I say all of this to let you know that I am fully aware of the risks of what I am about to do. At this moment, several weeks before Election Day, 2026, I am here to officially declare the defining moment of the entire 2026 election cycle. That moment was when Chuck Gray, the GOP nominee for the open at-large Congressional seat for Wyoming, was forced to fund, shoot and air a general election ad that emphasized poll-tested, inoffensive issues of affordability and Congressional stock trading.

Chuck Gray will not lose his race in November. He may very well not even underperform by all that much. But the fact that he feels the need to do something like this—the fact that at least one big-name forecaster has chosen to hedge its bets by listing the race as Likely Republican instead of Solid Republican—is the story of this election. Across the country, across the board, from races expected to be highly competitive to those that had been completely written off at the start of Trump 2.0, the vast majority of individual Democratic candidates in the most important races have put on absolute clinics in 2026. These candidates come from different backgrounds, hold different beliefs, and have employed different strategies, but they have collectively pushed Republicans to the complete brink. To determine which of this collection of stellar campaigns has been the absolute best of the best, we will once again evaluate these campaigns along three principal lines:

• Success Against Republicans. How well has this candidate done against their Republican opponent, and how much of that success is actually attributable to their campaign? While this will primarily be based on polling, it will privilege candidates who have done well enough to force actions by the GOP, whether that be by spending in states not expected to be competitive or by pulling out of contests expected to be headline races.

• Factional Success. What has this candidate done to help provide an electoral proof-of-concept for their ideological faction? How important is said proof-of-concept to said faction, and how much of their strategy came from their own ideas as opposed to an already-crafted playbook? This will privilege candidates coming from more marginal factions who have succeeded while trying new things this year.

• Personal Success. How much has this candidate succeeded in building up their own personal political profile among national liberals while also succeeding in their own state? This doesn’t apply to every candidate—not every politician is an aspiring 2028 contender—but the ones it does apply to represent some of the most impressive political efforts in recent history.

So, once and for all: who has run the absolute best Democratic campaign of 2026?

B Tier

Abdul El-Sayed

Faction: Outsider Left

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Less than one month from now, the 2026 midterm election will come to an end, and we will finally get the results from the largest-scale anti-Trump political experiment ever conducted. After an ossifying eight-year period following 2016 in which the liberal establishment was completely confident that it had the answers to beat Republicans and the liberal base was content to trust that they did, the two years following 2024 have finally brought some real political experimentation from all different sides of the coalition. Gone are the days in which the party near-exclusively ran either well-entrenched incumbents or hand-selected loyalists on the same messaging across the country. For every one of these candidates in major races that won their nominations, there are others carrying the banner of something novel, from the Berniecrat left-wing populism that the party had never before given a chance in major races to updated brands of “heterodox” centrism purported to finally allow the party to win over right-wing voters.

Which of these efforts have been good? Which have been bad? On November 4th, everyone will claim to have known all along. As I wrote on the eve of the 2024 election almost two years ago, one of the most pernicious aspects of American political coverage is the way in which pundits will come to their takes about an election first and then work backwards to justify them based on the results. We saw this occur to a cartoonish degree in the aftermath of Kamala Harris’ defeat, in which both progressives and centrists who had previously praised her and the Biden administration for representing their ideals immediately turned tail to condemn both as either unforgivably corporate or unforgivably woke. While this development ended up being politically beneficial for the left, it has also only furthered an already-deep credibility crisis for commentators among discerning viewers. The results of the political experiments being conducted around the country this month will stand as the highest-quality data that any of us are going to get about the best way to beat Republicans for the entirety of this administration. The conclusions that will be made about them will determine everything about the Democratic Party’s approach in the upcoming presidential election, from the kinds of candidates that will be viable to the policies that can be realistically run on to the size of the map that can be contested. This process could not be more important, and as things stand, readers have very little reason to believe that any of the takes that anyone puts out next month will come from anywhere other than a place of convenience.

To combat such understandable skepticism, I have once again decided to do something different. Rather than wait until after the election to give my impressions of the major Democratic campaigns this year, I will do so before any results have come in. Through this, you can be confident that my analysis of the flaws or virtues of one campaign—say, Abdul El-Sayed’s—was what I was willing to say when any kind of result was possible, not just something I pulled out for the sake of a narrative after the fact. In this list, we will cover all of the most nationally relevant Democratic statewide campaigns in the country, including all of the major competitive and competitive-ish Senate and gubernatorial contests. Listed along with them will also be other candidates who, despite not facing competitive races, are running for positions high-profile enough that the quality of their campaigns carry national implications. They will be evaluated along three principal lines:

• Success Against Republicans. How well has this candidate done against their Republican opponent, and how much of that success is actually attributable to their campaign? While this will primarily be based on polling, it will privilege candidates who have done well enough to force actions by the GOP, whether that be by spending in states not expected to be competitive or by pulling out of contests expected to be headline races.

• Factional Success. What has this candidate done to help provide an electoral proof-of-concept for their ideological faction? How important is said proof-of-concept to said faction, and how much of their strategy came from their own ideas as opposed to an already-crafted playbook? This will privilege candidates coming from more marginal factions who have succeeded while trying new things this year.

• Personal Success. How much has this candidate succeeded in building up their own personal political profile among national liberals while also succeeding in their own state? This doesn’t apply to every candidate—not every politician is an aspiring 2028 contender—but the ones it does apply to represent some of the most impressive political efforts in recent history.

Who has run the sole best campaign of 2026? Who has run the worst? What does it even mean to be a “good candidate” in a massive wave year? All of these questions and more will be answered below.

Hell Tier

Graham Platner

Faction: Outsider Left

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Of the many things that have changed about my life since I became a father this March, one that I didn’t expect coming into that wonderful journey was getting more into sports than I had been in years. This stemmed from what might be an embarrassingly sentimental place—my son had been born right before the start of baseball season, so I decided to follow the Braves closely once again to watch something grow up alongside him—and it quickly grew to make following my teams my main hobby for the first time since I had been in college. An exciting process of rediscovery followed, wherein I caught up on all of the new stars, new contenders and new rules that I had missed over the years. Some changes were small. Some were big. Some were massive enough to make entire leagues feel as if they had entire completely new worlds. But across the board, from stem to stern, none were even remotely as jarring as the sheer extent to which gambling had been integrated into every aspect of the experience.

However cartoonish you can possibly imagine it being, the reality of this cultural colonization is somehow worse. To watch one of your teams these days is to buy a subscription to something called FanDuel Sports Network, view a broadcast saturated with graphics showing betting lines and event probabilities, and then go online to read “discussions” largely dominated by bettors pissing and moaning that one player or another didn’t convert their parlay. It’s embarrassing, it’s insufferable, and it’s been immensely effective. Over just the course of 2026 alone, the total trading volume on both Kalshi and Polymarket has increased several times over entirely as a result of sports betting, a clear and depressing vindication of the industry strategy of shameless oversaturation.

To these companies, the path forward is clear: run this exact same playbook over and over to take over as many aspects of life as they can. As they have gone forward with this effort, the past year has shown that their eyes are on one prize above all: conquering the world of American politics. The 2024 election got both Polymarket and Kalshi their start, and both companies fully intend to make the open race ahead of us in 2028 the first true “prediction markets election.” While this has predictably involved the same big-name deals with big-name networks that have been hallmarks of their takeover of global sports—think of how Harry Enten now always references gambling odds during his CNN segments for one particularly embarrassing and egregious example—it has also brought about something a bit different. This has been their signing of sponsorship deals with online commentators, some large but many quite small, as a way to reach to their target Gen Z consumer base.

