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Tracey Sullivan

Mailbox question. Big article today in the NYT about the incompetency of Ken Martin and the DNC. What are we going to do about it?

Answer

It was a tough Sunday for Ken Martin. It wasn’t just the devastating New York Times story about his tenure; NOTUS and The Bulwark ran similar stories. As readers of this newsletter know, I am not a huge fan of Ken Martin. I called on him to resign because of how he mishandled the autopsy. I was not the only one calling for Martin to go, but most of the party leadership and the DNC members stood by him.

Things have gotten worse since then, and Democrats are wondering: can anyone save the DNC?

Read more

Crooked Con is coming back

Last year, 2,500 people joined us at Crooked Con for conversations with the most interesting voices in and around politics about how to fix this mess. Even Barack Obama showed up.

I was there, co-hosting the Pod Save America live taping, leading an interview with Senator Chris Murphy, and hosting a panel on polling featuring some of the smartest people in politics.

I’ll be at Crooked Con again this year, November 5–7, in Washington, DC. It all kicks off with a Pod Save America live show on November 5 at the Warner Theatre. On November 7, we’ll gather for the all-day Crooked Con at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

Here’s what to expect:

• Go Behind the Headlines: Main stage conversations with big names in politics and media, strategy-focused panels, political organizing sessions, and much more.

• Get Involved: Connect with grassroots organizations and activists. Meet some of the best, brightest, and most progressive creators and new-media personalities.

• Meet Like-Minded Folks: Food, drinks, parties, meetups with hosts and creators, and lots of ways to connect with each other. If you work in politics — or want to — there’s no better place to be than Crooked Con.

Tickets are on sale now! If you haven’t already, get yours at crookedcon.com, where we’ll also announce the lineup. If you’re a Friends of the Pod subscriber, a limited number of discounted tickets are still available — be sure to grab them before they run out.

I’ll see you there.

Dan

Six years ago this week, I launched this newsletter. It started as something to do while stuck at home during a pandemic and a presidential election. As always, I had thoughts on the race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and I wanted to offer a kind of political analysis I thought was sorely missing from the discourse. I wanted to help you understand what was happening in the election — but also what we could actually do to win it, defeat Donald Trump, and stop the MAGA movement in its tracks (two out of three isn’t bad).

I was also testing a long-held theory about politics: the best messengers in the Democratic Party are not the politicians, the pundits, or the podcasters. It’s all of you. I wanted to use my experience in politics and my obsession with polling data to give you the best information and the best messaging to talk to your friends and family. YOU will always be better at persuading the people in your life than some politician, some reporter, or a stranger sent to their door.

Despite all of that, the plan was to stop after the election.

Six years later, I’m still here — still pumping out several newsletters a week to an incredible community of nearly 170,000 activists, political junkies, and people who care about our democracy. I’ve even launched Message Box Pro, a companion product built specifically for people running for office or working in politics and communications.

I could not be more grateful for this community, or feel more privileged that you’re willing to read what I write.

And I’m not going anywhere. Message Box is here to stay, and I have big plans for the years ahead.

First up: in-depth coverage of this midterm election. We’re living in an era of peak punditry, where every primary result and every twist is treated as apocalyptic while everyone races to fire off the hottest take possible. My promise to you is to do the opposite — take a step back, put things in context, and ground every observation in the data.

Second, I want to help you cut through the endless text messages begging for help and promising victory. I’ll tell you which races are actually winnable, which ones need more resources, and where you can have the most impact.

Finally — and this pains me to say — the 2028 Democratic presidential primary will kick off hours after the last votes are counted in November. It will be a wide-open contest with massive implications for the party and the country. I’m going to cover that primary closely, talk to the candidates, and interview the people making decisions behind the scenes, so you have as much information as possible when it’s your turn to decide.

