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Good Friday Morning! Except for the New York Jets. Plaxico Burress went on Lil Wayne’s podcast and was asked to compare his prison sentence with his season playing for the New York Jets. He took the question seriously. “They’re both kind of similar because when I walked into prison on my first day, I was like, ‘damn man you a [expletive] loser.’ And I had the same damn feeling every day I walked through the door with the Jets.”
Some context for that answer. Burress shot himself in the thigh at a Manhattan nightclub in 2008, took a plea on a New York gun charge, and served twenty months. He signed with the Jets about two months after his release, caught eight touchdowns for them in 2011, and was gone after the season. Somehow, the being with the Jets was worse…
I am a Titans fan, so I know pain when it comes to rooting for bad teams. But that takes a back seat to the Jets. I can’t recall any Titans players comparing their time here to a prison sentence. I’ve felt that way sometimes as a fan, but I do often remind myself of one thing: at least I’m not a Jets fan.
Speaking of places that feel like extended prison sentences, this week, I’m writing about the Democratic Party. The powers at the top of the party are re-writing the rules for its own presidential primaries eleven days before voters pick a Senate nominee. I’ll excuse you for thinking you’re in the movie Groundhog Day because yes, you’ve seen this film before – links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- Somebody phished the DNC by pretending to be its chairman. The DNC lost close to $29,000 to an email scammer impersonating Ken Martin, according to reporting from NOTUS. The committee’s statement called it a “misdisbursement of Committee funds” that was “the result of fraudulent activity by an external third party,” and added that it was “a one-off mistake that was promptly caught and addressed.” I want to be fair here, because every large organization gets hit with this eventually and most of them lose more than $29,000 when it happens. The reason it lands differently this time is the balance sheet underneath it. This is a committee that finished June with roughly $16 million in the bank against about $18 million in debt, with a line of credit secured against its own headquarters building, in a midterm year, while the Republican National Committee sits on more than $120 million and owes nothing. Democrats legitimately got scammed out of their rent money. Maybe this explains why Mamdani and the rest want to freeze rent.
Where you can find me this week
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Abdul El-Sayed Says He’s Not a Socialist. Democratic Socialists Are Moving to Michigan To Put Him in the Senate. – Conservative Institute
Robert Hur Was Right. It Took Two Years and a Lawsuit to Prove It. – Conservative Institute
Anthony Fauci Won’t Say What He Did. Congress Never Built The Place To Ask. – Conservative Institute
Democrats Are Changing The Election Rules… Again.
The party cannot control the money and cannot control the candidates. Rewriting the rulebook is the only move it has left.
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held a rally in Detroit last week for Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina congressman whose endorsement rescued Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020 and the most powerful Black Democrat in the country, saw the pictures of the crowd in a city that is majority Black. He told the Capitol Hill newsletter Punchbowl News what he noticed: “I saw the rally. I didn’t see a single person that looks like me. That tells me all I need to know.”
Michigan Democrats pick their Senate nominee on Tuesday. Clyburn does not live in Michigan. Seven days ago a committee of Democratic Party officials voted to move his state back to the front of the line for 2028, meaning South Carolina gets to vote on a presidential nominee before anyone else does.
The Democratic establishment is rewriting the rules that pick its presidential nominee. The new rules keep the party from ever having to answer its own left wing.
South Carolina votes first because Iowa and New Hampshire vote too far left
On July 24, the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee met to set the 2028 calendar. That committee is a standing panel of party officials who write the rules for how Democrats nominate a president. Its members are not chosen by voters in any primary.
Forty-nine of them voted on which state goes first. South Carolina took 26 votes, Nevada 19, New Hampshire 4.
The panel recommended this order: South Carolina on January 22, Nevada on February 1, New Hampshire on February 8, New Mexico on February 15, Michigan on February 22, Virginia on February 29, and then Super Tuesday on March 7. Nothing is final yet. The full DNC votes on it at the party’s summer meeting on August 13.
Iowa does not get to vote early at all anymore. Georgia applied to be an early state and the committee cut it.
The stated reason was race. Jaime Harrison, the former DNC chairman who runs the South Carolina party, said the party “needed a strong statement to say to the most loyal members of our party, which are Black voters, that we’re going to stand up with you.” Jane Kleeb, who chairs Nebraska’s party and sits on the rules committee, put it this way: “Black voters didn’t just show up for this party in 2020. They saved us.”
