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Thirty years after first visiting Havana, an expert in US-Cuba relations reports on his latest visit.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump stumbled haplessly through a series of events at NATO on Wednesday. It was profoundly humiliating in countless ways, not just to him, but also to the United States. But there was one remarkable exchange in which a Danish reporter pressed the NATO secretary general about NATO’s relationship with Trump that captured something really essential about this moment. The reporter asked, How can you have any self-respect praising Trump after all he’s done to NATO and to our allies?The deeper question here is: What’s going to happen to NATO and America’s international alliances after all that Donald Trump has done to them? We’re talking about it all with Elizabeth Saunders, a foreign policy writer and thinker who’s really good on this sort of thing. Elizabeth, thanks for coming on.Elizabeth Saunders: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.Sargent: OK, so the headline news out of Trump’s visit to NATO was that he lashed out at everyone in sight. He said the ceasefire with Iran is over. He threatened more strikes. He erupted at Spain for failing to help with Iran, said our trade is finished with them. And he again threatened to steal Greenland outright. Elizabeth, what was your one simple big takeaway from everything that happened there?Saunders: Well, I think it was a classic Trump display of volatility. NATO is in survival mode. Its mission at these meetings is to not have anything major come out of them in terms of an American withdrawal, right? So I think if you think back to the Davos meetings in January, when Trump had already been engaged in a couple days of saber-rattling over Greenland, and even floated the idea of taking it through military force—and then Mark Carney came and delivered the “this is a rupture” speech, and then Trump did back down.That episode, reporting in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere has shown, it was really a—I wouldn’t say a wake-up call, I’d say it was a straw that broke the camel’s back, but it really made clear to the Europeans that this was a serious crisis, that America might be turning on its allies. And so from that point on, I think the strategy of flattery that many European countries had—I mean, it’s understandable why they thought they had to try—has really fallen by the wayside.All that said, it is still especially NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s job to try to hold the alliance together, move forward. And I think he in particular has stuck with the flattery strategy a lot longer than some of his other counterparts.Sargent: Yeah, it’s almost comical at this point. So speaking of that, here’s an exchange in which a reporter from Denmark, Rasmus Svaneborg, questioned NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. The reporter starts out by saying, Mark, you sit next to Trump while he says and does all these things to NATO and our allies. Listen.Rasmus Svaneborg (voiceover): Mark, you sit next to Donald Trump in moments where he talks about conquering Greenland, talks about lashing out at allies like Spain, starting trade wars—things that it doesn’t seem like the old Mark Rutte would approve of. Does this have any effect on your self-respect when you sit next to him like that and say nothing?Mark Rutte (voiceover): You know, what I always do is acknowledge when praise is due. And I think we should praise Donald Trump for the fact that NATO is so much stronger. Of course it has to do with the Russian threat, it has to do with the war in Ukraine. But it very much also has to do with President Trump delivering now what, since Eisenhower, the United States tried to achieve—equalizing spending between the U.S. and Europe.Sargent: So as you heard there, the reporter asked Mark Rutte, how can you sit there next to this guy while he talks about seizing territory by force, lashes out pathologically at allies, and unleashes wildly destructive and crazy trade wars? How can you do that while maintaining your self-respect? Elizabeth, there’s something about this moment that perfectly captures the essence of the situation. What did you think of it?Saunders: Well, your first instinct is to cheer the reporter and hope that Rutte says something like, you know, You’re right, I feel cheap and horrible when I do that, and I really think that Trump is an idiot or whatever. Very much like people were cheering for Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the U.K., to have a Love Actually moment where he told off the American president in a big televised speech, as Hugh Grant does in the movie Love Actually.I mean, again, I think the era of flattery is over. I think Rutte probably knows that. But in his defense, he is the one in charge of just NATO, not a country anymore. And so he may feel that there’s a reason why he wants to at least keep Trump from lashing out, right? That’s how you get the no-drama—is you flatter him enough that he doesn’t do anything rash. I do think it does seem increasingly ridiculous to see anybody acting that way, though. This is the president of the United States. His words really matter. And he again threatened Iranian civilian targets when he said he was going to bomb Iran tonight. I mean, he throws this language around so indiscriminately. And I don’t think we can forget that it’s not normal. It’s very abnormal.Sargent: On the exchange with the reporter, I just want to point out how, in an understated way, it was an extraordinary takedown of Donald Trump, because it