<....But those leading the California map-drawing effort ultimately figured such a bare-knuckled approach would be too risky to alienate the progressive lawmakers and civil rights groups they would need to endorse the plan.

“I just don’t think that it’s something that the voters of California would have supported. I don’t think it’s something that the California Legislature would have supported, and I don’t think that the California [congressional] delegation would have gotten there,” Aguilar said.

Aguilar, Lofgren and Mitchell held a series of 30-minute Zoom meetings with each delegation member, talking through the proposed changes and soliciting feedback. Some members in safe blue seats were set to take in substantial numbers of conservative voters, and others were not thrilled about losing territory they had long represented. But none of those lawmakers aired their grievances publicly, enabling the delegation to project a united front.

“Once the governor signaled very clearly that he was serious, we all got serious about it,” said one California representative. “I don’t think this took a lot of convincing, honestly. People got it.”

‘Passing the baton’

Meanwhile, the Texas Democratic state lawmakers were on the run. In a bid to stave off the GOP redistricting plan, they left Austin to deny a quorum and suddenly became the hottest commodity in Democratic politics. Many took up refuge in suburban Chicago, appearing with Pritzker, another possible 2028 hopeful. Newsom twice hosted groups of Texas legislators in Sacramento. Even former President Barack Obama chimed in to offer support during a virtual meeting in mid-August.

“He painted the reality of what’s going on right now, the value of our democracy, what it takes to preserve democracy and that it’s not in a straight line,” Texas Rep. Ramon Romero Jr. said of the call with Obama. “There are bumps and ups and downs. So we’re a part of that preservation of democracy.”

The quorum break gave Democrats time to organize, but it wasn’t ultimately going to stop the Republican redistricting push. Meanwhile, the strain of the journey was starting to pile up: Lawmakers were levied a daily fine for their absence, and top Texas Republicans threatened to send the FBI or other authorities to track them down. Eventually, it was clear the lawmakers would be heading home.

“We are passing the baton,” Ramon Jr. said, echoing Obama’s message to the Texans. “We’ve run a good first leg.”

The lawmakers returned to Texas earlier this week, paving the way for the state Legislature to approve the new GOP-friendly maps. With Texas moving forward, California Democrats struck their trigger language from their proposal, a tacit acknowledgement their bluff had failed to convince Texas Republicans to fold.

Meanwhile, the redistricting arms race began to spread to other states. Senior White House officials, including Vice President JD Vance, met with Republicans in Indiana to urge them to draw new maps. After some opposition to the idea, the White House is now considering backing primary challengers to uncooperative Indiana Republicans. Ohio is obligated by law to redraw its maps ahead of 2026, which could net Republicans additional seats, while lawmakers in Missouri and Florida have also indicated an openness to mid-cycle redistricting.

Some blue-state governors, such as New York’s Kathy Hochul, have signaled they’re willing to respond. But none have taken concrete steps like California. Marc Veasey, a Democratic congressmember from Fort Worth, said more Democrats should be following the California governor’s example and engaging in the redistricting war.

“Mutually assured destruction is the only way how you stop mid-decade redistricting moving forward,” he said....>

<....Flipping the script

When California state lawmakers broke for recess in mid-July, they had no idea their return to work four weeks later would be dominated by redistricting. Several legislators said they had first heard of Newsom’s gambit through podcasts and social media, stirring up familiar frustrations among Democrats who have chafed at the governor surprising them with splashy announcements.

To put the question to voters, Newsom needed near-unanimous support from Democrats in the state Legislature. And they would have to act on their first week back from recess to get the procedural gears turning in time for a Nov. 4 special election.

The bulk of the map-drawing was being feverishly hashed out among members of Congress, but legislators would need to feel some ownership as well. Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas began fielding messages from members of Congress, particularly Lofgren, Aguilar and Pelosi. He commissioned his own poll to gauge voter sentiments on redistricting. He held virtual caucus meetings over the break, with members calling in from trips outside the state or country.

One lawmaker described the presentations on those calls, which included Lofgren, Aguilar and Mitchell, as tightly scripted, conveying a sense that the train was moving and it was time to get on board. Maps were officially submitted to the Legislature by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee three days before state lawmakers reconvened, though legislators and staff continued to make small adjustments to the proposed boundaries.

As the proposal wound its way through the Legislature, Republicans excoriated the maneuver as the exact kind of backroom self-dealing that led California voters to remove elected officials from congressional redistricting 15 years ago. They insinuated Newsom was in it to boost his presidential bid and warned Democrats were undermining democracy by following Texas down the gerrymandering spiral.

“No matter what the justification is, why would we engage in behavior that is considered unacceptable by those who elected us?” said Assemblymember Tom Lackey during floor debate on Thursday. It was a preview of the opposition campaign, as the national GOP establishment and independent redistricting proponents embark on an unlikely alliance to sink the measure.

In the end, 87 of 90 Democrats voted to put the maps on the ballot — a display of consensus that Rivas said was made possible by the California-under-siege mentality that had been building up ever since Trump re-took the White House.

“It’s Whac-a-mole. We’ve been trying to play defense,” Rivas said. “But we finally just threw up our hands and said, ‘We’ve got to flip the script.’”>

<EPSTEIN, AGAIN: The coming weeks may prove to be crucial ones for President Donald Trump and his allies if they hope to bring the controversy surrounding the release of the so-called Epstein files to something approximating a close.

It’s been more than six weeks since the release of the brief and unsigned joint Justice Department-FBI memo that kicked things off in earnest by reporting that the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had indeed taken his own life and that there was no “client list” to disclose — despite the various assurances and promises of transparency made over the years by Trump, VP JD Vance, AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, among others.

Since then, the White House and Republican allies in Congress have engaged in scattered — you might even say flailing — efforts to tamp things down. As of Friday, the House Oversight Committee now has the first tranche of the DOJ’s rolling production of documents in response to a subpoena, so you can safely expect more activity on this front — and lots more chatter — once members return to Washington next week after the end of August recess.

As a result, we thought now would be a good time to take a step back and see where things otherwise stand on the government’s Epstein-related investigative forays.

To start, let’s level set with the most important question: What could the public usefully learn at this point?

You can break that down into two subsidiary questions based on public polling, media coverage and our admittedly subjective assessment of the political-legal zeitgeist.

1. What was done to prepare the DOJ-FBI memo? Or, to be more precise, what did the DOJ and FBI actually do in recent months to review the Epstein investigation, and what did they learn about the broader conspiracies alleged by skeptics? According to polling released last month, more than two-thirds of the country believes that the Trump administration is hiding information about Epstein.

2. What references to Trump are reportedly in the investigative files? Roughly half of the country apparently now believes that Trump was involved in crimes that were committed by Epstein.

Thus far, the Trump DOJ has failed to answer these in any meaningful way.

The DOJ’s effort to secure the release of grand jury transcripts was a comprehensive flop. There was never much reason to expect to learn anything from them, but as of last week, the administration has now lost in all three of the relevant courts. Two of the judges were particularly sharp in their brushbacks — writing in their opinions that the DOJ had effectively misled the public by suggesting that they would learn anything new from the material, and that the motions were political diversionary tactics.

