Vacancies and Margins

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

MIA MCCARTHY, CALEN RAZOR and BENJAMIN GUGGENHEIM at POLITICO:

First, the GOP Conference’s long-planned, day-long policy retreat Tuesday at the Kennedy Center — intended to build unity around a legislative agenda in a midterm election year — was shaken by news of Rep. Doug LaMalfa’s unexpected death and Rep. Jim Baird’s hospitalization from a car accident.

It brought into stark relief the major math challenges House Republicans now face. LaMalfa’s passing brings the balance of the House to 218-213. And as long as Baird is out recovering, Speaker Mike Johnson can only afford to lose a single GOP vote on party-line legislative business on the chamber floor.

“We keep saying we are one breath away from the minority — that’s more true today than ever,” one House Republican told Meredith Lee Hill.

Lindsey Holden at Politico:

Newsom has 14 days to schedule a special election, which would take place by mid-May unless the governor holds off until the June 2 primary.

The new congressional boundaries California voters approved in November don’t kick in until that primary. This creates a scenario in which a short-timer elected by LaMalfa’s current constituents could serve out the end of his term, followed by a representative running in the newly drawn, more Democratic, district.

Or, one candidate could thread the needle of both districts and serve the two terms back to back. However, that situation is fairly unlikely, considering the sharp red-to-blue swing Prop 50 will initiate.

California elections expert Paul Mitchell, who was involved in drawing the new maps, predicted in an X post that Newsom will schedule the special election in March, with a June runoff, or align it with the midterm primary with an August runoff.

January 6

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

Daniela Altimari:

In 2024, Democrats campaigned on a message that democracy was at risk by highlighting the harrowing Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump.

The warning, however, didn’t land with voters who were focused more on the cost of living than high-minded appeals about the rule of law and the fate of democracy.

Now, five years after the attack, the campaign dynamics of Jan. 6 have shifted in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections.

...

 “We can’t ignore that it happened, and we can’t ignore why it happened,” said Brian Lemek, executive director of Defend the Vote, a political action committee that backs Democratic congressional candidates. “But we don’t need to relitigate all that all the time. We need to focus on what people care about today.”

...

While concerns about democracy and fair elections continue to rank high among Democrats, those issues have found less traction with Republican voters.

An Economist/YouGov poll released in July found that 89 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of independent voters viewed Jan. 6 as “a violent insurrection.’’ (Meanwhile, 51 percent of Republicans and 24 percent of independents saw it as “legitimate political discourse.”)

“Trump’s reelection made it really clear [that voters] were able to overlook that violent assault on our democracy to improve their day to day lives,’’ Lemek said.

But some Democrats say there’s room in their 2026 messaging for a corruption angle that includes invoking the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack.

Trump “did whatever the hell he wants, and he’s going to try to do that for the next three years,’’ Lemek said. Democrats “need to put some blocks in place to prevent him from causing any more damage. "

The Shrinking House Battlefield

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. The off-year elections were good for Democrats, but...

 Yasmeen Abutaleb at WP:

Of the 39 seats Democrats are competing for, 28 are in districts that Trump won by five or more percentage points.

A gerrymandering spree instigated by Trump has narrowed the number of truly competitive seats, furthering a trend that was already underway in recent elections as the nation has become more polarized. That has not affected the race for the Senate, which Republicans are favored to hold.

Just 36 races in this year’s election are rated competitive by the Cook Political Report, compared with 49 races at the same point in the 2018 cycle. Half of the seats rated competitive by Cook this year are already held by Democrats, leaving the party even less room to gain ground.

“Democrats will have a very narrow but viable path to the majority. That’s a different scenario than 2006 or 2018, when Democrats put a ton of Republican-held seats in play,” said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the Cook Political Report. “There’s so little elasticity in U.S. House elections these days compared to prior eras.”

...

