Dems Are Looking Good in North Carolina—or Are They?

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Inside Washington

Dems are looking good in North Carolina—or are they?

If Democrats want to take back the Senate, they need North Carolina—their best chance to pick up a previously Republican-held seat, according to the Cook Political Report. So you think they’d be delighted: For months, polls have consistently put former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper ahead of his opponent, former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley. But Cooper’s campaign is on edge, and experts say it should be—Whatley could still win this race.

In early August, a Harper Polling survey of likely voters found Cooper up by 13 points against Whatley in the race to replace retiring GOP Senator Thom Tillis. A Change Research poll of likely voters from around the same time had Cooper up by seven points: 50 percent of respondents said they’d vote for Cooper, 43 percent for Whatley, and six percent were undecided. Those undecided voters could be where Whatley finds his margin of victory.

“I think that polls at this stage of the race, when we’re still a couple months out from an election in a race that will have very difficult-to-predict turnout, should be taken with a grain of salt,” said Jason Husser, a professor at Elon University and the director of the Elon Poll. “The race is far from over, and we have seen historical precedent of Republicans surging at the last couple weeks in the state.”

In the 2016 Senate race, for example, Republican candidate Richard Burr launched a barrage of effective attack ads against Democrat Deborah Ross toward the end of the campaign, and ultimately won. In the 2014 Senate election, Tillis was trailing Democrat Kay Hagan in the vast majority of polls, only to win by 1.5 percentage points. In Cooper’s run for governor in 2016, polls consistently showed him leading by at least two percentage points, but he won by only 10,000 votes.

The Cooper campaign is particularly concerned that a recent Supreme Court decision on campaign finance spending will help Whatley’s campaign. The decision says that political parties can now coordinate directly with campaigns and raise unlimited funds. Since the RNC has a major cash advantage over the Democratic National Committee (which is actually in the red financially), Republican candidates could get bigger infusions of cash this cycle.

“The RNC has been stockpiling their money because they knew their former chairman Michael Whatley would need to get bailed out,” Jeff Allen, Cooper for North Carolina campaign manager, said in a statement to The New Republic. “Whatley’s elite D.C. connections and party loyalty means he’s first in line for the RNC’s nearly $130 million war chest. The Supreme Court just guaranteed that this race will be among—if not the—most expensive races in the country.”

Despite that, Cooper remains ahead in direct campaign fundraising, having raised $35 million to Whatley’s $16 million. Outside group spending is in full force: In late July, the Senate Leadership Fund, a GOP super PAC, announced that it was spending $17 million on an ad buy attacking Cooper’s record on crime as governor. While Cooper’s campaign is focused on affordability—he’s been touring the state on a “Make Stuff Cost Less” tour—Whatley has been hammering on crime and public safety.

Big ad spends could help Whatley with undecided voters and voters who don’t know who he is. After serving in state government for 38 years, with eight years as governor, 92 percent of voters are familiar with Cooper, while just 69 percent are familiar with Whatley.

“If we just look at the subset of voters who have high levels of familiarity with Michael Whatley, the race looks pretty competitive,” said Husser, who polled this question earlier this summer. “And so instead of it being a 10-point Cooper blowout, it starts looking like a typical North Carolina nail-biter.”

Husser found that voters’ familiarity with Whatley increased by 15 points over the course of this summer. A July Public Policy Polling, or PPP, survey found the closest margins yet, with 48 percent saying they’d vote for Cooper and 44 saying they’d choose Whatley.

But that poll also found that “Democrats are almost completely lined up behind Cooper, while a lot of Republican voters remain undecided. That gives Whatley much more room for growth,” PPP noted in its press release. That’s exactly the kind of analysis that should worry Cooper’s campaign.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz issued an executive order Tuesday blocking mining near the famous and fragile Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and boy are people worked up about it. Within hours, Republican Representative Tom Emmer had called Walz a “lame duck loser” who “let fraud run rampant while holding hardworking, tax-paying Minnesotans back from the opportunity for better lives,” while his fellow Republican Representative Pete Stauber called it a “spiteful and harmful attack against hardworking people.” The Minnesota Star Tribune’s liveblog of reactions to the news notes that Democratic Representative Betty McCollum, Democratic Senator Tina Smith, and Chair of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa Carlos Hernandez praised the decision, although the Boundary Waters area’s Democratic State Representative Grant Hauschild registered his disapproval. Walz’s term is up in January, and state law dictates that executive orders expire 90 days after the governor leaves office. Democrat Amy Klobuchar currently leads Republican Lisa Demuth in the polls. (As of this writing, neither had weighed in on the decision yet.) This whole thing started when Congress voted last spring to lift a 20-year ban on mining in the area.