treated him as this buffoonish, irrelevant, sidelined figure, and essentially said, at this point, the only thing that matters now is how the rest of us react to this lunatic. It’s all on us. It essentially says, no more enabling of this madman. The whole world sees how crazy and destructive he is. It’s time to stop.Saunders: The difficulty is, it isn’t just on the Europeans. Because the U.S. still has all the military power—or most of it, enough military power that it matters more than any other country. The Europeans and the Canadians are still dependent on it. And so you have this situation where Donald Trump is the single point of failure for the West. And it has some pretty serious threats facing it from Russia—I mean, I could go on, but the big one they were there to talk about was Russia, right? And instead of that, he’s not just, as in his first term, doing things to kind of undermine the foundations. He has actually lashed out at Iran in a way that weakens the entire region, and over which they have very little control over events, if any.So I don’t envy—there are many jobs I would not want to have in today’s world. University president, European head of state, right? That’s a tough one right now.Sargent: Let’s listen to what Trump said about Spain. Check this out.Donald Trump (voiceover): Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore, by the way. I’d like to cut her out. Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don’t participate, they don’t pay. I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please. Including visits. OK, we don’t want anything to do—watch them, watch them come running back. They’re open about it, they’re hostile about it. And let’s see how hostile they remain when they call up and they please, please, we want to trade with you, sir, we want to trade with you, sir. They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less.Sargent: He appears to be angry because Spain wasn’t willing to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But let’s just recap what happened there. Trump went to war without consulting allies, after spending the last year and a half shitting all over them. And then when his war went south—exactly as his own advisers and everyone else, including the allies, warned that it would—he suddenly runs back to our allies for help in cleaning up his mess. Elizabeth, can you talk about that big dynamic? How ridiculous it is?Saunders: Yeah. I think the other piece of it is that Spain refused to sign on to the defense spending pledge that Trump wanted and that Mark Rutte tried to kind of get everyone to pledge. And Spain is pretty far from Russia. It has some mountains in between it and the rest of continental Europe. It certainly has maritime—it’s of great maritime importance. But Spain is not going to be the backbone of NATO under any circumstances, right? And it doesn’t make sense for Spain to spend as much, or to spend the same way, right? Not every European country can build tanks.So he’s been angry about Spain not providing help that makes no sense, and then insulting Spain and Italy and—you know, Keir Starmer, who flattered him, as not very Churchillian and so forth—but then he really does need help from the NATO allies. So it’s a situation where, again, he’s not a very good negotiator. He doesn’t know how to take care of his friends and keep them happy so that they’re there when you need them.Sargent: Rutte has kind of praised Trump by saying he was right about getting European powers to chip in more for defense and all that. And just putting that aside, there’s no denying that Trump has essentially screwed over the alliance in all kinds of ways, is there? Saunders: And also screwed over America, right? It’s very helpful to have these allies. This is the part that Trump has never appreciated—that having allies who will not just share the burden, but allow you to use their bases, provide all kinds of logistical support without having to occupy them, that’s a huge advantage. It’s an advantage the Soviets didn’t have in the Cold War. It’s an advantage China doesn’t have today. It’s much better and strategically more valuable and easier for the U.S. to just be really close friends with Denmark and get what they need out of Greenland, rather than take over Greenland itself.So the U.S. role in the alliance is special. It has the most capabilities, especially the nuclear umbrella. But fundamentally, NATO boils down to trust. Trust that each country will in fact come to each other’s aid if attacked. And fundamentally, the most important country there has always been the U.S., and the credibility of the U.S. guarantee is the most important thing. Presidents have always sought to make that promise credible. And the way you make things credible is you say what you mean, and then you follow through, and you don’t change your mind overnight and start making demands and so forth. And so I think they have recognized that Trump is the single point of failure in this alliance, and they cannot allow—they need to build in some redundancies.It’s also just kind of another example of how this is screwing over America too. The dynamic of NATO has always been, we ask the allies to spend more and do more on their own. But the minute they start to do that, we get annoyed, because we also want to tell them what to do. And whatever one thinks of that, clearly we’re giving up whatever leverage we had over the NATO countries militarily. And that’s a loss for the U.S. You can’t deny it.Sargent: Yeah. Let’s just try to sum up the big picture here. So Donald Trump comes in. He’s supposed to be the hardheaded realist who does big things in the