I don’t necessarily begrudge (some) of these commentators for taking these deals. Making money talking about politics is hard for young people, especially today. While I was fortunate enough to start my writing here back when Substack was still virgin territory, aspiring pundits now need to compete against a large number of already well-established professional journalists and commentators who decamped to the site over the past few years and currently command the lion’s share of attention and subscriptions. It’s not easy. But if being in a position to turn down these sponsorships makes me privileged, I will use my privilege to promise you this: I will never, ever take money from Polymarket, Kalshi, or any other “prediction market.” I do not want to give a single one of my readers a reason to wonder if my analysis is based on my actual thoughts or opinions or the financial interests of a predatory industry. I do not want to reference any metric, betting odds or otherwise, outside of when they are actually needed. I do not want to make a mockery of my claim to be independent or the trust you all have placed in me to tell you the truth and represent your values.

If this all means that I will be missing out on a massive cultural wave, so be it. If it means I’m leaving money on the table, so be that too. You all deserve at least one person covering politics during the 2028 election who you can trust to be loyal to their readers and nobody else. I promise to you that I will be that person, even if it means I end up standing alone.

Always yours,

Ettingermentum I, father of Ettingermentum II

With only six weeks to go until Election Day 2026, the Democratic Party is running against history. If Republicans ever once had a hope of meaningfully contending for another trifecta, it is now long gone, sunk somewhere at the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz. Despite all of their efforts to lie, cheat, and outright rig the elections this year, the backlash to the incumbents and their failed policies has grown far too large for them to manage or survive. As things stand, quantitative models have the odds of a Democratic House majority above 90%, while a once-seemingly unwinnable Senate now outright leans in their favor.

It all raises a question: what, exactly, is on the line over the next month-and-a-half? Back in 2018 and 2022, the stakes of the upcoming elections were clear and obvious: whether or not a party that had just suffered a devastating defeat would be able to rebuild a national coalition, win at least one chamber of Congress, and obstruct the new President’s agenda for the next two years. This time around, these defining questions appear to have already been answered. There’s little doubt that Democrats will take at least one chamber of Congress this November, little interest in the fact that they’re rebounding yet again after a loss, and—most crucially—little thought that anything we’re seeing right now matters at all in the long term. Even if Democrats run up the score and secure victories in Alaska, Iowa and beyond, it is simply assumed by pundits that the political status quo we’ve known for the past decade will continue as usual.

It’s an incredibly outdated perspective. While midterm cycles may always lack the star power of presidential ones, they have long been just as consequential. Thanks to our historically small pool of consistently competitive swing states and ultra-polarized electorate, governing parties can no longer expect to quickly recover from devastating midterm cycles in the way they once could, just as they can no longer credibly dismiss losses in safe states as flukish, low-turnout oddities. As such, it is not an exaggeration to say that the next decade of American political life will be defined by what happens in November six weeks from now. The kind of candidate Democrats will nominate in 2028, the direction of the post-Trump GOP, the possible ambitions of the next White House—the answers to all of these all-consuming questions will be determined by the degree to which the opposition runs up the score in this moment of overwhelming anti-Trump sentiment.

So, again: what, exactly, is on the line over the next month-and-a-half? What would it mean for America and the world in 2028 and onward if Democrats absolutely thrash the GOP and secure the kind of towering majority they haven’t had in decades? What happens if they “just” flip their most promising targets and get a solid majority? What happens if they fall short of winning it, and what happens if they do so while fumbling well and truly winnable races? All of these scenarios will be considered here, starting first with the most intriguing one: the one where the Republican Party completely dies.

Scenario One: A Blue Megatsunami, or; (Angie) Nixon Now

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For the past week, I have been thinking constantly about someone who I do not know the name of. This person is the Iranian government’s designated advisor on American electoral politics.

I know that this person exists because nothing about the country’s recent behavior in its war against the United States can be explained without their existence. Ever since the country effectively took control over and closed the Strait of Hormuz back in early March, it has enjoyed a nearly unprecedented level of power over an American presidency, one only matched in recent history by its own taking of American hostages nearly half-a-century ago in 1980. More than the White House, more than the DNC, more than any individual candidate or even any megadonor, Tehran and Tehran alone has been deciding the basic contours of this midterm election.As one would expect, this has resulted in much more uncertainty than we are used to in an American election cycle. For almost half a year, the very nature of the most important issue for the most important voters in the country has been in the hands of a foreign power operating on its very own set of considerations—considerations that could plausibly go in any direction imaginable.

Would Iran, as would be entirely within their right, help Republicans politically in exchange for concessions in a favorable pre-midterms deal? Would they do what they did in 1980 and attempt to maximize the political pain in order to humiliate a despised opponent and send a message? Or would they, as the Trump administration reportedly hoped they would, simply ease up on the economic noose as a sign of good faith for post-November talks? Only those at the highest levels of the Iranian government could be said to know, and that was assuming that they had actually made a decision at all. As the conflict ping-ponged from escalation to de-escalation and ceasefire to open hostilities, it was impossible for even the most informed to confidently declare what approach Tehran would take—and, to that end, how bad the cost-of-living crisis would actually be by November 2026.

But time brings clarity, and clarity is exactly what we got just last week. What happened was not just that the Iranian side of the conflict, as anyone with a car can tell you, escalated the conflict in such a way that sent energy prices shooting upwards to some of their highest levels of the conflict. It was that they did so at the precise time they did. Iran specifically chose to escalate during the week of Labor Day, the unofficial start of general election campaign season in American political folklore. It is precisely at that moment that any notion that any events or scandals are “too early” to matter electorally are laid to rest, both because of the amount of voters that start paying attention around then and the lack of time for things to change between then and Election Day. It is very, very difficult to imagine that Iran escalating by as much as it did in the way that it did at that precise moment is a coincidence of any kind. It was a calculated move—the kind of move that could have only been made in consultation with that in-house IRGC expert on the American political calendar who I can’t stop thinking about. It is one that puts the Trump administration in a horrific, utterly unwinnable political situation, where its best-case scenario is a hurried unconditional surrender that doesn’t occur quickly enough to reduce price pressures and the most likely scenario is an ever-spiraling cost-of-living catastrophe that only gets worse before peaking in November.

This isn’t the sort of thing that traditional handicappers account for or statistical models can project. Even strict opinion writers haven’t been confident enough to fully factor it in. But it may be the most important piece of new political information we have received since the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year, and it comes, in a remarkable coincidence, as Democrats are already surging as a result of post-Labor Day polling adjustments. As things stand, we aren’t just on track for a mere Democratic win this year or even a simple blue wave. We are on course for something genuinely historic beyond anything we have seen before in the Trump era, courtesy of an entire nation choosing to put humiliating Trump above everything else. Here’s what it looks like when the party in power has lied to everyone, failed at everything, and is left with no outs on the road to oblivion.

The Official Ettingermentum 2026 Senate Ratings Map. No Tossups.

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American liberalism is haunted by the past. The same political tendency that once prided itself for its focus on the future now looks squarely backwards at all times, gesturing at an endless number of lost futures to prove its current worth. Its argument, even if stated quietly, is always clear: that even if history says that you can’t trust the latest Democrat promising to deliver universal healthcare or a fair economy to follow through, it also tells you that electing even the most milquetoast liberal over any conservative would have prevented all of the major crises we are grappling with today from occurring. It’s tenuous, it’s unfalsifiable, it’s frustratingly repetitive, and it works. Even after the Democratic Party’s reputation reached all-time lows during the Biden administration, only a miniscule fraction of the left-wing electorate chose to back alternative options like the Green Party in 2024. Even the most radical of all voters, it seems, are convinced by the argument that we’d all be safely brunching if Hillary won, living in a wholesome solarpunk fantasy if Gore won, and out there in some kind of Star Trek spacefaring society if Reagan was defeated in 1980.

How actually true is this? That is the question that this series has sought to answer, starting in Part I with the instances where the alternative historographies were the most clearly off the mark. It is not true, for instance, that the election of a President Hillary Clinton would have nipped Republican far-rightism in the bud, or even that a President Henry Wallace could have prevented the Cold War. Such truths are important to understand as our endless historical what-ifs continue to dominate left-of-center American politics. But for every case where such mythologizing is wrong, there are also cases that stand as genuine historical hinge points, where some of the most important developments in this country’s history really did come down to random chance.

