US confirms it has weapons in spaaaaaace
Emily St. John Mandel Still Has Hope
Emily St. John Mandel is perhaps best known for her 2014 novel Station Eleven, which presciently depicted a devastating global pandemic. Her new novel, Exit Party, out this week, isn’t much sunnier: This one imagines the aftermath of the collapse of the United States as a nation, and both the banality and turmoil that might follow. Exit Party centers around Ari Waker—a character Mandel first introduced in her 2010 novel The Singer’s Gun—who has just been released from prison as the United States settles into its first spring after civil war. She and her roommate attend a party to celebrate the end of curfew, but something isn’t quite right. The party’s host steps outside for some air, and is never seen again.
As I read Exit Party earlier this year, ICE agents were taking over cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, scanning the faces of protesters for some unknown database. The US and Israel had just launched a military assault against Iran. The CDC confirmed 1,000 measles cases, four times the number from the same period last year. Mandel’s speculation about the disintegration of the country didn’t seem as far-fetched as her pandemic might’ve seemed in 2014. Still, I was surprised she was writing about such a dark topic, when in a 2023 Reddit AMA she mentioned that she’d written Station Eleven before having a child, and that she might not have been able to do so after, because “imagining the world ending with my daughter in it is unbearable.”
When we spoke earlier this summer, I asked how she was able to overcome that impulse. Though she said that looking at these ideas “dead on is a little bit unbearable,” the “speculative cloak” helps. And ultimately, what she wants readers to know, is that this novel, like her others, is full of hope, too.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
There’s probably going to be a reaction to your new book, Exit Party, that’s like, “Oh no, the author who wrote a book about a pandemic years before Covid hit is now writing about the fall of the United States! What does she know?”
I know nothing. I’m not clairvoyant—I just read the news. There’s something incredibly uncomfortable about thinking about some of these scenarios that I’ve written about in Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, and now Exit Party, but you may have to be willing to live with some discomfort to create interesting art. So I tried to lean into my fear and anxiety around the very dangerous path that the country is on.
What led you to want to write about this?
I am drawn to writing about the aftermath of catastrophe. There’s something very clarifying about how we respond to disasters as people. I’ve been thinking about this idea of the United States fracturing in a serious way since the early pandemic, when there was a real shortage of personal protective equipment and obviously a total vacuum of leadership in the first Trump administration. There was this weird moment where Northeastern states banded together to buy PPE as a bloc. I remember looking at these states on a map, thinking, “Well, here are these contiguous states working together to advance their interests, kind of at odds with the surrounding country. This kind of looks like a country. This kind of looks like a fracturing.” This feeling of there almost being two countries superimposed on top of the same geography with totally different cultures and ideas and understanding of reality—it’s that idea that animated the whole writing of Exit Party and channeling my political anxieties into fiction. Sometimes looking at something dead-on is a little bit unbearable, but putting it in this kind of speculative cloak makes it easier to consider more deeply.
You talk about your anxieties around the news being channeled into Exit Party, and surveillance seems to be a big part of that.
I think that we’ve surrendered a lot of our privacy, and we’ve done that very voluntarily. We’ve clicked on the videos; we’ve looked at the pictures. This dossier is being built around us. Another thing that scares me is the situation these days with ICE, and how it’s become normalized to have a secret police. Try to imagine how shocking it would have been five years ago for there to be a police force that floods the streets in American cities with masks on their faces. That’s not something that I think most of us would have anticipated for the United States or that we thought was possible in any kind of serious way, outside the conspiratorial fringes of the internet.
Early in Exit Party, some characters have a conversation about how boring living through catastrophe can be.
There’s kind of a banality of catastrophe, which I remember from the 2008 financial collapse, where you’re checking the news every day and after a while, there’s this feeling of “Yep, world still ending, still feels terrible.” I remember that from Covid, where you go from hitting refresh on the mortality graphs to thinking, “Well, yeah, okay, it’s another absolutely god-awful moment in a whole sequence of them.” There’s something both terrifying and hopeful in human psychology around the way that we can get used to anything and adapt to anything.
Yet your books are ultimately quite hopeful.
If a book is completely bleak, that feels implausible to me. Look, it’s a dark time in a lot of ways, but there is still a lot of joy, and there are still people resisting in honestly kind of silly ways that are super-effective. The actions we saw among citizens in Minneapolis were spectacular. Like that level of community organization and resistance and relentlessness in documenting what was going on and people helping their neighbors—that was pretty wonderful. You hear about things like that, and you think, “You know what? There is actually some hope here, even though the country does seem to be flirting with authoritarianism.”
A character in Exit Party says, “No country lasts forever.” Is that, to you, a hopeful statement or a terrifying one at this point in time?
That’s something that I found myself thinking about in the first Trump administration, when there was such despair on the left, and we comforted ourselves with this idea that “Well, nothing lasts forever. Life continues.” I don’t mean that in any kind of callous way. There’s something devastating about the idea of losing a country. At the same time, I’ve certainly met people who were born in places like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia that no longer exist in those forms, and that is the reality of countries. They don’t always last forever. You hope that whatever comes next is better.
Gov.uk still struggling with IT contractor tax rules
The martini is having a moment. Here’s where to drink one in Santa Cruz County
I had my first martini at 22. A recent college grad, I ordered it at a bar while trying to feel like a grown-up. What could be more chic, I thought, than a martini?
I bluffed my way through the bartender’s pop quiz — shaken or stirred? Dry or dirty? Olive or lemon peel? I had no idea. The first sip made my eyes pop. I choked down half, and didn’t order another one for almost 15 years.
Transcript: Trump’s Angry New Tirades on AI Wreck GOP Midterm Strategy
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
On Monday, Donald Trump let out a series of unhinged tirades about the future of AI. He raged at the very idea of regulating AI and brushed off increasingly dire warnings that are coming from AI scientists themselves. What’s striking is how this seems almost designed to sabotage the GOP’s midterm message. Republicans badly want to appear eager to rein in AI. So how do Republicans maintain this posture when the leader of their party is pushing the opposite? How should Democrats capitalize?
James Downie of MS Now has a new piece arguing that Republicans are finding it uniquely difficult to argue for sticking with GOP rule, precisely because the leader of the party is making it impossible. This AI fiasco is a case in point. James, good to have you on.
James Downie: Good to be back.
Sargent: OK, so over the weekend the CEO of Anthropic warned that it’s time for a global slowdown in AI development. Others quickly followed suit. But on Monday, Trump exploded on Truth Social, saying:
Back“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
He claimed that concerns about AI are being pushed by, quote, “conspiracy theorists, treasonists, traitors, and leakers.”
James, considering that a huge majority of Americans are concerned about AI data centers, that doesn’t seem well advised, does it?
Downie: No. There’s almost nothing that polls as poorly, in particular, as data centers—AI in general. There’s a ton of concerns among voters about what that’s going to do to their jobs, what that’s going to do to education, what that’s going to do to society writ large. And then, especially drilling down on it, the data centers that AI companies are depending on are extremely unpopular almost across the board.
Later this week there will be an event with both Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders coming together to call for far stronger regulations on AI. I mean, that’s a pairing you couldn’t have seen even a couple of years ago. So that just shows just how wide the opposition is.
Sargent: Yeah, it’s really interesting. Everybody who’s done serious reporting on the on-the-ground sentiment around this data center rebellion reports that a new kind of coalition is coming into being. It is interesting to see Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon agreeing. But it’s not just sort of, like, a horseshoe left-populist, right-populist thing. It’s even broader than that, isn’t it?
I mean, we’re talking about independents, we’re talking about moderates, we’re talking about, you know, plenty of even some hardcore Republicans and the occasional MAGA type. So it’s a very big coalition, right?
Downie: I mean, absolutely. A perfect example of how far we’ve come, and how, as you said, it’s not just sort of the horseshoe ends of the political spectrum: the House Republicans this week are looking to pass a bill to limit data center costs. And this is one year since they tried and failed to put a ten-year moratorium on AI regulation writ large.
That’s how quickly this issue is moving. And how it’s not just, as we said, it’s not just the left and the right—it’s the mainstream of both parties coming together in opposition.
Sargent: And the center of the electorate. Very much the center of the electorate, and deep in some red areas as well. It’s quite an event that’s happening.
Trump let out a second tirade that was even more loopy. He said:
“AI taking over the world, destroying humanity, and all other things bad is a HOAX—no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA—UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE.”
And Trump also said this: “The only reason the AI data center outburst is happening is because the United States is leading, by a lot, every other country. Don’t kill the Golden Goose!”
Downie: Yeah. And so I think here we see two longstanding Trump stories. First of all, there’s the personal interest. His family is invested in AI companies, his sons are invested in that. And as we saw with crypto, for example, Trump went from saying crypto’s a scam to “I love crypto” as soon as he got invested in it—as soon as his family had invested. Like, that’s the first thing.
And then there’s the other aspect, as we’ve seen with the trade war with Canada, where, if you frame things as winning and losing, Trump—as soon as he hears that frame, he’s totally trapped in it. And he can’t break it. It doesn’t matter, even if it’s the apocalypse. Hey, we’re the first ones to cause the apocalypse. Isn’t that great?
Sargent: Yes, right, exactly. You know, AI—I think somebody joked, I forget who, but I think it was Brian Beutler, actually, on his Substack, writing something like, AI robots kill a lot of people, but hey, it’s our AI robots killing people. So we win.
Downie: Absolutely. And also, I think there’s another longstanding Trump story here too, which is that this is a guy who’s never suffered consequences. So it’s hard for him to conceive that, like, anything bad would happen to him. Now, especially now that he’s 80—hey, I mean, for him, even if, as the AI companies are saying, by the end of the decade we might all die. Well, he’s 80. What does he care?
And you add that to, again, his wealth has insulated him from consequences his whole life. So for him, his family’s making money, he gets to claim we’re winning, everything’s great.
Sargent: Exactly. A recent NBC poll found that 70 percent are more worried about AI than are excited about it. And yet here Trump is calling this a scam. James, whenever a Democrat whispers anything that can be construed as out of touch with voters, the media goes absolutely nuts.
I really doubt that the mainstream media is going to frame this story that way, as being totally out of touch. They may point out the disparity between Trump’s dismissal of concerns and what the polls say, but they won’t actually say, this is an elitist in a bubble. That’s not permitted to say about Trump. But it really is true, right?
Downie: Absolutely. And it’s something we’ve seen much more in his second term in particular. And I think, speaking of topics that a lot of media outlets are scared to touch, I think that’s a factor of age. You would not catch him, I think, being this openly supportive of data centers in his first term.
I really think we saw how with an issue like abortion—where he was practiced at soft-pedaling that. When he first ran for president, he had a lot of practice in sort of ducking and dodging and threading the needle and not talking about that, and turning to other topics.