I’m genuinely excited about what’s ahead. But I’ll be honest with you: growing Message Box has gotten harder. The marketplace is more crowded, and platforms like Twitter have made it harder to get eyeballs on anything that isn’t a flaming hot take. The easiest way to grow an audience in this environment is to go to the extreme or tell partisans exactly what they want to hear. I’ve been far from perfect, but I try hard to resist those perverse incentives — and I can only keep doing that because readers like you have my back instead of an algorithm or an advertiser.

That’s what paid subscriptions make possible. They are what allow this newsletter to exist. To everyone who already pays: thank you. You are the reason I get to do this work the right way.

If you’ve been reading for free and value what you get here, now is the moment to jump in. Upgrade to a paid subscription today and get 20% off your first year. It’s the single best way to support this work — and to make sure it keeps going through the midterms and all the way to 2028.

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Thank you for an incredible six years, and for coming on this journey with me.

Dan

In the interview, Ossoff says he opposed Medicare for All. This led to a lot of bashing and consternation from progressive Democratic activists online.

Many of them demanded to know how Ossoff could possibly oppose Medicare for All. It is an article of faith on the left that Medicare for All is an incredibly popular policy, and that the only reason more Democrats don’t support it is that they’re doing the bidding of corporate donors.

Medicare for All, which had been on the political backburner since Biden won the 2020 primaries, has reemerged as a major issue this cycle. The three victorious progressive candidates in New York City were Medicare for All supporters. Melat Kiros, who upset a 30-year incumbent in Colorado, was a supporter, as were Chris Rabb, Randy Villegas, and Matt Dunlap, who all defeated establishment-backed candidates in their primaries.

On the Senate side, Juliana Stratton won the Illinois primary in part by running on Medicare for All, and Abdul El-Sayed, who literally wrote a book on the policy, made it a centerpiece of his campaign. Graham Platner did the same, before he was forced to withdraw from the race.

The reemergence of Medicare for All as a rallying cry for some Democrats matters this fall, and it’s going to have big implications for the 2028 primary.

The politics of Medicare for All have been hard to analyze, because there has been a real lack of quality polling on the issue. Almost all of the publicly available data has come from progressive advocacy organizations that support it or industry-funded think tanks that oppose it. Question wording matters a lot in any poll, and that’s particularly true for a policy as complex as this one. Even a mediocre pollster can write a question to generate the result they want.

That’s what makes a recent poll, conducted jointly by the Searchlight Institute, a moderate think tank, and Zeteo, a progressive publication, so valuable. It just dropped, and it’s one of the more comprehensive and thoughtful surveys I’ve seen in a long time.

Just to lay my cards on the table: I come to this as someone who strongly supports Medicare for All, or a similar single-payer program, and believes it’s something Democrats should work toward, because I believe health care is a human right. But as someone who went through the absolutely brutal process of passing the Affordable Care Act with historically large Democratic majorities, I’m also wide-eyed about the political and legislative pitfalls of enacting this policy anytime soon.

The debate around Medicare for All, on both sides, is so often detached from political reality that it becomes counterproductive to enacting the best possible health care policy.

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Why M4A Can Be So Powerful

Medicare for All has been incredibly powerful in the context of Democratic primaries for a few reasons.

First, Democrats strongly support universal health care. A 2025 Pew poll found that 90% of Democrats believe the government should provide health insurance for everyone. This finding is consistent with a raft of other polling over the years.

Second, Medicare for All is the best-branded Democratic policy in decades. Everyone loves Medicare, so it’s a very appealing alternative to the current system, particularly for Democrats.

Finally, Democrats are in the mood for big solutions to the health care crisis. They are instinctively skeptical of what appear to be small-bore fixes. In the NYT/Siena poll from earlier this summer, Democratic voters wanted the party to move to the center on crime and immigration and were split on where the party should go on the economy. Health care was the only issue where Democrats wanted the party to move left, and they preferred moving left over tacking to the center by 25 points.

More than the polling numbers, support for Medicare for All signals something bigger than health care. It’s a sign that a politician gets the scale of the affordability crisis and is willing to take on powerful corporate interests — in other words, the opposite of what so many Democrats currently believe about their own party.