New Hampshire’s problem is legal. State law requires the state to vote at least seven days before any other. The rules committee scheduled it seventeen days after South Carolina. The state’s Democratic chairman, Ray Buckley, said the vote “shows that many party insiders have learned nothing from 2024.”
Carville is talking about a divorce, and the left says it is coming for the party
Republicans did not invent the idea that Democrats are at war with themselves. Democrats have said it out loud for five straight weeks.
James Carville, who ran Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, went on his own podcast in late June and proposed the party formally break apart. “I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk ‘the S-word.’ ‘Schism.’ I really do,” he said. Then: “Let’s negotiate a terms of a schism here. Maybe we can part under some kind of advantageous terms for both of us, but I’m done.”
Van Jones, the CNN commentator who worked in the Obama White House, watched socialist candidates beat party-backed incumbents across New York on primary night in June and called it a rout on air. “This is a battle between the establishment and this insurgency,” he said. “And the roof is collapsing on the Democratic Party establishment tonight.” He named the establishment he meant: “Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.” Three weeks later Jones wrote that the progressive movement “is being hijacked by too many people with insane, outlandish and nutty ideas,” and that those ideas are, in his capital letters, “REGRESSIVE.”
The left does not deny the charge. NBC News asked Joseph Geevarghese, who runs Our Revolution, the political group Sanders founded, whether the far left was trying to take over the Democratic Party. His answer was “Yes, we are!” He added that the movement is “probably a more formidable force than we’ve ever been.”
Sanders named the other side on Face the Nation five days ago. “There is a strong division within the Democratic Party,” he said. “You have an establishment like Rahm Emanuel, who are dependent on billionaire campaign contributors and want to maintain the status quo.” Emanuel ran Barack Obama’s White House and then ran Chicago. Congressman Ro Khanna, one of El-Sayed’s endorsers, wants that establishment gone: “The establishment and recycled faces need to step aside stage left.”
Fetterman has already named the price of keeping him
John Fetterman, the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, is fighting in both directions at once, and he keeps score out loud.
In late June he said the “Democratic Party is becoming an orgy of socialism,” and that “these recent elections vindicate my description.” Of Darializa Avila Chevalier, the socialist who beat a five-term incumbent congressman in Upper Manhattan, Fetterman said: “She wants to abolish the border, abolish prisons. That is a deeply disturbed individual.”
Then he named his own exit. At a Washington summit on July 15 he said that if the party “ever becomes, and just makes it official, the anti-Israel party, that’s when I would leave because that’s been a moral clarity for me.” He repeated the condition more precisely the next day: “If they put that in our platform, no aid for Israel, and officially become the anti-Israel party, then yeah, that’s a red line for me.”
He tied the threat to the primaries themselves. “You look at the kinds of individuals that are winning our recent primaries.”
That red line is closer than it sounds. On July 15, one hundred and three House Democrats, including Katherine Clark, the second-ranking Democrat in the House, voted for an amendment to strip Israel out of the State Department funding bill. It lost, 314 to 104, and every one of those Democrats is on the record wanting it to pass. The people who win primaries write the party’s official platform, and the people winning primaries keep moving in one direction.
Fetterman is not becoming a Republican. He said so again yesterday: “I’m not going to be a Republican, and I would just remind anybody that I’ve been very clear on that.” And: “I am a Democrat.” The only condition he has ever named for leaving is formal anti-Israel language in the party platform.
The party is not waiting for him to decide. The Working Families Party is a small left-wing party that runs candidates inside Democratic primaries. Its Pennsylvania branch announced last November that it will field one against him in 2028. The statement opened with three words: “We’re primarying John Fetterman.” Congressman Brendan Boyle, a fellow Pennsylvania Democrat, called Fetterman “Trump’s favorite Democrat” and said “He needs to go.” Fetterman’s standing among Democrats in his own state fell from 80% approval to 54% negative in a Quinnipiac poll last October.
A sitting senator is telling his party the terms on which he stays, and the faction he is attacking is organizing to remove him first.
Schumer and Jeffries own the money. The DNC owns the rulebook.
Van Jones named the right men. Chuck Schumer leads Senate Democrats and Hakeem Jeffries leads House Democrats, and between them they control the committees that pay for Senate and House campaigns. They also pick the people who run those committees. Schumer announced Kirsten Gillibrand for the Senate job. Jeffries appointed Suzan DelBene to the House one. House Democrats elected that chair themselves as recently as 2020, then voted to hand the pick back to their leader. Each of those moves takes a decision away from a wider group and hands it to a smaller one.