While votes are still being counted in Alaska, it’s already clear that Democrat Mary Peltola and Republican Dan Sullivan will advance in the state’s nonpartisan “top-four” primary. Just before Tuesday’s primary, a poll from Data for Progress tried to simulate a general election matchup using Alaska’s ranked-choice program, and found Peltola up six points (47–41) over Republican Sullivan. That would be for the first round of counting. Peltola also led by six (53–47) in its attempt to calculate how a second round might go. You can read The TNR Blue Book’s prior coverage of this race here.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

The Center for Strategic and International Studies holds an “emergency” podcast episode to discuss Trump’s withdrawal from joint military exercises with South Korea. Mark Lippert hosts Andrew Yeo, Sydney Seiler, and Victor Cha. “At a strategic level, I think there’s a lot that’s being risked and a lot that could be lost,” says Yeo. Watch or read the rest here.

Public Citizen accuses Todd Blanche of violating the Hatch Act by attending a campaign rally with Trump in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups have released a statement cheering California’s “first-in-the-nation efficiency standards for replacement tires,” a development that “shows how practical climate policy can deliver meaningful benefits for Californians,” according to NRDC California climate and energy policy director Merrian Borgeson. The statement notes that, according to California Energy Commission calculations, the standards “will save drivers about $180 in gasoline costs over the lifetime of a set of replacement tires” and “will reduce nitrogen oxides and particulate matter pollution and cut annual greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equivalent to those from 400,000 gasoline cars.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week: The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, by Jill Lepore

THE GIST: Emerging from an outstanding 2024 New Yorker piece about the rise of the algorithm and the decline of trust in the state, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State argues that liberal, democratic governance is increasingly being replaced by automation and artificial intelligence. The book covers everything from pesky robocalls and scammy fundraising to what it means to be political in a world run by machines.

PRAISE: It’s an eclectic mix of blurbs—from novelists George Saunders and Philip Pullman to technologist Jaron Lanier and Lepore’s New Yorker colleague Elizabeth Kolbert. Kolbert calls the book “dazzling in its range and totally on target.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: This is a Jill Lepore book, which means it’s a sweeping history, not a polemic—or at least not just a polemic. The Simulmatics Corporation, an early data company founded in the 1950s that promised to predict human behavior—and shape American politics—is one area of focus. Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a supporter of the “Technocracy Movement,” which aspired to replace politicians with scientists (and an avid backer of Apartheid), is another. Lepore’s references are, as always, pleasantly diverse: The introduction features excellent close readings of both Hannah Arendt and poet Richard Brautigan.

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: It’s hard to think of someone better to write a book like this—a history of humanity’s use of technology and data that doubles as a penetrating critique of artificial intelligence, automation, and the increasing tyranny of the algorithm in everyday life. As bleak as Lepore’s diagnosis is, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is also a surprisingly hopeful book. “A wall of mirrors can be smashed with the slightest hammer, the nearest rock,” she writes. “That rock is the right of the people to elect a government by consent and not by automation.”

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day

With Donald Trump now officially in the low 30s in approval ratings: In the modern history of polling, which president had the lowest ever approval ratings, and how low did he go? (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

Florida’s Senate primary isn’t what it seems

On the surface, Angie Nixon’s and Alex Vindman’s contest in Florida on Tuesday might look like another progressive-versus-moderate primary, as we’ve seen in other Democratic primaries this cycle. But neither candidate is eager to portray it that way. Instead, both seem focused on whether Dems might have a chance in this once-purple, increasingly-red state. Whichever one wins the primary will be facing an uphill battle against a Republican incumbent that few outside Florida have even heard of: Ashley Moody, who Governor Ron DeSantis appointed to fill the seat vacated when Marco Rubio became Secretary of State.

Angie Nixon, a member of the Florida House of Representatives since 2020, who recently joined the Democratic Socialists of America (the organization hasn’t endorsed her), is running on Medicare for All, a tax on billionaires, and free childcare. Alex Vindman—known for his role as a whistleblower during President Trump’s first term, as well as for being Representative Eugene Vindman of Virginia’s identical twin brother—has emphasized cost of living, corruption, and his military service. His testimony in 2019 ultimately helped lead to Trump’s first impeachment charge.

