Congress

Will Michael Bennet Shift his Fight Against Trump to the State House?

Published

1 year ago

March 29, 2025

Michael Bennet seemed destined for a lifetime appointment to the Senate.

He was tapped for a vacancy in 2009, the same moment Colorado was turning perpetually blue. The Democratic son of the former staff director of the Senate Budget Committee and grandson of another political hand, Bennet brought lineage, his own impressive resume and, most significant of all, a thoughtful, affable and moderate sensibility to a chamber that once rewarded all three qualities.

Yet after accumulating 16 years, and well-positioned for another decade-plus of service having just turned 60, Bennet is poised to walk away from seniority, the Senate and Washington, the city where he was raised.

He’s frustrated with Congress, yes, but also Joe Biden’s selfishness, what Donald Trump has done to both parties and the corrosive impact of social media on politics, the media and even the once-presumed idea of shared facts.

Bennet is almost certain to run for governor in his adopted state next year, according to multiple Democrats in Washington and Denver.

In an hour-long interview this week, Bennet made little attempt to hide his intentions, telling me he’ll reveal his plans in early April.

“The central fight is whether or not we can create an economy where people feel like when they work hard they get ahead,” he said. “And I think the answer to that over the next decade is as likely to come from the states as it is from Washington.”

Reminded about his father’s staff tenure — stints with a pair of Cold War senators in addition to his committee post — the senator noted that Douglas Bennet Jr. also eventually left the Senate to run USAID and eventually NPR and Wesleyan University.

“I wish he were still alive, because I wish I could ask him his advice,” Bennet said. “And I think what he would tell me is, notwithstanding the fact that he worked here and he loved this place, he also moved on to do other things. And he might say, take what you’ve learned and find a place to be as effective as you can be.”

That Michael Farrand Bennet is no longer sure the Senate is a place to be effective is as harsh an indictment I can recall of what was once unironically called the world’s greatest deliberative body.

He’s not the only lawmaker headed for the exits. Already this year, before the first quarter even ended, Democratic Sens. Gary Peters, Tina Smith and Jeanne Shaheen announced they wouldn’t run again.

Some of this owes to simply hitting retirement age or dreading a prolonged life in the minority. But when taken together with all the lawmakers in both parties who’ve walked away since Donald Trump’s first election, it’s undeniable that what was once a political pinnacle has become a place for some that’s just not worth the hassle.

After all, the Senate was usually what governors graduated to, even if they preferred their old jobs, not an office one left for the statehouse. Look no further than the trajectory of Bennet’s colleague and former boss: Senator, and former governor, John Hickenlooper. War and peace, treaties and the Supreme Court, affairs of state, were determined in the nation’s capital. Prisons, roads and schools were left to the states.

What makes Bennet’s frustrations so meaningful, and illuminating, however, is that they go far beyond the usual bill of particulars. Sure, he’s exasperated with — and has even compiled research about! — the trend toward the consolidation of power and the diminution of the committee barons he met when he arrived in the Senate in the last years of the World War II generation.

“The duties of the senators have been sucked up basically into the leadership of the Senate,” he said, adding that “the decision-making among the four corners in the Congress has in some sense dispossessed the other actors.”

Bennet dodged questions about whether Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer should continue to lead the caucus, but was candid about the leadership void.

“I think we need a strategy, and I think we need a plan, and we need a message,” he said, adding: “And if current leadership can’t figure out how to do that, then the caucus will figure out how to do that.”

Is the current message entirely: Trump is bad?

“I think the current message is basically, yeah, Trump’s bad.”

Bennet’s obvious misery of serving in Trump-era Washington is in some ways more notable than his unhappiness with Schumer. And this gets at something that isn’t sufficiently appreciated. The departures, some voluntary and others less so, of anti-Trump Republicans have been well-documented.

But Trump has also made Congress a lot less appealing for serious-minded Democrats who want to legislate and suddenly find most of their GOP counterparts are barely coping, living a lie or in thrall to a personality cult.

“That has been a big change, that’s a big difference,” said Bennet, citing the departures of John McCain, Jeff Flake, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker. “There are people here, but it’s also true across the country, for whom Trump’s approach to politics has become normalized.”

More to the point, he said: “I’d be lying, if I said — It’s tough when you got everybody on the other side voting for Pete Hegseth to be the secretary of defense.”

