This Surprising Senate Race Could Ruin Democrats’ Plans

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Inside Washington

The challenge Peggy Flanagan will face in Minnesota

If Democrats want any shot at taking back the Senate, they need to win the seat in Minnesota being vacated by retiring Democrat Tina Smith. Normally, this wouldn’t be a tough task: The party hasn’t had to worry about a Minnesota Senate seat in nearly 20 years. But a unique set of political crises in the state and a pro-choice Republican candidate could change that.

The progressive Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan won the Democratic primary on Tuesday night, edging out centrist Representative Angie Craig. Flanagan, endorsed by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, will now face Republican Michele Tafoya, a former sports broadcaster who beat out a crowded field. In her victory speech, Flanagan started tying Tafoya to President Donald Trump’s unpopular agenda, which will likely be one of her main messages during the race. “Donald Trump has cost our state far too much already. And we are not about to give Donald Trump another loyal soldier like Michele Tafoya to take his orders and do his bidding,” Flanagan said. The DFL issued a statement emphasizing a high-profile Tafoya gaffe from March, when the Republican said that Americans need to “be patriots” about gas price spikes due to the Iran war—and that if they find their budgets stretched, they should “take one less trip to Starbucks.”

But despite that inauspicious start, Tafoya this week showed why she is likely the best shot Minnesota Republicans have had to take a Senate seat in decades. As outlets called the race in her favor, Tafoya sketched out a moderate campaign focused on the fraud scandal that has plagued Governor Tim Walz’s administration: “This isn’t about red versus blue. It’s common sense versus crazy. We will not reelect politicians who let criminals steal billions and treat accountability as optional. We deserve better, and it’s time we demand better,” Tafoya said in a statement after her win.

“Republicans are very happy to run against [Flanagan] because they think she owns the fraud issue,” said Steven Schier, a professor of political science at Carleton College. Fraud in state social safety net programs has been a major issue in Minnesota since 2020, and Trump’s administration has elevated reports of fraud to denigrate Somali-Americans and paint the state’s Democratic leadership as inept and corrupt. The main instance of fraud involved a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, which stole $250 million worth of federal nutrition funds during the pandemic. There are a number of other social safety net fraud cases working their way through the courts. While the leader at the center of the Feeding Our Future case, Aimee Bock, is white, the Trump administration has highlighted the Somali-American backgrounds of others charged, often calling the Minnesota fraud allegations “Somali fraud” and using the story to boost anti-immigrant and anti-Somali sentiment.

By emphasizing Flanagan’s role as Walz’s lieutenant governor while these scandals transpired, Tafoya could appeal to frustrated suburban voters and independents. “There are two groups in the state that determine the direction of state elections: the group of political independents and the suburbs,” Schier said. “We know from anecdotal evidence that suburbanites are very upset with their money disappearing through fraud.”

Tafoya is also well positioned to win over suburban and independent voters because of her views on abortion. Tafoya has described herself as “pro-choice” multiple times, though she sought to align herself more with pro-life conservatives during the primary election. This pro-choice statement could end up being extremely helpful among suburban women voters.

“College educated suburban women are perhaps arguably the most important voting bloc there is in Minnesota,” said David Schultz, a professor of political science at Hamline University. He pointed to a town called Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis in Hennepin County. Around 20 years ago, Edina was solidly red, but has since become blue. “Tafoya needs to win in places like Edina,” Schultz said. The centrist women in those kinds of suburbs are deeply concerned by “family security issues,” he explained: school safety and quality, cost of living, and healthcare. “If [Tafoya] can talk partly about that and come across as at least a moderately pro-choice candidate,” he added, “that helps her a lot.”

The suburban ring counties around Hennepin and Ramsey will be crucial to watch, said Schier. Those counties—Washington, Dakota, Scott, Carver, Wright, Sherburn, and Anoka—have tended to be solidly Democratic, but could flip to Tafoya.

The last Republican to win a Senate seat in Minnesota was Norm Coleman, who served from 2003 to 2009 and was narrowly defeated by Al Franken in 2008. Coleman’s path to victory was unique. He served as mayor of St. Paul for eight years, which helped him pick up urban voters that would ordinarily lean Democratic. Experts also pointed to Arne Carlson as a useful example of a statewide Republican victory in Minnesota. Carlson served as governor from 1991 to 1999 and was both pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ rights. In 1994, the Republican Party denied him an endorsement over his pro-choice views, but he still won the primary and general elections in landslides.

While Tafoya seeks out suburban women, Flanagan will need to distance herself from the fraud scandal. One way she will do that will be shifting attention from state governance to federal issues, like Trump’s unpopularity and the ICE incursion into Minnesota earlier this year, dubbed Operation Metro Surge.

She’ll also lean on what state Democratic leaders and experts say was a successful primary. Schultz pointed to her success outside of the Twin Cities, where Flanagan outperformed Craig in areas where Democratic voters tend closer to the center. “She emerges out of this a stronger candidate than I think most people were thinking,” Schultz said. Flanagan also has a turnout advantage: The Democratic primary turnout was double that of the Republican turnout on Tuesday.

