If you’d like to read this issue on my website, click here! If you’d like to sign-up and receive this in your inbox each week, click here! Read past issues here.
Good Friday Morning! Except to the scientists who decided to shell out money on “smart underwear” to measure how frequently humans engage in flatulence. If you think I’m above starting this newsletter on a fart joke (or news story), you are wrong.
The New York Post is on the case. Previous research claimed we sounded off a backend bugle call (or TN barking spider) only about 14 times a day. But researchers in Maryland, using “smart underwear,” say the real number is double that: an average of 32 times a day. With individual rates “varying” with as few as “four times a day and others up to 59 times a day.”
I think the person hitting 59 times a day has a condition. Or had Taco Bell.
But don’t worry. Doctors were quick to add, “‘We don’t actually know what normal flatus production looks like,’ said Brantley Hall, an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics at UMD. “Without that baseline, it’s hard to know when someone’s gas production is truly excessive.“
I also learned that one gastroenterologist refers to himself as the “King of Farts.” And I want to say that these kinds of careers were shockingly absent from career day presentations. If a lawyer called himself the “King of Farts,” he’d get kicked out of a courtroom.
All the news and thoughts fit to print here.
This week, I’m going to dig into the upcoming midterms, what I expect from them, and what they can and can’t tell us about 2028 – links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- “We don’t know if the models are conscious.“ That was a line from Ross Douthat’s interview with Anthronic’s CEO about AI. Anthropic makes the Claude models, which have mostly been aimed at programmers but have recently started to make headway in the broader model war, with OpenAI now targeting them. Additionally, the WSJ profiled the one woman tasked with teaching Anthropic’s AI models “morals“ and to “be good.” She’s a philosopher by trade. When you combine Douthat’s interview and the WSJ piece, you’ll probably not feel great about the future. Why is nothing being done? China. Just this week, OpenAI accused DeepSeek (one of the top Chinese models) of basically stealing everything from OpenAI and other U.S. companies. China can’t compete with our development and research… so they’re stealing. The AI race isn’t slowing down, which makes the interviews and moral think pieces we’re getting very interesting and important.
- The American Almanac is growing! Hundreds of thousands of people now read us daily. I want to express my sincere gratitude to those of you who subscribe, share, and help us grow. You can subscribe here for free. Additionally, please check out Capital Digest (finance/economics), Conservative Legal News, and Real Talk Digest. There are more projects in the pipeline. If you don’t see anything in your inbox a day after signing up, check your spam folder.
Where you can find me this week
Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter and The American Almanac.
Accountability Starts With Saying: That Was Wrong – Conservative Institute
Mamdani’s socialist nightmare: How NYC failed to save 18 lives – Conservative Institute
Democrats Want ICE Reform—So They’re Sabotaging TSA and the Coast Guard Instead – Conservative Institute
The Democrats’ 2026 Mirage
The midterm tea leaves look promising for Democrats. The generic ballot shows them up by 5.2 points. Trump’s approval rating hovers around 42 percent—hardly a vote of confidence. Republicans are on defense about immigration enforcement, the economy, and a dozen self-inflicted wounds. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries can practically taste the gavel.
Here’s the problem: winning in November might be the worst thing that could happen to Democrats. A blue wave in 2026 will paper over—not solve—the geographic and demographic disaster that handed Trump the White House. And the leading candidates for 2028—Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom—suggest the party learned exactly nothing from getting shellacked last time around.
The Wave That Won’t Matter
Trump built his 2024 coalition on low-propensity voters—people who don’t typically show up for midterms. Standard political gravity suggests those voters stay home while energized Democrats flood the polls. That’s textbook midterm dynamics, and it’s probably what happens.
But here’s what else happens. Democrats pick up seats in California through aggressive redistricting. They flip a handful in Virginia. Maybe they grab some vulnerable Republicans in blue-state suburbs. The Cook Political Report currently rates only 14 Republican-held seats as genuine toss-ups—and six of those are in solid blue states. This isn’t 2018 wave territory. It’s blue-state consolidation dressed up as a national mandate.
The Liberal Patriot’s Justin Vassallo documents the problem with surgical precision. Democrats could win control of the House without dramatically changing the state of play in states they must win in 2028 to regain the presidency. Even impressive special election victories in state legislatures don’t change the underlying reality: the party’s infrastructure is still seriously impaired in Texas as well as former purple states such as Iowa, Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina.
The math gets worse. Much of Trump’s hemorrhaging support appears concentrated in states Harris already won. When the president threatens to deploy ICE agents at polling stations or cuts funding to blue states, he reinforces Democratic dominance in places Democrats already control. That’s electorally useless. You can’t win the Electoral College by running up the score in California and New York.
