Americana

1. Democrats fret about elderly members
2. Republicans focus on migrant Medicaid cash
3. The Biden age discourse intensifies
4. Pittsburgh’s mayor loses
5. “Iron Stache” runs again

Also: Which Trump policies are buoying his poll numbers.

Republicans in Congress brought Americans a little closer this week, by limiting what states were allowed to do without it. State-by-state experimentation, a popular idea when Democrats ran the government, was out of fashion again.

In the House, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (yes, “bill act”) put a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation, in any state; most of the regulations it would affect were passed in Democratic-led blue states. The president wanted no giveaways to liberals: “Illinois and Gavin ‘Newscum,’ those are the people that want this, and they’re Democrat states,” he said of one potential tax change. States that had created generous welfare and healthcare programs got new restrictions designed to nix benefits for non-citizens, and make them pay more for all of it, with fewer federal funds.

“The bill requires states to have skin in the game on SNAP,” Rep. Erin Houchin, R-Ind., said during the floor debate, referring to nutritional assistance. “The bill requires states to be more responsible about how Medicaid is funded.”

Democrats rolled their eyes at that line. “Enough BS about states having skin in the game!” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. “I would argue my state of Connecticut that sends more money to the federal government than Indiana already has skin in the game,” said Rep. Jahana Hayes.

It was a popular Democratic argument, that red “taker states” were being subsidized by blue “maker states.” Liberal pundits had made this argument for ages, but legislators were usually more cautious, coming up with compromises that distributed benefits to red states and districts.

That’s how the clean energy credits in the IRA were designed, in the hope that it would make them harder for Republicans to scrap; it’s why the annual farm bill blended together aid for farms, which went mostly to GOP strongholds, with SNAP funding, which went mostly to places run by Democrats.

That was then. While Democrats weren’t ideologically opposed to ag spending, Republicans were ideologically opposed to “food stamps,” and the old concord withered.

Just as urban “blue dots” in red states have lost their ability to enact policies that Republicans disagree with, blue states are now losing some of their ability to experiment when those projects clash with national GOP priorities.

That was the story in the Senate, too. For the first time, Republicans used the ability to unwind federal regulations to get rid of a waiver — specifically, the one California got to enact its long-term ban on gas-powered cars. A blue state acted. Republicans in DC opposed it. They then used their power to stop it, embittering Democrats, who are already thinking about the limits they’ll put on red states if they regain power after Trump.

“What about the next Democratic Administration?” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Ca.) said on the floor. “All bets are off.”

Democrats panic about dying electeds

On Wednesday, Virginia’s Gerry Connolly became the third congressional Democrat this year to die in office, making it slightly easier for Republicans to wrangle votes in the House until their seats are filled. The Democrats’ internal argument about aging members, well underway before his death, got even louder.

“It’s one more point on the real danger posed by the system of seniority politics that we have here,” said DNC Vice Chair David Hogg, who has frustrated some Democrats and encouraged others with a PAC that plans to primary some “asleep at the wheel” incumbents. “It’s really sad that this happened, but the feelings of any particular member don’t take precedence over the millions of Americans who are going to be impacted by these bills.”

Connolly announced his esophageal cancer diagnosis days after winning re-election; the other two Democrats who have died since November, Arizona’s Raul Grijalva and Texas’s Sylvester Turner, ran after disclosing their fights with cancer. All were over age 70, and Turner briefly replaced the late Sheila Jackson Lee, who died shortly after disclosing that she had pancreatic cancer.

None of their seats will be filled until after summer, and Democrats will now hold an election to replace the Virginia congressman as ranking member of the House Oversight committee — a job Connolly had won over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who won’t seek it again.

And next month, the DNC will hold a virtual re-vote for vice chair, after a successful challenge to the Feb. 1 election that gave one of the jobs to Hogg.

The GOP’s migrant-focused Medicaid message

As they barreled toward the vote on their tax and spending package, Republicans united behind language that would punish states — most of them run by Democrats — if their state healthcare plans covered non-citizens.

Wary of the political fallout from cutting Medicaid, and searching for savings they can defend to voters, Republicans backed a cut in federal Medicaid payments to states with health plans that cover immigrants who lack legal status. Instead of paying for 90% of expanded Medicaid coverage, the government would pay just 80%. Some states, if hit by the penalty, have “trigger” laws that would require them to drop the expanded coverage altogether.

That idea, along with a plan to add “work requirements” for Medicaid recipients, is projected to eliminate health insurance coverage for millions of people in ways that Republicans are comfortable defending. It comes as some blue-state governors seek to cap the number of noncitizens who can access local health care plans, angering their fellow Democrats.

