Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “The Iowa Senate race moves onto the periphery of the competitive board this week.”
“Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) was in the news recently for comments on health care, although the bigger reason for the switch is that she drew a potentially credible Democratic challenger.”
Nate Cohn: “While the history books will rightfully dwell on whether Democrats could have forestalled another Trump presidency, the question of whether Mr. Trump cost conservatives a more decisive victory might be the more useful one to understand American politics today.”
“Voters wanted change, badly. They were repelled not just by Mr. Biden’s faltering condition, but also by rising prices and perceived failures of Democratic governance on everything from immigration to energy. While it didn’t yield a more decisive Republican victory, the backlash against pandemic-era restrictions, rising prices and ‘woke’ all help explain why a close election felt like a conservative ‘vibe shift.’”
“The race was close for one reason: Donald J. Trump. He was an unpopular felon who had alienated millions of Americans with his comments and actions over nearly a decade. Obviously, President Trump possesses important political strengths, but his weaknesses plainly made a landslide victory more challenging. To the extent the election offered the Republicans an opportunity to win big, he was not the candidate to capitalize on it.”
Tim Walz on Saturday delivered blunt advice to fellow Democrats in an address to party activists and officials: “We’ve got to find some goddamn guts to fight for working people,” Politico reports.
He added: “The party of the working class lost a big chunk of the working class. That last election was a primal scream on so many fronts.”
Of Republican control, he acknowledged: “Some of it is our own doing.”
“As Elon Musk became one of Donald Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known,“ the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.”
“It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.”
“At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children.”
Nate Silver: “As you can see from the Catalist data, it’s actually common for most dropoff voters to be Democrats: this also happened to the party in 2012, 2016 and 2020. In some sense, that’s a sign of being a victim of your own success. If you’re good at turning out marginal voters, you’re happy to book the win — but they might not vote again next time.”
“In past elections, however, new voters were also Democratic, enough to more or less cancel this out. This time, however, the majority of new voters picked Trump.”
“Put another way, Democrats performed poorly among marginal voters in general: people who don’t read the news that much, and whose political views don’t match the ideologically ‘consistent’ views of strong partisans. Young voters, voters of color, and voters without college degrees are overrepresented in this cohort, all groups that Democrats struggled with in 2024 compared to previous elections.”
Jessica Yellin has a very interesting interview with former Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) and why he ultimately tried to challenge President Joe Biden in the Democratic primary.
Said Phillips: “This was an issue of nobody, Vice President Harris, who was in the room, who’s known Joe Biden for years, who attacked him vigorously in 2020, who met with him weekly, a woman of color. You know, she wouldn’t run. I called Gretchen Whitmer directly. Her very thoughtful political director said, please do not mention this. Do not mention her name. And as a result, you know, we can’t have you talk. I called JB Pritzker directly, same thing. His team was rude and I thought reprehensible.”
He added: “I tried to encourage everybody, Newsom, Klobuchar, anybody. Of course, I knew they wouldn’t do it, though, Jessica, because they wouldn’t give up. They wouldn’t risk their personal futures for the country’s.”
It’s worth watching.
“Mike Donilon, a top adviser to former President Biden, was paid about $4 million to work on the 2024 Biden campaign at the president’s insistence,” Axios reports.
“The sum was orders of magnitude higher than the pay for other top aides — campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon made $300,000 — and illustrates the standing held by Biden’s inner-most circle of advisers.”
“Many former Biden officials remain bitter at Donilon for making so much money and, in their view, guiding the campaign into disaster.”
Cook Political Report: “Back in 2012, Barack Obama’s campaign had a mantra — a younger, more diverse electorate was the key to reelection. Had the 2024 electorate been in place in 2012, the team in Chicago would’ve been over the moon. The electorate last fall was three points less white than it was 12 years ago. What’s more, the youngest cohort of voters by generational breakdown made up 36% of the electorate (compared to 18% in 2012), while the oldest cohort was just 39% (down from 57% in 2012).”
“And, yet, that coalition was much friendlier to Donald Trump than to any other GOP nominee.”
“So what happened?”
Playbook: “Harris seriously struggled with younger, more-diverse and less-engaged voters shifting significantly to the right — a change from Democrats’ typically stronger showing with infrequent or new voters.”
“Joe Biden clearly just was not capable of delivering the message we needed to deliver in 2024. Why did it take so long? Why was it so hard to recognize that and make the change? So I guess to some degree it is helpful to have that conversation.”
— Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), quoted by Politico, on the new wave of headlines about former President Biden’s mental and physical decline.
A new Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll finds Kamala Harris would lead Donald Trump in a theoretical rematch by 5 percentage points, 47% to 42%.
However, when limited just to people who voted in 2024, a rematch is tied at 43% each.
Democrats also lead on the generic congressional ballot, 47% to 41%.
The New Yorker run an excerpt of Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson:
“President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged. The élites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama—they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race. If he had stayed in, he would have beaten Donald Trump. That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again.”
“His pollsters told us that no such polls existed. There was no credible data, they said, to support the notion that he would have won. All unspun information suggested it would have been a loss, likely a spectacular one, far worse than that suffered by his replacement as the Democratic nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris.”
“The disconnect between Biden’s optimism and the unhappy reality of poll results was a constant throughout his Administration. Many insiders sensed that his inner circle shielded him from bad news. It’s also true that, for Biden to absorb those poll results, he would have had to face the biggest issue driving them: the public had concluded—long before most Democratic officials, media, and other ‘élites’ had—that he was far too old to do the job.”
“He totally fucked us.”
— David Plouffe, quoted by The Guardian, in the new book, Original Sin, saying President Biden undermined Kamala Harris’ “fucking nightmare” of a presidential campaign.
“Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to pass on a Senate bid has top Republican officials scrambling to find a backup plan and avoid a divisive primary — or, at the very least, one divisive candidate,” NBC News reports.
“There are growing concerns in Georgia GOP circles that if Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene becomes the Republican nominee to take on Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, she could hurt the party’s chances to flip the seat, given her divisive reputation and rhetoric.”
“The Republican challenger for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat conceded last November’s election to Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs on Wednesday, two days after a federal judge ruled that potentially thousands of disputed ballots challenged by Jefferson Griffin must remain in the final tally,” the AP reports.
Former President Joe Biden told the BBC that he doesn’t know “that it would have made much difference” if he had withdrawn from the 2024 presidential race earlier.
Said Biden: “I don’t think it would have mattered. We left at a time when we had a good candidate. She was fully funded.”
He added: “It was hard to say, ‘Now I’ll stop now.’ I meant what I said when I started, that I’m preparing to hand this to the next generation, the transition government. But things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away, and it was a hard decision.”
For members: Rewriting History Around Biden’s Decision to Run Again
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) is passing on a Senate run against Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) in 2026, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.
“Though some allies of the second-term Republican long doubted he would run, the uncertainty froze for months the race against Ossoff, whom Republicans see as one of the most vulnerable incumbents on the ballot next year.”
Kemp was the only Republican candidate who was running ahead of Ossoff in recent AJC polling.
“Months before President Joe Biden was forced to abandon his re-election campaign, his top White House aides debated having him undergo a cognitive test to prove his fitness for a second term but ultimately decided against the move, according to a forthcoming book,” the New York Times reports.
“The account illustrates the degree to which Mr. Biden’s top aides harbored deep fears about how voters viewed his age and mental acuity.”
“Mr. Biden’s aides were confident that he would pass a cognitive test, but they worried that the mere fact of his taking one would raise new questions about his mental abilities.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