The Trump DOJ’s release on Friday of the audio and transcript of the Ghislaine Maxwell interview conducted by Deputy AG Todd Blanche was also effectively meaningless.

The decision to interview Maxwell in the first place was — at least as an investigative and prosecutorial matter — a baffling one. For reasons too numerous to recount, no serious prosecutor would take her at her word on anything related to her misconduct, Epstein’s misconduct or, frankly, pretty much anything.

Ironically, the department’s release of the Maxwell interview itself ought to put to rest the notion that she is credible in any form. That is because Maxwell told the DOJ that she was unaware of any criminal misconduct and that she never witnessed any misconduct by any men who visited or traveled with Epstein....>

<....As a practical matter, that would mean one of two things.

The first possibility is that Maxwell was indeed innocent all along — that the first Trump DOJ falsely accused Maxwell when they charged her, that she was wrongfully convicted at trial by a unanimous jury, that most if not all of the overwhelming evidence against Maxwell at the trial was false or fabricated and, in addition, that for some reason she did not testify in her own defense despite watching all of this false evidence come in.

The second possibility is that she is a serial liar who committed terrible crimes and whose self-serving interview with Blanche should be dismissed out of hand — whether it helps or hurts Trump or anyone else. (If you need a refresher on what the evidence at trial revealed about the type of person that Maxwell is, we suggest pages 5-14 of the DOJ’s post-trial sentencing submission.)

We’re going with Occam’s razor on this one.

Meanwhile, House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) has just begun a series of depositions on the Epstein matter. Former AG Bill Barr appeared last week, and the remainder of the schedule includes former AGs Alberto Gonzales, Jeff Sessions, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder and Merrick Garland, among others.

None of these people would seem to have much useful information to offer. In fact, to answer the most pressing Epstein-related questions, the people you would want to speak with would probably include — in no particular order — Trump himself, Bondi, Patel, Blanche, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino and Alex Acosta, who negotiated the sweetheart 2007 plea deal with Epstein while serving as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

You might even call these bizarro investigations. They do not appear to be asking the right questions or talking to the right people to address the things that the average American might actually want to know.

Will the Trump DOJ’s document production be better? That remains to be seen, but a very healthy dose of skepticism is in order. Among other things, the DOJ gets to pick which documents it produces and when it produces them. Yesterday, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that the overwhelming majority of the 30,000+ pages produced by DOJ on Friday was material that was already public.

If you put it all together, an unfortunate verdict emerges: The public has learned pretty much nothing new from the government about the Epstein investigation since this controversy kicked off.

What they have learned, perhaps, is that the Trump White House, the Trump DOJ and House Republicans have provided the appearance of investigative activity and of forward momentum — but that that appearance is, in fact, an illusion.>

<Gavin Newsom knows that politics isn’t just about policy papers or legislative roll calls — it’s about culture, imagery, and the stories people tell each other. That’s why he’s been trolling Donald Trump online with parody memes and razor-sharp mockery that’s spread faster than any campaign ad ever could.

The effect is unmistakable: the California governor is shifting the cultural battlefield, showing that Democrats can seize the same terrain of humor and symbolism Republicans have dominated since Richard Nixon’s “law and order” days. Newsom has left conservative pundits — particularly on Fox “News” — sputtering.

It’s the kind of cultural jujitsu that Antonio Gramsci imagined — flipping power by seizing the symbols and frames of your opponent — and it’s the kind of thing Democrats have needed to do for years but haven’t successfully pulled off since the days of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society.

Gramsci sat in one of Mussolini’s prison cells in the 1920s and 1930s, scribbling his Prison Notebooks and thinking about power. The Italian Marxist theorist recognized something most political leaders of his era missed: raw political control is never enough.

To truly rule with the broad consent of a nation’s citizens, he realized, you have to shape the culture. You have to convince people that your worldview is “common sense,” that your version of reality is the only normal, natural way to see the world.

He called this “cultural hegemony.” The churches, the schools, the newspapers, the songs people sang, the plays they watched and the stories they told all carried values. And those values shaped politics far more than any speech in parliament.

If you win the cultural battle, he argued, you will inevitably win the political one.

Gramsci’s ideas didn’t stay locked up with him. They passed through post-war European intellectuals, the British cultural theorists of the 1950s and 60s, and the American left in the academy. But conservatives were reading too, and by the 1990s a handful of right-wing thinkers had begun warning that liberals were using “cultural Marxism” to dominate universities and Hollywood.

Their solution was simple: steal Gramsci’s insight and use it to push back. Andrew Breitbart put the slogan on bumper stickers: “Politics is downstream from culture.” Steve Bannon made it into a strategy for the Trump White House.

Change the story the nation tells itself, control the cultural conversation, and politics will follow.

Republicans have taken that playbook and used it ruthlessly. Following Frank Luntz and other experts’ advice, they reduce every issue to a frame that touches the gut, not the head, and then repeat it until it becomes the background noise of American life.

Nixon gave us one of the earliest, ugliest examples. His “law and order” campaign wasn’t about crime in general; it was code for crushing the civil rights movement and suppressing Black political power.

His “war on drugs” wasn’t a moral crusade against addiction; as his aide John Ehrlichman later admitted, it was a way to criminalize Black people and anti-war activists. They couldn’t outlaw being Black or protesting the Vietnam War, but they could associate both with drugs and then use police and prisons to break movements and communities.

That was cultural framing at its most cynical and vicious. Nixon didn’t have to talk about race. He just had to say “law and order” and “drugs,” and racist white voters understood the code.

The pattern has repeated itself ever since.

When Republicans attack reproductive rights, they don’t say they want to outlaw abortion or strip women of autonomy; they say they’re defending “life.” That single word is a cultural sledgehammer. Democrats, for years, answered with “choice,” which at least carried some emotional punch, but over time they got pulled into defending Planned Parenthood against smears and explaining the economic dimensions of reproductive healthcare as a women’s “economic issue.” Important arguments, yes, but they don’t resonate at the same visceral level as “life.”

On healthcare, Republicans took the word “choice” and made it their own. “Choose your own doctor” became the mantra of those defending corporate-controlled healthcare and insurance. Democrats talked about “single payer” or “public options,” language that could have come out of an actuary’s report. “Choice” sounds American, even when it means choosing between bad insurance plans or facing bankruptcy....>

<....When Republicans use Reagan’s favorite phrase “small government,” people picture a plucky individual freed from bureaucrats and taxes, a man out west on horseback making a life for himself and his family out of the wilderness. What they mean, though, is making government too weak to tax billionaires, regulate corporate pollution, or protect people from discrimination.

But Democrats never met this frame with one of their own. Instead of talking about “government that works for all,” as FDR and LBJ once did, Democrats let the conversation drift into debates over the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges or the technical structure of regulatory agencies.

