Is there any way when we bundle donations to candidates to ask them not to add our emails to their fundraising lists? I have to flag a bunch more spam every time I donate.
Wait, Matt, are you saying that Zach Wahls is a good candidate in the Iowa Senate race? He’s from an extremely safe seat and was an awful minority leader. Sage is a good candidate, though I wonder if he can raise enough money.
Slow Boring's endorsements always stand out as principled, practical reasoning rather than partisan bias. What would be even better, though, is if thousands of voters with very different political views could make endorsements by working through the issues, see where real agreement lies, and then identify the candidates who truly match those shared priorities.
Endorsements structured that way wouldn’t just show one analyst’s opinion—they’d demonstrate a clear cross-party agreement on which candidates truly align with what voters want government to do.
I am currently testing a structured, web-based process to see whether a shared-priority map can be created easily and clearly enough to support consensus-driven endorsements. If successful, it could eventually help organize statewide groups of solution-focused voters around candidates who align with those priorities.
If you’re interested in the experiment or want to participate, the link is in my profile.
I love the spirit of this post because it has actionable advice to support the mission. Matt, I’d love a post at some point on other specific investments / donations that you’d recommend to support an increase in US centrist / “common sense” policies. Donating to candidates is certainly important in the short term, but in the longer term how can we persuade the large portion of the country that prefers either Authoritarianism or Socialism that those aren’t very good options?
Chris Pappas is my congressman and running for Shaheen’s open senate seat in NH. I think he’s the most moderate of the 3 declared democratic candidates so far and the most likely to keep the seat blue. NH1 has been inching to the right though so if he wins the senate seat, there’s a chance of the house seat flipping if the republicans nominate someone sane. (Karolime Leavitt was the R candidate in 2024 so sanity is clearly not a prerequisite)
Good lord the Jared Golden shit pisses me off. It’s yet another symbol that there is a meaningful part of the democratic establishment that genuinely does not value beating Trump or delivering for Americans more than their own comfort.
Scott Weiner doesn’t know what a woman is, he’s for men in women’s sports, locker rooms and prisons. If you watched the Black, lesbian woman confront him about the absurdity of encountering a man in the women’s locker room at Golds Gym, he was smug and self-righteous. A hard NO. He’ll likely be elected because it’s SF but he doesn’t fit the qualities you looked for in other candidates.
Crazy it has been five years, congratulations! My subscription just renewed today which means I must have subscribed right when you started it, because I definitely subscribed in the first year. Groovy!
To put a finer point on this post and the era we live in, federal employees probably can't give hard money donations for this upcoming cycle unless they're comfortable losing their jobs or ending up on some sort of right-wing website. This is bad, and I hope those of us who can donate do what we can to return to a more open political environment.
So, Jared Golden, the Democrats’ MVP in Congress, is not running for reelection, and Matt Y focuses his annoyance on … progressives and “media cool kids in Brooklyn” who weren’t sufficiently nice or appreciative of Golden, so now he’s leaving! Look what you made him do!
It’s like an intraparty version of Murc’s Law: anything that goes wrong is the fault of those no-good, meanie lefty progressives!
Sigh. Look, I’m sure that being a Democrat in Congress nowadays sucks absolute ass, and it’s easy for me to judge when I don’t have to deal with it myself. But also, come on. The recurring critique of the Democrats is that we’re too soft and feminine, and we need to be all manly and tough and macho and FYF to appeal to more working class men. In light of that, a man (and a veteran no less, if I remember correctly) going “womp womp, I’m leaving my seat, most likely to be won by a Republican, because people are too mean to me” is unseemly.
Dude do you have kids? Because I think framing it as “wah people are being mean to me” is pretty disingenuous. I’m a woman, but I can tell you the most manly, macho thing a guy can do in my eyes is say he’s putting aside his personal ego to protect his children. He explicitly said he wanted to step away from the ugliness it was exposing his children too. If you want to make yourself feel better by acting like that’s wimpy, go ahead, but it takes balls. The question is did Democrats do what they could to make the environment his family was exposed to better or worse while he was in office and if the answer isn’t better, why on earth not, given how valuable he was?
It's really disappointing, and I can't understand it from a "true believer", wanting to make a difference perspective. Which means it's something else, something less heroic and potential more human (fallible). But with his performance, he probably had a shot at Senate or Governor one day (of his choosing), and gave up on it
Or it's the added stress of having to drain resources in a primary battle and then having to fight yet another uphill battle in the general election, all to give more power to people who actively make you and your family's life more miserable.
No one really knows for sure why he's not running, but I think it's silly the way people on the left like you clearly disdain him but also get really mad at him for not running.
It's not Golden's fault that the left is too stupid to win in swing districts.
I wasn't aware congressional seats were given in perpetuity to whomever won a primary and general once.
