Americana

1. New Jersey’s ICE brawl
2. DNC re-vote threatens Hogg
3. GOP loses Omaha’s city hall
4. Dems cross aisle to “protect women’s sports”
5. The lies Americans tell

Also: Love-bombing John Fetterman.

“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules,” was Saul Alinsky’s fourth rule for radicals, and the most fun to deploy. It was what Republican senators were doing last week when they began posting letters of support for Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., whose mental health was being probed by reporters after a damaging New York magazine profile.

“The radical left is smearing him with dishonest, vicious attacks because he’s pro-Israel,” wrote Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., praised the “incredible example” Fetterman set by talking about his depression. In The Wall Street Journal, Jamie Kirchick wrote that “attributing Mr. Fetterman’s political maturation to mental illness is shameful,” and that he was “doing for mental health what former First Lady Betty Ford did for addiction.” Adding to the troll: It’s Mental Health Awareness Month.

There’s opportunism among the Fetterman critics; the people who want him to resign know that a Democratic governor would pick his replacement. They were arguing that his post-stroke mental health struggles disqualified him from office, and that was at odds with the cultural acceptance of therapy, depression, and neurodivergence, much of that driven by liberals.

And this wasn’t happening in isolation. Earlier this month, former staff for Democratic ex-Rep. Yadira Caraveo told the Colorado Sun that her behavior was so “frightening and traumatizing” that they worried she might kill herself — and that she should not run for Congress again. Caraveo had talked openly about her depression during her 2024 campaign, to “de-stigmatize” it. Her team now believed that her condition made her unfit for Congress.

On the right, the idea that “acceptance” of mental health struggles had gone too far had deeper grounding. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s HHS is investigating the use of anti-depressants, starting from his premise — shared by many conservatives — that people are being medicalized for conditions they should be able to beat with healthier lifestyles. The premise of the Defense Department’s purge of transgender servicemembers is that the military had been too tolerant of “gender dysphoria” and its purported “mental health constraints.”

The overall trend here is a rowback from the tolerant approach taken toward mental health since the 1990s — especially in politics, where people had been shamed out of public life for treatable conditions. Shame is back, and deployed when it’s most convenient.

ICE scuffle rattles New Jersey politics

Republicans condemned three Democratic members of Congress who tried to prevent the arrest of Newark’s mayor at an immigration detention facility, with one House member moving to yank their committee assignments.

“The radical left has lost their minds,” Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., told Fox News this week, accusing three Democrats — Rep. LaMonica McIver, D-NJ, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-NJ, and Rep. Robert Menendez, D-NJ, of “assault.”

Each Democrat denied that charge, as did Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was briefly detained and charged with trespassing after his visit to the Delaney Hall facility. Videos taken by ICE, reporters, and immigrant rights activists showed McIver and Watson Coleman encircling Baraka to prevent his arrest; McIver blocked one officer’s arm when he approached with handcuffs, then was part of a scuffle at the gate, being pushed from behind and putting her arms on officers in front.

The incident had instant electoral implications, in multiple states. Baraka is a candidate for governor in next month’s Democratic primary, and had run a TV ad about his effort to stop the facility from processing non-citizen detainees. Carter is running for US Senate in Georgia. And House Speaker Mike Johnson said, on Wednesday, that Republicans were discussing “appropriate action that we need to take here to address that inappropriate behavior,” as conservative journalists tracked down Watson Coleman and McIver to ask about their “assault.”

DNC may vote out David Hogg

David Hogg readied for the Democratic National Committee to “remove” him as vice chair, after a party panel voted to recommend a new election for the job that Hogg would be less likely to win. The 25-year old Hogg, who had angered some colleagues with a PAC that planned to intervene in primaries, said that it was “impossible to ignore the broader context of my work to reform the party” as a factor in the challenge.

The Feb. 1 election, which put the Hogg and 34-year old Malcolm Kenyatta in major party messaging roles, was challenged weeks later by one of the three female candidates who’d lost to them. Kalyn Free asked for a new vote, with one ballot to choose a man and one to choose a candidate of any gender. And Hogg, who won fewer votes than Kenyatta, might lose that vote.

The pile-up frustrated Democrats, including Kenyatta. “This story is complex and I’m frustrated — but it’s not about David Hogg,” he wrote in an X thread, kicking off a mini-media tour where he criticized his fellow vice chair. Hogg’s readiness to beat “asleep-at-the-wheel” incumbents had gotten broad media attention, including an appearance with Bill Maher where he condemned a Democratic “culture where we say, if you say the wrong thing, you’re excommunicated.”

