On Wednesday, Harry Styles begins his 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden, making him the latest in a wave of celebrities who are turning away from conventional touring and changing the experience of live music as a result.

In recent years, Adele, Bad Bunny, and Billy Joel have all had sold-out residencies in Munich, Puerto Rico, and New York, respectively. This means that fans can’t just wait for a visit to their hometown — they have to buy a ticket and book a trip, sometimes a very expensive one.

Residencies have become a high-profile example of how the economics of entertainment are changing how we experience culture, and who can even afford to have that experience. 

There are a number of reasons for the trend: residencies are more cost-effective for musicians and crew, and they’re a lot easier in other ways. Burnout, exhaustion, and substance abuse have long been features of touring musicians’ stories from the road, and residencies alleviate some of that physical and mental toll — at least for the superstars who can book them.

The fans, however, especially the ones coming in from out of town, have to pick up that tab now. Today, Explained host Astead Herndon interviewed Billboard writer Robert Levine about this topic back in February. They discussed why this has happened — and how, for many fans, these costs can actually be worth it. Residencies create increased pressure to create a “sense of event,” and ensure every show offers something special — really delivering for the handful of people who can make the trip, and creating FOMO for those who can’t make it, which is kind of the goal of all of it.

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

I’m based in New York, so Harry Styles’s tour really perked my interest. He’ll be here for a 30-night residency and he has no other US shows on his tour. Can you explain to me the business of Harry staying put like this? Why has this become a thing for artists? What do we think this tour represents?

What’s interesting is all the writing and all the talk about the concert business focuses on the money that’s going in. Hardly anyone thinks about the money going out. As always, they have crew, they have musicians, they have expenses. The most expensive part is getting it all around. So imagine if you could minimize that expense and make the same amount of money.

So is that why we’re seeing someone like Harry Styles sit for 30 nights at MSG? It’s to lower travel costs?

Well, look, I mean haven’t talked to Harry Styles, so I’m just making an educated guess, but yes, I think so. And there’s the sort of capital-R residency that he’s doing. He’s declaring this a residency, and he’s making an event of it. But if you look at the concert business in general, you are seeing a trend — and sometimes people don’t notice it — toward playing more shows at fewer venues. The same kinds of economic forces are changing the nature of what we might call regular tours. Now you’re seeing more two-night stands, more three-night stands, more four-night stands. 

And there’s also…this isn’t economics, but there’s also lifestyle considerations. All those classic rock songs about the romance of being on the road; “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger where he was talking about how burnt out he is. … There used to be a romance to being miserable and now there’s not. 

Rock stars on tour, the crazy bus, all of that stuff.

We’re coming to your town, we’ll help you party down. Now you have to come to them and help them party down. And I think people realize a lot of the performers are getting older. They might not want to move around so much. But also remember when Elvis was in Vegas? This is not Elvis the teen sensation who wouldn’t be filmed below the waist. This is Elvis the middle-class performer, and in Vegas, he could stay in a really nice hotel rather than be in a van. 

I’m going to ask about the New York piece. When we think about Harry Styles specifically, I think back to the fame, and I don’t have to go all the way back to Elvis for famous residencies in Vegas. Think about Celine Dion, or more recently, folks like Adele or even Usher.

Vegas had an advantage in that a lot of people were there with expense accounts always. That’s probably less the case today, but it’s still a convention in a conference town. If you’re charging people that amount of money, it doesn’t just need to be a great show. It needs to be part of a great weekend. It has to be a city with a lot to do. It has to have great air connections and a lot of hotel rooms. New York scores on all of those. 

It seems as if from what you’re saying, it makes sense for the artist in terms of reducing travel costs. It makes sense because maybe resale markets have made it clear to the entertainment industry that the demand for higher prices is there. But it does, as you mentioned, also raise expectations of what fans expect to experience at the concert. I wonder: in your opinion, are fans getting more for their money at these shows since they’re more expensive now? 

I think that’s so much in the eye of the beholder, right? For Adele in Munich, where she had a residency two summers ago, they built the biggest video screen in the world. Bigger than a football field. It was gigantic. I’m not that interested in a big screen. I don’t care if it’s the biggest screen. I’m not counting. She performed with fantastic musicians, and the staging was really creative. I thought it was an incredible show. I took the train four or five hours to go from Berlin. I thought it was fantastic and well worth it. Was I excited about the Ferris wheel? Honestly, not really.

What limits artists outside of the Adeles or Harry Styleses from adopting this residency model?

I think it’s less about the size of the artist and more about the implied specialness of it. It’s about FOMO. These are the biggest concerts, but there’s a lot of great concerts. How do you sell this as a special thing? Well, you play your marquee album, you promise two shows, two nights, no repeats. Metallica did that.  

You really have to create a sense of event. You have to have a claim on people’s souls. In the modern concert business…it’s not so much, why do you want to see them? but, why now and not next year or the year after?

How do you see these residencies having an influence on the way the live event industry operates as a whole? Part of what we’ve been looking at are the changes that have occurred in the industry post-pandemic. Where do you see this piece fitting in?

I have to admit that a lot of people in the business and who write about the business have been very cautious about the boom in the industry. Look at the price spike post-Covid. But what happens when that ends? When will that bubble burst? Look at how high prices get, will people still have the money to go to other concerts? 

And the truth is…the demand to see shows has proven all of this wrong. There’s always this idea that it’s a winner-take-all business: you’re going to travel to see Harry Styles, you’re not going to see other shows…logically, that money ought to be not spent on other concerts. But you don’t see that. And this is at a time when the economy is very, very good for some people and pretty lousy for most people. So that might be another reason why people are so interested in playing New York and LA because you get more people with disposable income. Other people can fly there, but at some point, I don’t know what the limit is. We don’t seem to get there.

People who might buy a cheaper pair of jeans or a cheaper television don’t seem to look at…concerts are not a competitive good. Who’s your second if you can’t go see Harry Styles? Who’s the artist most like Harry Styles, who’s also playing a concert? Who’s most like Beyonce, who’s not Beyonce? The answer is nobody.

Yeah. If Kelly Rowland was doing concerts, I would be moving in the same way. Right? It’s specific to that artist. And I can kind of see your point…that is what has made this shift be more permanent than folks expect now.

By the way, I bet some of those artists that you would say don’t compare to Beyonce, put on great shows.

For sure.

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: The data center backlash is a democracy story

This week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged a small hurdle in his quest to integrate artificial intelligence into all parts of human life and the economy: the rest of us. 

In an episode of the Founders podcast with David Senra, Altman confronted the growing public backlash against tech leaders and their AI tools, conceding that he’d overrated the speed at which they’d be adopted across the economy and that the industry hasn’t made its case to the public.

“We have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated,” Altman said. He added that “it’s probably a good feature of human society that we have some built-in inertia, some skepticism of rapid change.”

You think?

Survey after survey shows how deep — and how bipartisan — the backlash against AI, and specifically data centers, already runs. The pressure has been building all year: A Gallup poll in March) found that 71 percent of Americans said they oppose building AI data centers in their area — 48 percent of them strongly. That opposition runs across the aisle: 75 percent of Democrats, 74 percent of independents, and 63 percent of Republicans. For perspective, Americans are more opposed to a data center going up near them than a nuclear power plant (53 percent). This is not some fringe opposition. It is a consensus. 

The shift is already scrambling candidates’ positions ahead of the midterms, where data centers, artificial intelligence, and the future of work will be front and center. Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s refusal to back a data center moratorium (which he reiterated on America, Actually) has given Republicans an opportunity. His opponent in Michigan, GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers, recently came out for a one-year moratorium — an attempt to get to the left of El-Sayed (!). The shift reflects our new political reality. At this point, being pro-data center isn’t just a minority position overrepresented among C-suite executives — it’s become a moral and cultural signal. An us-vs.-them litmus test in an age of elite distrust.

The political world did not see this coming. A year ago — before Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, before DSA congressional wins in New York and Colorado, before El-Sayed in Michigan and Angie Nixon in Florida — the Democratic establishment was all about Abundance, the 2025 Ezra Klein–Derek Thompson book that had become something like an electoral manual for Washington Democrats and the press that covers them. But Abundance was (and is) powered by advanced technology and its mass adoption — the book says so on its first pages — and, like Altman, its proponents may have underestimated how unwilling neighbors would be to hand still more of their lives over to our Silicon Valley overlords. In a recent piece, my colleague Andrew Prokop wrote that Abundance flopped among voters because leftists adopted their best ideas, and issues like Israel became more of a motivating force among primary voters. But I’d also add that it replicated the same mistake tech leaders made: reveling in the benefits of a transformed economy before building consensus among the people who must live with it. 

We’ve been covering this issue throughout the year, including attending an early-summer town hall in New Jersey over a proposed data-center expansion in the state’s poorest county. But even I have been surprised at how much we hear about AI and data centers from voters on America, Actually — and how tied those fears are to a larger anxiety about the future of work and a growing resentment of tech CEOs like Altman and Elon Musk. If the 2020 election was defined by both parties’ silence on AI, the years since have been defined by elites telling the underclass that they have no agency in the disruption to come.

Based on our reporting this year, here are four things that I think explain the shift in sentiment — and forecast where this goes in the midterms and the presidential race to come.