Democrats believe they have effectively neutralized Republican efforts to pick up additional seats through gerrymandering in Texas, Ohio and North Carolina by gaining seats of their own in California and Utah. The Indiana Senate rejected a partisan gerrymander last month, and Democrats are still exploring whether they could pick up seats in Virginia, Illinois and Maryland. Wasserman said the post-gerrymandering landscape remains “pretty equitable to both parties.”

 

"Take the Oil"

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

Anton Troianovski at NYT:

While he was out of office, President Trump mused about what would have happened if the United States had taken control of Venezuela.

“We would have gotten all that oil,” he said in a speech at the North Carolina Republican Convention in 2023. “It would have been right next door.”

On Saturday, Mr. Trump made it clear that he now intends to follow through.

In the last year, as the Trump administration built up pressure against Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, the president and his top aides said that the aggressive U.S. actions were necessary to curb drugs and migration from that country. But on Saturday, as Mr. Trump discussed the predawn attack on Venezuela that led to the capture of its leader, it was evident that the president’s longtime fixation on oil was a driving factor in his decision to greenlight the mission.

“We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he celebrated the seizure of Mr. Maduro, promising that American companies would be able to tap more of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

On January 21, 2017, he told the employees of the CIA:

But when I was young—and I think we're all, sort of, young. When I was young, we were always winning things in this country. We'd win with trade. We'd win with wars. At a certain age, I remember hearing from one of my instructors, "The United States has never lost a war." And then, after that, it's like we haven't won anything. We don't win anymore. The old expression, "To the victor belong the spoils"—you remember. I always used to say, keep the oil. I wasn't a fan of Iraq. I didn't want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you, when we were in, we got out wrong. And I always said, in addition to that, keep the oil. Now, I said it for economic reasons. But if you think about it, Mike [Pence], if we kept the oil you probably wouldn't have ISIS because that's where they made their money in the first place. So we should have kept the oil. But okay. [Laughter] Maybe you'll have another chance. But the fact is, should have kept the oil.

But taking military action on behalf of the oil companies is likely to be unpopular.  Americans do not like oil companies:

 

Corruption 2026

 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.

Ben Berkowitz at Axios:

 A hypothetical $1,000 invested in various stock and crypto assets on Jan. 19 — the day before Trump took office — would have produced sharply different outcomes by year's end.On the stock side, a $1,000 investment in the Nasdaq would be worth about $1,184, while the same investment in the SOCL ETF would be worth $1,272 and in Trump Media shares would be worth $331. On the crypto side, a $1,000 investment in the global cryptocurrency market cap would be worth $842, while the same investment in dogecoin would be worth $327 and in Official TRUMP would be worth $114.

...

The intrigue: The retail investing public may not have done well with Trump assets in 2025, but the president and his family, by all accounts, did just fine.Forbes estimates the billionaire president's net worth has more than doubled, fueled by gains in his various crypto investments.

The magazine reports Donald Trump Jr.'s net worth rose sixfold in 2025, based also on crypto gains. In fact, just Wednesday morning, as the year closed, TMTG said it would launch a new crypto token for its shareholders.

Dave Michaels, Sadie Gurman and Aruna Viswanatha at WSJ:

 President Trump’s first year back in office turned the world of white-collar enforcement upside down. 

The Justice Department, focused on White House priorities such as immigration enforcement and violent crime, has stepped back from the kinds of complicated investigations into foreign bribery, money laundering and public corruption that former department leaders often cited among their greatest successes.

Along with that shift, administration officials have undone a number of notable Biden-era white-collar prosecutions. In some, the department dropped charges against executives that were pending. In others, Trump has used the pardon power to forgive a string of top company officials charged with or convicted of crimes related to their businesses.

...

One of the most notable shifts has been in foreign bribery cases. Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act fell off a cliff this year.

The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which share authority to investigate violations, brought about 33 cases a year against companies or individuals between 2015 and 2024, according to data maintained by law firm Gibson Dunn. This year, the Justice Department brought six new FCPA cases. The SEC brought none.

Trump said the law hurt U.S. companies operating abroad and ordered a six-month freeze on new cases. Justice Department officials responded by closing nearly half of open foreign-bribery investigations and saying future cases should be connected to U.S. strategic interests, including the fight against transnational drug cartels.