Polling so far puts Flanagan ahead. She was up seven points against Tafoya in a late May Impact Research poll. A June survey of 800 likely voters had a generic Democratic candidate up eight points against a generic Republican, with nine percent undecided. The Cook Political Report rates the race as “Likely Democratic.” Despite that, the race is still competitive, and could strain national Democratic resources in a cycle where the Senate map is tough for Democrats. “Even if Tafoya can’t win, the fact that the Democrats now have to defend a seat and worry about it—one that they normally don’t have to worry about—is a problem for them,” Shultz said.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Democrat Nate Willems, running for Iowa attorney general, is putting a populist spin on the traditional tough-on-crime talk for A.G. candidates. If elected, he announced this week, he’ll create a new enforcement unit to recoup cash from wage theft, which he said in an interview to the Iowa Capital Dispatch amounts to “ten times the amount of all other types of theft in the state of Iowa combined.” The unit will offer workers a “direct line” for reporting violations, and have a special focus on “chronic offenders.”

Buried beneath Wisconsin primary and consumer price index headlines on Wednesday, The New York Times published a disturbing report about Ecuadorean fishermen being attacked and killed in drone strikes, with their lawyer saying the drones were “deployed from a vessel manned by ‘gringos’ with American-flag patches.” Despite the Trump administration boasting of similar strikes on boats in the past, both the Pentagon and U.S. Coast Guard have disclaimed these attacks. The Times also points to flight data showing “that a maritime patrol plane—based out of a military base in El Salvador—flew in the direction of all three boats in the days before they were attacked. The pilots onboard spoke English with American accents, according to air traffic control communication recordings.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

In a brief for the Roosevelt Institute, Michael Madowitz outlines policies that could “reduce price volatility and maintain global stability” in the face of supply chain shocks like the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz. “Advanced economies need not import inflation when crises occur due to geopolitical conflict,” he writes. “We are once again seeing a real-time example of the case for strategic reserves, buffer stocks, and spare production capacity for even abundant commodities.”

The Center for American Progress publishes a new report by Michael Sozan and Ben Olinsky on Trump’s efforts to meddle in upcoming elections. They detail 15 specific tactics, including “installing election deniers in key government positions,” “gutting key agencies and essential election security programs,” “sharply curtailing voting by mail,” preparing to “purge” voters by “weaponizing federal databases and demanding personal voter information,” and more.

The Center for Biological Diversity celebrated California’s announcement of a rapid phaseout of the pesticide paraquat earlier this week. Vermont became the first state to ban paraquat in May. “California and other states are taking aggressive steps to protect people from this dangerous poison, but the EPA continues to spin a web of red tape to obscure paraquat’s well-documented harms,” said Nathan Donley, the organization’s environmental health science director. You can read TNR’s coverage of paraquat research, as well as state efforts to shield pesticide firms from cancer lawsuits, here and here.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.

Does anyone really think ICE can be trusted with those gloves?

Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted unpack the hype around the agency’s new “humane” shock gloves, which Edie notes aren’t supposed to be used on “pregnant women, children, the elderly, or people with severe disabilities—in other words, people that ICE has demonstrated no qualms about detaining.”

Political Trivia Question of the Day

With David Crowley now officially nominated to seek the Wisconsin governor’s mansion: How many Black governors have there been in U.S. history, and can you name three? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

You’re reading The TNR Blue Book. Get daily scoops, strategy, and developments inside the liberal ideas factory delivered right to your inbox. Sign up for free.

Inside Washington

Could Jon Husted be Sherrod Brown’s ideal opponent?

We’re taking a look outside of Washington during Congress’s recess, highlighting some of the top battleground House and Senate races. Today, we’re focused on Ohio, where former Senator Sherrod Brown is fighting to represent the state once again in the U.S. Senate.

Brown, who served three Senate terms before losing to Republican Bernie Moreno in 2024, is running against Jon Husted, whom the governor appointed to fill the state’s other Senate seat—the one JD Vance vacated when he was elected vice president that year. Since taking the seat last year, Husted has consistently voted for President Donald Trump’s agenda, repeatedly voting against resolutions that sought to curb the war in Iran.

Husted previously served as Ohio’s lieutenant governor and, before that, Ohio’s secretary of state. Despite this history, “not that many people know who he is in Ohio, to be honest,” said David Cohen, professor of political science at the University of Akron. “Jon Husted is a bit of a mystery to a lot of people.” What they do know about him tends to be negative, Cohen added, citing his “lockstep” votes for Trump’s agenda, contributions from Epstein associate and billionaire Les Wexner (the Husted campaign has pledged to donate them), and his testimony in a corruption case involving the utility company FirstEnergy. Husted testified in March for the defense in the FirstEnergy case, which Cohen called “Ohio’s biggest political scandal in history.” The central allegation of the ongoing case is that FirstEnergy funneled some $60 million to various state GOP politicians to pass a bill favorable to its interests. Husted has not been accused of wrongdoing in the case. His testimony involved a dinner between the then–governor elect and FirstEnergy executives. Before the scandal was public, Husted’s 2017 campaign for governor received support in the form of dark money contributions from FirstEnergy.

Brown’s campaign has emphasized Husted’s role in the FirstEnergy trial, his past campaign contributions from Wexner, and his support for building data centers in Ohio. “It’s a no-lose issue for Democrats,” Cohen explained. “Data centers are universally hated by people on the left and on the right and in the middle.”

Husted’s adherence to Trump’s agenda could be the biggest gift of all for Brown’s campaign. The war in Iran and subsequent cost of living increases are deeply unpopular among voters, and could be enough of a motivator for Democrats to turn out for Brown and independents to push him over the edge. The unpopularity of Trump and his agenda has created “an opportunity that we haven’t seen really for 20 years since 2006, when the Bush administration was struggling so badly in the wake of Katrina and other things,” Cohen said. “I think it’s possible not only [for] Sherrod Brown, but you may see a clean sweep of the statewide Democratic candidates this year.”