And here saying things like data centers, which 70 percent of Americans are opposed to—and as you mentioned, when they try to build, even in very deep red areas, people come out and say, we don’t want this here.
And this is something that, again—not that he’s ever actually had the common touch, but he knew on issues like Social Security and abortion where to sort of break with GOP orthodoxy. And he’s lost that discipline. And now he’s lost that little bit of self-protection from his own mouth. What little he had is completely gone. And now he’s just like, this is great, we’re winning.
Sargent: Yeah, I think you’re getting at an essential thing here, which is that we don’t often acknowledge this, but Trump really is canny in certain ways. He’s aware of voter sentiment. He knows when the Republican Party is straying. Here the Republican Party is screaming at him to stop, and he’s not doing it. That’s what’s really remarkable.
Downie: Yeah. And I think one factor is that there’s nobody in this White House who’s going to even bring it up to him. I think, again, not that Trump one was great by any means, but there were people who, let’s say, were willing to give him the bad news. Were willing to say, this is unpopular—not that we disagree with you, sir, you’re great, but this is unpopular.
Those people, they don’t exist here. There’s just, as we’ve seen—whether it’s Natalie Harp or Stephen Miller or whomever—they’re going to either encourage his worst instincts or just sort of smile and nod and not say anything.
Sargent: So you alluded before to the Republican Party’s political situation. A number of vulnerable House Republicans have been demanding that GOP leadership hold a vote on a measure reining in data center electricity costs and other things like that.
As we’ve been discussing, the movement against data centers is really a serious outpouring of genuine political energy that we haven’t seen in some time. And clearly it’s caught Republicans, and maybe even Democrats, off guard. And it’s a proxy for AI more broadly, though to what degree is, I think, not exactly clear.
The essential point, though, here is that Republicans badly want to appear like they’re doing something about data centers, about AI. They want to appear cognizant of the long-term threat. They want to appear like they’re willing to use congressional power to do something about this. But the leader of the Republican Party is basically saying, we don’t have to do anything. Don’t do anything. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like this in some time. Have you?
Downie: Yeah, I really think it’s difficult sometimes to explain to people who are sort of on the younger side, or maybe who haven’t followed American politics for as long, that the way that Trump, in this term in particular, is sabotaging his own party’s prospects, like, in a deliberate sense, and hurting the economy in a deliberate sense—as opposed to even someone like George W. Bush, who was a terrible president.
He did not invade Iraq thinking, this is going to go badly. He thought, foolishly, that we’re going to—to use his vice president’s words—we’re going to be greeted as liberators. It’s going to be tremendous. But Trump, on the other hand, is, like, literally blundering ahead and doing everything he can to make the worst-case scenario for his party come true.
Sargent: So you wrote about the bigger dynamic here, which is that Trump isn’t letting Republicans make the case that voters should stick with them. You noted that he keeps insisting, for instance, that inflation is totally under control, even as the data keeps showing otherwise.
In a sense, Trump doesn’t want Republicans to say something like, look, we know prices are still difficult, they’re still bad for a lot of Americans, we’re really committed to doing something about it—because that would make it look as if Trump failed, and that’s not permitted.
I think there’s something worth teasing out here, which is that Trump will only allow Republicans to make a case for sticking with Republican rule on terms that flatter him. And that’s just sort of, like, the through line here. And it’s like, you know, you’re really stuck with this narcissist now. Tough shit, man. Like, you made this bed.
Downie: Yeah. I mean, to those of us who haven’t been in the Trump cult, it’s sort of a “what did you expect” moment. Everything has to flatter the president. And you have a president who—I mean, as rough as the economy is, and as unhappy as Americans are with the economy, and they should be—we’re still, unemployment’s 4.1 percent, inflation’s in the mid-threes. That’s not great, but it’s not completely disastrous.
And yet this president is already in the 35, 36 percent approval rating. That takes real work, to get to that level in this economy. And he seems to be just pushing every button he can to make things as bad as possible for the Republicans.
Sargent: It really does seem like that. I think maybe the way to understand this is as follows. It’s often observed that Trump doesn’t really care if Republicans win or not. I think that’s probably true, but I think we can refine the point a bit and say it this way: Trump doesn’t want Republicans to win the midterms if it’s done on terms that make him look bad.
In other words, he would actually rather Republicans lose the midterms than win them by doing what Republicans should conventionally be doing in the situation, which is distance themselves from the president. He’s just not willing to permit that at all.
Downie: Absolutely. I think it’s been essential to his image through his whole life, long before—when he was just sort of dabbling in politics rather than actually taking part in it. His image has always been, I’m a winner. Don’t talk about the bankrupt casinos. Don’t talk about how I had to make my money through, like, stuff like Trump University and Trump Steaks instead of the career I started in. Don’t talk about the banks that won’t work with me anymore. I’m a winner. Everything in his life is about cultivating the image of a winner.
Sargent: How do Democrats capitalize here? We have a new piece on this up at NewRepublic.com. You can check it out—it’s by me, it’s on this topic. It seems to me like Democrats are taking a bit of a narrow approach to AI. They’re essentially treating it almost like a NIMBY issue, mainly: electricity prices, water, local governments getting corrupted by oligarchs, and so forth and so on. There’s not really an effort to put Trump at the center of the story.
But Trump is at the center of the story. He is allied with the tech oligarchs, and he’s willing to deregulate the future of AI in ways that at least some tech oligarchs are probably going to like, either openly or secretly, as you say. I think Democrats should be making that case a little more directly and saying, this is the party that wants your AI future to rage out of control. Why would you ever put them in charge? What do you think, James?
Downie: I think that’s absolutely right. And I think that’s true both in the short and long term, for different reasons. There’s sort of the immediate term, with Trump—tying an unpopular president to an unpopular industry, tying the Republican Party to an unpopular industry.
I think also in the long term, even as Trump eventually will pass from the scene. And I think what everyone can agree on, apparently even these AI executives—I mean, they want to self-regulate, but they agree that there needs to be some. Now, there’s sort of the question of, OK, who does the regulating, what forms does it take?
And we have seen in their spending over the last couple of years—including against Sherrod Brown in Ohio, for example, in 2024, where they spent millions and millions against him, just to get someone who the AI industry saw as an enemy out of the Senate.
The Democrats are going to have to face down this industry, if they want to be anything other than no-regulation AI. And this industry has so much money right now. So the earlier you make it politically toxic for the AI industry to be spending money in support of an opponent, the earlier you disarm that weapon.
And we have seen over the last 40 years, we’ve seen that too many times, Democrats think that we can also win over that industry if we take and get some of their money. And then it ends up handicapping or neutering regulations. And what we’ve seen in the long run is that people see Democrats as also not being responsive to the people, as being responsive instead to donors. And that hurts the party’s image long term.
So I think the earlier you can tie this to Trump, and the earlier you can make the AI industry—these tech oligarchs—politically toxic, or even more politically toxic, it helps you in the long term. Not just against Trump this year, not just in 2028 against someone like Vance, who is very closely tied to these oligarchs, but even in the long run, where you have an incredibly wealthy industry that otherwise can mobilize that money against you for years to come. And you have to disarm that now.
Sargent: Such an important point that you raised there. When they run against JD Vance in 2028, they will be much better off if right now they establish themselves as the party of sensible regulations. James Downie, great to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Downie: Thanks for having me.
Santa Cruz County considers requiring voter approval for AI data centers
Santa Cruz County could give residents the final say over any future artificial intelligence data center proposed in the county’s unincorporated areas, under a ballot measure and ordinance that supervisors will consider Tuesday.
The proposed measure would require voter approval before an AI data center or other “high-intensity computing facilities” could receive zoning or permits or begin construction. It also would express the county’s opposition to such facilities.
UK's Digital ID walks into a bar... two months after being killed off
‘The Last Five Years’ at Santa Cruz Shakespeare: A beautiful production of a frustrating musical
There is something inherently irresistible about a train wreck.
If you go
Who: Santa Cruz Shakespeare
What: “The Last Five Years”
When: Through Oct. 3
Where: The Audrey Stanley Grove at DeLaveaga Park, 501 Upper Park Rd., Santa Cruz
Tickets: Click here or 831-460-6399
Is This What It Takes to Win Ohio?
Amy Acton comes from struggle. For someone running to be Ohio’s first Democratic governor in 15 years, her hardscrabble background may be unusual, but it’s not unheard of for residents of a state still trying to recover from the ravages of deindustrialization. She was a kid when Youngstown’s steel industry shuttered in the 1970s, leaving the city depleted and its landscape dotted with abandoned steel mills and brownfields. The loss of work—and purpose—for the adults made for some rough childhoods. Acton says she moved 18 times before age 12; she recalls sleeping in a tent through one winter. Today, she is frank about the sexual abuse, hunger, and neglect she faced. She often talks about what it was like when people looked away from her, a “dirty and smelly” child.
It’s no coincidence that, over the decades since deindustrialization, the formerly purple state has become increasingly crimson, thanks in large part to partisan gerrymandering. (For 28 of the past 35 years, Republicans have simultaneously held the Ohio governor’s office and both chambers of the Statehouse.) Since the 1990s, the state’s once-lauded public schools have steadily declined; $1 billion per year in public school funding now goes to private school vouchers. Nearly a dozen rural Ohio hospitals are at risk of service reductions or closure due to Medicaid cuts in President Donald Trump’s trademark tax bill. And then there’s the corruption: Republican Larry Householder, former speaker of Ohio’s House of Representatives, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for his part in a $60 million racketeering scheme. In Ohio, economic circumstances may make life hard, but politicians often make things worse.
Acton has focused her campaign on that corruption and on the dire conditions of Ohio’s economy and public infrastructure—and the fact that Republicans have been running the state as it has fallen apart. Promising to “take on the corruption that’s raising our costs” and “give power back to the people,” her platform centers on affordability: She’s proposed a tax cut for working families, and lowering energy and medical costs. As her campaign website states, restoring public education is a top priority.
Acton’s background is squarely in Ohio. She paid her own way through Youngstown State, went to an Ohio med school, and taught public health at Ohio State. She is also a relative political novice: Her experience in public office begins and ends with her 16-month stint as the director of Ohio’s Department of Health in 2019 and 2020. Perhaps because of this, she is disarmingly unguarded for a public figure, with an approachable manner and a knack for establishing quick connections with strangers.
Her opponent, the stiff, ruthlessly ambitious former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, could hardly offer a greater contrast. An alum of Harvard and Yale, Ramaswamy is recognized primarily for his achievements outside the state. He is a Cincinnati-born hedge-fund billionaire who also founded a pharmaceutical startup that netted millions by exploiting the buzz around an Alzheimer’s drug that ultimately failed clinical trials. Later, he was tapped to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, with Elon Musk, but around the time of Trump’s inauguration, he left to pursue the Ohio governorship.