1. It’s about agency, not “the environment” 

The thing that comes through loudest on the ground isn’t a technical objection to server farms, or even a concern with their potential impact on the environment. It’s the feeling that this change was done to communities — not in consultation with them. At the New Jersey town hall, one resident put it this way: “Folks feel unheard. And we don’t feel that way — we are unheard.” Another related it to a broader anxiety about artificial intelligence, which she said felt imposed on society from the upper class: “Everything relates from the top down, and what we’re getting from the top has spread all the way to the local level. And it isn’t good.” 

Sen. Ruben Gallego — no AI opponent himself — suggested the resentment often came from how the industry picks its targets. “They’re gonna put a data center all because it’s cheap land, and also because they think it’s a Black and brown area, so they’re gonna have less pushback,” he said. And that feeling of powerlessness is not only amplified in the absence of federal regulation, but by the knowledge that most elected officials don’t even understand the technology themselves. 

In New Jersey, residents suspected the game was rigged against the people with the least power to say no, and it often is. One word in particular, from a data center developer, had enraged them. The developer had called the project an “experiment.” That means  “we’re the guinea pigs,” the resident said. 

2. These are not all Luddites

Recently, I’ve seen the data center backlash dismissed as a “psyop” — a foreign plot to undermine the US economy — or a symptom of technophobia. Simpletons who can’t understand what’s to come. 

But that’s a convenient and self-serving misread. In New Jersey, one of the most striking voices at the town hall was a man who runs a civic-tech project: “I use AI all the time — for project management. If you use it responsibly, you can leverage it to get real-world tasks done.” He was still, firmly, against the data center. And he’s not alone: Gallup also finds concerns about the local impact of data centers are much bigger drivers of opposition than more general anti-tech ideas, as does Fox News’ polling. People weren’t rejecting the tools altogether — there were plenty of ChatGPT users in that room. They were rejecting the pace, and the secrecy, of a project reshaping their community. 

3. The costs are visible. The benefits are a pitch.

A resident in New Jersey pointed out something important: “A couple hundred jobs for two and a half million square feet? How can that possibly be supported with today’s grid? There’s no plan for the future. … Who benefits with that building? It’s not the people of this town.” 

I think this speaks to one of the challenges the pro-data center crowd has faced. Once the construction jobs leave, the noise, the water draw, the rising electricity bills, the fear about home values, and the sheer brutalist ugliness of the structure all stay. One homeowner told us: “I can’t sell my house — it’s been for sale since February. A woman came back twice, had cash, then realized it was near the data center. Her kids said, ‘Mom—’ and she said, ‘I just can’t do this.’”

And even if local concerns are the dominant issue, AI isn’t offering much of a bigger-picture national argument to overcome them. As Gallego put it to me, “there is no massive-scale benefit to society when it comes to AI” that voters see in their lives so far, and they have competing concerns about tech’s impact on children, privacy, and job losses. 

Rep. Greg Casar, the Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, told me this is the reason the left has found success tying anxiety about artificial intelligence to their broader message of affordability. 

A lot of the establishment traditional Democratic politics…are telling candidates, ‘Don’t even say the words AI.’ And if you do, say there needs to be safety but innovation — and then shut up…because maybe AI lobbyists are gonna spend tons of money against you.

Being progressive means uniting all the people getting their costs jacked up and having them vote for a politician even if the AI industry spends against them.

4. The left has their answer. What’s the center’s? 

As I wrote previously, I think a defining characteristic of this ongoing ideological battle in the Democratic Party is the collapse of the center — even more than the rise of the left. And on artificial intelligence and data centers, I think you see that crumble clearly. 

Progressives like Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna have made clear cases for the need for a data center moratorium to prioritize the potential impact of AI on workers. And candidates like El-Sayed have laid out a proposed regulatory framework even if they don’t support a moratorium. 

But the most shocking answers on the topic that I’ve heard have both been from elected officials more representative of the liberal center. Gallego called data centers a “necessary evil” — quite possibly the least inspiring words in American politics. Rep. Jim Clyburn’s answer on artificial intelligence was even worse. He told me he hadn’t heard about ChatGPT until recently and that he’s never used an LLM or visited a data center. 

“I have a great staff,” he told me. “I know how to legislate, I know how to build relationships, and I hire people to bring knowledge into the game.” It’s a fine answer for most of governing. It is a terrifying one for a technology moving this fast.

In examining the public backlash against data centers, it’s important to remember statements like these. People don’t want to feel like they’re guinea pigs in an experiment, and it’s not just Sam Altman who has contributed to that feeling. It’s also the politicians who have treated technological change as something they retroactively legislate after a crisis arrives, whether it’s in the economy, or the environment, or society. You can’t govern a revolution you refuse to understand. 

What I’m hearing

This week, I called Adrian Walker, longtime political columnist at the Boston Globe and one of the moderators of the recent debate between Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), the 47-year-old member of Congress who’s challenging him in a September 1 primary election. The debate also featured a viral moment from Markey on artificial intelligence, where the 80-year-old incumbent did not seem to fully grasp the technology. You can watch that exchange here. 

So is this all about age? What have been the lines of division beyond that? 

You know, it’s surprising that when you poll people, and you ask them about age, they have concerns about Markey being 80 (and 86 potentially at the end of this next term). But it’s not what’s really driving votes. It’s really kind of become more of a race about who’s more progressive, and Markey has successfully, I think, pitched himself as the more progressive candidate.

What are the ways in which they are both seeking to prove their progressive credentials?

Markey constantly touts the Green New Deal, and he talks a lot about his endorsements from AOC and Ayanna Pressley and people like that. It’s basically the same playbook he ran six years ago when he beat Joe Kennedy, when he also did better than anybody expected among young voters.

So he’s still riding that Green New Deal/AOC connection.

He’s running the exact same campaign. And Moulton came in with a lot of skepticism. People are still mad about him going against Pelosi (in 2018). And he had this very high-profile attack about trans kids in youth sports — and people have been skeptical about him as a progressive. So he’s sort of trying to reinvent himself while Markey, you know, kind of rides the same thing that got him a little success. 

So is there a reason we should be watching this beyond just the question of age? 

I think the AI question really speaks to something very fundamental in this debate. I think people really have concerns about the fact that the whole Senate seems to be in their 70s and 80s, and I think it was reflected in that question. You have Markey up there saying, you know, it doesn’t matter whether you call it Siri or Claude or whatever. And people walk away thinking this is not the dude who should be regulating AI; they think “Yeah, you know, the 47-year-old actually understands this, and the 80-year-old pretty clearly does not.”

And it kind of speaks to, I think, the sort of hunger I think a lot of people are feeling for generational change in the Senate: You watch Senate hearings, you watch congressional hearings about things like AI, but they’re really not that impressive. It really does look like a bunch of people who don’t really understand this at a very deep level. And that’s driving this frustration. 

It’s the Democrats who have mostly had to answer questions about electability this midterm season, but why are there so few questions about the “E” word for the other side?

Gas prices are still skyrocketing. A number of Republican candidates, such as Ohio Rep. Max Miller and former Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s running for a Senate seat, are mired in scandal. The Iran war was unpopular from the start, but it is getting even less popular as it drags on. And Trump’s approval rating recently hit 33 percent, the lowest of his presidency yet.

On this week’s episode of America, Actually, host Astead Herndon speaks with one of Trump’s most vocal defenders, conservative influencer CJ Pearson, about whether we’re seeing Trump’s brand slip even among his supporters and the young people who helped him win in 2024, and how that could affect the midterm elections. 

Pearson, a conservative content creator and influencer, first went viral when he posted himself, then 12 years old, criticizing Barack Obama in a YouTube video. Now 24, Pearson is one of MAGA’s most prominent Black voices.

In this episode, Astead and Pearson discussed how Republicans should answer questions about whether voters’ lives are better than they were two years ago; whether Trump still has any cultural cachet left over from his last presidential campaign; and when Pearson started to see young Republicans turning away from the MAGA movement.

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Pearson, 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.

That “E” word’s been thrown around a lot about Democrats, but we want to think about how Republicans are on their own. If you could rate Donald Trump’s second term one through 10, what would you give it?

I think the president’s doing incredibly well for the American people. Promises made, promises kept in many ways. 

I think if you look at this president who ran on securing our southern border, he’s done it. You look at this president who’s talked about bringing down costs, he’s brought down the cost of dairy, eggs. He’s achieved that. 

And I think also this president is only just getting started. He ran on “no tax on tips.” He did that. He ran on “no tax on overtime.” He did that. Oftentimes I tell people the challenge of this administration is keeping up the messaging at the same pace as the accomplishments of this president.

And so I think that there’s a lot more work to do. Thankfully, we have two more years to do it.

Can I get a number?

I think he’s doing well. I will say I grew up in a place where there’s always room for improvement, so I’ll give him an eight.

You’re giving him an eight. I wanted to just start there because Trump’s approval rating has fallen, as I’m sure you have seen. Why do you think the country isn’t maybe on the same page as you?

I think a lot of people are focused on their pocketbooks, right? They’re focused on domestic issues, and I think that we have been very internationally focused over the course of the past few months as we’ve navigated and dealt with the Iran conflict. 

But I think that as we get ready to get through this last wave of primaries, I think you’re going to see a change in his messaging and a reset at the midterm convention in Dallas next month in September. 