A Tougher Issue in the General Election

When you test the phrase “Medicare for All,” it tests quite well. A 2025 Kaiser Family Foundation poll (the gold standard in health care polling) found:

Medicare-for-all starts with a net favorability rating of +14 percentage points (56% favor it, 42% oppose it). This jumps to +45 percentage points when people hear the argument that this type of plan would guarantee health insurance as a right for all Americans.

Seems great, right? It is, but it gets more complicated as you dig deeper.

The Zeteo/Searchlight poll found that support depended heavily on how the program was described. The most effective description was:

Automatically enrolling every American in a comprehensive government-administered health insurance plan, something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get.

Support drops significantly, unsurprisingly, when people are told that M4A would involve replacing private health insurance.

If people think the health care system is in crisis, hate insurance companies, and like Medicare, why does support drop?

The first problem is that only 29% of people said they’re confident the federal government could successfully administer a national insurance plan. I suspect that number would rise some among Democrats with a Democrat in the White House, but distrust in government is a significant and longstanding barrier to large government-run programs.

To put this in context: when LBJ was passing Medicare, 77% of Americans trusted the federal government, according to Pew polling.

The second problem is that people hate the health care system but are much more satisfied with their own health coverage. In this poll, 70% of voters, and even 58% of Democrats, said they would rather stay with their own insurance than switch to a Medicare for All-type plan.

This finding gets at one of the vulnerabilities in how Medicare for All advocates often discuss the policy. It’s frequently framed around providing universal coverage and helping the uninsured. Morally and substantively, that’s the right thing to do, but it’s worth remembering that the vast majority of Americans already have health insurance. It may be too expensive, not cover enough, and generally be terrible, but those people mostly want their health care made cheaper and better, not replaced outright. Health care costs are the biggest issue, and M4A would address those costs — but its advocates need to lead with that in their messaging.

None of this is an argument for Democrats to abandon Medicare for All. Far from it. People who authentically and passionately support it should run on it. More M4A advocates in the House and Senate would be a huge improvement and push the party in a more populist, progressive direction. Nothing here suggests a Medicare for All advocate can’t win a tough race. But if we want to make the policy a reality, Democrats need to win enough seats to make real progress toward its goals, and we can’t do that without first reckoning with the political reality.

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JF

Please explain wtf is happening in Wisconsin’s governors race. We’re sleepwalking into a GOP governor. Where’s Ben Wikler?

Answer

I am very glad you asked this question, because the current state of affairs in Wisconsin is an epic shitshow with massive consequences for this election and beyond.

Let me explain.

Read more

The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee has decided on the order of the presidential primaries. For a long time, the order was set in stone: Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. In 2008, they added a Nevada caucus before South Carolina. After losing Iowa and New Hampshire but winning South Carolina, Biden’s allies at the DNC moved South Carolina to the front of the line for the 2024 election. This was a temporary and cynical move designed to reward South Carolina and help foreclose a primary challenge against Biden.

Friday’s decision was the first wholesale reimagining of the calendar since the advent of the modern primary system. Here’s the new order of contests approved by the DNC.

• January 22 - South Carolina

• February 1 - Nevada

• February 8 - New Hampshire

• February 15 - New Mexico

• February 22 - Michigan

• February 29 - Virginia

• March 7 - Super Tuesday

One caveat is that New Hampshire has a state law mandating that it hold the first primary in the nation. Under the old calendar, Iowa was a caucus state, which meant it could go before New Hampshire. When the DNC put South Carolina first in 2024, New Hampshire didn’t change its date, so the DNC stripped all of its delegates. To move to February 8th, New Hampshire will need its Republican governor to agree to move the date, or to hold a fully party-funded primary. If neither happens, another state, likely Delaware, would move into that slot.

The big news, of course, is that South Carolina will go first. The first state is exponentially more important than each subsequent state. South Carolina wouldn’t have been my choice. I would have preferred a battleground state like Nevada or Michigan to go first, but I understand how the DNC ended up here.