FDR understood that people don’t want less government or more government; they want a government that works for them. That is a cultural message, not a policy paper, and Democrats have abandoned it ever since Jimmy Carter’s well-intentioned but wonk-driven presidency.

Republicans say “tax relief,” and suddenly taxes are a disease from which you need to be liberated. Democrats counter with discussions about marginal rates and progressive brackets instead of using FDR’s old line that, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. Too many individuals, however, want civilization at a discount.”

Republicans say “red tape,” and instantly every rule protecting you from being poisoned, cheated, or injured is recast as a useless nuisance. Democrats instead talk about the importance of “regulation,” something all of us would like less of in our lives.

Republicans say “freedom,” and people see flags and hear the national anthem. Instead Democrats, too often, talk about “programs” or “safety nets.”

The same dynamic plays out on guns. Republicans wrap the issue in the word “freedom” and the power to “fight tyranny.” Democrats come back with talk about universal background checks and assault weapons bans. Important, necessary measures, but they don’t touch the same cultural nerve.

Democrats could have framed gun control differently: freedom from being shot at school, freedom from being afraid in a grocery store, freedom from the constant terror that your child might not come home. That’s freedom that resonates with ordinary people. But by ceding the cultural word “freedom” to the GOP, Democrats let Republicans define what freedom means in America.

On immigration, Republicans talk about “secure borders” and “sovereignty.” Democrats talk about “pathways to citizenship.” Republicans make it about the survival of the nation, Democrats make it about paperwork. The Democratic Party is the party of the Statue of Liberty (that was installed during Democrat Grover Cleveland’s presidency), yet Republicans have stolen the cultural image of America and turned it into one of a fortress under siege.

Education has become another cultural battlefield. Republicans push “parents’ rights” and book bans “to protect our children.” Democrats respond with statistics about test scores and defenses of teachers’ unions. But the cultural high ground belongs to the idea that every child has the right to learn the truth, and every parent has the right to send their kid to school without censorship or fear. Republicans frame themselves as liberators of children, even as they chain them to ignorance. Democrats need to call that out for what it is, in cultural terms that are impossible to ignore.

The lesson is the same in every case. Republicans don’t win by having better policies: their policies are almost uniformly cruel, corrupt, and designed to serve the morbidly rich at the expense of everyone else. They win because they fight at the cultural level. They win because they tell a story, over and over, that makes people feel. Democrats, for decades, have responded with charts that only tickle the intellect.

It wasn’t always this way. During the New Deal and the Great Society, Democrats owned the culture wars. FDR didn’t talk about the Securities and Exchange Commission; he talked about “saving capitalism from itself,” about “restoring faith in America,” about “freedom from want and fear.”

Lyndon Johnson didn’t just present Medicare as a program; he said it was part of building a Great Society where people could live with dignity. He sold the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts with similar rhetoric. Those were cultural narratives, not policy briefs. They tied the Democratic party to the most powerful emotions and aspirations of the American people....>

<....If Democrats want to win again, they have to stop ceding the cultural battlefield. Instead, they need to seize today’s opportunities to fully engage in the culture wars, from policy prescriptions to Gavin Newsom ridiculing Trump to JB Pritzker calling out the GOP’s embrace of fascism.

That means reframing every major issue not just in terms of policy mechanics, but in terms of the classic and compelling American values of freedom, fairness, safety, dignity, and opportunity.

Taxes aren’t a burden; they are the way we all pay for the freedom and opportunity America makes possible.

Regulations aren’t red tape; they are the rules that keep the game fair.

Healthcare isn’t about exchanges; it’s about whether you have the right to live without fear of medical bankruptcy.

Guns aren’t about background checks; they’re about whether your child comes home from school alive.

Immigration isn’t about paperwork; it’s about whether America still stands for the promise on the Statue of Liberty.

Republicans learned from Gramsci and weaponized culture. They turned it into dog whistles, slogans, and memes that bypass reason and lodge themselves in the national gut. Democrats can learn from the same source without resorting to the GOP’s lying, cruelty, and thinly coded racism.

The closest Democrats have come in recent years was Barack Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign in 2008, revisited in 2012. But those terms, while culturally potent, lost their impact as the Democratic Party continued to bow to the demands of the banks (not a single bankster went to prison for the 2008 crash they caused) and health insurance (Obamacare was written by the Heritage Foundation and gifted the industry with trillions after Obama dropped the public option) industries.

We can tell the story of freedom that is big enough to include everyone. We can tell the story of America not as a fortress for billionaires but as a community where everyone has a fair shot and nobody is left behind.

Like FDR and LBJ, Democrats can again talk about America realizing its potential as a “we society” instead of the selfish Ayn Rand “me society” that Republicans idolize with their “I got mine, screw the middle class” policies and memes.

The alternative is to keep losing ground to a Republican Party that has mastered the art of cultural hegemony in the worst sense of the term. Nixon showed how destructive that could be with his law and order rhetoric. Reagan perfected it with his “welfare queen” lies. Trump and Bannon have pushed it into the realm of authoritarian spectacle, where politics becomes theater and culture becomes a weapon to bludgeon democracy itself.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The Democrats of the New Deal and Great Society eras knew how to speak to the heart as well as the head. They knew that politics is not just about what laws are passed but about what stories a nation tells itself about who it is. They knew that culture is not an afterthought; it is the riverbed through which politics flows.

Republicans now know it too, and they’ve been poisoning that river for half a century. If Democrats want to save democracy, they must reclaim the story of America, the cultural high ground, and the word freedom itself.>

Same here, enough already.>

I sent his carcase to iggydumb a time ago; his compulsion to have the last word on everything is de trop.

<Even better, I will take an extendend break from CG. I'm feeling stalked by this guy.>

<Democrats are starting to finally see their path back to power in the Senate — if they squint really, really hard.

Party leaders have landed top recruits in Ohio and North Carolina, both pickup opportunities. They hope a snowball effect will push their favorite candidate in Maine, another offensive target, into that race in a state former Vice President Kamala Harris won.

There are other, rockier potential targets: Perhaps they could finally win Texas, where Republicans are locked in a messy, expensive primary. Or Alaska, where senior Democrats are courting a dynamic former representative. Or maybe, they hope, Iowa could become a purple state again.

There’s no doubt that Republicans are still favored to hold onto the Senate after next year’s midterms. Democrats need to flip four GOP-held seats while also holding onto states that President Donald Trump won like Michigan and Georgia. Everything would have to go perfectly for them to pull it off — and this is not an era when things have typically gone perfectly for Democrats.

Still, Democrats are increasingly optimistic after former Sen. Sherrod Brown decided to run for his old seat and former Gov. Roy Cooper launched a bid in North Carolina.

“I’m not going to say we’re taking back the Senate right now, but it looks more possible than it ever was,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.). “We’re recruiting great candidates, and it looks like they’re not really doing the same. The map is expanding week by week.”

Earlier this year, many Democrats were pessimistic that Brown would run again — and without him, Ohio was considered hopelessly out of reach. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer doggedly pursued Brown anyway, repeatedly calling and meeting with him. Brown is expected to officially launch his campaign against Republican Sen. Jon Husted any day now.

