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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“People are missing Joe Biden more and more each day.”

— Keisha Lance Bottoms, 2026

You may not have noticed, but the centrist wing of the Democratic Party doesn’t really talk much about centrism as an ideology anymore.

To be sure, they’ll put on airs from time to time. Sometimes, they’ll try to prove their impeccable normie credentials by talking about how they’re an “an American, goddamnit” and wearing American-flag themed suspenders. Other times, they’ll start saying the word “retard” out of nowhere to show how un-PC they are, as Noah Smith has done since November 2024. I’ve always found it to be a bit contrived, but far be it from me to tell you which of these newfound beliefs and attitudes are sincere or not. The world is vast and unpredictable; for all we know, it really could just be the case that this group of former Warrenite yuppies truly are flag-humping patriots with the same vocabulary as the kid in your third grade class who bit people. But once they get beyond these perfunctory attempts at “vice signaling,” these pundits quickly get to the beating heart of their approach: defeating Trump’s Republican Party at any cost.

At least, that’s the promise on the tin.

As they speak to their ultra-polarized audiences of Trump haters who want nothing more than to live to see the GOP burned to the ground, the post-2024 class of neo-centrists has promised them that they represent something new and different compared to past iterations of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. No longer, they say, will the center wing push politically vulnerable policies just because they happen to line up with the teachings of the neoliberal consensus. Their faction has moved beyond identity politics, liberal immigration policies, and anything else that stands to be a liability for the big tent coalition at the ballot box. Even unconditional support for Israel stands to be on the chopping block—polling permitting, of course. Jared Golden, not Hillary Clinton, will be the model in this new age of hard-nosed electoralism.

I’m not here to argue about the wisdom of this approach—at least, not today. I am instead here to look at whether or not it is even real at all. To do this, I will look at a test case that should, in theory, be very favorable for centrists: last week’s Georgia Democratic gubernatorial primary. If you were to hand-select a place for the party’s center to show off what their new approach looks like, it would be precisely here: a wide-open race in a state where national progressives hold almost no power. The state party’s pre-Trump base of Black voters has always been moderately-inclined party loyalists, and its new Trump-era base of ex-Republican suburbanites have taken their old centrist ways with them. The audience is receptive, the moment is ripe, and the stakes are as high as they can be. If there has been or will ever be a place for our new class of intellectuals to show their data-driven heterodox approach in action and actually improve things in the process, it is in the state of Georgia at this very moment.

So, who’s our ruthless, Shor-pilled rising star ready to turn theory into practice? Who’s the South’s moderate mirror of Zohran Mamdani? Who is set to right the wrongs of the Stacey Abrams misadventure and sweep Republicans from power in a state where they have won every gubernatorial race since before LeBron James was drafted to the NBA?

They don’t exist. But this woman does.

This woman’s name is Keisha Lance Bottoms. Based on her resume of one term as mayor of Atlanta and a brief stint as one of Joe Biden’s many senior advisors, she was chosen in a landslide to be the Georgia Democratic Party’s gubernatorial nominee in the 2026 election, and I am not happy about it. As longtime readers will know, I’ve long been immensely frustrated with my home state’s Democratic Party, which has never once lived up to the immense hype and credit it’s been given in the national media. Contrary to what you might have heard, the Stacey Abrams era was a complete and utter disaster. Under her rule, Georgia Democrats were an unserious party following an unserious strategy at the behest of an unserious person, and it constantly lost. When Abrams finally stepped back from statewide politics last year, all I wanted was some break—any break—from the way the party had been running on autopilot since the end of the Obama administration.

But that break hasn’t come. There hasn’t been any meticulously crafted data-driven move to the heterodox center, just as there hasn’t been any swing towards an energetic, affordability-minded left-populism. It’s nothing that anyone with a byline has ever reccomended, and it’s got me thinking. As political writers, it can be easy to write about the centrist faction as a coherent, unified bloc, with an intelligentsia that comes up with ideas for elected officials to run on and voters to support. But this has not been the case in reality, at least in the places that really matter this year. Instead, there is a large and growing gap between centrism in theory and Actually Existing Centrism. While the most well-known moderate pundits have had success at publicly reframing the philosophy as something focused and adaptable, the actual moderate voter base has only served as an anchor on the anti-Trump cause over the past year and a half, resolutely supporting unpopular status quo candidates in extremely important elections.

With this in mind, we’re well overdue for evaluating the centrist faction based on what it actually is in the real world rather than what it simply says it is. Over the past number of years, we’ve all seen countless profiles about the likes of Matt Yglesias and David Shor and all of their supposedly game-changing ideas. Now, it’s about time that we talk about what their wing actually looks like in practice by looking at a woman who I believe to be the best possible representation of it that you can find. Without further ado, is the most through overview you will ever find of the life and times Keisha Lance Bottoms: failed politician, visionless functionary, and human proof of just how utterly delusional and ultimately irrelevant the centrist pundit class is.

