Gov. Tim Walz (D) told the New Yorker he hated how much time he spent addressing the Trump campaign’s decision to spread false rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in Springfield, Ohio.
Said Walz: “They sucked me in on that.”
He added: “I was just horrified and angry when they were demonizing folks in Springfield, Ohio. And there I was talking for almost a week about immigration, right where they wanted us to be.”
“Lots of people have terrible debates…Usually, the party doesn’t lose its mind and that’s what happened here. It melted down.”
— Biden adviser Mike Donilon, speaking at Harvard, adding that pushing Joe Biden out of the presidential race was “insane.”
“It was kind of fun actually. I learned that the Democrats can’t sell worth shit. And they’re so, you know, persnickety about every little detail and that’s why the Republicans at the presidential level — I don’t want to say kicked their ass because it wasn’t a runaway, but like I said, Donald Trump can sell. If you gave the Democrats a dollar bill and said, you can sell these for 50 cents, they would hire 50 people to decide how to do it and then would not know how to sell a dollar bill for 50 cents.”
— Mark Cuban, speaking about what he learned campaigning for Kamala Harris in 2024.
A new Emerson College poll in California finds 57% of Democratic primary voters would support former Vice President Kamala Harris if she ran for Governor.
The next closest competitor is former Rep. Katie Porter follows at 9%.
Joe Rogan pushed back against claims in a new book suggesting he was partially behind why an interview with Kamala Harris on his podcast never happened, Mediaite reports.
Said Rogan, on his podcast: “No one ever committed to doing it. This is really important because they keep pretending that I lied.”
He added: “This whole idea that we fucked her over, and that we fucked her over for Trump — incorrect. Just not true. But I think it’s someone trying to cover their ass for the fact that she never did, and if she did do it, it might have had a positive effect.”
“Elon Musk spent at least $288 million to help elect President Donald Trump and other Republican candidates,” according to a Washington Post analysis of new Federal Election Commission filings.
“Friday’s FEC filings cement Musk’s status as the biggest political donor of the recent presidential cycle at a moment when he has amassed an extraordinary amount of power as a member of Trump’s inner circle — and decried by critics as a de facto, unelected co-president.”
“As the Democratic National Committee prepares to elect a new chair, its departing leader says Democrats should have stuck with Joe Biden in the 2024 race,” the AP reports.
Said Jaime Harrison: “That’s the mentality that I had going into this. And my nature is, ‘I’m on the team with you, you’re my quarterback. You got sacked a few times. But you know what? I’m going to block the hell out of the next person that’s coming at you.’ And that is not always the mentality of everybody in my party. And so sometimes, people look on the sidelines, ready to call in the backup.”
NBC News: “Only a few people knew the real reason: the whole Houston rally was built to put Kamala Harris in proximity to Joe Rogan. The ongoing negotiations on that were touch-and-go… But Elon Musk and Dana White had convinced Trump and Rogan to bury their dispute, according to a Trump aide. There would be no Harris interview.”
“Harris aides thought they had one more ace to play… But Beyoncé didn’t perform at the rally. She would speak. But she would not sing.”
Excerpted from Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
A New York Times analysis of the nearly 6,000 congressional and state legislative elections in November “shows just how few races were true races. Nearly all either were dominated by an incumbent or played out in a district drawn to favor one party overwhelmingly. “
“The result was a blizzard of blowouts, even in a country that is narrowly divided on politics.”
Big oil spent a stunning $445 million throughout the last election cycle to influence Donald Trump and Congress, The Guardian reports.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D), a former law school dean who oversaw two presidential elections in battleground Michigan, is launching a campaign Wednesday to become the state’s next governor, the Detroit News reports.
Detroit Free Press: “Michigan voters first elected Benson as Secretary of State in 2018 and then again in 2022 by a nearly 14-point margin — the biggest of any of the major statewide races that year. As Michigan’s chief elections officer during the 2020 election, Benson spoke out against President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss that year. She regularly appears on cable TV news programs as a national voice on protecting democracy in the U.S.”