A lot is going to change between now and January 22, 2028, but it’s hard to see putting South Carolina first as anything other than a massive advantage for Kamala Harris.

Read more

That is the proposition at the center of the increasingly contentious Michigan Senate primary between Abdul El-Sayed and Congresswoman Haley Stevens. This primary has become a proxy for a lot of the fights inside the Democratic Party — the establishment vs. the Bernie left, AIPAC vs. those who want to cut off aid to Israel, moderates vs. leftists. And it is very much a depressing preview of how the question of electability will play out in the 2028 Democratic primary.

Chuck Schumer, the DSCC, and much of the establishment infrastructure support Stevens. They argue that El-Sayed is far more likely to lose to Republican Mike Rogers in a state Trump has won in two of the last three elections, because he is too liberal for it. Stevens, they say, gives Democrats a better shot in a must-win state precisely because she is a moderate.

El-Sayed is a proud supporter of Medicare for All, campaigned with Hasan Piker, and made some statements about defunding the police in 2020.

Stevens is more moderate than El-Sayed. She is not associated with the Sanders wing, doesn’t support Medicare for All, and belongs to “moderate” groups like the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. But Stevens is not a moderate in the mold of Jared Golden or Joe Manchin. At the risk of oversimplifying, she is a mainstream Democrat who voted with Joe Biden nearly 100% of the time and against Trump nearly 100% of the time. She is a moderate in persona, and certainly in comparison to El-Sayed — except on one major issue.

Israel.

El-Sayed calls Israel an apartheid state, decries the genocide in Gaza, and wants to end all aid to Israel. Stevens has criticized Netanyahu, but supports aid to Israel without conditions, won’t refer to what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide, and AIPAC is spending tens of millions of dollars to support her.

Israel is the one issue where Stevens is swimming against the current in the Democratic Party.

You are rarely going to win elections if voters think you are too far left or too far right. This has been a problem for Democrats in recent cycles, including 2024, when voters saw us as more extreme than Trump (imagine that!). In the recent New York Times/Siena poll of the Senate battlegrounds, 53% of voters said the Democratic Party is too far to the left, while only 47% said the same of the Republicans.

So in some races, Democrats do need candidates who appear more moderate than the party’s image. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t spent much time working in red or purple states — or is wearing some pretty significant blinders.

But moderation for moderation’s sake is a miserable strategy. How you moderate matters. If you want to break with your party, you have to do it on issues where voters think the party is out of the mainstream. There are many such issues for Democrats. Israel is not one of them. It has all of the downside of angering the base with little of the upside of appealing to actual moderates.

Read more

President Donald Trump’s media company is planning to charge for special high-speed access to Truth Social posts, including possibly his own, affecting national security and financial markets.

The move announced Thursday would allow Wall Street trading firms and other institutions to get news from top Truth Social contributors in milliseconds so they could profit off subsequent moves in stocks, bonds and interest rates.

I know this sounds esoteric, and it involves Truth Social, which is a joke of a site that is full of bugs and held together with chewing gum and string, but this is just a stunningly corrupt abuse of power for self-enrichment. In fact, it might actually be the most corrupt thing Trump has done since returning to office. It’s so brazen and so blatant.

And it’s something Democrats should scream from the mountaintops about. Because the news came out on the same day that Trump gave his deranged, dishonest national address, this story got much less attention than it deserves.

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Insider Trading at Scale

What presidents say moves markets. Trump’s posts about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz moved oil prices. His spring-2025 tariff announcements crashed stocks; his follow-up posts about backing off tariffs sent them surging.

Over the last 18 months, there has been a lot of speculation about people with advance knowledge of Trump’s decisions making advantageous stock transactions. This is known as insider trading, and it is illegal.

Truth Social is now selling early access to Trump’s statements to Wall Street banks. The whole product is designed for high-frequency and algorithmic trading firms that profit off the gap between when they get the news and when everyone else does. Ordinary investors are structurally on the losing side.

This is no different than Trump giving a heads-up on a market-moving announcement in exchange for a bribe. It’s pay to play.