And I think you’re going to hear this president talking about how he’s made America more affordable, how he’s kept Americans safe, far safer than they were under President Joe Biden.

And I think that you’ll see those numbers start to change. And a reminder, the only poll that matters is on Election Day. There are many polls that had Kamala Harris beating President Trump, in 2024, and that didn’t happen.

Yeah, I don’t want to be overly poll-reliant, but we’ve heard some of this directly from Republicans even. 

We were at Donald Trump’s UFC event in DC talking to young men, and even there we heard people really come to be critical on three issues specifically: tariffs, the Iran war, and the handling of the Epstein files.

You mentioned the question of affordability. Donald Trump has said, quote, “I love the inflation.” And when asked by reporters about the public strain that has come from the conflicts with Iran, he said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

How can you say that Republicans are gonna run on affordability if the president’s saying he doesn’t care if Americans’ lives are unaffordable?

Well, I’ve often said that we can’t cede this entire affordability debate to the Democrats. The reason that I think a lot of young people are giving a little bit, even a flirtatious nod to the DSA and their socialist and communist candidates, is because they’re talking about an issue that’s top of mind for them.

In the same way that when President Trump won in 2024, he was talking about issues that were top of mind of the American voter, which was the cost of living. 

And so I think that we need to get back to that messaging. I think that this president has continued to deliver on that front. Costs are coming down.

The economy is resurging. We’re seeing economic and global investment in this country unlike anything we’ve seen before. In Oklahoma, we’re bringing back manufacturing with the aluminum smelting plant.

But the president’s not saying this. The president’s saying, “I love the inflation, and I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” Do those words help Republican midterm candidates?

Well, I think the president has a lot of time to say a lot more things because Election Day is pretty far away from now. I think we have two or three months left, and I think the president will make this case. 

But I think what will also make the case is that the candidates that the Democrats are running and nominating all across this country, who are now affiliating themselves with the socialist movement, are not actually fighting for things that will actually ever work.

Socialism has never worked anywhere it’s been tried, and I think that this is going to be an election between common sense versus crazy. Do you wanna run a candidate that hates Thanksgiving?

For the record, that candidate lost in the primary. She will not be on the ballot in November.

She did. She almost was there, though, and that’s the thing. I’m glad common sense won the day in Wisconsin, that the good people there love turkey.

I know that you say that the argument is based on how Democrats are out of touch, but we have talked about some ways in which Donald Trump has not lived up to folks’ expectations, particularly on things like prices and on things like the Iran war.

How does the GOP overcome that electability question? What is their message when folks ask, is their life better than two years ago?

I think we’ve got to lock in. I think we also need to prosecute the case that it’s going to be a lot worse under the Democrats if these crazy communists get into office. And so I think that when you’re looking at costs, we need to make that argument central. We need to make that what we lead with.

And I think that we have to pump the brakes on a lot of the international stuff. And I think that we need to talk about the things that are actually affecting people’s everyday lives at grocery stores, at gas stations, wherever it may be. And I think that is how we can kind of turn the ship around.

When we talk about the Democratic candidates, you’re saying the DSA candidates are far left, and we’ve certainly explored some electability questions for them and some ways that I think they might have stances that are misaligned with the American people. But so does Donald Trump, and he’s endorsed scandal-plagued candidates like Ken Paxton in Texas, like Max Miller in Ohio.

Why is that not just as much a sign of a conservative version of extremism, just as you are arguing that there’s a Democratic or leftist version of that?

Because I think you’re talking about folks who have dealt with issues in their personal lives, not necessarily their voting record.

Okay, maybe I should say Tom Tiffany, who didn’t vote to certify the 2020 election, but I imagine you agree with him.

Well, no, I think that was six years ago. I don’t think about 2020 anymore. I think about 2026 and I think about 2028. So when I look at that … it’s important that we really make the case for crazy communism versus common sense. And I think that the American people are not going to vote for that.

I guess I’m saying, does Donald Trump win the commonsense argument? Like, isn’t crazy versus commonsense an argument that Democrats can make and say Donald Trump is said crazy?

No, because I think Donald Trump definitely wins the common sense argument when we’re running against folks who belong to a party that is now, you know, waging a war against Thanksgiving, who believe that biological men should be playing women’s sports. Again, these are 80/20 issues, and so I actually really like our odds here.

It’s going to be hard, right? It’s always hard for the party that controls the White House to fare all too well in any midterm election. But I think that we’re going to overperform. I think we’re going to hold onto the Senate. The House will be a dogfight, but I like our chances.

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. Let’s get into it.

One Big Idea: The electability conversation we should be having

Here’s something you wouldn’t know from most of the coverage of this year’s midterm elections: The biggest electability problem belongs to President Donald Trump and the Republicans. 

GOP candidates in the midterm elections must contend with defending an unpopular president leading an unpopular war, not to mention $4 gas (if they’re lucky). The administration has upset its own base at various moments — first tariffs, then the release of the Epstein files, now a worsening war — and the party has followed Trump into backing scandal-plagued candidates in the general election, including Ken Paxton in Texas and Max Miller in Ohio. To top things off, more than six years after the January 6 insurrection, any Republican who wants to remain in the president’s good standing cannot acknowledge the fact that he lost the 2020 election, an issue that helped cost the party major races in 2022 and could still bite in 2026. 

Tom Tiffany, the Republican Senate candidate in Wisconsin, has stood side by side with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp wrote about recently. Just this weekend, Tiffany said he did not regret his efforts at all, even after events like the Jan. 6 insurrection. And Trump has done nothing to help candidates move past these concerns; his pardons for January 6 defendants and (so-far failed) attempts at creating a government fund for payouts have kept the issue fresh.

Yet still, the focus of Politics World (and to some extent this Substack) has often been the story that’s more dynamic: the changing nature of the Democratic Party. In doing so, “electability” has become synonymous with the ideological battle between moderates and progressives, and specifically the idea that left-wing candidates, in particular, are electoral underperformers.  

Take the latest edition of the New York Times political newsletter by chief polling correspondent Nate Cohn, which asks, “Could El-Sayed Cost Democrats Michigan?”

These candidates of the activist left often seem to fare much worse than mainstream progressives, even though they may not be very different on the issues. The members of Justice Democrats, which includes the Squad and many of their congressional allies, fare about five points worse than other Democrats. Elizabeth Warren, who might count as part of that broader group of activist-backed progressives who aren’t democratic socialist, has underperformed the Democratic baseline in Massachusetts by as much as 10 points on net.

On one hand, Cohn’s point is real — there is a trend of electoral underperformance among the most activist progressives worth analyzing. But the sample size is small (there are only nine members of Justice Democrats) and there are some complicating factors — mainly that the most progressive candidates often compete in uber-blue areas, so their organizing efforts are more focused on the primary than the general. 

There is also the reality of identity: Candidates of the left are often from a marginalized background — a woman, a person of color, maybe even both — and while the piece doesn’t mention the reality of things like racism, sexism, and (especially lately) Islamophobia, I’d argue that it’s a force multiplier in these conversations about progressive electability. What was Andrew Cuomo’s closing message against Zohran Mamdani if not dripping in Islamophobia? Prominent “Squad” members like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib continuously face even uglier rhetoric and conspiracy theories, and few politicians in America get more gendered attacks than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Would Democrats have been so willing to discard Francesca Hong as unserious if she weren’t a woman?  

These are ultimately questions batted around between political insiders that will be resolved in November, but the conversation also does the work of flattening just how unpopular Trump’s second-term MAGA agenda has been. That Democrats have a shot at retaking the House — much less the Senate — seemed far from certain in early 2025, considering the tough election map and partisan gerrymandering advantages. The president has upended the landscape through his sheer unwillingness to moderate, and there are no signs he’s hit his electoral floor. 

As we turn to November, it’s important for political coverage to reflect the main character of these elections (Trump). The president’s drag on electability should be front and center, with Republican candidates pressed about the administration’s actual policy at least as much as Democrats have been asked about Zohran Mamdani or Hasan Piker. Whichever party wins control of Congress, Trump will have far more power come January 2027 than any of the Democratic factions we’re discussing.

This is not to say we should “ignore the polls” — Trump’s plummeting approval ratings and voter discontent with issues like Iran and inflation are also derived from surveys, after all. But, as we saw in some surprising results in primaries this month in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, the polling side of the midterms should also not be treated as predictive gospel — and that goes double for platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket that have become integrated into mainstream media coverage and narrative-setting platforms like X. I’d also add that only bettors care about the spread — to most voters, who won is all that matters. 

Cohn and other top polling analysts like Nate Silver acknowledge the limits of predictive certainty in their writing, of course, and discuss Trump as well. But I do worry whether focusing on these kinds of small-bore distinctions between candidates risks getting ahead of things, especially after the primaries — a time when voters do consider electability as a factor — are over. 

It reminds me a bit of 2016, when the poll-driven anticipation of a Hillary Clinton victory pushed political coverage beyond the actual questions facing the public at the moment. That year, it sometimes felt like the press wanted a head start on holding Future President Hillary accountable, which presented a false balance between her inconsistencies and Trump’s overt extremism that — in my opinion — helped change the expected result in the process. 