The money sits with them too. At the end of June the House committee held $79 million and the Senate committee held $41 million. The Democratic National Committee held $16.3 million against roughly $18 million in debt, and a line of credit it took out against its own headquarters. Ahead of each of the last two elections the DNC sent about $12 million to each of those committees. This time it has sent nothing of consequence.
Rufus Gifford, who ran finance for the party’s 2024 campaign, says the committee is “spiraling towards irrelevance.” Elections analyst Drew Savicki calls it “a powerless organization.”
Democratic small donors sent $586 million through ActBlue between April and June, the fundraising site almost every Democratic campaign uses to collect money online. That was 15 million separate contributions and 573,000 first-time donors, in three months, while the national committee closed June in the red. In Michigan, El-Sayed raised $1.2 million from donors giving under $200. Haley Stevens raised $227,000 from the same kind of donor.
The committee cannot fund a Senate race and cannot pick a Senate candidate. The fundraising site its own candidates use raises more money than it does. What it still owns, completely and by itself, is the rulebook: which states vote first, how primary votes turn into delegates at the convention that formally picks the nominee, and who gets to vote in a Democratic primary at all.
Rewriting rules costs nothing. That is why the rules are the lever they pull.
White Democrats are the party’s left wing. Black Democrats are its moderates.
Democrats sold this calendar as a racial correction. Sorted by ideology, it moves the party toward the middle.
Nate Silver, who built his career forecasting elections, explained why two days ago. “White voters overall are more conservative than members of racial minority groups,” he wrote. “But among Democrats, the ideological ordering is reversed. White Democrats are generally really liberal, while Hispanic and Black Democrats are more moderate.”
His numbers come from the Cooperative Election Study, a large academic survey that has polled hundreds of thousands of voters since 2016. Among white Democrats, 65% call themselves liberal or very liberal. Among Hispanic Democrats it is 44%. Among Black Democrats it is 41%.
Silver named the irony himself: “it’s usually the moderates who express more need for racial balance.” He says the new calendar “puts a slight thumb on the scale in favor of more moderate candidates.”
Pew Research asked a sharper question in January. Instead of asking about socialism as an idea, it asked which Democrats like politicians who call themselves democratic socialists. Among white Democrats, 40% said yes. Among Black Democrats, 21%. Among Hispanic Democrats, 20%. Democrats with a college degree came in at 41% and those without one at 26%. Upper-income Democrats hit 40% and lower-income Democrats 24%.
The socialist wing does best with white college graduates. It does worst with the working-class minority voters it says it speaks for.
Across the six states that would vote first, the voters are about 64% white, which the elections analyst Geoffrey Skelley calculates is “essentially the same share that voted in the first four states in 2020.” The group of states voting first did not get more diverse overall. What changed is which voters go first, and the ones going first are the least liberal Democrats in the party.
South Carolina is Clyburn’s state. It saved Biden’s campaign in 2020 when he had lost everywhere else. Jaime Harrison ran its party before he ran the national one. Loyalty politics explains the move without any reference to socialism at all. That is true, and it is also why the move was easy: the most loyal state in the Democratic coalition is also one of its least liberal, so the calendar collects both at once.
Silver argues the reshuffle “probably diminishes the importance of the first four states” compared to the fifth and sixth, Michigan and Virginia, because those two come right before Super Tuesday, the single day when the most states vote at once. Michigan is worth more under this calendar than it was under the last one, which is part of why Tuesday’s primary there is worth more than a Senate primary usually is.
Every living Democratic governor of Michigan is on one side of Tuesday’s primary
Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Haley Stevens on July 24, the same day the calendar vote happened, eleven days before the election, after months of staying out of it. That endorsement completed the set. Every living Democratic governor of Michigan now backs Stevens: Whitmer, Jennifer Granholm, and Jim Blanchard. So do Schumer, retiring Senator Gary Peters, Clyburn, and the campaign arm of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The governor’s primary on the same ballot went the same direction against a different kind of opponent. Jocelyn Benson has the party so completely consolidated that Sheriff Chris Swanson is polling at 11.9% with $187,000 in the bank against her $6.4 million. Swanson is not a socialist insurgent. The Detroit News editorial board endorsed him in June on the argument that Democrats should pick a nominee who will shake up the status quo. The machine beat back the left in one race and a moderate sheriff in the other.