Brown, a frumpy populist who won three terms in the Senate even as Ohio grew increasingly redder, lost reelection by fewer than 4 percentage points last year. What makes Democrats nonetheless hopeful is that Brown kept the contest close even as Trump carried the state by 11 percentage points. With Trump in the White House but not on the ballot, they hope, next year’s midterm elections will almost certainly be a better political moment for Democrats.

“Unless you believe we’re headed into another negative environment for Democrats again, this is almost by definition a toss-up race,” said an Ohio Democratic strategist who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about a still-developing race.

Schumer also worked to persuade Cooper, a popular former two-term governor, to run. Cooper broke fundraising records when he announced his Senate bid and is now leading Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley in early polls.

Schumer’s recruitment efforts are reflective of a larger strategy to stake his party’s chances in several key states on well-established, older candidates, even as much of the Democratic base hungers for generational change. Along with Cooper, 68, and Brown, 72, Democrats are hoping to lure Maine Gov. Janet Mills, 77, into the race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins, 72.

The Democrats’ game plan doubles, in theory, as a way to avoid costly and divisive primaries. Cooper effectively boxed out most of the North Carolina field by keeping the door open to a run, and the sole other Democratic candidate, former Rep. Wiley Nickel, exited the race after Cooper launched his bid. Brown is also expected to clear the field in Ohio.

Nickel told POLITICO his initial decision to run was about “fighting for the best chance to flip North Carolina’s Senate seat,” but with Cooper getting in, he said the former governor “gives Democrats our best shot to flip this seat.”....>

<....The success that Senate Democrats have had in luring battle-tested candidates into the arena stands in contrast to Republicans’ efforts this cycle.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, widely seen as a strong potential contender to oust Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, decided against a run. Former New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu similarly opted against a bid for the seat left open by the retirement of Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, even after winning Trump’s support.

Republicans have also lost an incumbent to retirement — and there could be more.

North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis announced he was not running for reelection after Trump attacked him for voting against advancing his megabill. In Iowa, Sen. Joni Ernst has not formally announced she is seeking reelection, and the White House saw it necessary to encourage her to try for another term. Collins got her dream job as Senate Appropriations chair only to see her power undermined by Trump, and Democrats are praying she could be next, though she’s said she intends to run again.

Democrats are also hopeful that contentious GOP primaries could bolster their chances to hold Ossoff’s seat in Georgia and turn Texas blue if MAGA darling Attorney General Ken Paxton ousts incumbent GOP Sen. John Cornyn as polling indicates he might.

“From nasty, expensive primaries to a string of embarrassing recruitment failures and a toxic agenda, Senate Republicans are falling apart at the seams,” said Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesperson Maeve Coyle.

But Democrats have their own crowded primaries to contend with. An ambitious field of three well-funded Democrats in Michigan is threatening to divert resources from defeating Republican Mike Rogers, a former congressman who narrowly lost a Senate race to Elissa Slotkin last year. The GOP quickly consolidated behind Rogers rather than risk a contested primary.

And Democrats are still hoping for other top recruits to enter races. In Maine, Schumer has yet to persuade Mills to get into the Senate race. Ditto for former Rep. Mary Peltola in Alaska, where she is also eyeing the gubernatorial contest after narrowly losing reelection to the House last year.

There are other hurdles for Democrats. They lack a clear leader, are struggling to raise money, and remain unpopular with voters after their resounding defeat in last year’s election.

“The idea that Democrats, saddled with historically low approval ratings, will win in red states with candidates like Brown and Peltola — who voters just rejected — is absurd,” said Joanna Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

But optimistic Democrats know that a single strong candidate — perhaps a Cooper, Brown, Mills, Peltola — can singlehandedly reshape a race. And maybe if they can get a few more of them, their path to control starts to get a little clearer.

Even without squinting so hard.>

<When she announced the criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia in June, Attorney General Pam Bondi said he “has landed in the United States to face justice.” She said, “This is what American justice looks like.”

Bondi is correct that Abrego’s case is an example of “American justice” under the Trump administration — just not in the way she meant.

Had someone tuned into Bondi’s news conference without knowing the backstory, they might’ve gotten the misimpression that Abrego was a fugitive hiding out in a foreign country and that the government had finally captured him.

But he was only in his birth country of El Salvador because the U.S. had sent him there in March, in violation of a court order that barred his removal to that country for his fear of persecution there. The government sent him not only to El Salvador but to that country’s notorious terrorism prison, though he hadn’t even been charged with any crime. By the administration’s own admission, it made an “error.” But instead of quickly fixing it, as ordered by the courts, it resisted until it finally relented in June in the face of a civil lawsuit that Abrego’s lawyers filed for his return to Maryland, where he was living prior to his illegal removal.

But the administration didn’t return him to Maryland. It took him to Tennessee, where federal prosecutors had developed a criminal case against him while he was being held in El Salvador, where he said he was beaten and tortured. He pleaded not guilty to the charges of unlawfully transporting undocumented immigrants. The charges center on a 2022 traffic stop from which he was released at the time without charge. The Trump Justice Department’s decision to bring the case reportedly led a high-ranking Tennessee prosecutor to resign over concerns that the case was “pursued for political reasons.”

Indeed, had Abrego not been illegally sent to El Salvador and then fought for his lawful return, he likely never would’ve been indicted in Tennessee. His lawyers made that point last Tuesday in their motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that it’s based on vengeance.

After the government lost its motion to detain him pretrial, Abrego was released Friday, with the understanding that he would return to Maryland and face the prospect of removal proceedings — potentially lawfully this time.

But a court filing from Abrego’s lawyers over the weekend shows that the administration has taken its vengeance to a new level. According to the filing, on Thursday — the day before he would be released — the government told his counsel that if he agreed to stay in custody and plead guilty, then he could be deported to Costa Rica after he serves whatever sentence the court would impose. Like El Salvador, Costa Rica is a Spanish-speaking country in Central America.

As we know, Abrego declined to stay in jail because he was released Friday.

After his release, an immigration official said the government now wants to deport him to the African nation of Uganda. He was ordered to report to a Baltimore immigration office on Monday morning and was given until then either to accept the Costa Rica deal “or else that offer will be off the table forever,” Abrego’s lawyers wrote in the Saturday filing.

“There can be only one interpretation of these events,” they wrote of the offer, “the DOJ, DHS, and ICE are using their collective powers to force Mr. Abrego to choose between a guilty plea followed by relative safety, or rendition to Uganda, where his safety and liberty would be under threat.”....>

<....Abrego was taken into immigration custody Monday morning. His lawyers filed a new lawsuit Monday to challenge his latest detention and potential deportation.

To borrow Bondi’s phrase, is this “what American justice looks like”?

In response to the Saturday filing, the DOJ said in a statement that Abrego “can plead guilty and accept responsibility or stand trial before a jury.”

