Americana

1. Wilderness battle for the DNC
2. Senate GOP rallies behind Trump
3. Power brawl in Minnesota
4. Dems debut new trans rights strategy
5. Top House progressive lays out 2025 gameplan

Also: David recommends an upcoming book by Chris Hayes.

The speech we’ll probably remember from this week was delivered two miles from the Oval Office, at the end of a confirmation hearing, from a senator who wasn’t expected to make news. Democrats had questioned Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth over reports of heavy drinking and marital infidelity. Oklahoma Republican Markwayne Mullin buzzed in to protect him.

“How many senators have shown up drunk to vote at night?” asked Mullin. “How many senators do you know have got a divorce before cheating on their wives? Did you ask them to step down?”

Allegations like these had sunk other nominees, including a senator who’d once sought the same job as Hegseth. Past tense. Mullin was describing the new world, where constituents didn’t expect immaculate behavior from their side’s politicians, and didn’t believe the worst about their favorites. This was especially true among MAGA voters. Democrats recall the confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a travesty of denial and dodged accountability; Republicans believe that the justice survived a smear campaign, the kind that every conservative is going to face unfairly.

This colored the entire 2024 campaign, and it’s given Donald Trump a far less bumpy transition than reporters expected two months ago. There are limits. Trump lost his first nominee for attorney general when at least four Republican senators couldn’t stomach allegations against Matt Gaetz — or just Gaetz, as a person, period.

But the cynical read on what happened was his sacrifice widened the path for every other nominee, and that held up this week. “Look what’s going on across the hallway,” Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin pleaded at the end of floor debate over a bill to make it easier to deport illegal immigrants with domestic violence convictions. The old material of outrage politics is still being churned out every day. But it’s lost potency since Trump’s first term, and it’s not playing the same role in the coming administration as it played in his first one.

DNC fight gets sharper

DETROIT — The crowd of candidates running to lead the Democratic National Committee kept getting bigger. Their zoom-room Q&As with interest groups kept getting longer. The questions weren’t getting any fresher.

But at the first of two in-person public forums hosted by the party, Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party chairman Ken Martin made DNC members a new offer. He could be mean.

“I will take the low road so they can take the high road,” said Martin, explaining what he told candidates back home. “I will throw the punches so they don’t have to.”

Martin proved that on Thursday, taking a few shots at Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler, while rejecting the “academic exercise” of questioning whether President Biden should have run for re-election.

As Republicans prepare to take power next week, Democratic self-reflection has focused mostly on messaging — how to be credible, and how to be heard.

GOP starts moving Trump agenda forward

Republicans are working more closely than ever with Donald Trump to move his agenda forward, as new Senate Majority Leader John Thune stays close to the incoming president. The first week of confirmation hearings for Trump cabinet nominees went as well as the transition team hoped, even as the tougher fights — for Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr — loomed.

“I talk with him fairly regularly on the phone,” Thune told Semafor in an interview this week. “At the same time, as you know, I don’t over-promise. And I like to keep expectations realistic. And I like to be straight with people.”

Senate leaders can’t be cast out on the floor like House speakers, and Thune has more command over his conference than Mike Johnson — who is far more reliant on Trump. But Mitch McConnell was dogged by persistent critics on the right who made his job increasingly difficult, Trump sometimes among them. And some Trump allies were already bracing for Thune to break on a priority that would matter to the new president.

Court battle for control of Minnesota House

Minnesota Republicans claimed control of the state House this week, taking advantage of a Democratic foul-up that forced one member to resign and gave the GOP a single-seat majority.

Democrats, who hold 66 House seats now and expect to regain their 67th after a special election on Jan. 28, boycotted a session this week to deny Republicans a quorum. But the GOP elected a speaker anyway, and Democrats sued, hoping to prevent two outcomes. One: Republicans may avoid a power-sharing agreement, typical when neither party has a majority, and run the House for the next two years. Two: They could use their majority to remove Democratic Rep. Brad Tabke, who won the closest re-election in the chamber, winning by 14 votes after 20 absentee ballots were not counted.