Who Is Keisha Lance Bottoms? or; The Art of Losing, Matt Yglesias: Part II

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As the 2026 election grinds ever forward, the Republican Party stares down the barrel of a generational disaster. Even after going as far as rolling back the entire legacy of the civil rights movement to further their chances, they still stand set to lose at least one and likely both chambers of Congress. The load-bearing myth of their entire “populist” political project is gone, sunk to the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian mine layers. Their big man’s overall job approval rating is as low as it’s ever been, while Democratic Senate candidates have seen polling leads everywhere from Alaska to Texas to Ohio. At the rate things are going, the tenth anniversary of the 2016 election is set to play host to the unwinding of the hated political system that Trump ushered in with his first win, with the Democrats finally securing the thumping rebuke of right-wing populism that consistently eluded them when the current and former President was associated with high growth and low prices.

Last week, we went over how this new political environment has impacted those on the fringes of top-tier contention. The dominant theme was that of a relatively condensed field, with a massive and largely indistinguishable morass of minor contenders standing outside a small group of international celebrities and young up-and-comers set to strike it big in 2026. It was quite a fun morass to explore, but now, it is time to get to the main event. While there is only one new face in this Top 5 compared to the last list, the Iran War and the subsequent immolation of the Trumpist coalition has still thoroughly shaken up the top tier of contention for the Democratic nomination, to the point that almost none of our names remain in the same spot that they were back in February.

Who is this new name who entered the top tier? Who stands at #1? How will liberals react to the results of an election where they stand to really win Texas for the first time in more than thirty years? All of these questions and more will be answered here.

The Top 5

#5: Gov. Josh Shapiro (🔻1)

At long, long last, he’s really on the way down.

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To provide some perspective about how much has changed in American politics in a very short span of time, I’d like to call back to the most recent edition of this series. Published just over two months ago in February, that edition was squarely focused on the topic that, at the time, was at the front of mind for every political observer in the country: the Texas Democratic Senate primary. Such was the state of analysis in those far-off days, back when everything was so familiar. For all of its supposedly revolutionary potential, the sum total of the entire right-wing populist project had been to just send us back to the days of 2018, with a broadly-but-not-historically-unpopular President facing off against a fractured opposition. In that light, the only real question left appeared to be what kind of approach a once-again-leaderless liberal base would take for their second bite at the apple. Ergo, an entire set of articles about the implications of one primary for one race in one state.

And then the war happened.

There’s not too much I can add to what’s depicted here. Donald Trump’s approval rating on inflation—the defining issue of his entire 2024 campaign—has collapsed so thoroughly that the numbers have fallen quite literally below the chart. His net approval on the issue is worse than anything ever seen by any president at any point in their term, Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter included. This is more than just a betrayal, a mistake, or any other kind of political challenge that we’ve seen Trump hobble through before. It is a full-scale political collapse that has eviscerated MAGA as a concept. The load-bearing myth of the entire Trumpist project—that he is a bad man who nonetheless gets things done—has been completely and utterly shattered, left to moulder in the dustbin of history next to Biden’s pre-Afghanistan reputation as a competent elder statesman.

For the ever-closer Democratic primary, this means one thing above all: that it is now entirely possible, if not outright likely, that 2026 will be a full-on blue tsunami, one that surpasses the 2018 wave and sees Democrats win in places where they haven’t won in a generation. Here are the top ten most likely candidates to win the Democratic presidential nomination in this new world.

(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.

• Rep. Jasmine Crockett: After an exciting and illuminating year of having Crockett in the top ten of these lists, it is now officially time to lay her 2028 ambitions to rest. From her start as a favorite of online 2024 election deniers to her meteoric rise to become a genuine political celebrity, we went on a truly incredible journey with her—one that, in one shining moment, seemed set to end with her gliding to a coveted Senate nomination and taking center stage as one of the leading characters of the 2026 midterms. Alas, it was not to be. After running a thoroughly inept campaign that played right into every negative impression of her as a politician and a person, she completely squandered her early lead and lost by a decisive margin. Now, she is going to be unemployed by the start of next year, with no clear path back to political relevance in the immediate future. While there is still so much to learn from her and her career, her personal story is over. A run to go straight from the U.S. House to the White House—something that actually could have been quite credible had she never put her name up for Senate—would only look pathetic after this.

• Sen. Chris Van Hollen: After having edged his way to the very bottom of the Top 10 in February’s list, Van Hollen now stands outside of it once again, largely because of how things have improved for him on another, entirely different front. Along with everything else that has occurred since late February, the past few months have seen Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s standing within his caucus reach an all-time low, courtesy of the politicians Democratic voters have chosen. From safe-seat candidates like Julia Stratton to challengers for must-win seats like Graham Platner, hardly any of the people that Schumer is currently relying on to win his party a new majority actually want him to lead it come 2027. Between this, the fact that he’s committing himself to a superminority position on top issues, and his own uncertain political future in New York State, the odds that Schumer will be forced out of his position come 2027 are very high. This provides an obvious and far easier path for Van Hollen to take a position of national leadership if he wants it. While the Maryland Senator is far from guaranteed to come out on top in a battle to succeed Schumer, the possibility that he could do so is enough to take him out of true top-tier contention. I doubt that he’s particularly upset about it.