Put another way, there’s simply not going to be a robust debate over, say, the refundability of the Child Tax Credit, a Bennet priority, when every day revolves around what Trump or his administration just said or did.

He calls it “shirts and skins,” tribal politics, and he deplores the culture. But this is where I should note, clearly, what Bennet emphasized: that he’s eager to remain in the fray.

He wants to confront Trumpism, he said. And, for a 60-year-old, he is unusually conscious of his own mortality, a trait he may have because of his father’s passing at 79, his mother’s youthful escape from the Holocaust and his own treatment for prostate cancer.

I had suggested to Bennet that his own potential early exit from the Senate along with his brother James’s unhappy departure from the New York Times both had a tragic quality. Here were enormously talented siblings who would’ve flourished in an earlier, more consensus-oriented era.

“I don’t feel like I was born too late,” the senator said, after citing all the policy goals he’s still eager to enact on the economy, healthcare, education and sustaining the American dream. “I think that my expectations about where we would be and the progress that we have made turn out not to have been fulfilled. And I am becoming incredibly impatient with the notion that I could die before seeing this to-do list addressed.”

That impatience has intensified since Trump’s second election, an event that I told Bennet seemed to jar him. “It definitely did,” he acknowledged, “it definitely did.”

Which triggers his deep discontent with his own party.

Bennet has long been frustrated with Washington — he wrote a 2019 book lacerating “the pathological culture of the capital” — but Trump’s return seemed to mark a personal pivot point.

“I can’t say that I was surprised, but I find it shocking that the Democratic Party lost to Donald Trump twice, once after he took away a woman’s right to choose, you know, and with all of the convictions and everything else,” he said. “And you know what? I hate to say this, there are many things that I blame Donald Trump for but getting elected is not one of them.”

For that he blames Biden. Bennet himself barely left a mark when he ran for president in 2020 and he acknowledged Biden may have been the only Democrat who could have defeated Trump that year.

However, the Coloradoan was one of the first Senate Democrats to say publicly what was obvious to all of them: that Biden couldn’t win the election after his disastrous debate. And Bennet was one of the loudest critics of Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter, on the way out of office.

His irritation doesn’t seem to have receded.

“What I would say to the American people who are frustrated that the Democratic Party has not fought hard enough to provide a compelling alternative to Donald Trump, a big piece of that was the decision that Joe Biden made to run for re-election,” said Bennet.

“The Democratic Party,” he continued, “didn’t show up as a fighting force during the Biden administration.”

But Bennet conceded that, no, he never privately urged Biden or the former president’s top aides to not run again in the first place. “I wish I had,” he said. “I wish we all had.”

Recalling a caucus meeting after the now-infamous debate, Bennet recounted telling his colleagues that “if we elect Donald Trump president, we will be the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunity, not more, for the people coming after us.”

That’s what plainly eats at Bennet. It’s not just Biden’s vanity, and the failure of the rest of the party to intervene well before last summer, but the deeper failures of Democrats and the potential implications of those failures.

Though much closer to the center than his party’s progressives, Bennet reflects the widened policy aperture of this moment and pans Democrats’ timidity from both the left and the right.

“When I think about this last election, was it important for us to make sure that we were extending the Obamacare tax credits for health care?” he asks. “Of course it was. But shouldn’t we be standing for universal health care in this country? Shouldn’t we be standing for universal mental health care, especially for our kids who have been so incredibly affected by Covid and by social media?”

Yet on education, an area of personal expertise dating to his time running Denver’s public schools, Bennet said his party needs to be bolder.

“We have to recognize that our system of public education has to be dragged from the 19th century to the 21st century, what are our ideas for that?” he said, all but rolling his eyes as he recalled that much of what Democrats say about the topic begins and ends with “forgiving student loan debt.”

And it wasn’t just 2024.

“The Democratic Party failed to make a compelling case in really a generation worth of elections,” Bennet argued.

He recognizes, however, that the great challenges of the present are less tactical than structural.

He’s no nostalgist — “I don’t mourn the analog world,” Bennet said — but he said “our tribal instincts have been concretized by the medium of the internet.” And it’s digital technology that must resolve that problem so that Americans can “have a shared understanding of the facts.”