But I'm sure in a way Matt is right, in the sense Jared Golden was likely annoyed he actually had to win over Democratic voters and appeal to them for the first time in nearly a decade as opposed to just play both sides are bad guy for an entire campaign.
Plus it didn't help as seen in polling that just maybe, his dumb pro-tariff stance wasn't actually that popular in this district and it wasn't the progressives that made him support that.
All I'm going to say is Omar & Tilab both faced far more serious primary campaigns than Dunlap likely was and they didn't take their ball and go home.
Golden won the Democratic primary every year he was on the ballot, so clearly he was successful in winning over Democratic voters.
But if you're right, then if a dumb cowardly moderate with no support from Democratic voters like Golden could win this district, then surely a True Progressive with the full support of The Base should be able to easily win.
How much do you think Dunlap will win this district by if he wins the primary? 5 points? 10?
I'm not saying Dunlap will win, but at a certain point, if you want to be the Democratic party nominee, you have to win over Democratic voters, especially when those Democratic voters have another choice.
I don't think Jared Golden should've dropped out.
I think Jared Golden should've proven himself to be the great politician all the centrists and moderates claim he is.
He did win over 90% of the Democratic voters in every election.
Compare that to someone like Zohran Mamdani who only won 66% of Democrats despite his only opponents being a Republican and a Trump-endorsed sexual predator.
But again, if everything is saying is accurate, then Dunlap will win easily. He only won't win easily if you're wrong.
He never actually had significant primary competition until this time, which he turned tail and ran. I bet a competitive primary would've resulted in far more votes in said primary than any other past primary Golden was involved in.
I never said Dunalp was guaranteed to win and it's weird you keep claiming that.
At the end of the day, when the time came, Jared Golden thought it was above him to actually compete for the votes of Democratic primary voters when they may actually be in question.
I've met Cait Conley face to face, and personally was sold enough to send her a substantial donation. Aside from the great bio (fourth gen in the district, West Point grad and served a decade, then worked national security policy for years), she is really artful at bringing any topic back around to how it impacts working class families in the Hudson Valley, without seeming like she's ignoring the question or stretching -- she conveys that _this is what she actually cares about_, and she sees actual connections to those issues and whatever you said. She doesn't sound like she's just trying to fit in non-sequitur talking points.
She also talks about the importance of each Democratic candidate truly representing their constituents, in a way that vibes with Ezra's recent piece about how the party lost its way and how it can win again.
We discussed public safety briefly and, without having heard about Matt's "Police For America" idea, she basically described something similar -- the importance of improving the pipeline for police so that it's affordable for city governments to hire enough good officers. She generally is big on the idea that we need to bring back strong social respect for a lot of under-supplied public service and trade jobs, rather than having this cynical world where the aspiration is to make money by grabbing attention as an influencer.
There are a couple other maybe-competitive candidates in the primary, but they are just nowhere near Conley's level, IMHO. Beth Davidson, the other candidate who has raised a fair bit, is pretty NIMBY if you read her website. The polling that's been done of a head-to-head between either Davidson or Conley and the incumbent Repub shows Conley something like ten net points stronger -- Davidson losing by five, Conley winning by five. The other guy in the race who has been actively courting Abundance folks, Chatzky, has serious weaknesses. (a) He hasn't raised much but is self-funding (which obviously is convenient in some ways, but also opens up the "he's trying to buy a seat" line of attack), (b) he is on tape taking a position on Israel/Palestine stuff that caters to the activist class, which is pretty left of the median voter in the district, and (c) in a recent interview he made a Katie-Porter style gaffe, saying he didn't need to appeal to Republicans at all. Which strictly speaking may be true -- you can get a majority with 30-some percent Dems, plus 20-some of no-party-preference. But it's a stupid thing to say in public, in a decidedly purple district where you absolutely should be trying to peel off some anti-Trump registered Republicans.
Since this district was drawn, it has had two close elections, in both of which the perceived-as-moderate Republican Lawler won. (He just-barely beat an incumbent in 2022, which was a relatively worse year for Repubs; then won by more than six points as the incumbent in 2024.) If we want to hold this district for the long-run, we need somebody who can survive the next _red_ wave, not just barely squeak in during a blue wave. We need a "common sense Dem" who _represents the whole of the district_, not somebody who actively _says_ he's only even _trying_ to just barely reach fifty percent.
Donated! We love actionable ways to win elections!
Is there any way when we bundle donations to candidates to ask them not to add our emails to their fundraising lists? I have to flag a bunch more spam every time I donate.
Wait, Matt, are you saying that Zach Wahls is a good candidate in the Iowa Senate race? He’s from an extremely safe seat and was an awful minority leader. Sage is a good candidate, though I wonder if he can raise enough money.