The Top 10

#10: Former Sec. Pete Buttigieg (New) (Derogatory) (Far lower than the consensus, and I have good reason for it)

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Everyone on the left had a personal low moment after the 2024 election. For me, it was when I seriously convinced myself that Angelina Jolie 2028 was something worth looking into and posted about it publicly. For you, it might have just been a simple crisis of faith that (hopefully) didn’t lead you to spiral nearly as much as I did. Regardless, it wasn’t a good time. After watching every major left-wing leader in America put everything on the line for a historically unpopular administration, their entire project appeared finished, stuck at the bottom of the ocean with Bidenism forever. But through a combination of luck, savvy, and a few shameless pivots, the Bernie wing of the party managed to re-establish itself as the official anti-establishment opposition in the span of only a few weeks after the race and has seen unprecedented success in the year+ since.

For whatever it is worth and regardless of whether or not it is truly earned, the American left currently enjoys a certain je ne sais quoi: that same intangible combination of credibility, reformist appeal, and outsidery-ness that has been the secret sauce of every modern game-changing campaign from Reagan to Obama to Trump. They are fresh while everyone else is tired, standing alone as the last remaining major faction of the System of 2016 that hasn’t already had its moment in the sun and squandered it. And to top it all off, they have an ace up their sleeve: their prospective candidate for the 2028 election. In a race otherwise defined by unexciting mediocrities with uncertain profiles, she is a bona fide star who stands as the clear successor of Bernie Sanders himself. In a field where attention will be the most valuable commodity of them all, she has proven herself capable of dominating entire news cycles with as little as a word. She even stood out among her ideological compatriots as a relatively respectable electoral performer even before she went through her recent rebrand that has put her substantially closer to public opinion.

Her name is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and there is no more divisive debate on the left than the question of if she should run for president at all.

The defining quality of this debate—the thing that makes it so deeply contentious and keeps it from ever ending—is that it’s maddeningly easy for both sides of it to come to very confident and entirely definitive answers. One can easily use the facts listed above to say that her running is an absolute no-brainer, just as they can also put together a similarly towering list of facts that make the very idea of running her seem insane. She is both the politician of the future and the face of a dead political era. She is both an international celebrity and a regional figure who struggles to create positive press. Bernie Sanders himself has all but declared her to be his heir, but she has so far been incapable of replicating the most important parts of his appeal. Even the electoral breakthroughs by her allies that have made the left at large more credible than ever have only made her personal approach look more dubious. Every pro you can name has a closely related con that negates it, and vice versa. What we are left with is the political equivalent of a choose-your-own-adventure book, where any and all conclusions one might come to are available to you depending on what you want to see.

Yet there is one clear answer here. All we have to do is to find it. So, if you’ll join me, I’d like to invite you on a journey. With open minds, we will treat this question with the seriousness that it deserves, examining every aspect of both the cases for and against an AOC run. What do we make of her celebrity? Is her fame enough to preclude us from considering anyone else? How indecisive is she, actually, and what does this trait say about her as a potential candidate and president? And above all else, what is the actual state of the left heading into the next election? Is it weak enough to make an AOC run a luxury it cannot afford, or is it strong enough that it can seriously consider backing someone even more hardline than she is?

Question #1: Can She Win the Primary?

Before we get into the specifics about AOC and her qualities as a prospective candidate, we must first establish one thing: whether or not she is actually a viable contender for the 2028 nomination at all. This is something that I’ve seen nearly everyone engaged in this debate take for granted, regardless of what their actual side may be. Both her proponents and her opponents on the left assume that she will be a top-tier contender for the nomination capable of easily competing at a high level, only really disagreeing on whether or not her doing so would be a good or bad thing. Yet there is one major problem with this assumption: her actual strength in actual polling.

To state the obvious: this isn’t good. While there certainly are instances in presidential history where a candidate came from humble beginnings to take the White House, such cases aren’t exactly common, especially so when the candidate in question was already well known heading into the race. As stated before, AOC is already one of the most famous people in the world; it’s utterly impossible for her issue to just be one of name recognition. It’s also not one of mistaken identity, either. Democratic voters absolutely adore AOC, giving her higher net favorability ratings than even Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom in some polls. They are just very reluctant to say that they think that she should be the party’s nominee. Such a poisonously mixed verdict, if truly cemented, could render her bid completely dead on arrival: a mile away from real viability but with no room to improve.

So, where do things truly stand for Representative Ocasio-Cortez? Is she stuck in a political no man’s land, popular enough to preclude any other left campaign from getting off the ground but not trusted enough to truly contend? It’s a tough question, but there is an answer—and it starts with a look at the career of LeBron James.

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Throughout all of its struggles and disappointments over the course of the Trump era, one thing about the modern Democratic Party has remained constant: its electoral model. That model has been President Barack Obama: the most recent president to win two back-to-back terms, the most recent president to leave office with a positive approval ratings, and one of only a small handful of national political figures to enjoy positive personal favorability ratings today. It’s not all that bad of a state of affairs for the reactionary center of the Democratic Party, which can very plausibly claim Obama to be on their side. But they have still gone looking for more, towards a clearer, even more validating example of how the party can only win by following their playbook. They’ve been working at crafting a new story, and they’ve decided that they’ve found their man.