Perhaps because of his brother — who was hounded out of his job as the Times’ editorial page editor by liberals angered over an op-ed written by conservative Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton — or perhaps just because he’s a reader, Bennet returned repeatedly to what social media and its attendant algorithms had done to sow division and make folly of the Moynihan maxim that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.

“We have had many reactionary periods in American history,” he said. “Those have always been followed by a progressive period. Always, always. The only difference right now, between our lives and those lives, is we destroyed our journalism in America.”

The ”old political order has collapsed,” said Bennet and “the journalistic order has collapsed with it.”

But what remains, he emphasized, is his appetite for building what comes next.

“Whatever I do is not going to signify a retreat from anything,” Bennet said. “What I’m trying to figure out is where the fight can best be joined.”

Denver’s golden dome awaits.

Congress

Turek leads Hinson in Iowa Senate poll of likely general election voters

Published

1 hour ago

June 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Iowa Democratic Senate nominee Josh Turek has a narrow lead over GOP rival Ashley Hinson in a new internal poll of likely general-election voters.

Turek leads Hinson 47 percent to 45 percent in the poll, conducted by Global Strategy Group from June 8-11 among 1,000 likely general election voters. The poll shows that Republicans have a 10-point edge in voter registration (42 percent to 32 percent) and an electorate that voted for Trump by 9 points (50 percent for Trump to 41 percent for Kamala Harris).

But the polling also shows President Donald Trump’s favorabilities underwater across the electorate, with 45 percent favorable and 52 percent unfavorable. Among registered independents, Trump is upside down 28 points.

Turek is “significantly outperforming the state’s underlying partisan dynamics,” Global Strategy Group’s Matt Canter & Ramzi Ebbini write in a memo first obtained by Blue Light News. “Republicans maintain substantial advantages in voter registration and party identification, yet Turek enters the general election ahead of Republican Ashley Hinson, with stronger personal favorability ratings, overperforming a generic Democrat, and with clear opportunities to expand his coalition as more voters become familiar with him.”

Some Republicans have acknowledged a concern about Iowa.

“There are some issues there that we got to deal with — the biggest one is trade — trade and tariffs,” said a Republican close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the obstacles.

In his early general election messaging, Turek has leaned into farmers’ frustrations.

“Josh Turek is winning this race because Iowans are sick and tired of multi-millionaire politicians like Ashley Hinson who sell out working families while they get rich,” Turek for Iowa campaign manager Brendan Koch said in a statement first shared with Blue Light News. “We will spend the next 134 days connecting with Iowans in every corner of the state and across the political spectrum to send a fighter for the working class to the U.S. Senate.”

Congress

Capitol agenda: House GOP races to make Recon 3.0 real

Published

2 hours ago

June 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Republicans have eight days to prove Reconciliation 3.0 might actually happen.

The House returns Tuesday with only eight legislative days before they break again for the July 4 holiday. If members want a realistic chance at fulfilling their self-imposed timeline for advancing the legislation before the end of July — when they pause work again for another five weeks — they need to move fast.

That means assembling, and then adopting, a budget resolution — the first step in unlocking the filibuster skirting power of the reconciliation process. It took Republicans months to advance such a blueprint during their two earlier reconciliation efforts this Congress.

House GOP leaders are tentatively planning another senior-level reconciliation meeting for Wednesday, according to three people involved in the talks granted anonymity to discuss private plans.

Still, the House is coming back with several other moving items to deal with this week, including promised briefings on the president’s Iran deal and a major housing affordability package GOP leadership wants to clear as soon as Wednesday.

Reconciliation talks also come as President Donald Trump is expected to join the Senate’s GOP lunch Wednesday, where he’ll likely continue pushing the chamber to pass his SAVE America Act or attach pieces of the GOP elections bill to the party-line legislation (an idea one of the bill’s biggest backers, Sen. Mike Lee, spiked Sunday).

Republicans involved with Reconciliation 3.0 discussions also warn they need to reach a final agreement on how to pay for the bill as well as what policy items will be included before GOP leaders can try to advance any budget resolution.

At this point, however, many fiscal hawks and at-risk incumbents are largely unhappy about how the discussions are coming along.

“It’s fake pay-fors for defense spending no one has fully agreed to and no meaningful reforms,” said one House Republican granted anonymity to discuss private talks.

Back on the other side of the Capitol, GOP senators have been in no rush to start working on a third party-line bill, especially as they are consumed with other political fires — like trying to confirm Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence to speed up a FISA reauthorization (more on that below).

