Americana

1. Democrats run against DOGE
2. GOP hunkers down on budget
3. Ed Martin’s speech probes
4. Cuomo’s likely comeback
5. How the left recovered in UK

Also: The least popular mayor in America

House Republicans triumphed over low expectations this week, passing their budget resolution by the margin of Victoria Spartz. Expectations were even lower for Democrats. They met them, too — still worth noting, given how little the party’s base thinks of its leaders right now.

No Democrat voted for the GOP’s budget resolution, just as no Senate Democrat voted for the GOP’s companion package last week. No Democrat was even tempted to. On Tuesday afternoon, when House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries gathered his conference on the Capitol steps, most of the 13 Democrats whose districts voted for Donald Trump stood behind him; all 13, of course, voted against Trump’s budget.

Republicans want that vote to hurt them. “Democrats are so infatuated with Elon Musk that they will vote against low tax rates for hard-working middle class families,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said before the vote. “Expect this vote effectively hiking taxes on hard-working families to be weaponized,” the party’s campaign committee warned in a table-setting memo to the media. House Speaker Mike Johnson had just told CPAC that the party would “play not defense, but offense” next year, competing in the 13 Trump/Democrat seats and “more than 20 districts that President Trump came within five points of winning.”

Where had I heard that before? Every first year of a new presidency. Barack Obama’s Democrats thought that they could shame Republicans for not supporting the middle-class tax cuts in the 2009 stimulus. Republicans believed that the 2017 tax cuts they’re extending now would be hard for Democrats to run against in 2018. They did so easily. Not since 2001, when a rump of conservative Democrats voted for George W. Bush’s tax cuts, has the opposition party given any votes to advance a president’s tax agenda.

The risk of opposition, for nearly everyone in the conference, has vanished. Just a few dozen House seats are truly competitive in general elections, and fewer Democrats need to run in “Trump country” than at any point in Trump’s first term. Eight of the 13 Trump/Democrat districts voted for Joe Biden in 2020, as did Georgia, home to the only Democratic senator (Jon Ossoff) seeking reelection in a Trump state.

Their most endangered member at this point in Trump’s first term was Collin Peterson, whose greater Minnesota seat went for Trump by a 2-1 margin, and who’d strategically voted against Obamacare to save his seat. (That stopped working by 2020.) Their most at-risk member now is Maine’s Jared Golden, who last month promised to work with Trump on tariffs and this week opposed the GOP’s budget for its “harmful cuts, irresponsible deficit spending and unnecessary tax cuts for those at the top.”

Johnson said last week that working class voters moved “on the sheer force of Donald Trump’s persona,” which both parties agree with. But that persona won’t be on a ballot again, and the Democrats have moved on from a Mueller/Avenatti-era fantasy that the president will be undone by some scandal. They remember that Trump was weakest, last time, not when they were impeaching him — the first impeachment made him more popular — but when Paul Ryan talked him into trying to slash Obamacare.

Modern campaigns have grown more expensive and less competitive, more money splashing onto a smaller and smaller map. It might be worth it for Republicans to lose the House next year if they achieve their generational goal of shrinking the administrative state — although perhaps not for the Republicans who lose their seats. Democrats couldn’t rebuild that, quickly, if they wanted to. But it’s notable, just how unafraid a weak Democratic Party is of voting “no.”On Tuesday, Trump will deliver a joint address to Congress, setting up the mid-month fight over government funding. Americana will be off next week and back right after.

In Virginia, Dems run as the save-your-job party

Abigail Spanberger couldn’t believe what she heard from the Republican governor she hopes to succeed — a gift to anyone campaigning against DOGE’s impact on the federal workforce.

Term-limited Gov. Glenn Youngkin gathered reporters on Monday to announce Virginia Has Jobs, an online portal that he said might help the commonwealth’s 144,000-odd federal workers find new employment — whether or not they’re hit by the Trump administration’s layoffs. Youngkin tried to convey to those workers that “we care about them, and we value them, and we want them to find that next chapter,” a message that astounded Spanberger.

“Frankly, it’s out of touch with the real concerns that people have,” the former congresswoman told Semafor of Youngkin’s response to the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.

“It’s discounting the livelihoods and the mission to which people have devoted themselves,” added Spanberger, who’s running for governor this year. “And I think it’s divorced from the real responsibility of the governor of Virginia, which is to stand up for Virginia jobs.”

The real budget fight for Republicans

Senate and House Republicans largely agree they need to make President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. They are agreed on very little else on the budget.

The House’s Tuesday approval of its once-wobbly budget caught the Senate largely off-guard and teed up a series of perilous choices for the GOP — on preventing a government shutdown, avoiding a debt default, keeping Trump’s border policy funded and enacting his new tax cut ideas.

