Americana

1. The DNC’s lowkey chair race
2. Ozempic vs. Congress
3. The final House count
4. Pardon politics
5. What’s next for Justice Democrats

Also: The book that explains the Democrats Clinton-era reboot

It’s hard to be in the same place as John Fetterman and not see him, but I pulled that off on Wednesday. We were both outside the Supreme Court, where supporters of Tennessee’s ban on youth gender medicine were rallying right next to activists who wanted the ban to be overturned. On one side, conservatives and de-transitioners gave speeches, then blasted “God Bless the USA” and “Chicken Fried” through their speakers. On the other, trans people like Elliot Page spoke about their fear of a world where gender dysphoria couldn’t be treated medically; in between remarks, they blasted “Born This Way.”

The court won’t rule on the case until next summer, but Americana has covered the issue since we started publishing more than two years ago. Conservatives are emboldened in nearly every way right now. They are incredibly confident of a court victory in Tennessee, after donors, including Elon Musk, spent more than $215 million on gender-related ads before an election they won.

“Evil has always targeted the family,” American Principles Project president Terry Schilling told supporters at the organization’s holiday gala on Thursday. “We can’t compromise with those promoting sex changes for children or the left’s never-ending demands.”

On the left, there’s actually a vigorous debate about how to fight back, and whether Democrats can be trusted to do it. I went to the kick-off of the DNC chair race this week, where social issues weren’t discussed at all; while I traveled there, the Gender Liberation Movement was staging a sit-in at a Capitol bathroom, protesting not just Republicans for keeping trans women out of the women’s room, but Democrats for not having the “spine” to oppose them. Facing attacks on every front, they are not exactly sure yet what to resist, or how.

Inside the race to chair the DNC

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – The campaign to lead Democrats into a second Trump term started here on Thursday, at a meeting of state party chairs who sounded inclined to pick one of their own.

“If the election were in a week, I’d probably win,” said Minnesota DFL chairman Ken Martin, the president of the state chairs’ group since 2017, presiding over their meeting for the last time. “But the election is in two months.”

Martin was one of four declared candidates for the job, alongside Wisconsin party chair Ben Wikler, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, and New York State Sen. James Skoufis – two established insiders, and two self-styled outsiders.

The Biden White House was staying neutral. So was outgoing chair Jaime Harrison, who choked up describing Vice President Harris’s defeat and predicted a quick Democratic comeback.

The politics of GLP-1’s

On its way out the door, the Biden administration is recommending that Medicare and Medicaid cover anti-obesity medication. The estimated cost: $35 billion over 10 years. The resistance: Mostly from Republicans, who are eager for Democrat-turned-MAGA leader Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to take over the Department of Health and Human Services, and move the federal government away from support for pharmaceuticals.

“Obesity is not a disease. It’s a side effect of different things, like unhealthy eating or whatever,” Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., a licensed pharmacist, told Semafor. “So no, I’m not in favor of that, because it’s going to put us in dire straits and run us out of money.”

Trump will have the power to scrap the Biden administration’s plans for anti-obesity medication after he takes office without formal input from the Hill, but congressional Republicans will likely want their say on the issue. That requires them to reconcile their own internal argument over whether to reject new federal cash for the drugs or agree to short-term spending in the hopes of reducing the long-term cost of obesity-related illnesses.

Trump gets a very different House majority this time

Republicans secured a 220-215 seat House majority this week, giving Speaker Mike Johnson even less room for error than he had in 2024. On Tuesday, the count in California’s 13th Congressional District ended with a 187-vote win for Democrat Adam Gray; Republican Rep. John Duarte conceded defeat, giving Democrats a net gain of 2 seats since the midterms.

That means Johnson will have the smallest working majority for any speaker in nearly 100 years, eking it out thanks to GOP victories in Pennsylvania and Alaska, and a new gerrymander in North Carolina that erased three Democratic seats — though on Fox News, Johnson argued that the GOP majority would be larger if Democrats hadn’t gerrymandered Illinois or drawn a new map in New York. It was significantly smaller than the 241-194 majority that then-Speaker Paul Ryan enjoyed at the start of the first Trump presidency.

At the time, that gave Ryan a 23-seat cushion on controversial legislation. The party’s priority bills — a repeal of the Affordable Care Act that died in the Senate, and a tax code overhaul that became law — passed despite significant defections. In the new House, they would have been enough to throttle both bills.

But both House conferences are more ideologically coherent than they were eight years ago, with far fewer members in seats won by the opposing party’s presidential candidate. Anti-Trump Republicans who caused problems for him then have been replaced, either by MAGA candidates or by Democrats.

Rep. Van Duyne (R) Texas will sit down with Semafor’s Senior Washington Editor Elana Schor to share personal insights on the powerful Ways & Means committee, discussing the GOP’s plans for taxes, tariffs, and the future of the Republican party.

