Americana

1. The California crime backlash
2. Eric Adams and the ‘lawfare’ conspiracies
3. What if Adams leaves office?
4. Democrats’ new Senate gambit
5. Jayapal on the left’s Harris era

Also: The popularity contest between JD Vance and Tim Walz

Presidential candidates are just like us: They vote. In Florida, Democrats and abortion rights activists created a problem for Donald Trump by putting an abortion amendment on the ballot. The state’s most famous voter dodged questions about it for months, then finally said he’d oppose it. That teed up Democrats to attack him over the state’s six-week state abortion ban, which will remain law if the amendment fails — but which Trump attacked when Ron DeSantis signed it. Kamala Harris isn’t facing anything so messy, but in California, her ballot will include a high-profile rollback of a 10-year-old criminal justice reform package. She hasn’t said what she’ll do about it, and there’s a story there.

Kamala Harris stays quiet on California crime measure

Gavin Newsom’s against it. Some Democrats in tight races are for it. And nobody’s sure what Kamala Harris thinks about it. On Nov. 5, Californians will get a chance to pass Proposition 36, a measure that would roll back some of the criminal justice reforms passed by voters 10 years ago — popular at first, then widely and conveniently blamed for a post-COVID spike in crime. Last week, a respected statewide pollster found Harris easily winning her home state, but clocked a 45-point lead for the ballot measure. “I wondered which state I was living in,” Newsom said at a press conference when asked about the PPIC poll results. “It’s about mass incarceration… the impact it’s going to have on the Black and brown community is next level.”

Harris never supported Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot measure that voters might partially undo. Donald Trump has falsely claimed that she did; Harris, as attorney general, presided over the crafting of ballot measure language, and stayed neutral on the propositions themselves. But to the surprise of some Republicans, who’ve watched Harris reel back some of her progressive positions since becoming the nominee, the most prominent California politician in America is staying out of a high-profile election.

Eric Adams’ unlikely defenders

New York City Mayor Eric Adams pleaded not guilty to federal corruption charges today, after multiple FBI probes into the financing of his 2021 campaign and gifts he allegedly accepted from Turkish operatives. Adams immediately rejected bipartisan calls for his resignation, suggesting that he had been targeted unfairly, as he stood up for his city.

“We expected this,” Adams said at a Wednesday press conference as the federal indictment was unsealed. “This is not surprising to us at all, the actions that have unfolded over the last 10 months. The leaks, the commentary, the demonizing.”

New York Republicans quickly linked Adams to the rest of the Democratic Party in the hopes of dragging their opponents down with a pay-for-play scandal. But among some conservative pundits — and with Trump himself, who has a history of embracing indicted Democrats — Adams had some early success linking his legal trouble to the idea that “lawfare” is being carried out against Biden’s enemies. In this case, voices on the right cited Adams’ soured relationship with the White House over his public complaints about migrants being bused into his city.

“I said: You know what? He’ll be indicted within a year. And I was exactly right,” Trump told reporters during a Thursday press conference at Trump Tower. “We have people who use the Justice Department and FBI at levels that have never been seen before. So I wish him luck.”

Progressive Democrats, who never supported Adams, lambasted the mayor for suggesting that the charges — the details of which dated back to long before his time in Gracie Mansion — had something to do with his politics.

“Lobbing an accusation that this is somehow a politically motivated indictment is conspiratorial,” congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told NY1 on Thursday. “It’s something out of Donald Trump’s playbook.”

New York braces for a potential mayoral opening

Eric Adams’s troubles forced a new question into New York politics: What would happen if he goes? No New York City mayor has been indicted before, and no elected mayor has resigned since 1950, when the rules and line of succession were very different. Nothing compels Adams to quit while he fights the charges, though there are two options for removing him.

One: Gov. Kathy Hochul could remove Adams, because the city charter empowers the governor to fire any mayor charged with a crime. Two: He could lose a removal vote taken by members of an “inability committee,” composed of the city’s corporation counsel, comptroller, council speaker, a deputy mayor, and the longest serving borough president; currently Queens Borough President Donovan Richards. Comptroller Brad Lander was already running against Adams before the indictment, but there was no movement by Friday on the committee option.

If Adams goes, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams would serve as acting mayor until a special election. Williams, a progressive who’s been stymied in runs for higher office, has little in common with Adams; the mayor’s a former cop, and the public advocate led protests against police funding in 2020. A special election would be open to all registered voters, using the ranked-choice voting system first implemented four years ago. That would allow Republicans, who have not won the mayor’s office since 2009, to play a role in replacing Adams.

The mayor, who was deeply unpopular even before the indictment, had already drawn half a dozen challengers, most running to his left. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has talked for months about running for mayor, led the field in a December 2023 poll of a potential special election, but only narrowly.

Democrats make a play for Texas and Florida

Senate Democrats announced new investments in Texas and Florida this week, hoping to expand their target map after Montana Sen. Jon Tester and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown slipped in public polls. “All cycle long the DSCC has been preparing to take advantage of Sens. [Ted] Cruz and [Rick] Scott’s damaged standings in their states,” said Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, in a Thursday statement.

Cruz and Scott, who won their last races by the slimmest margins of their careers, have remained narrowly ahead of challengers Colin Allred and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, and outspent them all year. Republicans have focused elsewhere, and both senators have crossed with Sen. Mitch McConnell — Scott challenged him for leader in 2022. The Senate Leadership Fund and One Nation, the McConnell PACs that have poured money into close races, have ignored Texas and Florida; Stephen Law, the CEO of both PACs, told The Hill that “If it gets tough, we’ll be there for them.”

