This applies to SCOTUS too. Declining to impose consequences (e.g. court packing) after the GOP stole a seat has made the GOP justices more brazen, not less. The pathway to good government court reform is to threaten to pack it, forcing GOPers to choose between a Dem Court and a nonpartisan one.

Apparently, the basis for assessing him a "winner" was that he received plaudits from right-wing media (for a question rooted in ignorant and racist assumptions that Mamdani easily shot down). Truly revelatory reporting, at least in terms what it reveals about the NYTimes itself.

I don't think this is quite right. There's a difference between charming Trump from a place of resolute strength and engaging in (ineffective) appeasement. Mamdani can do this without blowback because he didn't concede anything or sell out, and he pushed back on the hostile questions he was asked.

Incredible that this act of cowardice happened at the same time as a profound demonstration of the effectiveness of standing up to Trump. Trump's deference to Mamdani, in contrast to his treatment of other notable Dems, should be a lesson for those who are tempted to try appeasement as a strategy.

one thing i think is true is that republicans assumed that democrats would not respond in kind and that the forceful pushback spooked them (a lesson to learn here, perhaps)

Nope. We have 100 years of public policy effectively dictating one of these outcomes. Policy has made suburbs (space and cars) the default option. A lot of people are willing to pay a massive premium to live in urban areas though. It's just that there are very few places where it's a viable option.

I think this is what happens in practice in recent years, but I don't think it has to be this way. Low info voters can understand nuance. The problem is, convincing these voters that Trump was trying to kill SNAP and it was Dems who saved it takes real effort, and Dems don't seem to want to do that.

Using "do GOP voters care?" to define newsworthiness inevitably kills any story negative to the GOP. It cedes the narrative on current events to the GOP propaganda machine. On any story, GOP outlets make excuses, deflect blame, concoct lies. And eventually GOP voters do not care, and the story dies.

i’ve said this before and i remain convinced it’s true, the 2028 platform that would deliver obama 08 results is “i am gonna bring the hammer down on the corrupt self-dealing politicians and their rich friends and there are no sacred cows id give a pass”

This is completely backwards. Internal recriminations are a prerequisite to fighting united. Leaders have betrayed the public so many times over the past year. This being perhaps the most egregious example. How can the public trust the leaders moving forward without some sort of accountability?

Since the Democrats worked extra hard to hide who actually supported this, I think the No Kings/Resistance position should be to primary every Democrat unless they publicly call for Schumer's ouster this week Either they go into total rebellion mode, which they won't, or the people will

ah, perhaps instead of pumping millions into endless factional infighting Dem donors could invest in making local Dem organizations genuine civic spaces that can reach people during and between elections

I think a lot of the 2024 pundit consensus was based on wishcasting rather than a good faith effort to understand the election. Trump lacked a mandate for his agenda, given that his win was built on lying about what he would do in office. Many pundits wanted to manufacture consent for his agenda.

The last month of the anti-Mamdani campaign was an absolutely shameful undertaking, an attempt to rip the city and Democratic coalition apart and I'm very happy to see it failed.

We *can* have nice things!

i hope to see enterprising democrats announce their intent to retire schumer and gillibrand over the next two years.

Cheney pushed us into an unnecessary war that left hundreds of thousands dead. People warned in real time that the surveillance state and security apparatus he was building to kill foreigners he didn't like would one day be turned onto Americans, and Trump is now doing just that.

I've been beating this drum since the campaign. Mass Deportation is not a policy that targets only noncitizens. Awful people will use the deportation regime to erect and entrench race-based hierarchies, even among citizens.

(1) This sounds great! (2) It's really telling that the GOP House Leader is claiming that they can can only retain majorities through continued disenfranchisement.

This piece is deeply misleading. Cuomo was the single biggest impediment to NY progressives for a decade, and the article omits entirely how he spent years working behind the scenes to empower the GOP in the state legislature and conservatives in the state high court to defeat Democratic priorities.

Between what came before and what happened tonight, Dems ought to treat encounters with CBS reporters as presumptively hostile and untrustworthy. A small thing, but there’s no way out of this disaster if the party continues helplessly submitting to unequal treatment from ~all mediating institutions.

This is also how they’ll cover him if he wins. Mamdani - all democrats who actually want to govern and fix things - need to understand the NYT politics team as a partisan force arrayed against them.

🤣

I think this gives the "run on kitchen table issues!" crowd too much credit. It's not just that they're endorsing him through gritted teeth. They also spent months trying to inject non-economic issues (Israel, policing) into the election in an effort to distract from his popular economic platform.

I think any story about Trump's autocracy should be mostly about the people and institutions who failed to stop it. This guy isn't a political genius, everything else just happens to be rotten. 'Toddler Consolidates Power In Household' is a story about incompetent parents, not shrewd maneuvering

This is such a bad faith take. Mamdani's unfavorables are lower than the other Dems tested! And he's been subjected to a national media pile-on, aided by prominent Dems. It's just projection to attribute his supposed unpopularity to ideology as opposed to the national media's scaremongering.

