Democratic party

When Barack Obama set out to fundamentally transform the country, he took for granted that it could be transformed back — and could only look on as America sent a populist billionaire to do just that. The aspiring media mogul has only now discovered that part of a politician's legacy is the successors he leaves behind. It has dawned on Obama that his chief legacy from eight years in office will not be healthcare reform but Joe Biden — and now he is scrambling to cultivate a new champion. Politico is reporting that America's first black president is holding closed-door meetings with the likes of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, socialist darling Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and moderate Michigan representative Haley Stevens to try to find an heir worthy of the crown.

Welcome to Thunderdome, your weekly update on all the crazy that 2024 has to offer! Thanks for listening to our weekly podcast, the latest edition of which is available here — and yes, we start off by talking about golf and soccer, but don’t worry: we don’t focus on important things for too long. There’s presidential stakes to be talking about, and questions to answer! Like: who is Doug Burgum, and why is Doug Burgum? Let’s get to it. Christie the kamikaze, or Pence the pure of heart? Everyone assumes that Chris Christie is going to be the thorn in the side of Donald Trump on the debate stage in August. But what if he isn’t?

Is the United States a one-party state? Surely not. Just look at the ballots the next time you vote. There are nearly always Republican as well as Democratic candidates, and often there are candidates from other parties as well (Green, Working Families, Libertarian, etc.). But when you go beyond the labels, what do you find? Tucker Carlson, a recent victim of the uniparty monopoly, put it very well. “Suddenly, the United States looks very much like a one-party state,” he said in a post-Fox video. “That’s a depressing realization,” he added. “But it’s not permanent.” I think he is right about both things: the depressing reality that the United States looks more and more like a one-party state and the fact that the situation is not, at least not necessarily, permanent.

Extremists have got to learn to take half a loaf. Just like the cheap labor-demanding GOP donors, pro-lifers need to be told: you can’t get everything you want. If Republicans give you this, they’ll lose their jobs, and the people who’ll replace them want you dead. Unlike a lot of people complaining about the anti-abortion zealots, I am an anti-abortion zealot. That’s why I’m begging them to stop pushing wildly unpopular ideas. These fanatics are going to get millions more babies killed when Democrats win supermajorities in both houses of Congress and immediately pass a federal law making abortion-on-demand the law of the land.

The Democratic establishment has never looked more vulnerable to progressive upheaval; Biden's supposed leadership bridge to a new generation leads nowhere. "Moderate" darling transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg has seen his slim national prospects dwindle with every near-miss in the air and toxic train derailment on the ground. Vice President Kamala Harris has been about as visible as Biden was on the 2020 campaign trail — and a geriatric Capitol Hill leadership class appears on its last legs. The scene is set for the party’s progressives to strike. And yet there is little relief in sight for the party’s left wing as its own geriatric champion rides off into the sunset.

North Carolina sparked some hope for the GOP future this week, after the “historic” defection of a longtime Democratic legislator handed Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the state’s House of Representatives. State representative Tricia Cotham, a moderate now-former Democrat, was joined at a press conference by her new colleagues in the state House’s Republican conference and US House representative Dan Bishop, who was on crutches after injuring himself playing pickleball. “I didn’t care if I had to have the leg amputated, I was going to be standing next to Tricia,” he told me.

President Biden has been clear: he’s itching to attack Republicans for “wanting to cut Medicare.” But he’s running into a problem: his own administration rolled out a little-noticed rules change that’s poised to slash benefits for millions of retirees across the country. The change could jeopardize his own standing with a crucial voting bloc and could put down-ballot Democrats in electoral peril.  Biden has used everything from the pages of the New York Times to his State of the Union’s teleprompter to accuse Republicans of wanting to slash benefits to seniors who’ve paid into the retirement fund.

She only officially entered the presidential race on Saturday, and already critics are counting Marianne Williamson out. To be fair, I understand why. On paper — and off paper for that matter — she is not your traditional candidate. The author and spiritual advisor made waves in 2020 with her eccentric debate moments, including her focus on the moon landing and her insistence on harnessing love for political purposes to defeat Donald Trump. But this time around, Williamson and her ethereal diction might be able to seize on one of President Biden’s major weaknesses: his incredible lack of empathy. During the 2020 election, one of the media’s major selling points for their favorite hair-sniffer was that he was a person who cared.

When Chicago went to the polls on Tuesday, the voters made one thing abundantly clear: they wanted to see the back of Lori Lightfoot, the current mayor. She had come into office on a landslide in 2019, winning some three-quarters of the vote against a well-known, well-liked opponent. Four years later, all that support was gone. She received only 17 percent in 2023, a distant third in a race where only the top two candidates enter the runoff (since none received 50 percent). The candidates going into that runoff are Paul Vallas, with about 34 percent of the vote (twice that of the incumbent), and Brandon Johnson, with about 20 percent. The rest of the vote was spread among the six other candidates, including Lightfoot.

