Americana

1. The year in 10 election days
2. DNC chair race heats up
3. The resistance that wasn’t
4. Special elections in Virginia
5. Dems help pass a GOP immigration bill

Also: David recommends great reporting on the Los Angeles wildfires.

Joe Biden was the youngest member of the Senate. Jimmy Carter was a newly sworn-in president, promising a new post-Vietnam commitment to “human rights.” They were on the same page: America would relinquish its claim on the Panama Canal — a “diplomatic cancer” (Carter) and “the last vestige of US imperialism” (Biden).

Biden’s successor disagrees. Nothing has startled Democrats, already girding for four years of miserable surprises, like Donald Trump’s new flirtation with territorial expansion. As usual, he has brought his party with him. “This is the new Manifest Destiny,” freshman Texas Rep. Brandon Gill told CNN this week. “Reacquiring the Panama Canal, acquiring Greenland, renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America — this is the light of America expanding.”

The most popular Democratic response to this was exhaustion. “Why is Donald Trump doing this?” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren asked this week, explaining that it was a “distraction” from the nomination fights for Trump’s most controversial cabinet picks.

But Trump is trying to reverse decades of consensus that modern America does not try to take new territory. Democrats see this as a ruse, not a serious policy. One minute, Donald Trump, Jr. was posting about his visit to Greenland, with a clear expansionist message. The next he was denouncing Los Angeles for donating fire supplies to Ukraine. Do these guys want an empire, or don’t they?

You can understand the frustration, from a party that can’t even propose a tweak to the child tax credit without being asked how it could possibly pay for it. Trump’s AI-powered troll-posting about annexing Canada isn’t serious, but it drives news and reverberates in Ottawa. Trump’s talk about negotiating for Greenland or re-colonizing part of Panama is serious, and conservative intellectuals and legislators treat it that way, rolling out a Panama Canal Repurchase Act, explaining why full ownership of Greenland would protect “national security,” asking Americans to imagine how they’d feel if China took it over instead.

This really isn’t a distraction from the work of confirming Trump’s cabinet or passing a tax bill. It’s a vision of American greatness that hasn’t been popular for at least a century, when maps of the Greater United States highlighted the scale and size of the country’s territories. Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, who accompanied Trump, Jr. to Greenland, calls this the “resurrection of masculine American energy.” This is antithetical to how Democrats, from Carter to Biden, viewed America’s role in the “rule-based international order.”

You’d think, by now, they’d be ready for Trump throwing out everything they were used to.

The year ahead in 10 election days

Republicans are preparing for at least two years of total control in Washington. Democrats are at the very beginning of a wilderness journey with no clear ending. And this year’s elections won’t change that.

But across the country, from New England to Northern California, they will test the strength of the urban progressive movement that thrived in Donald Trump’s first term — and provide hints to how the 2026 midterms might play out. In two states, Republicans will try to defy history and elect governors who belong to the president’s party; in Virginia, that would mean electing the first Black female governor in America.

To help understand what’s coming, I’ve highlighted 10 election days that will matter in 2025. One could remake state politics in Wisconsin, with downstream consequences for the rest of the decade. One could create a New York political comeback that nobody would have predicted just two years ago. Several will determine whether the criminal justice reform movement that ran through major cities for a decade will continue or be snuffed out.

“Influencer” forum for DNC chair candidates

The race to lead the Democratic National Committee will heat up next week, when candidates meet for their first in-person forum and join a first-ever “influencer” forum designed to reach past the mainstream media.

Next Thursday, the leading candidates to replace DNC Chair Jaime Harrison will head to Detroit for a discussion moderated by five Politico reporters. Two days earlier they’ll head back into their Zoom rooms for “The Chorus DNC Chair Forum,” organized by a new nonprofit put together by social media influencers who were invited to the party’s convention in Chicago.

“Here’s the thing: about 40% of Americans actively avoid the news, [y]et people are consuming more information than ever before while scrolling on their phones,” Minnesota DFL chair Ken Martin told Semafor. “Republicans jumped on this and invested in an information feedback loop to constantly hammer a false image of Democrats. They understand how the algorithm economy works. They understand how the creator economy works. Democrats need a massive realignment of our information strategy at every level.”