Those are generally the options in criminal cases. But the government doesn’t seem eager to bring this one to a jury. Rather, it seems eager to spirit the defendant out of the country again, going so far as to hold the threat of a dangerous exile over his head as leverage to secure a conviction without having to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.

I should note that in criminal cases across the country — ones you’ve never heard of and never will — prosecutors make plea offers that force defendants to make choices that would put them in bad situations immediately to avoid worse fates down the line. Against that backdrop, it’s unsurprising that most cases don’t go to trial. In the ones that do, defendants who are convicted face greater punishment than they would have faced had they pleaded guilty, a phenomenon that’s been called “the trial penalty.” So at least from the defense’s vantage point, there’s an element of legalized coercion baked into the system.

In that light, it’s understandable that not everyone sees American justice as a righteous concept to begin with. But it can always be further degraded.

The Trump administration seems hell-bent on such degradation. Having embarrassed itself with the illegal removal of Abrego and failure to quickly fix it, it’s now acting as a sort of dystopian travel agent in a desperate bid to avoid a criminal case that it didn’t have to bring in the first place.

Rather than ensuring that Abrego would “face justice,” as Bondi proclaimed upon his U.S. return, the government appears to be trying to save face. No matter what happens next, that won’t be possible in the eyes of people who’ve been paying attention. The damage to American justice has been done.>

<The redistricting war is officially on.

After weeks of bluster from dueling governors and state lawmakers, California and Texas raced forward with parallel action this week to draw new congressional maps, setting into motion a national redistricting fight that could upend the midterms and determine control of the House.

Texas Republicans on Saturday passed a new map that will help the GOP flip as many as five House seats — a partisan play at the hand of President Donald Trump. On Thursday, California Democratic lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom preemptively agreed to send a retaliatory ballot measure to voters — the first step in potentially offsetting Texas’ maneuver by creating new Democratic-leaning seats.

The nation’s two largest states had fired the opening salvo in what is likely to become an intense and protracted redistricting campaign by both parties to grasp power in Washington. Now other red and blue state governors face pressure to follow their lead and aggressively gerrymander their congressional maps.

Republicans hold a clear advantage in the arms race: The GOP is poised to move forward with redistricting in Florida, Ohio, Missouri and Indiana, which could yield at least half a dozen more seats. Democrats, meanwhile, have struggled to get gerrymandering efforts moving in blue states beyond California, though leaders in New York, Illinois and Maryland say they are weighing options.

“Right now, these other states need to step up,” said Rep. Robert Garcia, a Democrat from Long Beach, Calif. “I know it’s hard, I know it’s complicated … But, if you’re a blue state governor, the time is now to step up and get it done.”

As the map battles continue, at stake is a national shift away from the norm of once-a-decade, Census-aligned redistricting and toward a more polarized landscape in which both parties redraw political maps at will to shift the balance of power. The escalation has major implications for Trump’s post-midterm agenda and the political prospects of several prominent Democrats, including Newsom and his likely presidential run in 2028.

Democrats in the California Legislature framed their vote Thursday in that national context, casting it as a fight to save American democracy from Trump’s “election rigging” — even as they voted nearly unanimously to toss aside lines drawn by the state’s independent commission and put forward a partisan map. The ends, they argued, justified the means.

“We don’t want this fight and we didn’t choose this fight, but with our democracy on the line, we cannot and will not run away from this fight,” said Assemblymember Marc Berman, a Democrat from Silicon Valley.

The vote sets off a Nov. 4 special election for Californians, and both parties are gearing up for an all-out campaign sprint. Democrats estimate they will have to raise up to $100 million to mount an advertising blitz across the state’s large and expensive media markets to convince voters, whom early polling shows are skeptical.

Republicans, who have a thin minority in the California statehouse, unsuccessfully tried to derail the vote with a host of procedural maneuvers. They argued California Democrats betrayed voters’ trust by adopting a map drawn behind closed doors, sidestepping the state’s voter-created redistricting commission. A GOP-backed legal attempt to thwart Democrats’ map was also dismissed by the California Supreme Court on Wednesday.

Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, a Republican from San Diego, called the vote a “political stunt.” When Democrats said he couldn’t use props during his floor speech, he retorted, “Then, why have you become props to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s presidential campaign?”

Texas Democrats, a minority in their state House, have pulled their own stunts. House members prolonged passage of the map by leaving the state for two weeks in protest, denying Republicans the quorum needed to conduct official business. When they returned, Rep. Nicole Collier refused to sign a permission slip ordered by GOP leadership allowing law enforcement to supervise her movements and instead staged a sit-in on the House floor.

Unlike California Democrats’ map, which requires voter approval to take effect, the Republicans in the Texas Legislature were able to approve their map without going to voters or mounting a statewide campaign. Both parties have vowed to fight the maps in court, disputes that could ultimately lead to the U.S. Supreme Court. A lawsuit in Texas was filed just hours after the map was approved by the legislature early Saturday....>

<....“The fight is far from over,” Texas Rep. Gene Wu, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, said on the floor after the map passed the House on Wednesday. “Our best shot is in the courts. This part of the fight is over, but it is merely the first chapter.”

In Texas, Democrats argue the GOP’s map illegally dilutes the voting power of Hispanic and Black voters. In California, where the state’s map preserves minority-opportunity districts, Republicans say the map illegally sidelines the state’s independent redistricting commission.

But in the redistricting wars, voting rights and other legal considerations are taking a backseat to purely partisan interests.

Efforts are underway to carve out more GOP seats in Indiana, Ohio, Missouri and Florida — and Trump’s political operation is pressuring individual state lawmakers to act. On Thursday, Trump declared on X that Republicans in Missouri — where the GOP could pick up one more seat by splitting a district in Kansas City — are “IN!” to call a special session to redistrict.

The legal hurdles for Democrats in other deep-blue states could prove more formidable, hampering their party’s quest to retake the House in the 2026 midterms.

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to disband a quasi-independent commission in charge of drawing House map. But the panel, created by a voter-approved constitutional amendment, cannot be erased until 2027 at the earliest.

And while the New York governor has talked tough about redistricting, she acknowledged to reporters her hands are tied by the state’s lengthy constitutional amendment process. Any changes must be approved by two separately elected sessions of the Legislature before going to voters in a referendum.

“Now, everyone says, ‘Why don’t you do what Gavin Newsom does?’ Gavin Newsom has a very different situation, because if I could, I would,” Hochul told reporters this week. “But I have to have the Constitution changed, and also the voters approved that change, before I can do that.”

Albany Democrats are under pressure to act faster anyway.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat, has talked several times in recent weeks with Hochul about their options and this week urged her and other top New York Democrats to expand the state’s voting rights law — which enables legal challenges to local legislative districts — to include congressional seats.

That would open the door to a legal challenge to the existing house lines, a maneuver designed to force a mid-decade redistricting if the map is thrown out. But two New York Democratic officials, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said that would be a long shot given the complexities of the strategy. One of them said there are “no clear options” for what New York can do ahead of the midterms.