Rep. Morgan Griffith said he was confident if the right policies are included in the House plan the Senate would then take it up — although he, too, acknowledged the challenges of a short timeline.

“If we do it right, yeah,” Griffith said. “There’s some interesting things out there that are being discussed that could make it a real possibility.”

What else we’re watching:

— OBAMA’S FEROCIOUS IRAN CRITIC SOFTER ON TRUMP DEAL: Tom Cotton, the No. 3 Senate Republican and chair of the chamber’s Intelligence panel, is not alone among GOP defense hawks in finding himself in an awkward position trying to defend Trump’s Iran deal after lambasting President Barack Obama’s a decade before. But the combination of his prior ferocity toward the Iranian regime and his current leadership responsibilities have put him into an especially tight spot.

— FIRST IN IC: DEMS WANT MORE OF JACK SMITH’S REPORT: Senate Judiciary Democrats are asking a federal court to unseal part of former special counsel Jack Smith’s report about his investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents after his first term. The request from the Senators comes as the Judiciary Committee is poised to call Smith to testify about his Biden-era cases before the end of this Congress. Republicans in the House and Senate have been investigating Smith’s work, alleging it amounted to a weaponization of the federal government against the then ex-president.

Jordain Carney and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.

Congress

A rising populist tide is threatening New York’s powerful incumbents

Published

4 hours ago

June 22, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

NEW YORK — Incumbents beware: The public is angry.

As voters across the country express frustration with the political establishment, congressional hopefuls are seeing a prime opportunity to tap into a movement with the potential to manifest a handful of upsets in New York’s primary elections.

The dynamic is playing out in intraparty electoral brawls across the state, where the outcomes will shape the political future for Democrats and Republicans alike.

In upper Manhattan and the Bronx, Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat is trying to fend off a stiff challenge from community organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, who’s running with the backing of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a democratic socialist who channeled populist fervor in his successful bid last year.

Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, Rep. Nydia Velazquez’s preferred successor, is squaring off against first-term Assemblymember Claire Valdez, another hopeful backed by Mamdani. Like the mayor, both Valdez and Avila Chevalier are members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

And in the upstate New York fight to replace GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik, Republican Assemblymember Robert Smullen — running with the backing of the state party — is locked in a caustic battle with Anthony Constantino, President Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate.

Candidates with scant political experience are channeling the public’s exasperated mood with the expectation that restive voters will reward them. Populist anger over rising prices and Washington leadership have provided an opening to outsiders promising a new path. And this combination has created one of the most perilous political environments for incumbents since Trump’s first presidential victory a decade ago stoked an anti-establishment fire that’s burning brighter than ever.

“If you’re perceived as being part of the status quo, then you’ve got a problem,” said Republican pollster John McLaughlin. “Regardless of which party, if you’re perceived as bringing about change you’ll win. If you’re inside the beltway you’re not talking to normal people.”

New York’s closed party primary battles are a window into the broader challenges facing incumbents across the country at a time of sustained grievance over affordability and hardening partisanship. At the same time, voters are increasingly willing to be unfazed by a candidate’s baggage — be it Graham Platner in Maine or Avila Chevalier’s tweets criticizing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It paints a picture of an electorate that’s willing to embrace flawed candidates, reject a political establishment they believe has failed to deliver on their promises and eager to send a message to their perceived enemies.

“We’re in a negative partisan environment and one of the most negative partisan environments we’ve ever witnessed,” Democratic former Rep. Steve Israel said. “People will overlook blemishes in their party in order to meet the existential goal of beating the other party. That creates openings for outsiders to come in with tattoos and old social media posts.”

The mood is reflected in the polling. A statewide Siena University survey released last month found a plurality of voters, 48 percent, believe New York is heading in the wrong direction. A sizable majority — 65 percent — said the country is on the wrong track.

Cost-of-living concerns, which enabled Trump’s White House return two years ago, continue to be a major factor in global elections. In the UK, affordability woes over housing and utility rates have put the ruling Labour Party on its backfoot and threaten to short-circuit Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s tenure.

Rising gas prices in the U.S. following Trump’s decision to launch a war against Iran have kept inflation stubbornly high, teeing up what’s expected to be a difficult GOP midterm. And while Democrats are feeling bullish about their prospects this November, they’re still dealing with their own, often vast, intraparty differences of opinion.