On Thursday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz endorsed Martin for the DNC role — and David Hogg, the 24-year-old who became a gun control activist after a mass shooting at his Florida high school, for DNC vice chair.

The un-resistance

Democrats came to Monday’s certification of the Electoral College vote with a plan: Say little, lose gracefully, and hope that people appreciated it.

“I can feel proud that we’re acting as constitutional patriots,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who served as an impeachment manager after Donald Trump tried to subvert the last Electoral College certification. In 2017, he was among the Democrats who objected to Trump’s victory, knowing that it wouldn’t work. In 2025, he and the rest of his party wanted, and got, “a peaceful and uneventful and nonviolent transfer of power.”

That was the mood for most Democratic activists, elected and grassroots, as Jan. 6 came and went. There were few rallies or protests marking the occasion — fewer than 100 people outside the Capitol on Monday, a handful of protests over the weekend by groups founded in Trump’s first term. One organizer in southeast Virginia told Semafor that, to her surprise, a Japanese TV crew came to cover her Jan. 6 remembrance event, which attracted about 40 people. According to the producer, it was the only one they could find within a day’s drive of Washington.

No surprises in post-November Virginia polls

The first elections of 2025 ended with no seats changing hands, and a slight increase in vote share for Virginia Democrats. The special elections kicked off when GOP Rep. John McGuire and Democratic Rep. Suhas Subramanyam resigned to take their House seats, and pulled in Gov. Glenn Youngkin and an array of Democrats, all of them testing out field strategies and trying to shift the margins in typically uncompetitive districts. Devastated by their election losses, Democratic voters pushed through the snowbanks and voted anyway.

In the DC suburbs, Democratic state legislator Kannan Srinivasan easily held Subramanyam’s old Senate seat, and Democrat JJ Singh won the race to replace Srinivasan. They won by 23 points and 24 points respectively, running marginally ahead of Kamala Harris’ result in last year’s election — but behind Joe Biden’s landslide wins in those seats, west of Dulles International Airport, in 2020.

In central Virginia, Republican Luther Cifers prevailed by 18 points, easily holding McGuire’s seat. But Democrat Jack Trammel ran 11 points ahead of Harris, winning several precincts that Trump and McGuire won in November, in a place where his party failed to field a candidate in the last state elections.

An El Paso Democrat on immigration

Democrats surprised party activists this week by providing key votes for the Laken Riley Act, an immigrant detention measure they’d blocked in 2024. Forty-eight House Democrats voted for it, and dozens of Democratic senators voted to advance it on Thursday, some hoping to amend the bill.

The momentum didn’t surprise Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat who has repeatedly tried to pass some combination of immigration reform and border security legislation since arriving in DC six years ago. There was time, she said, for legislators and advocates to draw attention to the powers the bill would give Republicans in the states to detain more immigrants who had not been convicted of crimes. But the situation revealed, she said, how her party had panicked about the politics of the issue, and how the strategies they deployed in the first Trump term weren’t applicable anymore.

“The groups which were so good at holding us accountable during the Biden administration — about issues, about executive orders, about proposed bills that they didn’t like — were very engaged,” said Escobar. “I hope they are even more engaged going forward. But this bill was not a surprise. This is a bill that came up last Congress. It was part of the Republican rules package that we voted on last week. No one should have been surprised by it. My hope is that all of those advocates who are deeply concerned about this bill will sound the alarm sooner next time, and share their specific concerns far sooner.”

Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Small Business Caucus, and Trump campaign economic adviser Stephen Moore will join Semafor’s Elana Schor to discuss what’s ahead for US small businesses as President-elect Trump and congressional Republicans eye tax cuts and regulatory reform.