Joe Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer once berated the commander-in-chief at his Wilmington home. Biden couldn’t get a word in edgewise without the legal giant interrupting. Aides recall the no-nonsense law professor muttering, “Not very smart, Joe,” and “I don’t know why you’d say that,” and “That’s dumb.” Bauer was playing Trump in mock debates at the time. Little did he know that he was standing in the middle of a crime scene, one he and his team of attorneys would be revisiting to quell a scandal of the president’s own making. The discovery of classified material at Biden’s various residences and offices makes for an open-and-shut case, according to former federal prosecutor Joe Moreno.

California senator Dianne Feinstein, eighty-nine, whose mental decline has long been an open secret, announced her 2024 retirement last week. This comes on the heels of a stinging Sacramento Bee editorial withholding endorsement for her replacement and an accelerating race for her seat. Senator Feinstein has no public plans to resign. She says she will serve out her full term, preventing an appointment by Governor Gavin Newsom. Efforts to force her out of office early will persist. When Feinstein ran for the Senate in 2018, she obtained just 54 percent of the primary vote against fellow Democrat Kevin de León, a widely despised figure in California politics, now clinging to his Los Angeles city council seat after being exposed as a cutthroat diversity fraud.

Democrats in Washington, DC and Iowa are now led by a pair of election deniers. Following a disastrous cycle, Iowa Democrats have elected one of their party’s most prominent 2020 election deniers to helm them into a critical 2024. The decision comes weeks after House Democrats threw out their old leadership and elected veteran election denier Hakeem Jeffries to run their caucus. In Iowa, Rita Hart — whose 2020 House campaign ended in a six-vote defeat at the hands of now-Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks — won a contentious vote held over Zoom to run the Democratic state party. In the months after the 2020 election, Hart mounted a dubious challenge to Miller-Meeks’s win where she asked the US House of Representatives to overturn her defeat and install her in office anyway.

As President Biden plans to launch his reelection campaign, he is whistling past a graveyard of recently discarded Democratic Party icons, who have either left the scene willingly or are being gracelessly kicked out. Nancy Pelosi. Steny Hoyer. Pat Leahy. Jim Clyburn. Anthony Fauci. Dianne Feinstein. Their combined age is 500 — and until a few months ago, they were running the country. Now they’re shadows of their former selves, headed to the greener pastures of retirement, book deals or the backbenches of the House of Representatives. Over the past few months, the Democratic Party’s leadership has transitioned from the Silent Generation to a mixture of baby boomers and Gen Xers.

As President Biden’s team tried to put out fires regarding the Curious Case of the Corvette and the FAA fiasco, one Democrat must have been grateful for the White House’s sudden maelstrom of bad news. When it rains it pours — and Joe’s torrent of bad headlines overshadowed Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s latest scandal that is brewing in the Windy City. On Thursday, news broke that the mayor’s campaign had sent an email attempting to recruit Chicago Public School students to “help” with the incumbent’s reelection effort. The students would earn class credit in exchange for their contributions.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to formally quit the Democratic Party could have serious consequences for America’s most famous socialist. While Democrats in Arizona and across the country figure out how to handle the Senate’s newest independent, the cogs in the Democratic Party’s machine are already kicking her to the curb. Their actions could have major ramifications for some of her Senate colleagues. Moments after Sinema declared her independence, her longtime progressive firm, Authentic, dropped her because its employees felt that working with her was tantamount to “devil’s work.” Now, NGP VAN, the Democratic Party’s top data firm, is cutting ties with her because she left the party. Here’s where it gets complicated for the Democratic Party.

When asked whether he will leave the Democratic Party and become an independent at a press conference on Monday, West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said, "I'm not a Washington Democrat, I don't know what to tell you… I have no intention of doing anything right now. Whether I do something later, I can't tell you what the future's going to bring." Simultaneously, Manchin threw a punch at former Senate challenger and current congressman Alex Mooney, stating, "[Governor Jim] Justice is a much better candidate, and he would be doing it for the right reasons. I think Mooney is doing it strictly for his political ambition." While Manchin hasn't yet confirmed a re-election bid, his comments leave the door open for his departure from the Democratic Party.

Start spreading the news. As party leadership for the upcoming 118th Congress shapes up, we now know that Democrats will have not only New Yorkers but Brooklynites as their top men in both the Senate and the House. Chuck Schumer is poised to maintain his position as Senate majority leader after Republicans’ miserable results in the upper body. And with the departure of Nancy Pelosi as House head honcho, it will be Representative Hakeem Jeffries taking her place and hoping one day to be speaker himself. So what will an all-Empire State Democrat leadership mean for the rest of the nation? To get a sense of this, it's worth looking at the unexpected and outsized role that New York played in the recent midterm elections.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced today that in the wake of Republicans taking the House, she's doing exactly what the octogenarian leadership class in this era of American decline does every time voters invite them to gracefully leave the stage: hold onto power. The decision by Pelosi to not seek election as leader of the Democratic minority, choosing instead to stay on as a kind of speaker emeritus, means she will be effectively looking over the shoulder of her successor, be that Hakeem Jeffries or another unfortunate soul. She's Democratic Speaker for Life in all but name. She will be feted by a sycophantic media, which will glorify her and build her up, even as she overshadows the people actually tasked with running Congress. But then, that's mostly just the media anyway.