Mark Joseph Stern: I've already laid out the blitz of executive actions that the next Democratic president needs to undertake immediately to undo the damage of Trumpism. But this question points toward an uncomfortable reality: To survive and endure, the next administration's agenda must be accompanied by a suite of structural reforms that will, over time, make the Supreme Court more reflective of popular will. Congress absolutely needs to add states to the union, starting with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett launched a campaign Monday for the U.S. Senate in Texas, bringing a national profile to a race that may be critical to Democrats' long-shot hopes of reclaiming a Senate majority in next year's midterm elections. Crockett, one of Congress' most outspoken Democrats and a frequent target of GOP attacks, jumped into the race on the final day of qualifying in Texas.
Sherrill, a four-term Democratic congresswoman who was first elected when she flipped a conservative U.S. House district in the anti- Donald Trump wave of 2018, said she had campaigned all year to "say no" to the notion that Trump was leaving his opponents deflated and powerless. She went on to defeat her Republican rival, the former state legislator and three-time gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli, by fourteen points-and watched Democrats win by similarly large margins in Virginia, California, and New York.
In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump carried Tennessee's Seventh Congressional District by 22 points. Last night, in a special election to represent the district, the Republican Matt Van Epps won by only nine points, defeating the Democratic State Representative Aftyn Behn. Trump celebrated the outcome on Truth Social as a "BIG Congressional WIN," but the margin of victory in a deep-red district is ominous for Republicans. Van Epps underperformed Trump by 13 percentage points, a sign that the party is vulnerable heading into the 2026 midterms.
Despite recent wins by individual Democratic candidates in elections that focused on the issue of affordability, the Democratic Party is still in trouble. And it's not just the current state of Republican control of the White House and Congress, but also a supermajority of conservatives on the Supreme Court, seemingly hellbent on overturning hard-fought liberties and the Constitution itself. While the Republicans, led by President Trump, are outright denying that prices from food to healthcare continue to rise,
There are a whole lot of MAGA lunatics on the Republican side of the Congressional aisle, but if one is listing off the absolute craziest, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's name goes at the top. She, after all, is the congresswoman who theorized that Jewish space lasers sparked the California wildfires, that the government controls the weather, and that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
I actually wanted to read a line from an op-ed that Long Island Congressman Tom Suozzi wrote in the New York Times over the weekend, because he said something that, frankly, is probably going to make a lot of your listeners' heads explode. And my head explode a little, but it's worth hearing. He said Democrats must concede that Donald Trump was right about the importance of securing the border.
"I've heard it said that hope is the consequence of action more than its cause," he told David Leonhardt while appearing on the New York Times Podcast, The Opinions, "and that's something I try to think about a lot in this moment. Instead of waiting around for hope, we actually have an obligation - a responsibility - to build hope, and that hope is the result of what we do in this moment."
The age of the conventional Democrat is over. The time of the Democratic contrarian has come. So says Adam Jentleson, anyway. The veteran political operative and former adviser to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently launched a think tank that asks Democratic candidates to ignore pressure from the far left, take positions outside the "liberal box," and be a lot more "heterodox" in general.
As President Donald Trump openly contemplates sending military forces into more American cities, the leading congressional Democrats almost invariably describe his actions as an attempt to create a "distraction" from something else - whether that's the cost of living, the massive Medicaid cuts he signed into law, or the controversy around the Jeffrey Epstein files. That reflex captures the overwhelming preference of top DC Democrats to frame the 2026 election on familiar partisan grounds, particularly the charge that Trump has failed in his core 2024 promise to bring down the cost of living for average families.
Stop me if you've heard this one before: As an aggressive MAGA policy initiative lurches into gear, Democrats fret over a just-so messaging response and generally dither over the prospect of alienating an increasingly mythic political center. As the initiative in question sows fear and terror, steamrolls the separation of powers, and generally disrupts whatever remains of normal life under conditions of authoritarian siege, it becomes massively unpopular.
A U.S. District Judge has barred federal agents from conducting detention stops in Southern California without reasonable suspicion of immigration law violations. Agents cannot rely solely on factors like race, ethnicity, or language.