“Ramaswamy is particularly inept and he’s particularly terrible,” said Nan Whaley, who ran as the state’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee four years ago. He is, moreover, untested as an Ohio candidate, having waltzed to his party’s nomination thanks to Trump’s backing. “I think that’s a statement on where the Republican Party is today, right?” Whaley said.
Ramaswamy may be the perfect foil for the personable Acton: As she’s crisscrossed the state in her Ohio- and union-made Jeep, she’s taken the opportunity to remind her audiences that Ramaswamy travels via private jet. Comparatively, in a state where 12.7 percent of residents live in poverty, her own backstory of hardship may resonate more. Mix in many Ohioans’ parasocial relationship with her since her wildly public-facing role at the beginning of the pandemic, and she has a real shot at breaking Democrats’ long drought in the state.
Because her past exposure to the public was limited to Covid response and prevention, Acton has the advantage of being a bit of a blank slate: likable, empathetic, and not a “typical politician.”
Acton aims to build a coalition around the basic policies she often estimates “95 percent of Ohioans talk about … that no one would disagree on.” Because her past exposure to the public was limited to Covid response and prevention, Acton has the advantage of being a bit of a blank slate: likable, empathetic, and not a “typical politician.” But as Election Day approaches, she’s become more prone to the calculations and tough, often controversial calls that are symptomatic of high-stakes campaigning—at times to the dismay of some of her biggest supporters.
While conditions nationally are now as fraught as Ohio’s have been for generations, Acton’s path—and voters’ response—may have long-standing implications for the Democratic Party. Indeed, depending on the outcome, her campaign may offer a blueprint for how Democrats can keep their coalitions together while running in competitive races, especially in the Midwest.
Acton’s political trajectory started during the anxious early period of the pandemic. Most Ohioans got to know her during her time advising Republican Governor Mike DeWine from 2019 to 2020. Under Acton’s guidance, on March 12, 2020, DeWine was the first governor in the country to order state schools to close in hopes of curbing the virus’s spread. Proactive communicators, DeWine and Acton hosted daily afternoon press conferences. “Wine With DeWine” or “Snackin’ With Acton” became an early-lockdown ritual. Someone started a Facebook fan club for Acton. There were bobblehead dolls.
Inevitably, Acton also faced backlash and threats of violence from those angry about lockdown. Protesters—some carrying long guns, and including at least one member of the Proud Boys—lurked outside her home. In June 2020, Acton resigned after refusing to sign public health orders (pushed by Householder) to permit outdoor fairs when businesses were just reopening and hospitals were stabilizing, but she continued advising DeWine.
The Ramaswamy campaign used Acton’s public health role as ammunition: In just six weeks, while Acton spent $100,000 on ads, Ramaswamy swamped Ohio with $9 million in ads. His political action committee, V-PAC, spent or reserved $82.3 million for ads that largely attack Acton, lambasting her leadership during the pandemic, alleging she would be soft on crime, and misconstruing a 1994 medical disclosure form in which, one ad claimed, she “admitted to emotional or mental illness, drug addiction, or an alcohol problem”—actually a reference to therapy for her childhood abuse. Acton’s campaign, meanwhile, has pounced on various missteps: In 2024, Ramaswamy called Medicare and Medicaid a mistake, “particularly Medicaid.” (The latter helps cover health care for about a quarter of the state’s population.) That same year, Ramaswamy moved his financial services company from Columbus to Texas. In a March Columbus Dispatch column, Ramaswamy suggested consolidating public universities to “right-size” Ohio’s education system—a position received poorly in a state with a lot of pride in its public universities.
Indeed, Ramaswamy sometimes sounds almost contemptuous of his would-be constituents. In July, he got booed offstage at a Young Americans for Liberty National Convention at Xavier University in his hometown, after claiming the real divide in America is not based on party, but between people who want to win and people who want to whine. As boos and jeers intensified, Ramaswamy hit back that, no matter what happens, “people in my generation have already made it. We’re gonna be fine. It’s gonna be your generation … that pays the price.” The room exploded in cursing and calls to “get the fuck outta here.”
Meanwhile, Acton has held a slim lead in most of the summer’s polls, even as Ramaswamy’s spending blitz increased. At the end of July, Steve Bannon commented, “Vivek is a terrible candidate to have at the top of the ticket,” and said Ramaswamy was dragging down Republican Senator Jon Husted, who is running for reelection against Democrat (and former Senator) Sherrod Brown.
It’s tempting to surmise that Acton’s campaign is succeeding primarily because Ramaswamy is such a poor candidate, but that’s only part of the story. The economic desperation in Ohio is real and long-standing, and her empathetic approach is tapping into people’s desperation to be heard.
Acton practically doubles as an oral historian on campaign stops, gathering stories from across Ohio, in a circuit of roundtable listening sessions with voters describing their experiences during the Covid lockdown. Or about their struggle to pay bills. Or about babies born roadside due to rural hospitals’ collapse.
Acton listened again in downtown Dayton at 6888 Kitchen Incubator, a women-, minority-, and veteran-led hub for underrepresented food entrepreneurs housed in the over century-old Dayton Arcade. Dabriah Rice, 6888’s executive director, and Jamaica White, chief operating officer, gave Acton and her staff a tour and then gathered over bounteous food samples. The conversation turned to finances. “It seems like there’s no catching up, regardless of how hard you try,” said Gia Daugherty Houston, 6888’s catering manager.
“That stress goes somewhere,” Acton said to a round of mm-hmms of assent. She described hearing from women business owners who previously helped their employees using the Affordable Care Act, but the subsidies expired. Acton also mentioned that her husband, Eric Acton, a teacher, “has to keep working while I’m running for governor, so we have health insurance.” Acton told the entrepreneurs that she wants to replicate an Illinois medical debt–reduction program, where a $10 million investment resulted in $1.1 billion in forgiven medical debt.
As the general election began to heat up in July, Acton began to stake out more moderate positions on issues involving law enforcement and trans rights, wading into more controversial policies that could win over centrists and Republicans. It’s not new for Democrats from red regions to break with the party—Dems from rural areas often swing conservative on gun rights; Midwestern officials may protect fossil fuel companies in the name of jobs. Most Ohioans only know Acton’s name because of her close work with a Republican administration. She tells voters, “I don’t care what party you are.”
In August, Acton broke with many in her own party to support a Republican-proposed amendment that would enshrine the state’s existing voter ID law in Ohio’s constitution. Later that month, after receiving the Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association endorsement, Acton was asked about ICE and said, “We always work with the federal law enforcement.” She said she would not prevent local law enforcement from assisting with immigration raids. Many headlines missed her caveat that federal agents would have to follow the law. But the campaign promise falls flat at a time when Springfield’s Haitian population and the city itself are under siege by ICE.
Then there was a response she gave to the Toledo Blade in July about trans athletes’ participation in youth sports. Acton said, “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports. This is already settled law in Ohio, and as governor I will enforce and uphold the law.”
To LGTBQ+ advocates, hearing Acton describe trans girls as “boys” sounded like diminishing a vulnerable group for political ends. The situation worsened when Acton’s campaign invited state LGTBQ+ leaders to a “conversation”—presumably to patch things up—but Acton wasn’t in the online meeting. Trans leaders, including Ohio House candidate Arienne Childrey, were denied entry, and the meeting rapidly devolved into, as one participant described it, “a shit show.” Since the interview, Acton’s score on LGTBQ+ rights from The Buckeye Flame, a nonprofit newsroom focused on LGTBQ+ issues in the state, has gone from “A” to “pending.” (Ramaswamy, who asserts biological sex and gender are fixed and opposes gender-affirming care, received an “F” from The Buckeye Flame.)
When I asked Acton about her Blade comment, she framed the uproar as an attempt to use settled law to distract and divide, and a “sad part of political season.” But the controversy has rankled many in the queer community, and disappointed many of those for whom Acton’s pledge to “see” all of her constituents for who they are had resonated. Lee Tepper, board chair of Kaleidoscope Youth Center, Ohio’s oldest and largest youth center serving queer young people, is pragmatic. “We are not in a system that is going to offer us a choice that’s gonna feel good in every dimension. We’re going to have to sacrifice.” I could hear the restrained sigh in Tepper’s voice when they added, “But that doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice people, right?”
Whaley, now president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio, sees Acton’s comments as a reflection of the state. (Seventy percent of Ohioans oppose transgender girls playing on female sports teams.) “We have a lot of work to do to change hearts and minds,” Whaley told me.
“She’s way, way better on trans issues than Vivek Ramaswamy,” Whaley added. It’s hard to argue with her there.
At the same time, her campaign has also attracted national attention for unsettling reasons. Over Labor Day weekend, an armed man, Patrick Havas, attempted to rush Acton at the Canfield County Fair, injuring multiple spectators before being apprehended by the Ohio State Highway Patrol. Acton was not hurt and, in fact, treated some of those who had been pushed down. Havas is the brother of Andrew Havas, a state lobbyist who resigned from Husted’s campaign after an NBC report detailed his 2009 conviction for sexual misconduct with a minor. Ramaswamy’s campaign issued a statement after the assault attempt, condemning political violence, just as Ohio’s Republican Party amplified a conspiracy theory, spread by far-Right provocateur Laura Loomer, that the incident was exaggerated or fake.
In a nation polarized by culture wars, such controversies remain commonplace. Yet Jessica Taylor, Senate and governors editor of The Cook Political Report, recently cited Acton’s campaign as one that is breaking with her party’s expected norms. “It goes back to the idea that Democrats just need to come across as normal and not woke,” Taylor told The New York Times.
What’s “normal” is, of course, up for debate. In Ohio, for a long time, it has meant struggle, unresponsive leadership, and corruption. Acton has pulled ahead by asserting that she can fix what ails it. “I’ve been on the ground for about two and a half years now,” she told me. “I go places Dems have not been in a long time.”
Cynics may see Acton’s recent maneuvers as mere political theater. Some supporters now worry she is Republican-lite. But an optimistic progressive Democrat might consider Acton the state’s best shot for something different, finally.
Don’t Knock Kevin Warsh if the Fed Doesn’t Raise Interest Rates
The Federal Reserve’s Open Markets Committee, or FOMC, meets September 15 and 16 to decide whether to raise interest rates, lower interest rates, or leave them the same. I suspect Fed Chair Kevin Warsh will leave them the same. If he does so, the business press will portray that as a craven surrender to President Donald Trump. But if you think, as I do, that the August jobs report was a fluke, then leaving rates where they are is a good call.
The two factors likeliest to drive the Fed decision are job creation and inflation. Let’s start with jobs. As I pointed out on the eve of Labor Day, the labor market has been weak. During the 12 months preceding July 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, reported that the average number of jobs created was 31,000. BLS logged 63,000 jobs created in May, 31,000 in June, and 21,000 in July. Then, in August, BLS reported that job creation suddenly jumped to 162,000. If the previous slowdown in job growth really reversed itself that dramatically in August, then yes, that’s a strong argument for Warsh to raise interest rates. But did it?