These are the cases that this section will be about. To properly understand this country and the possibilities of its politics, those of us on the left must be as clear and honest about the cases where one person being in one place at the right time could have changed things for the better as we are about the cases where it wouldn’t have. So, which of the would-be presidents of the past actually could have been good ones? Which major disasters in our history that seem as if they were set in stone really were only products of random chance? And when all is said and done, who stands alone as the Greatest President We Never Had?

B Tier

Al Gore 2000

Here it is: the big one.

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Although there may be still more than two months to go until November 3rd, 2026, the 2026 midterm election has already made history in its own small way. After cycle after cycle after cycle defined by virulent disagreements about which side would win, 2026 has been characterized by something different: real, wide-ranging consensus. Across the whole span of the political spectrum, from the most arrogant Republican operatives to the most radical wings of DSA, everyone to speak on the midterms lately has accepted the same basic truths: that Trump is deeply unpopular, the GOP is in a massive hole, and Democrats are at least threatening to win in places that they haven’t won in a long, long time. The House, despite all the very real success of the Republican gerrymandering campaign, is a fait accompli. The Senate, as shocking as it might be given the map, is a true tossup. The backlash is real and a wave is coming, as mediated by power of polarization, candidate quality, and Hasan Piker. Amen, amen, amen.

From one perspective, it is quite strange that this election, of all elections, is the one to finally have a ho-hum and largely agreeable discourse surrounding it. From another, it makes all the sense in the world. Even if the possible outcomes on tap this year (Blexas!) are far more momentous than anything that was in play over the past few cycles, the idea of the GOP falling behind after these 19 months fits squarely within a wide beliefs in a way that the ideas of a neutral 2022 or even a Trump victory in 2024 didn’t. Within the GOP, Trump loyalists can simply say that it’s simply a result of his name not being on the ballot like in past midterm cycles, while those rare few anti-Trump far-rightists can pin their party’s woes on his betrayals of the so-called America First movement. Those on the left, meanwhile, hate Trump more than enough to understand why anybody might also hate him; right now, they’re just hoping they won’t wake up to see that their leads in Texas, Ohio and Alaska are all just a dream. It’s all so coherent; so legible; so easy to explain in a way that doesn’t require the observer to truly reconsider their underlying beliefs.

It is, in other words, a lot like the leadup to the 2025 election cycle, when our last careful, mediated, and widely accepted understanding of how far the anti-Trump backlash would go ended up underestimating Democrats by double digits across the board.

Then, as now, the pre-election expectations and polling fit entirely with a certain conception of the anti-Trump backlash. A close race in New Jersey and a high-single-digit Democratic advantage in Virginia both stood as examples of a blue environment overcoming the Republican-friendly local factors (the presence of an unpopular Governor Phil Murphy and a popular Governor Glenn Youngkin respectively). Neither looked set to be a world-beating result even in that context, but that was about what was expected from a damaged Democratic Party that didn’t look like it was going to beat the world anytime soon. But then the actual results came in, and they showed a degree of anti-Trump backlash several gears higher than what the consensus said was occurring or would even be possible. The political world was shocked, the pollsters hedged a few points towards Democrats, and then everyone moved on to focus on the next big story, simply leaving one of the most dramatic systemic polling errors in recent memory in the past.

Perhaps this is warranted. But perhaps—perhaps—it is not. Ever since that fateful night last November, an ever-convincing case that even the wave-level numbers we are seeing for Democrats right now are just the party’s floor rather than its ceiling has been building up. It is a case that says that what occurred in New Jersey and Virginia could end up being the rule, not the exception, and that an already-satisfactory situation for Democrats could become even stronger, making 2026 a true double-digit tsunami that outdoes even 2018. It is one that promises a moment of historic, exquisite irony, where Republicans are felled by the exact same forgotten voters that drove their own overperformance in 2024, all for the exact same reasons that those same demographics abandoned Democrats for Trump.

And now, we do not need to guess what it might look like at the federal level. As of last week, all we need to do is look at the primary results in Alaska, where the GOP quietly received a result so mortifying that it raises serious questions about their ability to defend either chamber of Congress this November.

What Happened in Alaska

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As hard as it may be to believe, it is true: the 2028 presidential election cycle will begin in earnest less than three months from now. As things stand, we are a long way from knowing how this race will go, who it will be contested between, or even what its most important issues will be. But there are two things that we can say with absolute certainty: a) that it will be framed in absolutely existential terms, and b) that voters will regard it as such. Despite the deep and chronic unpopularity of both major parties, the historically consistent unpopularity of major party candidates, and widespread disillusionment in the fairness and legitimacy of the very foundations of American society, recent presidential elections have been characterized by record-high turnout and record-low third party vote shares. The fight for the White House, it seems, has become one of the last places where the public sees any room for contingency, feels any agency, and thinks that anything truly meaningful is happening at all.

It’s not hard to see where they get the idea from. Since the year 2000, all of America’s presidents but one have been either elected or re-elected by small margins across a small number of state(s). The sole exception—Barack Obama—only narrowly won his party’s nomination. The reality that every one of our recent leaders were all only a few bad breaks away from never coming to power at all has loomed extremely large in our collective consciousness, especially so for those to the left of center. After having come out on the losing side of a brutal four of the five ultra-close races of this century, liberal voters have built an entire folk history about the importance of close presidential elections, which they have come to see as the casual factors behind essentially every negative occurrence in American history. Simply replace Richard Nixon with Robert Kennedy, Ronald Reagan with Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush with Al Gore and Donald Trump with Hillary Clinton, it is said, and you solve all of modern America’s problems, from the fascists to the wars to an entire half-century of stagnant wages and rapidly-growing inequality.

How much of this is true? How much isn’t? These are the questions that this article will seek to answer, as the actual implications of the country’s leading alternative history scenarios have gone largely unexamined despite how massively important they are to modern American political culture. Going all the way from Abraham Lincoln’s running mate choices in 1864 to the many opportunities Democrats had to defeat Donald Trump over the past decade, we will look at the most famous examples of would-be presidents and judge them based on how much they could have truly improved things if just a little more broke their way. In doing so, we will follow a brief set of ground rules:

• We will consider would-be general election winners, would-be presidential successors, and would-be major party nominees. Those in the final category will be at something of a disadvantage, as we will not work off of the presumption that they would have won the general election if nominated. Most in this category rank low for this reason, but some of the most interesting are at the top.

• With the exception of what-ifs involving elections well before the emergence of the modern party system, this list will consist exclusively of potential Democratic presidents and party nominees. Although there is no shortage of fascinating alternative history scenarios involving conservative Republican politicians, they all either result in things becoming outright worse or only improving in incredibly tenuous and indirect ways. Perhaps one day they can be reviewed in a list about the biggest dodged bullets in American history.

• Since this is meant to be an exploration of modern liberal historical mythology, most of the cases we will review will be recent—i.e., within the past 50 years. This, however, is not at all a hard rule. Make no mistake: there will be a Benjamin Butler section.

To see what the verdict is for Ted Kennedy, Henry Wallace, Al Gore, Bernie Sanders and many more, read on.

F Tier

Hillary Clinton 2016

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On Tuesday night, a remarkable season of left-wing insurgency within the Democratic Party came to an unofficial end. Although about one more month and seven states worth of primaries remain on the docket, they collectively include only one major race that the organized left is contesting with any degree of seriousness. Absent that contest in Florida’s 23rd district, we have already learned all that we will learn about the state of the so-called Democratic Tea Party in advance of the start of the 2028 primaries.

So, what’s the scorecard? First and still above all else still is Zohran Mamdani’s shock victory in the New York City mayoral primary, which revealed a new kind of left-wing coalition that has served as the foundation for the left’s victories ever since. But for all of the races that the faction’s candidates won in the year after Mamdani’s primary victory, the wing still faced a familiar asterisk: almost all of their wins had come in safely blue territory. The sole exception to this rule was Graham Platner, an unvetted gimmick politician whose scandal-plagued candidacy was on track for disaster even before it ended in complete disgrace. When he left politics in July, the left was left bereft of the one thing it desperately needed: a flagship candidate in a swing state who could prove that their model could defeat Republicans just as well as Democrats.

