Politics
The far left hits a wall
After hot DSA summer comes the fall.
Democratic socialist Francesca Hong’s stunning loss in Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary Tuesday night revealed limits to the far left’s power — and is undercutting the narrative of an emerging insurgency.
While progressive Peggy Flanagan cruised by 20 points in Minnesota’s Senate primary, and last week the further left Abdul El-Sayed squeaked through his Senate race in Michigan, Hong, the furthest left of the three, received no major national support and fell short.
For a movement that had been riding high off a string of primary victories this cycle, including the Democratic Socialists of America’s recent wins in New York and Colorado, the deflating Wisconsin result led to an immediate round of finger-pointing on the far left. Some dyed-in-the-wool democratic socialists blamed fellow travelers who didn’t join the effort to boost Hong. More institutional-leaning progressives argued that she was a fatally flawed candidate with a long string of gaffes — and that her loss shouldn’t be read as a referendum on the broader movement.
“She got clobbered by the national media, didn’t respond as deftly as Abdul and didn’t have time to build a counter-narrative,” said Cenk Uygur, the Young Turks founder and Justice Democrats co-founder. “The negative publicity of the last two weeks seems to have taken its toll.”
Some mainline progressives sought to distinguish far-left democratic socialism from a broader movement, citing examples such as Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis), a progressive who has won statewide by focusing on kitchen table issues, health care and the state’s agricultural economy — all while refraining from the so-called woke battles.
“I wouldn’t equate progressive and DSA,” said one Wisconsin Democratic operative, granted anonymity to speak candidly. The person added of a democratic socialist’s outlook in Wisconsin ahead of 2028: “I do think there is a ceiling at this point.”
Baldwin, notably, did not endorse in the primary — nor did other top Wisconsin progressives including Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), a former co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus.
The movement’s leading national voices, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), also kept Hong at arm’s length and withheld their endorsements. Some who viewed Hong as a long shot in the general election and want the movement to avoid missteps like they saw with Graham Platner in Maine say the results proved those concerns were well founded.
“Bernie, AOC, and most national groups stayed out,” said a progressive Democratic strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Abdul El-Sayed was a great foot forward, Graham Platner was not, and we didn’t need our political reputation hanging on this race.”
“There’s a reason the institutional left mostly stayed away,” said a Democratic operative who works on progressive campaigns, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “The people who made those calls are relieved.”
Hong’s surprise flop drew attention on the left away from their biggest win of the night, where the Sanders-backed Flanagan — a solid progressive but not a democratic socialist — easily defeated moderate Rep. Angie Craig in the Minnesota Senate primary. A progressive won a primary in the seat to replace Craig, while the Sanders-backed Rebecca Cooke won a primary for Wisconsin’s swingy third district.
One donor adviser who works with progressive candidates around the country said Hong’s loss is a “good thing for the movement,” because it shows there is voter appetite for progressive ideas — but that candidate quality still matters, especially in a battleground.
“This is a far better outcome, and says that it is so close that a progressive who doesn’t say the dumbest shit in the world, [like] Thanksgiving should not exist, would have won,” the donor adviser said.
But others blame Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez for sitting out the race, arguing their involvement could’ve gotten Hong comfortably over the finish line.
Other DSA rising stars including Melat Kiros and Chris Rabb, who had spent other recent primary days campaigning in states like Michigan and Colorado, also skipped Wisconsin.
“This movement will fail if we see more letdowns at the critical moment, like we saw in this race,” said popular socialist voice Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the leftist magazine Current Affairs. “Especially if AOC wants to be taken seriously as a national leader of the left movement, she needs to actually support the candidates out there who have a chance to notch victories.”
Sanders’ and Ocasio-Cortez’s teams did not respond to requests for comment.
Some in the movement looked to downplay Hong’s showing as more of a stumble than a turning point, noting that a first-time statewide candidate came within a few thousand votes of sitting Gov. Tony Evers’ hand-picked favorite in a battleground state.