How Hunter’s pardon split the Democrats

Democrats wrestled all week with President Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter, with reactions falling into three categories: Condemnation, support, and avoiding the question until reporters got tired of asking about it.

Biden’s critics included Gov. Gavin Newsom, who told Politico that he was troubled by Biden repeatedly ruling out a pardon and then issuing one: “I took the president at his word.” That was a refrain from Democratic critics, some saying that Biden had given up “moral high ground” just weeks before Donald Trump replaced him – with well-reported plans to pardon his own allies, like supporters arrested for their actions in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

The president’s supporters agreed with his premise, that Republicans had targeted Hunter Biden for political reasons, and that the crimes he pleaded guilty to or was found guilty for – tax fraud, and lying when purchasing a firearm – were not often prosecuted. Many of them urged him to use the pardon power for more selfless purposes, with Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman suggesting that he pardon Donald Trump, and a group of progressives urging him to issue clemencies to non-violent offenders.

For anti-Trump Republicans, who had supported Biden as a bulwark against what they saw a challenge to the rule of law, the decision was flat-out tragic. But there were exceptions. Watergate whistleblower John Dean told Semafor that Biden should issue more pardons, pre-emptively, for people that Trump had talked about prosecuting on a flimsy basis – an idea that some in the White House were taking seriously.

Q&A: Justice Democrats’ Alexandra Rojas

All kinds of Democratic dreams died on Nov. 5. For progressives, the key defeats had happened months earlier.

New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Missouri Rep. Cori Bush lost their primaries thanks to a torrent of money from pro-Israel and centrist Democratic groups, which recruited less left-wing candidates – Rep.-elect George Latimer, Rep.-elect Wesley Bell. They were the first incumbent defeats for Justice Democrats, founded in 2017 by veterans of Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign to replace “corporate Democrats” with progressives with working class backgrounds and no PAC money.

Those races consumed Justice Democrats’ attention this year — the first, since its founding, when it did not recruit more candidates to run against Democrats in safe seats, or in open seats that the party was likely to win. Alexandra Rojas, the group’s executive director, talked with Americana about its still-forming 2026 plans, and about a Democratic blame game that has followed the party’s tradition — heaping responsibility on progressives and left-wing ideas.

POLLS

• Support for the president’s decision to wipe his son’s record clean is slightly lower than support for the president himself, which shouldn’t be surprising — the decision split his party, and Democratic voters heard some leaders they trust condemn Biden for doing it. Just 64% of Democrats support the pardon. Black voters, Biden’s strongest constituency, support it by a fairly slim 10-point margin. The only quasi-upside for Democrats is that voters don’t like Donald Trump’s use of the pardon power, either. In YouGov’s polling, an identical 50% say they disapprove, retroactively, of Trump pardoning Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law and his nominee for ambassador to France. In polling for Scripps News, 64% of voters pre-emptively disapprove of Trump pardoning participants in the Jan. 6 riots, which the incoming president has said he’s inclined to do.

ADS

• Mike Duggan for Governor, “Mike Duggan Launches His Independent Campaign.” The best electoral news for Republicans this week was that Detroit’s Democratic mayor would run statewide as a non-Democrat in 2026. Duggan, who won his first of three terms as a write-in candidate — he had stumbled over a residency requirement — had always been able to operate outside the city’s normal political infrastructure. “My approach didn’t fit comfortably inside the dogma of either of the two political parties,” Duggan explains in the launch video for his independent candidacy.

SCOOPED

• Ric Grenell was one of the Trump campaign’s quiet MVPs. He set up meetings across southeast Michigan for Arab-American voters, giving them an answer to their frustration with the Biden administration’s Gaza policy — vote for Trump, and he would bring peace. Some of the people who endorsed Trump on that basis hoped that Grenell would be Trump’s Secretary of State, carrying out this plan. But he didn’t take, or get, a top foreign policy job, and Politico’s Natalie Allison and Meridith McGraw got amazing details on the failed campaign to make that happen, with Grenell supporters offering cash to influencers to meme him into the administration.

NEXT

• 45 days until Inauguration Day
• 333 days until off-year elections
• 697 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

• Al From’s memoir arrived less than a year after Barack Obama’s re-election. The Democratic Leadership Council, which From helped to start, had shut down two years earlier. The need for a centrist Democratic think tank, created after Walter Mondale’s 1984 washout, had pretty clearly come and gone. “The New Democrats and the Return to Power” reads very differently today, with Democrats newly terrified by the electoral map, by their patchwork coalition of identity groups, and by voters associating their party with failure and extremism. It gets deep into the guts of the 1985-1992 rebuild, all the way down to Bill Clinton’s salary when took over the DLC. And it evokes the lost world where weekly magazines and newspaper columnists could decide whether a campaign was serious — not exactly where Democrats get to live now.

The OPEC+ group of major oil producing countries held off on raising production quotas until at least April, setting up a showdown with President-elect Donald Trump over his plans to boost US drilling, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell wrote.