Rich and powerful elites will learn valuable information before the rest of the public. It’s insider trading for profit at scale. It’s a win for those elites — they get an invaluable advantage in the market, and Trump gets money put in his pocket.

This is not a trial balloon or an idea that leaked out of a meeting. It’s a real, live business. It’s happening. Truth Social has already signed up several clients, including high-frequency trading firms.

A Giant Loophole in the System

This should be illegal, right? It is a blatant conflict of interest and a pay-to-play scheme.

However, it’s not.

The president is exempt from the conflict-of-interest rules that bind almost every other federal official. When the law was originally written, there was a concern that presidents worked on so many issues that applying it would be impossible. Despite the permissiveness of the law, past presidents typically put their assets into blind trusts and sold off or divested from outside businesses. Jimmy Carter even put his peanut farm into a blind trust to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest when making decisions on agriculture policy.

These presidents did this because they wanted to do the right thing, had a modicum of shame, and felt political pressure to not look like a crook.

Trump has none of those things and is driving a literal Brink’s truck through this loophole in the law.

Making the Corruption Argument Stick

There is a very persistent strain of thought among some Democratic strategists that the corruption message does not work against Trump. Voters know he is corrupt, so it’s not new information, and they think all politicians are corrupt.

However, a recent Echelon Insights poll reported on by Puck’s Peter Hamby suggests that may be changing.

In December of 2024, just before Trump’s inauguration, only 8 percent of Americans named “political corruption” as the biggest issue facing the country, according to our polling partners at Echelon Insights. At the time, voters were more anxious about the cost of living, jobs, the state of democracy, and immigration. One year later, however, the corruption number had crept up to 14 percent.

Today? Echelon’s most recent survey, out this week, finds that 17 percent of voters name political corruption as the biggest issue facing the country, putting it behind only the cost of living.

I have two related theories about the rising salience of corruption. The first and most obvious is that Trump is doing a lot of unprecedented corruption. The second is tied to rising prices. To voters, Trump seems to be more focused on raising his income than lowering their prices. So, even if you can’t convince the public that Trump’s corruption is a deal breaker, you can convince them that Trump cares more about his bottom line than yours.

And this latest gambit is a great opportunity to do that.

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Char Braun

The requests for donations from candidates across the country are piling up. SCOTUS once again is trying to silence the voices of voters with their decision to allow unlimited direct donations by DNC and RNC which really puts Dems behind the 8 ball since they’re out of money. Besides being a monthly contributor to VSA how do we decide who it makes sense to donate to so that our donation truly helps take back Congress and in my state (WI) make the most of our little less gerrymandered for now state?

Answer

I get this question all the time, and it’s very understandable. If you have given money to any Democrat over the years, your phone is under constant assault with desperate calls from candidates running for all sorts of office. Each one more plaintive than the last, and everyone promising they can win without ever explaining how.

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To quote Principal Max Anderson in the cinema classic Billy Madison:

What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

The speech was incoherent, poorly delivered, and deeply dangerous. It was also political malpractice of the highest order. Trump’s goal, to the extent he had one, was to scare Democrats about a potential effort to subvert the election. But the people who should be scared are Republicans on the ballot across America.

Here’s why.

Read more

I’m rolling out group subscriptions for Message Box Pro — my consulting service for candidates, campaign staffers, and political operatives.

If your team, office, or firm signs up together, everyone gets 30% off the individual rate. That means $45 per person, per month (with a two-seat minimum), versus $65/month for individual subscriptions.

Message Box Pro members get weekly strategy memos, polling analysis, messaging guidance, and access to a growing community of operatives, organizers, and candidates on Discord. Since launching a few months ago, it’s grown into a real professional network with congressional staff, statewide campaign teams, communications professionals, and grassroots organizers all in the mix. I’m on Discord every day, answering questions and sharing insights with the subscribers.

