How would they capitalize on anything with no ideas other than junk their progressive wing picks up from neo-Comminists? I’m asking this seriously - do they have any ideas other than “Resist!” and moronic DSA slogans. Are they going to abolish ICE and open borders? Are they going to remove sanctions from the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Houthis?
Asking seriously--where do you go to absorb their ideas? Do you actually look into what the party leaders say? Or are you absorbing everything through the distortionary lens of social media, where everything is filtered so you only hear what the loudest, fringiest voices say, and what confirms your biases, (since that's the easiest route to clicks, and that's all social media cares about) rather than Congressional leadership's actual platforms, statements and votes?
Through news and their actual votes, especially the ones of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. I don't use any social media, unless you consider Substack to be that.
I'm not sure if you're gaslighting or actually believe what you wrote. Biden ran as a moderate, then filled his administration with progressives and executed one progressive fantasy after another - starting with first day executive order to violate the Civil Rights Act's Title IX by forcing schools to let biological boys and men compete in women's leagues. Since then, has the greater Democratic Party ever vote differently, or allow anyone in its ranks to vote their conscience on the matter, rather than provide what trans activists and progressives demanded? The one standout, Seth Moulton still voted along that progressive agenda like a spineless schmuck.
That's just one example of progressives, and especially their interest group lobbyists, owning the votes of all Democrats in Congress. The Democratic Party also never closed the door on DSA neo-Communists, members of a completely different political party, from competing in its primaries. You have Mamdani and Katie Wilson running major US cities as Democrats, welcomed and accepted by the party top to bottom. The Portland city council is similarly stuffed full of neo-Communists. So it's not just the CPC alone, it's the fact that the party since roughly 2011 has been beholden to extreme progressive positions - the racism of DEI (forced by Biden on anyone doing business with the federal government), the illiberal, Jew hating Title VI violations of universities running amok on billions of federal dollars, the open hostility to a US ally attacked by Islamist terror army proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The toxic progressives have infected the entire party with their sociopathic slogans and policies. That's the party as a whole, unable to divorce itself from racist, antisemitic, anti-America and anti-democracy progressives.
Totally off topic but I thought the commentators here lean too far right - too *much* agreement - so I went to Matthew Yglesias' substack and was banned in 24 hours.
He has the right to prune his commentators as he wishes, but it was an interesting experiment. I appreciate the diversity of thought here! Lesson learned.
I'd recommend Andrew Sullivan's. Also a very mixed group, and Sullivan is very tolerant of dissent. He's to the left of TLP, I think, but not quite an Yglesias. Also critical of the Left's gender and identity politics, but from a gay man's perspective, which I think has the effect of making him unusually insightful there.
If you want to be inundated with criticism but not banned, you could try The Bulwark. You'll get the response I get when I run against the grain on Matt Taibbi's substack. (overwhelming flood of negative reactions, but no bans, and the occasional upvote)
Thanks for the recommendations! It's too bad that so few substacks that promote lively discussions and debate.
Also kudos to you for entering the lion's den and going to Taibbi's substack! He's got a lot of subscribers so every comment must be met with a swarm of replies.
Not sure why you're having trouble including your comments. Are you a subscriber? He allows subscribers to comment on any of his posts using the substack app, and often responds directly to them in comment threads. (and not all of the commenters there are friendly to him!) You can email him to try and see if he'll write a post that includes a response to your message, too.
He has a strong dislike of Trump for sure but he doesn’t pull any punches on the Left either. You should read his analysis of Biden, whose immigration policy and culture war positions he blames explicitly for the Dems’ loss. (Literally says people were voting for authoritarianism because the Left gave them too many reasons to think they’d be worse) His very reluctant endorsement of Harris is representative too: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/harris-for-president-77c. and here’s some of his writing in gender ideology: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/gay-lesbian-trans-rights.html
And, at any rate, ‘TDS’ is now just a synonym for ‘pointing out what Trump does’, as doing the latter means criticizing Trump’s truly deranged decisions and behavior in his second term.
I’d add that he’s a legal immigrant from Britain so he’s been *particularly* irate this week as Trump has openly insulted Europe and badmouthed the sacrifice Europe and particularly the Danes have made in fighting and dying for the U.S. in wars that weren’t even really theirs.
Are you talking about the Weekly Dish? Because I have been a subscriber for five years, and there has never been a comment section. It’s not that I can’t post to it, it’s that it doesn’t exist.