His name is William Jefferson Clinton: 42nd President of the United States and the first Democrat after FDR to successfully win two terms. As they see it, he presents the only responsible path forward for the Democratic Party.

Their story isn’t quite as unwieldy as you might expect. When they lay out their electoral history of the 21st century, the neo-Clintonians will freely admit that, yes, a Clinton indeed did lose in 2016, just as Democrats have indeed won the presidency three times with strategies vastly different from the old best practices of the DLC. But they will also just as quickly cite such elections as exceptions that prove the rule: narrow victories against weak candidates during times of world-historical crisis. Bill Clinton, by contrast, is said to have turned water into wine, serving two full terms as a Democrat in a strongly conservative era. By establishing himself as and winning as a moderate, he showed himself to be the only modern Democrat with a real path for winning.

There is, of course, a standard set of rebuttals to this claim. If you’re on the left, you’re probably thinking of them right now. They are the time-honored and true points that the bulk of Clinton’s actual policies ranged from bad to downright awful, to such an extent that much of the blame for Donald Trump’s eventual rise lies at his feet. These arguments have their place, but they don’t really address the main question: Bill Clinton’s alleged success at defeating Republicans. As such, they have become increasingly insufficient in the current moment, when anxieties about the Trumpist threat to democracy have become so high that liberals have become willing to accept any kind of victory, however hollow, as long as it staves off that all-consuming threat for at least some time.

In this light, I will critique the Clintonite legacy along a set of lines that it should have been criticized on long, long ago. I will address its record at achieving the one and only thing it ever truly promised the American left: that it would keep the ever-odious GOP away from power and do so more effectively than any alternative could hope for. While the widely-accepted mythology says that Clinton was resoundingly successful at doing so, the true history of Clinton-era presidential elections shows that the exact opposite was the case. Far from a generationally talented force who singularly kept the Democratic Party in power during tough times, Bill Clinton was an outright electoral anchor: an awful man whose dedication to poll-chasing turned what should have been a landslide 1996 into a mixed verdict and was set to make 2000 into a generational triumph for the Republican Party before one brave man’s decision to break from him averted disaster.

The story I will tell you is not one that you will hear from any centrist, rightist, or even leftist history of the politics of the late 1990s. It includes a cast of characters that you have likely never seen before: a locked-in Al Gore, a terrifyingly popular George W. Bush, and even a genuinely savvy Bob Dole. It is one that revolves around a President Clinton whose political failures were just as vast as his policy failures: a mad king whose delusional White House was only saved from complete humiliation by the tireless, thankless efforts of an underling who he resented and undermined. It is the story of the creation of one of the most gargantuan Big Lies in modern American political history: one that nearly did lead Democrats to disaster in 2008, actually did lead them to oblivion in 2016, and stands to send them hurtling off a cliff once again in the 2020s.

It is a truly revisionist piece of history, and it starts with what might be the most audacious claim I have ever made while writing this newsletter: that the 1996 presidential election was not only an interesting race, but a truly disastrous result for Democrats that very nearly led to the demise of American liberalism, all thanks to Bill Clinton.

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It never even really began.

Donald Trump has never been a popular politician. This is not to say that he is not well-liked by some, which he is, or that he doesn’t have unique political skills, which he does. It is to simply recognize an objective fact: that among all of the voters living in the country that he has twice led, more people have disliked Donald Trump than those who have liked him for nearly every single day of his 11-year-long political career. This was true throughout his entire first campaign, his entire first presidency, and the entire span of his first post-presidency. Even at the height of the post-election “vibe shift” period, when the entire world was prostating itself at his feet, even his most favorable aggregators were only able to give him a one-point net positive favorability rating for a grand total of four nonconsecutive weeks. That was what his entire honeymoon amounted to. Since then, his standing has fallen, fallen, and fallen some more, all the way down until now, where he’s once again despised by a solid majority of the public.

What should one make of such a politician? They should avoid overthinking it. The correct conclusion about the biggest question in modern politics has always been the single most obvious one: that President Donald Trump—the idiotic, corrupt, and elderly President Donald Trump—is a bad politician. That there is nothing more to him than meets the eye, and that a clearly inept blowhard is about as popular as clearly inept blowhards usually are. That his two victories only came about as a result of his opponents being dumb enough to insist on running their own inept hacks, and that he has no political room to breathe when he lacks such easy foils. Everyone—and I mean everyone—knows this, very much including the right-wing commentators who have spent years propping up his mythology. We know that they know this because they screamed it at the top of their lungs every time that they felt like they had an inch of room to do so. Not only did they say this when he first ran, but they did so as recently as 2023, when they were all desperate for Ron DeSantis to be the nominee in his stead.