Husted and other Ohio Republicans also risk being damaged by the scandal around Representative Max Miller, who is accused of abusing his daughter and ex-wife (who is the daughter of Ohio’s senior senator, Moreno). Miller, who represents Ohio’s 7th congressional district, has persisted with his reelection campaign, despite the allegations. Voters’ distaste for Miller could boost his Democratic challenger Brian Poindexter, as well as Brown, particularly if some Republican voters simply stay home. Husted avoided commenting on Miller’s candidacy until late last week, when he called on Miller to step aside.

But despite the favorable environment, Brown still faces a tight race. Ohio has become redder over the past decade. Trump won the state in all three of his presidential elections. Republicans control all statewide offices, both chambers of the state’s legislature, and the majority of the state’s House delegation. The Cook Political Report rates the race as a toss-up, and polls from June are split, with one showing Husted up three points, another showing Brown up three points, and a third with Brown up four points.

Brown lost to Moreno in 2024 by just 3.6 percentage points. In that race, Brown lost eight counties that he won in 2018: Ashtabula, Erie, Lake, Mahoning, Ottawa, Portage, Trumbull, and Wood. All eyes will be on those northern counties this November. In 2024, Brown was plagued by negative ads that attacked him for his support for transgender people. He also struggled to maintain distance from Kamala Harris, who was running at the top of the ticket. Ultimately, Brown received 120,000 more votes than Harris did in 2024, outperforming her by over seven percentage points.

Experts expect Brown to handily win the state’s blue urban areas. But he’ll need to shrink Husted’s margins in the red suburban and rural parts of the state, too. Suburban areas, home to about half of the state’s population, tend to have lots of independent voters, who Cohen says “are just kind of ripe for capture by Sherrod Brown and by Democrats in general” in 2026. The task isn’t necessarily to win these counties outright, but rather to siphon enough votes away from Husted in these crucial districts to carry the state as a whole.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong may have gotten most of the Democratic gubernatorial headlines this week, but in the Southwest, two other party hopefuls are making unusual pitches to the public as well. In Texas, a central component of gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa’s message, writes the Houston Chronicle’s Jeremy Wallace, is that she’s the only thing standing between America and a near-permanent GOP majority in Congress via gerrymandering and new census counts. (Wallace breaks down the numbers.) In Arizona on Tuesday, Governor Katie Hobbs announced the running mate pick that she’s been teasing for over a week, naming former Republican Mesa Mayor John Giles to her ticket. Giles, an independent now, split with his party in 2021 over a nondiscrimination ordinance intended to protect LGBTQ+ residents and endorsed Kamala Harris for president in 2024. He is also, the Arizona Capitol Times notes, “a member of the typically conservative Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a religious affiliation he shares with Hobbs’ opponent, Congressman Andy Biggs.”

Is a new, underwater front opening in the data center wars? Maine Public profiles a new proposal to build a “submerged” data center in Passamaquoddy Bay. The idea was famously tested in Microsoft’s Project Natick off the coast of Scotland in a pilot program that hasn’t been active in years; Maine Public notes that “earlier this year, another submerged data center was reportedly deployed in China.” Residents of Eastport, Maine, who worry about damage to the local economy, particularly if the data center heat drives out the lobsters, are having none of it. “Speakers from across the political spectrum lambasted the idea” at a recent gathering, Maine Public reports. One of the more memorable quotes, from Eastport City Manager Brian Schuth: “I have said it’s the equivalent of an idea scrawled on a bar napkin.” Of note: Both chambers of Maine’s state legislature passed a temporary moratorium on data centers larger than 20 megawatts this past spring—a measure spearheaded by state Democrats—only for Democratic Governor Janet Mills to veto. The measure would not have affected Passamaquoddy Bay, though, as the application by developer DeepGreen Western Passage would not meet this threshold.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Resources for the Future publishes a new working paper from Yanjun “Penny” Liao, Hannah Druckenmiller, and Margaret A. Walls on the urgent topic of how weather extremes are affecting the federal crop insurance program, or FCIP. Unsurprisingly, they write, “farmers respond to adverse weather and yield shocks by increasing insurance participation: a 10 percent yield decline increases insured acreage by approximately 4.9 percent for corn and 3.4 percent for soybeans.” That means that “climate-driven enrollment growth alone is estimated to raise program costs by 4–9 percent for corn and soybeans by midcentury.” On the bright side, they also find that “FCIP enrollment substantially mitigates the adverse effects of extreme heat on rural labor markets and generates positive spillovers to nontradable sectors, such as retail, hospitality, and health care.”

Illinois’s new law allowing Uber drivers to unionize, David Madland writes at the Center for American Progress, joins similar policies in Massachusetts, California, and Minnesota in showing the strengths of so-called sectoral bargaining for a “difficult-to-organize, ‘fissured’ industry with a dispersed workforce, such as rideshare.” This isn’t a fringe issue, Madland notes in a new article: “Around 1 million workers would gain union coverage if the approximately 70,000 rideshare drivers in Massachusetts, 800,000 in California, and 100,000 in Illinois can reach collective bargaining agreements with rideshare companies. That would mark a major shift for workers and unions, reversing approximately 20 years of gradual decline in private sector bargaining coverage.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week: What Happened to Liberal Democracy? by Daron Acemoglu

THE GIST: Acemoglu, a Nobel Prize–winning economist and NYT bestselling author of Why Nations Fail, argues that liberal democracy’s existential crisis stems from structural problems more than cultural ones—and that saving it requires a turn to what he terms “working-class liberalism.”