The Justice Department also has backed away from the Biden administration’s enforcement of anti-money-laundering laws against big cryptocurrency exchanges that were accused of allowing users in sanctioned countries such as Iran to trade with Americans.

 

Breaking: Trump Won't Get Younger in 2026

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments.  In 2024, Trump was already showing signs of cognitive decline. It's getting worse.

 Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Meridith McGraw at WSJ:

President Trump is taking more aspirin than his doctors recommend. He briefly tried wearing compression socks for his swelling ankles, but stopped because he didn’t like them. And he regrets undergoing advanced imaging because it generated scrutiny of his health.

“In retrospect, it’s too bad I took it because it gave them a little ammunition,” Trump said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on his decision to get a cardiovascular and abdominal scan in October. “I would have been a lot better off if they didn’t, because the fact that I took it said, ‘Oh gee, is something wrong?’ Well, nothing’s wrong.”

Trump, 79, the oldest man to assume the presidency, is showing signs of aging in public and private, according to people close to him. Yet he has at times eschewed the advice of his doctors and scoffed at the medical community’s widely accepted health recommendations, relying instead on what he calls his “good genetics.” Trump and his doctor say he is in excellent health, and aides say he maintains a vigorous schedule.

Trump gets little sleep and has recently struggled to keep his eyes open during several televised events in the West Wing. Aides, donors and friends say they often have to speak loudly in meetings with the president because he strains to hear. Aside from golf, Trump doesn’t get regular exercise, and he is known to consume a diet heavy on salty and fatty foods, such as hamburgers and french fries.

The large dose of aspirin he chooses to take daily has caused him to bruise easily, he said, and he has been encouraged by his doctors to take a lower dose. But Trump has declined to switch because he has been taking it for 25 years. “I’m a little superstitious,” he said in the interview.

...

Trump said he had plenty of energy, which he credited to his parents, who he said were energetic until their old age.

“Genetics are very important,” he said. “And I have very good genetics.”

 

Interesting that this story on Trump’s aging omits previous reporting (by Wash Post) of Alzheimer’s/dementia of Trump’s father. Trump brags about his “genes” so often. https://t.co/DhquefOli8

— Barbara Comstock (@BarbaraComstock) January 1, 2026

Jack Smith Testimony

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

On New Year's Eve, the GOP majority on the House Judiciary Committee released the transcript of special counsel Jack Smith's December 17 testimony.

For nearly three decades I have been a career prosecutor. I have served during both Republican and Democratic administrations and I've been guided by those principles in every role I've held. I continued to honor those principles when I was appointed to serve 7 as special counsel in November of 2022. 

The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions, as alleged in the indictments returned by grand juries in two different districts. Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump  engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power.

Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President  Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. 

I remain grateful for the counsel, judgment, and advice of my team as I executed my responsibilities. I am both saddened and angered that President Trump has sought revenge against career prosecutors, FBI agents, and support staff simply for doing their jobs  and for having worked on those cases. These dedicated public servants are the best of us, and they have been wrongly vilified and improperly dismissed from their jobs.

I made my decisions in the investigation without regard to President Trump's political association, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 Presidential election. We took our actions based on the facts and the law, the very lessons I learned early in my career  as a prosecutor. We followed Justice Department policies and observed legal requirements.

The timing and speed of our work reflects the strength of the evidence and our  confidence that we would have secured convictions at trial. If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.

Recent narratives about my team's work are false and misleading, including stories about our collection of toll records.  Toll records were sought for historical telephone routing information, collected after calls had taken place, identifying the incoming and outgoing call numbers, the time of the  calls and their duration. Toll records do not include the content of calls. Those records  were lawfully subpoenaed and were relevant to complete a comprehensive investigation.

January 6th was an attack on the structure of our democracy in which over 140 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted. Over 160 individuals later pled guilty to  assaulting police that day.  Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of  Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification  of the 2020 election. 

I did not choose those Members, President Trump did.