I see the confusion now--you are correct, the Weekly Dish doesn't allow you to comment directly under articles the way we are right now; however, Sullivan is extremely active on Substack Notes, and usually when he posts a new story to the Weekly Dish, he posts a Note that comments on it or links to it. (https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/notes) The discussions I'm referring to largely take place in the response threads of those Notes, and Sullivan often participates directly in them. So he's more-or-less just rolled The Weekly Dish's comments section into Substack notes.
Wow, I’ve never been banned on substack, so congrats, I guess! s/ I have been banned three times on Reddit subs, though. Permanent bans with no warning for wrong speak.
Reddit is pretty bad. I was banned from my first sub after Lia Thomas. I'd never followed gender ideology until that point and someone said that after a year of hormones there is no performance difference. My response was "I don't know anything about the effects of hormones, but height, hand size, and foot size are all advantages and I'm pretty sure hormones don't make your bones shorter." Ban. I made a tepid defense of JK Rowling on r/letterkenny and got banned from that.
Then I was participating on r/socialjusticeinaction, which was a great sub. It had a friendly mix of conservatives, liberals who dissented on gender ideology, and lesbians and gay men who had a forum to say "I don't want a man with a vagina" or "I don't want a woman with a penis." But then it got nuked as a hate sub and everyone on it got a site wide ban.
Wow! That tracks, because two out of three of my permanent bans from subs were from expressing opinions on trans issues (ie, biological men in women’s sports). The other was for expressing the opinion that low cut tops that show cleavage are not appropriate in all settings (I am a woman myself).
Two points. One is that Reddit is heavily censored, capricious, arrogant, and left wing in the proud and obnoxious Silicon Valley rich "progressive" style. The other is that almost all of Substack, including Liberal Patriot, is a series of Agreement Silos by consequence of charging people to make comments. Any exchange of ideas is narrow, including here.
Some years back, as California-style censorship began to take hold on the internet, I predicted the trend if not the mechanics. The only uncensored significant voice is X, but that one is rife with other problems.
Sorry. Polls, schmolls. These are the same polls that were off by over 10 in WI, off nationally, off by 9 in OH, not once, but twice, said Harris would win IA (!!!), had Ron DeSantis losing FL by a big margin, and had J.C. Vance in a tossup when he won by over 4. Same polls that showed Beto O'Roarke close in TX. And I'm not just talking about D friendly pollsters. Right now, even the most reliable pollsters in America, Rasmussen and Baris, have gone off the deep end because of Israel and are even manipulating those polls.
Yet in the middle of it all, again and again, these voters who "disapprove" of Trump are positively RUNNING to join the GOP and to leave the Ds. I'm convinced that for whatever reasons---just as they were in 2016 before they corrected---pollsters are really failing to find reality. Meanwhile, I see a half-dozen Democrat insiders issuing quiet warnings about the midterms, that MN ICE resistance is backfiring, that the Rs have $70 more BEFORE Trump stages his fund raising rallies.
It's time to find a new, reliable metric. Polls ain't it.
>>>"Yet in the middle of it all, again and again, these voters who "disapprove" of Trump are positively RUNNING to join the GOP and to leave the Ds."<<<
This is factually false, (https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx) and the Dems now lead amongst Independents and unaffiliated voters by more than the MOE in *national* polling, which has only ever been off 1 to 3 points. The polling misses you cite were at the state level, which can have larger disparities, but for the past half-decade have reliably tracked anti-incumbency bias--and those misses happened under Biden. Now it's Trump who is the incumbent that must answer for the state of things, and now it cuts in the other direction--thus why they have been consistently off up to 10-15 points in the Democrats's favor since January.
And that's before we get to the turnout advantage. Amongst other things, the sitting president's demented Greenland fetish and incoherent letters to Danish heads of state, his open destruction of our global alliances, and his invasion of Democratic cities by a legally unaccountable paramilitary force is the greatest boost to Democratic turnout you can give, and it will be tough to take that gift back until Trump and his shadow fully depart in 2030. We've also seen it in every. single. election. since January.
GOP voters, for their part, will not be fond of the brand that brought China into the arms of Canada for at least one election cycle, and perhaps more. For 2026 and 2028, I'll put all that up against your 'Independents-don't-matter' state registration numbers any day.