world. He knows how to manhandle Putin because he’s a tough guy like Putin. He recognizes that China’s a threat, and he’ll confront China because, unlike Biden, that softy—he’s a tough guy and all that. But then what you’ve basically actually got is Trump empowering Russia in all kinds of ways, Trump failing vis-à-vis China, doing things that actually empower China, and simultaneously throwing away all our allies who would essentially act as our allies in being a bulwark against those rising powers. Is that a fair summary of what’s going on?Saunders: Yeah, I think that sums it up. And for me, one of the most—it was both ridiculous and very poignant moments—was when a reporter asked Trump a question about his recent talk of, you know, the fear of communists, because he’s been calling some Democrats communists of late. And leaving aside the whole domestic angle of that, he then went on a long discussion about communism and the dangers of communism, and you can’t go back once you’ve gone communist, and you suffer and you suffer. And I’m thinking, as I’m listening to this, does he realize that he is in a room full of people dedicated to an organization that was founded to stop the spread of communism and Russian and Soviet aggression? And many of the countries that are now NATO members were behind the Iron Curtain for decades. And they sure do know what it’s like to live under communism.So I think what you say is right. And I think NATO is sort of hoping that it can limp along, maybe not to a point where—I think nobody really thinks it can go back to the way it was. But I think they hope that they can improve their own defenses to a point where they can make a deal with a much more rational president who will stick to what he says.Sargent: Yeah, and I think that that’s possible. I think a Democratic president could actually repair all this. Which brings me to this Wall Street Journal report—you referenced this earlier. The Journal reported on what our NATO allies are doing right now as they contemplate a world with a much less reliable America. As the Journal put it, these countries are engaged in “an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization.” Paul Krugman had a good line about this, where he said this reflects Europe’s realization that a country that elects Trump twice can’t ever be trusted again.What I take from this is, the world is moving on from us. Can you talk about this de-Americanization process? What does it entail, and what does it all really mean? Where does it go?Saunders: Well, there are various points on a spectrum of, quote-unquote, “de-Americanization,” right? And one would just be hedging, where you might not want to have American technology underpinning literally every facet of your defense and economy and so forth—not just because of Trump, but because of American tech companies, and being overly reliant on a single set of systems. Everybody knows that redundancy is good in this sort of situation. So there’s sort of hedging, insurance, reducing dependency. And then there’s rupture. And Carney’s speech in Davos talked about rupture. But I think even he would probably say it would still be better if NATO existed, right? And existed in a form that people didn’t question whether it was still going to exist in a year or two.So I think fundamentally we’re going to see more hedging from Europe. I don’t think that they will break away entirely, because their interests—if you step back, if you take a sort of 30,000-foot view of this, fundamentally Europe wants Ukraine to stay sovereign. The U.S. should want Ukraine to stay sovereign. There’s lots of common interests that still exist. And so I think you’ll see some hedging, but it’s not going to be as far as maybe a full de-Americanization. And part of that also is just the constraints of what Europe can do and how fast it can do it. It can’t make a tech industry overnight.Sargent: Yeah, it does seem like a Democratic president probably can repair things so that some form of an alliance that really matters in the world can continue. Do you think that’s possible?Saunders: I don’t think we’re ever going back to the way it was, because I think we had Biden and then we got Trump again. And I think Krugman’s point about this—you know, they voted for him twice. That is the thing that stops people in their tracks when they think about it that way. So I think there will be—even if you got a president from the sort of more, you know, suppose like, just throwing out a name, Nikki Haley, right? Someone who even worked for Trump, but who has clearly got a more internationalist outlook, would not ever want to go trashing NATO for the sake of trashing it. I think that’s someone the leaders at this meeting could work with, would want to work with. But they’re under no illusions anymore. And I think they will want to have redundancy. It’s just prudent, right? Diversification of portfolios—it’s what we’re all supposed to do with our money, right?So I don’t think they’re going to allow themselves to be in this position, to the extent their economies and capacity allow them to diversify. They have learned an important lesson. And I think America’s going to have to learn what it’s like to have a Europe with some autonomous capacity. As I said before, that traditionally has not been what we actually want when push comes to shove. We’d much rather tell them what to do.Sargent: Yeah. Well, I think that that reporter and that exchange really kind of nailed it. He basically said, in his own way, it’s time to move on. Elizabeth Saunders, really great to talk to you. Thanks for all that. It’s really great stuff.Saunders: Thank you so much.

