Americana

1. In with the old
2. YouTube’s AI problem
3. MAGA Inc. Watch
4. Oh! Canada?
5. Taken for Granite

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries shared good news with his caucus this week: His Democrats’ bid for a midterm campaign focused on “affordability” is cutting through the noise.

According to polling that Jeffries circulated this week, Democrats have fixed a mismatch that looked glaring five months ago. In April, voters had said that the “cost of living,” “the economy,” and “inflation” were their number one, two, and three issues, respectively — but that Democrats’ top issue was healthcare, with cost of living at No. 3 and the other topics barely registering.

Voters now thought that Democrats, like them, were most worried about the cost of living, then healthcare, then the economy. Jeffries then took to the cameras to explain how this agenda would play out next year, if he becomes speaker.

“We have to reverse the Medicaid cuts,” the New Yorker told reporters. “We should extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. We should restore congressional authority, as it relates to tariffs, because the Trump tariffs are making life more expensive for the American people. And we should end, decisively, if it’s still going on, Donald Trump’s reckless and costly war in Iran.”

Online pundits promptly panned that plan as too narrow, reflecting a persistent nostalgia for the 1994 “Contract With America” and “Six for ’06″ Democratic platform shaped by Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer. On social media, where nothing Jeffries does is credible, there’s a hunger for Democrats to identify a few specific, popular bills that every candidate can run on this fall.

And it won’t be satisfied. Democrats aren’t crafting the kind of bold-faced messaging that excites take-writers this year. Instead they’re promising voters who are paying more for groceries, fuel, vacations, and more that they can get relief by switching from red to blue.

This theory isn’t landing in Washington, where the frantic and ideologically charged discourse portrays the adrift Democrats as led around by their left wing. Turn on the TV in a swing seat, though, and you can see its power. The focus in competitive races is, still, on affordability.

In New Jersey’s 7th District, which backed Trump by 1 point in 2024, GOP Rep. Tom Kean is running ads about how he “protected Medicare and Medicaid.” In Virginia’s 2nd District, where Trump and Kamala Harris basically tied, GOP Rep. Jen Kiggans sums up the last two years of her party’s trifecta as “lowering prescription drug costs” and cutting taxes.

The schedule for next week’s Republican midterm convention — which Democrats think was a terrible idea that they might have accidentally trolled Trump into — shows that President Donald Trump’s party is trying to deliver its own take on an “affordability” message.

Republicans will tout their “working families tax cuts,” lower prescription drug prices, and crackdowns on fraud and immigration that haven’t yet made a dent in the national debt.

Markey’s victory caps a good night for incumbents

Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey resoundingly won Tuesday’s Democratic primary, turning back a challenge from Rep. Seth Moulton on a bad night for candidates running on generational change.

Markey, who turned 80 in July, ran stronger against Moulton than he did against ex-Rep. Joe Kennedy six years ago, and with a similar strategy. He campaigned as a progressive brawler who would help the next generation pass transformative climate and healthcare legislation, and who would support transgender rights to the hilt — unlike Moulton, who eventually apologized for saying in 2024 that the party needed an open debate on trans athletes in girls’ sports.

Moulton lost everywhere, with Markey even carrying his opponent’s North Shore district by single digits.

Other young Democrats, who ran on more progressive platforms than Moulton, also fell short this week by smaller margins. Rep. Richard Neal and Rep. Stephen Lynch held off their strongest-ever challengers; Neal lost many of the progressive towns in his western Massachusetts seat, while Lynch lost the Boston part of his seat and two growing towns.

In Moulton’s district, Democrats rejected a more progressive candidate in favor of Dan Koh, a former White House staffer who ran the only TV ads this year with straight-to-camera endorsements from both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

AI-fueled videos cash in on America’s divided politics

“William,” a middle-aged man in a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt whose YouTube videos have more than 14 million views, looked straight into the camera at his kitchen table in August and read a script about New York City’s mayor. His video, Mayor Mamdani Panics as Taylor Swift Triggers a $2.3 Billion Celebrity Exodus, quickly racked up more than 474,000 views.

“Omar,” a shaggy, bearded creator who claimed to be based in New York, read a report to viewers in June about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and her ex. AOC FREAKS OUT as Riley Roberts CAUGHT Running Her ENTIRE Operation, set to ominous music, got more than 250,000 views.

To the casual YouTube viewer, these would look like unconnected videos from political news creators outraged by events happening in cities led by Democrats. The reality is more complicated. “William” and “Omar” are actors, Semafor found in a forensic accounting of their channels’ origins. They were reading formulaic, repetitive scripts that appeared to be generated or aided by large-language models.

Viewers either didn’t notice or didn’t mind: A single network of interconnected videos that are affiliated with a growth-hacking company whose founder promises to be the “strongest alternative to paid ads” garnered well over 45 million views and 90,000 comments on YouTube as well as millions more impressions across social platforms like TikTok.

The story caught the eye of two researchers at Riddance AI, a company tracking AI-made content at scale, who “suspected that it might be a political entity looking to steer the conversation along the margins,” Semafor’s Media editor Max Tani wrote.