Though Vindman is the more moderate of the two candidates, he’s also framing himself as the anti-establishment choice, a different dynamic than other elections this cycle like the primary between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens in Michigan.

“If you want an outsider who is ready to take on the establishment and has the grassroots support to defeat Ashley Moody in November, I’m your guy,” Vindman said in a statement to The New Republic, touting his first-time run and rejection of corporate PAC money. He added that he wants to “lower costs for working Floridians and fight corruption in D.C., starting with lowering the cost of homeowners’ insurance, gas, and housing and banning Congressional stock trading.”

Nixon likewise rejects the framing of progressive versus moderate: “I think too much of politics today is about labels. People in Washington want to put candidates and voters into neat little boxes, but Florida is not that simple,” she wrote in a statement to The New Republic. “What I hear from people across this state is that they are worried about the things that actually affect their lives: Can I afford my groceries? Can I afford a home? Can I afford childcare? Can I keep a roof over my family’s head?” Like Vindman, she also cited the high cost of insurance in the state.

Polling so far is sparse, but a July poll of likely voters found Vindman ahead of Nixon by 15 points, though 36 percent of voters were undecided. A different poll from the University of North Florida found Moody ahead of both candidates in a general election matchup. In the poll, Moody has a 10-point lead on Vindman and an eight-point lead on Nixon. A survey of likely voters in mid-June had Moody and Vindman tied with 46 percent of the vote.

Since primary polling has been so limited, experts were careful not to make any predictions for Tuesday night. But in an expensive state like Florida, fundraising matters, said Kevin Wagner, a professor at Florida Atlantic University. So far, Vindman has massively outraised both Nixon and Moody. At the end of June, Vindman had raised over $14 million, compared to Moody’s nearly $11 million and Nixon’s $625,000. The Vindman campaign also noted that 13 percent of its donations have come from No Party Affiliation, or NPA, voters and seven percent from Republicans, which it hopes bodes well for a general election that will require the Democrat to win over a large chunk of NPA voters.

If Nixon pulls off a victory in the primary, said Aubrey Jewett, a professor at the University of Central Florida, it would likely be because of Black Floridians, who make up over 16 percent of the state’s population and are a crucial voting bloc for Democrats in the state. Nixon held a sit-in at the Governor’s office this year to protest against gerrymandering; four years ago, she joined other Black lawmakers in a similar sit-in on the floor of the state House to protest redistricting that they say disenfranchised Black voters.

The perennial question about leftist candidates in the U.S. is whether anyone tied to an organization with the word “socialist” in it can win in a general election. That question has a particular edge in Florida, though, where many voters or their family members have fled socialist countries like Cuba. Moody has already been campaigning against socialism, and is likely to peg whoever her Democratic opponent is with the label, even though Vindman himself fled the USSR as a child, a story he’s used to make inroads with Cuban voters.

No matter who wins tonight, the math will remain incredibly difficult for the Democratic contender: Florida Republicans hold a 1.5 million voter registration lead over Democrats. Even in traditionally Democratic parts of the state, like Miami-Dade County, voters have increasingly been voting for Republicans. The last time a Democrat won statewide in Florida was in 2018, in a race for Commissioner of Agriculture. Granted, Trump’s favorability in 2018 was +2, and now sits at -6, which Democrats think could give them an opening to pick up NPAs and some moderate Republicans.

Hispanic voters will also be crucial for a Democratic win in November, said Jewett. He pointed to Miami-Dade and Osceola counties, both of which have a large Hispanic population. Like other voters in Florida, Hispanic voters have leaned more Republican in recent years, but Jewett thinks there could be a pendulum swing back toward Democrats now that these voters have seen (and sometimes directly felt) the impacts of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda in his second term.

“They have to basically get everything right to have a fighting chance,” Wagner said of Democrats on the ballot. That means turning out the Democratic base in South Florida, picking up NPA voters in the center of the state, and peeling away some Republicans in the state’s more rural northern region.

That said, “the way you can tell whether a Democrat has a chance in Florida is by the volume of the vote coming out of South Florida, because they have to overcome vote totals in other places,” Wagner said. He suggested comparing Democratic and Republican turnout numbers on Tuesday to get a sneak peek of what the general election might look like.