The point made in Mr. Bahareen's penultimate paragraph will be, I think, of such unusual potency that it will be hard to figure out the answer to this question in the short-run.
The nuanced analysis of the party's long-run standing with the public that TLP engages in notwithstanding, in the short-term, this fact remains true: take the 2024 election, tack on a 10- or 15-point Democratic enthusiasm gap, and the party wins in a walk.
And the enthusiasm gap is going to be, IMO, at unprecedented levels, merely by dint of you-know-who. Trump has moved into 'batshit' territory and I don't foresee that changing as he progresses towards lame duck status. He has staged violent invasions of the Democrats' cities with a personal paramilitary group unaccountable to the public and weaponized the DOJ against them beyond anything we even saw in the Nixon era. He is openly destroying NATO and writing demented letters to its leaders that are making even the blindly sycophantic members of his own party in Congress speak up. Diatribes about 'men in women's sports' won't fix the effects of these blunders, and Vance will be tied at the hip to Trump, even if he tries to pivot away from him.
And before Larry comes in with the 'registration advantage' numbers I would note that a record number of people now identify as independents in the country, and of those Democrats have a five-point advantage. (https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx) Due to thermostatic politics and Trump's insanity, I expect that to hold for a little while. (but, again, in a short-run timeframe)
Yet this is sort of a trap, as it probably won't be until after Trump and his shadow (which will remain in 2028) leave, and the enthusiasm gap returns to its 'natural equilibrium', so to speak, that we will know where the Democrats truly are. I hope they make good decisions between now and then, and we see more Tallarico's and Peltola's in the swing states, and less Crockett's. And the young, digital native generation waiting in the wings needs to step up and eject the party's old guard. This is not the boomer's world anymore (although we may eventually miss that world more than we like to admit) and boomers shouldn't be making the decisions.
It is interesting that President Trump is just slightly below President Biden in the same period, with the support the left gave Biden and the unceasing attacks on President Trump.
ChatGPT tells me that the top three policy priorities of Americans right now are: Inflation & the economy, Healthcare, and Immigration & border governance
Inflation and the economy will go back and forth. There will be official stats, but many people decide based on whether they and their families’s lives are better.
Democrats strongest policy support is healthcare*.
Republicans strong policy is border security and immigration.
*Healthcare
There is a slow moving train of Medicare/Medicaid fraud investigations. Democrats own this policy, and that is the problem. As defenders of the safety net, how will voters feel when it is clearer the extend of the stealing, in Maine and Minnesota, under the watchful eye of Democrat administrations?
Dems best immigration weapon, along with ICE optics, has been the Rep refusal to propose more generous payments for the humane repatriation of non criminal migrants. That may change, if all non citizen federal subsidies really disappear Feb 1. In 6 months, many migrants may rethink a trip home, if the annual $125 billion taxpayer spigot has been turned off, and they are offered a larger check. Apportionment means Dems will fight each migrant departure, regardless of method.
Reps have also totally failed at detailing the real impact of 10 million unexpected, unvetted arrivals on American life. A friend recently visited at Round Rock ER at 11pm. The home of Dell Computers has changed. A native New Yorker, my friend is not unfamiliar with urban decay, but was surprised to find it in an upscale Texas suburb. The ER was full of menacing young men, covered in gang tattoos, and few others.
What appeared to be an actual stabbing victim, was holding his guts inside his body. The floor was covered in urine, as actual triage took place in the waiting room, with a 4- 5 hour wait. Fleeing, she found a private ER 15 minutes away. More expensive, but gang member free, and quick. My friend is wealthy enough to have options, most Americans do not.
Texas spends more than $110 million dollars every 30 days, just for unpaid illegal migrant healthcare. Feb 1, when many non citizen federal subsidies disappear, the number will likely skyrocket. Oddly, Mr. Tallarico's campaign rarely mentions that.
As for Trump's foreign forays, if they work, they will aid Reps. Obviously, failure will not. No one is invading Greenland, but a deal would put the issue to bed and benefit the US. It is a shame Trump did not undertake a charm offensive, rather than empty threats.
We are likely 6 months away from any real understanding of the Midterms. There are simply too many unknowns. No one foresaw Ms. Good's death. Neither did they expect, 4 illegal Maryland migrants would hack to death a young man with machetes, like a bad horror movie. Stay tuned for comment by Senator Van Hollen.