Geography Is Destiny
Iowa used to be competitive. So did Ohio. Florida was the ultimate swing state. Now they’re Trump country, and Democrats have essentially abandoned ship. North Carolina flirts with purple every cycle, then breaks Republican. Tennessee, Montana, Missouri, Indiana—forget about it.
This isn’t just about one bad cycle. The 2030 census reapportionment will punish Democrats further if they remain a coastal party. The Liberal Patriot (reminder: it’s written by Democrats) warns that without impressive upsets in Trump country, Democrats will remain a party of the highly educated Northeastern seaboard and West Coast, with all that implies in terms of its sociocultural outlook and understanding of rural and Rust Belt issues.
Some Democrat are emerging to challenge Republicans. Bob Brooks, a firefighter running in Pennsylvania’s 7th district. Christina Bohannan, a law professor trying again in Iowa’s 1st. Rebecca Cooke, a small business owner in Wisconsin’s 3rd.
But they’re swimming against the tide. Vassallo notes that deprived of strong local party branches, the next generation of red state Democrats are hemmed in by the very party structures they need to reform. Translation: to win, these candidates need money from national donor networks who are currently wedded to identity politics. They need support from advocacy groups that enforce progressive litmus tests. They have to be “good Democrats” and “different Democrats” simultaneously—an almost impossible trick.
(And as an aside: the DNC’s funding problem that plagued them in 2025 is pushing into 2026, too. Money matters for organizing and challenging unfriendly turf.)
The immigration issue crystallizes the bind. An overwhelming majority of the Democratic base, as well as a growing number of party leaders, support either overhauling or eliminating ICE entirely. Meanwhile, independents in swing districts remain skeptical of Democratic promises on border enforcement. They watched the Biden administration’s failures. They’re not confusing mixed reviews to Trump’s deportation policies with confidence that Democrats have a workable alternative.
Purple-district candidates who look soft on the border will get crushed. But candidates who break with the base on immigration might lose their primaries first. That’s not a sustainable coalition. It’s a party eating itself.
The 2028 Nightmare
Assume Democrats win the House in November. Fantastic. Now what? The presidential field looks like a rerun of the worst parts of 2024.
Kamala Harris leads or runs neck-and-neck with Gavin Newsom in most primary polling. Think about that. Democrats just lost with Harris at the top of the ticket, and their response is… maybe try again? Harris is a lot of things, a political talent like Richard Nixon is not one of them.
Nate Silver identified Harris’s fundamental problem: what he calls “Liz Cheney Syndrome.” Centrists think you’re a liberal, liberals think you’re a conservative. Harris threads this needle in the worst possible way. Progressives don’t trust her because she tried to distance herself from Medicare for All and other 2019 positions. Moderates don’t trust her because, well, she held those positions in the first place and never explained why she changed.
The numbers are brutal. 37 percent of voters characterized Harris as “far-left”, the same percentage who said that about the new New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Another 38 percent of voters described Harris as “left” or “center-left”; only 6 percent said she was a centrist. She’s perceived as being almost as far left as Bernie Sanders—not because of any coherent policy platform, but because voters remember her 2019 campaign and her race and gender signaled “progressive” to an electorate that doesn’t pay close attention to policy nuance.
Harris ran a substance-free 2024 campaign hoping to win on vibes. She couldn’t identify a single mistake she or Biden had made. She quietly disavowed past positions without replacing them with anything. The result? Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them” ads defined her, because the attacks were grounded in her own words and ACLU questionnaire responses. When your opponent’s hyperbolic attacks turn out to be literally true, you’ve got a messaging problem.
The Newsom Delusion
If Harris is damaged goods, what about Gavin Newsom? He’s risen in the polls. He’s Chairman of the Resistance, fighting Trump at every turn. He does podcasts with conservative hosts where he sounds almost moderate. He’s everything to everyone.
Ruy Teixeira sees through it. In a devastating piece, he argues that Newsom is essentially a message delivery system—and a very effective one. The governor tells Resistance liberals exactly what they want to hear about fighting Trump. He reassures progressives he’s still one of them. He throws economic populists some minimum wage increases. He courts the “abundance” faction with YIMBY initiatives while staying tight with Big Tech.
But here’s the catch: Clinton’s message delivery magic was in the service ultimately of reaching a general election audience not just a Democratic audience. Newsom’s optimized for Democratic primaries. He’s never had to win a competitive general election.
The “Deciding to Win” report tested 21 potential Democratic candidates against their states’ partisan lean. Newsom’s result? His 10-point underperformance relative to expectations is the worst of 21 potential candidates tested. He underperformed in deep-blue California by double digits. That’s not a “moderate.” That’s a candidate who can’t even maximize turnout in friendly territory.