The group rate is designed specifically for:

• Communications and consulting firms

• Think tanks

• Advocacy organizations

• Campaign teams

I’m biased, of course, but I think Message Box Pro can be a huge asset for communications shops on Capitol Hill or in state capitols around the country.

If that’s you or your team, I hope you’ll consider giving it a try.

Join Message Box Pro

Questions? Reply to this email — I read every one.

Dan

On Sunday morning, Trump reacted to the death of Lindsey Graham in a way that only Trump could or would. He called into the Sunday shows to talk about Graham. Trump heard about the death of a close political ally and frequent golfing partner and saw an opportunity to get more attention for himself. In some ways, it was a fitting tribute. Graham was a mainstay on the Sunday shows (despite being wrong about nearly every consequential foreign policy issue in the 21st century) and was preparing for what was supposed to be his 64th appearance on Meet the Press when he died.

Either the White House or Trump himself told the Sunday shows that Trump only wanted to talk about Graham and wouldn’t address other issues. To be clear, this is a request, not a command, and the hosts had no obligation to follow through. In fact, they did try to get Trump to talk about some other issues, which led to this stunning exchange with Jake Tapper.

Think about this for a minute. Trump says “WE are trying to get CNN to go down a normal path.” He is admitting on live television that the FCC’s approval of Paramount Skydance’s acquisition was part of a corrupt plan to make CNN more MAGA-friendly.

Now this isn’t shocking. David Ellison, the pro-Trump billionaire who owns Paramount, reportedly made promises to Trump to change CNN’s news coverage and on-air lineup. And this is exactly what Ellison did when he acquired CBS News. He installed Bari Weiss, a conservative opinion journalist with no TV news experience, to oversee the network. Weiss and Ellison immediately began gutting 60 Minutes, the news program that has been most at odds with Trump over the years.

It seems like CNN is the next media outlet in line for a billionaire-funded MAGA makeover.

Trump’s blatant admission shows just how aggressive the right is being to remake the media in their image. It’s a warning sign for democracy, and it’s a call to arms for Democrats to get their shit together and start fighting fire with fire.

Winning the Information War

Democrats tend to think politics is a contest of ideas, or a contest to see who can knock on the most doors by election day. That may have been true at one time, but today’s politics is information warfare, pure and simple.

To be fair, Democrats have gotten better at the tactics of the new politics. They are going on more podcasts, talking to more influencers, and spending more time on the platforms that matter, like YouTube and TikTok.

But let’s be honest: Democrats are massively outgunned.

Pro-Trump billionaires currently own Fox News, CBS News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Roku, the Washington Post, and a huge swath of local television and radio stations. More alarmingly, these MAGA billionaires control the platforms that distribute news, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, and TikTok.

I could write a book about this (I kind of did). The Democratic donor community and party leadership should stop putting all their money into TV, which reaches fewer people every day and is ignored by almost everyone under 40. Instead, they should invest in long-term media infrastructure that can deliver our message on our own terms. We’ve made some progress, and the pro-democracy side now has outlets like Crooked Media, Courier News, Meidas Touch, and others. But those examples are still too rare, and the number of donors willing to really invest in pro-democracy media keeps shrinking.

I don’t know how many billionaires or trillionaires (hi, Elon!) subscribe to Message Box, but if any of you do, I would be happy to sit down and talk through how and why we need to start building an arsenal to compete in the information wars.

But for every non-billionaire reading this today, I encourage you to support independent, pro-democracy media. Subscribe if you can, but if you can’t, your attention is an invaluable resource. Watch, read, share, follow. The more traffic the good guys get, the more the algorithms will share that content.

I have been arguing for Democrats to change their playbook for a decade. Six years ago, I put my money where my mouth was and launched Message Box to be a counter-balance to the both-sides, misinformed political analysis that has dominated the Trump era, and to provide people with real, actionable advice on how to fight back against MAGA. I’m not saying my newsletter is going to move mountains, but I do think it has value. I am so grateful to all of the paid subscribers who make Message Box possible. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, I hope you will consider supporting my efforts. If you sign up today, you get 20% off the subscription price for a year.

