Rural Battlegrounds

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Marcia Brown, Samuel Benson and Rachel Shin at Politico:

Democrats are accustomed to losing in rural America — especially to Donald Trump. Now they’re hoping the president’s own policies might prove to be the leverage they need going into next year’s midterms.

The party faces immense challenges in farm country that have overwhelmingly voted Republican for decades and turned out in droves on the president’s behalf three times. But over the past year, those same communities have borne the brunt of his tariff agenda, health care center closures, lingering inflation and cuts to public lands programs.

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The party is trying to replace wishful thinking with a new shoe-leather strategy in rural communities where it has long lacked a presence and is deploying unhappy farmers in media campaigns. If Democrats mean to retake Congress in the midterms or have a shot at the White House in 2028, their candidates don’t necessarily need to sweep rural counties — they just need to eat into the margins Trump was getting, which were frequently north of 80 percent of the vote.

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Democrats have previously dedicated relatively modest amounts of money, staff and advertising to rural counties and districts outside of swing states. But after a string of off-year victories last month, House Democrats have launched their first-ever rural outreach program, an eight-figure campaign that will fund efforts to hire staffers for candidates, mobilize voters and run ads focusing on the cost of living.

And then there's the One Big Beautiful Bill:

Rural health care centers across the country have already shuttered in response to the law’s Medicaid cuts, which will disproportionately hit communities where hospitals are few and often primary employers. Low-income Americans are quickly learning they may no longer qualify for federal food aid — even as most of the tax breaks the GOP has touted will benefit the wealthy.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who chairs the Democratic Governors Association and represents a ruby red state, recently called the law “a slap in the face to rural America.”

 

The 2026 Departure Lounge

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Annie Grayer, Molly English, and Alex Leeds Matthews at CNN:

Congressional Republicans have yet to break the record for most retirements in a single year, but some say it’s only a matter of time before widespread frustration with the current state of Washington leads to a tipping point as many in the party head for the exits.

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Eleven House lawmakers – 10 Republicans and one Democrat – are currently running for governor, surpassing the previous record of nine lawmakers in 2018

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York also announced plans to run for governor this year, but her run was short-lived: she suspended her campaign in late December and said she would not run for reelection to the House.

This year, three senators have announced they are running for governor – with two taking the unusual step of potentially leaving their Senate terms early for a chance at winning the governor’s mansion in their home states.

More are expected to put their hats in the ring. The field is so crowded that in two states – South Carolina and Arizona – two GOP lawmakers are running against each other for governor.

Many say their decisions to leave Congress are unique or the result of opportunities arising in their states. But frequent partisan stalemate in Washington this term has contributed to the allure of becoming a state executive, particularly in states that are considered Republican strongholds.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville has decided that he could be more effective implementing Trump’s agenda by returning to his home state of Alabama

 

DOGE as Partisan Weapon

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.   The real purpose of the "Department of Government Efficiency" was not to reduce deficits -- which it failed to do--  but to punish and disable perceived political enemies.

Luca Bellodi and Kyuwon Lee have a paper titled "The Executive Unbound: Politicized Bureaucracy and Partisan Procurement under DOGE."

The establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) during Trump’s second term marks an expansion of presidential authority over federal agencies. This institutional development provides a rare opportunity to examine whether presidents can leverage politicized agencies for political and electoral goals. Drawing on detailed procurement data and DOGE’s cancellation records, we find that Republican donor firms were less likely to face cancellations, whereas firms donating to Democrats were more likely to lose contracts. Cancellations were less frequent in Republican-held districts, conservative agencies, and states favorable to the Republican Party. Leveraging the timing of the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, we use a difference-in-differences design to show that Wisconsin-based firms experienced a sharp increase in cancellations following the election, underscoring the strategic timing of DOGE’s operations. Our findings shed new light on the consequences of agency politicization and align with the Trump administration’s effort to consolidate its support base.

Pardon Lobbying

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.