That’s especially apparent in New York, where both the leaders of the House and Senate could be situated if the Democrats have blowout wins this year. But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — both from Brooklyn — are not necessarily being welcomed with open arms. Some leading congressional candidates have declined to commit to supporting Jeffries as speaker if Democrats take back the House, yet another sign of hopefuls attempting to ride an anti-incumbent — and anti-establishment — sentiment.

At a debate earlier this month, the question of backing Jeffries as speaker revealed a stark contrast between Valdez and Reynoso: the former said she’s not committed to voting yes or no, while Reynoso said he would because if one doesn’t, you “become a pariah in Congress” and “won’t get any resources” into the district.

Schumer is on even shakier ground. In debates over recent weeks, when asked if they’re in favor of the 75-year-old running for reelection in 2028, many candidates in competitive races said outright that they’re not, or dodge the question. The Siena University poll released in May found Schumer’s favorable rating with New York voters statewide at only 33 percent. A majority of voters, 52 percent, hold an unfavorable view of the longtime senator — including 40 percent of Democrats.

Former city Comptroller Brad Lander, who’s waging a formidable challenge against Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman, often argues that his campaign is to enact “bold new leadership” (despite a long career in city politics). In response to a question about Schumer running for reelection, he said, “It’s time for a new leadership in the Democratic Party.” Goldman, for his part, said: “We’ll deal with that when the time comes.”

Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the city chapter of the DSA, said that “a key factor is seeing the failures of the Democratic Party to stop Donald Trump two elections now.” In previous cycles, he added, it felt like “a lot of people were not in the fight.”

“The national political situation has changed that for so many people, and that’s what created this hunger,” Gordillo said.

Voters’ willingness to buck incumbents has been long-simmering — and reached a boiling point in last year’s mayoral election after Mamdani, then a member of the Assembly, ran as an outsider to topple both embattled then-Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

“Coming off of a year when so many Democratic voters felt so cynical and disaffected by the Democratic Party, there were glimmers of hope in New York when someone like Zohran was elevated, to show, ‘Okay, we can transform this party by transforming leadership,’” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, the progressive group that helped boost the Squad. “Our job is to take that momentum from Zohran’s victory and show voters you don’t have to stop here.”

The group is backing Valdez and recruited Avila Chevalier, who seemed like a gamble just weeks ago as the race was still flying under the radar. And while that campaign is still expected to be a tough battle, the suddenly high-profile nature of the race — sparked by Mamdani’s endorsement of Avila Chevalier and millions of dollars in spending from pro-Espaillat entities — is evidence that it was at least worth a shot for Justice Democrats, which had a brutal 2024 cycle when Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri were both defeated in primaries.

The power of incumbency has for years made knocking out officeholders an uphill battle. And for retiring incumbents, that power would almost guarantee their hand-picked successor would follow them. But even that’s not enough this cycle, as evidenced in the crowded primary for outgoing Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler’s seat, which has been anything but a glide path for his heir apparent, state Assemblymember Micah Lasher. His opponents have sought to frame themselves as “outsiders” — even if many of them do have political ties — from fellow Assemblymember Alex Bores’ assertion that he’s a victim of Big Tech’s ire to Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg’s argument that he’s not beholden to any super PACs.

Still, some contend that experience is needed in this political climate. A super PAC backing Reynoso recently put out advertisements positioning him as someone “ready to fight back” — compared to Valdez, who has “barely a year in office.” Goldman has repeatedly made the argument that his seniority in Congress is too much to give up, arguing that Lander would be a “rookie” on Blue Light News, where legislating is more difficult given the partisan divides. And in a recent debate, Espaillat charged that Avila Chevalier “doesn’t know legislation.”

”This is a critical time in America,” Espaillat said. ”We need a fighter, somebody that really knows government.”

In New York and across the country, the playing field has been leveled significantly between incumbents and political newcomers — thanks in large part to social media turbocharging fundraising and widespread voter dissatisfaction.

Further complicating matters is partisan redistricting creating fewer swing seats, but increasingly deep blue or ruby red districts where the more competitive race is often the primary.

“You just have to care about not pissing off Trump if you’re a Republican,” former GOP Rep. John Katko said. “If you’re a Democrat you have to worry about not upsetting the far left. The cards are so stacked because of gerrymandering.”