Inside:
Let Them Take Out Los Angeles
The Tech Bros Free Hedge
Ninety Dollars Is A Weak Bribe
Hurricane Isisias Comes For Florida
Byron’s Larry Problem
Light Switches for the Brain
Reform of the Week: A Hard Cap on Media Ownership
Because of Course It Is
The Big Picture
Run Through the Tape
Democrats are winning. They need to understand why before they talk themselves out of it.
Twenty-five days out, I’m starting to see something that worries me. Democrats are winning, and they don’t understand why.
I have news for my Democratic friends. It isn’t because the party’s brand suddenly turned around in the minds of American voters. It isn’t because the country woke up one morning in love with your position on health care, or guns, or education, or climate, or whichever plank of the platform you personally hold dear.
That’s not what’s happening.
For years, American voters, including plenty of your own, looked at the Democratic Party and saw weakness. Sit behind the glass at any focus group and ask people to describe the Democrats. “Weak” is one of the first words out of their mouths. Every time.
Charlie Cook put it best: this isn’t just a blue wave. It’s a red undertow.
So here’s what I’m worried about. In the next couple of weeks there will be a powerful temptation to look at the numbers and relax. “We’re up eight. We’re up seven. Trend lines are great, Trump’s numbers are in the toilet, we’re going to win.”
And right about then, some consultant is going to walk into the room and say it’s time to pivot. Time to give voters a positive vision. Time for something optimistic.
A big hug.
Please don’t. I am begging you. Don’t.
A brief detour, because I know some of you are already rolling your eyes.
Stay on affordability. Stay on the economy. Hammer the corruption every single day. I’ve been saying this for a year: fuse the corruption to the economic chaos he’s causing, and you have a winning year.
Why does it work? Because voters are voting against him. Against his acolytes, his suck-ups, his lickspittles and bootlickers. They hate him.
Don’t underestimate what it took to get here. This is a president who once had approval in the nineties with his own party, and he’s dragged that number into the fifties and forties. Think about the sheer volume of pain he had to inflict on Republican voters to push them that far away from him.
So when I tell you not to change course, I mean it.
Run through the tape. Keep up the aggressive drumbeat, because it’s working.
Donald Trump wrecked the economy with tariffs and war. Donald Trump’s corruption hurts you, because the rich guys get everything and you get screwed. Donald Trump wants to decorate his White House ballroom like a New Orleans bordello circa 1850, and you want to fill up your car with gas without getting a second mortgage.
Americans have rejected this man so thoroughly and so profoundly, but it’s hard to see in the Twitter matrix, in the MAGA media, on Fox News, and CBS (The Other Fox!).
This country hates Donald Trump. It hates him more every day.
There was a time when he’d say something like “maybe we should hit San Diego or Los Angeles” and the reflex on the right was instant: ha ha, he was joking, libs. Ha ha, look how triggered the snowflakes are.
Now, among most Republicans, the reaction is horror. What the hell is this? And while that sinks in, he’s out there planning new strikes on Iran. His own voters hate that idea too.
He has made America hate him. Exploit it every day.
Nobody in this country is waking up in the morning thinking, my goodness, what I really need is an 850-page climate plan. Whatever the merits of the issue, I’m telling you the truth about the electorate. They don’t read your plans. They want action on the economy, punishment for the pain they’ve suffered.
Why does the Democratic Party have a bad brand? Because it doesn’t fight. It doesn’t get in the arena. It doesn’t punch bad guys in the face.
Like me or not, I enjoy punching bad guys in the face. There are worse hobbies. And right now voters are responding to Democratic candidates precisely because they’re doing it.
Look at Jon Ossoff in Georgia. Republicans have pulled their money out of Georgia and shipped it to that notorious blue bastion, South Carolina, because Ossoff has made the case over and over and over again. The economic pain Georgia families are feeling comes from a corrupt administration that raised their taxes through tariffs and turned the presidency into a shop built on bribery. He made that argument, and voters bought it because he fights.
Look at Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. He’s out there telling people the truth: this guy is an idiot. He goes on Fox and makes the case against Mike Rogers and Donald Trump, who at this point are the same guy.
Voters didn’t abandon Democrats because they hated all your policies. (They hated some of them. Some of them don’t play in Middle America, and let’s be adults about that.)
