Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: Democrats’ Laken Riley vote is aging badly

Two things happened this week that reveal how quickly the politics of immigration enforcement are shifting.

First, Republican Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, urged the administration to dial back its enforcement push. “Before you know it, you get people that get carried away in their job and whatever it may be, and all of a sudden, then you’re dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years,” Justice told Politico this week. “I don’t know that we need to be doing that stuff.” And he’s not the only red-state Republican who’s been pushing back on ICE lately, including some facing voters in tough races next month.

The second thing flew under the radar: Sen. Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat running for reelection who has also been floated as a 2028 presidential candidate, struggled to explain himself when a reporter confronted him on camera about his vote for the Laken Riley Act in January 2025. Passed within days of Trump’s inauguration and signed nine days into his second term, the law requires ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who are merely arrested for or charged with theft-related crimes, before any conviction.

In the exchange with a reporter from Drop Site News, Ossoff talked about his Senate work investigating alleged ICE abuses, but didn’t directly address his vote after being asked if he regretted it. “Laken Riley was my constituent and what happened to her should happen to no American, to no person in this world,” Ossoff said. “I think that immigration enforcement should be focused on those who are convicted or charged with serious crimes.” He excused himself to walk into a meeting as the reporter pressed him on whether the law undermined due process. 

In both cases, you see changing winds of electoral politics. Back in 2025, when Ossoff and 11 other Senate Democrats joined Republicans in supporting Trump’s immigration bill, they implicitly validated Trump’s premise on immigration enforcement: that not only was the border out of control, but that there also needed to be new efforts to step up interior enforcement through expanding agencies like ICE. In the year-plus since that vote, Trump has hired more ICE officers, launched sweeping raids in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and fueled a cauldron of chaos that’s led to shootings across the country. Politically, it has now put Democrats like Ossoff in a pickle, one that will matter more the closer we get to 2028.

How do you explain giving more immigration powers to a Stephen Miller-led White House? How can one argue you couldn’t have seen this coming?

In some ways, you can understand the political logic of the time. Ossoff, who is running in a state Trump carried, and many of the congressional Democrats who supported the Laken Riley law were in competitive races, and Democrats left the 2024 election thinking they had misread the electorate on the issue, particularly after Latino voters swung hard toward the right. But given what’s happened since, it’s clear many congressional Democrats made a familiar mistake: prioritizing political triangulation over standing on their values of protecting marginalized communities.

Take a look at some of the Democrats who have already had to walk back their votes. In the Democratic primary for Minnesota’s open Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan made US Rep. Angie Craig’s vote for the law a key focus of her campaign, calling it “disqualifying.” The attacks were so effective that Craig eventually expressed remorse, saying, “I wanted to be honest with the people of Minnesota. I will tell you when I get it wrong, and I got that one wrong.” Craig lost the August 11 primary to Flanagan.

Maryland’s April McClain Delaney, another congressional Democrat, also said she regretted her vote: “I will say that this was in the beginning of my term. And I never thought that ICE immigration and the horror of what has happened would happen.” (She survived her primary, defeating David Trone by 6 points.)

It’s easy to see where the buyer’s remorse is emanating from. Trump’s ICE is broadly unpopular. And as we’ve talked about on this Substack and in our reporting on America, Actually, Trump is doing worse and worse with Latino voters, with both prices and immigration enforcement driving the slide. A Hart Research poll for TelevisaUnivision of 1,500 Latino registered voters in battleground House districts (August 6–17) found 63 percent disapprove of Trump’s job performance and 62 percent disapprove of his handling of immigration enforcement and deportations. Sixty-four percent view ICE unfavorably. 

When I recently talked to Stephanie Valencia of Equis Research, she said this: 

The people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there. Like, they were told he was gonna focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was gonna focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that.

But while the shift in public opinion helps explain the elected officials’ political logic, it doesn’t change the material harm of their votes. Just this week, ICE announced plans to hire 5,000 more employees, most of them deportation officers, by the end of the year as enforcement continues to ramp up.