New York Times: “If there were a secret ballot among Democratic senators, Mr. Schumer would tell the president, no more than five would say he should continue running. Mr. Biden’s own pollsters assessed that he had about a 5 percent chance of prevailing against Donald Trump, Mr. Schumer would tell him — information that was apparently news to the president. And if the president refused to step aside, the senator would argue, the consequences for Democrats and Mr. Biden’s own legacy after a half-century of public service would be catastrophic.”
Said Schumer: “If you run and you lose to Trump, and we lose the Senate, and we don’t get back the House, that 50 years of amazing, beautiful work goes out the window. But worse — you go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.”
“Vice President Kamala Harris has told close allies and family members she is disappointed in President Biden’s recent contention that he would have won the 2024 election, straining relations between the two during their final days in the White House,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Harris has been reluctant to distance herself from Biden or criticize him throughout her vice presidency. Even as several top Democrats pushed her to break from the unpopular president after she replaced him atop the ticket, Harris refused. She vocally supported Biden after his halting debate performance in June, when several Democrats were calling on him to step aside, and when a special counsel report on Biden’s handling of classified documents amplified concerns about his mental acuity.”
“Harris has expressed deep sadness to people close to her over losing the election and Biden’s comments.”
First lady Jill Biden told the Washington Post that it was “disappointing” that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was the one whose decisive intervention pushed President Biden out of the 2024 campaign.
Said Biden: “We were friends for 50 years. It was disappointing.”
She added: “Let’s just say I was disappointed with how it unfolded. I don’t know. I learned a lot about human nature. I think that’s all I’m going to say.”
“A coalition of MAGA die-hards, tech bros and blue-collar workers were key to Donald Trump’s November victory,” Politico reports.
“Now, some of them are already at each other’s throats.”
“Free traders and protectionists are at odds over Trump’s promise to enact “universal” tariffs. Immigration hard-liners are butting heads with tech companies that support legal immigration. And isolationists are grappling with the president-elect’s apparently increasingly expansionist global agenda.”
“And days before he takes office some of Trump’s most ardent original supporters have been the most resistant to the bigger tent.”
Jonathan Chait: “On the substance, Biden’s economic agenda has registered some meaningful successes. The hot labor market raised wages; union organizers at a handful of companies, such as Starbucks and Amazon, have made breakthroughs; and the administration’s public investments in chip production and green energy have built up strategic domestic industries. As a political strategy, however, post-neoliberalism has clearly failed. Biden’s popularity dropped to catastrophic levels in his first year and never recovered, leaving his successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, unable to escape his gravitational pull. If rejecting neoliberalism for four years did nothing to pull working-class voters away from Trump, perhaps Trumpism was never a revolt against neoliberalism in the first place.”
“Some Democrats have responded to the disaster of 2024 by insisting that the way forward for the party is to keep doing what Biden did, but louder and more insistently. In fact, Trump’s reelection ought to call into question the whole foundation upon which the strategy was constructed.”
Playbook: “The ‘victory’ part didn’t pan out for the Harris Victory Fund. But the funding part remains alive and well on the bank statements of some Democratic donors.”
“Two months after Kamala Harris’ defeat, the joint fundraising committee her campaign set up with the Democratic National Committee is still charging monthly recurring donors to the committee… And some donors are not happy.”
Said a Democratic operative: “It’s silly, out of touch, and needlessly takes advantage of our most loyal supporters.”
“Republicans made almost universal gains in mail voting during the 2024 election, eroding a key Democratic advantage in nearly every state that tracks party registration,” the New York Times reports.
“The Republican rise in the use of mail voting was almost always accompanied by a drop in registered Democrats casting a mail ballot, allowing Republicans to make significant inroads in battleground states like Pennsylvania, red states like Florida and blue states like Connecticut.”
“The turnaround was remarkable given Republicans’ yearslong skepticism toward mail voting, fueled by President-elect Donald J. Trump’s false claims about fraud. The method was once widely embraced by Republicans in Southern and rural states but fell out of favor during and after the 2020 election as Mr. Trump and his allies argued that the only safe way to vote was in person on Election Day.”
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.
