The third annual Americana Awards

Best Senate campaign: We have a tie: Republican Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, and Democrat Elissa Slotkin in Michigan.

McCormick had the harder job, on paper, of convincing a state he did not always live in — Sen. Bob Casey never stopped talking about McCormick’s home in Connecticut — to reject a three-term Democrat who’d always won independents and a decent share of Republicans. He had money and national GOP support, so he was never off the air. But he trailed in polls, and it was hard for some Republicans to see how he’d unseat a famously moderate, low-key Democrat.“Casey kept giving us openings, and we took them,” said Mark Harris, a McCormick strategist. When Joe Biden left the ticket, the campaign instantly began tying Casey to Harris; when a focus group found that the final undecided voters were focused on “change,” McCormick went to his alma mater, West Point, and cut an ad all about “change.” He needed nearly every Trump voter, many of whom had voted for Casey in the past, to come with him, and he pulled that off.

Slotkin’s task was different: Hold an open seat in a swing state, as Kamala Harris lost it. She largely cleared the field, blowing past an actor/activist who ran to her left but never caught fire. But GOP nominee Mike Rogers mostly cleared his, too, securing an early Trump endorsement and rolling past more libertarian challengers. Slotkin had to navigate an electorate that was about to vote for Donald Trump — including tens of thousands of Muslim and Arab-American voters who were abandoning Democrats over Gaza.

After the election, Slotkin told Semafor at a reporter roundtable that she navigated that risk with regular, sincere outreach to the community. Harris lost the city of Dearborn by 2,607 votes; Slotkin carried it by 950 votes. Like other successful Democrats, she pinned Rogers down on abortion rights and highlighted how her party brought down drug prices.

Best House campaign: Another bipartisan, unifying tie here: Republican Vicente Gonzalez in Texas, and Republican Don Bacon in Nebraska. Both candidates had to run well ahead of their presidential ticket, in places that were moving away from their party with every new block of registrations. Both drew re-matches with candidates who out-performed in the 2022 midterms — Gonzalez had to beat Mayra Flores, who’d actually won the seat in a special election that year.

Both men figured out early, effective ways to distinguish themselves from their national parties. Bacon campaigned with Democrats and buried challenger Tony Vargas with ads about tax hikes he supported in Lincoln; Gonzalez instantly rebutted Flores’s ads about abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, picking a fight with progressive activists, confident that they didn’t know south Texas.

Biggest Bust (Non-Presidential Category): The seven-state campaign to expand ranked choice voting, a dream of good government reformers who want to blow up the party primary system that has driven Democrats to the left and Republicans to the right. Both parties opposed the measures, and they failed almost everywhere. The outlier was Alaska, where voters saved the three-year old ranked choice system by a 0.2-point margin – after approving it by 1.1 points. This is not taking the country by storm, but really, no attempt to break the “duopoly” is.

Best Campaign Ad: Donald J. Trump for President 2024, “Access.” When Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, the Trump campaign told Marc Caputo that she had several “Willie Hortons” in her oppo file. Democrats were nevertheless shocked by the Horton they picked: Shiloh Heavenly Quine, a convicted murderer who became the first prisoner in America to receive taxpayer-funded gender surgery. That generated no political outrage at the time, and Harris touted it in an interview with a transgender rights group two years later, as evidence of her commitment to LGBTQ+ rights. The Trump campaign turned that answer back on Harris, with this kicker: “Kamala’s for they/them, President Trump is for you.” Democrats were blindsided; their allies were hopeful that this ad, like anti-trans messaging in the midterms, would flop or backfire. Instead, it inspired more than $215 million of follow-up ads, by multiple campaigns, dividing Democrats and fulfilling the Trump campaign’s goal of branding Harris as an out-of-touch progressive.