That’s leaving Democrats to scour the map for potential redistricting pick-up opportunities outside California.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has spoken boldly about the importance for Democrats to not let Texas go unmatched, and the state hosted many of the Democrats who left the Texas state House. But Illinois has been known for its aggressive Democratic gerrymanders, and it currently has just three Republican seats it can target.

It’s also unclear Illinois Democrats have the political will to take on redrawing the congressional map — most of the redistricting talk this week has been on a whole other set of maps. Former Barack Obama chief of staff Bill Daley, a Chicago Democrat, and Ray LaHood, a Peoria Republican who served as Obama’s transportation secretary, rolled out a “Fair Maps Illinois” proposal this week that would end the process of state lawmakers drawing their own districts.

In Maryland — one of Democrats’ few options to wage a response to the GOP — House Majority Leader David Moon is pushing legislation to open its redistricting process. Gov. Wes Moore has said that “all options are on the table,” but has not laid out any specifics.

“It is not our first choice to fight back against this, and I think it’s everybody’s preference that we stand down and everyone steps back from the brink here,” Moon said in an interview. “But I think the common sentiment you’re seeing from everyone is that we have to be prepared in the event that this thing does explode.”>

<America is in the midst of a vast political realignment — not entirely caused by Donald Trump, but certainly accelerated by him. And the biggest indicator of how someone will vote is now based on education. Went to a four-year college? You’re likely backing the Democrat. Skipped it? There’s the Republican lever.

These are some of the most important observations in a new report on the state of American politics ahead of the 2026 midterms from Doug Sosnik, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and now at the Brunswick Group, a global advisory firm. Sosnik has become well known in Washington for his slide decks of political analysis, and this memo and slide deck lay bare the degree to which education polarization has reshaped American politics.

In 2024, Democrats carried 14 of the 15 most college-educated states, while Republicans captured 14 of the 15 least college-educated states (Utah and New Mexico, respectively, bucked the trend).

A year out from the midterms and with Trump’s approval rating on the decline, Sosnik told POLITICO Magazine that he expects Democrats to do well. The House is within reach for the party, though the Senate will obviously be tougher to take.

But Democrats would be foolish to think they’ve solved their problems if they do succeed in 2026. College-educated Americans are higher propensity voters — they’re more likely to turn out in a midterm election. When the next presidential election arrives, the makeup of the electorate will once again shift.

“2028 and 2026 are completely different,” he said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As we look through this report, what results jumped out to you as something different from the political consensus heading into 2026?

There’s been a rule of thumb, actually going back to the 1950s but certainly in the period of time that I’ve been in politics now for 40 years, that in midterm elections, the president’s job approval is the single best predictor of the outcome. And what also has happened in the last 20-25 years is that the president’s job approval around Labor Day of their first year in office tracks pretty closely to their job approval for their entire term of office. And Trump, more than any other president, has a much narrower band between his low marks and his high marks of job approval.

If you go back to 1994, when Clinton had the same job approval as Trump does now, it was the biggest midterm election swing against the incumbent party since at least the early 1970s. And then in 2010, Obama had the same job approval as Trump, and that turned out to be a bigger swing against the incumbent party, I think the biggest since World War II.

But due to structural changes in our politics, which are largely due to a realignment in our politics based on education levels, even if the Democrats were to have a really great election cycle in the midterms, there’s going to be a limit to how many seats they can win back due to these structural changes.

If you look at Trump’s job approval on issues, he’s underwater on everything, particularly way, way lower now on the economic ratings, on inflation, and even immigration now is underwater. So you would think that his total job approval, currently around 44 percent, would be lower.

The bottom line is based on historical standards, Trump and the Republicans should be headed to a really bad midterm election. But because of these changes in our politics, due to realignment based on education, they’ll be more insulated than they would have been in the past from a tsunami-type of midterm.

Trump’s approval rating suggests Republicans are in for a rough 2026, at least in the House. But Biden and Democrats managed to largely overcome very similar numbers in 2022. What’s the likeliest outcome next year, and what would Republicans need to keep losses to a minimum?

We’ve only had seven swing states in the last three presidential elections. The other 43 are not. And the reason the other 43 are not is they skew towards either a high level of college education or low level of college education. And that’s why 86 percent of the states in this country are not competitive. What distinguishes almost all of those seven states is that they all tend to be in the middle on education....>

<....So in 2022, there were probably three factors that helped Democrats. The first was, I do think that the Roe decision was a factor, especially for the higher percentage of the electorate that is college-educated that votes in the midterms. The second thing is that the basket of states in the Senate that were on the ballot were disproportionately in those battleground states where it wasn’t a layup for either party. The third reason is that the states overall were more favorable to Democrats. For instance, they picked up two governors’ races because you had Republicans in Massachusetts and Maryland, two of the most highly educated states in the country. So, I think it was the basket of states that enabled the Democrats to defy history. Those same conditions won’t be available to Republicans in 2026.

The Senate is obviously tougher for Democrats. What are their chances at winning back a majority?

Right now, there are only six Senate races that are considered highly competitive or somewhat competitive, and three of them are held by Democrats. So that’s a huge advantage for the Republicans in terms of limiting their losses.

Now for the Democrats to take the Senate back, they have to enlarge the map in Texas and Ohio. I think there are some reasons so far, at least, that there should be some concern by Republicans. They’ve done a poor job of recruitment. New Hampshire, which was considered a toss-up by the Cook Political Report, now leans Democratic because of poor candidate recruitment by the Republicans. They’ve done a poor job of recruitment in Georgia as well. And they’ve got a ticking time bomb in Texas, where if Attorney General Ken Paxton becomes the nominee, that state all of a sudden becomes winnable. The Democrats have also done a very good job in recruitment getting, without question, the best possible candidate in North Carolina and Ohio.

How does the fact that Trump is not a regular politician but a movement leader affect how the midterms might shake out?

There is some historical analog which should give some heartburn to Republicans. In almost 50 years, I think there have been probably three people that have been what I call movement candidates — Reagan, which was a political movement, that was probably the last time our politics had been realigned that way. And then Obama and Trump, and what happened for both Obama and so far with Trump is that movements are, by definition, built around the popularity of an individual, and that is largely proven to be not transferable in the case of Obama Democrats and in the case of Trump Republicans.

You look at Obama’s victory in 2008, I think it was the biggest political victory by a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson. If you look two years later, that was the biggest loss by a party since World War II. Because the people that voted for Obama were attracted to Obama. They weren’t necessarily attracted to the Democratic Party. Republicans got battered in 2018, lost over 40 seats in the House, and they underperformed considerably in 2022. So there’s no evidence up until now that this movement to Trump has transferred to other Republicans when he’s not on the ballot.

One of the starkest parts of your deck was the degree to which Democrats are now relying on college-educated voters, who also tend to participate more in midterm elections. Does this combination mean they have a better chance next year in a lower turnout scenario?