“One-point-four million illegal immigrants are receiving Medicaid coverage today, which takes away funding from the disabled, senior citizens, and pregnant women,” Rep. Julie Fedorchak, R-ND, said during one of the megabill’s markups this week. On Thursday, the GOP’s campaign committee urged every House candidate and incumbent to say that Democrats “voted to keep 1.4 million illegal immigrants on Medicaid.”

The Biden age debate

Democrats tried to move past questions about Joe Biden’s declining abilities during his presidency this week, while Republicans asked new ones. The release of Original Sin, the Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson inquest into the “politburo” that protected Biden, refueled an argument that had divided his party since the second, more difficult half of his presidency.

The book identified some culprits and did a mea culpa for the media. Tapper, who co-hosted the Biden-Trump debate, told Megyn Kelly that he had “humility” about not being more skeptical of Biden, and had apologized to Lara Trump for saying she’d been unfair to mock his stutter. Elected Democrats, who for at least some of his presidency had defended Biden, were frustrated by the topic and by how they acted.

“He should have been a transitional president, as he said initially he would be,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Tex., the first House Democrat to tell Biden to quit. “The only regret I have is not having moved earlier.”

Republicans wanted more investigations into Biden. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex., who faces a pro-Trump primary challenge from Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton, urged the Department of Justice to probe the Biden White House: “I fear the American people were deliberately misled about President Biden’s health.” Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are looking into the Biden orders and pardons signed by an autopen (a commonly used presidential time-saver), following conservative groups like the Oversight Project, which asked whether the orders could be invalid.

Another progressive mayor goes down

Pittsburgh Democrats rejected Mayor Ed Gainey’s bid for a second term, the latest defeat this year for a black city leader who’d been elected on a post-George Floyd wave of reform and enthusiasm.

Gainey lost narrowly to Allegheny County controller Corey O’Connor, the son of a former mayor who ran as a more pragmatic, effective progressive Democrat. Turnout was higher than it had been four years ago, when Gainey unseated an incumbent to become the city’s first black mayor. He won 26,479 votes that year, and 27,906 on Tuesday; O’Connor won 31,254 votes.

“This has been a wonderful four years,” Gainey said in his concession speech. “We didn’t put a crack in the glass ceiling. We shattered it.”

Progressive groups and unions that helped elect Gainey hoped voters would give his leadership a chance, and look past stumbles like a slapdash search for a permanent police chief and credit him for growth and lower crime. His campaign accused O’Connor of working for “MAGA” donors; both candidates got some help from donors who sometimes backed Republicans, which helped O’Connor neutralize that issue.

There were few ideological stakes in the race — O’Connor was friendlier with developers, and out-raised Gainey — but the mayor’s defeat came one month after St. Louis Democrats ousted Tishaura Jones, and six months after San Francisco elected Daniel Lurie, a wealthy Levi Strauss heir, after a decade of frustration at progressive governance. Activists did notch a win in Philadelphia, where District Attorney Larry Krasner, one of the first “reform prosecutors” elected after the Ferguson protests 11 years ago, clobbered a more conservative primary opponent.

A Resistance 1.0 star runs for Congress again

Eight years ago, Randy Bryce challenged the Speaker of the House, raised more than almost any other candidate for Congress, and lost. The union ironworker, a longtime Democratic activist, gained national attention for an unscripted, uncautious campaign that endorsed Medicare for All and the abolition of ICE. He claimed a sort of victory when then-Speaker Paul Ryan announced his resignation. Once Republicans picked businessman Bryan Steil to replace Ryan, they successfully used Bryce’s old DUI arrests, a late child support payment, and progressive views, against him, holding the seat.

“I think we peaked very early in the last campaign,” Bryce said of his defeat that year. If Republicans hoped to use his personal life and arrest record again, he was confident it wouldn’t work; they would be attacking problems he dealt with “years ago,” except for a fairly recent speeding ticket.

Southeastern Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district is still competitive, though — Trump carried it by just 5 points — and Democrats have put it on their ambitious target list. There’s a chance that the state will be forced, by a court order, to redraw maps, which Republicans see as a threat to Steil. But they’re fairly dismissive about Bryce, who ran behind the ticket in 2018. He jumped on the phone to explain why he thinks a rematch, in this environment, would be winnable, and this is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Polls

Polling on the Republicans’ tax agenda has varied wildly depending on the group and the framing of the questions. The new Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll asked voters if they would favor “cutting social services” to pay for tax cuts, and just 14% of them said yes. Progressive organizers seized on that number and cite it in their anti-One Big Beautiful Bill campaigns. Asked about the tax cuts without tradeoffs, voters are much more positive. Voters want to keep the current tax cuts and add more on. When asked what they’d cut — a separate set of questions here — a majority say “federal employees” and “NASA,” but nothing else. Just 17% say they’d cut Medicaid.