Explanations offered thus far for why the dwindling-jobs trend abruptly transformed into a robust-job-creation trend have not been persuasive. For example, The New York Times’s Sydney Ember said the August job gains “come at a time of broader economic resilience, marked by strong corporate profits and vigorous capital investments spurred by A.I.” But corporate profits and capital investments in AI were similarly strong in May, June, and July, when job growth was declining. Why didn’t job creation take off then? The biggest August jobs increase was the 62,000 jobs created in the leisure and hospitality industry, which lost 21,000 jobs in July. Did everybody put off their vacations this year until August? Not according to the Leisure and Travel Association, which says travel spending and room demand were fairly robust in July.
I’m not suggesting any sort of conspiracy. I don’t think the Trump administration tampered with the jobs statistics; that’s actually quite difficult to do. But Trump has taken a meat cleaver to all federal statistical agencies, making it much harder for them to their jobs well. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles the jobs numbers, has about 20 percent fewer staff since Trump’s second term began, according to a recent report by the American Statistical Association. That’s bound to affect performance.
“BLS,” the American Statistical Association report said, “has not had the funding increases necessary to modernize its core surveys that measure critical indicators on jobs, unemployment, prices, and expenditures.” As a consequence, BLS surveys are becoming less reliable. Notably, response rates to the BLS’s monthly establishment survey are falling. This is the survey that supplies the agency’s job-growth numbers. One result is larger after-the-fact revisions than in the past.
When there’s a big one-month swing in the jobs numbers, as there was in August, it isn’t crazy to wonder whether some big adjustment in the other direction lies ahead. Commenting on the August jobs report on CNBC, Wendy Edelberg, former chief economist at the Congressional Budget Office, said: “I think that these strong payroll numbers are absolutely going to get revised down. I think we don’t have the population growth to support this kind of payroll growth.” A more likely job-creation number for August, Edelberg said, was 20,000 jobs, and “maybe zero.”
Let’s move on to inflation. The Consumer Price Index, or CPI, is another statistic compiled by the beleaguered BLS. Last year the agency cut back on its data collection for calculating CPI. “When the government can’t collect data on prices,” Ben Casselman explained in The New York Times, “it has to fill in the gaps with a statistical technique called ‘imputation.’ The more data that must be imputed, the less reliable the overall numbers become.”
The August BLS inflation report showed the Consumer Price Index climbed to 3.4 percent in August. We have less reason to doubt that than we do BLS’s August jobs nuimber, because we know that the Iran war has been driving up the price of oil. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that in August the price of gasoline was up 27 percent over the previous year. But “core inflation” (i.e., inflation minus food and energy) rose a manageable 2.4 percent over the previous 12 months. Democratic politicians should still shout from the rooftops that the CPI is higher now than it was when Trump took office (2.8 percent CPI), and that the price of gasoline actually fell during Biden’s last year in office. Trump richly deserves such abuse because during the 2024 election Trump went around saying, untruthfully, that Biden unleashed “the highest inflation perhaps in the history of our country.”
But core inflation is lower today than when Trump entered office, and the Fed tends to make its decisions based on core inflation. As it happens, the Fed’s preferred metric is not the CPI at all but the Commerce Department’s Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Price Index, which shows both broad-based inflation and core inflation mostly falling lately (though the latest calculation goes only through July; August may tell a different story). The PCE percentages (3.7 percent for all items, 3.3 percent for core inflation) are higher than the CPI percentages, but if these didn’t prompt the Fed to raise interest rates during the past year (it has not, in fact, raised rates since July 2023), then it’s hard to see why the Fed should raise rates this week.
The best argument for a rate hike is that it might cool the bond markets, which pushed up 10-year Treasury bills to 5 percent on Monday. But would that really do the trick? Although the bond market is worried about inflation, it’s much more worried about the budget deficit, about which Trump can be counted on to do fuck-all.
If you think I’m letting Warsh off easy, I am not. He will still get crap from Trump for not lowering interest rates, which is what that madman wants. Also, this is not the last Fed decision on interest rates prior to the midterms. The FOMC will convene again on October 27 and 28. If my analysis here proves wrong—if the next jobs report, on October 2, confirms a two-month trend of 100,000-plus jobs created, and if the next PCE report, on September 30, shows core inflation rising significantly—then yes, Warsh will probably be well advised to raise interest rates. It will be the worst possible time so far as Republican congressional candidates are concerned. If Warsh did raise interest rates next month, Trump might try to fire Warsh and replace him with his economic yes-man, Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council. But the lunacy of such a spectacle would boost Democrats in the midterms. Almost everything Trump does seems to have that effect.
The Real Reason Obama’s Harsh Warning to Dems About AI Is So Unnerving
Barack Obama has a private warning for Democrats: They badly need to grab hold of the debate over artificial intelligence, and quick. “I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation,” Obama told a roomful of party donors and lawmakers last week, suggesting that a Democratic-controlled House should be ready to act next year. Given that AI is “moving very fast in private hands,” he warned, inaction now could be “dangerous.”
Obama’s admonition—along with growing fears among AI scientists that unchecked AI development poses existential threats to humanity—seems to have jolted Democrats, unleashing fresh resolve to find the right AI message for the midterms. But I think Obama’s intervention raises a deeper question: What should Democrats really stand for on all this?
I can pinpoint at least three ways that Democrats—with some exceptions—aren’t, as of now, meeting this moment. They aren’t sufficiently harnessing public anger over AI data centers to argue for a clean-energy future. They aren’t stamping themselves as the only party that wants AI’s gains broadly shared in a truly egalitarian way. And they aren’t talking enough about Donald Trump’s role in all of it.
Let’s take the last one first. As Paul Krugman writes, Trump is at the center of this whole sordid story. The short version: as president, Joe Biden signed an executive order calling for a society-wide effort by government, the private sector and civil society to both mitigate the risks and harness AI’s great benefits. But Trump ripped it up and installed a breakneck deregulatory posture, because it’s supposedly necessary to compete with China.
What’s more, Trump himself has flatly dismissed concerns over AI’s extinction-level threat, which he reiterated in crazed tirades on Monday. As Krugman notes, Trump’s coziness with tech titans and his hatred of corporate regulation have produced a deeply reckless stance: “Damn the social and existential risks, full speed ahead.”
There’s another overlooked aspect to all this, however. It’s that Trump is currently using federal agencies to facilitate the development of AI data centers in ways that already harm the public. His Environmental Protection Agency is moving to change federal regulations to make it harder for local communities to get wind of planned data centers before construction starts to frustrate counter-organizing. Trump’s EPA is also weakening other regulations over the data-center permitting process and the gas plants that power them. His Justice Department is actively siding with data-center developers—including Elon Musk—against community lawsuits.
Here again, Trump has snidely dismissed public concerns, insisting that communities who resist data centers will end up “backwards and poor.” Democrats could highlight all this agency activity, but they mostly aren’t. “Democrats can win votes in every corner of the country if they promise their majority will block Trump’s use of the DOJ and EPA as a goon squad to crush local opposition to data centers,” Jesse Lee, senior adviser to the advocacy group Climate Power, tells me.
This doesn’t mean Democrats must absolutely oppose any more data centers no matter what. Some Democrats can back moratoriums; others might not want to. It just means that Democrats can tell voters help is coming: If they win Congress, they will try to stop Trump from using federal agencies to grease the way for tech companies to steamroll them.
True, some Democrats have been running ads against data centers. But most of them—see here and here—treat this as largely a NIMBY issue, stressing higher electricity rates and corrupt local government. A memo circulating among Democratic operatives advises House candidates to tie data centers to corruption and high energy costs, with no mention of Trump’s role in any of it.
I get why Democrats are stressing the NIMBY angle: It’s concrete, tangible, and clear. As tech journalist Jasmine Sun told Substacker Derek Thompson about her reporting on the data-center rebellion, many people do understand this issue in such narrow terms. But there’s an opportunity here to enlarge the scope of the discussion, by connecting data centers to Trumpian oligarchy—both of which are deeply unpopular—in one broader message. As the group Guardrails Action has advised Democrats, public opinion on AI is unusually fluid. So it might be time to attempt bigger arguments.
After all, with data centers already commanding intense public attention, Trump’s smoothing of the process for them opens a window on his effort to facilitate runaway AI development for his corporate cronies in a much broader sense. These are one and the same story. Putting this Trump-oligarch alliance at the center of that story—and linking it to what people see and feel in their own communities—seems like a winner.
Yes, some candidates might fear invoking Trump could trigger negative partisanship among red-leaning voters who are gettable on this issue. But Trump is underwater everywhere, so invoking him is worth considering even in swingy areas. Aaron Rupar flagged this moment from Senator Jon Ossoff—who’s seeking reelection in very-swingy Georgia—in which he did this to good effect:
Ossoff: "On day one, Donald Trump rescinded the AI safety order meant to guard against catastrophic risks, including the engineering of bioweapons. Meanwhile, Don Jr's 1789 Capital bought big money stakes in data centers and AI labs ... President Trump is compromised" pic.twitter.com/ARTCSRI0ea
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 13, 2026That’s potent stuff. It captures an observation from Brian Beutler: If there’s good reason to fear AI, it’s in part because of the “devil’s bargain” many tech titans made with Trump. They struck it when his authoritarian power seemed unchallengeable. This itself shows they can’t be trusted with our future. Neither they nor Trump can be. Democrats should tell voters this, because…it’s the plain truth, and they need to know it.
Which brings us to the other themes Democrats should hit. Data-center mania has made voters unusually sensitive to elite self-enrichment via manipulation of public processes. So why not bring in clean energy where appropriate?
For some Democrats, this election won’t be the place to do this. But voters seem unusually tuned into the enormous volume of energy that will be needed to fuel any AI future, and into how oligarchic corruption is streamrolling local democratic aspirations. This comes, as Bill McKibben often notes, even as the Iran war and extreme weather horrors are heightening public awareness of our overreliance on fossil fuels, how it enriches petro-oligarchs, and the continued cheapening of alternative energy. Soon enough it will be time to seize the moment to talk about how to move toward powering the AI future we actually want with sun and wind.
Which leads, finally, to the distributional component. In the face of rising fears of AI-driven mass joblessness and exacerbated inequality, Matt Bruenig points out at The Argument that we already have policy tools at the ready to ensure a broadly equitable distribution amid the AI boom. These include socializing some tech profits, doling out dividends to the public from a government-owned investment fund, higher taxes on corporations, expanding the welfare state, and so forth. A more stable, more egalitarian transition is within our reach if we want it.