This November, there’s a risk of repeating the same cycle. And in overfocusing on the supposed unelectability of the progressive left, we underplay the central story of this midterms: the massive delta between the actions of this administration and the voting public, and whether Republicans can either find a way to reframe that agenda or push Americans to weigh other issues instead. That’s what this election will be about. 

Last month, I was re-reminded of all this after reporting for a recent episode on gas prices for America, Actually. We stood outside of a Speedway in Allentown, Pennsylvania  — the heart of the state’s Seventh Congressional District, a key battleground in the midterms — and asked people about the most important issues for them heading into the general election. There, it was clear that people were mostly wrestling with their own financial struggles, but also their feelings about Trump, and the gap between his promised priorities on the campaign trail and the current reality. 

“I voted for him with his promises to the American people. And I think he’s let us down,” one Allen voter told me in our episode. I asked what the biggest broken promise was. “The prices…it’s skyrocketed. … My main objective is a roof over our head, pay our bills, and then what’s left? There’s hardly anything left.”

So consider this a coverage corrective. I have tracked the changes within the Democratic Party in our election coverage (and will continue to!), but I think this portion of the calendar requires us to update our language. The most toxic and consequential bromance in politics isn’t between a mayor and a Twitch streamer — it’s between the president and the party he’s reshaped in his image. 

What I’m hearing

This week, we’re back in Michigan! I asked a few questions to Orlando Bailey, executive director at Outlier Media, the Detroit-based newsroom that focuses on finding innovative stories in Black communities and beyond. ​​He is also the co-founder of the award-winning podcast, Authentically Detroit, and a regular contributor to WDIV-TV and Detroit PBS. 

Abdul El-Sayed will likely be the most-watched Senate race in the country this fall, after he survived a bruising primary against Haley Stevens. What’s one thing about that campaign you’ve seen on the ground that’s been less visible in the national coverage? 

The national conversation has largely focused on two fronts: first, trying to understand and define the values of the Democratic Socialists of America while assigning El-Sayed to that wing of the Democratic Party — a label he rejects, noting that he considers himself a “capitalist.” Second, his call for the United States to stop funding weapons for Israel in its current conflict with Hamas, a position that has also been incorrectly conflated with holding antisemitic views. 

What has been less visible in the coverage I’ve seen on the ground is the multiracial, multigenerational progressive coalition across the state that is supporting El-Sayed because they feel aligned with his message. I was on the west side of the state in Saugatuck, and my waitress was wearing an Abdul for Senate button. That surprised me because Allegan County tends to be more conservative. His lawn signs were everywhere, too. His message is connecting in ways I didn’t expect, and in places I didn’t expect.   

Part of the reason the margins were closer than expected is that progressive candidates still seem to lag behind moderate Democrats in Black communities. Why do you think some Black Democrats preferred Stevens to El-Sayed — and can he improve with those voters ahead of the general? 

I always take polls with a grain of salt, of course. I knew he wasn’t going to win the primary by double digits based on what I had been watching play out on the ground and online. El-Sayed actually lost Detroit to Stevens. I want to draw a distinction between Detroit’s large Black population and the Black electorate — the two are not synonymous. Black voters are still holding his feet to the fire over his participation in the Uncommitted movement during the last Democratic presidential primary, although he eventually came around to support Vice President Harris’ bid for office. Harris also endorsed him [after] the most recent primary.

There’s another issue, and I’ll say the quiet part out loud: There is a fraught relationship between Black communities and Arab American communities in southeastern Michigan. There is a history of conflict and mistrust between the two. Arab Americans own many of the commercial establishments that Black residents frequent, and tensions can reach a boiling point when people feel surveilled, cheated, or otherwise mistreated. Those tensions have, at times, escalated into violence, including incidents involving gas stations. El-Sayed is now being forced to have that hard conversation. He will also have to localize his policy priorities and explain plainly to people who are struggling how his agenda will affect their bottom lines.

I’ve found the Donavan McKinney race interesting. He’s a Black candidate near Detroit associated with DSA, and he’s maybe flown under the national radar. Tell me about McKinney and his race? 

McKinney started as a community organizer on Detroit’s east side, which is where I’m from. He was elected to the state House in November 2024 and has aligned himself with the progressive caucus in Lansing. He regularly holds town halls in his district and shows up when residents and advocates call on him. 

A little bit of history: Charles Diggs was first elected to Congress in 1954, and until Shri Thanedar’s election in 2022 — after the independent redistricting commission redrew the congressional maps — Detroit had always had Black representation in Congress. Since then, there has been a longing for Black representation to return to Detroit, and McKinney proved to be the right candidate at the right time. What’s interesting is that he and El-Sayed agree on a lot, but El-Sayed didn’t win Detroit. 

Hasan Piker has for years now been both an asset and a liability for Democrats. The Twitch streamer has elevated base-energizing progressives, such as Darializa Avila Chevalier and Zohran Mamdani, in interviews and with endorsements. But he’s also stoked controversy with past anti-Israel commentary and generally caused headaches for establishment Democrats who would rather not see Hasan’s favored candidates get any more oxygen. 

Why? A familiar concept for these kinds of centrist Democrats: electability.

That concept has been on many left-leaning voters’ minds over the past few weeks, as primaries have put progressive candidates to the test — with very mixed results. Last week, Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate and democratic socialist Francesca Hong lost her primary to establishment favorite David Crowley. Not long before that, though, progressive Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed won his primary against the more mainstream Democratic candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens — albeit by a much smaller margin than many polls predicted.

America, Actually host Astead Herndon caught up with Piker to talk about whether the recent primary results have refined his understanding of how prepared Americans are to vote for democratic socialists, what support for unabashedly progressive candidates tells us about the changing working class in America, and the “pundit brain” problem in the Democratic Party.

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Piker, 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.

The last two weeks have produced mixed results for left-wing candidates: a big win in Michigan and a win this week in Minnesota for Peggy Flanagan, but a loss for Francesca Hong, which was a surprise in Wisconsin.

What have been your takeaways from the last set of results?

I think the ground game is phenomenal. There’s a lot of excitement on the platform. There’s a lot of excitement for the first time for “Change Candidates.” It’s still a good environment to be in if you are a socialist.

The establishment does have a lot of juice still, for sure. And when they can put together a similar strategy to what happened in 2020 against Bernie Sanders with Joe Biden, especially in a place like Wisconsin where Tony Evers is very clearly still a very popular governor, they were able to elevate David Crowley’s campaign, who actually had dropped out and consolidated support behind Sara Rodriguez initially. And he had to drop out because he was only performing at, like, 6 percent.

Yeah, the consolidation was swift, and it was complete. I mean, you’re comparing it to 2020, in which the establishment lined up behind Joe Biden and kind of nixed that Bernie Sanders campaign in the blink of an eye. I imagine you were surprised at the result.

I never underestimate my opponents, whether they be Republicans or whether they be establishment Democrats. You have to always operate as though you’re down 10 points. I don’t believe in the notion that we are going to win easy victories at the end of the day.

There are a lot of powerful interests at play here. There are a lot of people in positions of power that don’t wanna lose their seats. So they’re gonna fight like hell, so we have to also fight like hell. We have to fight extra hard, as a matter of fact, because we’re almost always outspent, right?

I got an alert right before we started talking from the New York Times that said, “A democratic socialist lost in Wisconsin, which shows the movement’s surging wave might crash before rippling out from big cities.” Is that wrong?

Oh, I love that. Look, people are gonna have their opinions. I’ll just say it like this.

Abdul El-Sayed’s one-point victory margin showed that the Democratic socialist-aligned movement or the progressive movement was in tatters. It was obviously a failure. And now, David Crowley’s less-than-one-point victory proves that the centrist bulwark is still here, and that the Democratic socialist movement is dying.

It kind of feels like it’s wish-casting for the most part, from a lot of people who maybe want to go back to the way things used to be. My assessment on this is definitely a little bit different. I think, at the end of the day, these are insurgencies, right? These are insurgent candidacies.

We’re talking about no name recognition for a state legislator that was entirely propped up by local Wisconsin DSA chapters. These people didn’t have a lot of money necessarily, and they were able to defy the odds, and they continued defying the odds all the way until the end.

The idea that the polls showed that Francesca was a clear frontrunner and was running away with this race is utterly irrelevant. Especially if you were to look at this with a broader perspective, like thinking about where Democratic Socialists of America have gotten to in the last two years.

I mean, I remember how I felt in 2024, in the aftermath of the DNC, about where the American socialist movement was as opposed to where it is now. We are clearly a force to be reckoned with, and that’s precisely the reason why a lot of people are paying close attention to what’s going on.

And I’ll say it like this. The fact that the Hong campaign did not have any major progressive national endorsements, and that I was like their top surrogate.

There was no Bernie Sanders endorsement, there was no AOC endorsement. That did make the Hong campaign unique on that front.

I think there were a couple other races that I was also involved in where my candidates lost, right? 

I mean, Saikat Chakrabarti was another great example of this as well. It wasn’t a statewide race, and obviously, there’s always clear local differences that play a formative role in how these races turn out.

But we’ve looked back at this data. There are a couple different endorsement trackers out there, and they’ll put my endorsement up there, and they’ll put, like, AOC and Bernie Sanders. And it’s very clear that the best likelihood of success usually comes from a consolidation of national progressive forces, whether it be outside expenditures coming from Justice Democrats or things like that. And with the Francesca Hong campaign, I think it’s a testament to their success. It’s a testament to how popular the platform is in general.