Come early August, the left had two politicians in positions to be such candidates: one in Michigan (Abdul El-Sayed) and the other in Wisconsin (Francesca Hong). Shockingly, late polling indicated that they would both win their races in walks, possibly indicating that the concerns about electability that had long defined the faction were no longer as relevant to voters as they had been in the past. But instead of doing that, both candidates massively underperformed, with El-Sayed only narrowly winning and Hong narrowly losing. To say that this has done a number on the left’s morale would be an understatement. The dream that the wing had already achieved dominance in purple America before really winning anything disappeared as quickly as it came, and the comedown has been harsh. But as we adjust to the new political reality that has been revealed by the results, it is important to recognize that it is very far from a bad one for the left. The political portrait that was painted across the upper Midwest in early August was one of a movement right on the verge of triumph, only one validating win in purple America away from surpassing all of its prior limits and reaching escape velocity.

In this light, what happened on Tuesday the 11th wasn’t merely not as bad as it might have seemed. It was far more than that. Knowing what we know now, the results were the absolute best case scenario for the left on offer, simultaneously showing what the left can look like when operating at peak performance while putting it in the best position to reach such a level nationwide as soon as possible. And just so it’s clear, I’m not saying that because I consider Hong’s result to be an encouraging moral victory in the face of impossible odds that provides a blueprint for the rest of the faction, as many have cast it as.

I believe that the faction saw its ideal result on Tuesday specifically because she lost, and I am hoping that you will hear me out as to why.

Peggy Flanagan Absolutely Crushed It

As far as I am concerned, nobody can or should be able to talk about what happened in Wisconsin on the 11th without also talking about what happened in the other left-vs-center contest that occurred in Minnesota. Taking place in a state far bluer than both Wisconsin and Michigan, the Senate race in the Gopher state presented an important question: how a left-flank candidate could perform in a statewide race in Middle America where electability wasn’t the defining issue. For the longest time, the verdict appeared set to be quite depressing. Despite facing an ICE-thanking, AIPAC-supported, capital-C Centrist opponent in Rep. Angie Craig, polling showed Flanagan consistently failing to convince Minnesota Democrats to get behind her, to the point that she entered election night with the final high-quality independent polls showing her behind. In at least this one major race, it seemed that the left unencumbered by electoral concerns just wasn’t any different than the left as it had always been: factional, controversial, and only capable of eking out bare victories at best.

Or perhaps not. Thanks to a massive polling error even larger than the one that bedeviled El-Sayed and only slightly less than the one that felled Hong, Flanagan, despite being outspent four to one, won her race in a crushing landslide that provided us with a completely different vision as to what left-vs.-center electoral politics could look like in a world where the electability question is at least somewhat moot. It isn’t just one where the left would be able to reach entirely new heights, although it would be.

It is one where the center isn’t able to even contend at all.

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On the night of Tuesday, August 4th, the Democratic establishment was dealt its biggest defeat in its modern history. In an open Senate race in Michigan where they ran a handpicked candidate blessed with a nine-to-one spending advantage, their primary voters chose to nominate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, an unapologetic Berniecrat, over Rep. Haley Stevens, a centrist four-term House incumbent. It may have only been by a narrow plurality that significantly underran pre-election polling, but it still occurred nonetheless, and it marks the end of an era.

Prior to this Tuesday, it had been an iron law in Democratic Party politics that the left could only contend in the most radical parts of the bluest cities in the country and that the establishment held dominion everywhere else. Absent an extraordinarily unique and ultimately doomed experiment in the state of Maine, the faction was still yet to establish itself as a meaningful statewide force even in deep blue America, to say nothing of the purple territories that actually decide national elections. But El-Sayed just won in one of the most competitive states in the country, and it leaves us with just one question: why? After years and years of the left not even coming close to contending in the races that actually count, what was it that allowed this man to break all precedents and accomplish the now-inconceivable?

As far as the mainstream media is concerned, the answer is a simple one: his win was simply inevitable. Because the polls had El-Sayed up by so much, it is said, victory had always simply spelled itself out for him, to the point that the fact that he only managed a one point win is an embarrassment on his part and a credit to the center. Progressives, it was said, “didn’t get the big election night they wanted.” In fact, they went home “chastened,” while the establishment showed that it “still has plenty of life.” It’s an utterly absurd attempt at spin that gets the entire result backwards. Between her massive fundraising advantage, credible resume, and laundry list of big-name endorsements, this race was Stevens’ to lose. She was given an uncontested platform to push her message and her message failed, and it failed because her faction fundamentally does not know what it is doing. They were astonishingly arrogant, they were fanatically ideological, they were hopelessly, sickeningly online, and they completely blew it—and now, they’re being celebrated for having achieved a moral victory.

It’s well past time for a reality check. Here are the biggest reasons why everything the center knows is wrong, they choked away a winnable race, and any remotely competent establishment would be utterly mortified by the results we saw.

#1: They Couldn’t Fucking Log Off. Haley Stevens and her Army of Bibi Bros Ran One of the Most Terminally Online Campaigns of All Time.

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If there is any one thing that sums up how the past 18 months have gone for the Democratic establishment, it is that they lost control of yet another race in yet another swing state in just the time between the publication of the two halves of this list. All of the old excuses—that the left could only win primaries with low turnout, or in a cobalt blue district, or by running a generationally charismatic master of new media—are gone now. What we are seeing is a full-scale, across-the-board revolt, unencumbered by the constraints of geography, electability, and even candidate quality that kept the left on the margins for so long.

In the first part of this list, we went over what this ongoing grassroots revolution meant directly for those on the outer edges of contention for the 2028 Democratic presidential primary. In this section, our look at the race’s top contenders will consider the biggest potential impact of the ongoing left-wing revolt: how it could structurally change the party establishment going into 2028. If, as polling indicates is overwhelmingly likely, Abdul El-Sayed and Francesca Hong win their primaries this month, it will spark an immense amount of finger-pointing and recriminations within what remains of the Democratic establishment. This will be largely unproductive, but it will also provide a massive opportunity for one particular faction: the Lis Smithian safe-populist liberal center. That side had sought a middle ground in the Michigan Senate race itself with the candidacy of Mallory McMorrow, and they had been firmly rebuked by a party establishment that had already decided that Stevens was the only way to go. While McMorrow’s campaign wasn’t exactly centered around warnings that Stevens was doomed to lose to El-Sayed at the hands of an angry base, it won’t be difficult at all for her former backers to reframe her as a Cassandra who could have prevented the left’s ascension by appealing to the angry liberals that Stevens simply couldn’t reach.

This will be a completely unfalsifiable exercise in alternative history, and it will also be extremely comforting to the powers-that-be. Because of this, it will become very influential very fast. Sympathetic pieces that might have otherwise been written about Josh Shapiro’s and Mark Kelly’s will instead focus on more broadly palatable options with more plausible appeals to partisan liberals. Approaches towards the left will shift towards managing it and neutering its appeal instead of simply stamping it out. And at the highest levels, there will be even more urgency and pressure to recruit the party’s rare few dream candidates, no matter how reluctant they might be to run. It’s a short list that has long included one Georgia Democrat, and it now includes another—one whose appeal is so potent that they immediately start off in the top five in their first inclusion in these rankings.

Who is this mysterious new name who entered the top tier so quickly? Who now stands at #1? Who else is at the peak, and what does it mean for their prospects that everyone in politics is now obsessing over an ascendant socialism in the midst of a blue wave? All of these questions and more will be answered here.