Perhaps some Democrats disagree with this or that specific idea. But just about every Democrat wants to ensure that the gains of this transition—including whatever major advances it inspires in medicine and other fields—are very broadly shared. Republicans are scrambling to get in sync with public anger by backing some regulation of data centers, and maybe some Republicans sincerely want to act against an AI apocalypse. But there’s zero reason to believe the GOP overall, as a party, has above-board long-term distributional intentions here. Trump has made gestures in the direction of a fairer distribution of tech profits, but he’s also a corrupt liar who’s overseen a very large upward redistribution of wealth, so believe that when you see it.
Now ask yourself: How much current Democratic Party messaging will leave the public aware that it’s far more serious than the opposition about achieving a broadly egalitarian distribution of the fruits of what will be the biggest technological transformation of our lifetimes—and much more devoted to securing truly shared mass improvements in human welfare from it?
In a subsequent statement about his warning, Obama called for a “democratic conversation” about AI’s future, adding: “Whether this technology results in amazing breakthroughs in medicine, energy and education or unleashes huge economic disruptions, greater inequality, and potential catastrophe will depend on the choices that we make right now.”
Obama is calling on Democrats to get on the right side of all that. His admonition isn’t just about the dangers of AI. It’s also a warning against an unnerving possibility—that an addiction to political smallball could muddy who stands where on one of the most consequential moral challenges of our time. It’s an exhortation to go bigger—to tell a much more ambitious story about the future we all want, and about how giving Democrats power will help to get us there.
Are Texas Democrats Finally Reaching the Mountaintop?
During Xaq Webb’s years of radical optimism, he thought little of the Texas Democratic Party. It didn’t take a genius to see reforms were needed. At least this was his perspective from the outside—early on as a lowly precinct chair, then working with the Texas contingent of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. But by March 2023, he’d been around the block; maybe it was time to make changes from the inside. He took a job with TDP as “operations director,” a senior-level bureaucrat of bureaucrats, what he called a “catchall” role, which entailed financial processing, campaign compliance reporting, and HR functions. “My estimation [before becoming staff] was that it was a well-functioning organization that was misunderstood,” he told me. “Of course, when I joined, I realized it wasn’t functioning as well as I was led to believe. But I think I was right that it was misunderstood.”
After 2022’s not-so-red-wave midterms, in which Texas Republicans flipped just one of three congressional seats they targeted that cycle, one might have hoped this meant TDP was on the right track. Then came 2024. Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by nearly 14 points in the state, more than double his margin over Joe Biden in 2020. In the aftermath, not unlike insiders at the Democratic National Committee, Webb’s central concern was the debt the party had saddled during the bloodbath. But the bloodbath wasn’t over: Democrats on the outside wanted heads to roll.
For years, reformers had tried and failed to oust TDP chairman Gilberto Hinojosa, a former county judge from the Rio Grande Valley, who held the position for more than a decade. The 2024 backlash forced his resignation. His interim replacement, elected by TDP’s governing board in late March 2025, was Kendall Scudder, a 35-year-old from Sulphur Springs, outside Dallas. He’d previously made a name for himself as TDP’s vice chair for finance. This July, he described himself to me as “a bull in a china shop.”
Webb and his co-workers—the old regime—were the proverbial china. On his first Monday as chairman, Scudder and a couple of consultants entered the Austin office and began interviewing staffers about the organization’s structure. Soon, a Dallas-based employment attorney began visiting, too. There was talk of “belt-tightening” and layoffs. The first to go, on April 7, was Monique Alcala, executive director since August 2023. This blindsided Webb, who had previously been involved in employment decisions. On April 16, he requested a formal clarification of his job description, which he says was never provided. Though his role was technically classified as “management,” his responsibilities had been reduced such that he chose to register with the staff union. He was terminated, and his last day was June 26. Finally, in September, Scudder announced that TDP’s central hub would be moving to Dallas, in addition to creating several satellite offices in Houston, Amarillo, and Eagle Pass, down along the border. The move prompted what The Texas Tribune called an “exodus of top staff.”
Critics claimed the move was intended to bring party operations closer to Scudder’s home base. But to Scudder, this initiative was making good on the promise that TDP would operate differently moving forward. “This is a strategic initiative to increase party presence across the state, and conversations are ongoing about future locations,” he said in a September 2025 press release.
“I knew if I only had one year as chairman, I was going to make it count for something,” Scudder told me, “and all the people who elected me to do something knew exactly what they were electing me to do.” He declined to discuss specific personnel matters, but added, “There was nobody sitting around in Texas thinking, ‘Man, if Dems would just stay the course, we’ll have some really great successes.’” If the party wanted to turn the state blue, the thinking goes, they’d have to leave their creature comforts in Austin and begin anew. (Meanwhile, four of TDP’s top five statewide candidates are from Austin.)
When problems arise, activists on lower rungs of the ladder are quick to blame the nominal leader of the state party, usually for said state party’s lackluster performance, candidates, or platform. But the actual job of a state party chair, like Ken Martin’s with the DNC, is basically infrastructural: administering primaries, data operations, voter registration—yawn. Still, Scudder has taken a more active, front-facing role this time around, presenting himself in media and online as a statewide leader at a time when Texas Democrats, frankly, have none.
The Lone Star State was once a Democratic stronghold, but no Democrat has won a statewide office here since 1994, the longest losing streak of any state party in the United States. Indeed, for the party faithful—a messy coalition of activists, politicians, donors, paraparty groups, and the party organization itself—reclaiming Texas, or at least nudging it toward a true purple, has been their task for more than three decades. And with each attempt to overcome their fate, each promise to reconnect with voters—to tack to the center, coordinate campaigns, build in the off years, win the “argument,” or let changing demographics work their magic—they’ve always seemed to tumble back to where they started.
Some moments have been closer than others: In 2008, they came within two seats of winning a majority in the state House, and Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 Senate run, in which he came less than 3 points away from ousting Ted Cruz, is often still discussed the wistful way one might recall their first beer. Today, with 37-year-old seminarian James Talarico seeking a suddenly open Senate seat, the dream is that he might succeed where Beto failed.
Talarico holds a “slightly stronger position” than O’Rourke in 2018, according to polling by the Texas Politics Project, a nonpartisan research group boasting Texas’s longest-running and most extensive public polling archive. Overall, more voters in April viewed Talarico favorably than said the same of O’Rourke at any time in 2018. Meanwhile, among Republicans, the job approval rate for Talarico’s opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, hovers at a far weaker margin than did Ted Cruz’s—around 59 to Cruz’s 74 percent—largely because Cruz reached the general practically uncontested, while Paxton duked it out with longtime Senator John Cornyn (to say nothing of the numerous scandals that have pockmarked his career).
“The objective evidence is that it looks very close, but as soon as you step away from the Senate race, I think it gets more complicated,” said James Henson, founder and executive director of the Texas Politics Project. “If you look at the margins in the other statewide races that we poll, particularly in the governor’s race, the Republican advantage in those races is between 5 and 7 points, with [Republican Governor Greg] Abbott at 5 points in our August polling.” Abbott—and, as of mid-January, his more than $105 million war chest—is the Texas Republicans’ center of gravity. If Democrats can make the other statewide races (especially the governor’s) more competitive, Abbott may have to adjust his plans to spend heavily helping downballot Republicans, which would send cascading effects around the state. (In late August, his campaign planned to pour $65 million into upwards of “31 target seats” between now and Election Day, according to The Texas Bullpen.)
Thus, in some small way, part of that Sisyphean task has fallen on Scudder’s lap. The Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate, state Representative Gina Hinojosa (daughter of former chairman Hinojosa), is campaigning fiercely but on a comparatively lean budget, meaning the Democrats’ $30 million coordinated campaign infrastructure—a collaboration between TDP; O’Rourke’s Powered by People PAC; the Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee; and Texas Majority PAC, a George Soros–backed vehicle with exceedingly deep coffers—will have to pull some weight.
It’s dull, logistical work: pooling resources to help with overhead costs, negotiating with vendors, building a “data hub,” centralizing volunteer operations. Compared to the other partnered entities, TDP is far less fiscally healthy and often dismissed by electeds, who have grown used to enduring a useless political organization from a bygone age. But TDP has a grand and terrible history, the kind that lives fitfully in the present. Within this year’s coordinated campaign structure, it stands alone as an entity represented by grassroots-elected party delegates, after all.
Democrats have been promised a new era for their party before; this is neither the first coordinated campaign nor the first chairman with big plans, and looking to history for easy solutions to present-day problems can be its own kind of snake oil. Still, Texas is projected to gain around four congressional seats by 2030, only a handful away from surpassing California. If Democrats are to remain relevant nationally, they’ll need to figure out how to win Texas—or at least some of it—whether they’d like to or not.
Maybe it goes without saying that every political party also entails a battle over who it’s “for.” “A political party is an organized attempt to get control of the government,” as political scientist E.E. Schattschneider once wrote, and for the majority of TDP’s history, it was an organized attempt to keep landowning Anglos in charge. Democrats, nationally, began taking interest in Texas before it gained statehood in December 1845, largely out of self-interest—to ensure another slave state entered the fold (the president at the time, James K. Polk, was a Southerner who aggressively sought to expand slavery). And after the Civil War, it was Texas Democrats who snuffed out the promise of Reconstruction, forming a true one-party state by and for white conservatives and (sometimes) white liberals.
It would last, through racial terror and political co-optation, into the 1970s. The governor was TDP’s “chief executive”—further melding it with the state machinery—and mandatory “loyalty” pledges were sometimes required to quell dissent or purge “bolters” (Democrats who voted for another party’s candidate). In the Rio Grande Valley, party bosses would sometimes pay voters’ poll taxes, but only if it suited them politically. As David Griscom recently showed in The Myth of Red Texas: Cowboys, Populism, and Class War in the Radical South, the populist movement was born in Texas, and later, its Socialist Party was among the largest in the country. Democrats killed both—the former by stripping its policy platform for parts, the latter through good old-fashioned state repression.
As a result, TDP was the “big tent” of trust and antitrust, farmer and banker, lumber baron and union employee. There was some debate as to whether a one-party state was in fact a multiparty structure, because many factions lived inside the TDP. And in 1901, after the discovery of oil at Spindletop, near Beaumont in East Texas, it became the party of Big Oil, too.
That alliance translated into federal political power. By the 1930s, any legislation dealing with agriculture and rural electrification, defense, the judiciary, financial regulation, and commerce could be approved or killed in committee by a Texas Democrat. For example, one oil lobbyist bragged that, on Washington’s Birthday in 1935, Texas Democrats had managed to pass a bill consolidating their state’s control over the petroleum trade—from committee through the Oval Office—in a single day. He told The Dallas Morning News that he’d never seen D.C. move that fast, “especially on a holiday.” As a bloc, they initially embraced the New Deal, but on their terms, siphoning hundreds of millions in federal dollars to their home state while demanding “sovereignty” from the feds, largely to protect their whites-only electorate and the oil industry. As political scientist V.O. Key Jr. wrote in 1949: “Texas has developed the most bitter intra-Democratic fight along New Deal and anti–New Deal lines in the South.” In 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt lamented that Texans were “running the government of the United States more largely than any other state.”