This is absolutely the first step towards defeating Trump. The elites and institutions that actually had the power to rein in Trump failed to do so because they saw capitulating as the path of least resistance. The public needs to show that the opposite is true.

Yes! This is a really great solution to Trump illegally redirecting federal money out of blue states. More states should do this.

This is so gross. Cuomo can't get run out of New York City fast enough.

This is a stunning poll. For anyone tempted to take potshots at Maine voters, this poll was taken largely before the Nazi tattoo scandal. Still, this is a huge lead over a sitting governor. Takeaway for me is out there's definitely a path for a progressive to defeat Mills, even if it isn't Platner.

Exactly. People aren't fighting over whether folks with bigoted views can vote for the party, but whether the party should change its positions to appeal to them. The big tent makes sense as an analogy to voters with different views, not to candidates and the party platform.

This is about where I land on Platner. Having a Nazi tattoo is a major red flag, both in terms of putting him in a position of power, and in defeating Collins. And he doesn't have a track record in public service that gives me the confidence that he's learned from his mistake.

This is correct. But also this is a litmus test for the press. Any press outlet treating this as less than profoundly corrupt should be understood as a propagandist for Trump rather than a serious news source.

Democrats should be drawing up legislation right now, this very minute, to bar Trump from helping himself to $230 million in taxpayer funds from DOJ. Challenge Republicans to hold a vote on it. Push this so hard in the media that every GOP Senate and House candidate is pressed to comment on it.

Worth noting that Mamdani got 3 times as many *first-round* votes in the mayoral primary within this district as Goldman received in either of his two primaries.

Important for folks to understand that irrespective of Trump's power grabs, the GOP and its SCOTUS majority have been engaged in a decades-long effort dismantle pluralistic democracy in the US by stripping much of the public of its ability to hold elected officials accountable.

This whole thread right here. When SCOTUS behaves in an unlawful, unconstitutional way, we are not obligated to accept its unlawful, unconstitutional claims as lawful and constitutional. We ignore them, we undermine them, we elect Presidents who refuse to accept them.

This is a reason why we should ditch the Electoral College & Senate & adopt proportional representation for the House so every voter counts equally no matter where they live. Our system insulates the governing party from electoral blowback in uncompetitive states & districts if it screws them over

What a moron. Half the point of oligarchs taking over liberal-coded media outlets is to push conservative propaganda onto *unsuspecting* liberals. The unsuspecting part is key: this is a lot more effective if the readers don't realize what they're being fed. He's giving away the game here.

It hasn't even been five years since Dems had the presidency and both branches of Congress, and they did none of those things. They should have. Dem leaders should also take note, moderating doesn't insulate you from criticism, the GOP will falsely accuse you of the maximalist position anyways.

It really can't be said enough: the goal of the "anti-woke" movement was always to destroy social norms against bigotry. And it worked. And there's a whole lot of purportedly "left" thinkers & commentators who helped it -- indeed, it couldn't have been done without them. They should feel bad.

LMAO, what a moron. I have no doubt that Posobiec and his white supremacist ilk think the anti-fascists were the main villains in Weimar Germany, rather than the Nazis. It boggles my mind though that he's too much of an idiot to know he should keep that thought to himself in a public setting.

Rubenstein's journalism arc is very reminiscent of Weiss's. He was a right wing troll at the NYTimes until he got pushed out due to incompetence, then he complained about mistreatment when circumstances suggested that conservatives were being given special treatment.

Been saying this for a while, but one of the ways Dems could make other powerful actors and institutions reconsider capitulating to / collaborating with the regime and its lawbreaking is by promising accountability. The attitude of "look forwards, not back" gives license to collaborate.

Something I think well-intentioned people need to understand is a huge portion of the populace is living in a fictionalized world. They don't go to places like Portland (or LA or NYC) on a regular basis and have no clue what conditions are actually like. except what they see in reporting.

This should be a national scandal. Shutdown or not, Speaker Johnson should not be depriving the people of Grijalva's district the representation they're entitled. That he is doing it in service of shielding GOP congressmembers from taking an Epstein file release vote is especially gross.

If you take "big tent" rhetoric seriously, sure. But the folks talking about the "big tent" mostly use the metaphor as a cudgel for imposing conservative politics onto a largely left-liberal coalition. Viewed in that framework, "big tent" has been a great governance strategy.

We're 10 months into an authoritarian takeover premised on this pretext, and a sitting senator in the ostensibly opposition party is still validating regime propaganda. Wholly unfit for this moment in time.

This is true, but also it's hard to claim with a straight face that the Dems "ran on democracy" in 2024. Sure, they cut a few ads about it. But that was on the heels of four years of slow-walking accountability for J6, failing to pass a new Voting Rights Act and throwing cold water on Court reform.

Setting aside the moral depravity of denying health care to people based on citizenship status, the America JD Vance envisions, where people have to prove legal status to get emergency health care, would degrade health care outcomes for Americans too.