Outside Washington

Arkansas’s Medicaid expansion program covering over 200,000 people under the Affordable Care Act is set to expire at the end of this year, and it’s still unclear whether the Trump administration will approve a two-year extension request, after declining a similar request to renew through 2031. On Monday, the Arkansas Advocate published the somewhat discouraging results of its attempt to ask each of the 2026 gubernatorial candidates “how they would tackle this issue.” Libertarian Colt Shelby “said the governor should take a lead role in ensuring Arkansas’s version of Medicaid expansion is extended indefinitely,” but also “reform” the entire system and match people with full-time employment to avoid relying on Medicaid. Democratic State Senator Fred Love condemned Republicans for proposing “no serious alternative” to Medicaid expansion, and noted that Medicaid disruptions could shutter rural hospitals, but was pretty short on details about what he would do if elected. And current Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t even offer a direct quote, but instead “referred the Advocate to a letter Department of Human Services Secretary Janet Mann sent to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services earlier this month,” which called the extension a “prudent step” and said that “helping capable individuals transition off the sidelines so we can focus resources on those truly in need remains a top priority.” There isn’t much polling on this race, but Sanders is heavily favored to win, having beaten Democrat Chris Jones in 2022 by almost 28 points.

The Guardian has published a useful report from Eric Berger on the current state of the increasingly strong right-to-repair movement—shorthand for a variety of policies to reduce corporations’ monopoly-like control over the repair of their products, so that it’s easier and cheaper for people to fix things like cell phones or tractors. The tractor tie-in has made right-to-repair a particularly hot issue in Iowa; Iowa’s House passed a right-to-repair bill this spring that went nowhere in the state Senate. Not mentioned, but worth noting: Both candidates in this year’s surprisingly tight gubernatorial race have claimed right-to-repair as a key component of their platforms, with Democrat Rob Sand calling right-to-repair a “no-brainer” and Republican Zach Lahn highlighting his running mate’s spearheading of the right-to-repair legislation in the House.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

On Wednesday at 10 a.m., Brookings will host an in-person and virtual event on “early assessment and open questions” regarding Donald Trump’s planned “Golden Dome for America,” a whole-country missile-defense system that he directed the Defense Department to start exploring in January 2025. Melanie W. Sisson will moderate a panel with Michael E. O’Hanlon, David Mosher, and Steve Fetter.

The Revolving Door Project issued a statement “condemn[ing]” Trump’s cryptocurrency and prediction markets roundtable this week. “On Wednesday, he’ll turn the White House into a hub for his crypto and prediction markets cronies to lean on independent agencies and a gridlocked Congress for a more permissive regulatory environment for these predatory corporations,” the organization’s Henry Burke said in the statement.

Data for Progress released a new poll finding that “voters think they are more likely to become homeless than a millionaire or billionaire, and reject the idea that billionaires obtain their wealth through innovation and hard work, instead seeing them as exploitative and a sign of a dysfunctional, anti-working-class economy.” There’s impressive cross-party agreement on that: Not just 67 percent of Democrats, but 65 percent of Republicans say they’re more likely to become homeless than become a billionaire—interestingly, only 54 percent of independents or third-party respondents agree with that. They’re more likely than either Democrats or Republicans to say they “don’t know” or are “more likely to become a billionaire.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Four Questions For: Jacob Rubashkin, Deputy Editor of Inside Elections

Interview by Grace Segers

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

A: At Inside Elections, I cover and analyze races for House, Senate, governor and president. Right now we’re ramping up our midterm coverage, so we’ve rolled out a new website, hired a new reporter, and are working hard to update the most competitive 100 or so races every issue.

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

A: When Inside Elections (previously known as the Rothenberg Political Report) and the Cook Political Report got going in the 1980s, they were stepping into an information vacuum. Since then, there’s been a real democratization in the data and information available to cover races—and that’s largely a great thing! I use lots of tools that were simply not available back then, and it helps voters be much better informed. But it’s a double-edged sword, because not all data is created equal, and even good data can be used improperly. So a big part of my job these days is not only assessing the races on the merits, but also helping explain to the public why some pieces of information (prediction markets, certain polls, etc.) aren’t as valuable.

Q: What is a race that you believe isn’t getting enough attention this year?