DNC Chair Ken Martin was already working to ban members’ involvement primaries at the party’s summer meeting. Hogg had told Semafor that he would not quit the DNC or his PAC if the rule changed. House Democrats, focused on budget mark-ups this week, commented only to condemn the distraction. “The DNC will prove itself to be irrelevant as a political organization if they punish duly elected leaders like David Hogg because they disagree with him,” wrote Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.).

Democrats win back Omaha

Omaha’s Republican mayor lost a bid for a fourth term on Tuesday, a balm to Democrats whose national conversation was consumed by arguments about Joe Biden and party leadership. John Ewing Jr., a longtime local politician and treasurer of Omaha’s Douglas County, stormed past incumbent Jean Stothert, becoming the city’s first black mayor.

The race didn’t turn on national issues. Stothert, who unseated a Democratic mayor in 2013 after anger at a local tax increase, ran on continuing the city’s growth; Ewing ran on hiring more police and fixing the city’s streets faster, after voters supported $200 million in new construction. Her vulnerabilities showed up in the first round of voting, when Democrat-turned-Republican Mike McDonnell, who ran on stopping a controversial streetcar project, grabbed 20% of the vote.

Outspent by Stothert, Ewing won with higher turnout in black neighborhoods, as turnout fell overall. “Seventy-five percent of us stayed home,” said Gov. Jim Pillen at Stothert’s concession event. “The mayor should have been re-elected, slam dunk.” Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin pointed to the national party’s long-term investments in Nebraska, from its Red State Fund and from spending to help Kamala Harris carry the Omaha-based 2nd Congressional District last year.

Some Dems join GOP on “women’s sports”

LEVITTOWN, Penn. — James Malone’s victory in a Pennsylvania special election this year was a Democratic triumph. The small-town mayor broke the GOP’s grip on Lancaster County, flipping a seat that Donald Trump had carried by 15 points. Gov. Josh Shapiro, who campaigned for Malone, thanked Pennsylvanians for rejecting “the extremism and division coming out of DC”

Last week, shortly after being sworn in, Malone voted with four other Democrats and every Republican for the Save Women’s Sports Act. Like legislation that had passed in the US House, and in dozens of other states, it limited female sports from kindergarten through college to “biological females.” Malone had told constituents that he planned to vote for it, and LGBTQ rights groups had urged him to reconsider, but it passed easily.

“This draws into question whether Pennsylvania remains a safe place for the transgender community,” said David Moore, the founder of the Pennsylvania Equality Project, an LGBTQ rights group that opposed the bill. “If Democrats back away at the state level from defending the community, we have to ask whether anybody is actively supporting us in a way that protects and preserves our rights.”

What voters don’t admit to pollsters

Todd Rose knows that most people lie. Many of them feel like they have to. The founder of the Populace think tank has been trying to find out just how much Americans conceal what they really think; his latest polling research, released today, found 63% admitting that they withhold their “true beliefs.”

Conducted with YouGov, with a sample of around 3,000 people, the results found more doubt, unhappiness, and mistrust than respondents wanted to admit. Just 37% supported the work of DOGE, though 47% said that they did so publicly. (Who’s against cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” if only conceptually?) 12% privately believed that violence might be politically necessary; just 16% were feeling good about the economy, a 13-point decline since last year.

Rose talked with Semafor about what Populace found in its interviews, and this is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Polls

The president’s job approval rating leveled off over the last few weeks, arresting and slightly reversing his post-“Liberation Day” decline. Voters with household incomes above $100,000 drove the number up, shifting from a net -13 approval rating last month to net -2 this month. Those same people drove a small overall bump in support for Trump’s handling of immigration; among these voters, that’s positive by 10 points, a 15-point swing since April. His improvement on “foreign” trade made the same shift, from 20 points underwater to just 7 points. Democrats have argued over whether it’s a mistake to campaign on anything but economic insecurity and tariffs; there’s some evidence here that the economy question, while bad for Trump, is too unpredictable to center in every news cycle.

Every candidate not named “Andrew Cuomo” has spent the last month hammering the former governor, grabbing onto every mistake (botching a public finance requirement, jargon in a policy memo that looked AI-generated) and trying to drive his favorable rating down. Cuomo has a floor, held up by black voters (50% support him) and Latinos (41%). Adrienne Adams, who entered the race when Eric Adams (no relation) quit the primary to run as an independent, gets 14% of the black vote, and white voters are split between Cuomo and Mamdani. There’s promising material for the anti-Cuomo candidates: Three-quarters of voters say they want the next mayor to stand up to Trump, which they say Cuomo won’t be able to do. But the key voters’ impressions of Cuomo are locked into his COVID era, when most Democrats saw him as a leader of anti-Trump resistance.