And these raids have a lasting effect on targeted communities, like in Maine, the Chicago area, and Texas. It’s the No. 1 issue that has come up in my conversations with local reporters. The chief architect of this chaos is the president, but make no mistake: Trump had help from shortsighted Democrats.

One thing I’m hearing 

Maya Miller is a Report for America corps member covering democracy and government for the Gulf States Newsroom, a public radio collaboration that includes Louisiana’s WWNO and WRKF. She’s been reporting on Mississippi’s redistricting fight and what residents are saying about their representation and the upcoming midterms.

You’ve been reporting from redistricting hearings in Mississippi. What are residents most concerned about, and is there a conversation or moment that captures the mood?

Residents are most concerned about their representation. In Mississippi in particular, race and party are strongly intertwined, and Black residents worry that by being drawn into new districts, voters may elect a Republican candidate. There was a bit of secrecy around redistricting earlier this summer, with Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, canceling a special session to redraw judicial lines. So advocates created the People’s Hearings, a series of meetings held across the state to voice concerns and create a public record of testimonies from Mississippians. Quickly after, lawmakers decided to host their own public hearings, and at these hearings, hundreds of residents showed up, mostly to urge them not to redistrict.

“It seems to me that the threat of losing representation has made people more aware of the moving parts.”

At one hearing, I spoke to Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis, president of the Natchez NAACP. She’s frustrated that the state is going to spend millions on new maps when people are struggling with day to day expenses. And Ramona Sanders of Meridian, Mississippi, has a lot of concerns on whether mid-decade redistricting is illegal. While it’s not, she says that lawmakers are opening themselves up to legal action. I haven’t heard anything from voter advocacy groups that points to future lawsuits, but only time will tell, if and when lawmakers redraw the maps, if these maps are constitutional or not.

Redistricting is often covered as a fight over which party wins more seats. What would these changes mean for the communities you cover and their ability to have a voice in Congress?

One change that could happen is that residents who are Democrats might lose the state’s only Democrat leader. Out of four congressmen, there’s only one Democrat, Bennie Thompson, who represents District 2. His district spans much of the west, from the capital city of Jackson to most of the Mississippi Delta and southwest Mississippi. It’s a heavily Black district, somewhere around 63 percent Black. He’s held this seat for 33 years and has brought millions to the district for health care, infrastructure, and agriculture. 

So residents are worried that Republicans are trying to edge him out and replace him with a more conservative leader who may not have the same concerns as the community. 

How are these fights affecting people’s interest in the midterms? Are you hearing more determination to vote, more doubt that voting matters, or something else?

People are fired up. They’re incredibly engaged. I’m hearing from a lot of people who are more determined to vote in November than when I covered redistricting in Alabama in 2024. It seems to me that the threat of losing representation has made people more aware of the moving parts. So they’re attending hearings, participating in rallies, registering to vote and checking their registration, phoning a friend and making plans to be at the polls on November 3.

What is the national conversation about redistricting missing that becomes clear when you spend time in these communities?

I think the national conversation is missing the voice of the community. It’s one thing to report on the politics of redistricting, but there’s a layer of real concern from residents that shouldn’t be ignored. They’re worried about hospitals closing. They’re worried about public schools losing funding. They’re worried about the rising cost of groceries and gas. I find that talking to and listening to residents helps me understand a community more than calling up a lawmaker and asking them their thoughts. There’s a place for that side of the conversation, of course, but I’ve always tried to center people who will be most impacted in my reporting, and I feel that leads to a better story for our listeners.

Is the best shot Democrats have at defeating safe-seat Republican senators…not running candidates at all?

That’s the theory behind the party’s approach to several Senate races in deep red territory this year — races in which they hope independent candidates might manage to take down Republican incumbents, if only the Democratic Party would get out of the way.

In Nebraska, South Dakota, and Idaho, the candidate who won the Democratic primary has since quit the race — often with some “urging” from the party establishment — to pave the way for a two-way matchup between a Republican incumbent and an independent. (Democrats tried to similarly clear the way for an independent in Montana, but the party’s nominee refused to quit the race.)