After exchanging strikes with Tehran, and after two wild NATO days in Turkey, the president flew home. In Maine, Graham Platner bowed to massive pressure and suspended his Democratic Senate campaign.

The Graham Platner campaign has collapsed in spectacular fashion, with the upstart candidate suspending his run for Maine senator in a video he released Wednesday night. A woman Platner had dated accusing him of sexual assault effectively ended a candidacy that had a lot of warning signs, from his controversial Nazi tattoo to prior reports alleging mistreatment of women. I and many others were too enthusiastic about Platner’s potential. But while Democrats rightly abandoned Platner after the woman’s allegations emerged, they shouldn’t abandon what Platner represented: an attempt to find candidates and messages that appeal outside of the party’s core voting base. Such experimentation and innovation is vital, because as the 2016 and 2024 elections showed, there just aren’t enough stalwart Democratic voters to defeat MAGA on their own. The initial enthusiasm about Platner came from three parts of the Democratic Party coalition. Most importantly, Maine liberals crowded his events, excited by both his personal story and populist politics, and eventually overwhelmingly backed him in last month’s Senate primary. Outside of Maine, leftists such as journalist Ryan Grim and Senator Bernie Sanders got behind Platner as the man who could defeat the party establishment’s more centrist choice, Governor Janet Mills. There was a third group of people on the left and center-left, perhaps best exemplified by the hosts of Pod Save America, who perhaps thought that Platner could appeal to voters who don’t traditionally back Democrats and not only finally defeat Susan Collins but offer clues about how the party could win such voters across the country. I had a foot in both the second and third camps. The electoral aspect was an important part of the fanfare around Platner. The backlash to President Trump alone may be enough for the Democrats to win control of the House, Senate, and presidency over the next two elections. But even under that optimistic scenario, today’s radical, antidemocracy Republican Party would control about half the states, including almost the entire South, and have a strong chance of regaining power in Washington in 2030 and 2032. And the Republicans will be in a strong position as long as they keep winning the white (57 percent for Trump in 2024), male (57 percent), white noncollege (63 percent), and rural (69) votes nationally, particularly since many independent voters and younger people either keep backing the GOP or don’t vote at all. So a white male veteran gun owner running in a very rural swing state was destined to get outsize attention from Democrats. This electoral aspect of Platner’s candidacy is tricky—and a bit icky—to discuss. A party like the Democrats that does better with urban voters than rural voters, women compared to men, Black people compared to white people, and college graduates compared to non–college graduates isn’t doing anything morally wrong. In fact, considering the history of America, the party that is more popular with women and Black people is no doubt on the right side of most moral questions. But to win elections, it would help Democrats to woo more men, rural voters, white people without degrees, and white people overall, particularly since the Electoral College and the Senate give disproportionate power to the latter three groups. So while no one who backed Platner admitted this openly, it’s unlikely they would have as enthusiastically supported a Black or female candidate in Maine with no political experience, an incendiary tattoo, and crazy social media posts. Platner was benefiting from affirmative action for gruff-looking white men, with political elites supporting Platner in part on the theory that he could reach other men like himself. It was irritating to see Platner portrayed as a candidate for the working class, since his background was fairly privileged and the voters that he would ideally reach were much better described by their gender (male) and geography (rural) than their income or working conditions. But I was more annoyed by the coded conversation than the reality it masked: There are probably some voters in Maine and other states who