And one thing I will have to stress here is the salience of the electability narrative. I think that’s still a real motivator for a lot of people.

Yeah, I hear that. Both El-Sayed’s campaign and Hong’s campaign did better among middle-class voters — I should say, than the data would tell us, among working-class voters. Considering how central working-class and bottom-up issues are to the DSA message, why has it not produced results that actually get it more working-class votes? Because that does seem to be something we’ve learned over the last three, four weeks.

I think that we have to dramatically reconstruct how we understand what it means to be working-class in this country. I think a lot of people will disagree with what I’m about to say here, but we have to do away with this fantastical notion that the working-class is one specific thing.

I think for the longest time, people have thought about this hardhat-wearing coal miner as the true working class, oftentimes White as well. And the working class is unbelievably diverse in this country, and it’s also a lot more college-educated than people actually give it credit for.

I think partially this is because if you look back to the ’90s as opposed to right now, yes, if you had a college education, you were upwardly mobile. You were probably a professional managerial class individual that was going to be able to retire at a reasonable age. You were doing fairly well. It was a guarantee for getting a good job, right? 

That’s not the case in America any longer. There are a lot more people who have a college degree who are downwardly mobile, who are having a very tough time in the current job market, who do not own a home, and it’s seemingly less likely than before that they will ever be able to own a home.

And that is the actual working class. It’s much broader, right? So we’ve seen in Zohran’s race and in Abdul’s race, there’s this massive group of working-class folks that constantly get cast aside as not being a true representation of the American working class, when I think like, No, that is the true representation.

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. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: Lessons from “Woke 1” 

Earlier this week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) flashed her political dexterity on ABC’s This Week when she was asked about the policies of Peak Woke — call it Woke 1, that stretch around the 2020 pandemic when the American liberal machine seemed to be at its political and cultural height. “I have a local city councilman who has this saying,” the Bronx congresswoman said. “Woke 1 was crazy.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her support for defunding the police in 2020: “During lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”https://t.co/dR4cGgbAq4 pic.twitter.com/e8z7EFyQvU

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) August 9, 2026

She was quoting a tweet from Chi Ossé, a New York City Council member from Brooklyn, but the point underneath it was the real tell. The Democrats’ emerging left — fresh off primary victories in New York, Colorado, and now Michigan — has developed a playbook for handling any unpopular stance, or tweet, from the early 2020s, whether it’s pandemic masking, defunding the police, or the broader vocabulary of that summer.

The new plan: Brush it off. Then refocus on the present, and on the policies that will actually make people’s lives better.

So far, the strategy is working. Zohran Mamdani walked back his support for defunding the police during his 2025 mayoral campaign and is now the mayor of New York. Darializa Avila Chevalier, the DSA-backed congressional candidate in New York’s 13th District, had a stack of deleted posts that CNN’s KFile resurfaced this June — including one that read “all deportations are wrong.” When I asked her about them, she didn’t disavow a word. She won her primary, albeit in a deep-blue district, anyway. Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong had a bad case of the woke mind virus in 2020 — the “cancel Thanksgiving” kind — and she’s still in the hunt in this week’s Democratic primary, where her candidacy has been far more focused on issues like data centers and education funding. 

Electorally, at least, Ossé has been proven right. The pandemic was wild, and primary voters seem to be extending progressives a grace period of sorts — a chance to reintroduce themselves after workshopping their ideas over the last five years. And while Republicans are still hopeful they can relitigate some of these fights in a general election, they’ve struggled to make them stick in high-profile races since 2024.

But these are also the issues — race, gender, sexuality, affirmative action, religion, cancel culture — where the simplest story gets repeated out of ease. The national media’s distance from everyday people, and especially from working-class people of color, is felt most in how it covers culture. Catch-all terms like “wokeness” flatten real differences across the electorate and quietly impose a conservative frame on genuine arguments about equity and inclusion.

That was one of my biggest takeaways from that 2020 summer: our collective discomfort with all of these issues in the first place. I watched that year up close, traveling with Democratic and Republican candidates through the pandemic and the racial-justice protests, and there was never a clean “Two Americas” moment — at least not the left-versus-right one everyone expected. The real gap was between Masked America — coastal, professional, absolutely consumed by identity politics — and everyone else. Among ordinary voters of all parties, and especially minority voters, there was significantly more skepticism from the start toward the highly-specific “woke 1” litmus tests now being renounced by their leading proponents. At George Floyd’s memorial in Houston and in the city where he died, there was no consensus on defunding the police, only a shared agreement about racial injustice and a deep distrust of institutions. In south Chicago, people were already skeptical that the sudden flood of corporate money into racial justice would outlast the moment — even while the checks were still being written.

So no, I don’t love the tidy language of Woke 1 (then) versus Woke 2 (now). But here are a few lessons from that summer — and from our recent reporting on America, Actually — that I think apply now, especially to the progressives stepping back from things they used to say.

1. Woke isn’t dead

The broad ideals — diversity, equity, a basic sense of fairness — still matter to Democratic voters. Criminal justice reform still has real purchase with the base. Minority and women candidates have kept winning since 2024, and even ideas like reparations still resonate with big chunks of the Democratic electorate. What’s changed isn’t who these candidates are — it’s what they choose to lead with.

What has fallen out of favor is a way of talking. Let’s say it’s the nonprofit register, or the Ford Foundation cadence — the language that lived in mission statements and land acknowledgments, or that made sweeping generalizations about a specific group — white women, cis men, you name it. David Axelrod, describing Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong, gave it this label: a “font of zany liberal, faculty lounge exotica.” Yes, that’s the part that’s gotten less popular. The vocabulary changed more than the values.

2. The left rewrote its message after 2024

The clearest change is the affordability pivot. When Abdul El-Sayed ran for Michigan governor in 2018, the animating cause was climate and a Green New Deal. Today the center of gravity has moved to economic populism, affordability, and a rethinking of the US relationship with Israel. Climate didn’t vanish, but it’s no longer the headline. And “representation” was, at its core, a white-collar frame — it spoke loudest to people already inside the room. 

Affordability speaks to everyone. When I sat down with El-Sayed on the show, this is how he described what Michigan voters were actually asking:

“Who poses the biggest pushback to a system of politics that has been bought off in ways that leave me unable to afford my groceries, unable to afford a home, unable to look at my kid’s school and believe that that’s a good place for them, unable to get healthcare when I need it — and then sending my money abroad, telling me that somehow that’s in my best interest?”

That’s not the language of 2020. It’s economic, universal, and it doesn’t ask anyone to first pass a vocabulary test.

It helps to remember that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was never really “woke.” He talked about class more than culture, the many against the money. And it repeatedly got him into trouble, leading him to adopt more of the left’s rhetoric and positions on identity and race after 2016. In 2028, the sweet spot is probably the middle, and that’s what the next generation of progressives — AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed — can do better than their Burlington forefather. They’re fluent in blending the class critique and the social one without missing a beat. 

“This is about the many versus the money,” El-Sayed told me. “If you support a politics of the UAW, of working people everywhere, of teachers, of nurses, of working families, of Bernie Sanders and AOC, of people who want to break the chokehold of corporations and special interests on our politics — this is that race.”

3. Democratic voters have changed

Progressives never had enough power to implement their most controversial ideas en masse (the Minneapolis City Council was backtracking off “defunding the police” by the summer of 2021). Instead, “woke,” as a cultural phenomenon, took its deepest hold in liberal and academic circles. So the corporate whiplash that followed — the rush to embrace new HR trainings, new DEI policies, and new vocabulary in 2020 and the quiet discarding of it a couple of years later — was felt most acutely by college-educated progressives themselves, and not by the more working-class voters cable news often invokes as most alienated by this period.

I think this speaks to Ossé’s tweet, and why the grace period is real. And I think we can’t underrate how many voters have been on a similar journey since 2020 — being genuinely shocked by the video of George Floyd’s murder, agreeing in large part with the ideals of progressive activists, and maybe coming to disagree on the specifics in hindsight. In some ways, it reminds me of the way MAGA voters heard out now-Vice President JD Vance’s journey from Trump critic to Trump loyalist. The audience is willing to believe the candidate’s evolution because they’ve been on a similar one. 

I think part of the reason “Woke 1” had a short shelf life was that it was based on a rigid framework of race and identity that has already been proven outdated. The binary that has guided most political discourse about race in the Democratic Party — with Black people on one side and white people on the other — is more outdated every election cycle. The emergence of Latino, Asian, and Arab swing voters has created coalitions for candidates beyond the Democrats’ traditional base.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion already mean something different than in 2020, and that’s what the next Democratic presidential primary will sort out.

4. The establishment’s credibility collapse is the bigger story

But, of course, the reaction to Donald Trump’s first presidency is different than the reaction to the second one. There have been material changes to the country, and voters aren’t weighing progressives against some pristine center. They’re weighing them against an establishment they believe has lied to them and fumbled the things that mattered, from inflation and immigration in Joe Biden’s presidency to his decision to run for reelection. 