But mostly they walked because they thought you weren’t fighting. They thought you rolled over for Trump. You weren’t the guy in the movie who got knocked down, got back up, and took on the bully. You were the kid sitting in the dirt crying, waiting for Mom to come pick you up.
That has changed. Trump is wounded now. He’s bleeding. And to quote the great American philosophical text, Predator: “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”
Keep hunting. Keep pushing. Keep telling voters the story they already know in their hearts. Everything costs more. Washington is filthy from top to bottom, and Trump sits at the tip of the fecal pyramid. Every day, the message is the same: Trump did this to you, and I’m going to fix it.
And you can fix it. Governing will be hard. You’ll get whipsawed a hundred different ways the minute you hit Washington. But you can fix it.
You can unwind the tariffs on day one. There’s plenty you can put in a continuing resolution to rein in ICE, to go after this administration’s corruption, to kill the rotten overseas deals that every Trump-adjacent scumbag on earth seems to have a piece of.
You can haul Todd Blanche and RFK Jr. and Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller and Markwayne Billy Bob Ed Joe Mullin in front of a committee. You can bring Pam Bondi back. You can bring Kristi Noem back. You can hold them to account.
And you can do all of it at the same time. End the tariffs, and you get an economic bump you can take credit for. Wall Street will like it. Markets will like it. Businesses large and small will benefit. Time it right and you might even get credit for a rate cut.
But once you’re elected, you can never, ever let go of the aggression that carried you there.
The biggest mistake I’ve ever watched the Democratic Party make came after January 6th.
A lot of people said, “Let’s move on.” Merrick Garland, call your office. Put it in the rearview mirror. Let Trump fade into oblivion. Let’s end the noise and the chaos so nobody has to think about it anymore.
A couple of weeks after the attack, Reed Galen and I were on a conference call with a bunch of Democratic strategists. One of them announced that the theme for 2021 and 2022 would be prescription drug coverage. We just looked at each other. What the hell are you talking about? These people tried to burn down the United States Capitol, and they damn near pulled it off.
Here’s what you need to understand. If you let creatures like Trump, Miller, Hegseth and RFK off the hook, they’ll slink off into the dark, lick their wounds, get stronger, and come back. They will not stop coming.
They’re not like you. They believe in two things: power over policy, and staying in office forever. They build systems to take power and keep it, because they intend to hold office until they die. Mitch McConnell, please call your office.
The people you meet on the stump who are hurt and angry and lost don’t want you to be nice. They want you to stop the problem. They want you to find the people who hurt them, and hurt them back. You’ll hear the “let’s move on” crowd again. Ignore them. Ride this all the way through November.
You can bring some of their voters over. This is a subject I know something about.
They aren’t going to become Bernie Bros. They aren’t going to start quoting AOC or rhapsodizing about the miracle of socialism. That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that after a decade, after a couple of decades really, they’re finally seeing that the system they thought they were defending doesn’t exist.
They thought they stood for American patriotism. Nationalism is a different animal. They thought they stood for free enterprise. Free enterprise has taken its hardest hit since 2008, maybe ever. If you’ve got good lobbyists in Washington or your state capital, that’s your business model now. Not hard work, not building something, not taking care of your people. That’s gone. Giant corporations have monetized everything under the sun, and Big Tech has built a world where it’s immune from liability for anything.
People feel this in their guts. The fight over data centers is a proxy for exactly that anxiety. They know that the data center plopped down on the farm next door drinks their water, jacks up their electric bill, and howls like a jet engine all night. They know that inside it isn’t just Elon Musk generating AI catgirl porn. Those machines are being trained to take their jobs.
So tell them you get it. Tell them you’re listening. Tell them you want to work for them.
Because they’ve figured something else out over the last six or seven months. A Democratic congressional campaign in a fairly red district recently sent me a clip from one of their focus groups. A Republican woman was talking about her congressman. Her grandmother’s Social Security check got fouled up, so she reached out to his district office. Nobody there. Looked like it hadn’t been opened in years. She called Washington and couldn’t get anyone on the phone. “But I saw him on Fox News twice that week,” she said, “and all he talked about was Trump, Trump, Trump.”
That’s the realization. Republican members of Congress and Republican senators don’t represent their districts or their states anymore. They represent themselves and Trump.