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Thank you so much for reading and being part of this amazing community.

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Saoirse

What are the highest priorities for a candidate to defeat Susan Collins?

Gail Gibson

As I read about the Platner mess, I can’t help but feel like we got really lucky on this one. We are losing an incredibly problematic candidate at just the right time, and the old, establishment candidate dropped out. So the Collins campaign really has to scramble to figure out how to beat Platner’s replacement. If Maine Democrats go with someone who is progressive and vetted it seems like we have a really solid chance to beat Collins. Am I on the right track?

Answer

Lots of questions this week about whether Democrats can still win Maine or whether Graham Platner ruined our chances. This is a critical question because there is no plausible path to a Senate majority without a win in Maine. Susan Collins is very hard to beat. She is a unicorn, a Republican who regularly wins a Democratic state. In fact, she is the last Republican representing a tried-and-true blue state. Prior to the sexual assault allegation but after the reports of Platner sexting women outside of his marriage, I thought Platner was a slight favorite to beat Collins — if nothing else came out.

Well, something horrifying came out. Platner is out of the race, and Democrats have two weeks to find a new candidate and mount a campaign. It seems daunting, and it is, but I think this race is still very winnable.

Here’s why and how we win it.

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These mailbags typically come on Saturdays, and since Saturday was the Fourth of July, I thought sending it out that day would hurt engagement. Now that I think about it, sending it out on the Monday after a holiday weekend probably isn’t much better, but I made a promise (without really thinking it through), so here we are.

As a reminder, these mailbags are for paid subscribers. If you want to get your question answered — and read my answers to everyone else’s — please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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Carrie

In your view, what is similar (Gov, Senate, House, State leg) and different from the last time it broke our hearts? What races is Vote Save America focusing on and why?

When i think about how consequential Texas is - this November and particularly beyond - I feel like I should be directing effort there, but like driving across it, it’s just so damned big and overwhelming.

Answer

So many Democrats I talk to love James Talarico but are afraid to get their hopes up for a Democrat in Texas. I very much get this sentiment. Texas has been Lucy with the football for Democrats for a decade now. The 2018 election, in particular, crushed our souls. Beto O’Rourke was such an inspiring candidate and Ted Cruz was so viscerally annoying that we came to believe a Democrat could finally win Texas.

Look, this is a tough race. Texas is a tough state. The GOP is going to drop about half a billion bucks in negative ads right on Talarico’s head. According to the New York Times poll of Texas released last week, Talarico and Paxton are tied 47-47.

But I think Democrats have a better chance in this election than we did in 2018, for three reasons.

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Yesterday, Jenny Racicot, a woman whom Platner had dated, accused him of sexual assault. Politico broke the story, and here is what they reported:

Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner, who is now the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.

“I remember him grabbing my pelvis and being really forceful of me,” she said. “I remember the specific moment where I thought to myself, like, ‘This is no longer my choice.’”

The allegations are disturbing, well documented, and highly credible. There is no question Platner should drop out of the race as soon as possible. If he does so soon, Democrats can replace him on the ballot with another candidate to run against Susan Collins.

I have been supportive of Platner and open to his candidacy, despite concerns about his behavior and judgment. There are many people online today saying “I told you so” and pointing out that I and others were very wrong to back Platner. Obviously, supporting him turned out to be a mistake. I owe it to you to lay out why I did so, what I learned, and where we go from here.

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Despite all that has happened, there is probably no primary more interesting and consequential than the one happening in Michigan. There is no path to a Senate majority without a win in Michigan. It’s the one Democratically held seat that might be in danger. Senator Gary Peters is retiring, and Mike Rogers, who lost to Elissa Slotkin by less than 20,000 votes, is running unopposed for the Republican nomination.

The Democrats had been in the middle of a pretty contentious and very expensive three-way primary featuring Abdul El-Sayed, State Senator Mallory McMorrow, and Congresswoman Haley Stevens. This primary has been a proxy for so many of the bigger divisions roiling the party — anger at the establishment, ideology, and Israel and Gaza.