FDR was enormously popular among regular Texans, but the New Deal’s reforms proved loathsome to the state’s political elite—particularly within the energy sector, which was happy to accept federal support but, as ever, hostile to regulations. When FDR captured the nomination for his third presidential term in 1940, a contingent of Texas oilmen and financiers, who had been propelled to global dominance by the New Deal regime, turned against TDP and supported the Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie; Roosevelt later remarked that his well-moneyed critics “should be asked directly just which of the remedies” that “Dr. New Deal” had prescribed should be “taken away from the patient.”
The World War II economy would double down on this dynamic: Industry was booming, and many Texans benefited from Democratic rule, largely through federal largesse, but with greater wealth came greater means to protect it. (Oil-rich Houston became known as the “city the Depression missed.”) At the same time, increased industry meant increased labor union activity—which was, for conservatives, a racially coded issue. Texas Democrats had outright banned nonwhite participation in Democratic primaries in 1923, but in 1944, the NAACP under Thurgood Marshall had won a Supreme Court case repealing the Texas law. Now, if Latino farmers along the Rio Grande or Black oil workers on the Gulf Coast could demand pay parity and protections on the job, what would stop them from pushing for representation in government?
Texas’s FDR-aligned activists were mostly quiet about race at this juncture, fearing that a backlash would push them further from the halls of power. But while that contingent strengthened its relationships with national liberal groups, Texas’s plutocrats curried favor with the nation’s conservative movement. In 1948, oil magnate Hugh Roy Cullen organized a rally in Houston for Strom Thurmond’s segregationist presidential campaign; Cullen was also the largest individual donor to U.S. politicians in 1952 and 1954. Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy, architect of the Red Scare, made frequent fundraising trips to Texas, including to Dallas—among the first areas where Texas Republicans saw gains—and was known as “Texas’s third U.S. senator.” Democratic Governor Allan Shivers, an ally to the oil industry, once even presented McCarthy with a “certificate” of Texas citizenship, along with a $6,000 Cadillac.
Meanwhile, Texas governors began formalizing their influence on TDP to quash local enemies and buck the national party. In 1950, for instance, Governor Shivers purged the party’s governing board and stacked it with so-called Shivercrats. Then he (and the party organization) “bolted”—exactly what generations of Democrats had worked to avoid—endorsing Republican Dwight Eisenhower for president. The next governor, Price Daniel, fostered the idea of “institutionalizing” the party, enlarging the staff headquarters in Austin (he hired the first executive director, a Shivers alum) to serve as “unofficial right arm” in his political and legislative matters, including political appointments. (Most of the executive committee and state party officers were the governor’s major donors.)
TDP’s liberal faction valiantly fought the conservative establishment during those years. Frankie Carter Randolph, the daughter of a lumber baron, helped bankroll an ecosystem of grassroots organizations—including the Texas Observer, the beating heart of Texas liberalism—which allied with labor and civil rights groups. (“De facto Mrs. Randolph was the publisher, whether de jure I was or not,” Ronnie Dugger, the Observer’s founding editor, told an interviewer in 1970.) Randolph also supported Ralph Yarborough, a New Deal liberal who ran for governor against Shivers twice and became a senator in 1957, relying on the Rooseveltian coalition that much of TDP spurned.
Yarborough feuded with much of Texas’s establishment, including his fellow senator at the time, Lyndon B. Johnson. The prevailing view among Texas liberals was that LBJ couldn’t be trusted. But going into the 1960s, the future vice president cannily secured the support of the liberal and loyalist (as opposed to conservative) wings of the party. Randolph and Dugger argued bitterly over her support for LBJ at the time; in Dugger’s view, “Johnson’s kind of power is an opportunist power that abandons the poor when his own career’s at stake and reverts to the cause of the poor when it’s useful to his career…. Amoral. Occasionally with moral results.”
Party formalization was a major step toward today’s professionalized party operations, and the civil rights era further pushed the party toward an administrative, rather than political, role. The goal, of course, was to ensure proportional representation among its members. Power within the Democratic Party had historically trickled upward from the states, because state parties chose how to select their delegates in presidential years. After its disastrous 1968 convention in Chicago, the Democratic National Committee created the McGovern-Fraser Commission, which eventually outlined reforms “opening” the nomination process. As political scientist Daniel Schlozman recently wrote, “State parties lost their most important job, and the DNC began to oversee the elaborate rules that translate primaries and caucuses into delegates at the national convention.”
To John Bryant, the two-time Texas state rep, this was “where we became a real, actual Democratic Party.” He joined in 1968, as a college student, after witnessing the liberal delegation at TDP’s state convention walk out in protest over proportional representation. But former Governor Preston Smith, a conservative Democrat who held the office from 1969 to 1973, disagreed, telling one researcher, “If the McGovern reforms had not been passed, we wouldn’t have a Republican Governor today.” In other words, opening up the party portended white conservatives’ drift to the GOP.
There’s some truth to both claims. The plutocrats who’d long steered TDP had no real interest in democracy, and for the first time in state history, TDP had adopted internal rules mandating democratic representation. Liberal organizers had gone from passively hoping demographic changes would flip the party in their direction (prefiguring the 2010s’ “demographics as destiny” refrain) to performing the slow, heroic, precinct-to-precinct work of party-building. But because state parties no longer mattered much, and TDP could no longer structurally guarantee a local decision-making monopoly, conservative financiers eventually sought partners elsewhere.
The most common explanation for Texas’s current blood-red makeup is that civil rights reforms killed the Democratic Party. They certainly played a role in its demise, but there were cracks in the foundation well before the 1960s, and it took until the 1990s for the party to truly crumble. So, what of the intervening years?
Although Republicans were making modest gains, TDP was still strong for most of the 1970s. The Democratic governor retained the power to select the party chairman, but the state committee and its officers were elected through delegates, representing a larger constituency than ever before. In this period, the party played an active role in recruiting and elevating Black and Latino candidates to Congress and the state legislature. “It became a much more diverse operation,” said Jim Hightower, a former Yarborough staffer and self-described populist who, as agriculture commissioner from 1983 to 1991, was one of the Texas Democrats’ last statewide officeholders. He added that “the party itself became more important” for brokering deals among candidates and developing statewide slates, though one researcher noted that elected officials’ participation within the state party apparatus had begun to decline.
Meanwhile, the electorate was changing. Within the next few decades, Texas went from a majority rural state to one of the most heavily urbanized in the country. As the Rust Belt, well, rusted, the 1970s oil boom brought tens of thousands of residents from other states in search of work (out-of-state workers, it’s worth mentioning, without generational ties to TDP). At the same time, automation hit the oil and shipping industries, sending shock waves through the unionized faction of the party, and the suburbs sprawled, creating segregated enclaves for the white-collar middle class.
Political majorities are constructed—they don’t materialize out of thin air. But coalitions, “built around increasingly obsolescent combinations of trade and labor, decay,” wrote Thomas Ferguson, research director at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. And in their place, new coalitions arise. This new coalition of oilfield wildcatters and white-collar middle managers was primed to vote Republican.
Members of the Texas GOP may have had the wind at their backs, but their dominance wasn’t preordained. Their genius in this era was their ability to meld their donors’ country club proclivities with regular people’s frustrations surrounding a frequently corrupt 100-year-old regime. (One might even call it a “popular front.”) Matters only got worse in 1978, after Democrats suffered an upset loss in the governor’s race. For the first time since Reconstruction, a Republican—the oil entrepreneur Bill Clements—held the “crown jewel” of Texas politics, meaning for the first time in history, TDP’s chairman would not be chosen by the governor. TDP’s foremost attachment to the state was finally severed.
Bob Slagle, a boisterous, gum-chewing attorney and former Lyndon B. Johnson staffer, was the first independently elected party chairman in TDP’s history. He held the position, which had no salary, from 1980 to 1995—three years longer than Scudder’s predecessor, Gilberto Hinojosa—and his tenure basically marked the peak of true two-party competition in Texas. He soon parted ways with his executive director, Garry Mauro, who went on to serve four terms as Texas land commissioner (Mauro was also first to computerize TDP’s voter lists). “For the first three-quarters of this century,” Slagle wrote in a 1990 campaign letter, “only rarely did a Chairman acknowledge the interest of the party itself or that of any Democratic candidate or officeholder other than the Governor.” True to his LBJ roots, Slagle capably occupied the center lane, coordinating candidate slates representing folks from his left to his right, “the radicals with the establishment,” as Hightower told me. He was a champion for voter registration programs and played a major role in redistricting fights, supporting the creation of minority opportunity districts. The hope was that the party could become a vehicle for all of its members—at least nominally following the “big tent” strategy of the New Deal era.
As leaders the world over recently learned, holding onto power amid a historic economic crisis—in Texas’s case, the 1980s oil crash—is no small feat, and Texas Democrats, during the Reagan Revolution, maintained control over most statewide offices and the legislature. At the same time, however, TDP suffered a “record number of defections to the Republican Party,” per the Texas Observer, indicating the steady groundwork the GOP was focused on at the time. As David Griscom writes, “The GOP built a sizable and influential organization, encouraging grassroots supporters, women, and young people inspired by Ronald Reagan to do much of the party’s” spadework. In essence, they followed Frankie Carter Randolph’s precinct-by-precinct model of change.
Randolph died in 1972, “tired and pretty much withdrawn,” as Dugger once said, having watched the nationwide reaction to the Vietnam War, and “the discovery by the American personality that something more than ordinary electoral politics was going to be necessary to reform the system.” And while the party had opened up, the relative decline in officeholders’ participation in intraparty politics meant that, paradoxically, Slagle faced few tests against his leadership. The irony was that Texas underwent democratization at a moment when both parties were hollowing out, becoming more of a tool for moving money and aggregating data than a functional part of civic life.
Nineteen ninety-four—the year George W. Bush was elected governor, ousting liberal Democrat Ann Richards—was bad enough. But by 2003, Republicans held both legislative chambers and every executive office in the state. And with this newfound majority, they redrew the congressional maps and ensured their supremacy for decades to come. All told, Texas had maintained true two-party competition for about as long as Family Guy has been on TV.
Once again, heads had to roll, and Slagle’s tenure, much like Hinojosa’s in 2024, came to a rather unceremonious end. Rumors swirled of his ouster and potential replacements, and in June 1995, Slagle announced his intention to step aside at next year’s convention. Around three months later, several prominent statewide Democrats decided they’d waited long enough. They published an open letter calling for his resignation “in order that we may all begin planning for the future.”