The theory is that the Democratic brand is so toxic to so many voters in these states that it’s impossible for a Democrat to win there nowadays — but that there’s no great love for the Republican establishment either, and dissatisfaction with the political status quo more generally. So perhaps a fresh-faced independent could capture essentially all of a red state’s Democratic voters and peel away enough Republicans and independents to win.

It’s a bold bet and, most believe, unlikely to succeed — but polls do show surprisingly close races in some of these contests. And it’s not an entirely new strategy. In several red-state Senate contests dating back to 2014, Democrats concluded that the only way to win is not to play, even as all the independents they cleared the way for have lost.

But this year’s crop of independents stands out. For one, they’re running in a national environment that seems much more hostile to the GOP, making it more plausible that one or more makes it to Washington. For another, they’ve formed a loose alliance over group text, and they have something of a shared platform — a focus on economic populism and taking on corporate power, while downplaying cultural issues. 

Brian Bengs, the independent running in South Dakota, told me: “I think I can speak for the others when I say our collective efforts are based on the idea that the left-right social issues are what is being used to keep us at each other’s throats. The real fight that we need to have is big money versus little folks — the regular folks.”

They also have some specific plans for how, if elected, they’d get together to shake up how the Senate works.

“If a couple of us, maybe just as few as two independents, get across the line, we can deny a majority to either party. We can create a Fulcrum Caucus,” Todd Achilles, the independent in Idaho, told me. “Both parties would have to negotiate with us to get stuff done.”

Whether these candidates win or lose, their stronger-than-expected candidacies have made Republican incumbents take notice, and are an intriguing model of how to bring at least some competition to states that seem very solidly red — or even, potentially, very solidly blue. Should they perform well in November, their shared message could end up influencing candidates across the partisan spectrum. 

Furthermore, if they do reach critical mass in the Senate, it could mean the rise of an informal third party, one that can advance its own agenda in Washington. Yet it should also be noted that the more of them win, the harder the math for a Republican majority specifically gets, since they’d be knocking Republican incumbents — and only Republican incumbents — out of power.

Amidst rising dissatisfaction with both parties, there would seem to be an opening for a different approach. But busting up the two-party system is easier said than done — particularly when all these candidates have past ties or present coziness with Democrats that, their opponents argue, call their supposed independence into question.

The Dan Osborn model

Democrats have tried this strategy of clearing the field for independents in red-state Senate races before — in 2014, when entrepreneur Greg Orman (I) challenged Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS); in 2020, when orthopedic surgeon and commercial fisher Al Gross (I) challenged Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK); and in 2022, when former CIA officer Evan McMullin (I) challenged Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Yet all those independents lost by double digits.

But the current model of an independent challenger was inspired by a different candidate — Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, who came surprisingly close to unseating Sen. Deb Fischer (R) in 2024, and is now challenging the state’s other GOP senator, Pete Ricketts, this cycle.

Osborn has a background as an industrial mechanic, labor leader, and Navy veteran with a plain-spoken affect. He did not graduate from college, he’s said he didn’t own a suit, and he has forearm tattoos. He had led a strike at a Kellogg’s plant in 2021 that won concessions in the company, but he was later fired. 

Union figures helped recruit him to challenge Fischer; the consultant Daniel Moraff (who later coaxed Graham Platner to run for office in Maine) also became involved in Osborn’s campaign. Osborn’s admaker Tommy McDonald later co-founded the consulting firm Fight Agency, which is now semi-famous for challenging the Democratic Party establishment by backing Zohran Mamdani and Platner’s campaigns.

Dating back to his initial campaign launch, Osborn’s messaging focused heavily on criticizing “monopolistic corporations,” aligning him with a faction on the left that believes the Democratic Party doesn’t do enough to challenge big money and concentrated corporate power. Osborn also took moderate or conservative stances on some cultural issues, supporting gun rights and President Donald Trump’s border wall. (“If Trump needs help building a wall, well, I’m pretty handy,” he said in one ad.) The Democratic Party stood aside; no Democrats filed to run in the primary.

The result was that in 2024, when Trump won Nebraska by 20 points, Osborn lost his race by just 6.7 percentage points. That closer-than-expected outcome in a disappointing cycle for Democrats made many in the political world take notice, spurring polls and research projects about whether it could be replicated elsewhere — and whether, amidst more favorable national conditions, it could actually succeed.