That was the theme of my recent interview with Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC). Asked what the party should learn from 2024, he pointed the finger at Black voters — arguing Vice President Kamala Harris would have won if turnout had been higher. And while I appreciated the congressman’s candor, that sentiment — pervasive among moderate Democrats right now — is exactly why the establishment is in the predicament it’s in. Yes, there are real policy fights, over corporate PAC money and Medicare-for-all. But voters are also rejecting an insular way of doing politics, one built in the pre-Trump era, that refuses to account for its own failures.

The Democratic Party leadership is on the defensive, and handwringing about “woke” — and its so-called excesses — is fighting the last war. It’s what helped Trump get elected in 2024. I don’t think it’s going to win elections in 2026 or 2028. 

Also, I think most people have moved on. The scope of Trump’s actions in his second term are so severe, and the backlash to anything “DEI” adjacent is so total, that the mild annoyance of Peak Woke seems tame in comparison. 

What I’m hearing

With the Wisconsin primary today, I talked with Sachin Chheda, a progressive strategist in Wisconsin who works on Democratic elections for issues and candidates. He oversaw winning campaigns for Wisconsin’s all-important elections in the state Supreme Court. He is the principal at Earthrise Strategies. 

Is the expectation at this point that Francesca Hong is going to win?

I think that’s the most likely scenario, but politics in Wisconsin is like the weather, and you can see big swings in a very short period of time. 

The contours of this race have sort of been confounding, starting with Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, and then the collapse of Mandela Barnes. Should we see this race as Hong winning? Or the Dem establishment failing to organize itself?

I think it’s two things. 

First of all, the other candidates, who run the gamut from farther left to close to centrist, all underestimated Fran. 

She really hit on where the electorate is — especially on Gaza and data centers. Gaza isn’t a central issue of this campaign, but it’s a signal, and just like Joe Biden, most of the other candidates missed it, while her supporters centered it. 

And she just has her finger on the pulse of the electorate on data centers, while most of the other candidates were more focused on navigating the building trades politics. Again, not the central issue for most voters — but being the lone candidate against data centers sent a signal and allowed her to differentiate herself. 

The other thing is the “alternative-to-Fran” candidates didn’t coalesce — the opposite of what happened with Biden in South Carolina. There’s some real differences among the candidates, there’s some real ill-feeling and animosity and history among them, and there’s real resentment of Gov. [Tony] Evers’s late power move. 

Is there any risk Wisconsin Democrats have an issue uniting ahead of November? 

Competitive primaries are always tough on the candidates, on activists, on volunteers…and fun for pundits! 

But I have no doubt that whomever wins, Wednesday in Wisconsin will be just like Michigan last week — where a close race still ended in a quick endorsement and a very public show of unity among the candidates. 

All of the Democrats support lowering the cost of healthcare and childcare, funding public schools, taxing the rich, building more housing, putting guardrails on data centers, protecting civil rights, blocking ICE from kidnapping Wisconsinites, and stopping the corruption of the Trump administration and the MAGA agenda. They of course differ on many of the details, and that’s why we have the primary election. There will always be some folks at the margins who don’t get on the train, but 99% of Democrats will support the nominee and oppose far-right extremist MAGA goofball Tom Tiffany. 

With the 2026 midterm elections quickly approaching, President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is ongoing and gas prices remain high. 

Americans are taking note: On this week’s episode of America, Actually, host Astead Herndon visits Allentown, Pennsylvania in the state’s bellwether Seventh District, to hear how persistently high gas prices — almost $4.20 per gallon in Pennsylvania — are showing up in residents’ lives. Many said the economy and prices were at the top of their list of issues, and laid the blame at Trump’s feet.

Still, gas is just one expense of many, for voters who are likely also feeling the pinch with the cost of groceries, housing, electricity, and more. So how much power do gas prices really have to shape the outcome of an election — and, potentially, a presidency? And after decades of renewable energy growth, technological disruption, and new existential worries, why are gas prices still so core to the American political conversation?

To learn more, Herndon spoke with Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. They discussed the history of gas prices as a salient political issue, why Americans feel high prices so acutely, even compared to other commodities, and whether voters are ever willing to overlook gas prices when they go to the polls.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, 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.

When did the price of gas become such a political weapon in America? Does this date all the way back to the Model T?

It really dates to the 1970s. That’s when the United States will have two energy crises, in 1973 and 1979, and the price of gas becomes a huge political issue for Americans. It affects presidents, it affects Congress, and it becomes a manifestation in that decade of the problems facing the country.

I think that’s when we start to realize we don’t have unlimited resources and it’s gonna be a political problem.

Can you go in more detail about that? What happened in the ’70s to make it so clear to Americans that this party might not last forever?

Production of oil here peaks in the late 1960s, early 1970s, and then in 1973, OPEC, which is the cartel of oil-producing countries in the Middle East, imposes an embargo on the US because the United States had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War. And as a result of the embargo, prices go up and supplies go down, and that’s when Americans start to face gas lines.

Then, in 1979, we have another round of this after the Iranian Revolution, and that leads to even bigger gas lines and more stringent rations and government mandates in ’79, and many people think it really helped bring down Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Carter in 1979 is really reeling from what Americans experience. And it’s not simply gas prices, it’s waiting in line for gas. It’s hearing that you could only buy gas on certain days. It’s reading stories about people stealing gas and violent clashes occurring over getting this commodity. 

There’s a lot of things that go into the mix with Carter — the hostages in Iran — but certainly his difficulty dealing with this fundamental is a big part of what happens in 1980 when Reagan wins the presidency.

Of course, presidents have little control over the global price of oil, yet they are blamed for it seemingly every time. How have politicians and particularly presidents dealt with that reality, considering the price at the pump is so important to their political futures while not always in their control?

In the ’70s they tried with legislation. Carter pushes legislation that deals with energy, but it’s limited in its success. Americans want a lot of oil and it was hard to get them to conserve.

He put solar panels on the White House. There’s really not much that presidents can do. We have the strategic reserves. And other than that, I think presidents just wait it out and hope the timing works in their favor and the gas prices go down again.

Is there an example of a president who beat the gas prices trap? Do we have any example of someone successfully convincing the country, “Hey, look away from the price of the pump”?

I think we have presidents who say, “Just look away for a little while,” and when reelection comes around again, they’re doing better. Even President George W. Bush struggled with some of this after 9/11 and after the war started. But in the end, he doesn’t make an announcement about it so much as focus on other issues such as national security.

And now we see how prices fluctuate, so you just wait for those moments.

Why is it always gasoline rather than other commodities when we think about the priorities for the electorate?

There’s a few things. One is that, historically, the automobile really symbolizes American freedom and American consumption. And so when something impinges on our ability to drive a lot…

Second, it’s a price you just see. It’s just very visible when it goes up or down, more than groceries even.

I think that kind of recurring image for people becomes very politically potent if that number gets too high. So it’s a real struggle, but it’s also symbolically right in front of us. And these days, I think even more so now than in the ’70s or ’80s, it’s become something that the reporters and the media track.

I want to talk specifically about this summer. We’ve crossed $4/gallon again this summer, the highest since 2022, and this time it’s pretty clearly tied with the ongoing war in Iran.

Donald Trump has tried to make the argument that some short-term pain at the pump is worth a long-term national security focus. But his energy secretary said pretty clearly that gas won’t be back to $3 until 2027. Obviously, that puts us after the midterm elections. It sounds like he’s running the exact playbook you just told me has never worked, which is to get people to just pretend this is not happening.

What have you thought about how the president has handled the spike in gas prices?

In part it strikes me as a president who doesn’t really care about the fate of his party. I think it’s a big issue. I think most Republicans understand that. And it’s tied to a war that really doesn’t have public support.

It’s a war without the kind of clarity that many people felt after 9/11 with Afghanistan, and Iraq for a while. It’s the worst of all worlds. And so I think he’s really fumbled on this issue, and there was part of him that hoped people either wouldn’t care even if they noticed, or somehow the prices would diminish. It’s certainly not looking that way.

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. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: The Uncommitted movement has already won

During the 2024 presidential election, on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we recorded an episode of my election podcast The Run-Up that I still think about all the time. The premise was simple: I wanted to know whether Democrats were making a material change at the top of the ticket or just a cosmetic one. So we asked convention-goers a plain question — how would Kamala Harris’s Democratic Party be any different from Joe Biden’s?

The tone of the piece reflected the optimism of the room. The activists, down to a person, thought Harris was showing a newfound openness to the administration’s critics. But underneath the hopium was a specific policy desire: that Harris would break from Biden’s unconditional support of Israel’s violent campaign in Gaza. That afternoon, I spent time with members of the Uncommitted movement, born in Michigan, who were trying to pressure the DNC into putting a single Palestinian speaker on the stage. They held press conferences with grieving families, and warned the party that the Democrats’ Muslim and Arab base in particular would not forget being sidelined. 

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain made clear the confidence surrounding Harris at the time was tied to the belief her posture around Gaza would be different from Biden’s: “She’s made, obviously, a couple different comments on Gaza,” he said. “We called for a ceasefire in UAW back in November. And obviously, she understands the humanity issue of this. And I mean, my conversations I’ve had with Kamala Harris have been very good, very fruitful.” 

They didn’t get one. Not the speaker, not the policy shift, not the break from Biden. Harris famously refused to distance herself from her boss, whether it was Israel or anything else — and likely lost because of it. 