Since I’ve been in politics, the world has turned on its side on that question. Politics is a lagging indicator. Starting in the 1960s with the Vietnam War, and then the economic divide between the people with and without money in the 70s, it didn’t surface in our politics until 1992, when Ross Perot got 19 percent of the vote, driven by rural non-college voters who have been screwed by the transformation of our economy. Trump was a symptom of and not a cause of this, but he did accelerate the completion of these trends that formed long before he ever thought about running for president. His 2016 election was the culmination of those trends, and his presidency helped reinforce them.

The 2018 midterms was the first election in this post-realignment world in which all of a sudden, midterm elections favor the Democrats because they’re the party of the college-educated and they’re the highest propensity voters. On average, the percentage of the electorate that’s college-educated is about four points higher in an off-year. And so 2028 and 2026 are completely different....>

<....The 2026 midterms, for all of the challenges and problems the Democrats have going forward, those challenges can actually become an advantage in the midterms. But they are an increasing liability in the presidential. So I don’t think you should look at the midterms as a precursor to what’s going to happen in 2028, but amongst the advantages that the Democrats now have in the midterms next year is having a party full of college-educated people and higher propensity voters.

So, Democrats are in for some lean presidential years if they can’t reverse this trend.

Somebody asked me, what should the Democratic Party be doing to get back? My answer is threefold. The first is, presidents and nominees define parties. So us taking the White House back in 2028 is going to be hugely dependent on who we nominate. Do they have the right vision, the right temperament to be elected president?

The second thing we need to do is not take the bait on the social issues in which we are outside the mainstream. Not only where we are on these issues, but the fact that we spent a lot of time focused on them.

But the third factor, and the most important, we will never become a majority party again if we’re not able to attract non-college people to vote for us. If you take the history and the strength of the Democratic Party, we were the party that provided opportunities for people, if they worked hard, they could get ahead. And we’ve now had a half a century in which there’s an increasing number of people who believe that we no longer do that. So to me, the key for us is understanding we’re in a country in which 60 percent of the people don’t have a four-year college degree, the key for us is going to be whether we can attract non-college-educated voters to support us, and we need an agenda that will enable them, if they work hard, to get ahead.

We have a clear collection of swing states now. But if these trends continue, what other states could be up for grabs, and what current swing states might move more into one column or another?

2000 was the beginning of this correlation of education and voting. And so that was the first year that you saw, I think, five states that were traditionally Democratic not only move to the Republicans, but become part of the Republican base — Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and West Virginia. And then you saw in the first decade a trend in which both Colorado and Virginia, because they’re highly educated voters, move to Democrats and Ohio and Iowa increasingly become Republican. They both have a low percentage of educated voters.

If you go back to your question, it depends on your frame of reference in terms of time. So, for instance, I’m quite confident that in a fast moving, fast growing state like Tennessee that is getting a huge growth and huge influx of people from other parts of the country, and a huge increase in the number of companies that are moving to Nashville, I believe that Tennessee will be a Democratic state in the future. Now, if you ask me when, I would say I don’t know, but maybe in 20 years.

<....As a Democrat, the things that I’m looking at that concern me the most out of the 2024 election are the fact that education is now beginning to transcend race and ethnicity in determining how people vote, and the decline in young voters voting for Democrats.

There was an old saying that Democrats believed 20 years ago, which was that demography is destiny, and because all these young people and people of color and Hispanic people were all Democratic, these states with a high proportion of the population being Hispanic and young, they’re all eventually all going to be Democratic. Well, I’m not sure demography is destiny anymore.

I will say, though, that for younger people of all races and ethnicities, I think they don’t really believe in any of the people in power. I think they feel alienated from both political parties. And so I think they’re all completely up for grabs.

Do you have any other direct predictions about how 2026 will play out? Any specific races you’re watching?

In the House, if you’re looking at all the states considering mid-decade reapportion redistricting, that totals up to almost a third of the Electoral College. So at this point, it’s really difficult to make any predictions. The first question is how does the mid-decade redistricting come out? The range of outcomes is probably Republicans netting somewhere between plus four and plus nine seats. Then I’d look at these 13 Democratic-held seats that Trump carried in 2024. Then, I’d look at states with a bunch of competitive seats as barometers, including California, New York and Pennsylvania.

If you look at the Senate, I think you’re going into it assuming that it should be a good Democratic year. The question is, how good? There’s holding onto a first basket of states, that’s Michigan, New Hampshire and Minnesota. Then in a second tier, there’s holding Georgia and winning North Carolina and winning Maine — that would be maybe better than what we thought going in. Then you look at Texas and Ohio, and if you were to tell me nothing else about the election but that Democrats won Texas and Ohio, then I’ll tell you they had a great year.>

<Gavin Newsom knows that politics isn’t just about policy papers or legislative roll calls — it’s about culture, imagery, and the stories people tell each other. That’s why he’s been trolling Donald Trump online with parody memes and razor-sharp mockery that’s spread faster than any campaign ad ever could.

The effect is unmistakable: the California governor is shifting the cultural battlefield, showing that Democrats can seize the same terrain of humor and symbolism Republicans have dominated since Richard Nixon’s “law and order” days. Newsom has left conservative pundits — particularly on Fox “News” — sputtering.

It’s the kind of cultural jujitsu that Antonio Gramsci imagined — flipping power by seizing the symbols and frames of your opponent — and it’s the kind of thing Democrats have needed to do for years but haven’t successfully pulled off since the days of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society.

Gramsci sat in one of Mussolini’s prison cells in the 1920s and 1930s, scribbling his Prison Notebooks and thinking about power. The Italian Marxist theorist recognized something most political leaders of his era missed: raw political control is never enough.

To truly rule with the broad consent of a nation’s citizens, he realized, you have to shape the culture. You have to convince people that your worldview is “common sense,” that your version of reality is the only normal, natural way to see the world.

He called this “cultural hegemony.” The churches, the schools, the newspapers, the songs people sang, the plays they watched and the stories they told all carried values. And those values shaped politics far more than any speech in parliament.

If you win the cultural battle, he argued, you will inevitably win the political one.

Gramsci’s ideas didn’t stay locked up with him. They passed through post-war European intellectuals, the British cultural theorists of the 1950s and 60s, and the American left in the academy. But conservatives were reading too, and by the 1990s a handful of right-wing thinkers had begun warning that liberals were using “cultural Marxism” to dominate universities and Hollywood.

Their solution was simple: steal Gramsci’s insight and use it to push back. Andrew Breitbart put the slogan on bumper stickers: “Politics is downstream from culture.” Steve Bannon made it into a strategy for the Trump White House.

Change the story the nation tells itself, control the cultural conversation, and politics will follow.

Republicans have taken that playbook and used it ruthlessly. Following Frank Luntz and other experts’ advice, they reduce every issue to a frame that touches the gut, not the head, and then repeat it until it becomes the background noise of American life.

Nixon gave us one of the earliest, ugliest examples. His “law and order” campaign wasn’t about crime in general; it was code for crushing the civil rights movement and suppressing Black political power.

His “war on drugs” wasn’t a moral crusade against addiction; as his aide John Ehrlichman later admitted, it was a way to criminalize Black people and anti-war activists. They couldn’t outlaw being Black or protesting the Vietnam War, but they could associate both with drugs and then use police and prisons to break movements and communities.