El-Sayed outraised Stevens $4.6 million to $2.1 million in the second quarter, and beat her better than five to one among donors giving less than $200. The answer came from outside the campaigns. Super PACs, which can spend without limit as long as they do not coordinate with a candidate, put roughly $29 million behind Stevens against $2.6 million on El-Sayed’s side. Groups tied to AIPAC, the main pro-Israel lobby in American politics, spent about $30 million on this one primary.
The coalition split inside that race is the same split the new calendar sorts for. In the Detroit News poll conducted July 8 through 11, Stevens led among Black voters by 46 points while El-Sayed led among white voters by 12. Stevens led voters without college degrees by 22 points. El-Sayed led college graduates by 7.
The horse race itself is close and unstable. El-Sayed leads by roughly 8 points in the RealClearPolitics average, which combines every public poll of the race. Three credible pollsters have put this contest 22 points apart in three weeks, which is the reason to watch the average and ignore any single survey.
Rahm Emanuel made the electability case in the Wall Street Journal on July 24 without using a poll at all. His warning was that the problem does not stay local: “What happens in the 13th District doesn’t stay in the 13th District,” meaning the Harlem and Bronx seat a socialist took from a five-term incumbent in June. His description of the record was blunter than anything a Republican would need to write: “It was socialists who led the charge to defund the police, open the borders, abolish prisons, release violent criminals onto the streets and degrade the flag.” On CNN four days later he put a number on it: “since 2018, the progressive caucus hasn’t flipped a single red to blue district.”
Silver reaches the same place from the data. Candidates “associated with democratic socialism often claim to have the mandate of the working class,” he wrote. “But in practice, their strengths tend to be with college-educated voters.” In the Democratic Socialists of America’s own 2021 membership survey, 85% of members were white, and 80% of those over 25 held bachelor’s degrees.
I made the case against El-Sayed himself this week at the Conservative Institute. Whatever he is, the party is not planning to beat him by telling anyone he is wrong.
El-Sayed is ahead going into Tuesday. The party’s leadership is building 2028 machinery precisely because it keeps losing 2026 races on the merits. A party confident it could win these arguments in front of its own voters would not need a new calendar.
They ran this play in 2016, in 2022, and again in 2024
Democrats made this argument against their own party long before Republicans did.
Joe Biden won every 2024 primary contest but one, losing American Samoa by 91 votes, and took more than 14 million primary votes. Weeks after the June debate, the same party leadership pushed him off the ticket, and his replacement became, as the political scientist Daniel Klinghard wrote at the time, the first Democratic nominee since 1968 “to win the nomination without winning a single primary vote.” The modern primary system exists because of 1968. At that year’s convention, delegates for Hubert Humphrey, who had not run in a single primary, outvoted the delegates that primary voters had sent for Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. The party made the primaries binding so that could not happen again. Graham Platner won Maine’s Senate primary in June and filed his withdrawal 31 days later, after the national party and the major donor networks committed to spending nothing in the race while he stayed in it. Serious allegations against him surfaced first, and he denies them. I wrote about the rest three weeks ago.
Biden also built this calendar the first time, and Clyburn explained why on camera. South Carolina rescued Biden’s 2020 campaign after he finished fifth in New Hampshire. Asked whether moving it first stacked the deck, Clyburn told Chris Wallace on CNN: “I don’t think you’re stacking the deck. I think you’re avoiding embarrassment, that is what he is attempting to avoid here.” He asked the obvious follow-up himself: “Why should President Biden sit back and allow a state that he finished fifth in be first up?” The calendar built to protect Biden from an early loss worked exactly as designed, and then the party removed him anyway.
The 2024 version of this machinery fell apart. Georgia’s secretary of state set his own primary date. New Hampshire held its own primary in defiance of the calendar and got its delegates seated anyway. The penalties written into the rules were never imposed on anybody. Iowa Democrats are openly keeping open the option of running their own early contest in 2028 without the party’s permission. Ken Martin, the current DNC chairman, has promised what the last calendar never delivered: “This is a calendar this party is actually going to protect.”
In 2016, Jake Tapper asked DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz what she would tell voters who thought the party had rigged the process. Her answer described superdelegates, the party insiders who get a vote at the convention that no primary voter ever gave them: “Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists.” Tapper’s response was that he was not sure the answer “would satisfy an anxious young voter.”
