The Briefing, Vol. XIII, Issue 34
Aug. 25, 2025
This week:
- Democrats’ crisis is deeper than you thought
- The futility of Kamala Harris’s multi-billion dollar campaign
- Gavin Newsom’s double gambit
Outlook
Democrats’ voter crisis: The New York Times reported last week on Democrats’ massive and widespread loss of registered voters since 2020. The situation is so bad that the Democratic establishment is in a bit of a panic, reconsidering whether party resources — sparse lately due to weak fundraising — should keep flowing to the organizations that have traditionally helped repopulate their voter rolls by seeking new supporters specifically among certain racial and ethnic groups..
In the 30 states where U.S. citizens register to vote as members of one party or another, registered Democrats have lost ground as a share of the total in all 30. In nearly all of those, they have actually declined in numbers, not just in share.
In all, Democrats have lost a net 2.1 million registered voters in those states overall due to death or defection, whereas Republicans have gained a net 2.4 million due to new registrants and Democratic defectors — a net swing of 4.5 million voters. And although there are no such data on the 20 states that don’t register voters by party (including Texas, Georgia and Illinois), the fact that all 30 of these are pointed in the same direction bodes ill for those as well. If people don’t want to belong to the Democratic Party in that many states, then it’s probably true almost everywhere.
This is a broad-based phenomenon, affecting vastly different states — deep-red states like Idaho, Oklahoma, Wyoming and Florida; deep-blue states like California and New York; and swing states like Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
And the trend did not stop in November 2024 with President Trump’s re-election, but has continued, with new numbers coming out every month since the election and confirming Republican progress.
Both men and women newly registering to vote are less Democratic than before. This is creating a gender gap that suddenly favors Republicans on net. Hispanics are also far less likely on net to register as Democrats than they were in 2020, with massive double-digit shifts occurring in multiple states.
This voter crunch did not happen overnight. For the last 12 months at least, it had already been visible in the data — especially in Nevada, where Democrats lost their registration edge, and in Pennsylvania. Long before Election Day 2024, and even before Joe Biden quit the race last July, it was already prompting conversations among well-heeled Democrats. Some concluded that it was no longer worth funding voter registration drives for Latinos, Blacks, or young people — after all, they might just be paying to register new Republicans. In a party and a business where the flow of cash is so important to everyone, this highlights the magnitude of the crisis. It illustrates just why Democrats’ midterm victory in 2026 is anything but certain.
Kamala’s failure: It also highlights something profound about last year’s race: The multi-billion dollar Democratic campaign — including $2 billion from the DNC alone, more from other entities, plus a massive in-kind contribution of pro-Kamala hype from the media — was insufficient to stop the Democrats’ registration slide. Whatever efforts the Biden and Harris campaigns made at registering new voters (and they spent quite a lot of money on less worthy causes, like celebrity endorsements and podcasters) were vastly inferior to the combined power of Democrat voter attrition and Republican new-voter registration.
And Democrats face a much bigger problem than this: Namely, their message.
No, that’s not to say that their woes are the result of their message being misinterpreted or not being disseminated effectively. Their problem is the message itself. They have lustily embraced an array of divisive and destructive cultural ideas that they still can’t bring themselves to discard even now as they are being pummeled in defeat.
Central to this is the fight to normalize males playing in girls’ sports and invading women’s bathrooms (including sex predators), the soft-on-crime policies that have made so many major cities unliveable, and instant deportation of all criminals who are in the country illegally, just for starters. These are just a few of the issues where the Harris campaign and its commitment to “they/them” politics put the party on the wrong end of issues that are easily 80-20 or even 90-10 among the public.
Trump has managed to accentuate this disadvantage for Democrats with his ongoing crime cleanup in Washington D.C. By taking action where he is unambiguously legally permitted to do so, President Trump is demonstrating that letting one’s city become dystopian and unlivable is a Democratic policy choice — not an inevitability. The left’s long-term strategy of trying to make western capitalistic and democratic systems collapse under their own weight fails whenever someone steps forward and actually solves a problem — in this case by simply deporting or incarcerating the relatively small number of people who commit all of the crimes.
Verba prohibita: To underscore all of this, a controversial memo circulating among Democrats has demanded that they stop using weird and alienating vocabulary — words that conservatives will recognize as “politically correct” vocabulary. This includes obvious candidates like “birthing person” (for mother), “unhoused” (for homeless), “LBGTQIA++,” “justice-involved individuals” (for convicts), “cisgender,” “Latinx,” and dozens of other words that no normal human being would ever use and most don’t understand.