PRAISE: Thomas Piketty says the book offers a blueprint “for rebuilding Roosevelt-like ‘working-class liberalism,’” while Joel Mokyr, last year’s Nobel laureate in economics, says it’s “essential reading for anyone concerned about politics, power and populism in the twenty-first century.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: What Happened to Liberal Democracy? isn’t just a work of political philosophy—though there are plenty of references to Rousseau and Rawls in its pages. In a sweeping chapter on automation and the rise of the postindustrial society, Acemoglu argues that the U.S. tax code has long incentivized corporations to shed jobs via outsourcing. And he writes incisively about the role of technology and the increasingly insidious role played by artificial intelligence and social media in everyday life.

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: As the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election draw nearer, the question of how to rebuild from the wreckage of the second Trump administration has only grown more urgent. While Acemoglu takes a global view of liberalism, he offers insight into the questions U.S. Democrats are asking right now—about what went wrong and where we can go from here.

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day

As the South Carolina GOP Senate primary heads to a runoff: The Palmetto State last elected a Democrat to the Senate back in 1998. Who was that Democrat? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

You’re reading The TNR Blue Book. Get daily scoops, strategy, and developments inside the liberal ideas factory delivered right to your inbox. Sign up for free. 

Inside Washington

The big question in Iowa’s Senate race

Is Iowa still a swing state? That’s what Democrats are testing in the increasingly red state’s races for governor, U.S. Senate, and four House seats this fall. Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for a vital U.S. Senate seat, is hoping to prove that a Democrat can still win in Iowa. But he faces an uphill battle.

Turek, a Paralympic gold medalist basketball player who has served in the state legislature since 2023, is facing Ashley Hinson, a former TV journalist and current member of the House of Representatives, a role she’s held since 2021. The two are vying to replace retiring GOP Senator Joni Ernst. 

Both Turek and Hinson list affordability and agricultural policy high up on their policy platforms. Turek wants to raise the minimum wage, set term limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, and address cancer-causing water pollution—a serious problem in Iowa that has been linked to agricultural runoff. Hinson’s platform includes limiting regulations for family farms, moving federal agencies out of D.C. and into the states, and cutting government waste. Both candidates want to see Congress pass a farm bill, and Turek says he wants it to include anti-monopoly provisions and a “right to repair.”

In the last decade, Iowa’s status as a swing state has become increasingly debatable. The state has elected Republican governors since 2010, and both Senate seats have been held by Republicans since 2015, when Ernst was elected to serve alongside long-serving Senator Chuck Grassley.

President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 by over 9 percent, a massive 15-point rightward swing from the 2012 election. He then won Iowa by 8 percent in 2020, and by over 13 points in 2024.

Turek hopes his “prairie populist” vibe, which has won him elections before, will help him flip the Senate seat. In the state legislature, he represents the 20th district, which includes his hometown of Council Bluffs. He won the seat by just six votes in 2022 and 561 votes in 2024—even though Trump won the broader Pottawattamie County, which includes the 20th district, by 17 percent in 2020 and 20 percent in 2024. 

“When I went door to door, crawling up stairs and dragging my wheelchair behind me, the first question people always asked was ‘how in the world did you get up here?’ I would tell them ‘I crawled up here, because that’s how important your vote is to me. I think more than anything, people want their representatives to be willing to listen and fight for them, not for the billionaires and the large corporations,” Turek said in a written statement to The New Republic.

Turek will need independent voters this November. According to a new Emerson College Polling/Nexstar Media survey, independent voters break for Turek by an 11-point margin. But he still trails Hinson in the poll, with support from 45 percent of respondents to her 48 percent. Six percent of respondents remained undecided.

Some political analysts think Turek’s ability to appeal to independents and conservatives still won’t be enough. “If a Republican is disaffected this year, they’re a heck of a lot more likely to not show up or to skip over various offices on the ballot than they are to vote for a Democrat,” said Charlie Cook, founder of the Cook Political Report, in a speech at Des Moines’s Drake University in late July. “We’ll have to wait and see whether the Iowa Senate flips, but I’d give it probably a one in four chance.”

The Cook Political Report rates the Senate race as “leans Republican,” and Cook himself said that he believes Iowa hasn’t been a swing state “for a long time.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The Ohio Capital Journal has published a trio of pieces reviewing candidates’ data center positions in three key races: gubernatorial (Democrat Amy Acton versus Republican Vivek Ramaswamy), Senate (Sherrod Brown versus Jon Husted), and the 9th congressional district (Marcy Kaptur versus Derek Merrin). Ohio passed tax breaks for data centers in 2017, and now ranks sixth in the nation for current and planned data centers. All three races are believed to be a dead heat, although there’s very little public polling on the 9th. While data center backlash transcends partisan divides, the pieces show that, across the board, Democratic candidates in Ohio seem to be adopting a more aggressive regulatory position. 

One of the water utilities recently targeted in suspected Iranian cyberattacks on the U.S. water supply, The Washington Post notes, was in western Arkansas—one of three states that sued the Environmental Protection Agency under Joe Biden to prevent it from instituting a requirement to harden water systems against cyberattacks. “Had the EPA rule been in place, some experts say, the Arkansas utility or others like it might have been spared,” write Ellen Nakashima and Amy B. Wang

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

The Open Markets Institute’s Center for Media and Digital Governance director, Courtney Radsch, condemns last week’s Federal Communications Commission vote to scrap a rule that limited TV media consolidation. “This decision effectively places FCC Chair Brendan Carr in open defiance of Congress, and it gives us yet again another reason to call for removing him from his post,” said Radsch in a statement.

Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert calls last week’s Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general a “stain on the record of Senators who voted to confirm him.”

After yet another company announced a settlement agreement with Trump’s Interior Department last week to abandon its offshore wind leases, the Natural Resources Defense Council notes that this brings the tally of such settlements up to “nearly $4 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds.” In a statement published on the organization’s website, NRDC policy analyst Pasha Feinberg said that “American consumers are paying twice, once with their tax dollars and the second time with higher utility bills.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Four Questions For: Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center

Interview by Monica Potts

Q: Who are you, and what are you working on right now?

A: I am the president of the Food Research & Action Center, where I’ve spent 27 years working to end poverty-related hunger in America. Before stepping into this role, I spent many years leading our child nutrition work. Right now, we are focused on restoring, protecting, and strengthening the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program after Congress made unprecedented cuts to the program in July 2025. Since then, five million people have lost access to SNAP.

Q: What is the most difficult thing about your line of work?

A: Helping policymakers feel the urgency of ending hunger can be one of the hardest parts of this work. Children only get one childhood, and there are no do-overs. Growing up in a food-insecure household, as one in five children do, can have a lasting impact on how they grow, learn, and thrive. Hunger is solvable. It just requires political will.

Q: What was your biggest success in the last year or two?

A: We have made significant progress on Healthy School Meals for All. More schools are offering school breakfast and lunch to all their students at no cost, regardless of household income. That’s a win for kids who have the nutrition they need to thrive in school, families who can count on school meals to help ease pressure on their household budgets, and schools who have students who are well nourished and ready to learn. 

Q: What keeps you going in these stressful times?

A: What motivates me is knowing that hunger isn’t inevitable; it’s a policy choice. We know what works. We have the tools to solve it. And that is what we focus on every day at FRAC. I also draw strength from the commitment and passion of my colleagues, who bring that same sense of purpose to the work.

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

A Democratic Wisconsin senator from the 1960s and ’70s was the creator of Earth Day. Who was he? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.) 

Editor’s Note: Welcome to The TNR Blue Book. It’s our new daily newsletter that covers Congress and much more, but with a distinctly TNR twist: Our focus will be strictly on Democrats, liberal and progressive groups, and the fight to take back power and save democracy. Every morning, you’ll get a rundown of late-breaking news, what Democrats on Capitol Hill are thinking, quick hits on what you need to know nationally, the latest on what’s coming out of the think tanks and activist groups, short interviews with progressive newsmakers and authors, and more (including some humor and political trivia!). There’s nothing else out there like it.

Inside Washington

Protecting workers from AI is easier said than done

House Democrats trying to address artificial intelligence–related job loss have a problem: No one’s really sure what the economic upheaval from AI is going to look like.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made headlines last year when he predicted that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. Verizon CEO Dan Schulman predicted 20 percent to 30 percent unemployment within the next two to five years. A coalition of 200 AI-industry professionals and economists (including 16 Nobel laureates) released a statement titled “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” which calls for stakeholders to prepare for the economic impacts of more powerful AI.

On Thursday, Representatives Greg Casar, Valerie Foushee, and Sara Jacobs unveiled the latest installment in a host of Democratic and bipartisan bills seeking to address concerns about AI. Their proposal: the AI Tax and Work Protection Act, a plan to tax AI companies and build a new Work Protection Administration to create AI-proof jobs.

“While workers get pushed out, some of the world’s biggest corporations are raking in record profits off of AI systems trained on human work, without ensuring workers share in those gains. So Congress needs to act right now,” said Jacobs.

Legislative proposals around AI so far have mostly focused on data centers and safety regulation—although no bills on this front have been passed. Some legislators are also trying to get more information about how AI is already affecting workers. Senators Jim Banks, a Republican, and John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, are collaborating on a bill that would add questions to federal job surveys about how AI is used in the workplace and which roles are most impacted by AI. That bill, the AI Workforce Projections, Research and Evaluations to Promote AI Readiness and Employment, or AI Workforce PREPARE Act, was introduced in December. The new bill from House members also spells out a plan for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to collect more data about AI and the economy.

The current lack of information around how AI is impacting workers is a major concern for researchers. “I think it is fair to say that nobody really knows exactly what’s going to happen with regard to related job loss, and we have no good measures of it,” said Thomas Davenport, a professor of information technology and management at Babson College.

But some experts are skeptical of predictions like 50 percent of white-collar jobs disappearing. “I think there’s a lot of uncertainty, of course, about AI, and potential for job loss has been dominated by the opinions of people in industry,” said Morgan Frank, an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. “That means that certain narratives can run wild without the empirics to back it up. And so I can understand why the public is worried and wants to see legislators respond, and therefore legislators are responding.”

Lawmakers say they’re acting on concerns they’ve been hearing from their constituents. “It’s what people want, and so these AI PACs can try to spend huge amounts of money to try to shut people up, but I think that Democrats should pick where the voters are, what the voters want, over what big money interests want,” said Casar, addressing the role that AI-industry money has been playing in elections. Leading the Future, a PAC supported by major tech figures like Greg Brockman, the co-founder of OpenAI, and Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir, has been spending heavily to elect pro-AI candidates. The PAC’s policy wing, Build American AI, has endorsed 43 House members so far.