A squad of independents?

So this cycle, in addition to Osborn himself running again, there are several other candidates trying their luck as independents with similar platforms. 

In South Dakota, Brian Bengs, a Navy and Air Force veteran, had previously run for Senate as a Democrat in 2022 and lost in a landslide. Working as a park ranger in 2025, Bengs told me that he became dispirited by DOGE cuts to the National Park Service, and got in touch with Osborn to discuss whether he should run again — this time as an independent against South Dakota’s other GOP senator, Mike Rounds. 

“Our economic system and our political system have the same problem, which is too much concentration of money and not enough competition,” Bengs told me. “And it is producing poor results for regular folks in both systems for the same reason.” 

The winner of South Dakota’s Democratic primary, Julian Beaudion, quit the race in August, saying he’d faced “intimidating threats to drop out,” setting up a two-way face-off between Bengs and Rounds.

In Idaho, meanwhile, Army veteran, former corporate executive, and former Democratic state legislator Todd Achilles is running as an independent against 83-year-old Sen. Jim Risch.

Before running for office, Achilles had written for the American Economic Liberties Project, the left’s leading anti-monopoly think tank. He told me that “toxic concentrated corporate power,” brought on by “wave after wave of mergers and consolidation,” was destroying free markets in the US, as well as corrupting the political system. 

“You can’t tell the difference between a corporatist Republican and a corporatist Democrat anymore,” Achilles said. “They’re both checks from the same organizations, the same special interests.” 

In the Idaho race, too, the winner of the Democratic primary dropped out after state party leaders withheld their support.

Finally, in Montana, Seth Bodnar, an army veteran and former president of the University of Montana, is running as an independent for an open seat contest against Republican Kurt Alme. But Democrats’ high hopes that Bodnar could take on Alme untrammeled went awry when the winner of the Democratic primary, Alani Bankhead, refused the entreaties of practically the entire state party establishment to drop out. As a result, polls suggest, Bodnar and Bankhead will split the anti-Republican vote and likely let Alme cruise to victory.

The independents’ big plans for exercising leverage in the Senate

These various independents running have a lot in common — they all have military backgrounds and roughly similar platforms. They’re also all on a group text, per the New York Times — and they’ve started to think about how they could shake up the Senate if they win.

The few independents elected to the Senate in recent decades — centrist Joe Lieberman in Connecticut (after he lost the 2006 Democratic primary), socialist Bernie Sanders in Vermont, and center-left Angus King in Maine — had little in common with each other, but all ended up deciding to caucus with the Democratic Party after they won, believing that’s the best way to score their preferred committee assignments and help advance their priorities.

But Bengs, Achilles, and Bodnar have vowed that they would not do this. They’ve all said they wouldn’t caucus with either party if they win, and that they’d instead caucus with any other independents, making what Achilles calls the “Fulcrum Caucus.”

Achilles told me that, if these independents stick together, they could demand major reforms to the political system such as term limits and age limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, restrictions on dark money spending on elections, and bans on gerrymandering. “I think we’re all aligned on this,” he said. (Several of these ideas would likely be shot down by the current Supreme Court as unconstitutional.)

“The goal is to deny the majority,” Bengs told me. “So neither Team Red or Team Blue gets to impose their will on the other side, without either going through us or working together — which would be a win unto itself, if they would work together.”

With the Senate growing more fiercely partisan in recent years, many have wondered why centrists on both sides don’t get together and try to seize control of the agenda. 

Yet the unity of this hypothetical new independent bloc already seems a bit shaky — in part because Osborn hasn’t committed to this strategy. In fact, Osborn has recently begun offering a new answer to the “caucus question” that has dogged him throughout two campaign cycles.

“I’ve given that a lot of thought and completely done a 180 on that,” Osborn told me. “Caucusing with nobody, you wouldn’t get anything done. I’m gonna caucus with everybody.” 

That meant, he said, he’d try to caucus with both parties at once. When I asked him whether that was possible and how it would work in practice, he told me, “Nobody really knows, and nobody’s been able to tell me that I can or can’t.”