Newsom talks a good game about moderation on his podcast—he agreed with Charlie Kirk that biological boys in girls’ sports seems “unfair.” Then he immediately walked it back to avoid alienating progressives. He admitted to Ezra Klein that Democrats “failed on the border.” But his actual record as California governor is wall-to-wall progressive priorities, from providing health insurance to illegal immigrants to signing whatever his ultra-progressive legislature sends him.
This is the Democrats’ idea of a Bill Clinton comeback? A coastal governor who’s never won a swing voter in his life, whose record is left-wing but whose rhetoric tries to paper over it? The Atlantic documented a Democratic Party in basic disarray, and beholden to a radical left instead of anything approaching common sense. Newsom represents the party’s delusion that it doesn’t actually need to change—it just needs better marketing.
The Counterargument
Democrats will counter that Trump’s chaos creates opportunity. His threats to “nationalize” federal elections violate the Constitution. Steve Bannon’s lunatic proposal to deploy ICE at polling stations gives Democrats legitimate “defending democracy” ammunition. Trump’s rhetoric, combined with Republican tone-deafness on the economy, could spark the kind of revulsion that powered Virginia’s recent gubernatorial race.
Maybe. But “defending democracy” flopped in 2024. And even if it works in November 2026, it won’t fix the Democratic brand in regions that actually decide presidential elections. Suburban college graduates in Northern Virginia already vote Democratic. Maxing out their turnout doesn’t help in Iowa or North Carolina or Arizona.
The honest Democrats—politicians like Sherrod Brown before Ohio voters sent him home, or the candidates Vassallo profiles—understand this. They know you can’t win the Midwest by lecturing working-class voters about systemic racism or performing land acknowledgements. They know border security matters to people who aren’t racist xenophobes. They know corporate consolidation and trade policy destroyed communities, and vague promises about “affordability” won’t cut it.
But these voices are drowned out by a national party that learned the wrong lessons from 2024. Instead of asking why working-class voters of all races broke for Trump, Democrats doubled down on maximizing turnout among their existing coalition. Instead of confronting their immigration policy failures, they yell about ICE abuses and hope voters forget the Biden administration’s open-borders experiment.
Fool’s Gold
Standard midterm dynamics suggest Republicans will lose House seats in November. History, Trump’s approval rating, and Democratic energy all point that direction. But a Democratic victory built on California gerrymanders and consolidating blue states won’t translate to Electoral College math in 2028.
The structural problems that delivered Trump a second term—the hollowing out of Democratic competitiveness in the Midwest and Southeast, the party’s capture by coastal progressives, the inability to talk to working-class voters without condescension—all remain. A House majority won’t fix them. Kamala Harris won’t fix them. Gavin Newsom definitely won’t fix them.
Until Democrats field candidates who can actually win in Trump Country—not just “resist” Trump from California and New York—they’re a regional party playing for second place. The 2026 blue wave might save them from one Trump term. It won’t save them from themselves. And it certainly won’t save them from J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio in 2028.
Links of the week
The media need to stop gaslighting us about the reality of trans mass shooters – NYPost
NJ prosecutors targeted me for DEFENDING a victim of antisemitic violence – NYPost
Define ‘Anti-Zionism’: How many Jews actually believe Israel should be erased? – Commentary
Houston, We Have a Problem: It’s not rocket science that kept America from returning to the moon. It’s state capacity. – Francis Fukuyama
Why Is There So Much Lying in Politics Today? – J. Budziszewski
Kamala Harris’ rebooted online ‘Headquarters’ is not the answer for Democrats – MS Now
Elites Versus Ordinary Americans on Voter ID – Chronicles
Trucking has become a hot spot for illegal labor — with lethal results – Adam B. Coleman
Gov Pritzker ignored my letter — after his sanctuary policies killed my daughter – Fox News
China’s College Takeover: Reclaiming U.S. Schools for American Young People – Steve Cortes
The Story That United A Divided America – Sasha Stone
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Stay-at-home jobs do more for fertility rates than any policy.
Satire of the week
Biden Grateful He’s Not Alive To See What Trump Doing To Country – Onion
Fraud Suspicions Arise As Somali Team Wins 734th Gold Medal At Winter Olympics – Babylon Bee
Kid Rock’s ‘Bawitdaba’ Added To Hymnals – Babylon Bee
How to Stop Obsessing Over That Weird Bad Thing You Said and Focus on All the Weird Bad Things You’re Going to Say – Reductress
Mosh Pit Resolves Man’s Issues Quicker than Previous Six Years of Therapy – The Hard Times
‘Manufacturing Consent’ Taking On Whole New Meaning After Noam Chomsky Pictured With Jeffrey Epstein For 3,000th Time – Waterford Whispers News