Congressional stock trading has struck the same nerve. Republican voters hate it, whether it’s their side or yours, and Republicans have been making bank. Democrats do it too. If you’re smart, you ban it day one, hour one, minute one. Dare Republicans to vote against it. Send it to Trump, let him veto it, and override him. Every official above a certain senior level in all three branches should have all tradeable assets held in a blind trust run by an outside fiduciary. Period.
That argument moves people. So does ending the tariffs. So does saying out loud that this war with Iran was a catastrophe.
Some of you will say Iraq was a bigger strategic blunder. Compared to this? No. Iran will have a nuclear weapon now. It controls the Persian Gulf now. It’s a regional superpower now, and it’ll get Chinese help building an ICBM that can hold us at risk. Why? Because Donald Trump tore up the JCPOA and then started a war.
His voters hate it. You can almost hear the gears grinding when they talk about it. Well, a nuclear Iran was bad, but I wish we’d had... Yes. We did have something. It was called the JCPOA. When it came out, I was still in the Republican universe, and I thought it was terrible, but I was wrong. It worked.
Do things that work.
Tariffs, corruption, the war, and Trump’s own behavior are driving independents away from the GOP at warp speed. Understand what that means and what it doesn’t. They aren’t joining the Democratic Party for life. You’re getting an audition.
That goes double for the conservative Democrats you lost years ago, the ones who became behavioral Republican voters. Win back even four or five percent of them, and you’d be a hell of a lot more competitive across the South and the Midwest.
For the most part, Democrats have used the audition well. This year’s crop of candidates is stellar: Talarico, Ossoff, Cooper, Jolly, Andrews, Acton, Peltola, and I could go on. I’ve seen better congressional recruits than in a long time, and candidates rising at every level down to state house and state senate races.
Every one of them who’s rising is making the same case. Trump and MAGA betrayed you and hurt you, and I’m going to fix it. And I’m going to listen. Not in the soft, facilitative, therapist way. Listen like: the Route 42 bridge is falling apart, get me a federal grant. My grandmother’s Social Security check is screwed up, can you fix it? Yes. I can fix it.
The candidates who’ve been paying attention know why voters are angry. They’ve heard the stories. They know these people are showing up because Trump drove them there.
You don’t get many reboots in life. I’ve gotten a couple, late, and I treasure them. I spent a lot of years doing the consultant thing, and make no mistake, being a Republican consultant was a good gig. For the last decade I’ve tried to do the right thing instead. I don’t always get it right. But I think I’m directionally correct.
You appreciate second chances more as you get older. The Democrats have been given a second chance, perhaps a final chance.
One more reason to keep the intensity up: they are planning to interfere in this election.
You can watch the moves happening in real time. Bannon talks about it openly. Cleta Mitchell and Tina Peters get invited to the Oval Office. Trump nods and winks at Russ Vought. Yes, they’re going to try something, and it’s up to us to stop them.
First: vote early. Most states let you. Vote by mail, vote absentee, vote in person early, whatever your state allows. Do it now. Bank those votes before they’ve organized whatever they’re planning for Election Day, because on Election Day there will be goons at polling places and games played with the count, and legislatures will be leaned on to shut it down. Every early vote that comes in is a signal to them that the tide is coming in and the undertow is about to drag them out to sea. Rack up enough and some of them will look at the numbers and decide it isn’t worth trying.
Second, and I say this advisedly, knowing they will deliberately and comically misread it: if they try it anyway, if they try to stop the vote, if there are armed men at polling places, this country needs to be in the streets.
Millions of people. When your secretary of state says there’s interference at the polls, go. Show up. Bear witness. These people are human cockroaches, and they cannot stand the light. Turn it on, and they scatter. Yes, they’ll show up in their Tactical Timmy costumes with the body armor, the black Oakleys, and the shooting gloves. Go anyway. Yell louder. Stand your ground. And if Mike Johnson wants to play games with duly elected members of Congress, we need two million people on the Mall.
They need to see America standing right in front of them. Furious, exhausted, done with the bullshit, with nothing left to give this man and his foul movement.
There isn’t much time left.
Democrats are going to win the House. The only question is by how much. They’ll probably take the Senate, and I’d much rather the margin start with a three or a four than a one or a two.
But keeping both of those predictions alive means staying on target between now and Election Day.
Don’t pivot. Don’t soften. Don’t go looking for the big hug.
Never stop fighting.
Intel and Observations
At a Monday rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, stumping for the egregious human-tardigrade lab experiment, Pete Ricketts, the President of the United States, explained
