Very interesting piece. According to Politico a big reason Rep Andy Ogles, one of the slimiest and terrible members of the GOP House caucus, went down to defeat is that he was targeted with $2 million by a SuperPAC funded by solar industry execs. They didn’t hit him on renewables or environment policy. They used garden variety attacks about Ogles’ missed votes while playing up the conservative credentials of his primary challenger. Of course, climate and environment advocacy have close to no supporters in the contemporary GOP. But Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC is going after the much smaller group which goes out of its way to hurt the renewables industry in any way it can. It’s their third win this cycle.
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A week ago I wrote about a new CNN poll and how it showed Democrats were pretty evenly divided over “left” vs “centrist” politics (should the Ds “move to the left” or “move to the center”) but very united over fight vs accommodation. So focus on the latter and agree to disagree on the former. I also noted however that these terms are wildly over-determined and mostly don’t mean very much. For this specific question, those polling results are still broadly valuable because those are the catchphrases by which a major intra-party debate is identified. So if that’s the language being used and people split roughly down the middle, you know it’s very divisive and no one side is going to beat the other. It’s a standoff, and what you really want going into a critical midterm is unity.
But it’s still important to remember how little these terms actually mean, and to consider the complexities and uncertainties they paper over. I was reminded of this when I saw Axios describing a Reuters poll which Mike Allen said showed that independents are “progressive-curious.” The evidence was that substantial majorities of independents support higher taxes on corporations and billionaires (64%) and government-provided health care for all Americans (60%). But 43% are less likely to vote for a candidate who identifies as “democratic socialist.”
I mentioned this in my morning post today, but one of the weirdest, Trumpiest, vehemently anti-immigrant and scandal-plagued members of Congress lost a primary yesterday. Goodbye Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN). Those seeking to pass legislation denaturalizing Zohran Mamdani or giving Trump a third term will have to find another congressional champion.
I just finished recording an episode of The TPM Social Club with Josh Kovensky. We had an awesome conversation with Jake Bittle about the state of the Colorado River, which unfortunately is vanishing. That episode will drop tomorrow and we hope you’ll check it out.
While we were recording, I noticed a notification from Slack: We had just published a major investigation showing how the Trump administration had repeatedly admitted in court to withholding grant money from blue states simply because they voted blue — a shocking thing to put in writing in a legal dispute. The authors of that story were Emine Yücel and my trusty co-host, Josh — although that doesn’t mean I knew it was imminent.
The New York Times has a piece today with the title “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left.” Specifically it’s about the centrist pressure group Third Way and a plan with a budget of $15 million to, as the group’s president Jonathan Cowan puts it, “prepar[e] for the next war that is coming.” I’ll note that during the first two years of the Biden administration Third Way was notably and consistently supportive of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. It was a sign of the remarkable party unity that allowed Biden to push through a remarkably progressive agenda with a tied senate. I’ll also note that you place an article like this because you want to show the people who gave you the $15 million that you mean business. So talk of “going to war” is sort of what you want to show them.
That said, this is remarkably ill-conceived and a misunderstanding of the current moment.
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