While Osborn is an underdog, he is generally believed to be the independent candidate with the best shot at winning — several recent polls have shown his race to be tight. Since he has a shot of actually being in the Senate and having to follow through on his promises, he may feel less eager to box himself in.

But are they actually just Democrats?

When I asked the independents why they weren’t Democrats, they offered varying answers. Osborn said that “Biden and Harris failed on our border,” and that “if we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country.” He also said Democrats weren’t fighting hard enough for guardrails on the artificial intelligence industry, and complained that “Chuck Schumer’s daughter just got a job at OpenAI.”

Bengs said “the open borders of Biden” were disastrous, called defunding the police and abolishing the police “stupid ideas,” and said he condemned socialism. Achilles criticized “the dangerous decision to put President Biden forward for a second term” and the “corporatist” lean of the party generally.

But the reality is that prominent Democrats have implicitly or explicitly backed all their candidacies — and some of the candidates themselves were registered Democrats very recently.

Bengs told me he was a registered independent for his entire life, until he wanted to run for Senate in the 2022 cycle, to prevent Sen. John Thune from winning reelection unopposed. When it was too difficult for him to get on the ballot as an independent, he sought the Democratic nomination instead. And when he learned that state law required a party nominee to be a member of that party, he registered as a Democrat. When he lost, he swiftly became an independent again.

“My biggest weakness in this race is the fact that I ran as a Democrat in 2022, and that I was a registered Democrat for 13 months,” Bengs said.

Achilles, for his part, said he was a registered Republican for most of his life — but that, in 2024, state Democrats wanted to appoint him to an open state legislature seat, so he joined the party.

Then, in June 2025, he resigned from the legislature, announced he had switched his party registration to unaffiliated, and launched his Senate campaign against Risch, saying “the two-party system is just fundamentally broken right now.”

“It makes it a lot easier to tag you as a secret Democrat if you’re a former Democratic officeholder or a former Democratic Senate candidate,” Jacob Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, told me.

Osborn’s version of the problem is a series of leaks that have come out in recent weeks, in which he addressed Democrats privately and struck a very different tone than he typically does in public.

The Trump border wall he’d publicly backed was “a symbol of racism,” Osborn privately told a group of Latino and Black Democrats last year. “It’s a joke,” he added. “It does nothing, you know.”

Another recording, from a private campaign-related event, featured Osborn discussing how “Billy Bob in fucking Red Cloud, Nebraska” waves the Trump flag because he wants to be “on the winning team.” He added: “That’s all they care about because their lives probably suck.” (Osborn apologized for those comments after they were leaked, and said: “My life sucks too.”)

“When you’re funded by Democrats, hold the same policies as Democrats, and let your campaigns be run by Democrat consultants with ties to Chuck Schumer and Zohran Mamdani, you’re a Democrat,” Bernadette Breslin, press secretary for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told me in a statement.

That’s the message that Republicans will be broadcasting to voters in these red states. Whether it will work will depend on each particular state and matchup. In Montana, Bodnar has the additional problem of the Democratic candidate staying in the race to split the vote.

But Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, argued to me that Bengs and Achilles have the toughest road — in 2024 Trump won their states, South Dakota and Idaho, by the overwhelming margins of 30 and 36 points, respectively. “It is just hard to find the votes in those states,” he said. But he pointed out that Rounds is up on the airwaves in South Dakota, and said Risch appears to be “taking the race seriously” and “running a real campaign” — so, at the very least, these runs mean the incumbents won’t take another term totally for granted.

Osborn, in contrast, has “the proof point” of coming within 7 points of winning in 2024, Rubashkin said, and this is now a more unfavorable national environment for the GOP. The question is whether his own behavior and comments will have damaged his prior reputation for independence, particularly once they’re amplified by millions in spending from his opponent Pete Ricketts, the self-funding scion of a billionaire family, and the super PAC backing Ricketts.

Still, if Osborn pulls it off, it will be seismic — as the candidate himself mused on one leaked recording. 

