Americana

1. Democrats’ wait-and-see plan
2. What’s left in Congress
3. North Carolina power grab
4. Dems hedge on Penny verdict
5. Chris Sununu talks DOGE

Also: The latest polling on the Trump transition

The biggest stories in Washington right now are about Donald Trump’s second transition, and his party’s agenda — none of which Democrats can control. They have made peace with that. They are not jumping on every revelation or accusation about Trump’s cabinet nominees, and they reacted with a deep sigh to the planned resignation of FBI Director Chris Wray. That short-circuited an early 2025 fight about whether Trump would blow up the norm of the independent FBI, and the traditional 10-year term given to its director. But talking about norms didn’t get them very far this year, anyway.

This week, they talked more about murder. A tough question for some of the most high-profile progressive Democrats was: What did they think of the organic, rarely kind reaction to the killing of a UnitedHealth executive in New York? What did they make of the fandom that had been built around the suspect, a privileged 26-year-old from Maryland named Luigi Mangione?

“Violence is never the answer, but people can only be pushed so far,” said Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who added that the “visceral response” to the murder from people upset with their own care was a “warning to everyone in the health care system.” She was the least cautious of several progressives who had an “I condemn it, but…” reaction to the story, egged on by activists and social media users who saw the executive, not the gunman, as a villain. Warren later followed up with a statement clarifying that she “should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”

What does it say that some Democrats had a rawer reaction to that story than anything Trump did this week? They were enervated after the election, and still don’t know how the party should oppose a president they believed had discredited himself. They’re unclear on how a billionaire, surrounded by billionaires, has capitalized on populist anger. He did that with a lot of bets that Democrats wouldn’t have made, taking risky positions that got him condemned by all the people who knew better. To get attention, some are taking more risks themselves, some of which they may end up regretting.

Democrats signal they’ll work with Trump — for now

BEVERLY HILLS, Ca. — The anti-Trump resistance was not at the Beverly Hilton this week. At the post-election meeting of the Democratic Governors Association, held in a state where Democrats had just held a special legislative session to “Trump-proof” their constituents, the party was in a wait-and-see mood.

“He is a master of saying something creating a great deal of noise — and then the reality may be different,” said North Carolina Attorney Gen. Josh Stein, whose landslide victory in the race for governor was one of the party’s few November highlights.

As Trump prepares to take office, with a far more loyal set of advisers and staffers than he enjoyed eight years ago, the Democratic response is measured — and strategic. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has highlighted Trump’s most populist campaign trail promises, saying he’s willing to get them done, and implying that Democrats will have something to run on if Republicans balk. Other Democrats are looking straightforwardly at things they could achieve in the minority, just a month and a week after their party warned that a Trump victory could threaten democracy as Americans knew it.

“The fact that we work across the aisle really matters to people,” said Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, who defied a Republican trend to win his state’s open US Senate seat last month, after a campaign where he said he could work with anyone to fund more border security. “If we’re always just raising the alarms and fighting, we’re going to be seen as not being even-handed players.”

Congress wages its final 2024 battles

Congress is winding down its work for the year with fights over President Biden’s final nominees, over what funding should be passed before he leaves office, and Democratic battles over who should lead their minorities on House committees.

Joined by a minority of Democrats, House Republicans passed the National Defense Authorization Act with riders that would prevent military health care from providing gender medicine to minors, a provision that many Democrats ran against. In the Senate, two retiring independents — West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema — joined together to block a final Biden nominee to the National Labor Relations Board, giving Trump the chance to shift the board’s majority next year.

“The only thing they could do is catch me when I’m not there,” Manchin told Semafor, explaining his determination to sink the nominee.

House Democrats were more focused on who would be ranking members on narrowly divided committees next year, with multiple incumbents facing or losing challenges to younger candidates. New York Rep. Jerry Nadler conceded the top role on the House Judiciary committee to Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, telling reporters this week that he was “not-so-voluntarily” moved out. Georgia Rep. David Scott, who has struggled with health issues, has not been endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus for another term as the top Democrat on the Agriculture committee; he also skipped forums with members who want the job. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is challenging Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, who is 74 and was diagnosed with cancer this year, on the House Oversight committee — though Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi supports Connolly, who previously stepped aside for Raskin.

“Having multi-generational leadership in the party sends a strong message that we can really rely on the leadership of seasoned senior leaders, and that we are also a party that cultivates a new generation,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters this week.

North Carolina’s lame duck power grab

North Carolina Republicans are taking power away from the party that defeated them in the final weeks before new Democratic officials are sworn in.

In Raleigh, after Democrats easily won top statewide races and broke the GOP’s gerrymandered legislative supermajority, Republicans used a hurricane relief bill to weaken the incoming attorney general and take control of state election processes. Protecting Republican majorities in state courts will require the governor to replace judges only with nominees picked by legislators. Jeff Jackson, the attorney general-elect who kept up his party’s century-plus streak in that office, will no longer be able to take positions that diverge from the legislature.

Both parties expect this month to finish off the GOP’s supermajority, which it won only after a frustrated Democrat switched parties last year. But Republicans have not conceded a close race for a decisive House seat, or a race for state Supreme Court where the Democratic candidate prevailed by fewer than 1000 votes; the defeated Republican candidate sued to disqualify more than 60,000 ballots, refusing to give up after two recounts and an unfavorable ruling from the current election board.

Sen. Thom Tillis, who faces a potential GOP primary next year, spoke up for the changes after pressure from conservative activists. House Speaker Tim Moore, who will be in the next Congress after drawing himself a safe seat, told Steve Bannon this week that the changes are “critical to making sure North Carolina continues to be able to do what it can to deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket.” Democrats are not pursuing the same tactics in states they control: In Michigan, where they lost their narrow majority last month, the party has passed gun safety measures but left some of its ambitious 2022 agenda undone.