will back a white man like Platner but not Democratic candidates of other demographics. I don’t love elevating gruff white guys as an electoral strategy. But it’s in some ways preferable to the Democratic establishment’s favorite tactic: constantly moving to the right to appeal to a mythical constituency of anti-Trump Republicans. Following the center-left playbook, Kamala Harris spent the latter part of her 2024 campaign abandoning populist economic policies, promising to ensure that America’s military remained the world’s “most lethal,” and touting her support for more Border Patrol officers. That approach not only moves the party in a worse direction on policy, but rarely wins over many non-Democratic voters. Many of the Democrats running in 2026 backed anti-immigrant measures last year, although they have shifted left as Trump has become more unpopular. There are two alternative approaches that hold promise. First, some Democrats rely on parts of their biography to woo voters who aren’t traditional liberals. Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock leans into his Christianity and pastoral role. For Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, it’s faith and a nerdy dad vibe. Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, and New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill all won swing House districts and then statewide office by emphasizing their service in national security jobs. Second, a growing number of Democrats, such as Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, are running as anti-system, anti-corruption figures. They emphasize their opposition not to Republicans but to big corporations.The virtue of these two approaches is that they don’t require Democratic candidates to be Republican-lite on policy as Harris was on some issues in 2024. And the anti-corruption message allows candidates to tap into the anti-Washington, anti-institution sentiment that pervades the country. In 2024, Harris was constantly highlighting how much support she had from Republican politicians like Liz Cheney. But being well liked by fellow politicians, even from the other party, isn’t that useful in appealing to voters who hate everyone in Washington. Two of the most surprising victors in the post-Obama political era, Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both won over swing voters and inspired people to vote who often sit out elections by running against the establishments in both parties. Platner was using both of these approaches. He was bashing elites in Washington and calling for limits on corporate and billionaire spending in politics, like other populist candidates across the country. At the same time, his candidacy was very much about his own unique biography: small-town veteran and oysterman who had never previously run for office. Would this have worked in November? As my colleague Greg Sargent wrote before the sexual assault report, Platner was far behind Collins among voters without college degrees. Perhaps his message and bio weren’t selling. Alternatively, all of the swirl around his past made voters wary, no matter what he said on the campaign trail. We’ll never know how a general election between Collins and an untainted Platner would have gone. And we don’t know how El-Sayed, Ossoff, or others running on the anti-corruption, anti-system agenda will do this November. But we do know how the 2016 and 2024 elections went. The Democrats, for the presidency and key congressional races, ran traditional candidates with centrist policy platforms—and they lost. That doesn’t mean Democrats will automatically win if they run pastors, oyster farmers, or anti-corruption warriors. What those elections tell us is that there isn’t yet a clear formula for beating the MAGA right. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer shouldn’t be so confident he knows which candidates are best. Nor should Morris Katz, the strategist who helped steer Mamdani to victory but also helped create the debacle that was Platner’s campaign. Platner wasn’t the right candidate. But neither were Hillary Clinton or Harris. The Democratic Party shouldn’t only look for white men with unusual jobs to run for office. But it should look for candidates who get voters to give Democrats a second look—even if those candidates are white men with unusual jobs.

