Americana

1. New York’s socialist surge
2. New Jersey’s race for governor
3. The DNC’s infighting ends
4. Governors on trial
5. Tom Homan’s next steps

Also: Bibi, in his own words.

The story of the week was told in two less-touristed parts of Los Angeles, 12 miles apart. Protests against ICE enforcement in the city, and of the National Guard deployment that followed it, mostly took place in a square mile curfew zone between Dodger Stadium and the Fashion District. Sen. Alex Padilla, the state’s first Latino senator, was arrested at a Department of Homeland Security press conference in the Wilshire Federal Building, a bleached set of modernist towers designed by the firm that made Madison Square Garden.

Those incidents, both legally unresolved, told us how differently the Trump administration and Democrats see the world. Kristi Noem, whom Padilla had tried to interrupt at the FBI’s field office, pledged to “liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership” of “this Governor Newsom and this mayor.” It was, in her telling, an intervention against an oppressive government, probably (according to the president) with rigged elections, occupied (according to him again) by a “Migrant Invasion.”

Most Republicans agreed that the intervention would save lives and livelihoods. The deportations needed to continue, and the city needed to be saved from rioting. In a Thursday afternoon email, the president’s joint fundraising committee told donors that “if I didn’t ‘SEND IN THE TROOPS’ to Los Angeles, that once beautiful and great City would be burning to the ground right now due to these incompetent leaders.” This was Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, and the lesson of that was to maintain “peace through strength” and prevent mass rioting.

Padilla’s protest was in the Democrats’ tradition of resistance, which looks back to Selma in 1965. Conflicts are won by street mobilization and civil disobedience, until conservative governments overreact and spark a backlash. “Arrest me — but stop attacking these vulnerable people,” Gov. Gavin Newsom told Trump, through reporters, whom he talked to all week.

On MSNBC, Padilla said that he had interrupted because “at a certain point hearing Noem say they had to rescue LA from the governor and mayor was too much to take.” In the House Oversight Committee, where news of the Padilla arrest was brought in by Democrats during a hearing with Democratic governors, Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) led them in calling for Noem to be subpoenaed, while Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called Frost a former Antifa member.

“Me?” asked Frost. After a short break, Greene corrected herself: Frost had been arrested at a voting rights protest. “Proudly,” he said.

That’s the conflict. Democrats don’t venerate every protest, as a Canadian trucker could tell you. They don’t control everything that happens at their favored protests, such as the anarchists who crack concrete blocks to throw them at windows. They are waiting for the electorate to get as outraged as them. The administration sees that outrage as manufactured, something to save real people from.

The rise of Zohran Mamdani

“It’s easy to forget now,” said Zohran Mamdani, “but four years ago, Eric Adams was hailed as the new face of Democratic Party politics.” Mamdani, a 33-year old state assemblyman and member of Democratic Socialists of America, had just launched a canvass in Harlem with 100 of his campaign’s 29,000 volunteers.

He was waiting out a summer rainstorm in a coffee shop, laying out his strategy for the June 24 Democratic mayoral primary — briefly interrupted by three young women who saw him, gasped, and called him “the mayor.”

The candidate finished his point: Adams, who quit an unwinnable primary to seek election as an independent, had “pitted different sets of New Yorkers against each other, so as to evade any actual institutional response” to the city’s problems.

A new mayor could confront the Trump administration, which Adams decided not to do. He could also prove that progressives, if given the keys to a city, could make life cheaper and safer. To get there, and past former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, he’s proposed $10 billion in upper-income and corporate tax hikes, for which he’d need improbable sign-off from the state.

New Jersey’s blockbuster primary

New Jersey will hold a race for governor between Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarell, the winners of primaries on Tuesday that broke the state’s raw vote records. Democratic leaders believed they’d nominated their best possible candidate, who had shown wide appeal in a suburban district that she flipped in 2018. Republicans think that the territory has moved right since then.

Ciattarelli got 68% of the Republican primary vote, falling under 60% only in the counties served by the radio station where opponent Bill Spadea hosts a show. Turnout, as of Friday, was 457,530 votes, up 43% from four years ago, when national Republicans largely ignored the state and thought Ciattarelli would lose. But Democrats set a 44-year turnout record, with around 800,000 votes cast. That was up 59% from 2017, the last contested Democratic primary, when Gov. Phil Murphy easily won his first nomination.

Democrats have never spent so much on a primary here, with the New Jersey Education Association spending $40 million just to help union President Sean Spiller. He placed fifth in the six-way race. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka came closest to Sherrill, beating her in majority-Black and immigrant towns in north Jersey, after his arrest at a city ICE facility raised his profile as the most progressive candidate.

Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop ran as an anti-machine candidate with a Clean NJ slate, and compared Sherrill to state First Lady Tammy Murphy, who abandoned a Senate bid last year after grassroots Democrats opposed her at state conventions. Voters didn’t see the connection. Sherrill ran as a “Navy veteran, former prosecutor, and mom of four” against an “establishment” Republican who had begged Trump to endorse him. Ciattarelli, for the first time in three gubernatorial campaigns, embraced Trump, said he would bring a version of DOGE to Trenton, and accused Democrats of wanting to focus on “pronouns” while he focused on “property taxes.”

“Republicans keep coming at me, saying, all Democrats want to talk about is cultural issues,” Sherrill told Semafor after a weekend campaign stop. “And I say: Well, I want to talk about housing.”

Democrats replace their pro-primary vice chair

David Hogg’s 130-day tenure at the Democratic National Committee ended on Wednesday, after DNC members voted to hold new elections for his job and he opted not to seek it again.

“I have decided to not run in this upcoming election so the party can focus on what really matters,” Hogg wrote in a letter announcing his decision. On Thursday morning, he sent supporters of his Leaders We Deserve PAC a message: “I am no longer a DNC Vice Chair.”

Hogg’s decision ended a months-long saga that began with a botched Feb. 1 election, continued with a challenge by one of the Democrats who lost to him, and turned into a widely-covered argument about the future of the party. The 25-year old Democrat said that Leaders We Deserve, designed to elect young progressives, could support challenges to incumbents who weren’t doing enough with their jobs.

Malcolm Kenyatta, the Black Philadelphia Democrat elected with Hogg in February, was set to win back his own vice-chair gig. The three female Democrats who lost to Hogg will compete again in an online vote this weekend, ending the saga. “I’m looking forward to putting this all behind us, and getting back to the work of electing Democrats,” said one of the candidates, Washington state Democratic Party chair Shasti Conrad.

Republicans shame ‘sanctuary state’ governors

Republicans summoned three blue state governors to the House Oversight Committee on Thursday, to probe “sanctuary state” policies. They challenged Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on how much they let law enforcement work with ICE and what benefits they gave to non-citizens or pro-immigrant NGOs.

That often meant quizzing the governors with the names of non-citizens who had committed violent crimes in their states, and asking whether their rhetoric had inflamed tensions with law enforcement. Multiple Republicans asked if Walz would apologize for comparing ICE agents who conducted their work in masks to the Nazi gestapo.

He never did, and multiple Democrats echoed Walz by comparing immigration enforcement to fascist enforcers. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), the acting Democratic ranking member, said that his World War II-veteran father would be proud that he was “fighting today’s Nazis.” Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.), who is competing for the ranking member job, invoked slavery “plantations.” Most Democrats said that the majority was distracting from their plan to cut Medicaid spending or the reality of the protests in Los Angeles.

Some Republicans got more personal, with several mocking Walz for losing the 2024 election and asking him, under oath, to discuss biographical details that he’d exaggerated. Rep. Pete Stauber (D-Minn.) shouted “Stolen valor! Stolen valor!” after asking Walz about the National Guard record that he’d blurred in some speeches. Rep. Elise Stefanik named illegal immigrants who’d committed violent crimes and called Hochul culpable: “No amount of words is going to clean up your failed record.”

Tom Homan on the next Trump deportation plan

Critics of the Trump administration’s deportation and “re-migration” strategy have accused it of inflaming tensions on purpose, targeting blue cities instead of punishing employers who hire workers with no legal status.

In an interview this week, White House border czar Tom Homan said that this focus was about to change. “Worksite enforcement operations are going to massively expand,” Homan told Semafor’s Ben Smith.

Though the Trump administration prefers to focus on “sanctuary” city policies that restrict police from turning over migrants who have committed crimes, this week’s turmoil in Los Angeles began when federal agents raided four workplaces in the city’s garment district as part of criminal investigations. Homan said the government will seek sanctions against employers.

DoorDash said in a recent filing that a crackdown “may result in a decrease in the pool of Dashers.”

“They’re coming here for a better life and a job, and I get that,” Homan said. “The more you remove those magnets, the less people are going to come. If they can’t get a job most of them aren’t going to come.”

