hope he pulls it out, but I don’t feel confident in his campaign’s approach.

Much has already been written about Maine, and because I’ll be in Hancock County Maine (where Graham Platner is from) for most of the summer, I’ll probably end up covering this a lot. I just want to note here that Maine had a ton of ambitious, age-appropriate, well-vetted politicians, absolutely none of whom ran for Senate. That includes guys like Troy Jackson, a Bernie factionalist whose politics I don’t really agree with but who would have brought everything to the table that Platner fans like without some of the downsides.

This brings us to Michigan, a true fiasco.

Gretchen Whitmer would have cleared the field and easily won this race. But she pulled an anti-Peltola and is throwing a promising political career away for no clear reason.

Meanwhile, nothing this cycle has caused me more heartache than this primary. We have Abdul El-Sayed, a Bernie factionalist, running not in one of the D+infinity House seats that are the left’s specialty, but statewide in a swing state where even small underperformance could be deadly. The establishment kinda sorta but not really consolidated around Haley Stevens as their candidate but, while Stevens is a moderate, she’s actually a weak electoral performer. Mallory McMorrow, the third force in the race, has more political skills than Stevens, but those skills have mostly been deployed in ugly fighting with Stevens.

I have friends in both the McMorrow and Stevens camps, and unfortunately instead of working together to fix the party, the narcissism of small differences is creating a situation where El-Sayed will likely win the primary.

It’s a massively frustrating situation. Even without Whitmer in the race, there were better options like Kristen McDonald Rivet (one of the top electoral performers in the House) and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan (who instead chose to run for governor as an independent and then drop out). Maine is the bluest state on the 2026 map, but it’s tough for Democrats because Susan Collins is tough. Michigan should have been easy, but instead it’s become very hard — a true blunder.

Tactics versus strategy

I think the tactical efforts of Democratic Party leaders have been a little under-appreciated.

Hakeem Jeffries has his people collaborating on actual House votes, winning discharge petitions, and doing a surprisingly good job of influencing the news agenda. With the exception of one House race in California (pour one out for Jasmeet Bains), he’s managed to keep the factional infighting firewalled from the important races. Redistricting ended up being fucked, but that’s not his fault.

Schumer, I think, is guilty of a legitimate brain fart in Maine, where there were many better places to park his hopes and dreams than in Janet Mills.

But the Michigan situation, while a total nightmare, is not his fault. It’s not like he forgot to call Whitmer; she just chose to do the wrong thing. Iowa, Alaska, and Texas have all worked out quite well, and while I’m kind of gritting my teeth about Ohio, I do understand the play and I think this race is basically on Brown to read his old press coverage and talk to some steelworkers and people in the building trades about energy.

But as a guy whose whole thing is complaining about Democrats, I really do want to emphasize that 80 percent of what’s keeping Democrats in the game here is Trump blundering.

To that you can add some strong tactical optimizations around candidate selection and messaging emphasis. My moderate-aligned friends who work in ads and testing are all really happy with the direction the party is going in. I am less pleased, because I think operatives tend to massively overrate paid media and direct-to-camera videos relative to strategic position-taking.

But the national party has not made even token gestures at a rebrand. There’s nothing like the Republicans’ “young guns” from 2010 or the brand refresh Democrats did in 2006.

I think Democrats think they’ve changed their pitch on immigration after the Biden fiasco, but I genuinely don’t understand what they think is different about it. They know that “affordability” is their best talking point against Trump, but that has meant rebranding ideas that were mostly developed in Obama’s second term rather than an actual renewed focus on interest rates and productivity.

I’m trying to not be too whiny about this, because Weber specifically warns against the person who will “crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer.” The stakes are high, but there are real reasons for hope in these midterms and green shoots of the kinds of change that need to happen.

Democrats have under-reacted relative to what will maximize their odds in the midterms, and I really don’t want them to get complacent if they flip the House with two seats to spare. But there have been positive changes, and taking advantage of Trump’s screwups is a legitimate way to conduct politics. Relative to the disastrous situation the party was facing in the winter of 2024–25, things are looking up.

It’s going to take a bunch of small things all going right to make me feel good about this November. But it’s definitely possible if we all pull together and walk the narrow path to save the country.

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At the same time, my strong sense is that among Democratic Party elites, a superficial consensus around being annoyed at Joe and Jill is masking deeper disagreements about what, exactly, they did wrong.

Jerusalem and I decided it might be fun to try to put together our rankings of the Bidens’ mistakes.

I don’t want to spoil the actual list — you’ll have to listen to the pod for that — but personally I take the somewhat contrarian view that the decision to run for a second term and then drop out too late to avoid an open primary was fine. It was maybe good, even. I’m also a defender of Biden’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. This obviously was not perfect. Like every other president in history, he did not successfully resolve the conflict and generate a just and peaceful outcome. But the rapidly congealed conventional wisdom on the left that he was complicit in a genocide is, I think, both factually wrong and also a kind of cope — a way for progressives to sharply distance themselves from his administration without grappling with its substantive failures on domestic policy.

Jerusalem is less kind to Biden on those two points, but correspondingly kinder on some others. All told, I think this is the kind of conversation that Democrats really need to be having about the past administration — almost everyone these days agrees that the party needs to change and offer something different, but what exactly is that going to mean?

As for future episodes, in a couple of weeks we’ll be reviewing Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” so grab a copy and read along!

The episode’s transcript will be available for paying subscribers after the paywall in this post.

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New episodes post every Thursday.

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