We'll have no idea of how even the midterms are shaping up until the morning after. Midterm voters are likely to be even harder to predict than before. Later it will be hard to run against Trump who won't be on the ballot.
But to the greater question of have Democrats given me any reason to vote for them other than the fact that none have threatened Canada, no. Cumulatively I think the fairly crazy in the D party adds up to at least the crazy of our Eskimo war Prezident Trump. . . Inuit, sorry.
It takes two to tango, and Minneapolis isn't entirely due to Nazi Groypers.
A solution in Minnesota would be a real good way for the Democratic Party to gain some legitimacy for actually doing things. Daily, Justice, Homeland, ICE, etc parade photos and histories of the worst of the worst they've arrested as part of their efforts. If Minneapolis could deliver any Illegal immigrant murderers or rapists with facial tattoos directly to ICE it might help a little. A felony conviction is supposed to be an automatic ticket home.
The big polling misses people like to cite are at the state level. The top national pollsters rarely have national polls that have been more than 2-3 points off in any direction.
Biden's approval rating amongst Democrats was at 95% in April of 2021, one year in, so Trump's approval amongst Republicans isn't anything special--as you can see, that number means very little in a hyperpolarized political environment.
That’s not true at all. The only time they’ve ever offered any resistance to Trump’s constant overreach is some withering criticism of his prosecution of Jay Powell, some complaining from MTG, and a few objections to this batshit insane ‘we must have Greenland’ thing. He’s gotten a pass on pretty much everything else. Just the other week they couldn’t even vote on a flimsy resolution saying “Trump can’t do literally anything he wants in Venezuela.”
How would they capitalize on anything with no ideas other than junk their progressive wing picks up from neo-Comminists? I’m asking this seriously - do they have any ideas other than “Resist!” and moronic DSA slogans. Are they going to abolish ICE and open borders? Are they going to remove sanctions from the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Houthis?
Asking seriously--where do you go to absorb their ideas? Do you actually look into what the party leaders say? Or are you absorbing everything through the distortionary lens of social media, where everything is filtered so you only hear what the loudest, fringiest voices say, and what confirms your biases, (since that's the easiest route to clicks, and that's all social media cares about) rather than Congressional leadership's actual platforms, statements and votes?
Through news and their actual votes, especially the ones of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. I don't use any social media, unless you consider Substack to be that.
Fair enough, but I'd note that less than half of the Democrats in the House belong to the CPC, and only 3 Democrats in the Senate belong to it.
So tracking the votes of the CPC alone does not get you an accurate depiction of what the party is doing as a whole.
I'm not sure if you're gaslighting or actually believe what you wrote. Biden ran as a moderate, then filled his administration with progressives and executed one progressive fantasy after another - starting with first day executive order to violate the Civil Rights Act's Title IX by forcing schools to let biological boys and men compete in women's leagues. Since then, has the greater Democratic Party ever vote differently, or allow anyone in its ranks to vote their conscience on the matter, rather than provide what trans activists and progressives demanded? The one standout, Seth Moulton still voted along that progressive agenda like a spineless schmuck.
That's just one example of progressives, and especially their interest group lobbyists, owning the votes of all Democrats in Congress. The Democratic Party also never closed the door on DSA neo-Communists, members of a completely different political party, from competing in its primaries. You have Mamdani and Katie Wilson running major US cities as Democrats, welcomed and accepted by the party top to bottom. The Portland city council is similarly stuffed full of neo-Communists. So it's not just the CPC alone, it's the fact that the party since roughly 2011 has been beholden to extreme progressive positions - the racism of DEI (forced by Biden on anyone doing business with the federal government), the illiberal, Jew hating Title VI violations of universities running amok on billions of federal dollars, the open hostility to a US ally attacked by Islamist terror army proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The toxic progressives have infected the entire party with their sociopathic slogans and policies. That's the party as a whole, unable to divorce itself from racist, antisemitic, anti-America and anti-democracy progressives.
Totally off topic but I thought the commentators here lean too far right - too *much* agreement - so I went to Matthew Yglesias' substack and was banned in 24 hours.
He has the right to prune his commentators as he wishes, but it was an interesting experiment. I appreciate the diversity of thought here! Lesson learned.
I'd recommend Andrew Sullivan's. Also a very mixed group, and Sullivan is very tolerant of dissent. He's to the left of TLP, I think, but not quite an Yglesias. Also critical of the Left's gender and identity politics, but from a gay man's perspective, which I think has the effect of making him unusually insightful there.