In an interview with Semafor, McConnell was skeptical that it would come to that, calling the DSCC’s move a “waste of money” as the GOP’s takeover chances improved. (Democrats have conceded Joe Manchin’s seat in West Virginia, and a victory in Montana or Ohio would give the GOP control of the chamber.) “I don’t think they have a chance in either Texas or Florida,” McConnell said.

Q&A: Pramila Jayapal on progressivism in the Harris era

Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal led the Congressional Progressive Caucus through a frustrating year. House Republicans killed any hope they had of passing legislation; donors who wanted to beat progressive candidates spent more money than ever to do it. In May, Jayapal’s sister Susheela lost a primary for Portland, Ore.’s House seat after AIPAC allies funded ads against her, blaming her for the post-COVID crime surge. And Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has abandoned multiple progressive ideas from her 2020 primary bid.

Nevertheless, Jayapal has thrown herself into electing Harris and a new House Democratic majority. She’s raised more than $400,000 for Harris through her email list, given nearly $200,000 to front-line (swing seat) candidates, and used her own campaign infrastructure (her Seattle district is safely blue) to phone bank for competitive races. And she’s been campaigning across the country, in person, while pitching wary progressives on Harris’ virtues.

“I think she has done a remarkable job,” Jayapal told Semafor this week. “Despite some areas where I might want something different, she’s been making this about middle class families, about lifting everybody up, about energizing people to see themselves both in her and Tim Walz.”

Polls

Since he was added to the GOP ticket, Vance has consistently polled worse than Trump; since Walz joined the Democratic ticket, he’s polled far better than Vance. No other poll has found a discrepancy this wide, but the cross-tabs explain what’s happening: Trump has made some inroads with non-traditional Republican voters who aren’t interested in Vance. He runs 13 points worse than Trump with Hispanic voters and 6 points worse with Black voters. Vance heads into Tuesday’s debate as the heavy underdog in public image, even though both parties have been impressed with how he carries himself in those formats.

Democrats are trying to expand their Senate targets right now, but they aren’t very worried about protecting a left flank in Maryland. Their theory of this race, six months ago, was that Hogan ended his two terms as governor with high approval ratings that wouldn’t stand up in a federal election, and that any Democratic nominee would rise as they got better known. Tens of millions of dollars in ads later, most of them from Hogan and allies, the theory is bearing out. Alsobrooks’ +28 favorable rating is now comparable to Hogan’s, at +26 — and that’s Hogan’s worst favorable rating since he won the governor’s mansion in 2014. Despite Hogan’s promise not to support new abortion limits, Alsobrooks leads him by 29 points on that issue. Polling also underrated Hogan in his 2014 race, and internal GOP numbers are better for him, but he has never run in an electorate this big. In 2018, he won a landslide re-election with fewer than 1.3 million votes; in 2020, 3 million Marylanders cast ballots.

Polling over the last week has found Trump running better in Arizona than in any sunbelt swing state, while his handpicked Senate candidate continues to trail there. The simple explanation here: Voters like Trump and are nostalgic for his presidency in Arizona, while they don’t like Kari Lake, who lost the 2022 race for governor and still hasn’t conceded it. Harris and Lake have the same unfavorable rating of 53%, and Harris leads with Latino voters by just 12 points, half of the winning Biden margin in 2020. Gallego, who has led Lake all year, leads with that part of the electorate by 25 points.

Ads

• NRCC and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, “Safer Oregon.” Democrats helped Rep. Janelle Bynum win a swing seat primary because they worried that a left-wing candidate would blow it. Republicans only slightly tweaked their strategy: This ad links Bynum to the criminal justice and drug reform policies supported by ex-Gov. Kate Brown, warning that she joined Democrats to “let violent criminals out of jail.”
• NRCC, “The Only One.” Last year, most House Democrats and all but one Republican voted for the HALT Fentanyl Act, permanently raising penalties for possession or trafficking of the drug. Connecticut Rep. Jahana Hayes, like most non-white and urban district Democrats, opposed it over worries about racial sentencing disparities. Here, the “no” vote is enough to link Hayes to the “epidemic” of overdoses: “How many have to die?” appears on-screen as Hayes laughs and smiles.
• Senate Leadership Fund, “Detained.” The story of Juan Ramon-Vasquez made headlines in Philadelphia for two years — an illegal immigrant from Honduras who got out of jail after the city didn’t cooperate with ICE, then went on to commit brutal rapes. In 2019, the city’s Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, who’d later run for governor, blamed Philadelphia’s “sanctuary city policies.” This spot against Sen. Bob Casey quotes that statement and assigns blame to the senator, who hasn’t supported the sanctuary city restrictions Republicans keep introducing in the Senate.

Scooped!

This already got a mention at the top of the newsletter, but Alex Thompson’s stories about what Harris has and hasn’t stuck with — irritating though they may be to Democrats — are putting together a clear narrative about how her party changed. The most recent example: Harris declining to weigh in on the death penalty. It made very little news when Democrats erased their opposition to the death penalty in the 2024 platform, looking to get ahead of a more crime-focused cycle. But the party’s decision represented a dramatic shift for Harris, who nearly lost her 2010 attorney general race over her refusal to seek the death penalty as district attorney — which she tempered with a pledge to enforce the law as applicable in state cases.

Next

• four days until the CBS News vice presidential debate
• 39 days until the 2024 presidential election
• 81 days until the Electoral College votes

David recommends

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