A: I’ve got two on the opposite ends of the country. In Alaska, the open gubernatorial race is an unpredictable melee in a state known for its unorthodox politics. There are over a dozen credible Democratic, Republican, and independent candidates competing in Tuesday’s primary for four spots on the general election ballot and you really can’t rule out any outcome at this point. In Florida’s 12th District, which is north of Tampa, the GOP state legislature redrew longtime Representative Gus Bilirakis’s seat to be significantly less Republican. Bilirakis hasn’t had a tough race since his first election to Congress two decades ago and he’s got a real opponent in Air National Guard Col. Darren McAuley. The partisan lean is in Bilirakis’s favor but he can’t be caught sleeping if a wave develops.

Q: What keeps you going in these stressful times?

A: Family and loved ones, this summer’s abundance of fresh basil, John le Carré novels, and friends with a high tolerance for my kvetching.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Florida holds its primaries today. Who was the Democratic Florida governor of the 1970s who pursued transparency and public disclosures, passed the state’s first corporate tax, and championed civil rights in the formerly segregated state?

(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

Mary Peltola is putting the “fish” back in kitchen table issues

Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola has a campaign slogan you don’t hear in other states: “Fish, Family, and Freedom.” The last two aren’t surprising. But “fish”?

Other Senate candidates this year are focusing on gas prices or health care costs. But to Peltola and many other Alaskans, fish are a crucial and overlooked policy issue touching everything from affordability to labor to the role of money in politics. Ahead of the primary on Tuesday, August 18, she’s been traveling around the state making her case. The top four candidates in the nonpartisan ranked-choice voting primary will advance to the November general election. Peltola is all but guaranteed to advance to the general.

Peltola’s main opponent is Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan, who is seeking a third term. Peltola faces an uphill battle in the red state, which hasn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1964. But Peltola, who represented the state as its single Congressperson from 2022 to 2025, has outperformed other Alaskan Democrats—in 2024, she lost reelection to the House by fewer than three points, while President Donald Trump won the state by 13 points.

Recent polls show a competitive race. An early August Alaska Survey Research poll showed Peltola with 50.8 percent compared to Sullivan’s 49.2 percent in the final round of ranked-choice. A late June poll from The New York Times and Siena University has Sullivan with a two point lead in the initial round of ranked-choice, with five percent of respondents undecided. Both the Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball classify the race as a toss-up.

Peltola’s fish policy isn’t just about fish, her campaign says, but also the role of corporate spending in politics, Alaska Native sovereignty, and everyday bread-and-butter (fish-and-butter?) issues.

“As someone who grew up salmon fishing on the Kuskokwim River with my father, I know firsthand that fish is more than food—it’s central to Alaskans’ way of life,” Peltola said in a statement. “That’s why I will fight tooth and nail to restore our fisheries to abundance, and that means doing whatever it takes to ban factory trawling and reduce bycatch, deliver relief for Alaska fishermen and communities that are suffering the fallout of fishery collapse, and save our fish. I will stand up to anyone—including the factory trawling lobby and Lower 48 special interests—to fix the rigged system in D.C. and put Alaska first.”

Trawling—using nets pulled through the water to catch fish—is common in Alaska’s fisheries, but can have devastating consequences for the marine ecosystem. In 2026 so far, trawlers have caught nearly 22,000 Chinook salmon by accident in their nets—a side effect known as bycatch. Alaskans are two years into a seven-year fishing moratorium in the Yukon River to protect the fish population. Indigenous subsistence fishers say the ban harms their way of life, while large-scale trawling continues. A majority of likely Alaska voters support a ban on trawling and believe fishing should be limited to rural residents when the salmon population is low, according to a 2025 survey conducted by Data for Progress.

“Alaska is actually well known for having some of the best managed fisheries,” said Liz Nussbaumer, a program officer in the Seafood, Public Health, and Food Systems Project at Johns Hopkins University. Despite that, she said, Peltola’s proposed fisheries policies are welcomed by many, particularly in the deregulatory environment of the Trump administration.

Nussbaumer pointed to Peltola’s plans for fishery disaster funding (which helps keep fisheries stable after a natural or man-made disaster), a fish by-product economy (using fish waste produce for things like pet food and pharmaceuticals), and new monitoring technology to stop bycatch as the most innovative proposals on her platform. “It’s been a blind spot for fisheries and aquatic food systems, where terrestrial [agriculture] typically has had a lot of these protections, but fisheries have not, and especially smaller scale operations, these producers can be living paycheck to paycheck,” Nussbaumer said about disaster funding for fisheries.