Addressing the fact that data about AI-related job loss is sparse, legislators on the call said that the bill is designed to be flexible and responsive to a changing economy. They pointed to its shifting tax rate: The rate rises when unemployment rates rise. If AI usage increases dramatically, more tokens are spent, so the token tax revenue rises too. “This bill has this kind of framework that plans for an uncertain future,” Casar said. “We should have a plan in place so that if unemployment does go up, we’re prepared, rather than just dealing with the crisis once AI billionaires are becoming trillionaires and many people are put out of work.”

Revenue from the taxes would be invested in projects like building housing, training caregivers, increasing access to elder- and childcare, and modernizing infrastructure. The grants would be disbursed from the Work Protection Administration to states, cities, tribes, localities, nonprofits, unions, and educational institutions, the bill says.

The bill “recognizes that creating this full-employment economy, ensuring that we still have a full-employment economy, is not a matter of dreaming up make-work jobs. It is a matter of elevating and expanding the desperately needed jobs that are undersupplied today and will be undersupplied tomorrow,” said Gene Sperling, the director of the National Economic Council and assistant to the president for economic policy under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Sperling worked with the lawmakers to draft the legislation.

Casar said that he’s hopeful the bill will complement other recent legislative proposals, like an AI safety bill from Representatives Jay Obernolte and Lori Trahan, and another bill from Representatives Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran. “This is not a symbolic proposal. This is a proposal that we have been vetting with the relevant committees, and we hope it’s written in a way that it is intended to be put in place as soon as possible,” Casar said. “So this is not a messaging bill. This is what we want Democrats rallying around.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Sarah Trone Garriott responds to trans panic with Scripture

Democrat Sarah Trone Garriott, the Lutheran minister and state senator running against Republican Zach Nunn in an attempt to flip Iowa’s 3rd congressional district, has released her first general election campaign ad, and the second word she utters in it is “Scripture.” In the 30-second video heavily emphasizing her faith, Trone Garriott says that “in Scripture, it’s taught to be quick to listen and slow to speak. Well, Congress could stand to hear a verse or two.” The ad continues to say that “people are hurting and Washington isn’t helping,” and that’s why “it’s time to pass term limits, require town halls, and ban politicians from trading stocks.”

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy profile of Trone Garriott (with charts!), noting that she’s part of a wave of progressive Christian Democrats, including fellow Iowans Lindsay James (IA-2) and Rob Sand (governor’s race), aiming to “win back religious voters.” As both the Journal’s Christopher Kuo and the Des Moines Register’s Marissa Payne note, however, Trone Garriott is also responding to Republican attacks “seeking,” in Payne’s words, “to undermine her religious credibility, painting her progressive politics and positions on LGBTQ issues as incompatible with her faith.”

This is putting it mildly. “She voted to let boys into girls’ sports and girls’ locker rooms,” Nunn campaign manager Brendan Duffy said earlier this week. “She voted against protecting kids from sex change surgeries. She put her name on a bill to start sex ed in kindergarten.” As Payne has previously reported, Republican social media accounts have also called Trone Garriott a “so-called” or “fake” minister. The battle lines for the general election, in other words, are becoming clear. The Nunn campaign will portray Trone Garriott as a sexual radical who threatens children’s safety. There hasn’t been any public polling in this race since the primaries. The Cook Political Report calls it a “toss-up.”

Elsewhere:

• The Nevada Independent publishes a rundown of differences between incumbent Republican Joe Lombardo and Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford, who are competing in November’s gubernatorial election. Some highlights: Ford favors “requiring data centers to provide their own power,” increasing the state’s per-capita K-12 spending, limiting “the number of homes a corporation can purchase,” and enshrining a right to an abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, while Lombardo’s campaign “did not give a direct yes or no answer” on of any of these, Tabitha Mueller reports; they are unsurprisingly split on repealing the state’s “right-to-work” law—as well as requiring a photo ID to vote, and other issues.
• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports that 96 million gallons of untreated wastewater were leaked into Lake Michigan last week following a storm. That’s actually on the smaller end of what’s known as a “combined sewer overflow,” a deliberate release of water intended to prevent basement backups. But it’s not a great situation given the increasingly severe weather driven by the climate crisis. The paper’s Caitlin Looby notes that updates to the system are being “fast tracked.” You can read more about those efforts here.

—Heather Souvaine Horn  

The Ideas Factory

For the Commonwealth Fund, Maanasa Kona, Sabrina Corlette, and Zeynep Celik pen a report on “where current state medical debt laws fall short and how states can fill gaps and build on their recent reforms.” Specifically, they find “many hospital financial assistance requirements exclude underinsured patients, immigrants, and people just above narrow income thresholds.” Also, they write, the application processes are too complicated.

Earlier this week, Groundwork Collaborative president and CEO Lindsay Owens strongly condemned surveillance pricing while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. “Surveillance pricing isn’t just unfair. It erodes transparency and predictability and makes it harder for families to budget, let alone comparison shop,” Owens said, before listing both historical and hypothetical examples. “Imagine you’re the parent of a sick child. It’s midnight. You ask Walmart’s AI shopping assistant, Sparky, to suggest a thermometer and some Tylenol. Sparky knows that your purchase is urgent, potentially leveraging that vulnerability to overcharge you.”