Rebecca Ballhaus, Josh Dawsey and C. Ryan Barber at WSJ:

In the first year of his first term, Trump granted a single pardon and commuted one sentence. He waited until his final day in office to issue around 140 additional acts of clemency. This term, he pardoned more than 1,500 people on his first day alone, and has since granted clemency to a further 87 people and companies.

The new approach—driven in part by Trump’s own experience as a criminal defendant, people close to him say—has spawned a pardon-shopping industry where lobbyists say their going rate is $1 million. Pardon-seekers have offered some lobbyists close to the president success fees of as much as $6 million if they can close the deal, according to people familiar with the offers.

A lobbying firm run by former Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller and former Trump Organization executive George Sorial was paid $1 million in the first quarter to lobby for a developer convicted of bribing former Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and gold bars. He hasn’t been pardoned. The firm declined to comment, and a spokesman for the developer said he terminated his relationship with the lobbying shop this spring.

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Administration officials and lobbyists describe two playbooks that have emerged. There is the official track, which involves pardon czar Alice Johnson, Justice Department pardon attorney Ed Martin and the White House Counsel’s Office. Applicants usually go through one of the three, and ultimately White House counsel Dave Warrington reviews the application and makes a recommendation to Trump. The two men meet every few weeks to discuss pardons, administration officials said.

The second track is riskier but can be much faster. If an applicant can find Trump at Mar-a-Lago or a White House event and ask for a pardon directly, Trump is often inclined to be helpful, administration officials said—particularly if someone says the magic words: “unjust persecution.”

Trump has often claimed that those he pardons were the victims of “witch hunts.”

Many of Trump’s most controversial pardons—including for Zhao and the Honduran ex-president—have gone through the latter track, which some senior administration officials said worried them. Another senior White House official said the “vast majority” of pardons have gone through the proper channels.

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Epstein Files Relases

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.  Especially Epstein.

David Enrich at NYT:

In a 2020 email released on Monday by the Justice Department, a federal prosecutor informed colleagues that President Trump’s name appeared on the flight logs for Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet “many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware).”

The email, written in January 2020 by an unidentified federal prosecutor in Manhattan, noted that Mr. Trump was listed as a passenger on Mr. Epstein’s jet at least eight times from 1993 to 1996, including a few instances in which other passengers apparently included young women. The prosecutor wrote the message for “situational awareness” and “didn’t want any of this to be a surprise down the road,” according to the email.

The frequency of Mr. Trump’s travel on Mr. Epstein’s planes may have been news to prosecutors at the time, but the trips have since become public knowledge.

The logs tracking the comings and goings of Mr. Epstein’s planes, as well as their passengers, were exhibits in the criminal trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, one of Mr. Epstein’s closest associates. They show that Mr. Trump was among numerous prominent individuals — including former President Bill Clinton — who were repeat passengers.

Last year, Trump lied through his teeth about flying on Epstein's plane:

Willa Pope Robbins at Mediaite:

Information released by the Department of Justice in some of the files surrounding convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was not properly redacted, with blacked-out text becoming visible with a simple copy and paste.

When the DOJ posted documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act on its website beginning Friday in accordance with the midnight deadline, the level of redacted information drew instant outrage.

But as more information continued to be released, amounting to nearly 30,000 documents, some viewers found that blackout intended to protect sensitive information was easily sidestepped by simply copying the text into a separate document

In 2019, Paul Manafort's lawyers made the same mistake. 

 

One Right-Wing Battle After Another

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration  has been full of ominous developments -- including a tranche of racist and anti-Semitic chats by prominent Young Republicans.  Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, defended Tucker Carlson after his softball interview with Nazi wannabe Nick Fuentes.

Zach Kessel at The Free Beacon:

Leaders of Advancing American Freedom (AAF), the nonprofit led by former vice president Mike Pence, said that their move to hire more than a dozen former Heritage Foundation employees represents a significant shift within the American right.

AAF president Tim Chapman described the organization’s addition of Heritage Foundation’s legal, data, and economics centers, a move that doubles its size, as a "reorganization of the conservative movement.