The memo is very wise — Democrats simply will not connect with normal people again until they start (literally) speaking the same language normal people speak. But this memo has met with considerable pushback on the left. Democrats are, at least for now, unlikely to heed its warnings. And although their party will not keep losing forever — it is the world’s oldest party, after all, and it didn’t get that way by being inflexible in the long run — it will keep losing until it finally drops the woke nonsense.
Redistricting arms race: Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) wants to be president. His bid to gerrymander California via ballot referendum may help that cause (or end it), but it won’t help Democrats overall in 2026.
Texas has just adopted maps that will likely give Republicans five more seats, including two additional Hispanic-majority seats. Democrats in California have responded by creating a ballot referendum for this November which voters may well defeat, that would likely give Democrats five more seats.
In fact, its chances of passing are middling at best, given that most California referenda that start near or below 50 percent are doomed to fail, and this one is starting at 48 percent.
Proposition 50 now has a number and name for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Republicans to campaign against. It is probably fitting that Newsom, who opposed and worked against the creation of the citizens’ redistricting commission when voters first approved it in 2010, would work to throw away its maps in favor of districts gerrymandered by state legislators. And whereas the commission system bars commissioners from running for the seats they draw, Democrats are currently itching to jump in and get elected in the new districts they are drawing. That is why California Democrats are weirdly defensive when answering questions about who drew their map. They have been creating or lobbying for bespoke districts for themselves.
If they succeed, then it will save Newsom’s career from a very risky bet that could yet end it. But the long-run consequences don’t look good for Democrats. They have already gerrymandered most of their strongholds to the max or nearly to the max. They might be able to squeeze a seat out of Maryland. But Republicans, having either lost in court or taken the higher ground in most of the states they control (including Florida, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, New Hampshire, Indiana, and Nebraska), have a lot more potential to gain from this kind of arms-race. Moreover, Ohio is already forced to redistrict either way, and its map is almost certainly going to hand two extra seats to Republicans.
Newsom is doing this to promote his brand. So far, it is working. He has also hired a team to use his social media accounts to mock Trump in a way that raises his profile and perhaps helps improve his odds in the 2028 mix. But even if this helps him gain notoriety, that’s not the same as gaining support as a presidential candidate.
Senate 2026
Ohio: A new poll shows appointed Sen. Jon Husted (R) with a comfortable if not overwhelming six-point lead over former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D), who lost the state’s other Senate seat last November to a much less formidable politician.
The Emerson survey shows Husted at 50 percent, which is a very good sign for an incumbent politician, and Brown — who is already easily as well-known to voters — at just 44 percent, which is not good for a quasi-incumbent.
That’s not to say Brown has no chance, and he will at least force Republicans to expend resources in Ohio if he can’t win. But some are already comparing his bid to that of former Sen. Evan Bayh’s (D) vain attempt at a comeback in Indiana in 2016.
Brown, like Bayh, is a formerly popular politician running in a state that just isn’t the same as it was in 2006 when Brown first won statewide.
Also, even though Bayh started off that other race with a 20-point polling lead due to widespread positive name recognition (Bayh had been governor and both he and his father had served in the U.S. Senate for decades), he ended up losing to an obscure and only recently elected Republican congressman (Todd Young) by nearly ten points.
Governor 2025
Virginia: Is it 2021 all over again?
Virginia Democrats are once again opening up a big can of cultural “they/them” issues in this race. It is a choice they are likely to regret, win or lose. At the very least, it is threatening to make an uncompetitive race into a competitive one.
First, their educrats in Loudoun County suspended male students for questioning a girl identifying as a boy who was recording them in their locker room.
Second, in Arlington County, Republican nominee and Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R) showed up to testify against Arlington schools’ policy that allowed a male sex offender into two schools’ girls’ locker rooms to use their public pools over a period of months. That sounds bad already, but then they indulged her by staging a protest that included a ridiculous racist sign (Earle-Sears is black) and giving the issue a much higher profile than it would have had otherwise.
This has not only helped resurrect the issue, but it could even resurrect Earle-Sears’ campaign against Democratic nominee Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D).
Governor 2026
Ohio: The same Emerson poll mentioned above shows Vivek Ramaswamy (R), who is almost certain to become the Republican nominee, holds large leads over all Democratic comers — most importantly, he leads former Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) 49 to 41 percent.