Slow Boring's endorsements always stand out as principled, practical reasoning rather than partisan bias. What would be even better, though, is if thousands of voters with very different political views could make endorsements by working through the issues, see where real agreement lies, and then identify the candidates who truly match those shared priorities.
Endorsements structured that way wouldn’t just show one analyst’s opinion—they’d demonstrate a clear cross-party agreement on which candidates truly align with what voters want government to do.
I am currently testing a structured, web-based process to see whether a shared-priority map can be created easily and clearly enough to support consensus-driven endorsements. If successful, it could eventually help organize statewide groups of solution-focused voters around candidates who align with those priorities.
If you’re interested in the experiment or want to participate, the link is in my profile.
I love the spirit of this post because it has actionable advice to support the mission. Matt, I’d love a post at some point on other specific investments / donations that you’d recommend to support an increase in US centrist / “common sense” policies. Donating to candidates is certainly important in the short term, but in the longer term how can we persuade the large portion of the country that prefers either Authoritarianism or Socialism that those aren’t very good options?
Chris Pappas is my congressman and running for Shaheen’s open senate seat in NH. I think he’s the most moderate of the 3 declared democratic candidates so far and the most likely to keep the seat blue. NH1 has been inching to the right though so if he wins the senate seat, there’s a chance of the house seat flipping if the republicans nominate someone sane. (Karolime Leavitt was the R candidate in 2024 so sanity is clearly not a prerequisite)
Also, his father invented the chicken tender.
BTW, just in case anyone didn't have enough to worry, spiders of different species are apparently now cooperating on a previously inconceivable scale: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/science/biggest-spiderweb-sulfur-cave.html?unlocked_article_code=1.008.mqcM.6SrFAmMYz89e&smid=url-share
Kill it with fire.
Good lord the Jared Golden shit pisses me off. It’s yet another symbol that there is a meaningful part of the democratic establishment that genuinely does not value beating Trump or delivering for Americans more than their own comfort.
Scott Weiner doesn’t know what a woman is, he’s for men in women’s sports, locker rooms and prisons. If you watched the Black, lesbian woman confront him about the absurdity of encountering a man in the women’s locker room at Golds Gym, he was smug and self-righteous. A hard NO. He’ll likely be elected because it’s SF but he doesn’t fit the qualities you looked for in other candidates.
I don't care if Wiener is a YIMBY. He actively advocates for housing violent male criminals in women's prisons. Don't give him money.
Crazy it has been five years, congratulations! My subscription just renewed today which means I must have subscribed right when you started it, because I definitely subscribed in the first year. Groovy!
To put a finer point on this post and the era we live in, federal employees probably can't give hard money donations for this upcoming cycle unless they're comfortable losing their jobs or ending up on some sort of right-wing website. This is bad, and I hope those of us who can donate do what we can to return to a more open political environment.
So, Jared Golden, the Democrats’ MVP in Congress, is not running for reelection, and Matt Y focuses his annoyance on … progressives and “media cool kids in Brooklyn” who weren’t sufficiently nice or appreciative of Golden, so now he’s leaving! Look what you made him do!
It’s like an intraparty version of Murc’s Law: anything that goes wrong is the fault of those no-good, meanie lefty progressives!
Sigh. Look, I’m sure that being a Democrat in Congress nowadays sucks absolute ass, and it’s easy for me to judge when I don’t have to deal with it myself. But also, come on. The recurring critique of the Democrats is that we’re too soft and feminine, and we need to be all manly and tough and macho and FYF to appeal to more working class men. In light of that, a man (and a veteran no less, if I remember correctly) going “womp womp, I’m leaving my seat, most likely to be won by a Republican, because people are too mean to me” is unseemly.
Dude do you have kids? Because I think framing it as “wah people are being mean to me” is pretty disingenuous. I’m a woman, but I can tell you the most manly, macho thing a guy can do in my eyes is say he’s putting aside his personal ego to protect his children. He explicitly said he wanted to step away from the ugliness it was exposing his children too. If you want to make yourself feel better by acting like that’s wimpy, go ahead, but it takes balls. The question is did Democrats do what they could to make the environment his family was exposed to better or worse while he was in office and if the answer isn’t better, why on earth not, given how valuable he was?
She can of course speak for herself, but drosophilist is a woman with two kids (one a newborn).
It's really disappointing, and I can't understand it from a "true believer", wanting to make a difference perspective. Which means it's something else, something less heroic and potential more human (fallible). But with his performance, he probably had a shot at Senate or Governor one day (of his choosing), and gave up on it
Or it's the added stress of having to drain resources in a primary battle and then having to fight yet another uphill battle in the general election, all to give more power to people who actively make you and your family's life more miserable.