“The truth, at least about one network of accounts, appears to be both more familiar and stranger.”

Republicans hope Paxton gets a Trump super PAC rescue

As they prepare for next week’s rare midterm GOP convention in Dallas, Republicans keep asking: When will the president’s super PAC really start spending its money?

In Texas, where some Republican donors refuse to support state attorney general Ken Paxton for Senate, Paxton’s allies are hoping that MAGA Inc. will come in after Labor Day to assist the candidate. (When he was still running against Sen. John Cornyn, Paxton encouraged donors to give to the president’s PAC.)

Republicans have an overall cash advantage heading into Labor Day. The RNC is posting record fundraising leads over the DNC; outside groups allied with the GOP have far more to spend than outside groups allied with Democrats. This week, Securing American Greatness, one of the groups funded by MAGA, Inc., began running a national ad that features Dana White praising Trump, and Trump giving the State of the Union address, with no mention of any Republicans running in 2026.

Trump’s Canada trade war polling poorly

Democrats who want to be optimistic about trade politics have a lot to celebrate here: signs that the president hasn’t convinced voters that he can lower prices, but has convinced them he’s distracted by things that don’t matter.

Viewed that way, last week’s “Lake America” executive order and tariff negotiation breakdown were gift-wrapped for the opposition. Neither move was popular, even with Republicans. Just 44% of them support the new tariffs, compared with 72% of Republicans who support the new tariffs on Iran.

And just 33% approve of the “Lake America” renaming, celebrated in conservative media but mocked by most voters — and by Canada. Provincial leaders who don’t belong to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s governing Liberal Party made fun of the decision last week, and on Monday, the Liberals swept three by-elections, adding to their majority in Ottawa.

New Hampshire’s Senate ads show its purple hue

Republicans haven’t won a Senate race in New Hampshire since 2010. They’ve kept the state on their target list this year, confident in their backup candidate: John Sununu, the former senator who lost his seat in 2008 but benefited after his brother Chris became a popular governor. And they’re hopeful that Rep. Chris Pappas won’t excite enough independents or far-left voters to beat Sununu.

Democrats argue that the GOP nominee is benefiting from voter confusion about which Sununu he is. Pappas’ first stab at fixing that was “1996,” a reference to the year Sununu got to Congress; he “gave huge tax breaks to pharma companies” and then “went to work for them.” Karishma Manzur, Pappas’ main left-wing challenger, is up with a digital ad that attacks Pappas for having “never supported Medicare for All” and failed to support cutting aid to Israel.

Republican advertising for Sununu, by contrast, doesn’t mention party ideology, or even that he used to be a senator. In its first joint ad for the candidate, the NRSC says that he spent a career “solving problems” and is “independent” — while claiming that Pappas, by opposing the GOP’s party-line tax and spending bill, wants to raise taxes on “tips” and “Social Security.”

As AI and emerging technologies reshape the global economy, three billion people remain offline, disconnected from the digital opportunities transforming our world.

On Tuesday, September 22 in New York City, The Next 3 Billion will bring together leaders including David Miliband, President and CEO of International Rescue Committee; Dr. Jean Kaseya, Director-General of Africa CDC; Jumoke Oduwole, Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment of Nigeria; Josh Parker, Head of Sustainability, Nvidia; Kara Hurst, Chief Sustainability Officer of Amazon, and more to explore how AI, energy, and global development can expand access, unlock opportunity, and drive inclusive growth across the world’s fastest-growing regions.

The best story I’ve read about the dominance of “dark” money in this election came from Shane Goldmacher and Teddy Schleifer at The New York Times — a comprehensive collection of anecdotes and data about how most campaign spending this year came from hidden sources. Attorneys, they write, now “advise nonprofit clients not to file comprehensive disclosures of this cycle’s activity with the Internal Revenue Service until mid-November 2027.”

The late singer-songwriter Randy VanWarmer is remembered for two big hits: His self-pitying ballad “Just When I Needed You Most” and Alabama’s country-rock song “I’m in a Hurry (And Don’t Know Why).” Neither really got him into the soft-rock canon. “Nobody ever really put a name to the song,” he once said of “Just When I Needed You Most,” accepting that most people assumed it was performed by Bread.

This newsletter’s position is that VanWarmer is an underrated tunesmith who followed up his schmaltzy hit with a far more interesting style and album, “Terraform,” which unfairly started him on a path to obscurity. His first four albums were collected by Warner in 2019, available to stream but not reissued on vinyl. Even better. You have no excuse not to play “Whatever You Decide” or “Suzi Found a Weapon” and decide whether I’m recommending a lost power-pop savant or whether I’m crazy and you can only trust my opinion on campaign ads.

• two days until the first midterm mail ballots are sent out
• six days until primaries in New Hampshire
• seven days until primaries in Rhode Island and the GOP midterm convention in Dallas
• 13 days until primaries in Delaware
• 62 days until the midterm elections