The politics of the Penny verdict

Republicans celebrated a Manhattan jury’s decision to acquit Daniel Penny this week, calling the Marine veteran who held a homeless man in a chokehold after he threatened subway passengers a “hero.” Democrats were much more cautious, with just a handful criticizing the verdict, and fewer raising racism as a factor in Jordan Neely’s death.

“That was a tragedy, and it should not have happened,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters on Wednesday, two days after the verdict. “We’ve got to do a better job of making sure that we have a more compassionate, enlightened response to dealing with the mental health challenges that so many Americans are experiencing.”

Democratic caution marked a significant departure from how the party spoke about other recent, high-profile, criminal cases with white defendants and Black victims. They largely ignored reactions from Rev. Al Sharpton and the remnants of New York’s Black Lives Matter organizations, while Republicans from House Speaker Mike Johnson to Vice President-elect JD Vance said that Penny had acted correctly. On Friday, Vance announced that Penny would be his guest to the Army-Navy football game this weekend.

Q&A: Chris Sununu on the coming DOGE fight

If Senate Republicans had their way, Chris Sununu would be spending a lot of time in DC. The governor of New Hampshire, who is retiring this year, rejected their pleas to run against Sen. Maggie Hassan or Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, leaving Democrats with total control of the swing state’s delegation in Washington.

On a brief trip to the city this week, Sununu had another goal: Building support for massive spending cuts, including entitlement reform, through the Department of Government Efficiency. He was thrilled by the pop-up non-agency Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were running, with a mandate to shrink the government and no hard plans yet. And he talked with Americana about what it should be doing, and why Washington should embrace it.

“I’ve heard the criticism of Elon,” says Chris Sununu. “Oh, he’s just this outside billionaire. Well, I don’t care how successful someone is. Would you be happier if he were poor?”

Polls

The public is more optimistic about a second Trump presidency than it was about the first one. It views this transition more warmly than the one that unfolded after the 2016 election. But Americans are grading on a curve. In previous CNN and Gallup polling, Trump’s first presidential transition was historically unpopular, with a majority of voters disapproving of how he handled it — twice as many as disapproved of George W. Bush’s first transition, when many Americans doubted that he’d been elected fairly. Confidence in Trump’s second transition is held down by Democrats and independents — just 54% of all voters expect him to do a “very” or “fairly good” job, compared to 61% who expected that from Joe Biden four years ago.

The biggest story in political media for the past month has been the Trump cabinet. The coverage, with a few exceptions, has been skeptical and negative. Only some of that has gotten through to Americans, who are paying less attention to political news right now, and have strong views of only a few nominees. Kennedy, whose favorable ratings crashed with Democrats during his 2024 campaigns, has the most overall support thanks to his name recognition from Republicans and independents. Hegseth, who faced the most outspoken skepticism from some GOP senators of any post-Matt Gaetz nominee, has the softest GOP support — just 60% of Republican voters want to confirm him, 20 points behind Kennedy.

It’s been eight years and three months since Salena Zito came up with a phrase to describe why so few Trump voters paid attention to outraged coverage of his rhetoric: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” While Trump and his campaign surrogates got loud applause when they talked about taking revenge on his political opponents, or unfriendly prosecutors, just 21% of Republicans say that he will actually do that. Seventy-seven percent of Democrats say that he will, and independents split on the question, 48-48. That goes some way toward explaining why one of Democrats’ messages throughout the campaign, that Trump was a threat to democratic norms, didn’t move many votes.

Ads

• Building America’s Future, “Fighter.” Elon Musk’s functionally unlimited war chest has been an asset to the Trump transition team — a sword of Damocles, hanging over Republicans who might go wobbly on nominees. This spot, running in nine Republican senators’ states, warns that “the deep state” is trying to beat Hegseth, using b-roll and footage of the DoD nominee to promise that he “will stop at nothing to keep America safe,” so long as senators let him do it.
• FWD.us, “One More Chance.” Progressive advocacy groups are trying to make every day of the Biden lame duck period count, and pressuring the president, on multiple fronts, for clemencies. FWD’s national spot, which went up after the Hunter Biden pardon, doesn’t mention any specific federal prisoner deserving of a pardon. Instead, it highlights Republicans and Democrats who’ve given clemency to thousands of prisoners, with lots of political (and legacy) upside.
• Republican Party of Texas, “Looking Out for Himself.” Over the summer, Texas’ Republican conservative donors and primary voters ousted more than a dozen incumbents — and nearly unseated the speaker of the state House. The speaker gave up his gavel this month, and a more conservative candidate won the GOP conference vote to replace him, beating the more moderate Dustin Burrows. Now, the state party is spending money in Burrows’ district, warning that he behaved like a “child” when he lost, raising awareness of the issue in case Democrats try to ally with Burrows and make him speaker next year.

Scooped!

There are 10,000 stories to write about the Democrats’ agonizing re-think, but the biggest one — how the party lost Latino voters to President Mass Deportation — seemed too big to handle. But not for Rogé Karma: his reporting for The Atlantic on the Latino shift right explains why Democrats kept “conflating the views of the highly educated, progressive Latinos who run and staff these organizations, and who care passionately about immigration-policy reform, with the views of Latino voters, who overwhelmingly do not.” On the record, those highly educated, progressive Latinos dig in deeper: “Most of these other pollsters haven’t published 83 academic articles on polling methodology and don’t have Ph.D.s,” says Matt Barreto, one of the pollsters who convinced the party to embrace less popular, expansionist immigration policies.

Next

• 38 days until Inauguration Day
• 326 days until off-year elections
• 690 days until the 2026 midterm elections

David Recommends

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