They shouldn’t have changed their minds. Their opponents shouldn’t have changed their minds either, even after they lost. There was never any point in anyone ever lying to themselves. Far from any sort of generation-defining realignment period with Trump at its head, the past decade of American politics has always been best understood as an extremely high stakes game of chicken, where both major parties have attempted to leverage the unpopularity of their opponents to force their own highly risky comfort characters into the White House. Both Republicans and Democrats spent the past decade skirting right on the edge of viability, hoping against hope that voters would find their opponent to be so odious that would leave them with no choice but to go with their side. In the long run, the real risk was not that one would lose while attempting this gambit, but that they would actually win and become completely locked in to a fundamentally flawed way of doing things while their opponents regrouped. Now, thanks to Trump’s helpful insistence that the 2020 election was stolen, the party that is stuck in a state of fatally arrested development is the GOP, while it is the Democrats who have been dragged kicking and screaming into imagining a kind of politics that doesn’t revolve around blackmailing the public into electing their favorite elderly crook.

It is along these lines that the great unraveling of the supposed right-wing populist coalition of the future has occurred over the past year. As the clock ticks down to the midterms, things have become very, very, very dire for Republicans—significantly worse than how things looked not all that long ago. As recently as last fall, one could still look at the 2026 midterms in light of the reasons they had for hope: the unpopularity of their opponents, their resilience among electorally important demographics, and the longstanding structural advantages that have bailed them out countless times before. Since the start of the Iran War, this is no longer the case. Unlike past elections where things simply looked “bad” for Republicans, we have now entered truly uncharted territory. There are no more silver linings. There are no more moral victories. There are no more little games left to be played.

There is no floor.

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

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Ever since Donald Trump won the 2024 election, I have refrained from engaging with any of the rampant speculation about the supposed fight for the future of the MAGA movement. To me, simply saying that it had already been sewn up has been the only defensible take. For all of the hype about MAGA’s oh-so-interesting factional splits, the party’s primary voters had been staunchly loyal to Trump during each of three runs and have remained solidly behind his latest Vice President ever since the big man himself was constitutionally barred from consideration. Not only has JD Vance never trailed in a single 2028 primary poll conducted since his selection as Trump’s running mate in July 2024, but his numbers have hardly ever wavered. Even today, after months of everyone from online gamblers to the D.C. press corps to the president himself swooning over Marco Rubio, JD is still holding on to the same ~45% primary vote share he has enjoyed in the polls since January of last year. For now and for the forseeable future, it remains true that if he wants the nomination, he is going to get the nomination.

So, why am I writing about the 2028 Republican primary now? If conservatives are still as slavishly loyal as ever to the people in power, what’s changed by so much as to finally allow for some legitimate intrigue? The answer is practically everything. While Trump 2.0 has been ailing politically for well over a year now, the President’s recent pivot to unabashed warmongering has introduced genuinely unprecedented levels of political risk to the MAGA project. Even before the effects of an imminent energy crisis have truly kicked in, the unpopularity of just the very concept of his Iran War has already been enough to drive his disapproval rating to near all-time highs. The door has been opened for a genuine blue tsunami in 2026—one so vast that just the prospect of it has already been enough to make even the most ambitious Republican presidential aspirants rethink what a nomination in 2028 might mean for them.

Want proof? Read the news. Citing his “recent private conversations” and other statements from “people close to Vance,” the Washington Post recently worked on the Vice President’s behalf to put out his first feelers for punting on 2028. While the official justification is that he and Usha are simply waiting to see how another baby this summer will affect their lives, the tell is in the rest of the article, which goes into painstaking detail about how he has oh-so-reasonable reservations about the war but is also oh-so-reasonably loyal to his president. In other words: while Vance is still trying to find a way to square the circle, our ideological Houdini is now well and truly afraid that he may have finally run out of tricks. Even though it may have been fine for him to change everything from his views to his last name on a dime when he was a no-name pundit, he now has far too many eyes on him to credibly flip-flop once again, and he knows it. Now, as he struggles to square his now-established “realist” brand with Trump’s full conversion to Markism-Levinism, he is putting it out as a serious possibility that he might do the wise thing by bowing out with some dignity intact and letting some other chump be the face of this administration when the reckoning comes.

It is in this possibility that we get the first intrigue of any kind about Republican presidential politics since 2016. While the Republican field is still far too narrow for me to do anything resembling the top ten lists that I have been regularly making for the Democratic field, there is still enough variance to make a solid top five. So, who are the top five most well-positioned Republican politicians to take—or be made to take—the nomination in 2028? Is Vance still in the pole position even in the face of his own doubts and a MAGA movement that’s completely moved away from him ideologically? Will Marco Rubio—now being cast by the media as the official Republican Savior for the third presidential election of his career—finally be able to live up to all of those decades of hype? And if it’s neither of those two, who else remains in the wreckage of what was once the right-wing populist coalition to take their place?