If you want to be inundated with criticism but not banned, you could try The Bulwark. You'll get the response I get when I run against the grain on Matt Taibbi's substack. (overwhelming flood of negative reactions, but no bans, and the occasional upvote)
Thanks for the recommendations! It's too bad that so few substacks that promote lively discussions and debate.
Also kudos to you for entering the lion's den and going to Taibbi's substack! He's got a lot of subscribers so every comment must be met with a swarm of replies.
I love Andrew Sullivan’s substack. But he does not allow comments at all. He does allow you to email him, and publishes some of those emails.
Not sure why you're having trouble including your comments. Are you a subscriber? He allows subscribers to comment on any of his posts using the substack app, and often responds directly to them in comment threads. (and not all of the commenters there are friendly to him!) You can email him to try and see if he'll write a post that includes a response to your message, too.
Haha so I checked out Andrew Sullivan's substack and it's pure TDS with no real attempt at analysis. What happened to him?
He has a strong dislike of Trump for sure but he doesn’t pull any punches on the Left either. You should read his analysis of Biden, whose immigration policy and culture war positions he blames explicitly for the Dems’ loss. (Literally says people were voting for authoritarianism because the Left gave them too many reasons to think they’d be worse) His very reluctant endorsement of Harris is representative too: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/harris-for-president-77c. and here’s some of his writing in gender ideology: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/gay-lesbian-trans-rights.html
And, at any rate, ‘TDS’ is now just a synonym for ‘pointing out what Trump does’, as doing the latter means criticizing Trump’s truly deranged decisions and behavior in his second term.
I’d add that he’s a legal immigrant from Britain so he’s been *particularly* irate this week as Trump has openly insulted Europe and badmouthed the sacrifice Europe and particularly the Danes have made in fighting and dying for the U.S. in wars that weren’t even really theirs.
Edit: here’s his critique of Biden: https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewsullivan/p/the-man-who-brought-us-here-be3?r=2pnvf&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
Are you talking about the Weekly Dish? Because I have been a subscriber for five years, and there has never been a comment section. It’s not that I can’t post to it, it’s that it doesn’t exist.
I see the confusion now--you are correct, the Weekly Dish doesn't allow you to comment directly under articles the way we are right now; however, Sullivan is extremely active on Substack Notes, and usually when he posts a new story to the Weekly Dish, he posts a Note that comments on it or links to it. (https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/notes) The discussions I'm referring to largely take place in the response threads of those Notes, and Sullivan often participates directly in them. So he's more-or-less just rolled The Weekly Dish's comments section into Substack notes.
Thanks for letting me know about that! I’ll check it out.
Wow, I’ve never been banned on substack, so congrats, I guess! s/ I have been banned three times on Reddit subs, though. Permanent bans with no warning for wrong speak.
Reddit is pretty bad. I was banned from my first sub after Lia Thomas. I'd never followed gender ideology until that point and someone said that after a year of hormones there is no performance difference. My response was "I don't know anything about the effects of hormones, but height, hand size, and foot size are all advantages and I'm pretty sure hormones don't make your bones shorter." Ban. I made a tepid defense of JK Rowling on r/letterkenny and got banned from that.
Then I was participating on r/socialjusticeinaction, which was a great sub. It had a friendly mix of conservatives, liberals who dissented on gender ideology, and lesbians and gay men who had a forum to say "I don't want a man with a vagina" or "I don't want a woman with a penis." But then it got nuked as a hate sub and everyone on it got a site wide ban.
Wow! That tracks, because two out of three of my permanent bans from subs were from expressing opinions on trans issues (ie, biological men in women’s sports). The other was for expressing the opinion that low cut tops that show cleavage are not appropriate in all settings (I am a woman myself).
Two points. One is that Reddit is heavily censored, capricious, arrogant, and left wing in the proud and obnoxious Silicon Valley rich "progressive" style. The other is that almost all of Substack, including Liberal Patriot, is a series of Agreement Silos by consequence of charging people to make comments. Any exchange of ideas is narrow, including here.
Some years back, as California-style censorship began to take hold on the internet, I predicted the trend if not the mechanics. The only uncensored significant voice is X, but that one is rife with other problems.