And while many of the most prominent voices of the Uncommitted movement (including current Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed) ended up publicly backing Harris in the end, some of Harris’s most ardent supporters have repeatedly blamed left-wing activists for undermining her campaign. Haley Stevens, the Michigan representative who’s running for the Senate as the party’s establishment choice, has sought to make El-Sayed’s support for Uncommitted an issue in that race, suggesting that the movement planted seeds of discontent ahead of a must-win presidential election. 

I want to argue the opposite. Two years after the Uncommitted movement shook up the Democratic Party, its impact has never been more clear. Public opinion of Israel has plummeted across the American electorate, to the point where the movement’s position is now a majority opinion. Per Quinnipiac, 77 percent of Democrats say they believe Israel is committing a genocide — an unthinkable number just two years ago. The Uncommitted movement also led to the growth and maturation of the Democrats’ Muslim left, which has already molded prominent elected officials like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. 

Even more, I think Uncommitted challenged the blame-the-voters framework that allows the establishment to avoid self-reflection. The movement was never only about a DNC speaking slot, but about the idea that every vote must be earned, not owed. It was a retort to “vote blue no matter who” — an argument that conditional support for the party is not only valid, but of moral importance. 

In 2024, that posture got you branded a spoiler. Today it’s just how Democrats talk. When I sat down with Hasan Piker — the most popular voice on the Democratic left — he told me he voted for Kamala Harris but pointedly refused to endorse her, and named exactly why:

“The only reason for my refusal to openly endorse was because of…a continuation of the genocide in Gaza.”

“I understand the harm reduction arguments…but it’s not a practical approach to winning elections, and demonstrably it’s been a failure with Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.”

Piker put the mechanism plainly. October 7, 2023, and its aftermath, he told me, were “a seismic shift that gave a lot of confidence to the left, that as long as they stood by their positions…people would actually see the truth.” The movement didn’t move Biden. It moved the electorate Biden’s successors now have to answer to.

And you can trace that shifted ground straight into this year’s wins. In New York, Zohran Mamdani rode exactly this coalition into City Hall — a victory Piker described as the proof of concept he’d been waiting for: “that’s why I was so grateful for Zohran’s victory…I can just point to him.” In Congress, progressives like Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York City and Melat Kiros in Colorado add to the growing evidence that acknowledging Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide is now a litmus test for Democratic voters gauging the trust and credibility of their candidates.

Which brings us to Michigan, where the whole thing started. It’s easy to forget now, but the Uncommitted movement was born in the Michigan primary — and the general-election bill came due there, too. Kamala Harris got 36 percent of the vote in Dearborn, a city Joe Biden had carried with nearly 69 percent in 2020. She lost the state by about 80,000 votes. The voters the party told to fall in line didn’t, and Michigan is where that refusal was most legible.

Now look at who’s competitive in this week’s Senate primary. Abdul El-Sayed is running on the precise argument Uncommitted was making in the streets of Chicago — except now it’s a statewide campaign with real money behind it, against a candidate backed by tens of millions in pro-Israel spending. He turns the foreign-policy question into a pocketbook one and refuses to soften the language. As he said on America, Actually:

“There is an electoral cost to backstopping genocide and apartheid.”

“If you can’t call a genocide perpetrated by our tax dollars the moral abomination that it is, then at some point it’s hard for me to believe that you’re gonna fight for anything,” he told me.

Whether or not El-Sayed wins today, the fact that a candidate running explicitly against AIPAC and unconditional aid is fighting for a Senate seat in a swing state is the clearest possible measure of how far the ground has moved since that convention floor.

In the coming months, it may be that the Democrats’ moderate wing — think tanks like Third Way, party leadership, and those offended by the electorate’s rising leftist tide — will adopt some of the same tactics they criticized. Already, Rep. Hillary Scholten, who is supporting Stevens in Michigan, has signaled she may refuse to support El-Sayed in a general election, due to his association with Piker. 

It seems “vote blue no matter who” has its limits. For progressives. For centrists. For everyone. 

What I’m hearing

With Michigan’s primary set to conclude today, that leaves the Wisconsin governor’s race as the next big election on the Democratic calendar. This week, I reached out to Dan Shafer, a reporter in Milwaukee who has been covering the race for months. Schafer writes for the Recombobulation Area, where he’s political editor and writes a weekly opinion column. 

It looks like Francesca Hong, the DSA-aligned state assemblywoman, has a commanding lead in the Wisconsin governor’s primary. This would’ve been a shock a year ago. How did this happen?

The short answer is that Francesca Hong has simply run the best campaign. She has run circles around the consultant-brained conventional approaches of her opponents, and has found success by doing things decidedly differently.

From the very beginning, I characterized her as the “wild card” in the race. And while I certainly did not envision her having a commanding lead in the polls in the final stretch in the primary, I knew that, given her background in the restaurant and hospitality industry, she wouldn’t let anyone out-work or out-hustle her on the campaign trail. Her relentless ground game and digital organizing energy essentially issued a challenge to every other campaign to step up. The rest of the field failed that test. 

She’s also absolutely dominating this primary with younger voters. In the Marquette University Law School Poll from last week, the data showed her with the support of 66% of likely primary voters in the 18-29 age group, and 51% in the 30-44 age group. No other candidate was even in double digits. I write a breakdown of every new Marquette poll, and these are just preposterous numbers. For Gen Z and millennials, she is the candidate.

Hong has made data centers and AI backlash a centerpiece of this race. How important is this issue specifically in this race?

I think it’s been the No. 1 issue [since] she’s taken off in this primary. 

She backed a data center moratorium in January, and began running on this issue early. It’s been a very animating issue in Wisconsin, first for all the reasons the anti-data center backlash is coming to so many Great Lakes states, but also because of the failed Foxconn project in Racine County that happened during the first Trump administration under then-Gov. Scott Walker. It came with the promise of thousands and thousands of jobs, Trump called it the “eighth wonder of the world,” and it’s just been a miserable failure on so many levels. Hong just filmed her most recent ad at the Foxconn site — a project the Republican nominee Tom Tiffany voted for while in the state Senate at the time.

Politically, though, what really helped Hong on this issue is that no other candidate running backed a data center moratorium. One of the most significant moments of the primary happened in a June 3 candidate forum focused on working-class issues, where moderator JT Cestkowski asked a yes-or-no question on whether the candidates back a data center moratorium. Only Hong said yes. If any other candidate had said yes, that would have given the anti-data center voter options in the primary. Instead, they all went to Hong.

There is an assertion that Hong is a weak general election candidate. Is there evidence for this? 

This is Wisconsin. Anyone pretending a statewide election in this of all states should be considered anything other than a toss-up is kidding themselves. Many have argued that her likely Republican opponent, Tom Tiffany, is a uniquely weak general election candidate in his own right. But it can’t be denied that there would be a whole lot of risk involved with her as a general election candidate: The “socialism” of it all will undoubtedly be a challenge. But Francesca Hong continues to be a wild card, and she might have what it takes to play a winning hand.

Welcome to the first edition of The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one thing I’m thinking about — a 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

There are two ways of looking at the current divides within the Democratic Party. The first — and more dominant — narrative is that the party’s left wing is on an upward march, one that began with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election in 2025 and has continued through this year’s Democratic primary season.

The second, and I believe more accurate, explanation is that the party is rudderless — an ideological fight to be settled in the next presidential election — and that the left’s success in New York City, Colorado, and even Maine (before Graham Platner’s campaign collapsed) grows out of a void left by a bigger, less-talked-about story: an establishment in free fall, on the wrong side of fundamental shifts across its own rank-and-file base.

The difference between those interpretations is fine, but important. I don’t think the Democratic base agrees with every position articulated by successful left-wing candidates — like “all deportations are wrong” (as NYC’s Darializa Avila Chevalier told me) — or have suddenly become committed democratic socialists. But I do think the left is on the right side of the gateway issues the base is currently prioritizing: a working-class-led affordability agenda, a skepticism of artificial intelligence, and a moral opposition to President Donald Trump’s war against Iran and to Israel’s campaigns of violence in Lebanon and Gaza. Those issues, more than any others, have defined the Democratic Party’s internal battles since 2024.

Progressives have also benefited from a moderate wing that, in many cases, has yet to lay out an affirmative vision. After the signature policies of the Biden administration flopped as political motivators, the center has seemed frozen in time, unable to offer its own blueprint for the electorate’s concerns (“abundance” aside). When I sat down with Third Way president Jon Cowan, he had no trouble assailing Hasan Piker, Abdul El-Sayed, or any number of the party’s most prominent progressive figures. But when I asked whether Third Way was actually responding to the clear shifts among the electorate — on Medicare-for-all, on abolishing ICE, on foreign aid to Israel — his answer was far less sure.

Cowan on America, Actually:

We’ve never said that there’s a problem with Hasan Piker because he advocates for Medicare-for-all. … I think Medicare-for-all is still very problematic as a political issue, and if someone were nominated for president on the Democratic ticket and they were for Medicare-for-all, I think it would be a major barrier to getting elected. But that’s not our beef with Hasan Piker at all.

It was the same evasion whenever the conversation turned from the messengers to the message. In a recent interview with US Rep. Jim Clyburn — the powerful South Carolina Democrat who has endorsed US Rep. Haley Stevens’s Senate run in Michigan — he bluntly defended insider politics, insisting party leadership was not at fault for the 2024 result. The blame, he told me, belonged to the Black voters who hadn’t turned out for Kamala Harris.