Republicans had few clear answers on Wednesday about how to handle those problems. Many of them were still digesting the House’s triumph over the Senate’s low expectations.

“I don’t think the Senate thought we could do it,” said Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, a member of party leadership.

The mysterious “probe” into Democratic rhetoric

Last week, the Washington Post told California Rep. Robert Garcia that the acting DC US Attorney might investigate him. The newspaper shared a letter from Ed Martin, asking him to “clarify” comments he’d made on CNN: that Americans wanted Democrats to “bring actual weapons to this bar fight” with Elon Musk. “This sounds to some like a threat,” wrote Martin.

Garcia shared the letter on X. Yet one week later, after Martin’s Feb. 24 deadline for a response had passed, he told Semafor that the letter never got to his office. “We’re treating it as real,” he said, “but my response has been that we’re going to continue to take on Elon Musk.”

Martin’s inquiries to Garcia and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, part of what the Trump appointee call “Operation Whirlwind,” have been received as threats to free speech that the targets can’t quite take seriously. (The operation is named for a 2020 speech in which Schumer said that anti-abortion Supreme Court justices would “reap the whirlwind,” which he quickly apologized for.)

They were part of a loose campaign to define Democratic rhetoric as dangerous, and link it to potential violence. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene did that on Wednesday when New Mexico Rep. Melanie Stansbury called Trump a “king” and Greene said that “threats against the president of the United States will not be tolerated.” South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace did it with Garcia, writing a censure resolution condemning his “threats” to Musk.

But Mace found no co-sponsors on that resolution, and Garcia and other Democrats, who warned of a chilling effect, said that the inquiries backfired. “It’s such a dangerous overreach from someone who’s calling himself Donald Trump’s attorney,” said Garcia, who did not regret his comment. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee wrote to Martin this week, accusing him of “misusing your office for political ends, threatening and intimidating critics of the Administration,” and asking for documents on the alleged investigation, though they do not have subpoena power without a Republican signoff.

NY Democrats brace for Cuomo comeback

As former Gov. Andrew Cuomo decides whether to run for mayor of New York City, which his allies now expect, progressive activists were gearing up to oppose him. New Yorkers for a Better New York Today launched with a campaign called “DREAM: Don’t Rank Eric Adams for Mayor,” urging Democrats to leave him off their ballots. (Adams narrowly won the 2021 primary with some help from second-choice votes from some progressives who wanted to block Andrew Yang.)

“DREAM is designed to disrupt the millions of dollars that dark money PACs are about to unleash to elect nightmare candidates in the most consequential primary this year,” said campaign spokesman Lawrence Wong. “If there’s one thing we know about this city, it’s that even the most hated, scandal-plagued executives can linger around like wet farts.”

Adams has trailed badly in early polling that includes Cuomo; polling that models the ranked choice vote, when New Yorkers’ second and third choices are added up until one candidate gets a majority, have shown him falling off quickly. Cuomo looms as the bigger threat to progressives, who flailed in the 2021 campaign, and whose candidates only got around a third of the first-round vote. (A recap: Then-Comptroller Scott Stringer won key endorsements, then lost them after a sexual misconduct accusation he denied, with his endorsers moving slowly over to civil rights attorney Maya Wiley.)

On Wednesday, Cuomo’s allies launched the Fix the City super PAC, aiming to raise $15 million for a quick-start campaign. (Adams spent $10 million to win the 2021 primary.) “No candidate should be able to stay on the sidelines and send out innuendos,” Adams said on Wednesday, before skipping a candidate forum; he has not attended any of them this cycle.)

What the UK’s Labour remake can teach Democrats

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited the White House this week, giving Democrats a look at something they won’t see for a while — a center-left leader with a governing majority. He got a better reception than he sometimes gets back home. Starmer, elected last July, is already deeply unpopular, facing anger from the populist right and disappointment from the populist left.

“The party had been routed in 2019, under Jeremy Corbyn, and was confronted by a question which has troubled many social democratic parties across the world,” said Patrick Maguire, the co-author (with Gabriel Pogrund) of Get In, a new history of Labour’s comeback under Starmer and strategist Morgan McSweeney. “What are we for? Can we win again? By 2019, the party had finished a doomed experiment with socialism, but it was in no mood to revisit Tony Blair and Bill Clinton’s ‘third way’ politics.”

In Get In, the two reporters for the Sunday Times get deep inside Starmer’s Labour Party, from their text messages to their private moments of doubt. (Starmer considered resigning after Labour lost a safe seat in a 2021 by-election.) It’s a story with some lessons for Democrats — albeit none of them very easy or repeatable. 