Yesterday, this three-way primary became a two-way primary. McMorrow suspended her campaign. She had fallen into third place in the polling, and there were questions about how she could overtake El-Sayed and Stevens before the August 4th primary.

As some of you know, I was supporting McMorrow in this race. I rarely, if ever, take a position in a Democratic primary, but I have long been impressed by Mallory and have gotten to know her a little bit over the years. I think she is extremely talented, a good person, and someone who is in politics for the right reasons.

Great candidates sometimes lose races. Barack Obama famously got clobbered in a race for Congress. I’d encourage you to watch the video above. Mallory McMorrow has a very bright future, and I’ll be watching to see what she does next.

Her decision reshapes the most important Democratic primary in the country. Here’s what we need to be watching.

Why McMorrow Lost

As always happens when a campaign fails, there is a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking. For the McMorrow campaign, much of that analysis has centered on how McMorrow responded when Hasan Piker came to campaign for El-Sayed. McMorrow condemned El-Sayed for campaigning with Piker.

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In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled for the plaintiffs in a case called NRSC v. FEC. Here’s how Politico described the ruling:

The Supreme Court struck down limits on coordinated spending between candidates and political parties on Tuesday, a win for Republicans that will fundamentally change how tens of millions of dollars are spent in congressional elections.

One quaint little fact about the case is that J.D. Vance was one of the original plaintiffs who brought it back in 2022.

Campaign finance is incredibly esoteric and seems almost designed to obscure the legalized bribery taking place behind closed doors and under the table. But let me be very clear: this is the most consequential campaign finance decision since Citizens United, and it will have a significant and immediate impact on the midterm elections.

Here’s why:

What the Case Was Actually About

There is a legal limit on what people can contribute to campaigns. Whether it’s you and me or Elon Musk, we can only give about $3,500 to a primary campaign and another $3,500 in the general election. People like Elon, of course, can give unlimited amounts to super PACs. And while there is plenty of grey area in the law, candidates cannot directly solicit or receive donations to super PACs or other outside groups. The contribution limits are designed to check the influence of wealthy people by capping what they can give directly to a candidate’s campaign at a relatively small amount.

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Tom Toro

In the last presidential election the polls did not reflect accurately what the final outcome was. Why should we believe them now and are they really true indicators of what and how voters feel?

Answer

This question goes to the heart of this newsletter and frankly, much of what I do. I like to believe that the value proposition of Message Box (and Message Box Pro) is that my takes and insights are grounded in data. I really try not to fire off from the hip, because that’s what 95% of all political commentators do.

So asking whether the polling data that undergirds my analysis is accurate is a tough but very fair question. Beyond my work, so many Democrats want to know if they can trust the polls that show Trump sinking, Democrats winning on the generic ballot, and candidates like James Talarico and Mary Peltola in the hunt in deeply red states like Texas and Alaska.

And after the giant poll misses in recent elections, it’s fair to ask — can we trust the polls?

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his allies swept a series of congressional primaries in New York City on Tuesday in a remarkable show of strength for the insurgent left that sent shock waves through the Democratic Party.

Mr. Mamdani’s candidates toppled a pair of incumbents backed by the city’s political establishment, including major labor unions and the House Democratic leader. Another candidate backed by the mayor won an open House seat, and a handful of democratic socialist challengers he supported were winning down the ballot.

In a relatively bold move, Mamdani went all in. He bet real political capital to elect Brad Lander, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Claire Valdez. He even appeared in this ad during the New York Knicks NBA Finals.

Sometimes these primary results, particularly when they happen in the city with the most reporters and pundits per capita, can be wildly over-interpreted. However, the Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus losing to a first-time candidate with no political experience who supports prison abolition and has a colorful history of attacking the Democratic Party’s most popular politicians is something certainly worth analyzing.

What does the “socialist earthquake” say about the state of the Democratic Party and the rise of socialism, and should Democratic leaders start panicking?

1. Should the Establishment be Panicking?

Definitely

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