“Republicans have been clear throughout our negotiations that they intend to remove members of our caucus who won their seats in the election,” said Melissa Hortman, the DFL leader in the House, in an interview with Americana. “The Republicans badly want a 68th vote, and they are willing to manufacture reasons to get it.”

The state Supreme Court will take up the case next week, with Republicans arguing that they had a quorum when they organized the House and Democrats saying that without a 68th vote, nothing they’ve done is legitimate.

Just two Dems break ranks on trans sports bill

House Republicans advanced legislation this week to bar transgender athletes from women’s sports, bringing along two Democrats but losing others who’d sounded open to the idea.

The GOP had reached deeper into the Democratic conference with this month’s immigration legislation, quickly breaking opposition to the Laken Riley Act and getting 61 Democratic votes for legislation making it easier to deport illegal immigrants with domestic violence convictions — even though a coalition of women’s rights groups opposed it.

But Democrats largely hung together against the Protect Women’s Sports Act. Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who has defended his call for the party to take the issue seriously — even drawing a primary challenger — said that it was “not the sort of balanced, fairness-oriented policy I’ve advocated for.” In their floor debate, Democrats positioned the GOP bill as one that would protect “child predators,” arguing that the only way to enforce it would require invasions of students’ privacy. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had previewed that argument last month, when Republicans preemptively prevented Delaware Rep. Sarah McBride, the first transgender member of Congress, from using the women’s bathroom.

“When we tell the truth about what Republicans are doing, and when we’re unafraid to do that, it generates momentum,” Ocasio-Cortez told Semafor. “When Democrats aren’t afraid to throw a damn punch, then we can see that we can yield results. I don’t believe that we should cower in the face of tough issues. I think people are looking for strength.”

Greg Casar has a plan for Democrats

Texas Rep. Greg Casar took over the Congressional Progressive Caucus last month and instantly picked a fight. Democrats, said Casar, might have won the election had they governed more like the CPC and less like Joe Manchin. The retiring West Virginia senator hit right back — Casar was “completely insane,” he said — but Casar thought both Manchin and the media had missed his point.

“I don’t mean that someone campaigning in Nebraska or West Virginia should campaign the way that somebody campaigns in Seattle,” Casar said this week in his House office, shortly before all but two Democrats voted against a Republican bill to bar transgender athletes from women’s sports. “I said, we need to have actually passed the housing plan that the Progressive Caucus championed. We need to actually have passed the plan that would have reduced child care costs that the Progressive Caucus championed. If we’d done all that, I think we would have had a much better shot at winning.”

Casar’s goals for his tenure are vast: Defending every incumbent progressive (after several lost last year), building a credible resistance to Donald Trump, and reaching out to voters who get their news from outlets and social networks that are built to help Republicans.

As Donald Trump’s second inauguration approaches and global leaders head to Davos for the World Economic Forum, Mixed Signals asks: what will the media’s role be in an increasingly unstable era? Will it bring more order or disorder to global politics?

Ben and Max invite Ian Bremmer, President of Eurasia Group, to explore how global leaders interact with new media and whether digital media is shaping global politics or vice versa. They also discuss Ian’s run-in with Elon Musk in 2022 and how Donald Trump’s second term could influence media leaders like Zuckerberg and Bezos.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Polls

At the high point of his presidency, shortly before he announced the final withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan, less than 30% of adults told CNN’s pollsters that things in the country were going “well” under Joe Biden. And that was a 7-point improvement over how they felt in Jan. 2021, when he was preparing to take office. That was the polling story of his presidency: A brief burst of optimism, then anger at military deaths during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, then pessimism that never let up, even if Republicans didn’t always benefit from it electorally. Eighty percent of Trump voters attribute his failure to “personal shortcomings,” compared to just 10% of Harris voters. The same share of Harris and Trump voters, 14% of them, blame “circumstances” that the president couldn’t control.