They also noted Hong had her margins cut down in key strongholds by a fellow progressive who didn’t heed calls to drop out of the race. State Sen. Kelda Roys pulled over 7 percent of the vote.
Organizers watched a national volunteer army flood neighboring Michigan just a week earlier to help El-Sayed grind out a surprisingly close race. To them, the contrast with Wisconsin — where Hong was largely left to fend for herself down the stretch — was hard to ignore.
“Wisconsin being this close is very frustrating because folks like AOC and Bernie Sanders stayed out. If they just did one rally in Wisconsin for Hong, that would have probably wrapped it up for her,” said Deep Singh Badhesha, a DSA political operative who campaigned in past primary states.
Our Revolution, the progressive group founded out of Sanders’ 2016 campaign that is no longer associated with him, offered a veiled jab at the progressives that didn’t publicly support Hong — including, seemingly, their original founder who sat out the race.
“We cannot build progressive power while gatekeeping our own movement through the eyes of the establishment,” the group said on X. “Solidarity cannot be something we practice only after someone has proven they can win without us.”
Politics
Trump wants the Postal Service to radically overhaul mail voting. But ballots are already going out.
President Donald Trump’s controversial demands for the Postal Service to overhaul and monitor millions of mail ballots hit another snag on Friday, when North Carolina became the first state in the nation to start sending out ballots for the November election.
In March, Trump signed the initial executive order, which aimed to crack down on mail-in voting — which he regularly alleges without evidence is a vector for widespread voter fraud — and assert an unprecedented amount of federal control over the upcoming elections.
Under this order and the subsequent rule drafted by the U.S. Postal Service, the USPS would refuse to deliver ballots to states that failed to provide lists of eligible mail voters or did not adhere to an approved envelope design style.
Since then, the order has faced legal challenges, and it remains paused by a federal judge’s orders. But the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow the new rule to proceed — something current and former election officials from both parties say would be both a legal nightmare that oversteps the federal government’s traditional role in elections and a logistical one that is happening far too close to the November election to implement even if they agreed with it.
“Why the hell are you rocking the boat this late in the game?” said Stephen Richer, a former Republican recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, who has clashed with Trump allies for defending the security of the 2020 election.
Still, election officials are trying to project a sense of normalcy for voters, particularly in North Carolina, which serves as a test of whether established local election systems can operate normally amid intensifying federal scrutiny.
“I want to emphasize this point because there has been a lot of outside noise: Our county workers are ready,” Sam Hayes, a longtime Republican lawyer in the state and now executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said in a Thursday afternoon press conference.
He added, “All we can do is what we’re doing. … It is business as usual as far as I’m concerned.”
Despite the legal challenges, the Trump administration has continued to press the courts to let it proceed. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to lift an order from a Massachusetts judge which temporarily prevents the USPS from enforcing their rule. It is the second time the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to step in, after winning an earlier victory in which the high court dismissed an earlier hold on the rule as premature.
“The uncertainty is coming from a single activist judge who continues to try and obstruct President Trump from implementing commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans vote in American elections,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement. “These safeguards for mail ballots were proposed months ago giving election officials ample time to prepare for the 2026 election.”
The USPS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Election officials said that if the rule goes into effect this close to November, it would cause chaos and place added strain on the USPS and election officials. And an anonymous federal whistleblower said in a report circulated earlier this week by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that the USPS was moving forward in a “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process” to try to implement the new system ahead of the midterms.
In the coming weeks, states across the country will follow North Carolina’s lead. Nine other states will begin mailing ballots in the next two weeks, according to a tracker from the National Conference of State Legislatures — with the biggest day for mailing coming 45 days before the election in mid-September.
“It would be so outrageous to try to let this go into effect. It’s hard to even imagine,” said Ben Hovland, a senior fellow for democracy at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress and former Democratic commissioner with the Election Assistance Commission who was fired by Trump in July.
