The Briefing, Vol. XIII, Issue 35
Sept. 2, 2025
This week:
- Why the Dems are so Blue this Labor Day
- Gavin Newsom may be the only Democrat properly adapting to the situation
- Redistricting won’t rig the election, but it could help Republicans temporarily
Outlook
One year from now — Labor Day 2026 — Americans will start paying attention in earnest to the coming 2026 midterm elections.
In reality, Trump’s numbers are underwater but not really that terrible. In fact, they are almost even except for three outlier polls, and even including those, he clocks in with only a minus-five point net approval on average.
But even the attempts to push a “walls-are-closing-in” crisis for Trump — or inflation, or any of the other things that aren’t really a crisis right now — points only to just how demoralized Democrats really are as of September 2025. A Gallup survey last week found that literally zero percent of Democrats are “satisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time.” This marks a new record and it may help explain some of the self-delusion that has been going on lately in the party.
The constant need to find some cause of hope persists, of course. But over and over again, reality dashes nearly all glimmers of hope.
Consider the facts:
- Democrats are being beaten in fundraising this cycle and crushed especially in cash-on-hand. The fact that the DNC has just $15 million on hand, compared to the Republicans’ $80 million (even though the other two committees are in better shape) is a sign that donors just don’t share the Left’s existential dread about what the Trump administration is doing. The donor drop-off includes not only the institutional party, but also key dark money groups.
- Democrats have also lost 4.5 million net registered voters in comparison to Republicans since the November election. Their losses, incurred in all 30 states where voters register by party, signify that the public utterly rejects their existential dread over the Trump era. In fact, most voters (Quinnipiac aside) approve of Trump on crime and people are roughly evenly split on his immigration policy. Even though Trump’s numbers are not so rosy on other issues, he is not in free fall the way their Chicken Little approach to 2025 politics would suggest.
- Voters’ opinion of the Democratic Party is at a 35-year low. Actually, that’s not quite correct — it is at its lowest point since the Wall Street Journal started asking the question 35 years ago. It might be at an all-time low.
- Republicans are likely to gain between 8 and 14 additional net House seats through mid-decade redistricting, regardless of what Democrats do to redraw their own maps. (More on this below.) Between this and Democrats’ failure to open up a significant lead so far against the president’s party in a midterm election cycle, Democrats may be headed for a disappointing 2026.
- Liberal activists within the many federal bureaucracies are being effectively purged. In some cases, entire agencies like USAID and Voice of America are being shuttered. In others, they are leaving either because they have taken buy-outs, or they are throwing sandwiches at ICE agents, or they just cannot behave themselves on the job, or they can’t bring themselves to keep their mouths shut and their heads down to work quietly against Trump, as they did in his first term.
- Key parts of the Democratic coalition show signs of either withering or going over to the other side. Labor unions (we just had Labor Day, after all) fell to their lowest share of the workforce last year since the National Labor Relations Act first passed in 1935. Hispanics are increasingly voting the same way as working-class white people.
- Trump’s D.C. crime crackdown is working to drive down the most violent crimes to mere New York City levels, to the point that the liberal Democratic mayor doesn’t deny it. As of this writing, there has been just one murder since it began August 13. Think of this as a demonstration project — either a threat of further federal interventions, or a demand that Democrats get their act together and govern the cities they control politically. As we predicted, Trump is proving that District residents need not live in fear as they have been living — that the dysfunction and criminality in D.C. are the result of liberal criminal justice policy choices that can be reversed.
- Liberal legacy media are in decline, having lost their monopoly on public opinion to increasingly popular conservative outlets, long-form podcasts and newly free social media. MSNBC, having already fired some of its most radical hosts, is being jettisoned by NBC and rebranded. CNN ratings, at less than one-fourth of Fox News, are down 35 percent year-over-year. Neither network is experiencing anything like the Trump ratings boom of his first term. Liberal journalists are taking buyouts and facing layoffs (or resigning in principle) at major legacy publications such as the Washington Post. Much of the hype machine that tried in vain to make Kamala Harris happen during the “brat summer” of 2024 has vanished or fallen into disrepair.
- Leftist cultural dominance is losing its grip, from universities to late-night television and other forms of comedy. Both edgy jokes and traditional pre-woke themes are once again en vogue, and being a Democrat has never been less cool.