While moderate Democrats such as Chuck Schumer, Gretchen Whitmer, and even Haley Stevens have pointedly endorsed progressive Abdul El-Sayed following his win in the Michigan primary earlier this week, centrist and moderate groups are making their displeasure known. Two notable examples: centrist group Third Way, which announced a $15 million “war” against the left in The New York Times on Thursday, and centrist think tank Progressive Policy Institute, whose president, Will Marshall, issued a statement saying El-Sayed’s “narrower-than-expected victory … highlights the risks posed by left-wing ideologues to the party’s midterm election prospects” and will “compound the party’s already difficult challenge of winning back the Senate this fall.”

The Center for Biological Diversity, Miami Waterkeeper, Florida Wildlife Federation, and the Diving Equipment and Marketing Association are suing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and National Marine Fisheries Service for allegedly violating the Endangered Species Act via a dredging project near Port Everglades. The dredging, they say, endangers “critical marine habitat, threatened corals and queen conch,” adding: “There is added pressure on the reef ecosystem, and greater risk from this project, after an unprecedented 2023 marine heatwave caused widespread staghorn and elkhorn coral mortality, leaving these threatened species at dire risk of extinction.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn  

In Closing

Good Week: Abdul El-Sayed

It may have been by the skin of his teeth—a result far closer than the (historically bad) polling in Michigan suggested—but the newly minted Senate nominee is looking ahead to what promises to be a pugnacious general election after surviving the massive cannons of money spent to ensure his primary defeat.

Bad Week: Third Way

Not everyone is taking this news well, however. The self-styled centrist org has picked this moment to announce a $15 million war against the Democratic Socialists of America (of whom El-Sayed is not a member). Isn’t there an election to be won? Scratch a grifty moderate, find a wrecker.

—Jason Linkins

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

The night of the burglary that started the whole mess, a night watchman at the Watergate office complex noticed something amiss as he made his rounds. What was his name, and what did he see? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

Editor’s Note: Welcome to The TNR Blue Book. It’s our new daily newsletter that covers Congress and much more, but with a distinctly TNR twist: Our focus will be strictly on Democrats, liberal and progressive groups, and the fight to take back power and save democracy. Every morning, you’ll get a rundown of late-breaking news, what Democrats on Capitol Hill are thinking, quick hits on what you need to know nationally, the latest on what’s coming out of the think tanks and activist groups, short interviews with progressive newsmakers and authors, and more (including some humor and political trivia!). There’s nothing else out there like it.

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Inside Washington

Will this bill save Social Security, or kill it?

A new piece of legislation aims to avert a Social Security crisis by fast-tracking a solution before cuts are imminent. But Democrats are torn: Some say, far from saving the program, the bill could give Republicans an opening to raise the retirement age or cut benefits.

The bipartisan bill, dubbed the Protecting Retirement Opportunities and Maintaining Income Security for Everyone, or PROMISE, Act, calls for the nonpartisan Social Security Advisory Board, or SSAB, to come up with a legislative framework to keep Social Security solvent for at least 50 more years. The act, which senators debated in a Finance Committee hearing on Wednesday, also requires the House and Senate to debate, amend, and vote on the bill on a condensed timeline, with just 100 hours of floor time allotted for it.

Critics like Senator Bernie Sanders say there’s insufficient oversight of the SSAB drafting process and that the tight voting timeline means a lame-duck Congress could be deciding the future of Social Security. “Social Security is the most important program facing the American people, and we need a serious way forward,” Sanders told The New Republic. “I don’t think a serious way forward is having folks who have either been defeated for election or who are retiring making the key decisions.”

Senator Tim Kaine, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said he understands the desire to start this process when there isn’t a Republican governing trifecta, but that there’s a downside to further delay. “If you wait until it’s right up against the deadline, you traumatize a lot of people who think maybe [Congress] won’t come up with a solution,” he said. “So our goal is to start the discussion earlier.”

A report released by the Social Security Board of Trustees in early June found that the Social Security Trust Fund will only be able to cover 78 percent of benefits in 2032, which means that without congressional action, Americans who receive Social Security benefits will see theirs reduced by 22 percent. Based on the average benefit of $2,071 per month, that would amount to a monthly cut of $450. More than 70 million Americans receive Social Security benefits. One estimate suggests that this cut could push more than three million seniors and people with disabilities into poverty.

Some progressive senators suggested Wednesday that the impending cliff is all the more reason to have a freshly elected Congress address the issue directly, rather than relying on the SSAB to determine the path forward.

Sanders pointed to his own proposal for Social Security, as well as Senator Elizabeth Warren’s, as potentially the best paths forward. Both Sanders and Warren support lifting the cap on taxable income to generate more revenue for Social Security. Currently, the Social Security payroll tax only applies to the first $184,500 workers earn. Someone who makes $60,000 per year, for example, will pay 6.2 percent of every dollar they earn into Social Security. Someone who makes $500,000, though, will only pay that 6.2 percent tax on the first $184,500 of their income. Warren suggests eliminating the cap altogether, and Sanders wants to subject all income over $250,000 to the payroll tax.

“If you’re a nurse or an electrician, you pay taxes with every paycheck. If you’re a billionaire and you’re good with your accountant and you know your lawyer, you can pay little or nothing; that’s not right,” explained Senator Ron Wyden, who started his career as the co-founder of Oregon’s Gray Panthers, an advocacy organization for the elderly.

Removing the cap while providing benefit credit for those earnings could raise an additional $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years, according to one estimate. That revenue would close nearly half of the 75-year funding gap.