The Top 5

#5: James Talarico (🔻4)

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Ever since I first started writing these power rankings all the way back in March 2025, I have tried to begin with the end in mind. Rather than base my analysis solely on the state of the polls at any given moment, I have kept my thoughts squarely on the winter of 2026 and 2027, when primary season will actually begin. It’s a perspective that has served me very well. It led me to see Jon Ossoff as a potential top-tier candidate eons before the mainstream media caught onto him, just as it kept me rightfully skeptical of Gavin Newsom even when he was at his peak. I’m quite proud of it, and it’s not at all going to be the focus of this article. Instead, I’m going to focus on something that I didn’t expect: what, exactly, political discourse was going to be about right now.

While I was quite adept in 2025 at tagging what the media environment of 2026 wasn’t going to be about, I never knew what actually would be the topic of discussion during the heart of the election cycle. I could only look at past midterm cycles for answers, and they provided me with a simple one: that the political discourse preceding an important midterm election would be focused on, well, important midterm races. That had always been the case before, and for a while, it looked like it would be the case again. For the first half of 2026, the highest-ticket races received the most attention, while national coverage was squarely focused on the all-important fights for control of the Senate and the House. Everything appeared simple, straightforward, and in line for red state liberal stars to monopolize the attention of the entire world.

And then the Democratic Socialists of America took out as many House incumbents in one week across two states that the entire Tea Party took out across all 50 states in all of 2010.

Although they proved impressively dismissive of Zohran Mamdani’s shock win in New York City last year, the rapidfire DSA and DSA-aligned primary wins this summer have broken the national punditocracy. All they can now talk about, it seems, is socialism: how it’s ascending, how bad it is that it’s ascending, and how unfair it all is that the Democratic base is now leaning towards it. It’s an unexpected development, and it forced me to recalibrate. Up to this point, I had built my rankings in no small part off of two primary presumptions: that the flagships races of the 2026 midterms would receive the most coverage in advance of primary season, and that the left would be underestimated and overlooked heading into 2028. What does it mean that neither of these two things look as if they will come to pass and that the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party isn’t settling for anything less than socialism?

(Dis)honorable Mentions

Before we begin, let’s start with a few names that have either received substantial recent coverage or were ranked in previous lists but didn’t make the top ten this time.

• Former Sec. Pete Buttigieg: I made a big show in my last list about how little I thought of Mayor Pete’s chances and he only just barely managed to get his spot at the absolute end of the Top Ten, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that another rejiggering of the placements is enough to once again leave him out of it entirely. Not only does everything I said about the discouraging results from his high-effort low-impact shadow campaign still apply now, but his position is imperiled even further by the liberal political story of the summer: the death of the Democratic middle class. Pete and his clones are supposed to be simultaneously inspiring enough for the left and electable enough for moderates, capable of nothing less than completely ascending above all of the divisions that are said to define Democrats today. While the tack has had its moments in some races, the stunning failure of Mallory McMorrow’s campaign revealed a potentially fatal flaw for the entire project: that neither centrists or leftists are currently pessimistic enough about their own chances to settle with a compromise choice. Whether or not this means doom for the Lis Smithian left-center-left remains to be seen, but if there is one thing that can be said with certainty, it is that this washed-up, unaccomplished, establishment-coded has-been polling at 0% with Black voters will not be a leading candidate to square the circle, ascend all previously-existing divides, and unify the party.

• Gov. Andy Beshear: In theory, the past few months of political developments should have actually been kind to Andy Beshear. While I had extensively criticized the Kentucky Governor in April’s rankings for taking a hard and completely unnecessary pro-establishment centrist tack, the surprising resilience of other pro-establishment centrists suggests that he might have stumbled his way into an actually existing lane. Although he still faces the issue of not being the first, second, or fifth choice of the establishment powerbrokers who hold the power over the party’s base of drone voters, he’s still in the running for their consideration, which isn’t nothing. The only fly in the ointment for him is that the party’s base of drone voters heavily overlaps with its base of insane voters, who are currently apoplectic at Beshear for not revealing Mitch McConnell’s death and illegally replacing him with a Democrat in the Senate. As far as they see it, he failed his first and most important test and is now disqualified.

The Top 10

#10: Abdul El-Sayed (New)

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Not very long ago, a consensus reigned over the discussion about the Democratic Party’s once-long-shot fight to take back control of the U.S. Senate this year: that everything that could have gone right for the party had gone right for the party. Over the course of the pre-campaign buildup in 2025, the party’s leaders pulled off the candidate recruitment equivalent of an inside straight, somehow convincing every popular and established former red state winner at their disposal to forego retirement and/or easier contests to take the fight for the upper chamber. In the cases where their recruitment efforts went bust or were nonexistent—think Janet Mills in Maine or the entire debacle in Texas—fate miraculously intervened to create quality nominees from thin air. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, stumbled from disaster to disaster, dragged down by a White House breaking its back to saddle them with the worst possible candidates imaginable. By the time they started an unwinnable war that sent gas prices to $5 a gallon, it had become accepted wisdom that the battle for the chamber was at least a tossup.

You’d be hard pressed to find someone pushing this exact narrative after the past few months. Remarkably, this hasn’t been because of bad developments in what should by all means be the Democratic Party’s weakest link: their always-tenuous efforts to snag a pair of seats in double digit Trump territory. Instead, the disaster has struck on the party’s backline. Up in Maine, a Harris+7 state that polled as the party’s easiest pickup opportunity less than two months ago, Democrats were left literally without a candidate with only months to go after the spectacular implosion of the grand Graham Platner experiment. Over in Michigan, a race that once figured to be a positive exhibition of the party’s young talents has devolved into an immensely negative eight-figure slugfest thanks to AIPAC and the Democratic establishment. Somehow still leaderless and fractured deep into July, both state parties now have less than four months to mend their deep internal wounds and take the fight to well-polling Republican opponents who have been in general election mode since last year.

It’s hard to exaggerate how high the stakes are. If just one of these two races enters true tossup territory—to say nothing of outright leaning towards the GOP—the entire house of cards that the opposition party has carefully constructed will collapse. As Republicans learned the hard way in 2022, screwups in states that should otherwise be safe bets can have very national consequences. Every dollar that goes to a last-minute rescue mission is a dollar that isn’t spent on frontline candidates who desperately need funding. Resources become scarce, odds get longer, and things get set up for a full-on sweep for the opposing side—one wide and deep enough to set back a party for a generation.

So, while this article will go over every Senate race on the ballot in this country, it will principally focus on the two big Ms: Michigan and Maine. Together, these two races will do much to decide just how much Democrats can achieve this year, with it be a full-on realignment-level wave or a simple consolidation of low-hanging fruit. How much have centrist Democrats and their allies in the Israel lobby screwed the anti-Trump cause with the obstinance and ineptitude? What do things look for left-flank candidates in those races who are now suddenly beset on all sides? Can they truly get these races back onto stable footing with the whole world against them, and what options are left open for the party if they cannot?

Simply put: can Democrats still win the Senate in 2026?

The New Official Ettingermentum 2026 Senate Ratings Map. No Tossups.

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This Monday, one of the most shameful chapters in modern left-wing electoral history closed in sordid fashion. After almost a full calendar year of scandals and disturbing revelations—each of which he assured would be the last—Graham Platner’s Senate campaign ended in complete and utter disgrace following an allegation of rape from one of his former partners. Now, he is out of the race. The project has failed. The dream is dead. He will never be a U.S. Senator.

Over the coming months and years, there will be oceans of ink spilled about what this entire story has meant. How, exactly, did an unstable and unqualified psycho so easily capture the hearts and minds of liberals and leftists the nation over? What does it mean that he, with all of his infinite and well-known flaws, accomplished things at the ballot box that none of his ideological peers have even come close to? How will the electoral left recover from yet another high-profile, high-stakes recruitment disaster? These are all incredibly important questions, and they are all dwarfed by the task at hand: finding some way to go from this to defeating Susan Collins in November.