Cleo Abram left Vox and started her YouTube show, Huge If True, three years ago. Since then, the channel has grown to nearly 6 million subscribers and she’s become one of the most important tech journalists in the world. This week, Ben and Max talk to Cleo about why she started an optimistic show in an age of pessimism, the time she got space-sick in zero gravity, and how she navigates conversations with tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Polls

Democrats have struggled mightily to make news about their major priority: Building enough opposition to the GOP’s tax and spending bill to somehow stop it. There have been few days when that story dominated social media feeds or front pages. But Quinnipiac’s polling, which puts the president’s approval rating at 38% — lower than a lot of other polls, but higher than the support it finds for the OBBBA. Just 10% of Republicans oppose it, but nearly one in four have no opinion of it, and Democrats and independents view it more negatively than they do Trump himself. Just 18% of Republicans favor lower Medicaid funding, which explains why the party’s message is that it is “securing” Medicaid, not cutting it, by pushing non-workers and migrants off the rolls.

Taken before the Trump administration’s mobilization in Los Angeles, this poll is a level-set on what Americans think of deportation. The policy itself is popular, with independents split 50/50, 18% of Democrats in favor, and a supermajority of Republicans driving up the overall rating. By 12 points, more Americans think that the deportations are making the country safer. But by 7 points, more say that they are making the economy weaker. All of this is better for the Trump administration than the numbers of eight years ago, and this is what both parties are trying to shift.

President Trump has wanted to hold a military parade in Washington since 2018. It was never a very popular idea in his first term, and it’s not popular now. Eighty percent of Democrats, 72% of independents, and one in three Republicans agree that the parade isn’t a good way for the government to spend money. There’s no real anti-military sentiment in these numbers, as 68% of voters say defense spending is either at the right level, or it should be increased. The angst is about why the money’s being spent at all.

Ads

• Cuomo for NYC, “Experience.” Every Democrat running for mayor in New York has denounced the Trump administration for moving the National Guard into Los Angeles, calling it “authoritarian,” and explaining how they’d fight that in New York. “Imagine it’s Times Square,” says a worried-sounding narrator in the Cuomo ad, but sounding even more worried about Zohran Mamdani, who’s “passed three bills” in his career, being tasked to stop it. “Trump’s at the city gates. We need someone experienced to slam them shut.”
• Zohran for NYC, “Done Settling.” Zohran Mamdani’s first TV ad after his endorsement from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) cuts together footage from one of his campaign’s biggest rallies, in Brooklyn — the sort of event no other candidate has been able to pull together. It hits his highlights, of raising the minimum wage, selling cheaper groceries through city-run stores, and freezing rent. But the point is the cheering crowd, and the image of a campaign with momentum.
• Lander 2025, “Cyclone.” Brad Lander is the latest in a list of New York City comptrollers to run for mayor as a numbers-loving wonk who achieves things while other people talk. This spot dramatizes that with the comptroller riding at the front of the Coney Island Cyclone rollercoaster, working on a legal pad and a cell phone as New Yorkers scream around him, and summing up his agenda. The most specific action item is about fighting “Trump and Musk” when they “stole $80 million from New Yorkers,” a reference to a lawsuit to claw back FEMA money. That’s a big story that has faded from daily coverage of the race.

Scooped!

Molly Ball’s in-person visit with Gavin Newsom got him talking in the right mood at the right time. There was speculation about him running for president if he navigated this crisis. “I’m not thinking about running, but it’s a path that I could see unfold,” he said. That directness seeped in with other Democrats, so it’s good to have an origin story. It was the most important story of the week about the party.

Next

• Four days until primaries in Virginia
• 11 days until primaries in New York City and Virginia’s 11th congressional district
• 34 days until the primary in Arizona’s 7th congressional district
• 146 days until off-year elections
• 507 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

“Everyone likes a winner and striking first usually gives you a big advantage.” Benjamin Netanyahu wrote that in his 2022 memoir, Bibi, finished and published during the brief period when his Likud party was out of power. Having never really covered Israel, outside of the moments when American politics revolved around it, I read it to understand his thinking — or at least, how he sold American allies on it. And it delivered on that. Netanyahu chastises Golda Meir’s cabinet for not waging a pre-emptive strike on Arab states before the Yom Kippur War, exactly the kind of mistake he was criticized for after Oct. 7. “Perhaps they feared being accused of precipitating a new Middle East war, believing that preemptive action would impede support from the United States,” he wrote. “Golda Meir should have known better.” Spend a few hours with this and you understand better what American politicians are going to be asked to support next.

A big chunk of Meta’s $15 billion investment in Scale AI requires the startup to provide future work to Mark Zuckerberg’s firm, two people familiar with the matter told Semafor’s Reed Albergotti.

The deal reflects how companies pushing the boundaries of AI are racing to gather more training data that can be used to improve the capabilities of AI models, and is a masterful move by Zuckerberg, Reed notes.