He added, “It would be a break-glass moment for our democracy.”
The rule would require meticulous changes to ballot handling and tracking practices that Hovland said are impossible to implement before Election Day in about two months, effectively disenfranchising millions of voters.
“Ballots are printed. Envelopes are printed. You can go on and on with all the practical reasons that show that implementing something like this at this time is not feasible,” he said.
Richer said he doubted the new rules would bring about more security. Even if the USPS received lists from the states, according to the postal service’s final rule, it would not do any additional vetting of the list, Richer said.
“It’s just that the mail ballots have to be on that list, and I don’t see what added value for election integrity that does,” he said.
He added, “It creates a lot of administrative burden, and I think it creates a lot more opportunity for error.”
While a decision looms in the courts, election officials and experts cast doubt on the likelihood of the rules going into effect before November. A more pressing issue, they said, is the confusion and uncertainty surrounding mail-in ballots, which could subvert and change the behaviors of voters.
“It makes things seem messy or difficult, and it can dissuade people from participating or coming out to vote,” Hovland said. “It certainly also helps establish a pretext to make bad faith claims about election results.”
Hovland said that while none of these claims of voter fraud are backed up with facts, they could cause Americans to lose faith in the voting process.
Still, some current officials contended they were well-prepared for whatever happens — and that they’d be able to communicate effectively with voters who have become increasingly buffeted by dramatic rhetoric about the once-unmentioned nuts and bolts of actually running an election.
“There’s always a lot of noise around elections, that’s not going to change, and it can be hard to differentiate that from what’s actually going on on the ground,” said Jason Tyson, director of external affairs for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
As Election Day approaches, Tyson and election officials said they urge voters to check their registration status and make a plan to vote.
He added, “I think we’ve got a really well-trained, solid staff who are ready, and who have gone through all of the checks and balances and points of contact that we need to do to get to where we are.”
Missouri’s Supreme Court suspended a congressional map that state Republicans drew last year that would have netted the GOP an additional House seat, likely keeping the seat in Democratic hands this November.
The court ruled unanimously on Thursday that a referendum petition organized by Democrats to put the new congressional maps to a vote was incorrectly deemed insufficient by Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, and ordered that the gerrymandered map be put to a vote in the fall.
Voters will ultimately decide the fate of the new lines in November. But in the meantime, it cannot be in place for the midterms, meaning Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s original Kansas City-based district will likely stay in Democrats’ hands this fall.
Construction crews could begin the excavation process for what will be President Donald Trump’s massive 250-foot-tall arch in as soon as the next two weeks, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced on Thursday.
The monument — which will be erected in a traffic circle at the head of the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River, coming between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery — has generated controversy as concerns emerged about the design and traffic congestion during construction.
The arch would take two to three years to construct on the proposed schedule, according to documents released in June.
“We are pleased to announce that after a very long wait (over 125 years!), we are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary for the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck,” Burgum said in a social media post.
The 250-foot-tall arch will be among Trump’s most visible projects, as the administration continues its attempts to remake Washington. Critics, however, have voiced fears that the structure may be too large, and overshadow other monuments, like the Lincoln Memorial on the other side of the Potomac River.
The proposed arch will dwarf the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in size. It is unclear at this time how much construction will cost; the National Endowment for the Humanities earmarked $15 million for the monument.
“This will be one the the Great Pieces of American Architecture, honoring the history and significance of Arlington National Cemetery and befitting the most powerful Capital in the World,” Burgum said.
The monument will be constructed on land overseen by the National Park Service, and critics have argued Trump’s latest project requires explicit congressional approval. However, the Interior secretary continues to rebut these claims.
Instead, Burgum echoed previous statements and said historically “Congress and various congressionally chartered commissions decreed that a monumental work should adorn Columbia Island,” the traffic circle where the monument is planned to be constructed.
“Despite Congress’s intent, the site became and remains today a barren traffic circle lacking any monumental treatment and significant historic value,” he said.
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