It’s not nearly as hopeless as it sounds. Mercifully—and not at all coincidentally—these campaign-destroying allegations dropped in the middle of the grace period in which parties in Maine can replace their nominees after they drop out. Since Platner exited the race before July 13th, Maine Democrats have between now and July 27th to select a new nominee for the race. It’s a huge opportunity. Before Monday, Maine Democrats were in something of a reverse Goldilocks situation: stuck with a nominee who was damaged enough to lose the very winnable race, but not quite so damaged that he could be forced out. Now, with the full extent of Platner’s degeneracy made clear, they have a chance to wipe the slate clean and put themselves in a significantly stronger situation with a new candidate that Maine voters actually like. In a state where voters prefer a Democratic-controlled Senate over a Republican-controlled one by a full 12 points, just having someone recognized as a normal Democrat on the ballot could very well be all that they need.

Actually getting to that point, however, is far easier said than done. As things stand, whoever the party selects as Platner’s replacement will have less than four months to get an entire operation going from the ground up against a five-term incumbent loaded with cash. Many of his plausible replacements will be running against a Republican at the statewide level for the first time ever. Within their own party, they will have to deal with the fact that Platner and his staunchly anti-establishment platform received significant support just one month ago in the actual Senate primary. If the party goes too far in one direction, their candidate could be defined as the hand-picked choice of a psychotic rapist. If they go far in the other direction, they could be defined as an establishment toady forced on the voters in a full-on coup. You won’t be able to win the race just by selecting the first liberal you find on the street—not with this little time, this awful of a setup, and these many considerations.

Since the revelations on Monday, we’ve already seen a flurry of Maine Democrats floated for the spot. Some are terrible, others are better, and nearly all carry some kind of risk. But “nearly all” is not the same as “all.” Within a long list of craven opportunists and desperate bets are some genuinely strong options—so strong that they could not only put Collins right back on the path to defeat, but still make the election the kind of win for the left that Platner’s campaign once promised to be. To get to them, we’ll start from the bottom.

F Tier

Gov. Janet Mills

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The writing had been on the wall for quite some time.

For well over a year, one of the defining stories in American politics has been the very new and very real anger that once-loyal Democratic voters held towards their leaders. The conditions have been ripe for a full-on revolt since the 2024 election was called last November, and that is indeed what has happened this primary season. Just over the course of one week in two states, more incumbent Democrats lost to insurgent primary challengers (three) than all of the incumbent Republicans who lost to Tea Party challengers in all 50 states in 2010 (two). Open races have leaned even more strongly towards insurgent and insurgency-coded candidates, even in cases where they have faced highly credible opposition. Things have gotten so bad that it’s now conventional wisdom that the party’s two Congressional leaders wouldn’t be able to win a primary in their home city of New York if an election were held today.

Again, none of this is necessarily breaking news. What has subverted even these expectations has been the precise nature of the revolt against the establishment. Ever since the sheer depth of the Democratic base’s mutinous feelings became clear, we were assured that the new split within the party was one of posture, not ideology. Liberal voters were simply sifting between “fighters” and “folders,” it was said. All they wanted was someone who could be trusted to consistently oppose Trump, whether they be a socialist or a centrist or anything in between.

But ever since the primaries actually began, all of the big upheavals within the party have been underlined by one three-letter acronym: DSA. This one, small, impossibly fractured organization consisting of only 0.03% of the American population has stamped its name all over the ongoing revolt against the Democratic establishment, from coast to coast and at all levels of government. At the municipal level, candidates affiliated with the organization have already won mayoral elections in the 1st, 18th, and 22nd largest cities in the country. At the Congressional level, its candidates have beaten three of the four incumbents who have lost their primary this year, with the sole exception (Brad Lander) being a former DSAer and close ally of DSA Mayor Zohran Mamdani. In every single case in every single race, the organization accomplished something far grander than even its greatest achievements during Trump 1.0 and the Biden years. None of these wins were fly-by-night, low-turnout upsets by generational talents against weak targets off of the backs of Twitter-obsessed transplants straight from Girls. They were hard-fought victories against local institutions, built off of wide-ranging coalitions that extended far beyond the usual hard-left white transplant base.

They were, in short, the real deal.

Over the past few weeks, you’ve likely read your fair share of panicked, self-soothing takes about what all of this means. You’ve heard well-established pundits and observers that never saw any of this coming reassure you that it’s no big deal, that it’s just all luck, and that the real window into the soul of the Democratic voter still lies somewhere down the hall in Lis Smith’s office. I’m here to give you a different perspective—one that is fully aware of just how exceptional this all is and isn’t trying to hide from what it means. What is it about DSA that has made them so uniquely suited to fill this void in party politics? Why have the party’s supposedly oh-so-sophisticated liberal and progressive “fighters” completely and utterly failed to gain traction? How far can this go, and is there anything that the powers-that-be can do to stop it?

Simply put: why DSA?

#1: It’s Gaza, Stupid

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The American left is on the march. In the year since Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in the 2025 New York City Democratic mayoral primary, the faction has fully risen from the dead to take command of the country’s highly fluid political scene. Its rhetoric is now imitated by everyone from McKinsey liberals to far-right healthcare billionaires. Its candidates are winning in places where their forebearers never even thought of contesting, from the backforests of Maine to the Central Valley of California. It has won over the hearts of the broad anti-Trump resistance, earned the begrudging respect of those who had made careers out of doubting it, and humiliated every pundit who claimed that the future of politics belonged to the hard-right. As the 2028 election approaches, it and it alone carries that desperately coveted banner of capital-C Change that has followed the winner of almost every presidential election this century.

It also faces major leadership questions. With precious little time remaining until the official start of primary season, the faction’s 2028 ambitions still completely revolve around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the internationally famous backbencher congresswoman who is only just barely old enough to run for the White House at all. She raises more money than any other left-wing 2028 hopeful, commands more attention than any other left-wing 2028 hopeful, and is the sole member of her peer group to register in the early polling to any degree whatsoever. Across the board, she is the sole member of her wing who can hope to start off the primary with the kind of pre-built infrastructure, relationships, and name recognition that has historically been mandatory to seriously contend for a presidential nomination.

She also very well might not run at all.

While AOC is arguably in the strongest early position that any socialist seeking the White House has ever enjoyed in American history, she has made precious few decisions indicating that she actually plans to take the plunge. She has made practically no appearances on both legacy and new media outlets since Trump’s inauguration. Her political approach has been incredibly conservative, one fitting far more with someone seeking to go along and get along in Washington as opposed to someone planning to wage a full-on insurgency against it. It’s immensely frustrating, and it’s also hard to argue with the logic behind it. For AOC, the risks of a failed presidential run are massive—possibly even career-ending—while simply declining on a run almost certainly earns her a lifetime spot in the Senate. With decades upon decades of time left for her at the top of the political world, the best political decision for her personally would be to simply keep her powder dry and keep building up her record.

In this light, it is only prudent to take a look at what options might be available in the event that the gravitational center of the left-wing political universe suddenly disappears. This tier list will do exactly that, reviewing all of the major figures with a chance to take up AOC’s lane and ranking them based on how strong they might be relative to her. In this, they will be evaluated along three distinct lines:

• Ideology. The stronger your policies and the more trustworthy you are, the better. Most potential AOC replacements fall far short of her in this category, but some of the most interesting actually outdo her in it.

• General Election Electability. According to current polling and the most recent election results, AOC is a replacement-level Democrat whose greatest upside rests in the possibility that she could reshape national turnout dynamics. Her best replacements either match or exceed her readings on traditional metrics while still holding the promise of achieving a Mamdani-esque transformation of the electorate.

• Primary Election Electability. Neither of the above two metrics matter if the candidate in question can’t get off the ground in the primary. Some of the most mercenary options specialize in this, but it’s by far the biggest hurdle for most of the candidates.

It’s no easy task to replace a once-in-a-generation political celebrity. Very few of the non-AOC left-wing hopefuls succeed at measuring up to her in even just one of these categories, to say nothing of all three. But in their midst stands one possible saving grace—someone hiding in plain sight with such massive political potential that they may very well outdo AOC herself in every category across the board.

As for who that is: read on.