Slagle refused, saying he didn’t believe there was a consensus among the “rank-and-file party leaders,” and adding that it would be wrong for statewide electeds to “impose” a new chairman. “There certainly appears to be a consensus on Mr. Slagle,” said Bob Bullock, the Democratic lieutenant governor at the time, and one of the letter’s signatories. By December, Bullock and several other elected officials got their pick for the next chairman: former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Bill White, who’d proved himself a prolific fundraiser during Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. When push came to shove, the electeds still got their way—even as they distanced themselves from the party’s other operations.
Among the Democratic operatives I spoke to who were active at the time, there were varying theories about what happened. Democrats “decided to abandon grassroots campaigning,” Hightower said, while John Bryant blamed the insidious rise of Fox News. But to Glen Maxey, a Texas state legislator from 1991 to 2003 and TDP’s legislative director in the 2010s, “The Texas Democratic Party killed itself.” The story, to him, came down to data, and which party modernized first. In Red State: An Insider’s Story of How the GOP Came to Dominate Texas Politics, Wayne Thorburn, formerly the Texas GOP’s executive director, wrote that “the expansion of the Republican organization and candidate recruitment combined with the weakness of the Democratic organization” led to the collapse of two-party competition. Karl Rove, the state’s dominant political consultant of the era, mastered a micro-macro voter targeting system: direct mail aimed at micro-constituencies with a common interest and a voting history, and fomenting mass media hysterics to draw the general public’s attention to his client.
“Texas is a huge state. It costs millions of dollars to maintain voter files for all 254 counties,” Maxey said. At the time, groups had to go county by county to acquire and develop those records, but to save money (large donors increasingly aligned with the state GOP), they “were only going into the swing districts across the state.” Incumbents in safe districts were left to their own devices, and it was in their self-interest to avoid high voter turnouts. Even as Democrats suffered further losses, this dynamic hasn’t really changed. Post-primary, the work slows if it doesn’t stop completely. Maxey recalled asking a party officer near the border to help with a get-out-the-vote campaign in 2014, and their response was, essentially, Why should I? Meanwhile, Republicans “identified and registered new suburban voters before they had even removed their California license plates,” the Texas Observer wrote in 1995.
The data deficit hurt statewide candidates the most, and once Texas’s executive branch had gone red, TDP was well and truly adrift. “You had no leaders,” said Matt Angle, a veteran Democratic operative and founder of the Lone Star Project PAC. “We haven’t had an alpha elected official in Texas who could kind of call balls and strikes or break ties.… If you look around the country at the places where you have a strong Democratic Party, I don’t think there’s an example in which you don’t have a relatively strong statewide elected Democrat.”
To be completely fair to Slagle, the data game led by right-wingers like Karl Rove soon caught the rest of the country by surprise, too. But for someone who advocated for get-out-the-vote measures, as Slagle did, it does seem like a failure from on high to remain competitive in that arena. More broadly, though, as political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld wrote in 2024, modern American political parties maintain a distinctive combination of “activity and incapacity.” While they keep busy administering primaries, fundraising, and organizing voter data, they are “unrooted in communities and unfelt in ordinary people’s day-to-day lives”; they “tilt toward national entities at the expense of state and local ones” and are, in essence, “swarming networks of unattached paraparty groups, without popular accountability.” In Texas, that lack of presence was acutely felt, and that lack of accountability fostered a sense of distrust that lives on today. Looking back, one gets the sense that Slagle was active but incapable. He was still probably better than what came next.
For decades now, various well-endowed groups have promised to build upon the coordinated campaigns of the Slagle years. Memories being short, sometimes they’ve claimed they were the first. The “Dream Team” of 2002 was a coordinated effort to draw a diverse set of voters to the polls (yes, that’s the year Democrats lost both legislative chambers); Battleground Texas in 2013, led by former Obama aide (and future Lyft exec) Jeremy Bird, similarly crashed against the rocks; and Colin Allred’s “Texas Offense” initiative was about as threadbare as his NFL career. At root, the idea is a good one, but coordinating across 254 counties and 20 media markets, without much coherent gravitational force besides money and data, is a tall tree to climb.
Compared to the late ’90s and early aughts, things have certainly improved. Back then, Texas was mostly treated as an ATM for big national campaigns (though no Democrat appeared interested in becoming Texas’s “third U.S. senator,” à la Joe McCarthy), and TDP rapidly cycled through chair after chair, each promising to tackle the party’s debts or regain support among conservatives—what Kendall Scudder rightly mocked as a “maybe-they’ll-take-us-to-prom-this-year” ethos.
“It’s really hard to compare anybody after Slagle to Slagle,” Matt Angle said. After all, Slagle had statewide electeds to work with. The closest, at least in tenure length, is Hinojosa, and to his credit, Hinojosa presided over a period of institutional stability not seen within TDP for a long time. Yet, while he may have righted the ship, his vision for what the party could be was rather limited. He seemed to rest too much faith in the state’s growing Latino electorate. We know how that went.
Meanwhile, Scudder’s mandate seems secure. At TDP’s convention in Corpus Christi in June, its delegates overwhelmingly elected him to remain chairman. He paid off the debt that former operations director Xaq Webb was worried about, albeit in a manner Webb has publicly contested, and for the first time in modern state history, a Texas Democrat is running in every state and federal race this cycle. He also helped triple TDP’s sustaining member program. “We need to probably triple it again,” Scudder acknowledged, but “it’s made it a lot easier for us to make payroll each month.”
Probably his boldest move came in late May, when he called for Democratic state representatives to drop their support for Republican Speaker Dustin Burrows. In early 2025, 49 out of 62 Democrats crossed party lines to support Burrows over Representative David Cook, who had the votes of most GOP members, including the most conservative bloc. The calculus was simple: Democrats could make individual deals with Burrows to earn an ally and pass a few bills while avoiding the worst of far-right control. Instead, the Burrows-led House went on to pass a wave of conservative priorities; Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who presides over the Texas state Senate, called that year’s legislative session the “most conservative and successful” in the chambers’ history.
“The Democratic members whose votes gave him the gavel must now acknowledge the consequences of that decision and must be held to account,” Scudder’s resolution said. “There is no precedent for that in the Texas Democratic Party,” said John Bryant. Elected leaders may resent it, but “the primary voters, the people that make up the party and contribute to it, are tired of go-along-to-get-along nominees” who are “making their own private deals with the Republican speaker because they want to pass their insignificant bills.” As a minority bloc, they’re stronger together, Bryant said, and the public wants to “see us fighting effectively.” Scudder added: “It shouldn’t be controversial to hear the Democratic chair say they don’t like the Republican speaker.” Limited as he may be by the position itself, he’s shown genuine interest in casting aside the way things are supposed to be done in order to do what he thinks is needed.
Republicans have searched far and wide for someone to blame for the state’s many ills this cycle, but having spent decades at the helm—indulging years of industrial plunder along the coast, and more recently fueling the data center buildout through an alliance with Big Oil—it’s become harder to find a scapegoat.
In late July, polling from Fox News, of all places, showed Gina Hinojosa just 1 point behind Abbott. Hinojosa has hammered Abbott on charges of corruption, pointing to his vocal support for school privatization and, until recently, the data center boom. Fifty-six percent of Texas voters say they oppose the construction of data centers in their community, and over the past six years, the majority of Texans have felt the economy is worse off than the year before, suggesting that rapacious growth—the kind Texas is known for—may be falling out of favor with the public. Meanwhile, in one poll, Talarico crossed the 50 percent threshold in his race against Ken Paxton. If economics are any indicator, this could be a moment like the 1970s, when one coalition decays to be replaced by another.
Not for nothing, Talarico has, like O’Rourke, somewhat sidestepped the typical Democratic label; it can’t be coincidental that both campaigns shirked the usual blue yard signs for a more neutral-looking black-and-white. In June, just before TDP’s convention in Corpus Christi, the Texas Politics Project found about 52 percent of party voters still found the Democratic brand unfavorable. Perhaps surprisingly, nearly 40 percent found the party “not liberal enough,” compared to just 10 percent who found it “too liberal.” Meanwhile, Republicans have broadcast that “historically reliable GOP voters are showing signs of disengagement,” with “suburban districts” in particular “feeling this most acutely.”
Talarico has already raised more money at this stage of the race than any general election candidate in Texas within the past decade. Those deep pockets translate into potential downballot power. “Being willing and able to leverage the money that they have … gives them an opportunity to have an outside say,” Angle told me. Talarico has become, as Abbott is for the GOP, the party’s center of gravity; it’s his party, whether he wants the label or not.
If he wins, he’ll remain that center of gravity while further interfacing with the national party’s donor base. And Scudder will be known as the party chairman who retook Texas, even if he was one of many with their hands on the steering wheel. “He will be judged by races won and races lost,” Angle added. “I don’t think he’ll get blamed if Talarico loses, but if Talarico does well, and then we don’t pick up other stuff, if any incumbents lose who shouldn’t lose, he’ll get probably an unfair share of the blame.”
Scudder, for his part, said he ran “fully expecting this to be a career graveyard.” He’s overtly aware of what others might say once his term is in the past tense. That he was the last unpaid chair? That he moved party operations outside Austin? He hopes to be the “infrastructure” chair, the one who creates the “muscle memory” needed to win—and keep winning.
“What I have told people pretty consistently in the last year is that the number one way you know someone’s not doing the job of party chair in Texas is if they hold it,” he said. That is, the longer you keep it, the less likely you are to be doing it well. “It is a really tough job,” he added. Such is his fate.
Mahmoud Khalil’s Fight for a Normal Life
The Trump administration’s implacable assault on civic life has had many inflection points—cracks that signaled the astonishingly rapid shattering of what many Americans understood to be our bedrock sociopolitical order. Trump ordering troops into U.S. cities, the firing of the entire vaccine advisory board as measles made a comeback, criminal inquiries into political opponents, the use of regulatory power to try to censor broadcast networks.
An early such break came in March of last year, a couple months into Trump’s second term, when federal agents arrested legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil explicitly over his pro-Palestinian speech and organizing. Even among reporters who covered immigration and the first Trump term, it was a shock, a brazen shot across the bow of the First Amendment. Khalil would go on to spend over three months in detention before a federal judge ordered his release, and he remains embroiled in parallel federal and immigration court cases as the government tries mightily to deport him still.
For these tribulations, he became an emblem. Of what, depends on who you ask: of Palestinian resistance, of “woke” campus politics, of the retrenchment of free speech, of supposed antisemitism. In his plainspoken memoir, No Land to Stand On, Khalil seeks to reestablish sovereignty over his own life story, at least, and re-center the underlying reason he ended up in this position: Since his grandfather and countless others were expelled from Palestine as a result of the Nakba in 1948, he and his community have been standing on borrowed land, at best tolerated by the authorities wherever they’ve managed to set down.