(Dis)honorable Mentions

Tucker Carlson (and the Slopulist Right)

Before we get on with this list, I want to use this section to establish something very important about the Republican Party. When most pundits—especially pundits on the left—write about a potential split within the GOP that casts Vance out, they’re thinking about it in one way and only way only: the loser stooge JD being rejected as a Jew-loving faux-populist by a rabid Groyperized MAGA base. It is in accordance with this narrative that nearly any and all rightists to criticize Trump from a “populist” perspective over the past year have received wall-to-wall coverage and intense discussion about their future as a presidential contender. While I may have specifically mentioned Tucker Carlson in the headline for this section, he’s really just a stand-in for a large cast of politicians and public figures to receive this treatment over the past year, from Majorie Taylor Greene to Steve Bannon to Thomas Massie. All of these politicians have been talked up as 2028 dark horses at one point or the other, with potential futures as populist heroes returning from exile to restore the MAGA movement and do to Trump what Trump did to the old GOP.

Well, I’ll spare you the suspense: it’s not going to happen. When Vance hints at sitting out 2028, it’s not because he’s afraid that someone like Tucker will swoop in and destroy him for not being anti-war enough. It’s because he knows that he himself has been too anti-war to run a dignified campaign as the standard-bearer for this Republican Party. The White House is indeed right about one thing they’ve been saying a lot over the past few weeks: that there is no actual “realist” faction within the actually existing MAGA movement. Not only do upwards of 90% of self-identified MAGA Republicans currently support the war, but a full 100% of them currently approve of Trump’s job in office. The political angle that Tucker and co. are going for—that of a far-right MAGA loyalist who disapproves of Trump from his right—isn’t just a weak one. It’s one that has literally no constituency within the GOP as it actually exists.

Sen. Lindsey Graham

With everything said about the woes of the populist right, I will grant them one thing: they haven’t had absolutely zero impact on the course of history. While they may have completely failed at finding any meaningful constituencies, building any institutions, or establishing any degree of independence at all from Trump’s whims, they were undeniably successful at two things: sucking up to Trump personally and taking up media space. This has had a real impact on their hawkish opponents, if only by forcing them into the political shadows for an extended period of time. As the slopulists were allowed to run free and write the public definitions of their out-of-power movement, their war-hungry opponents were left in a state of arrested development, deprived of a new generation of politicians and pundits willing to carry the banner for their side.

As such, the future of our once-again-openly-hawkish GOP is thoroughly defined by political throwbacks. Because there are no proudly neocon versions of Tucker, MTG, or even Josh Hawley, the rising Republican stars for 2028 are essentially the same as the rising Republican stars of 2016. The only question left to be asked about these political resurrections is where the line will be drawn, and it is there that we find Lindsey Graham. While I did give South Carolina’s senior senator some real consideration for the top five of this list—anyone high enough to serve as Trump’s co-president deserves nothing less—it’s just too hard for me to find a serious path for him to put him in it. The only world where Graham will ever have a chance will be one where the field where all the top contenders are out, which will definitionally be one where the GOP has been totally devastated in 2026. There, the right will be fully preoccupied with trying to explain its losses, and it’s very hard to imagine any of them looking at Lindsey—elderly, always-so-factional Lindsey—as someone with the qualities that they previously lacked. Even if they remain completely loyal to his vision of MAGAism, they’re still going to want someone special—someone who they believe can rally the “silent majority” of 2024 without making any real sacrifices.

In short: they’re going to want a myth.

The Top Five

#5: Erika Kirk

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If there was one thing that the post-2020 MAGA movement could always be said to have, it was a clear sense of identity. When the administration officially took power in January 2025, everyone from its most committed supporters to its most bitter detractors could give you roughly the same summary of what it was and what it planned to do. Here was a rested and revitalized right-wing populist movement: one with the will, experience, and popular mandate to do the things it failed to do during its first stint in power. This time, they would finally cut back from costly and unpopular entanglements overseas, turn traditional Republican economic policy on its head, go through with those mass deportations, and make a real attempt at consolidating the working-class populist coalition that had brought them to power. What was once a Sonnenrad-shaped glimmer in Pat Buchanan’s eye now seemed to be actually happening.

It may never be possible to precisely pinpoint when this identity started slipping away. Perhaps the easiest answer is July 4th, 2025, when Trump signed his One Big Beautiful Bill and once again reduced his domestic legacy to the exact same set of Paul Ryan-authored tax breaks. Maybe it was November 4th of that same year, when Democratic candidates across the nation shattered his tenuous multiracial coalition while dramatically outperforming polling. I’ve always found a fun dark horse answer to be April 1st, when a surprisingly strong victory by the liberal candidate in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election humiliated then-DOGE chief Elon Musk and set the stage for his eventual departure. In any case, the administration had been reduced to something smaller, less interesting, less popular and simply different from what it was supposed to be by the end of the year. If it didn’t pivot in one direction or the other, it stood to be defined as little more than the third of three straight failed administrations led by an inept old man and his cabal of out-of-touch swamp creature advisors.

It wouldn’t take all that long into 2026 before we learned what their new direction would be: war. The first move came in the early hours of January 3rd in Caracas, where the U.S. military killed 80 people while illegally abducting Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro and his wife in an intervention that Trump explicitly said was done to access the country’s oil. The next flashpoint came only a few days later, when the administration’s occupation of Minneapolis claimed its first American life with the killing of Renée Good. The following weeks were then dominated by the administration’s inexplicable choice to bring back and put teeth to one of its most bizarre and wildly unpopular foreign policy proposals: that Greenland should be annexed by the United States. It was enough to make even the most cautious and measured world leaders publicly declare that whatever remained of the post-war order was officially dead, and it was all still completely dwarfed by the full-scale war against Iran that the administration launched at the end of the next month.