Worst Campaign Ad: Vote Common Good, ”Your Vote, Your Choice.” Everything that went wrong for Harris is packed into these 30 seconds. A celebrity endorsement (Julia Roberts) that reached nobody outside the Democratic base. A fantasy — that pollsters might be missing a quiet surge for Harris among female voters — that led to bad strategy. A smug message, that women were lying to their husbands, that generated more negative attention in conservative media than the expected good vibes in liberal media. Harris and her Future Forward super PAC ran economy-focused spots that helped her match or nearly match the 2020 Democratic vote in swing states. The outside groups that tried to be clever didn’t help at all.

Best Bet: Trump picking JD Vance for vice president. Democrats were aghast that he did it, amazed that he would validate their year of campaigning against Project 2025 with the think tank president who conceived it. (Indeed, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts delayed and retitled his own book, with its Vance forward, dropping it after the election when it would be less of a distraction.) Vance’s many, many hours of New Right speeches and interviews became, briefly, a problem for the campaign.

For a while, he was the least popular member of either party’s ticket. But he was a perfect complement to Trump: A risk-taker running against two very risk-averse Democrats. Vance found his footing when he attacked Tim Walz, tangling Harris’s running mate up with questions about his biographical exaggerations, then staggering him at their debate when he opted not to attack him, instead defending the Trump record in such warm ways – he “salvaged Obamacare” – that Democrats struggled to respond. According to exit polling, Vance ended the campaign with a 47-47 favorable rating — the only national candidate who wasn’t underwater.

Worst Bet: President Biden challenging Donald Trump to a June 27 debate, early enough for him to be replaced on the ticket if it went badly. And it did. Had Harris won the election, Trump accepting that invitation would have been remembered as a defining, but understandable, blunder — and a really good night for him, 90 minutes where he got to lay out his governing agenda with no effective pushback.

Most Catastrophic Success: The Democratic National Committee’s effort to demolish third party candidates, out of a desire to prevent another 2016 scenario where “double haters” – people unhappy with either major party nominee – swung the election to Trump. By most measures, this worked. None of the left-wing protest campaigns against Biden, then Harris, got much traction; there was no state where votes for the Green Party were decisive, and Cornel West’s candidacy largely became a cut-out for Republicans. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was pummeled by negative news stories, defeated in court, and, by the time he left the race, no real threat to Harris.

But that was the problem. Democrats shunned Kennedy, not wanting to associate themselves with his vaccine skepticism, while Donald Trump courted him and offered him a role in his administration. (Trump took risks, but he also said whatever it took to get elected – the official position right before the election was that Kennedy wouldn’t get the job he’s now nominated for.) Trump treated third party and fringe groups like potential coalition partners; Democrats treated them like threats. We saw the result.

Best Memorabilia: Joe Biden’s “performance enhancing” Dark Brandon water, a joke product inspired by the Trump campaign’s trollish insistence that the president could only speak coherently and energetically if he was under the influence of some un-named drugs. It went on sale the night of the debate; if you bought it, your can arrived after Kamala Harris had become the Democratic nominee.

Worst Memorabilia: Elon Musk’s “Dark MAGA” hat, which ditched the Century Schoolbook font used for all other MAGA merchandise in favor of a less-legible grindcore logo. It was the ideal Musk joke: The semiotics of something funny, without any funny content. What are you going to do? Tell the wealthiest man on earth not to wear Hot Topic chic?

Quote That Will Live in Infamy: New York Rep. Jerry Nadler bounding up to Biden after his final State of the Union to tell him that “no one’s gonna talk about cognitive impairment now.” It was a popular sentiment at the time, that Biden’s crisper speech that night would shove off all the concerns dredged up by Robert Hur’s report on his handling of classified documents. But within four months, questions about his competence would destroy the Biden candidacy; by the end of the year, Nadler himself would give up his ranking member status on the House Judiciary Committee, conceding to Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin amid a mini-rebellion against leaders whose best years were behind them. That is the first legacy of the Democrats’ loss. There’ll be others next year, as the campaigns get underway again —with no more candidates born in the 1940s.