Progressives like Sanders and Warren also worry that the SSAB, left to its own devices, might propose policies like raising the retirement age, privatizing the program, or reducing cost-of-living adjustments.

“We have very different approaches to resolving the upcoming Social Security cliff, and Republicans more than once have tried to put together commissions, hoping that Democrats will give them cover for their preferred solution: cutting the benefits. I won’t be a partner to that,” Warren said.

The AARP, whose executive vice president and chief advocacy and engagement officer, Nancy LeaMond, testified in the Finance Committee hearing on Wednesday, seems to agree with progressives on this. “Your legislation would require an unelected, four-member Advisory Board to put together a 50-year solvency plan in just over a month, with little time for deliberation and limited public input,” LeaMond wrote in a July letter opposing the bill. “If they are unsuccessful, any two members of Congress could force votes on their plans in just a few weeks.” She likewise criticized the prospect of “fast-tracked floor debates in the lame-duck session of Congress, just after the November elections, when departing Members are completely unaccountable to voters.”

Sanders sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to Democrats on Monday expressing the same concerns.

Kaine noted on Wednesday that the bill still provides opportunity for amendments and floor debate. “If it’s not getting 60 votes, it ain’t happening. So that means we’re all going to get to have our input,” he said. “I view the PROMISE Act as the jump ball. Somebody’s got to throw the jump ball up to start the game.”

—Emma Janssen  

Outside Washington

Does Doug Jones have a shot in Alabama?

Amid all the primaries coverage this week, you may have missed the remarkable finding that Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville—a 2020 election denier with a history of Islamophobic and racist remarks—is leading Democrat Doug Jones by only 49–41 in the Alabama governor’s race, despite 56 percent of respondents in that poll identifying as Republican. Granted, it was a weird news item: Those numbers were pulled from a poll funded by a national school-choice advocacy group called the “yes. every kid. foundation.” that was aiming to showcase the potential political payoff of supporting school choice. But when Tuberville and Jones last faced off, in the 2020 Senate race, Tuberville beat Jones by 20 points. So in that context—and given that there hasn’t been much polling on this race so far—the poll was guaranteed to make headlines. “If you’re a Democrat, I’m Lloyd Christmas telling you there’s a chance,” wrote Josh Moon at the Alabama Political Reporter on Wednesday, noting that this poll was conducted before Tuberville alienated a bunch of people with “scorched earth” comments against Social Security and in favor of data centers. “And if you’re a Republican supporting Tuberville,” Moon added, “I’m telling you that you’ve still got a two-score lead, but the other team is at the goal line and your quarterback keeps throwing interceptions.”

Elsewhere:

• CalMatters reporter Rachel Becker explains, for laypeople, why the ongoing policy negotiations over Colorado River water usage are so very complicated—and why neither the “rough parameters” released by Trump’s Interior Department last week nor the cuts that will be announced “any day” now are going to meet the urgent need for a long-term, comprehensive plan. “Building anything to store, move, or make more water typically takes decades and billions of dollars. Without longer-term certainty about how states will share the river’s water supply among 40 million people, millions of acres of agriculture, and two states in Mexico—cities and irrigation providers are struggling to plan how to close the gaps,” writes Becker.
• Big news for avocado fans and both hobbyist and professional plant breeders: Scientists have finally identified the gene that determines when during the day the trees open their female flowers versus their male ones—a daily sex-change ritual each avocado plant performs that’s been puzzling scientists for over a century.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

The Roosevelt Institute drops a new policy brief on “The Economics of the Last and Next Social Security Reform,” arguing that the typical thesis about Social Security’s insolvency—”people live longer and have fewer kids, ergo, Social Security is running out of money”—is flawed. “Social Security is a reflection of, and is supported by, the strength of the economy,” economist Kathryn Anne Edwards argues in the brief. “Who is working, how much they earn, how healthy they are, and how much they save matter more than the head count. People could live longer, have fewer kids, and have a solvent Social Security if workers earned enough money.”

The Open Markets Institute has filed an amicus brief in the Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google, arguing against a court ruling that allows Google to continue “pay[ing] companies such as Apple and browser developers to make Google Search the default search engine.” Brief author and OMI policy counsel Tara Pincock said in the organization’s press release, “If the court allows those payments to continue, the remedy will leave the monopoly largely intact.”

It’s becoming increasingly clear that voters’ views on Trump’s economic policies—particularly the inflationary effects of the war on Iran, as well as the never-ending array of arbitrary tariffs—are going to be a major factor in the November midterms. Pew Research’s recent findings on this were pretty stark: In the first six months of the year, the number of respondents saying they expected the economy to improve in the next year sank from 31 percent to 23 percent. Democrats have thought the economy and Trump’s handling of it was terrible throughout, so the big takeaway was how much of this is being “driven by a shift among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.” The share of that demographic rating the economy highly has fallen from 49 percent to 41 percent, and the percentage of them saying that Trump’s policies are to blame has risen from 18 percent to 28 percent.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.

Did Jeanine Pirro have any other choice?

Trump is furious with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for dropping the nonsensical Reflecting Pool “vandalism” case. But this wasn’t a principled stand. Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted explain the story, here.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

As the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation approaches (it’s next Sunday), we’ll toss out a couple Watergate-related questions. Today, the easier one: What was the name of Nixon’s secretary who acknowledged that she “accidentally” erased up to 18.5 minutes of a taped Oval Office conversation between Nixon and aide H.R. Haldeman? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)