POLITICO:
‘Blowout Is the Word’
Mikie Sherrill knows why she — and Zohran Mamdani — got elected.
It’s easy to find fractures in the Democratic Party, particularly as the center and left battle for dominance. But what’s to be gleaned from an Election Day when both factions win?
Mikie Sherrill, a moderate who scored a surprisingly large victory in New Jersey’s gubernatorial race this week, sees a through-line between her election, and that of fellow moderate Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York.
“I think what people want to hear is a leader who’s going to address their key issues, and then I think they want to see really good, clear results,” she said in an interview with The Conversation. “What all these races have in common is there is this desire to make change, that things aren’t working for people.
State Navigate:
State Navigate Experiment Shows how Pollsters Can Reach Young Voters
The 18-29 age demographic is one of the hardest demographics to poll, as their response rates fall well below a poll’s overall response rate. We knew that in order to create a sample that would be reflective of the upcoming electorate, we would not only need to oversample these voters in our raw sample, but also determine what could be an effective message to send them to pique their interest in filling out our survey.
Executive Director Chaz Nuttycombe, age 26, came up with the idea of sending them customized text messages that suited their day-to-day language. In other words, we ourselves had to “text like a Zoomer.” Two customized text messages with matter-of-fact, familiar language seemed to be an effective way of reaching this demographic. Nuttycombe and Elections Coordinator Michael Foley crafted the language, and we found that this tactic was extremely effective and a key part of State Navigate’s success compared to virtually every other pollster in Virginia…
Learning from this experiment, we sent a slightly different experimental message to a new sample of 18-29 year old voters on day 2 of the second poll. This message was lowercase (except for the potential respondent’s first name) and included an emoticon. Sending this message increased 18-29 response rates to 0.63%, under a tenth of a point less than that for the generic message sent to the non-18-29 sample that day.
G Elliott Morris:
What can Zohran Mamdani teach Democrats?
The self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" knows something about winning low-engagement and young voters
There are currently two factions battling for the soul of the Democratic Party. On one side, centrists argue that moving toward moderate positions will attract swing voters. On the other hand, progressives insist that bold, transformative policies are essential for energizing the base and defining what the party stands for.
People are trying to force Zohran Mamdani's recent upset victory in the Democratic primary for NYC mayor to say something about this debate. To one side, he shows what's possible when candidates pick bold, progressive messages to appeal to new voters. To the other, he embodies everything wrong with the Democratic Party's activist "groups." Here are some examples.
However, I don't think Mamdani's win fits this ideological divide. In my analysis, the primary was less about moderation and progressivism, and more about issue prioritization and the candidates themselves. Through this lens, Andrew Cuomo represented an old and out-of-touch status quo — Cuomo is the definition of the Democratic Party that New Yorkers have been moving away from — whereas Mamdani offered a new path focused on affordability and authenticity. He turned out a bunch of new voters, especially young ones.
G Elliott Morris/Strength in Numbers:
The 2024 Trump "realignment" is already over
Claims of a conservative realignment of non-whites, the working class, and young voters have been highly exaggerated
It is a matter of fact that Donald Trump won the 2024 election in large part by shrinking the vote margins for Kamala Harris among non-white, working-class, and young voters, relative to past Democratic nominees.
But the interpretation of Trump’s 2024 win is a matter of opinion. Some, like the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, have argued Trump’s inroads with traditionally left-leaning voters represented a fundamental realignment in American politics. He is not alone in arguing this. Many in the Democratic Party, too, interpreted Trump’s 2024 win as a historic blow — the performance of a coalition on life support. On marches the emerging Republican majority. Left-liberalism is dead.
Other analysts have been more skeptical. On the subject of realignment, political scientists have tended to land on the answer “it’s complicated.” For one thing, they argue, the national shift away from Democrats in 2024 stemmed mostly from non-ideological and non-Trump variables, such as inflation and the pandemic. Longer-term trends, too, have been pushing voters toward either party regardless of what nominees say or do, including the sorting of conservatives, regardless of race, into the Republican Party. Yes, residual group-level swings exist, but they are mostly small. Trump doesn’t look so indomitable in Dec. 2024 if you account for all the variables that set him up for victory (and it was a small victory at that).
It is clear now that claims of a fundamental realignment of American politics have been highly exaggerated
Susan B Glasser/New York:
America Begins Clapping Back at Donald Trump
In a week of political exits, a reminder that Trump’s time is coming soon, too.
It wasn’t just the party. No other President would have announced, barely a month before a statewide election that was already a referendum on his divisive leadership, that he was freezing billions of dollars in funding for an urgently needed new Hudson River rail tunnel to bring New Jersey commuters into New York City. In Virginia, home of the year’s other marquee gubernatorial race, an estimated two hundred and thirty thousand-plus federal workers, representing nearly six per cent of the state’s workforce, are currently going unpaid as a result of the shutdown—a crisis that Trump, after months of DOGE firings and rants about the evils of the Deep State, appears to care nothing about. Once again, the President has proved that he is often as helpful in getting out the vote for his adversaries as for his friends.
Philip Allen Lacovara/The Bulwark:
The Founders Would Abhor Trump’s Domestic Deployments
And the notion that courts can’t review his National Guard decisions is baseless.
The Founders would be appalled. They fought a revolution against a king who sent his troops against them to enforce his laws. That experience was fresh in their minds when they adopted a Constitution that says that Congress alone has the power “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”
The president argues that it is appropriate for him to use the military “to execute the laws.” He also contends that the courts have no authority even to consider the legitimacy of his decision to summon National Guard troops and send them into American cities for what he deems law enforcement.
Neither position has constitutional support.
David Shuster/BlueAmp:
The Sandwich That Beat Trump’s DOJ
A D.C. jury just told Pam Bondi and Trump’s prosecutors to stuff it — proving that humor and common sense still survive in the age of MAGA madness.
The fact this prosecution went forward at all tells us more about the administration’s character than any of its lofty pronouncements about “law and order.”
The same Trump crowd that turns blind eyes to real abuses — corruption, perjury, the daily vandalism of reason — will leap from its golden MAGA chaise lounge the moment a protester hurls a hoagie. To these MAGA lunatics, a citizen’s right to dissent is conditional upon silence and servility. Toss a subway sandwich, and you’ve struck at the very fabric of the republic!
Fortunately, the jury was having none of it. In their wisdom, or perhaps their ordinary human amusement, they found that a sandwich striking an armored agent produces no “bodily injury” except to the delicate dignity of officialdom.
Persuasion as well as turnout. And Trump is the best persuasion tool we have.