Sullivan, meanwhile, has received nearly $280,000 from the trawling industry. One of his largest contributors is Trident Seafoods, which has a history of environmental violations. In 2011, the Department of Justice announced that the company would pay $2.5 million to resolve Clean Water Act violations. In 2018, Trident Seafoods was fined $300,000 for underwater piles of fish by-product near its processing facilities. This June, Sullivan introduced a bill to reduce bycatch, but experts say it was similar to a bill Peltola introduced during her time in the House, which Sullivan did not support.

Peltola’s plan to create a fish by-product economy could help reduce the waste created and dumped by companies like Trident Seafoods. But she also sees this waste as part of a larger story. “Whether it’s bycatch or broken promises from D.C. insiders, Alaskans can’t stand waste, fraud, or abuse,” her website reads. She’s called for 12-year term limits on members of Congress, overturning Citizens United, and banning lawmakers from trading stocks. It’s not directly about salmon. But it’s part of the same story that Peltola is hoping will resonate with voters.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Republican House Representative John James, currently competing against Democratic nominee and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in the race to replace Governor Gretchen Whitmer, has chosen his running mate, and it’s looking like he opted for an attack dog: State Representative Jay DeBoyer. DeBoyer was one of the Republicans spearheading Michigan House’s lawsuit against Benson last year to force the release of training materials for election officials—information that Benson claimed, if publicized, “would enable someone to interfere with the chain of custody of ballots, tamper with election equipment, or impersonate a clerk on Election Day.” DeBoyer also led an effort to hold her in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena over this. Additionally, The Detroit Free Press’s Clara Hendrickson reports, “during a fiery exchange in a June 2025 committee hearing, he zeroed in on her violation of the state’s campaign law when she held a launch event for her campaign for governor in the building that houses her department’s offices.”

DeBoyer’s statement accompanying James’s announcement naming him to the lieutenant governor spot, Bridge Michigan reports, said that “Michiganders face a clear choice between socialism and a bold new direction rooted in freedom, opportunity, and prosperity.” Given that Benson is pretty moderate, this “socialism” reference may indicate that DeBoyer will try to use Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed (who also does not identify as a socialist, but is considerably more progressive than Benson) to argue that all Democrats are radicals.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

A new report from State Futures, a nonprofit focused on state policy in response to “federal authoritarian overreach,” paints a vivid picture of life in the Trump era: So far in 2026, the report finds, lawmakers have introduced 242 bills in 32 states to try to protect residents in response to the administration’s immigration policies. Of these, 53 have passed. Two, notably, have been vetoed—one by Virginia Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger, who said banning ICE from courthouses, schools, and hospitals “would effectively require security guards and, in some cases, local law enforcement be placed in the untenable position of choosing between violating state law or federal law.” The other veto came from Democratic Governor of Colorado Jared Polis, who said a bill allowing people to sue ICE agents for violating their rights contained overly narrow language.

The Open Markets Institute files an amicus brief in a case currently before the Tenth Circuit, “urging the court to reverse a lower court decision that shielded a no-hire agreement between grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons from antitrust liability.… Open Markets argues that the agreement deprived workers of one of their most important sources of leverage during a strike: the ability to seek employment with a competing unionized employer.”

Data for Progress released a new poll finding that “voters think they are more likely to become homeless than a millionaire or billionaire, and reject the idea that billionaires obtain their wealth through innovation and hard work, instead seeing them as exploitative and a sign of a dysfunctional, anti-working-class economy.” There’s impressive cross-party agreement on that: Not just 67 percent of Democrats, but 65 percent of Republicans say they’re more likely to become homeless than become a billionaire—interestingly, only 54 percent of independents or third-party respondents agree with that. They’re more likely than either Democrats or Republicans to say they “don’t know” or are “more likely to become a billionaire.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: David Crowley

In a matter of days, Crowley went from trailing Francesca Hong in the polls by 18 points to narrowly beating her in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor.

Bad Week: Pollsters

Maybe voters really believed Hong wanted to cancel Thanksgiving. Maybe Crowley dropping out of the race then reentering it, or Mandela Barnes’s sudden exit in late July, scrambled things so badly that no survey stood a chance. But coming hard on the heels of Abdul El-Sayed’s much-closer-than-expected victory in Michigan, Midwest pollsters have been the target of a lot of quips this week.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Who was the first ever Black Cabinet secretary? That’s a pretty tough one, so partial credit for naming the president who appointed him.

(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 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.)