On Wednesday, I discussed how the White House Domestic Policy Council’s “Saving America’s Story” report makes a number of false claims about what’s missing from the National Museum of American History. Today, I want to discuss what the report finds objectionable that’s actually there—starting with the person who oversees it all. Surprisingly little of the report, which was released July 4, finds fault with what a visitor will encounter when visiting NMAH today. A huge chunk of it is devoted to the character assassination of Anthea Hartig, the museum’s director since 2019. The word “Hartig” appears 229 times, compared to 81 mentions for “visitor,” 73 mentions for “United States,“ 61 mentions for “National Museum of American History,” 49 mentions for “founder,” 49 mentions for “president,” 38 mentions for “race,” 31 mentions for “Congress,” 18 mentions for “ideology,” seven mentions for “bias,” five mentions for “ethnic,” and six mentions for “patriotism.” Firing Hartig is clearly Job One for this report. The Domestic Policy Council condemns Hartig for everything from identifying her pronouns as “she/her/hers” to saying she would like to “problematize” the semiquincentennial. As Philip Kennicott notes in an excellent essay about all this for The Washington Post, “Problematizing is the essence of historical thinking.”I can’t defend Hartig’s public comments against 229 petty complaints because that won’t leave time for anything else, and anyway it’s a distraction from the topic at hand, which is her museum. So let’s stick to the report’s criticisms of how NMAH presents the materials on display in what the museum world, annoyingly, calls “didactics,” meaning those posters and cards that explain what you’re looking at. My method here is to search the document for the word “didactic.” There are 160 of these, so obviously I can’t field all these, either. But to give you some flavor, here are the first four.“A didactic in NMAH’s American Democracy exhibit entitled ‘Abraham Lincoln in the Classroom’ … provides no information about the accomplishments of the two great American heroes it cites—Lincoln and Washington—noting only that both were presidents and that Americans have used images of them in an attempt to ‘instill patriotic values and reinforce the idea of a shared national heritage.’”I did not see this particular didactic when I visited the museum earlier this week. But it would appear its subject is not the life of America’s beloved Railsplitter but rather how Lincoln is, you know, taught in the classroom. If the Domestic Policy Council is trying to suggest that biographical information about Lincoln is hard to find at the NMAH, let me assure you it is not. For example, a permanent exhibit titled “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War” contains a large section about the Civil War and, inevitably, much discussion of Abraham Lincoln. If anything, the didactics here tilt rightward. Here’s one:Lincoln hoped that the nation could be reunited without rancor, but he found himself at odds with Republicans in Congress. They wanted to punish the South for seceding and wanted Southern states to guarantee the freedom and rights of African Americans.Lincoln’s assassination, and the ineffectual leadership of his successor, Andrew Johnson, enabled the Congress to control Reconstruction. They divided the South into military districts, withholding statehood from some former Confederate states until 1870s.This approximates the pro-South narrative still taught when I attended high school in the 1970s, all about Northern carpetbaggers, Northern scalawags, wild-eyed Radical Republicans, and ex-slaves unready for citizenship rights in dear old Dixie. I know that the Domestic Policy Council is aware of the Reconstruction revisionist Eric Foner, who called bullshit on all this in 1988, because he’s quoted favorably elsewhere in the report. (It’s probably heard, too, of W.E.B. Du Bois, who made a similar case in his 1935 text Black Reconstruction.) But peddling a Gone With the Wind story about Reconstruction’s tragic overreach is never going to raise any hackles in the Trump White House.“One didactic about the Broadway musical Hamilton in ‘Entertainment Nation’ simply called Alexander Hamilton an ‘influential and flawed founding father’ likely, in part, because he may have owned slaves.” Any child who’s seen Hamilton knows that the man’s most conspicuous character flaw was not that he “may have owned slaves” (he also may not have; the historical record on this point is inconclusive, and I don’t think the matter comes up in Hamilton at all). Rather, it is that Hamilton had an extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds that, when made public, destroyed his chance of becoming president. In the age of Trump, is it now “woke” to look askance at a politician who cheats on his wife?In the “Many Voices, One Nation” exhibit, according to the report, a didactic presents ours as “a fundamentally oppressive nation” in saying European settlement was “a profound unsettling of the American continent” because its “population actually declined … as Old World diseases swept through Native populations that lacked immunity.” For starters, during the period described here our nation couldn’t have been “oppressive” because it didn’t yet exist. To say that European settlement spread disease “through Native populations that lacked immunity,” and that the North American population therefore declined, is merely true. To describe all this as “a profound unsettling” is offensive only to those who question the value of human life.In the same exhibit, the following sentence appears in a didactic: “In creating the new nation, early leaders envisioned a country that promised opportunity and freedom—but only for some.” This, the report states, is a “slander of America.”A slander by definition is untrue. Where’s the untrue part in that sentence? Early leaders granted the vote only to white male property owners. Women were excluded. Blacks were excluded, and anyway most of them were slaves, and slavery is the precise opposite of freedom.As I stated Wednesday, even when judged by the standards of the form, the White House’s anti-woke polemic is a shoddy piece of workmanship not unlike the peeling blue sealant in the $15 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool. No honest conservative could argue otherwise. I wonder whether that matters. I hope it does.