Clyburn on America, Actually:

When the white vote turned out 71 percent two years ago, and the Black vote turned out 59 percent, you tell me whose fault that is. … If that 59 percent had been 69 percent, she would’ve won.

When I asked him directly whether the argument was that Black voters had let Harris down, he didn’t hesitate: “In many instances, absolutely.” It is a remarkable thing to hear from a member of leadership — the base failed us, not the other way around — and it is exactly the instinct that has the establishment on its back foot.

This is why I think it matters to read the Democratic Party’s post-2024 convulsion as a story of establishment collapse rather than left-wing ascension. Stevens, Clyburn, and the party’s leadership would prefer to make this a referendum on the left — on the acceptability of its candidates and its media figures. But the base is communicating something else: a lack of confidence in the center, and in a version of establishment politics that prizes seniority and loyalty over voters’ values. Establishment collapse also explains the Democratic results that don’t fit neatly on the moderate vs. progressive binary: like Attorney General Phil Weiser’s victory in Colorado or whatever is happening in the Wisconsin governor’s race.

The center’s other problem is that its core general-election pitch — we may not thrill you, but we’re not Trump — is losing relevance the weaker that Trump looks politically. I spent a night at Trump’s UFC event on the White House lawn in June, an evening engineered to speak to the young men who broke his way in 2024, and found plenty of them cooling. “He was promising lower prices on everything,” one told me. “We didn’t know wars were gonna start.” Even the MAGA operative Jack Posobiec conceded that “the numbers are softer today, there’s no question about that.”

When the opposition’s own coalition is cracking, branding yourself as an inoffensive vessel who can gather up the most anti-Trump voters looks less compelling. The establishment needs an affirmative reason to be chosen — and it hasn’t found one.

So here’s my amendment to the narrative of the moment: The story isn’t a left-wing party discovering its confidence. It’s an establishment losing its own — and a base voting, in New York, in Colorado, and soon in Michigan and Wisconsin, on how much faith it still has that the center will name what it actually wants and fight for it. 

What I’m hearing: A Michigan reporter’s take on the Democratic Senate race

I reached out to Samuel Robinson, a reporter for the state’s oldest Black newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle; he also has a Substack, Detroit One Million. Robinson is based on Detroit’s east side, and he’s someone I’ve known for a while, as we’re both members of the National Association of Black Journalists. 

Both the Democrats’ moderate and progressive wings have invested so much in the state — it’s become the proxy war in the party’s fight over its future. What is it about Michigan that you think has made the stakes so high? 

Stakes are high because of the control of Congress. But also, Michigan is like a microcosm of America. It swings back and forth every four, eight years. But our US Senate seats have been held by Democrats since 1992. Republicans say they’re going to spend a ton of money to flip the seat being opened by Gary Peters retiring. Women moderates (Dana Nessel, Gretchen Whitmer, Jocelyn Benson) won big in 2018, and eight years later, all three to some degree have disappointed their own voters. Dems had a legislative trifecta from 2022 to 2024, and many people feel like Dems let down Black residents who got them elected in the first place. 

That’s one thing that unites the Black progressives and the Black establishment: Members in both camps feel the Democratic Party hasn’t done enough. 

How would you describe the difference between a Haley Stevens supporter and an Abdul El-Sayed supporter? 

Haley supporter — usually older; the young people I’ve met who support her typically come from wealthier backgrounds. Haley supporters are usually not involved in politics or people who keep up with national discourse. Haley supporters are worried about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. They are worried about Trump nationalizing elections or not leaving the White House after ’28.

Abdul supporter — usually younger; the older people I’ve met who support him often acknowledge they are in the minority of their peers. The younger people who support him are all over the place in terms of their backgrounds — rich, poor, highly educated, no college. He has the support of most young people under 35. They are mostly worried about sending American taxpayer dollars to Israel, and the influence of AIPAC. I hear more about that than I do Medicare-for-all. 

Stevens has sought to capitalize on El-Sayed’s perceived weakness with the Black vote. How real do you think that vulnerability is? 

Abdul struggles with certain Black voters mostly because they don’t know who he is. I’ve heard from countless people who have said something to the degree of, “I don’t know enough about him.” He received media attention as the Detroit and Wayne County health director, but not enough for people to feel it. Most people know that he ran for governor in 2018 with no experience. People see Haley Stevens ads and mailers. Most Black voters aren’t on Twitter.

I saw this post on X where you were talking to a Stevens supporter who expressed some pretty bigoted claims about El-Sayed’s candidacy. How widespread is that sentiment? When I was reporting on Mamdani’s election in New York City, it was clear that there was anxiety among the Black political class that the rise of Asian, Latino, Muslim communities could displace them. Is that fear at play here? 

The race is definitely a tension point between Wayne County’s Black and Muslim population. Many who have shared with me similar sentiments will point to the anti-Black racism and exploitation of our community at the hands of Arab gas station and liquor store owners. That resentment builds up and then bubbles over in a race like this. We certainly live amongst each other, like off Seven Mile on the east side, where Bengali families and Black families live side by side as next-door neighbors. But there’s a resentment that goes both ways.

The Midterms, Actually is a new weekly newsletter from Astead Herndon. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The gerontocracy is real: The median senator is 64 years old, and 20 members of Congress are over 80. One legal scholar called it the “old-igarchy.” It seems the combination of President Donald Trump’s recent 80th birthday, the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham, and the currently unknown health status of Sen. Mitch McConnell has called collective attention to the advanced age of our elected officials — and with good reason. 

So this week, I talked with Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina on his 86th birthday. And I wanted to (delicately) ask a question that’s been brewing in my head since the whole fiasco with then-President Joe Biden: Why don’t the oldheads want to retire? 

Over a long interview, I asked the House Democratic leader about generational change, shifts in the electorate on corporate PAC money and artificial intelligence, and whether he thinks there are any lessons to learn from the 2024 election.

On the question of age, Clyburn told me, “I know people who are 66 years old with much less energy than I have, and none of the experience that I have.” Clyburn said he would also be open to a recently proposed law calling for members of Congress to take cognitive tests, though he dismissed the idea of term limits or an age cap. 

Here’s what else I learned: 

1. They aren’t giving up power because they don’t want to

That’s the whole thing. The reason the boomers (and Clyburn’s Silent Generation) won’t step aside isn’t that no one has asked. It’s that they don’t want to. And for Clyburn, I think the armor doubles as the blind spot. When I asked about younger generations being distrustful that older politicians can deliver, he invoked his grandparents, saying, “Don’t worry about what people call you. It’s what you answer to that’s the issue.”

And while that is wisdom, hardened over the decades, I don’t know if it works as well as a leadership philosophy. Stay the course and ignore the criticism can also be read as ignoring electoral feedback. “I don’t react to that stuff,” Clyburn said, when asked about calls for generational change.

2. Clyburn says what the establishment thinks: It’s the voters’ fault

Clyburn articulates the core view of establishment politics as cleanly as anyone: There is nothing much to change. He doesn’t believe the party made significant errors in 2024, and he doesn’t take the primary results in New York City, Colorado, and elsewhere to be anything other than a flash in the pan. Pushed on what political lesson he took from an administration built to stop Trump that ended with Trump back in office, he went to turnout: “When the white vote turned out 71 percent two years ago, and the Black vote turned out 59 percent, you tell me whose fault that is.” Asked directly whether the argument was that Black people let Kamala Harris down, he didn’t hesitate: “In many instances, absolutely.” 

At its heart, this is a philosophy that blames the voters and insulates the party establishment from reflection. 

But this is also why the next round of primaries is so important. It’s easy to file New York, Colorado, or Graham Platner’s rise in Maine as one-offs — local flukes, not an overwhelming trend. But the Michigan and Wisconsin primaries are coming, and those are the ones that decide whether this gets treated as a pattern. The temperature of the freakout is still yet to be set.

3. He defends the establishment’s alliance with the Congressional Black Caucus

The moderate wing of the Democratic Party is held up, at the grassroots, by Black voters — particularly in the South. Clyburn knows that, and he defended both the alliance and the corporate policies that tie them together. 

Clyburn holds that taking corporate dollars is necessary for minority candidates who don’t come from family wealth — “I would challenge you to find me one single vote I have ever cast that pharma supported and my constituents didn’t.” He deferred to a pro-Israel colleague, Rep. Gregory Meeks, on questions of Israel: “I’m guided by Gregory Meeks.” He made no apology for backing Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani in this year’s New York mayor’s race — the same Cuomo he’d said should resign in 2021.

I asked him what Black communities have gotten in exchange for that loyalty. His answer was an agenda: “What did we get out of our support for Obama? What did we get out of our support for Biden?” And that’s a real answer. But I think there’s also another one underneath it.

I see Clyburn’s actions through the context of changing power within the Democratic Party, just as much as what’s going on outside of it. The Black political class, specifically, is invested in holding its own position against the party’s rising coalitions, immigrant communities in particular. That’s part of what’s at the heart of Clyburn’s endorsements of Cuomo and Haley Stevens in Michigan, and even the recent fight over which states should vote first in the Democratic presidential primary. 

Find the full episode — including a bonus segment where Clyburn defends the party’s approach to Israel — wherever you get your podcasts.