"People are voting with their feet as to where they feel they are best suited to be," Chapman said.

The mass defections from the Heritage Foundation are part of the continuing fallout from president Kevin Roberts’s release, in October, of a clumsy video taking aim at critics of the podcast host Tucker Carlson, who had recently conducted a friendly interview with the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

The new AAF hires include John Malcolm, who led the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and will lead the new Edwin Meese III Institute for the Rule of Law at AAF; Richard Stern, who directed Heritage’s economics center and will lead the Plymouth Center for Free Enterprise at AAF; and Kevin Dayaratna, who ran Heritage’s data analysis center and will build a similar program at his new institution.

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Since Roberts released the video in late October, three Heritage Foundation board members—Princeton University professor Robert George, Abby Moffat, and Shane McCullar—have resigned. McCullar said he took issue with the fact that the think tank "hesitates to condemn antisemitism and hatred" and "gives a platform to those who spread them." George expressed frustration that Roberts "could not offer a full retraction" of his video statement.

Michael Starr at The Jerusalem Post:

During her Saturday show, Political commentator Candace Owens urged her audience to read a 19th-century antisemitic book and accused Jews of orchestrating the Transatlantic Slave Trade and racial conflict between Caucasian and African Americans.

The YouTube show episode focused on Owens's grievances with conservative pundit and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, who had criticized her during his Thursday Turning Point USA AmericaFest conference speech.

AT WP, Jim Geraghty writes of Turning Point USA's year-end conference: 

The smiling faces of [Tucker] Carlson and [Megyn] Kelly were lined up on a poster for the conference alongside podcaster Ben Shapiro, longtime Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. (I realize this is a quaint and old-fashioned notion, but currently serving U.S. intelligence officials should not be speaking at a partisan pep rally.)

On Thursday, as the conference kicked off, Shapiro decided to address the elephant in the room.

“If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here, who worked with Charlie every single day, his best friends … and, yes, at Erica Kirk and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over Charlie’s murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA in Charlie’s murder or a cover-up in that murder, then we as people with a microphone have a moral obligation to call that out by name.”

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On Thursday, as the conference kicked off, Shapiro decided to address the elephant in the room.

“If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here, who worked with Charlie every single day, his best friends … and, yes, at Erica Kirk and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over Charlie’s murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA in Charlie’s murder or a cover-up in that murder, then we as people with a microphone have a moral obligation to call that out by name.”

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For his part, Bannon bellowed, “Ben Shapiro is like a cancer and that cancer spreads.”

More Ways to Buy Favor with Trump

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.

Karen Yourish, Kenneth P. Vogel, and Charlie Smart at NYT:

Since President Trump was elected a second time, he and his allies have raised nearly $2 billion for his favored political causes and passion projects. That total, which was confirmed by four people involved in the fund-raising, likely eclipses the amount raised to support his 2024 campaign.

The astounding haul hints at a level of transactionalism for which it is difficult to find obvious comparisons in modern American history. The identities of the donors behind much of the cash are not legally required to be, and have not been, publicly disclosed. In some cases, Mr. Trump’s team has offered donors anonymity.

To shed light on what has been a largely opaque fund-raising apparatus, The New York Times conducted a comprehensive investigation. It relied on previously unreported documents and public campaign finance filings, as well as interviews with dozens of people who are familiar with the solicitations or are involved in the fund-raising. It traced a large portion of the funds raised — more than half a billion dollars’ worth — back to 346 donors who each gave at least $250,000. It also found that more than half of them have benefited, or are involved in an industry that has benefited, from the actions or statements of Mr. Trump, the White House or federal agencies.

It is not possible to prove that any of the donations directly led to favorable treatment from the Trump administration. And the contributions do not personally enrich Mr. Trump, unlike some of his family’s cryptocurrency ventures.

But many of the deep-pocketed individuals and corporations who have given large sums have a lot riding on the administration’s actions, raising questions about conflicts of interest.