The death of the old media outrage cycle has been incredibly helpful to the Trump transition. The president-elect’s cabinet picks were more loyal, and (from the press’ perspective) controversial than his first ones, eight years ago. But Trump was far less personally popular then. Fifty percent of voters now say they view him favorably, even if some are worried about what he’ll do. Just 42% say he won a “mandate” last year, and just 41% say the result was an endorsement of him more than a rejection of the Democrats, and 65% want him to work with Democrats, not run around them.

When Democrats controlled the Senate, they could prevent any Republican bill that passed the House from reaching the other side of the Capitol. That’s not a problem for John Thune’s new majority. This poll question is about plans in Georgia to ban trans athletes from women’s sports, but Republicans are bringing the same issue to the Senate, after passing their Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. Sen. Jon Ossoff faces his first reelection next year, and will have to vote on it. So will the handful of other Democrats in competitive states won or nearly won by Trump, like Gary Peters in Michigan and Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire.

Ads

• The Heritage Foundation, “Kash Patel is the America First Warrior America Needs.” The think tank that brought you Project 2025 continues to spend money behind the Trump nominees with the wobbliest support from Republicans. This ad, for Trump’s FBI director nominee, sells Patel as a “warrior” whose achievements are better known among conservatives than swing voters, flashing back to investigations of the 2016 election and referring to a “two-tiered system of justice” without explaining who’s assigned to which tier. “You would not know about the FISA abuse if not for Kash Patel,” says former South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy in a Fox News clip, another hint at the conservative audience the ad’s designed for.
• House Majority Forward, “Outbreak.” The House Democrats’ super PAC has an ambitious list of GOP target seats and a very early start on negative messaging. No House Republican will get a vote on Trump’s cabinet nominees, but Democrats think Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine skepticism is unpopular with the voters they won in 2020 and lost in 2024. The message here is identical to what Protect Our Care is saying in Senate swing states, that Kennedy’s culpable for the deaths of unvaccinated children.
• Schimel for Justice, “Mission Statement.” The Republican-backed candidate for Wisconsin’s open supreme court seat beat Democrats to the airwaves, with a spot that stays away from ideology or conservative politics. He talks instead about closing rape cases and “putting pedophiles behind bars,” messaging that both parties use in judicial and attorney general races — Schimel held the latter office for four years. In 2023, when Democrats flipped a seat to gain a majority, their candidate had to fend off attacks that she was soft on criminals.

Scooped!

A few hours before Donald Trump took credit for the ceasefire in Gaza, beating the Biden White House to the microphone, Riley Rogerson and John T. Seward of NOTUS checked back on another Trump peace promise. What did Republicans think now of Trump’s pledge to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict “on day one” — or even earlier, as he told some friendly interviewers during the campaign? They redefined it (“I don’t think the media pressing Day One is specifically ‘Day One’”), they adjusted it (“let’s set it at 100 days”), they sometimes revealed that they hadn’t thought much about it.

Next

• three days until the inauguration
• 291 days until off-year elections
• 655 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

Nearly every conversation I’ve had with Democrats this year has veered into something they can’t fix: The new world of constant media distraction. Whether they think Joe Biden blew it, or whether they think a sterling Biden legacy got lied about on TikTok, they are thinking hard about something they hoped they could ignore. The new book by Chris Hayes, “The Siren’s Call,” is loaded with deep thinking about these problems from the perspective of a progressive who’s watched his own audience shrink, grow, and morph rapidly. It arrives in 11 days and it’s very worth reading.

Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Energy Chris Wright laid out his vision of how to achieve energy “dominance” during his Senate confirmation hearing, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell reports.

Wright’s comments indicated he may represent more of a departure on energy policy from Trump’s first term than from the Biden administration status quo, and he’s among the least controversial of Trump’s picks.