X Tier

A Flagrantly Unconstitutional Zohran Mamdani Campaign

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For as hard as it may be to believe, we are quite close to the end of the second Trump administration as we know it. Only five months remain between now and November 2026, when it is very likely that Democrats will break the GOP’s federal trifecta by winning at least one of the two chambers of Congress. Presidential election season will start shortly after that, and it will permanently shift the attention of the political world away from a President in the waning years of his time in power. And as Trump’s time at the center of the universe slowly slips away, so have the opportunities for everyone else in politics to respond to him and the world he has created. If you ever wanted to define your position towards this administration and set yourself up for whatever comes after it, the time to do so was over the past 16 months.

In this newsletter, we’ve written a lot about the politicians and factions that acquitted themselves well over this time period. Earlier this month, we took our first look at those who haven’t. From a sitting Vice President who has completely misunderstood his role to countless mid-tier Democrats who turned down once-in-a-lifetime promotions in favor of long-shot presidential bids, we went over a huge range of political fumbles, each of which would have been large enough to have been etched forever in political lore had they occurred in years past. They were all bad, and they all pale in comparison to the sheer, unadulterated idiocy on the top of this list. To a person and to an organization, every name mentioned here had a once-in-a-lifetime political opportunity in front of them at the start of this administration. The stars were aligned; success was as simple as putting two and two together. But they all failed to do so, they now face oblivion.

The Top Five

#5: The Lamestream Media

During that long, painful period in which Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee and losing to Donald Trump in the polls, the liberal commentary industrial complex had to spend a lot of time coming up with a lot of excuses as to why they were losing. These excuses ranged very far and very wide, but there was always one that rose above the rest of the pack: that the very idea that Trump could ever win was being willed into existence by an elite media class that desperately wanted him to come back to power. As the story went, all of us elite election commentators (yes, they included me in this for some reason) had grown resentful of Biden’s steady competence. He was simply such a good President that it had taken all of the drama out of Washington, and since Washington drama is what sells, he was drastically hurting our bottom line. As such, all of us Biden haters had become so desperate for the former guy to come back to office that we spent all of our days faking polls, conducting faulty analyses and otherwise wishcasting a new Trump presidency. We just desperately wanted to believe that he would come back to the White House so we could once again make that sweet, sweet #Resistance money.

If anybody anywhere was ever uncertain as to whether this story was true or not, their minds should have been settled right after Trump won the election last November. Far from some fifth column that eagerly anticipated another four years of high drama in the White House, the mainstream media reacted to Trump’s second victory with excessive shock and massive overcorrections. It has been a historic showcase in inept bumbling the entire way through, most prominently in the cases of CBS and the Washington Post. Both organizations took excessive and massively self-indulgent moves towards an elite anti-woke center-right philosophy long after it was already clear that the so-called “vibe shift” was a mirage, and both have declined massively in income and influence as a result.

It’s a textbook case of billionaire arrogance that has left the once-societally-dominant upper crust of the industry on life support. Had the likes of Bezos and the Ellisons been genuinely interested in why Trump voters were no longer interested in their coverage, just a quick review of the history of conservative media would have been enough to tell them that the right just wasn’t compelled by objective coverage as a concept. But since people as wealthy as them can never see a foot past their own faces, they convinced themselves that everything from America’s narrow selection of Trump to its decades-long distrust of the mainstream media was because established outlets were not sympathetic enough to the specific brand of right-wing politics that they personally liked: libertarian economics, hawkish foreign policies, and condescending anti-anti-Trumpism. So far, the entire project has only succeeded at destroying their appeal among high-trust liberals while failing to convince a single Dan Bongino fan to turn off Gutfeld! and tune into Whiskey Fridays with Tony Dokoupil. If it were not for the continued financial success of the New York Times—something that could very well just be because of wordle—the entire industry would be at the rock bottom of this list despite the fierce competition.

And trust me: when I say fierce competition, I mean fierce competition.

#4: Former Sec. Kristi Noem

Where do you even begin?

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You’ve all heard the story about Graham Platner’s serial adultery countless times right now, so I doubt that you need me to belabor the point. I’ll just give you my take as someone who correctly said that the round of revelations in October wouldn’t matter: it’s bad, far more so than the past revelations about his tattoo and Reddit posts. Americans view cheating to be a uniquely extreme moral failing, and the specific timing of the allegations throws a massive wrench into Platner’s entire message about how he overcame his past struggles. A man who once looked like a real person with real, sympathetic struggles now looks like a bad and untrustworthy individual, so suspect that even his own backers can only explain their support for him by couching it in qualifiers.

Yet he still won. In fact, he won huge. Although its impact may have been dulled by the fact that his leading opponent has been out of the race since April, the reality is still the same: Graham Platner—the completely inexperienced Hail Mary left faction candidate for the Susan Collins seat—won his race by more than 50 points with over 70% of the vote this Tuesday. He is both the first candidate of his kind to be a major party nominee for such an important race and the first candidate of his kind to dominate any race as thoroughly as he has. Along with the all-important question of whether or not he has a chance against Collins, there’s the equally all-important question as to how, exactly, this happened. Maine is supposed to be a reasonable, moderate New England state—the home of Jeffersonian town halls, not radical firebrands. How in the world did we get here?

Some believe that they already have the answer. As their story goes, the entire “Platner situation” was an entirely avoidable product of ignorant and condescending leftist operatives ignorantly assuming that an obvious asshole would be relatable to working class voters. It’s a comforting story, and it’s one that makes zero sense on its face. National consultants may have been able to have gotten Platner in the race, but they weren’t the ones who got him in the lead. They may have suggested some messaging for him, but they weren’t what those messages resonate to the extent that they did. Something else happened—something far beyond the control of Platner, his backers, or anyone else on the organized left.

That something was this: that the fabled nexus of money, influence and condescension known as the Democratic establishment has collapsed. That the race in Maine has gone down the way it has is entirely because of them: their ignorance, their arrogance, their childish insistence on forcing their own elite preferences down the throats of voters. In their refusal to acknowledge reality and recognize how things have changed, they paved the primrose path to a Platner nomination. If they ever once had the ability to stop someone like him, it is now gone, never to return.

This is what happens when you lose control over your own party. This is what happens when you’ve used up all of your chances and have no credibility left. It is not pretty, it is not nice, and it quickly leaves you just as confused as your supporters were after the devastating loss that uncorked everything. And for as hard as it may be for the D.C. elites and their sympathizers to believe, what they’re seeing in Maine is close to the best case scenario for them. If they try to freeze it out—if they use everything at their disposal to reclaim the powers that once came to them naturally but are foreign to them now—they will only invite something far, far worse.

In short: if you don’t like Graham Platner, you’re going to like what comes after him a lot less. Here’s how we got all the way here, past the point of no return.

How Parties Fail

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While it may be quite a long time before we finally reach the beginning of the end of the Trump administration, we can now say that we have reached the end of the beginning. As hard it may be to believe, we are now actively choosing the candidates that will run in the midterm elections that will occur only five months from now. Those races will dominate our attention until November, when presidential election season will officially start soon afterwards. As such, all but the most high-profile politicians have essentially run out of time to prepare for the next national cycle. If you’re not an already-famous national figure, someone who will outright be on the ballot in a top-tier race, or currently running the country, you no longer have any runway to name for yourself before things officially begin. What you have now is what you get, and it’s what you’re going to have to work with in 2027, 2028, and all the years going forward.

In this newsletter, we’ve talked extensively about the sides that have made the most out of their time in this new, open-ended political era. Today, we’re here to look at the other side of the coin: those who have blown the biggest opportunities of Trump 2.0. Some of our subjects are presidential contenders who are still truly in the mix, but failed to make the most of the fluid early days of this administration. Others had an opportunity for immediate advancement and long-term relevance right in front of them but chose to turn it down to prioritize short-term presidential aspirations that look more and more suspect by the day. And in the most extreme cases, we have those who almost certainly should have been at the top of the world right now but bungled things so badly that they hardly have any political future left.