Taken entirely after Mayor Baraka was arrested outside of a would-be ICE facility in Newark, Emerson’s polling doesn’t find that it moved many votes. What has? TV ads and endorsements. Democrats have moved mostly to Rep. Sherrill or Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City; both went on air early, and Fulop, who got into the race two years ago, has outspent everyone. Primary voters strongly opposed Baraka’s arrest, by a 63-19 margin. But Democratic voters were rattled by the closeness of last year’s presidential election and Gov. Phil Murphy’s 2021 re-election. President Trump is more popular than Murphy right now, 53% of voters say they want the next governor to “work with” the administration; by a 44-38 margin, more voters say they support Baraka’s arrest. Electability-conscious Democrats don’t look ready to reward a candidate whose actions they agree with, but who might not play as well against Ciattarelli, the runaway GOP favorite after he won Trump’s endorsement.

Ads

• Club for Growth, “Stand Up.” The right’s strange — but strategic — new respect for John Fetterman manifested in this ad, the only one urging a Democrat who’s not in cycle to vote for a Trump tax cut package. The senator “stands up for working families,” and that means he should “extend and expand” the cuts. Fetterman opposed starting debate on the GOP’s budget, and Republicans haven’t been lobbying him on something that can pass without Democratic votes. But there’s a lot of work and some money going into love-bombing Fetterman right now, as progressives make fun of him.
• Ghazala for Virginia, “Taken On.” The Virginia GOP’s choice for lieutenant governor quickly became a problem for his party; the rest of the ticket stopped campaigning with him after he was linked to a salacious Tumblr page, but he took a page from the Donald Trump playbook and blamed the “Richmond swamp” for the scandal. In the crowded Democratic race for the job, candidates are defining themselves against Trump. “Trump’s hate pushed me to run,” state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi says here, in front of an anti-DOGE protest sign, describing her wins in Richmond as bulwarks against the president.
• Stringer NYC, “Hustle.” Four years ago, former New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s campaign was hobbled by a #MeToo accusation that he denied; his defamation lawsuit is still working through the courts. This year, his pitch of progressive competence has been crowded out by current comptroller Brad Lander and the excitement around democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. Stringer’s first ad differentiates him from other progressives with a few campaign promises, like a “cop on every train” and more housing construction on vacant lots — no mention of other candidates and a quick reference to how he’ll fight the “schmuck” in the White House, which is central to some other campaigns.

Scooped!

Thirty House Democrats are 75, or older. How many of them will run for re-election this year? Axios’s Andrew Solender had the bright idea of asking them, and found that at least half are committed to seeking a new term, well above the age when many companies require their leaders to retire. “I haven’t started thinking about not doing it,” said Missouri’s Emmanuel Cleaver, who was born shortly before the Battle of the Bulge. The should-Biden-have-quit discourse, which can’t really be resolved, has led to a fascinating, ongoing, open argument about how old is too old to serve.

Next

• 25 days until primaries in New Jersey
• 32 days until primaries in Virginia
• 39 days until primaries in New York City
• 172 days until off-year elections
• 535 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

The best piece about the Trump administration’s refugee program for Afrikaners was this four-byline New York Times powerhouse, full of history that was obscure until it became important. “Some random person tells him something and he’s obsessed with it,” shrugged John Bolton, recalling how Trump, in his first term, suddenly became interested in rescuing white farmers from South Africa. Most foreign policy hands weren’t paying attention when videos of far-left politician Julius Malema led chants of “kill the Boer,” and Malema’s party actually lost seats last year, when the decline of the African National Congress led to a coalition government with a multi-racial party. But the narrative that got to Trump was that white farmers were being slaughtered, and Afrikaners are now getting into a refugee pipeline that’s been closed to millions of non-white people in war zones. (Read Will Sommer in The Bulwark for more on the arrivals.)

Fears of an economic downturn and consumer belt-tightening will test Wall Street’s favorite new business model: subscriptions for everything, Semafor’s Liz Hoffman writes.

Fueling this trend is a Wall Street money machine ensorceled by these steady payments. Because those cash streams can be forecast more reliably than episodic sales, they can be borrowed against.

But now two forces are testing that model. First, consumers are terrified about the economy and cutting back on some spending. Second, regulators are cracking down on the mazes of corporate trickery and psychological nudges that make it hard for customers to cancel.