Sorry. Polls, schmolls. These are the same polls that were off by over 10 in WI, off nationally, off by 9 in OH, not once, but twice, said Harris would win IA (!!!), had Ron DeSantis losing FL by a big margin, and had J.C. Vance in a tossup when he won by over 4. Same polls that showed Beto O'Roarke close in TX. And I'm not just talking about D friendly pollsters. Right now, even the most reliable pollsters in America, Rasmussen and Baris, have gone off the deep end because of Israel and are even manipulating those polls.
Yet in the middle of it all, again and again, these voters who "disapprove" of Trump are positively RUNNING to join the GOP and to leave the Ds. I'm convinced that for whatever reasons---just as they were in 2016 before they corrected---pollsters are really failing to find reality. Meanwhile, I see a half-dozen Democrat insiders issuing quiet warnings about the midterms, that MN ICE resistance is backfiring, that the Rs have $70 more BEFORE Trump stages his fund raising rallies.
It's time to find a new, reliable metric. Polls ain't it.
>>>"Yet in the middle of it all, again and again, these voters who "disapprove" of Trump are positively RUNNING to join the GOP and to leave the Ds."<<<
This is factually false, (https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx) and the Dems now lead amongst Independents and unaffiliated voters by more than the MOE in *national* polling, which has only ever been off 1 to 3 points. The polling misses you cite were at the state level, which can have larger disparities, but for the past half-decade have reliably tracked anti-incumbency bias--and those misses happened under Biden. Now it's Trump who is the incumbent that must answer for the state of things, and now it cuts in the other direction--thus why they have been consistently off up to 10-15 points in the Democrats's favor since January.
And that's before we get to the turnout advantage. Amongst other things, the sitting president's demented Greenland fetish and incoherent letters to Danish heads of state, his open destruction of our global alliances, and his invasion of Democratic cities by a legally unaccountable paramilitary force is the greatest boost to Democratic turnout you can give, and it will be tough to take that gift back until Trump and his shadow fully depart in 2030. We've also seen it in every. single. election. since January.
GOP voters, for their part, will not be fond of the brand that brought China into the arms of Canada for at least one election cycle, and perhaps more. For 2026 and 2028, I'll put all that up against your 'Independents-don't-matter' state registration numbers any day.
The point made in Mr. Bahareen's penultimate paragraph will be, I think, of such unusual potency that it will be hard to figure out the answer to this question in the short-run.
The nuanced analysis of the party's long-run standing with the public that TLP engages in notwithstanding, in the short-term, this fact remains true: take the 2024 election, tack on a 10- or 15-point Democratic enthusiasm gap, and the party wins in a walk.
And the enthusiasm gap is going to be, IMO, at unprecedented levels, merely by dint of you-know-who. Trump has moved into 'batshit' territory and I don't foresee that changing as he progresses towards lame duck status. He has staged violent invasions of the Democrats' cities with a personal paramilitary group unaccountable to the public and weaponized the DOJ against them beyond anything we even saw in the Nixon era. He is openly destroying NATO and writing demented letters to its leaders that are making even the blindly sycophantic members of his own party in Congress speak up. Diatribes about 'men in women's sports' won't fix the effects of these blunders, and Vance will be tied at the hip to Trump, even if he tries to pivot away from him.
And before Larry comes in with the 'registration advantage' numbers I would note that a record number of people now identify as independents in the country, and of those Democrats have a five-point advantage. (https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx) Due to thermostatic politics and Trump's insanity, I expect that to hold for a little while. (but, again, in a short-run timeframe)
Yet this is sort of a trap, as it probably won't be until after Trump and his shadow (which will remain in 2028) leave, and the enthusiasm gap returns to its 'natural equilibrium', so to speak, that we will know where the Democrats truly are. I hope they make good decisions between now and then, and we see more Tallarico's and Peltola's in the swing states, and less Crockett's. And the young, digital native generation waiting in the wings needs to step up and eject the party's old guard. This is not the boomer's world anymore (although we may eventually miss that world more than we like to admit) and boomers shouldn't be making the decisions.
It is interesting that President Trump is just slightly below President Biden in the same period, with the support the left gave Biden and the unceasing attacks on President Trump.
ChatGPT tells me that the top three policy priorities of Americans right now are: Inflation & the economy, Healthcare, and Immigration & border governance
Inflation and the economy will go back and forth. There will be official stats, but many people decide based on whether they and their families’s lives are better.