Sanders made the same complaint and refused to overstate it. He pointed out that more than 400 superdelegates committed to Hillary Clinton “eight months before the first vote was cast,” then declined to call it rigged: “That’s not rigged, I think it’s just a dumb process which has certainly disadvantaged our campaign.” A year later, Judy Woodruff asked Elizabeth Warren flatly whether the 2016 primary was rigged. Warren answered: “I think it was.”
Donna Brazile found the document. As interim DNC chairwoman she uncovered a 2015 fundraising agreement under which, in her words, “Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised” while voters were still choosing. She called it “not illegal, but it sure looked unethical.” Three days later, on ABC, she declined to call the primary rigged: “I found no evidence, none whatsoever.” The person who found the contract refused to use the strongest word about it.
Republicans lost this fight in the open and lived with the result
In 2016 the Republican establishment tried to stop a populist takeover of its own party. It failed. Donald Trump ran against the whole Republican field in primaries anyone could enter, beat all of them, and the party became his. The voters made that choice, and the party changed to match.
The Republican establishment tried to stop its insurgency and then lived with losing. The Democratic establishment is still trying, and it is rewriting the process so it never has to live with an outcome it does not like.
The people saying so are not conservatives. A sitting member of the Rules and Bylaws Committee told Axios the calendar could “shut down” a progressive presidential candidate, and that “the public is swinging left, and the establishment is trying to fight the winds of change.” Chuck Todd, who moderated Meet the Press for nine years, said on his podcast Monday: “this calendar is intended to make life harder for an insurgent progressive. That’s its intent.” He went further: “If I were to create a calendar that was going to do two things, make it much harder for a progressive to get the nominee and much harder for progressives to say the calendar was designed to stop a progressive from getting the nomination, this is the calendar I would come up with.”
A week after the vote, the faction this calendar targets has said almost nothing. No statement from the Democratic Socialists of America. Nothing from Justice Democrats, from Our Revolution, or from the Working Families Party. Not a word from Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, or Mamdani. One anonymous committee member, one writer at the socialist magazine Jacobin, and a former Meet the Press moderator are carrying the whole objection.
None of this is a defense of the Democratic Socialists of America. I want them to lose every race they enter, and a party that purges its socialists is doing something healthy for itself and for the country. The objection is about method. Machinery built to stop a faction does not disappear when the faction does. Democrats wrote the superdelegate rules to stop another George McGovern, the antiwar liberal who lost 49 states in 1972. Those rules were still sitting there in 2016 when a different revolt showed up.
They need the radicals. That is the trap the party’s leaders built for themselves. The enthusiasm is on the left and so is the money, $586 million through ActBlue in a single quarter and a five-to-one edge in small donations in Michigan, and no party wins a midterm without both. It cannot put those candidates on a general election ballot in a swing state and survive the result. So it takes the money and the turnout, then rewrites the rules to keep control of the nominations.
Stevens says El-Sayed is unelectable. Her allies say he is running for celebrity and that Republicans are propping him up. Nobody is telling Democratic primary voters that he is wrong. Not that Medicare for All does not pay for itself. Not that emptying the prisons produces victims with names. Not that abolishing ICE is a slogan rather than a policy.
Democrats can move South Carolina to January and cut Iowa out of the calendar entirely. They still have to explain to their own voters why the socialists are wrong, and they have decided not to.
Links of the week
Pleading the Fifth Won’t Spare Fauci from the Truth. He claims his Senate hearing was a witch hunt designed to entrap him. But his record convicts him on its own. – The Free Press
Fauci takes the Fifth 111 times – and the media still rush to defend him
Media elites continue to treat Dr Anthony Fauci as untouchable despite newly revealed contradictions in his COVID record – Fox News
Young Dems’ radicalism threatens to doom their party in midterms — and beyond – NYPost
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
Graham Platner’s replacement… married his cousin.
Satire of the week
New Evidence Shows Fauci May Have Been Created In Chinese Lab – The Onion
Spain Turns To Experienced Border Czar Kamala Harris For Help With Migrant Invasion – Babylon Bee
‘It’d Be So Easy To Hide A Body Out Here,’ Says Wife On Road Trip To No One In Particular – Babylon Bee
Woman Getting Anxious About How Stressed She’s Been – Reductress
Festival-Goers Not Sure Whether Bluegrass Band From Appalachians or Brooklyn – The Hard Times
Travel Insurers Begin Removing ‘In Event Of Wildfires’ Coverage From Policies – Waterford Whispers News