“If I beat Pete Ricketts, if a shop floor mechanic — independent mechanic — beats an entrenched Republican billionaire in a state like Nebraska, I will be one of the most popular politicians overnight, right?” he said. “And people are going to want to listen to what I have to say.”

With the 2026 midterm elections fast approaching, polling increasingly suggests that the GOP is in for a bad time. As the Iran war drives up inflation and fuel prices, Republicans are on the back foot not just in swing states like Michigan, but in redder parts of the map: Iowa, Texas, and maybe even Kansas, among others. (Not to mention Georgia and North Carolina.) 

It’s shaping up to be a Democratic wave, in other words, and a major repudiation of President Donald Trump. According to Sarah Longwell, the publisher of political news site the Bulwark, there’s a clear reason why this is the cycle that things seem to be falling apart for Trump, who has dodged scandals and bad poll numbers before. “The average person is often voting on instinctual things,” she explains, “and those instincts are a lot of your animalistic desires for things to be okay materially.” And for many voters right now, things are not okay materially.

Longwell would know: She regularly speaks with voters for her podcast, The Focus Group, and she’s the author of the new book How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time. 

Longwell talked with Vox’s Astead Herndon for a special live recording of the America, Actually podcast at the Texas Tribune Festival earlier this month about why voters are both more and less complicated than punditry sometimes suggests, what the future holds for the Republican Party post-Trump, and the lesson Democrats need to learn to capitalize on their wins.

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Longwell, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

One of the themes in the book is to talk to voters like real adults. What does that mean? 

There was a long period of time in our history where the artifice of politics was part of the performance of politics.

You could give a good speech. You’d do a debate. Those are not the rules of politics in this communications environment anymore. Every single one of you, if you’re a Bulwark person, you interact with me. I am in your ear, and we’re having a conversation.

We have a parasocial relationship. I walked in here and met a bunch of people, and they were like, “I feel like I know you.” And people want to feel like that about their political leaders now. And so they want to know what makes you tick. Are you a real person? And so the artifice of a debate on CNN is starting to feel really stupid, no offense to CNN.

People demand more now. And a lot of it is just that artifice is falling away for voters. Donald Trump understood that as a person who had been in people’s living rooms as a performer. Democratic politicians still have not figured it out. 

One of the things that comes through in both the book and I think the work that we both do is how voters don’t always fit into those neat ideological boxes.

I always tell the story about when I was at the Iowa caucuses, and I remember in 2019 in the Democratic primary, someone telling me they were stuck between Bernie [Sanders] and [former New York City Mayor Michael] Bloomberg, and asking, “How did you get there?”

And what was the answer? 

I think the short answer was they liked a strong guy where they knew what he believed in. And they did not care which side of that coin that was, as long as it felt consistent and something they could put their hands around.

If ideology is not the controlling paradigm for voters, how should we think about the different ways people are sorting themselves right now? 

My answer is genuinely not to sort them as much. This is the reason people say things like, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and then everybody gets bored with that answer, and they want to talk about 10 other things because they’re like, “Well, that’s so straightforward.”

But I try in the book to say it really is about improving people’s material well-being and ensuring their safety. So you go back to: What are the most human things that people want? They want to be able to afford gas. They want a job. They want a job [where] they think that they can go up the ladder. 

They want their kids to get a good education. Then they want to be safe. They want to know that they’re safe in their community. They want to know they’re safe in the places that they go. And Donald Trump and Republicans really do understand: People vote with weird animal instincts. 

Now, I bet a lot of the people in this room are college-educated suburban voters, but the average voter in a general election is a 55-year-old white guy without a college degree.

The average person is often voting on instinctual things, and those instincts are a lot of your animalistic desires for things to be okay materially — your cost of health care, and then for you to be safe. And so if you think about those base-level desires and then think about what Democrats spend most of their time talking about, you’re like, “Is that the thing that captures all these people?”

When I watch Democrats as somebody who’s an immigrant into the Democratic ecosystem, there’s a lot of, like, “And you get a policy, and you get a policy, and you get a policy.” And I don’t really understand that because everybody needs cheaper gas.

Everybody needs groceries that they can afford. And so talking about the things that unite us or that everybody needs, to me, is the secret sauce for how Democrats should think about policy. 