Polls

The paradox of DOGE is that it’s less popular than the government agencies it’s assigned to shrink down or eliminate. The rub is that the opposition is largely driven by people who didn’t vote for Donald Trump in the first place. Sixty-two percent of Democrats want to limit or eliminate DOGE, and 87% are concerned that Elon Musk will benefit personally from its work. (So are 56% of independents and 29% of Republicans, suggesting that the argument could have legs for Democrats.) Republicans are far less interested in reducing agencies, with 40% in favor of breaking down HUD, and fewer in favor of breaking down anything else. Voters don’t see those agencies as hotbeds of waste and fraud right now.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson ran a perfect campaign two years ago, eking into the runoff, then winning the general election by highlighting Paul Vallas’ criticism of Democrats. (Criticizing Barack Obama is a risk in the 85% Democratic city that elected him.) This pollster — which saw Johnson’s strength in 2023 — now finds him lagging badly in a reelect, with four-fifths of voters viewing him unfavorably. That’s a weaker position than ex-Mayor Lori Lightfoot was in when she came in third in the 2023 race, opening the door to Johnson.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs barely won her first term in 2022. Beating her next year is a top Republican priority; it would remove their major impediment to the election changes they wanted in place for 2024. But Democrats like Hobbs’ chances if she faces a “Stop the Steal” Republican, and two of them are the best-known, best-liked candidates among GOP primary voters. Kirk, the Turning Point USA/Action founder who modeled his organization’s turnout in the state, has the highest raw favorable number (45%) despite never seeking office before; Robson, who has Trump’s endorsement but challenged Trump endorsee Kari Lake in the 2022 primary, is just behind. Half of the potential electorate has no view of these options, but the plurality of the early vote is going to Kirk, 2020 election challenger Biggs, and Hoffman, indicted in that election’s “fake elector” scheme.

Ads

• House Democratic Caucus, “Chaos.” Virginia’s House Democrats, hoping to expand their narrow majorities this year, kicked off the week with 12 ads in their targeted districts. They link each Republican incumbent to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, accusing each of “following the leader” — illustrated by Trump and Musk, together. “Our jobs lost, our grocery prices up,” says a narrator, blaming the Republican drive for spending and tax cuts. (Democrats are also cognizant of an effective GOP argument in 2021, that they would cut grocery taxes as the incumbent party did nothing to fight inflation.)
• Republican State Leadership Committee, “Crazy.” Trump won 49.7% of the vote in Wisconsin last year, but Republicans know that they lose off-year elections in the state when their less-likely voters — the ones who only show up for Trump — stay home. In 2019, Republicans charged up their turnout in the state supreme court race by invoking Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. Here, the RSLC frames the election as a second Trump referendum, and stopping Democratic Party-backed nominee Susan Crawford as the only way to prevent “sanctuary cities.”
• Josh Gottheimer for Governor, “Over There.” Two House Democrats are running for governor of New Jersey. Both of them are positioning themselves as Trump fighters who’ll cut the cost of living. “Egg prices keep going up, and costs everywhere are getting worse,” says Rep. Gottheimer here, standing in front of the White House to reminisce about working for Bill Clinton (“creating jobs, making health care affordable”), the only Democrat mentioned by name.

Scooped!

Not many House Republicans truly mattered on Tuesday. Most of them were set on supporting the party’s budget resolution, which was sold to them as a shell to fill in later. A handful told reporters that they didn’t want to support it. Only one, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, stuck to his word. The thinking of the other, softer holdouts was best captured by Leigh Ann Caldwell at Puck and the Rubin/Beavers/Hughes power trio at The Wall Street Journal. See: A debt-obsessed Tea Party Republican hand his voting card to the speaker! Hear: Victoria Spartz get barracked by the president!

Next

• 32 days until Wisconsin’s state supreme court election
• 249 days until off-year elections
• 612 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

On Thursday afternoon, a fight broke out between the conservative influencers who thought they were replacing the media. Conservatives who’ve built massive followings as “DC Draino” and “Libs of TikTok” got invited to the White House and handed binders of “Epstein Files,” holding them up triumphantly for what they called “legacy media” photographers, before discovering that they contained redacted versions of information about the late Jeffrey Epstein that had been published elsewhere. The embarrassment is still playing out on social media, influencer on influencer; the larger context is in this piece from the anonymous writer Cartoons Hate Her, who is, horrifyingly, more online than me. “There are simply too many people trying to be the next big thing, and all these aspiring starlets … need to be willing to do more and more outrageous and degrading things in order to get the attention (and presumably, money) they desire, before fizzling out.”

The European Union is drastically curbing its climate ambitions with a wide-ranging policy reset that aims to halt the region’s upward spiral of energy prices without scrapping its decarbonization plans, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell reported.

“There’s a new urgency to make sure that our decarbonization agenda is also unleashing industrial competitiveness,” said one Brussels-based think tanker, reflecting the growing unpopularity of Europe’s legacy of climate regulation. “Otherwise, politically, this will simply not work.”