A new report from Data for Progress spells good news for Democrats—particularly those running on a message of economic populism. DFP surveyed 447 swing voters between May 15 and June 21 and found that they favor Democrats over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot by a 12-point margin, though the plurality of swing voters (46 percent) are unsure which party they prefer.What were the top issues that would move swing voters to vote for a Democrat? Raising taxes on the wealthy, instituting Medicare for All, and banning artificial intelligence from using personal data to set wages or prices. Economic issues like these have been embraced by progressive candidates, such as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Randy Villegas in California, and Sam Forstag in Montana. Villegas and Forstag both won their House primaries against opponents who ran to the center, and El-Sayed’s Senate primary against an establishment centrist will be held on August 4.“I think the big takeaway from this report is that swing voters who could decide the midterms are not asking Democrats to sound more like Republicans,” said Ryan O’Donnell, DFP’s executive director.DFP ran a similar survey in 2024. At that time, swing voters tended to be younger and more racially diverse. Today, DFP found that there aren’t significant demographic differences between swing voters and other likely voters. Despite the change in demographics, economic issues have consistently remained a top priority for swing voters. “Even though the electorate’s changed, the fact that their focus on economic populism has stayed so consistent is something to consider,” O’Donnell said.Other findings in the report support that notion. DFP asked respondents what issues they consider most when deciding which candidates to vote for. The top three issues were “economy, jobs, and the cost of living,” which 38 percent of respondents selected; “programs like Social Security and Medicare,” which 17 percent selected; and “health care,” which came in at 6 percent. So-called culture-war issues ranked far lower: Only around 3 percent of respondents selected “LGBTQ+ issues” as their top priority, and around 1 percent selected “race relations and racism.” Notably, “immigration” was the third-highest issue in 2024 but has fallen to twelfth in this year’s survey.Swing voters also shared what they find most concerning about the Democratic Party, and the results echo what many progressive members of the party have been saying for years: 32 percent of respondents said that “leadership is too old and out of touch,” and another 32 percent said that the party is “not doing enough to lower costs.”Some economic populists have rejected the Democratic Party brand and are running instead as independents, like Senate candidate Dan Osborn in Nebraska. “He’s doing a great job at pushing that message in Nebraska,” O’Donnell said. “Swing voters in general largely reject partisan and ideological labels, so it reflects that, as well.”Overall, the poll helps dispel the popular wisdom that running a conservative, centrist campaign is the best way to get the support of those in the middle. “If I were a Democratic leader reading this, I would say that these results indicate that taking a more conservative stance is not the way to win over the voters you need to win,” he said.

Troy Jackson, Shenna Bellows, and Nirav Shah all bring different qualities to a showdown with Susan Collins. The post Maine’s Three Likely Replacements for Graham Platner appeared first on The American Prospect.

Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Jon Husted, R-Ohio, Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, and Andy Kim, D-N.J., are backing the bill.

The vice president is focusing on domestic priorities while President Donald Trump and the military take point on the conflict.