Few pollsters have checked in on Virginia’s elections this year, after they underrated the chance of 2021 Youngkin sweep and overrated Kamala Harris’s strength in 2024. Roanoke College’s methodology, which doesn’t push undecided voters to make a choice, finds a huge Democratic lead and a weak GOP brand in the commonwealth: Gov. Youngkin’s approval underwater for the very first time, a 64% disapproval rating for Donald Trump. A poll for business groups, released the same day as this, found a smaller 4-point lead for Spanberger. Nobody disputes that Democrats enter the primary next month in better shape than four years ago, when Youngkin led a unified GOP ticket and Joe Biden’s approval rating was beginning to slide.

Most New Yorkers are still wary about giving Gov. Kathy Hochul another term next year, even though, for the first time this year, her approval rating is back above 50%. There are signs here that the state’s budget (passed late, as usual) could be helping her, and could help later. Taking ownership of the cell phone restriction in schools, a popular bipartisan idea, clearly helped her; 68% of Republican voters support it, and only 19% of Republicans approve of Hochul. Democrats are still lagging their pre-2020 numbers in the suburbs, and Trump is more popular in those regions than Hochul. But you can see the shape of an agenda for Hochul ’26, with some populist policies to win over non-Democrats and weekly battles with Trump that keep her base together.

Ads

• Ras Baraka for Governor, “Works for Us.” Early voting in New Jersey starts in 11 days, and Newark’s mayor is running his first negative ad, against Rep. Mikie Sherrill. She was implied in an earlier Baraka ad that accused no other Democrats of “fighting Trump,” but there are real accusations here: Her House campaigns got donations from Elon Musk, and she got wealthier while trading stocks. Sherrill had already donated her SpaceX PAC donations to charity (a food bank), and the story cited here about her wealth (in the conservative Washington Free Beacon and Newsmax) added that she had stopped making trades. Sherrill’s campaign called it all sleazy: “If Mayor Baraka believed this garbage, he had 2.5 hours standing next to Mikie at last night’s debate to address it.”
• Cuomo for NYC, “Target.” Less than a day passed between the New York Times revealing a DOJ investigation of Andrew Cuomo, and Cuomo’s mayoral campaign putting it into an ad. “They’re attacking Andrew Cuomo to interfere with New York City’s election,” it says, comparing a probe into whether Cuomo lied to Congress about his conduct during the pandemic to the arrest of Milwaukee judge Hannah Dugan and charging of Rep. LaMonica McIver. A number of politicians have condemned the “weaponized” justice systems and compared their treatment to Trump, urging him to step in for them: Eric Adams, Bob Menendez, Rod Blagojevich. Cuomo cites the investigation as proof that he’s honorable: “If Donald Trump doesn’t want him as mayor, you do.”
• Jay Jones for Virginia, “What It Takes.” Four years ago, Jay Jones challenged Democratic Attorney Gen. Mark Herring in a primary. He lost, and Herring, who was slightly damaged by revealing that he’d done a Jackson 5 sketch in blackface while in college, narrowly lost to now-AG Jason Miyares. Democrats have entirely moved on from the 2019 blackface mess, which started with Gov. Ralph Northam, and Northam stars in this ad for Jones, saying “there’s no one I trust more to stand up to Trump.” Democrats regretted that they had no black candidates on their 2021 ticket; Jones faces a white, female opponent from Richmond, Shannon Taylor, in the primary next month.

Scooped!

Theodore Schleifer has made it into this section before, and he’ll be back. His close look at the Democratic meetings where donors and strategists have sweated their media problem is full of news. You have the new shop “AND Media, which stands for ‘Achieve Narrative Dominance,‘” and “Project Bullhorn, which is meant to pool contributions to back creator projects.” Big payouts are implied, as they are across the creator universe. Some Democrats “argue that the latest pitches on the left are coming from operatives who are hungry to meet donors’ demand for a shiny new object,” which is not really a question by the end of the story.

Next

• 18 days until primaries in New Jersey
• 25 days until primaries in Virginia
• 32 days until primaries in New York City
• 165 days until off-year elections
• 528 days until the 2026 midterm elections

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Amjad Masad, CEO of AI coding startup Replit, said many companies may be mere months away from being able to develop and operate software without an engineering team.

Speaking at a Semafor Tech event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Masad said startups at Y Combinator are vibe coding their products with tools like Replit.

“I don’t think we’re there yet, where they can run the entire company without hiring engineers, but that might be a year, 18 months away,” Masad said.