That was cultural framing at its most cynical and vicious. Nixon didn’t have to talk about race. He just had to say “law and order” and “drugs,” and racist white voters understood the code.

The pattern has repeated itself ever since.

When Republicans attack reproductive rights, they don’t say they want to outlaw abortion or strip women of autonomy; they say they’re defending “life.” That single word is a cultural sledgehammer. Democrats, for years, answered with “choice,” which at least carried some emotional punch, but over time they got pulled into defending Planned Parenthood against smears and explaining the economic dimensions of reproductive healthcare as a women’s “economic issue.” Important arguments, yes, but they don’t resonate at the same visceral level as “life.”

On healthcare, Republicans took the word “choice” and made it their own. “Choose your own doctor” became the mantra of those defending corporate-controlled healthcare and insurance. Democrats talked about “single payer” or “public options,” language that could have come out of an actuary’s report. “Choice” sounds American, even when it means choosing between bad insurance plans or facing bankruptcy.

When Republicans use Reagan’s favorite phrase “small government,” people picture a plucky individual freed from bureaucrats and taxes, a man out west on horseback making a life for himself and his family out of the wilderness. What they mean, though, is making government too weak to tax billionaires, regulate corporate pollution, or protect people from discrimination....>

<....But Democrats never met this frame with one of their own. Instead of talking about “government that works for all,” as FDR and LBJ once did, Democrats let the conversation drift into debates over the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges or the technical structure of regulatory agencies.

FDR understood that people don’t want less government or more government; they want a government that works for them. That is a cultural message, not a policy paper, and Democrats have abandoned it ever since Jimmy Carter’s well-intentioned but wonk-driven presidency.

Republicans say “tax relief,” and suddenly taxes are a disease from which you need to be liberated. Democrats counter with discussions about marginal rates and progressive brackets instead of using FDR’s old line that, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. Too many individuals, however, want civilization at a discount.”

Republicans say “red tape,” and instantly every rule protecting you from being poisoned, cheated, or injured is recast as a useless nuisance. Democrats instead talk about the importance of “regulation,” something all of us would like less of in our lives.

Republicans say “freedom,” and people see flags and hear the national anthem. Instead Democrats, too often, talk about “programs” or “safety nets.”

The same dynamic plays out on guns. Republicans wrap the issue in the word “freedom” and the power to “fight tyranny.” Democrats come back with talk about universal background checks and assault weapons bans. Important, necessary measures, but they don’t touch the same cultural nerve.

Democrats could have framed gun control differently: freedom from being shot at school, freedom from being afraid in a grocery store, freedom from the constant terror that your child might not come home. That’s freedom that resonates with ordinary people. But by ceding the cultural word “freedom” to the GOP, Democrats let Republicans define what freedom means in America.

On immigration, Republicans talk about “secure borders” and “sovereignty.” Democrats talk about “pathways to citizenship.” Republicans make it about the survival of the nation, Democrats make it about paperwork. The Democratic Party is the party of the Statue of Liberty (that was installed during Democrat Grover Cleveland’s presidency), yet Republicans have stolen the cultural image of America and turned it into one of a fortress under siege.

Education has become another cultural battlefield. Republicans push “parents’ rights” and book bans “to protect our children.” Democrats respond with statistics about test scores and defenses of teachers’ unions. But the cultural high ground belongs to the idea that every child has the right to learn the truth, and every parent has the right to send their kid to school without censorship or fear. Republicans frame themselves as liberators of children, even as they chain them to ignorance. Democrats need to call that out for what it is, in cultural terms that are impossible to ignore.

The lesson is the same in every case. Republicans don’t win by having better policies: their policies are almost uniformly cruel, corrupt, and designed to serve the morbidly rich at the expense of everyone else. They win because they fight at the cultural level. They win because they tell a story, over and over, that makes people feel. Democrats, for decades, have responded with charts that only tickle the intellect.

It wasn’t always this way. During the New Deal and the Great Society, Democrats owned the culture wars. FDR didn’t talk about the Securities and Exchange Commission; he talked about “saving capitalism from itself,” about “restoring faith in America,” about “freedom from want and fear.”

Lyndon Johnson didn’t just present Medicare as a program; he said it was part of building a Great Society where people could live with dignity. He sold the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts with similar rhetoric. Those were cultural narratives, not policy briefs. They tied the Democratic party to the most powerful emotions and aspirations of the American people.

If Democrats want to win again, they have to stop ceding the cultural battlefield. Instead, they need to seize today’s opportunities to fully engage in the culture wars, from policy prescriptions to Gavin Newsom ridiculing Trump to JB Pritzker calling out the GOP’s embrace of fascism.

That means reframing every major issue not just in terms of policy mechanics, but in terms of the classic and compelling American values of freedom, fairness, safety, dignity, and opportunity....>

<....Taxes aren’t a burden; they are the way we all pay for the freedom and opportunity America makes possible.

Regulations aren’t red tape; they are the rules that keep the game fair.

Healthcare isn’t about exchanges; it’s about whether you have the right to live without fear of medical bankruptcy.

Guns aren’t about background checks; they’re about whether your child comes home from school alive.

Immigration isn’t about paperwork; it’s about whether America still stands for the promise on the Statue of Liberty.

Republicans learned from Gramsci and weaponized culture. They turned it into dog whistles, slogans, and memes that bypass reason and lodge themselves in the national gut. Democrats can learn from the same source without resorting to the GOP’s lying, cruelty, and thinly coded racism.

The closest Democrats have come in recent years was Barack Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign in 2008, revisited in 2012. But those terms, while culturally potent, lost their impact as the Democratic Party continued to bow to the demands of the banks (not a single bankster went to prison for the 2008 crash they caused) and health insurance (Obamacare was written by the Heritage Foundation and gifted the industry with trillions after Obama dropped the public option) industries.

We can tell the story of freedom that is big enough to include everyone. We can tell the story of America not as a fortress for billionaires but as a community where everyone has a fair shot and nobody is left behind.

Like FDR and LBJ, Democrats can again talk about America realizing its potential as a “we society” instead of the selfish Ayn Rand “me society” that Republicans idolize with their “I got mine, screw the middle class” policies and memes.

The alternative is to keep losing ground to a Republican Party that has mastered the art of cultural hegemony in the worst sense of the term. Nixon showed how destructive that could be with his law and order rhetoric. Reagan perfected it with his “welfare queen” lies. Trump and Bannon have pushed it into the realm of authoritarian spectacle, where politics becomes theater and culture becomes a weapon to bludgeon democracy itself.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

The Democrats of the New Deal and Great Society eras knew how to speak to the heart as well as the head. They knew that politics is not just about what laws are passed but about what stories a nation tells itself about who it is. They knew that culture is not an afterthought; it is the riverbed through which politics flows.

Republicans now know it too, and they’ve been poisoning that river for half a century. If Democrats want to save democracy, they must reclaim the story of America, the cultural high ground, and the word freedom itself.>