The book begins with the account of a sort of inadvertent martyrdom, as Khalil finds himself a symbol of his people’s resistance by circumstance. Not his 2025 detention; it is 14 years earlier, when the teenage Khalil is growing up in Khan al-Sheih, the large Palestinian refugee camp in Syria where he was born. A group has resolved to march to the Israeli-controlled town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights at an opportune moment while Syrian security forces are diverted to the burgeoning domestic civil war. The bookish young Khalil convinces a teacher to let him postpone an exam so he can join them. As he follows his stateless countrymen through a minefield and toward the border fence, he is shot in the leg by Israeli border guards and carried back toward the camp by demonstrators behind. In the chaotic aftermath, it is misreported through the camp and to his family that he has been killed.
Since his grandfather and countless others were expelled from Palestine as a result of the Nakba in 1948, he and his community have been standing on borrowed land, at best tolerated by the authorities wherever they’ve managed to set down.He wasn’t, of course, but the ordeal marked the beginning of a life of striving against authoritarianism and trying to reach a border that he’s never been closer to than the day he was shot. That path takes him to organizing resistance against the Bashar Al Assad regime, as a result of which he is forced to flee Syria for Beirut, when his fellow organizers are disappeared by Assad’s Mukhabarat police and it becomes clear he’s next. And later it takes him, of course, to his role as a communicator and negotiator for the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia University, which leads to his arrest and imprisonment by the Trump administration.
Khalil seemed ambivalent then and conflicted now about his status as an avatar for his community’s struggle. Throughout his detention in Louisiana, his face occasionally flashes on the television screens playing the news inside the cavernous holding cell he shares with dozens of others, and he thinks often and with some pangs of guilt about the men that surround him, who may not have any lawyer at all, let alone a team of 25 and the attention of major news outlets and members of Congress.
The detainees—young and old, longtime residents of the United States and recent arrivals, fellow Muslims and followers of other religions, people from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe—seem bemused by having this celebrity among their ranks, though Khalil fears that their feelings may teeter into frustration when the controversy swirling around him reaches in from outside, as when a protest on his behalf outside the facility’s gates prompts a multiday lockdown inside.
If the men feel any resentment, though, they certainly don’t show it. As he is first brought into the detention hall and the full reality begins to set in, Khalil is initially wary of the men who spring into action to help him get set up and acclimated, including a young Honduran named Alexander, who sets up his bed and tries to get Khalil to eat in the first days. Yet Khalil realizes quickly that this solidarity is the only way to survive in the detention center. Whatever is going on outside, inside he is mostly just another man in a jumpsuit trying to stay sane in the dull brutality of the unchanging room, lit 24 hours a day, which he discovers early on is owned by the publicly traded prison conglomerate GEO Group, meaning “every day we spent here was revenue.”
He is soon helping lead prayers for the small group of Muslims in the room, and eventually helping other detainees navigate the complexities of the system they’re in, having read a stack of ICE policy documents and the detention facility’s own handbook, which “described a facility that did not exist. It was a document written for auditors and lawyers.” This is as much a tale about the other detainees as it is about Khalil. The self-described political prisoner is horrified at the experiences and treatment of the others, who he finds to be kind, bewildered, regretful, and human, despite the dehumanization that surrounds them.
There’s Ricardo, who had spent a quarter-century in the U.S. working and raising two citizen daughters, who yearned to return to them and to his farm with his horses. Mamuki, a Georgian asylum-seeker, is consumed by remorse for having believed that the U.S. was a safe haven and convincing his wife to make the trek with him, at which point they were detained separately. Khalil, it turns out, is one of the lucky ones, ordered released into the U.S. and able to keep fighting his legal battles, as most of his fellow travelers remain detained, or deported, or worse. After his release, he hears from Ricardo that Alexander has been killed following his removal back to Honduras.
Khalil’s story is one of personally discovering the Kafkaesque nature of the U.S. immigration system. While he became an exemplar of Trump’s immigration overreaches, he was not an immigration activist. As a green card holder, he wasn’t particularly worried that immigration status would be an avenue to target him. When right-wing media and activists began fixating on him in early 2025, Khalil spent time reading Know Your Rights literature, with an eye toward dealing with the NYPD and FBI. He skimmed ICE, figuring they could no longer get to him.
It is hours into his detention, in a holding cell at the imposing 26 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan, before he gets any real sense of why he was arrested and the gravity of his situation, when he overhears agents saying the White House wants an update. Agents present him with documents laying out the claim from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that his presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”—this, it turns out, is the government’s basis for attempting to deport him. They ask him to sign. Khalil refuses.
This sets off a crash course in our system’s irrationality, in which at different times Khalil learns from his attorneys that the so-called Rubio determination automatically disqualifies him from receiving bond; that the fact of his having been moved to New Jersey and then Louisiana in the middle of the night means that there will have to be a whole legal discussion about where and how his First Amendment case can be heard; and that the court hearing his immigration case is part of the Justice Department, presided over by an employee of the same executive branch trying to deport him. The latter culminates in a curt and cursory dismissal of his asylum case by an immigration judge, a month after his son, Deen, is born.
Each chapter heading is a location—Jena, Louisiana, or Beirut, Lebanon, for example—and Khalil spends the book jumping around, mixing the chronology of his detention with memories of his upbringing and young adulthood. This never feels disorienting because the narrative is cemented around the core idea that, regardless of place and circumstance, he is defined by being Palestinian, both to himself and to the systems around him, a sense felt perhaps most acutely when it becomes evident that he will miss his son’s birth. For his entire time in the GEO facility, he has pushed away the possibility that he’d remain locked up for this moment; then his wife, Noor, goes into labor and the government denies his furlough request. “This was the fate of Palestinian men, I thought. Was I any different from the Palestinian prisoners who not only missed the birth of their children but also their lives?” Khalil writes.
This sentiment is a double-edged sword in that it also motivates Khalil to keep fighting. After his lawyers inform him that he has the ability to accept “voluntary” deportation, he sits in his bunk and thinks about all the people who had risked their prospects to protest for Palestinian rights, the Palestinians worldwide who had kept the movement going through decades of public ridicule and penalization, and those dying in Gaza and the West Bank. “If I ran, what message would that send to them? That the fight wasn’t worth it?” Khalil writes. Plus, he understands acutely that he is a test case for the Trump administration to whittle down speech and organizing through fear, as he witnesses firsthand when some acquaintances refuse to serve as character witnesses as they fret about what it could unleash for them.
This is not a story of stoic heroism but of constant estimation (and sometimes underestimation) of risk and the decision to accept it as the price of doing the right thing in a world of despots and cowards.He reserves some of his sharpest words for Columbia itself, which, over the months of his mediation between the administration and the pro-Palestinian movement, he perceives to be completely uninterested in protecting pro-Palestinian students against obvious threats and instead catering to donors, administrators, and trustees who support the Israeli point of view. “Had Columbia itself possessed the power to deport me and the other students, I have little doubt it would have done so,” Khalil writes.
While Khalil imbues the text with some of his musings from within and without detention about Palestinian political factions, free speech, bureaucracy, and so on, all are derived directly from his own experiences and this is fundamentally a memoir, not a text of theory or commentary. That is partly a product of Khalil’s own clear discomfort with “my life flattening into a cause, a headline, a legal precedent, or just a face on a poster,” which drove him to write his letter from detention and has driven him here to simply tell the story of what he’s actually experienced over a lifetime of trying both to just survive and to advance the cause of Palestinian rights.
This is not a story of stoic heroism but of constant estimation (and sometimes underestimation) of risk and the decision to accept it as the price of doing the right thing in a world of despots and cowards. It’s marked by fear, second-guessing, and frustration, all with no guarantee that things will actually get better. Khalil does not want to be shot at, or sought by the secret police, or detained in some for-profit gulag. He wants to live a normal life in his home with his wife and son, something that the world around him has decided is impossible, and so he struggles on.
Santa Cruz is quietly producing some of the best surf lifesaving athletes in the United States
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.
Let’s begin with a basic premise: Sports are kind of silly.
PostgreSQL 19 graph queries fail the 'would you ship this?' test
Give Xfce a Mac or Unity-style makeover
Trump’s Angry Tirades on AI Accidentally Wreck GOP’s Midterm Strategy
After AI scientists and executives called for a slowdown in unrestrained AI development, Donald Trump unleashed a series of crazed tirades to the contrary. He raged that the only oversight AI needs is a “STRONG AND SMART PRESIDENT,” which seemed to refer to him. He seethed that all such warnings are a “HOAX” and suggested it’s all a scam being perpetrated by America’s enemies. What’s striking about all this is how it unintentionally sabotages the GOP’s midterm strategy. Vulnerable Republicans have been calling for a vote on restraining AI data-center costs and others have pushed other regulatory ideas. Yet the leader of the Republican Party is saying none of this is needed. We talked to MS NOW’s James Downie, author of a new piece on the GOP’s midterm struggles. We discuss why Trump is badly undermining a core GOP strategic aim, how Trump has revealed himself as a conventional anti-regulatory plutocrat, and why Democrats, for their part, should place him right at the center of the story they’re telling about AI’s future. Listen to this episode here.
Open weights are not open source: Why AI's favorite label is under dispute
How Everpure plans to stop AI from starving without data
U.S. Supreme Court rejects Trump’s mail-in voting limits as November election nears
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected — for now — the Trump administration’s efforts to limit mail-in voting ahead of the Nov. 3 election through new rules issued by the U.S. Postal Service.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh left open the possibility that the postal service does have the authority to implement the rules, but that it “would be arbitrary and capricious” to do so during the 2026 elections because states and local elections officials won’t have enough time to comply.
California was among the states that sued over the rules and previously over an executive order Trump issued to limit mail-in voting. California uses universal mail-in voting, meaning it sends ballots to all registered voters.
Gov. Gavin Newsom applauded the high court’s decision. “Finally, 50 days out, and the American people have certainty when it comes to our country’s electoral process: Voting is safe, vote-by-mail is accessible to any and all who need it. And I encourage every Californian to make their voice heard this November,” he said.
The Trump administration wants to create a federal database of registered voters that the postal service would then cross reference to ensure mail-in ballots are only delivered to eligible voters. The president’s plan would have had the postal service refuse to deliver ballots in states that withhold voter data.
California election officials previously told CalMatters that the state uses ballots that largely comply with other changes the Trump administration wanted, including sending envelopes with scannable bar codes.
But other states might have had to make immediate changes to their ballots and election plans had the Supreme Court allowed the Postal Service rules to take effect.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the stakes of the lawsuit “could not have been higher.”
“Had this rule been allowed to take effect, the consequences would have been catastrophic,” he said.
California counties will begin sending out ballots the first week of October.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.
The post U.S. Supreme Court rejects Trump’s mail-in voting limits as November election nears appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.