No one really knows for sure why he's not running, but I think it's silly the way people on the left like you clearly disdain him but also get really mad at him for not running.
It's not Golden's fault that the left is too stupid to win in swing districts.
I wasn't aware congressional seats were given in perpetuity to whomever won a primary and general once.
But I'm sure in a way Matt is right, in the sense Jared Golden was likely annoyed he actually had to win over Democratic voters and appeal to them for the first time in nearly a decade as opposed to just play both sides are bad guy for an entire campaign.
Plus it didn't help as seen in polling that just maybe, his dumb pro-tariff stance wasn't actually that popular in this district and it wasn't the progressives that made him support that.
All I'm going to say is Omar & Tilab both faced far more serious primary campaigns than Dunlap likely was and they didn't take their ball and go home.
Golden won the Democratic primary every year he was on the ballot, so clearly he was successful in winning over Democratic voters.
But if you're right, then if a dumb cowardly moderate with no support from Democratic voters like Golden could win this district, then surely a True Progressive with the full support of The Base should be able to easily win.
How much do you think Dunlap will win this district by if he wins the primary? 5 points? 10?
I'm not saying Dunlap will win, but at a certain point, if you want to be the Democratic party nominee, you have to win over Democratic voters, especially when those Democratic voters have another choice.
I don't think Jared Golden should've dropped out.
I think Jared Golden should've proven himself to be the great politician all the centrists and moderates claim he is.
He did win over 90% of the Democratic voters in every election.
Compare that to someone like Zohran Mamdani who only won 66% of Democrats despite his only opponents being a Republican and a Trump-endorsed sexual predator.
But again, if everything is saying is accurate, then Dunlap will win easily. He only won't win easily if you're wrong.
He never actually had significant primary competition until this time, which he turned tail and ran. I bet a competitive primary would've resulted in far more votes in said primary than any other past primary Golden was involved in.
I never said Dunalp was guaranteed to win and it's weird you keep claiming that.
At the end of the day, when the time came, Jared Golden thought it was above him to actually compete for the votes of Democratic primary voters when they may actually be in question.
I've met Cait Conley face to face, and personally was sold enough to send her a substantial donation. Aside from the great bio (fourth gen in the district, West Point grad and served a decade, then worked national security policy for years), she is really artful at bringing any topic back around to how it impacts working class families in the Hudson Valley, without seeming like she's ignoring the question or stretching -- she conveys that _this is what she actually cares about_, and she sees actual connections to those issues and whatever you said. She doesn't sound like she's just trying to fit in non-sequitur talking points.
She also talks about the importance of each Democratic candidate truly representing their constituents, in a way that vibes with Ezra's recent piece about how the party lost its way and how it can win again.
We discussed public safety briefly and, without having heard about Matt's "Police For America" idea, she basically described something similar -- the importance of improving the pipeline for police so that it's affordable for city governments to hire enough good officers. She generally is big on the idea that we need to bring back strong social respect for a lot of under-supplied public service and trade jobs, rather than having this cynical world where the aspiration is to make money by grabbing attention as an influencer.
There are a couple other maybe-competitive candidates in the primary, but they are just nowhere near Conley's level, IMHO. Beth Davidson, the other candidate who has raised a fair bit, is pretty NIMBY if you read her website. The polling that's been done of a head-to-head between either Davidson or Conley and the incumbent Repub shows Conley something like ten net points stronger -- Davidson losing by five, Conley winning by five. The other guy in the race who has been actively courting Abundance folks, Chatzky, has serious weaknesses. (a) He hasn't raised much but is self-funding (which obviously is convenient in some ways, but also opens up the "he's trying to buy a seat" line of attack), (b) he is on tape taking a position on Israel/Palestine stuff that caters to the activist class, which is pretty left of the median voter in the district, and (c) in a recent interview he made a Katie-Porter style gaffe, saying he didn't need to appeal to Republicans at all. Which strictly speaking may be true -- you can get a majority with 30-some percent Dems, plus 20-some of no-party-preference. But it's a stupid thing to say in public, in a decidedly purple district where you absolutely should be trying to peel off some anti-Trump registered Republicans.
Since this district was drawn, it has had two close elections, in both of which the perceived-as-moderate Republican Lawler won. (He just-barely beat an incumbent in 2022, which was a relatively worse year for Repubs; then won by more than six points as the incumbent in 2024.) If we want to hold this district for the long-run, we need somebody who can survive the next _red_ wave, not just barely squeak in during a blue wave. We need a "common sense Dem" who _represents the whole of the district_, not somebody who actively _says_ he's only even _trying_ to just barely reach fifty percent.
This is great! Would love to see this at the state legislative level too since that seems to be where actual laws are passing!
I donated. But can you consider partnering with oath.vote in the future? They keep your information more private than ActBlue. Thanks.