Jan. 14, 2025 | Washington, DC | RSVP

Polls

As his term winds down, Biden is doing very little reputation management. He’s given just one print interview — a talk with USA Today’s Susan Page, in which he suggested he could have won in 2024 but might not have finished his term. It doesn’t sound like anyone’s listening. Biden leaves office with a majority of Americans rating his presidency “poor” or “below average,” a distinction he shares with Richard Nixon. He’s viewed more favorably than Trump was at this point four years ago. But Trump’s recovered significantly since then, with 40% of voters now rating his first term positively, an 11-point overall shift driven by a surge of nostalgia from Republicans, and a decent recovery among independents; just 47% of them now say Trump had a lackluster presidency, down from 63% when he left office.

Americans swerved hard to the right on immigration last year, and the effects are still shaking out across the states. In Maryland, where Trump won just 34% of the vote, a supermajority of all voters now support local law enforcement working with federal immigration officers to “arrest and deport aliens in Maryland who have committed crimes.” Opponents of the Laken Riley Act worry that voters are hearing about the detention policy, but not other aspects of the bill, and this helps back up that theory — 65% of Democrats support cooperation with ICE, something that many Democratic local officials have opposed.

Every year, the Associated Press asks open-ended questions about what Americans want Washington to focus on. This year’s answers reflect how the campaign changed voters’ minds and obsessions; specifically, there’s a surge of interest in immigration. Illegal border crossings fell after the Biden administration began removing asylum seekers more quickly, but the issue loomed even larger, as worries about education and crime decreased. In power, Democrats had no convincing answers to questions about immigration and inflation. Out of power, they are preparing to highlight any problems there and ask why Trump hasn’t solved them yet.

Ads

• 314 Action, “Samoa.” Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, a practicing physician, has been on a mission to stop Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Health and Human Services Department. His story — that he learned firsthand how devastating vaccination opt-outs could be after mass deaths in Samoa — gets told here by a Democratic PAC, news clips, and emotional interviews, including one with Green. “Why, RFK, did you do that?” asks Green, saying that Kennedy’s campaign against measles vaccinations “killed children.”
• Fulop for Governor, “Who Does That?” Months after Bob Menendez’s corruption convictions and a few weeks before his sentencing, the former senator co-stars in Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop’s first TV spot. Fulop, the ad says, took on “developers, Bob Menendez, and the political machine” — also represented by a shot of Menendez. Menendez gets as much play as the mayor’s military background, and more play than Fulop’s old dispute with former Gov. Chris Christie, which first put him in the spotlight as an anti-corruption Democrat. Instead, he highlights his clash with a disgraced Democrat whose son represents part of north Jersey in the House.
• Barbara Lee for Oakland Mayor, “Let’s Do This.” Days after leaving Congress, the 78-year-old Lee entered the special election to lead her old district’s biggest city — an election kicked off by the recall of a mayor who faced FBI raids and rising crime. “They say Oakland is a mess,” Lee says. “I hear this all the time.” The biographical piece of the ad focuses on her vote against invading Afghanistan; the policy piece condemns the city’s crime rate and homelessness and promises to replace that with a “renaissance,” details to come.

Scooped!

The first edition of Adrian Carrasquillo’s immigration newsletter for the Bulwark answered a very meta question: How is the media going to cover a new wave of deportations under Trump? The answer, from a collection of high-placed sources, was pessimistic. “We’ve done a poor job of covering immigration, historically,” said Univision’s Enrique Acevedo, who hosted newsmaking town halls last year with both Trump and Harris. It’s like a dispatch from the future — clip and save it.

Next

• 10 days until the inauguration
• 298 days until off-year elections
• 662 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

The most important story in America this week was the outbreak of devastating fires across Los Angeles County. Local reporters have covered this from every angle, under brutal conditions, and the climate-focused news startup Heatmap has been illuminating on the causes and the risks of what comes next. Matt Zeitlin’s reporting on the economic impact, Robinson Meyer’s work on the health hazards, Jeva Lange’s look at how the state and county’s preparations were outmatched — all of it’s illuminating, at a moment when social media sources are cluttered with sensationalism and wild theories.

Mark Zuckerberg’s blunt reversal on fact-checking this week puts an end to the era of corporate content moderation, Semafor’s Reed Albergotti wrote in an analysis.

Whether you view it as idealistic or sinister, content moderation has now ended as a failed experiment — even by its own terms, Reed noted, and it’s time to admit that the well-meaning experiment was misguided.