Three years ago, Democrats thought that being against January 6th was a thing that united everybody. There was a belief that pro-democracy arguments were going to unite people across ideology. Why did that fail in 2024? 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as Trump gets terrible poll after terrible poll, and this is my point.

The coup, all of the horrible things he said about women, all of the lawsuits — I mean, he told everybody an election was stolen. Why is he underwater right now? Because of gas prices, because of a war in Iran, because the negative personal consequences of his policies are hitting people.

I know that it frustrates people. I’m so aware of the frustration where people are like, “Why are people so selfish? Why don’t they think about the bigger picture of democracy?” And one of the things I try not to do is magic words — consultant stuff, because a lot of consultants do that. They’re like, “Say freedom,” and “Say affordability.”

There’s nothing to back it up. But the one magic word I do think that Democrats should start using is “America,” and swap it in for “democracy.” And the reason is, voters practice democracy in America by its individual things.

They practice free speech. They like rule of law. They like checks and balances. So they like the elements of democracy, but they don’t think about them up here as democracy. And also the word democracy now is very polarized, right? Republicans think that Democrats are a threat to democracy because they stole the 2020 election. And Democrats think Republicans are a threat to democracy because they lied about the election being stolen and then tried to overturn the entire government.

I think one side of that equation is more right than the other. But I think that’s why it didn’t work. 

I want to look ahead. Our show focuses on building a roadmap for American politics without Trump, and part of that question has been about Republicans.

They have made themselves into a new kind of America First-esque party. But what does that mean without Trump at the center of it? When you’re in your focus groups, is it clear what values or principles Republicans believe in besides what Donald Trump says to them?

Absolutely not. They don’t have anything. This is why I wrote the book. I wrote the book because we have 2026, we have 2028, and we have 2032. 

By 2032, there’s going to be a new census, and things are going to get worse for Democrats. Hear me on this. People are not grokking this yet. The map — people are leaving California for Texas, people are leaving New York for Florida, and it’s just going to get harder for Democrats to win if this same trajectory that we’re currently on holds.

But there is a generational opportunity right now, and it’s why I desperately wanted to bring this book and get it out there. The Republican Party at this moment is as hollowed out as … Donald Trump is going to leave it in shambles. There is no Trump heir who can do what Trump does, who has the longstanding parasocial relationship with voters where they give him this blank check that other people don’t get.

But my concern is that 2026 will go really well and that Democrats will say, “See? It’s fine. Everybody likes us.” They don’t.

This was the big mistake in 2022. The midterms were extrapolated [to signal] Biden’s re-election, and those were not the same thing.

They are not the same thing. And again, the average voter is a 55-year-old white man without a college degree. And you can just hold that in your head and picture that guy and say, “Do we have candidates who can appeal to that guy?” 

I was being annoying when I was flying here, tweeting things, and there’s a new poll out for [Pennsylvania Gov.] Josh Shapiro. He is beating his Republican opponent by 21 points in the poll right now. This is the largest swing state in the country, and Democrats hate Josh Shapiro.

Hate feels a little strong. I think the left doesn’t like Josh Shapiro. I don’t think that’s the whole party.

That’s a good point.

I’ll just say, as a slight Josh Shapiro stan, perhaps I feel more than most people’s antipathy to the idea of Josh Shapiro running. I get a lot of people just being like, “Absolutely not. He’s a corporate centrist. We would never consider him. And also he’s Jewish slash Zionist.”

And a lot of this is Twitter discourse, but it feels like he doesn’t get the same buzz or interest, which seems insane to me when you’ve got somebody that popular in such a big, important state that Trump was able to win twice. 

The electoral argument for the Josh Shapiros of the world is clear.

Twenty-one points in Pennsylvania at any rate is impressive, but let’s use him as an example, because I do think it speaks to where some Democrats have gone in the last couple years. The polling will tell you that the majority of Democrats want to see their party reshift its relationship with Israel and want to see things like an arms embargo.