In short, there’s not much joy in Mudville right now if you are a liberal or a Democrat. Yes, there have been a couple of state-level special elections in which they overperformed Kamala Harris or even won, with some consequences.
But Democrats have a deeper problem than just a losing streak. They are acting like crazy people.
Impelled by an instinctual need to resist anything Trump does, they are exhausting themselves without purpose while taking positions that most Americans reject and detest, no matter how they feel about Trump. So far, no one has figured out how to convince them to take another approach.
The Newsom gambit: However, at least one major Democratic politician seems to have figured out that there’s a better way. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), rather than simply attack Trump, is trying his own crime surge. Not only can this put him on the right side of the issue — the side the public supports — but, assuming he is actually willing to enforce quality-of-life laws and incarcerate repeat and violent criminals, it could deprive Trump of any excuse to go into his state.
There used to be a time when Democrats also opposed crime and took a lot of reasonable positions. Right nwo, Newsom is the closest thing they have to that. He hasn’t quite gotten to his Sister Souljah moment. But his is a much smarter approach than that taken by rivals such as Gov. JB Pritzker (D) of Illinois, which is to maximally resist Trump and encourage people who don’t like it to leave his state.
Senate 2026
Iowa: Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), first elected in 2014, announced that she is retiring after two terms in the Senate. Republicans are reportedly already looking to Rep. Ashley Hinson (R), who comfortably holds down a competitive district in the state’s northeast corner. Another potential candidate is former acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker (R).
Other candidates seem less likely to run. Pat Grassley (R) will likely wait for his grandfather to relinquish the other Senate seat, because two Senators Grassley serving together might be too much for some people. Gov. Kim Reynolds (R), who is retiring, is quite unpopular and probably wouldn’t be
The rest of the congressional delegation is otherwise occupied. Rep. Zach Nunn (R) has already committed to running for re-election. Rep. Randy Feenstra (R) is already running for governor. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R), whose seat is by far the most competitive, has committed to running for re-election but is staring down a second primary challenge from David Patusch (R), who is trying to out-MAGA her.
Democrats, who have seen their grip on power in Iowa slip away over the last 15 years, have a couple of state legislators vying for the nomination so far. Their only statewide officeholder, state Auditor Rob Sand (D), is running for governor instead.
House 2026
Redistricting: Republicans are gravely mistaken if they think they can just draw their way to a guaranteed 2027 majority in the U.S. House. But they can give themselves a lot of help — and they can potentially end Gavin Newsom’s bid for the presidency if they play their cards right.
Missouri Republicans have released a map that would give Republicans one extra district, folding Kansas City into a larger red district.
Indiana, if it does redistrict, is likely to add one more seat to the Republican column in the state’s Northwest corner.
Florida Republicans, depending on how aggressive they are, could eliminate as many as five Democratic seats.
Ohio is required to redistrict before the next election, and will likely add either two or three Republican-leaning seats. (In the latter case, one of them would be a swing seat.)
Texas has already passed a new map that is expected to add five seats for Republicans. It depends heavily on the fact that South Texas Hispanic voters are already moving sharply toward the Republican Party.
Depending on whether Maryland, California and Illinois, were they all to successfully redistrict, could at most cancel out seven of those gains. But California, the source of five of those seats, must first pass a ballot referendum this November to overturn the work of its nonpartisan redistricting commission.
The fallacy behind the idea that members of Congress can just pick their own voters is that aggressive gerrymanders are, by their nature, more competitive, not less. Republicans’ victory in 2000, which helped them draw maps for the first decade of this century, did not save them from losing the House in 2006. Their more resounding victory in 2010, which gave them the right to draw most districts in the 2010s, did not save them from their humiliating losses of 2018.
The reason is that more aggressive gerrymanders leave more competitive seats. They have to leave a lot of seats within striking distance of the other party, because one cannot win a majority by concentrating too many of one’s own voters in deep Red or Blue districts.
It doesn’t take that long for voters’ minds and demography to change — just consider, as a few examples, how much states like Colorado, Virginia, Iowa, Missouri, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have changed over the last 20 years. Districts can change even more quickly, as can the public mood.