Why do this? Why do any of this? How was it even possible? Not only have Americans been deeply skeptical of anything even resembling foreign intervention for decades, but this very administration came to power in large part due to its promises to end foreign wars. The polling and politics have been predictably horrific from the start, with even light-touch, zero-casualty interventions still being met with widespread public disapproval. Yet Trump 2.0 has been completely unfazed by each successive political failure, only upping the ante every time they betray their promises, tank in the polls, and watch once-steadfast allies turn away. A quick look at any official government social media account gives one the impression that they are nothing less than overjoyed to do all this despite the massive administration-destroying risks involved, to the point that they see it as little more than a big opportunity for more memes about video games.

To understand how this complete 180-degree turn has happened so seamlessly, we need to set aside everything else we know about American politics. The fundamental things that you might expect any administration to consider when launching a foreign war are irrelevant here. To this White House, all that matters is social media. Their online supporters are their entire world, simultaneously serving as their audience, cheerleaders, and braintrust. They live and die by the reactions they get from them, and the nature of the online right guarantees that they will always receive it. This is because the online right is not at all sophisticated, principled, esoteric, or any of the other adjectives it has liberally applied to itself. It is something else—nothing less than the precise thing it has spent more than a decade relentlessly mocking, day in and day out, until they couldn’t notice that they had come to define it.

The online right is soy. Deeply, truly, unfixably soy, soy all the way down to the bone marrow. It has become exactly what it once described as a fundamental civilizational threat: a very powerful group of overly-emotional, overly-excited, unthinking rule-following children. I bring this up not just because it is ironic, but because it is incredibly politically important—one of the single most important reasons why this White House is as chaotic and uncontrolled as it is. And to fully understand such people, one must go far back, all the way to the first things that made them so utterly obsessed with the concept of effeminacy that they were completely unable to recognize it when it came to define them.

This is not a story that one tells about a serious country. It’s just one that needs to be told about ours. So, without further ado, here’s the most important political story about the online right that you’ve never heard: how tired memes and decades-old insecurities combined to create one of the most potent feedback loops for overseas bloodshed in modern history.

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Just under a month ago, however, I broke a little bit from this rule. In the middle of my analysis of Rep. Ro Khanna’s 2028 chances, I offhandedly mentioned that I was an expecting father to explain why how I had come to see the trends I had seen on mom TikTok. Given that this was the first time I had mentioned this, it would have been entirely reasonable to assume that this meant that my fiancée and I had just learned the news that we were expecting and that our baby was due sometime this summer, if not later.

That wasn’t exactly the case.

To make a very long story short: I’m a father! Our baby boy was born happy and healthy earlier this week, and we’ve been spending the past few days getting in the routine for caring for him while settling him in to his new home. As for what this will mean for this newsletter going forward: hopefully not all that much! While this week’s article will obviously face a delay given the whole thing with the birth and all, I’m lucky to have a robust support system and (so far) very calm baby that should allow me to get back to my regular schedule in the near future. If nothing else, I’ll definitely be taking the advice from my own father to put out a few quick lists of old articles that are particularly timely. Depending on things go, you could even see me start doing some regular podcast episodes. Still, there’s certianly no shortage of topics to discuss as things stand, so you might see a few new articles in your inbox sometime soon.

For now, though, I only have one thing left to say: thank you. Yes, you, the person reading this article right now. I hold and will always hold eternal gratitude towards every single person who has made this newsletter possible, whether you’re free, paid, or just a lurker. None of this would have been possible without your support, and I’ll work for as long as I can to make sure that I live up to the trust you’ve all placed in me. I could never, ever ask for a greater group of supporters, fans, and friends. If all of this is only the start, I’m very excited for what the future has in store.

Forever thankful,

Ettingermentum I, father of Ettingermentum II

This Tuesday, the 2026 election cycle officially began. In a series of surprisingly early primaries across a series of Southern states, American voters of both parties went through with the first stages of their verdict on the latest Trump administration by selecting their congressional nominees for his final midterm election. Of all of these contests, the stakes were by far the highest in the Texas Democratic senate primary, where a historically large electorate of liberal voters was asked to choose their standard bearer in what stands to be one of the single most important contests of the entire year. Up for their consideration were two distinct visions for a new post-2024 liberalism: State Representative James Talarico’s shapeshifting liberal populism on one hand, and U.S. House Representative Jasmine Crockett’s firebrand partisanship on the other.

Just the fact that this was even a race at all was a story in and of itself. Despite beginning the new administration as a second-term House backbencher, Jasmine Crockett had made modern political history by posting, insulting, and demagoguing herself into becoming a national liberal icon over the course of less than one year. By the end of 2025, she decided to cash in on her fame entering a Senate contest that she was already leading before even launching a campaign. At that moment in late November, she looked like nothing less than the future of the Democratic Party: the spearhead of a new kind of nihilistic anti-politics centered around little more than anti-conservative hate.