Polling would tell you that the majority of Democrats believe that they shouldn’t be taking corporate money, or that things like AIPAC money are bad. How does a Josh Shapiro — let’s use him as an avatar. … Is that compatible with where the Democratic base is right now, even if it’s clearly compatible with Pennsylvania?

The way that you just said it doesn’t sound compatible. But I don’t think that it’s incompatible. 

This is a book about what the voters think, and the voters want a new relationship with Israel, hands down. Without question. They want America to reevaluate our relationship with Israel. And the next Democratic presidential candidate is going to have to do that.

And I have a theory about this. I do think that the 2028 nominee is very likely to be a Jewish person who is highly critical of Israel, because I think that it helps to heal the deep divide right now on this issue within the Democratic Party.

Now, do I think it’s more likely that that is the very handsome Jon Ossoff? I kind of do. But I just … a big part of this book is, “Don’t you want to win? Don’t you guys want to win?” Like, do you want to win more than you want to be right about everything?

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The last US troops in Iraq formally withdrew today, 23 years after the United States first invaded Iraq and 12 years after it returned to take on the Islamic State. It’s a historic occasion, by many accounts — but also a pretty low-key one: The US has steadily scaled back its presence in Iraq for years as part of a phased drawdown inked by the Biden administration. 

That drawdown represents the end of a long (and often, ugly) chapter in US military history. The US and its allies deployed tens of thousands of troops to Iraq as part of the larger war on terror that started in 2003. 

Those troops left Iraq in 2011. But a smaller contingent returned three years later to stamp out the Islamic State, a violent jihadist group that had gained a major foothold after Western forces left the country. 

Neither campaign was particularly popular with the American public in the end, and more than 4,500 Americans have died in Iraq in the past 20 years. Large numbers of civilian casualties, as well as drone strikes that were seen as violations of Iraq’s sovereignty, have also fueled periodic Iraqi protests against American intervention. 

As the US withdraws, however, it’s leaving behind some very loose ends. Loose ends that, as we’ll see in a minute, ultimately benefit…Iran.

Go a little deeper

Don’t quite believe me? Just look at how Iran’s allies are celebrating today’s news. The commander of one Iranian-backed militia in Iraq called the withdrawal “a crushing defeat for the American project.”

Both Iran and the United States have spent the past 23 years attempting to shape the new Iraq. Historically, Iran and Iraq were bitter rivals — an enmity probably best demonstrated by Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran. 

After the US toppled Hussein in 2003, however, Tehran redoubled its efforts to build political and military clout in the new Iraqi state. It strengthened ties with figures like Hadi al-Amiri, whose Iran-backed Badr Organization has become a major force in Iraqi politics. It poured hundreds of millions of dollars into soft-power projects, like expanding Shiite pilgrimage sites in Iraq. And it funded, equipped, and trained a number of powerful paramilitary groups.

Some analysts have warned that the final withdrawal of US troops could embolden Iranian-linked groups in Iraq. That also seems to be a concern on the ground, where ordinary Iraqis have told reporters they fear their country “could be swallowed up” by groups linked to Iran.  

Already, the Iraqi government has pushed back the deadline for Iranian-backed militia groups to disarm. It was originally supposed to happen on the official date of the US withdrawal — today.

It’s an inglorious ending, all told — and a sobering lesson on the limits of American power. The US may have the resources to handily win any military spat it gets itself into. But securing a desired political outcome is a different and more time-consuming project altogether.

It doesn’t help that US rivals like Iran seem very willing to play the long game. By dipping in and out of places like Iraq, the US may risk giving Tehran more openings. 

One link for later

➨ Don’t throw out that old receipt! It — along with the political mailers, ticket stubs, business cards, product packaging, and other printed ephemera you encounter in your day — is perfectly suited to the newly viral hobby of junk journaling. It can be a powerful creative practice and the ideal antidote to doomscrolling.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that your sense of touch peaks in your late teenage years, and declines gradually from there? It might be one of the reasons that elderly people are prone to falls.
• Today’s trivia: Where was Napoleon exiled to after his forced abdication? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked you for the origin story of civil rights icon Ruby Bridges. She was the first Black child in the American South to attend an all-white elementary school, and she went on to start a foundation devoted to tolerance.