Democrats strongest policy support is healthcare*.
Republicans strong policy is border security and immigration.
*Healthcare
There is a slow moving train of Medicare/Medicaid fraud investigations. Democrats own this policy, and that is the problem. As defenders of the safety net, how will voters feel when it is clearer the extend of the stealing, in Maine and Minnesota, under the watchful eye of Democrat administrations?
Dems best immigration weapon, along with ICE optics, has been the Rep refusal to propose more generous payments for the humane repatriation of non criminal migrants. That may change, if all non citizen federal subsidies really disappear Feb 1. In 6 months, many migrants may rethink a trip home, if the annual $125 billion taxpayer spigot has been turned off, and they are offered a larger check. Apportionment means Dems will fight each migrant departure, regardless of method.
Reps have also totally failed at detailing the real impact of 10 million unexpected, unvetted arrivals on American life. A friend recently visited at Round Rock ER at 11pm. The home of Dell Computers has changed. A native New Yorker, my friend is not unfamiliar with urban decay, but was surprised to find it in an upscale Texas suburb. The ER was full of menacing young men, covered in gang tattoos, and few others.
What appeared to be an actual stabbing victim, was holding his guts inside his body. The floor was covered in urine, as actual triage took place in the waiting room, with a 4- 5 hour wait. Fleeing, she found a private ER 15 minutes away. More expensive, but gang member free, and quick. My friend is wealthy enough to have options, most Americans do not.
Texas spends more than $110 million dollars every 30 days, just for unpaid illegal migrant healthcare. Feb 1, when many non citizen federal subsidies disappear, the number will likely skyrocket. Oddly, Mr. Tallarico's campaign rarely mentions that.
As for Trump's foreign forays, if they work, they will aid Reps. Obviously, failure will not. No one is invading Greenland, but a deal would put the issue to bed and benefit the US. It is a shame Trump did not undertake a charm offensive, rather than empty threats.
We are likely 6 months away from any real understanding of the Midterms. There are simply too many unknowns. No one foresaw Ms. Good's death. Neither did they expect, 4 illegal Maryland migrants would hack to death a young man with machetes, like a bad horror movie. Stay tuned for comment by Senator Van Hollen.
Is your entire comment available to everyone else? It's cut off for me...
I don't see it easier . Maybe it is someone's way of telling me to embrace brevity!
Very annoying!!!
We'll have no idea of how even the midterms are shaping up until the morning after. Midterm voters are likely to be even harder to predict than before. Later it will be hard to run against Trump who won't be on the ballot.
But to the greater question of have Democrats given me any reason to vote for them other than the fact that none have threatened Canada, no. Cumulatively I think the fairly crazy in the D party adds up to at least the crazy of our Eskimo war Prezident Trump. . . Inuit, sorry.
It takes two to tango, and Minneapolis isn't entirely due to Nazi Groypers.
A solution in Minnesota would be a real good way for the Democratic Party to gain some legitimacy for actually doing things. Daily, Justice, Homeland, ICE, etc parade photos and histories of the worst of the worst they've arrested as part of their efforts. If Minneapolis could deliver any Illegal immigrant murderers or rapists with facial tattoos directly to ICE it might help a little. A felony conviction is supposed to be an automatic ticket home.
The most accurate pollster of the 2025 election was Atlas Intel. (https://www.atlasintel.org/media/atlasintel-is-the-most-accurate-pollster-of-the-us-presidential-election-2nd-time-in-a-row) It called the victory margin almost perfectly--although it very slightly overestimated Trump's vote (had him at 50%, he won 49.8%). It currently has Trump at 59.6% disapproval: https://atlasintel.org/poll/usa-national-2025-12-19
The big polling misses people like to cite are at the state level. The top national pollsters rarely have national polls that have been more than 2-3 points off in any direction.
Biden's approval rating amongst Democrats was at 95% in April of 2021, one year in, so Trump's approval amongst Republicans isn't anything special--as you can see, that number means very little in a hyperpolarized political environment.
That’s not true at all. The only time they’ve ever offered any resistance to Trump’s constant overreach is some withering criticism of his prosecution of Jay Powell, some complaining from MTG, and a few objections to this batshit insane ‘we must have Greenland’ thing. He’s gotten a pass on pretty much everything else. Just the other week they couldn’t even vote on a flimsy resolution saying “Trump can’t do literally anything he wants in Venezuela.”