Jasmine Crockett succeeded in tapping into something real. When the results were finally tallied in her first-ever statewide race, she had won more than one million votes and carried three of Texas’s four largest cities. Yet she did not succeed in assembling enough support to actually win the nomination. Despite an early advantage in everything from polling to name recognition to endorsements, Crockett choked. She bled support across all three months of her short campaign until what was once a runoff-proof lead turned into a solid six point loss. For as much as liberals might have liked or even loved her personally, they were ultimately unwilling to meaningfully trust her with an actually important job once they actually got to see her in action.

If the soon-to-be-former Representative can take comfort in anything, it’s that what just occurred won’t be remembered as an all-time collapse. Crockett was never a Cuomo; just the fact that she made it to the position she once was at all was a major accomplishment with far-reaching implications. But none of this changes the fact that she isn’t the nominee, will be out of office by the end of the year, and failed so thoroughly at even finding a message for her bid that it now casts a shadow on all other Democrats with similar profiles heading into 2028. Here’s what both her rise and her fall can teach us about the ever-evolving nature of post-2024 American liberalism.

#1: Woke 1.0 is Dead.

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“America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in our way”

— Benjamin Netanyahu, 2001

“We see what we want to believe.”
— Robert McNamara, 2003

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

In the early hours of February 28th, 2026, a fringe foreign policy project several decades in the making finally reached its logical, bloody conclusion. With hardly any justification, pretense, or any other kind of attempt at public persuasion, the United States and Israel launched a full-on regime change operation against Iran that succeeded in assassinating the country’s 37-year Supreme Leader and plunging the entire region into a near-unprecedented state of chaos. Nobody knows how the war is going to end. Not even our loudmouth dipshit of a president is willing to even say how long it will last. Yet just the fact that it is even happening at all provides us with one certainty: that Israel, less than three years removed from the abject humiliation of October 7th, is in the strongest military position that it has ever been in.

Yes, it’s true. That endless faucet of American dollars and weaponry has done the trick. At the same time that it has conducted its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Israel had successfully tied up a great number of foreign policy loose ends in the years since 10/7. With the notable exception of the Houthis in Yemen, the once-vaunted Axis of Resistance was reduced to Iran and Iran alone with shocking speed, thus obliterating the few obstacles that kept the Zionist state from acting with complete and total impunity in the decades prior. After that point, an intervention of this scale was only a matter of “when,” not “if,” especially with this administration in the White House. It might not have occurred the precise way that Netnayahu planned it, but he has gotten what he has wanted for more than 40 years.

It’s a watershed moment. And in a great moment of historical irony, it took place less than 24 hours after another defining historical moment involving the same exact country, the same exact plans, and the same exact long-term relationship. But instead of bombs, drones, and the charred ruins of elementary schools, this first one in the form of a sample size of 1000 American voters.

As the Zionists and their allies have used post-10/7 elite sympathy to realize their wildest geopolitical fantasies, the foundation of public American support that their entire project has always rested on has completely shattered. Far from the rare source of bipartisan consensus that it is supposed to be, pro-Israel politics and pro-Israel policy have instead become the political equivalent of a termite infestation. They’ve divided otherwise rock-solid bases of support and branded entire presidencies as out-of-touch and corrupt, so far undermining the popularity of two seperate administrations of two seperate parties since the start of the genocide in Gaza. For aspiring American politicians—especially those who are a part of the currently-ascendant Democratic Party—the once-mainstream stance towards Israel is completely politically unviable, no more so than among the young voters of the future who sympathize with Palestinians by a staggering 30 points on margin.

As this shift and its consequences become ever-clearer and politically relevant in the coming years, you’re certain to hear commentators of all stripes talk about it as a completely unprecedented break from a continuous pro-Israel stance that America has held ever since the country’s founding. It’s a flashy, dramatic story that holds some grains of truth to it, but I don’t believe that it is the best way to understand the story of the American relationship with Israel. Far from an unbroken, 70+ year status quo, the modern era of AIPAC-driven Israel-first policy is itself a major historical aberration: a highly ideological product of a very specific set of circumstances that was only ever capable of sustaining itself in the shadows. If—when—America returns to a sane foreign policy and stops prioritizing Israeli interests over all else, it won’t be doing anything unprecedented or unheard of. It will be returning to an approach it took within living memory under the leadership of staunchly conservative Republican presidents—one that had been abandoned and still could have been abandoned had Israel itself not brought it back from the dead.

This is not the story that Israel and its allies wanted to happen. It is not a tale of the country’s so-called “America whisperer” manipulating a superpower’s politics to his own ends, successfully establishing his nation as a heroic figure in Western popular culture, and expertly navigating an era of ultrapolarization. It is instead the story of an arrogant egomaniac completely ruining a streak of generationally good luck through his sub-Hillary Clinton understanding of the American public. It is the story of countless pyrrhic victories, each of which put another crack in what should have been an unbreakable foundation of support. It is the story of a country and a lobby that has won countless battles, but is losing the war.

It is the story of how Israel lost the 21st century.

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