Between them, we can arguably learn more than we can by looking at the few big winners of the past 16 months. So, without further ado: who could have been great—should have been great—but isn’t?

The Top (Bottom?) Ten

#10: Governor Josh Shapiro

With his placement at the very bottom of this list, Josh Shapiro serves a very important purpose: to show that one not necessarily be at political rock bottom to have missed a major opportunity over the past 16 months. As I’ve detailed in my Democratic presidential power rankings, Shapiro still enjoys a solid position in the upcoming primary. No matter what happens between now and the start of the primaries, Josh Shapiro will win re-election by a stunning margin, will run for president, and will be paraded around by every editorial board in the country as the only candidate a sane person could vote for. It is because of this that Shapiro stands as the reactionary center’s best and possibly only chance of getting the party’s disgruntled base behind a true centrist candidate. For as much as the party’s voters may be put off by his right-of-center tendencies and alignment with an unfathomably unpopular Israel lobby, he will still be the guy who blew the doors off in the swing state, and he will stand as their best option if they decide they need to make a pure mercenary pick to beat Republicans.

This brand of condescending centrism is certainly a lane, and it’s one that Shapiro looks set to monopolize. As the rest of the party has raced to the left over the past few months, Pennsylvania’s governor has remained unmoving in his personal ideology, the fact of which has made him the only real remaining eat-your-vegetables moderate among the contenders. But while Shapiro may be entirely content to double down on this reputation ahead of the primary, there’s a rapidly growing body of evidence from Democratic voters themselves that it’s the most unviable tack any aspiring Democrat can take. While we now have proof that voters are open to reformist leftists (think Zohran Mamdani), institutionalist liberals (think Keisha Lance Bottoms and Xavier Beccera), and a certain class of reformist liberals (think James Talarico), there’s zero evidence that they’re interested in reformist centrists. From New York City to Georgia to California, all of the candidates who have run along radical moderate lines have done terribly, so far always only seeing vote totals in the single digits.

Perhaps it’s possible that Shapiro ends up ascending the now-well-established limits of this category through his sheer credibility and personal political skills. In any case, he would have been on far safer ground if he simply swallowed his pride and just acted like a normal Trump 2.0 liberal, à la Jon Ossoff. But because of his sheer unwillingness to abandon hasbarist talking points, he has resigned himself to competing for an establishment voting base that couldn’t care less about what he has to offer electorally. I’d call it a shame if I weren’t happy to see him fail.

#9: Vice President JD Vance

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“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

— Sir Arthur Harris, Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the RAF Bomber Command

On April 29th, 2026, the United States Supreme Court officially dismantled the last remaining pillar of America’s post-1964 multiracial democracy. In a 6-3 decision decades in the making, the court’s far-right supermajority sanctified the states’ supposed right to draw any kind of partisan gerrymander they wish, even when the effect of it is to violate the ban on racially discriminatory maps in Section II of the Voting Rights Act. Although the majority took pains to hide how much they changed and made sure not to fully declare Section II unconstitutional, the revolutionary effect of their revolutionary decision could be seen in what happened afterwards: a mad dash by states across the Deep South to eliminate VRA district after VRA district, some of them decades old, and deny their nonwhite citizens any chance of having federal representation.

Since we’re all adults here, I’ll start off by acknowledging the overwhelmingly obvious: that this was a political decision made by a Republican body with the intention of benefitting the GOP, just like all of the other voting rights decisions made by the Roberts Court. It is not a coincidence whatsoever that it came down in the midst of a nationwide redistricting war that the right started. Since long before the emergence of Donald Trump, the GOP has been attempting to use the gaps in the American political system and the complacency of liberals the country over to eliminate representative democracy in this country by rigging the U.S. House of Representatives decisively in their favor. Not only are they trying to do it now, but they have successfully done it before. After their commanding wins in the 2010 midterms, new Republican-controlled state governments the country over drew such wildly balanced maps the lower chamber was rendered all but unwinnable for Democrats for years.

It was a brazen, authoritarian scheme, and it never could have been accomplished if not for the astounding complacency of liberals in the early-to-mid 2010s. For whatever reason, the Democratic Party simply sat on its hands over the entire period, choosing to lull themselves to sleep with fantasies of a permanently Democratic White House over reckoning with how thoroughly they had been locked out of power. To the extent that the party put together any sort of organized response, it was an extremely belated push by Barack Obama and Eric Holder for independent redistricting commissions that only succeeded in tying the hands of Democrats in the states they controlled. While the party was able to win the chamber back in 2018 and 2020, that was because of a once-in-a-generation educational realignment that broke the GOP’s old gerrymanders—not any effort on their end to level the playing field. Even as they spiraled into a 24/7 panic about the state of democracy after January 6th, liberals never thought to grant themselves the powers to reshape the Congressional map that their opponents always enjoyed. In effect, they chose to let the fairness of the House as a competitive body rest on the GOP’s willingness to let it be so.

Over the past year, this state of affairs has come to its logical conclusion. With an entirely new cycle of Republican-friendly data to guide their decision-making, GOP-controlled state governments the country have swiftly redrawn their maps to cut out Democratic seat after Democratic seat. This made some blue states finally try to respond, but they were gravely restricted by the existence of constitutionally mandated independent redistricting commissions (thanks, Obama). Between this, the Callais decision, and the decision of the Supreme Court of Virginia to overturn the state’s 10-1 Democratic map on a technicality, Republicans have been able to build a truly meaningful advantage in the national House map for this cycle, large enough for them to still contend for and even win the chamber even while losing nationally by as much as three or four points.

Given that Democrats currently enjoy an expanding generic ballot lead somewhere between seven and eight points at the moment, it is unlikely that this new state of affairs will change the ultimate outcome in November (although it could significantly curtail the size of a future Democratic majority). That’s also not what matters to the right. For the Supreme Court and the rest of the Republican Party, the real prize is 2028, a presidential election year where things are expected to be much tighter than the blue wave that looks to be on tap this cycle. Not only will the current advantage of three-to-four points that they’ve currently built up stand to be extremely impactful in the event of a closely fought race, but the new guidelines created by the court will allow them to go after even more seats in states that they weren’t able to target in time for this cycle. From Georgia to Mississippi to South Carolina to possibly even Texas once again, Republicans will have free reign to add more and more seats to their column in advance of the next presidential election, to such an extent that their advantage could reach the same size that it was in the early 2010s if they are not met with a response.

That “if,” though, is quite a very big “if.” While it’s perhaps understandable that the Supreme Court and the Republican lawyers who challenged Section II assumed that Democrats would simply let them run wild based on their behavior during the right’s last big power grab, things have changed quite a lot since the 2010s. Between the successful redistricting in California and the near-miss attempt in Virginia, liberals have shown that they are finally willing to fight fire with fire, to the point of drawing maps just as brutal as the worst that the GOP has ever cooked up. It was already a strong response, and Callias just doused it with jet fuel. Now that Section II is officially eliminated, both the will and capacity for Democrats to punish Republicans has been massively expanded, to such an extent that the court’s latest attempt to help the GOP could end up as one of the biggest self-owns in American political history.

What I’m referring to here isn’t merely that Democrats could cancel out current and potential Republican redraws and re-create a fair national map. It’s something far more than that—something that would have been completely unimaginable just a few weeks ago. Thanks to the court’s decision, the legal and political barriers to future Democratic redraws in blue and purple states have been eased to such a dramatic extent that it’s entirely within the party’s power to grant themselves a significant structural advantage in the House in time for the 2028 elections regardless of what the GOP does. If they go far enough, they could guarantee themselves a win in the chamber even if they lose by as much as they did in 2024, if not more.

The path here isn’t ethical, proportional, or even all that likely to happen. It’s simply something that will be completely within the party’s power by next year if they just choose to do it, and it could stop Trumpism in its tracks.

Operation GQP Destruction, or; How the Left can Completely Block the Right From Power by 2028

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