The Briefing, Vol. XIII, Issue 36
Oct. 6, 2025
This week:
- Federal shutdown puts Democrats on the spot
- N.J. Democrats anxious over governor’s race
- AG candidate threatens to drag down Virginia Dems
Outlook
Government shutdown: We are just about one week into the government shutdown that began October 1. So far, it feels like the other shoe has yet to drop in multiple senses of the phrase. This includes both the political consequences and the potential for the Trump White House to take advantage of the situation and initiate mass firings of government employees in the absence of congressional appropriations. White House budget director Russ Vought said last week that he was “looking for opportunities” for “reducing the size and scope of the federal government” during the shutdown in ways that would not be possible if Congress had appropriated money for government agencies. However, the White House has not announced anything concrete just yet, and whether such a move would hold up in court remains uncertain.
Democrats’ messaging on the shutdown has been inconsistent. On the one hand, they are very eager to blame Republicans for it, as they did on the Sunday talk shows. On the other, they are willing to say — and some of them have said openly — that they are shutting the government down in order to preserve health insurance subsidies, Medicaid eligibility, or for some other vague healthcare-related reason.
Democrats are not necessarily suffering at this point for having caused the shutdown by voting down the continuing resolution in the Senate. But so far there have been far fewer recriminations against Republicans for this shutdown in the media than there have been for past shutdowns. It is such an unusual situation for Democrats to reject a clean continuing resolution that no one seems to know whom to blame or how to react.
The biggest risk for Democrats is that they actually do take blame and suffer in next month’s off-year elections if the shutdown drags on much longer.
Governor 2025
New Jersey: Democrats are concerned that they may be on the way to losing the governorship here, as they did to Chris Christie (R) in 2009. They refer ominously to unreleased polling that reflects what public polls also show — that Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D) is choking, barely leading in a state where polls underestimate Republican performance and voters are tired of Democratic rule under incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy (D).
Sherrill’s worst out-of-touch moment came when she said in a friendly podcast interview that she couldn’t remember whether she had made $7 million in stock trades since being elected to Congress. But the scandal weighing most on her now is the 1992 cheating scandal in an electrical engineering class that prevented her from walking at her graduation from the Naval Academy two years later. A Freedom of Information Act request submitted in July 2024 resulted in the release of more information than the law required or allowed.
So far, the early vote by party registration looks slightly better for former state Sen. Jack Ciattarelli (R) than it did in 2021, when he surprisingly came within 85,000 votes of defeating Murphy. According to data compiled by Michael Pruser, Republicans have returned more than one-third as many mail ballots as Democrats have returned — considerably more than in the last gubernatorial election — a hopeful sign for them if it indicates an underlying increase in enthusiasm for their candidate. Voter registration numbers, though they still favor Democrats overall, have moved in Republicans’ direction by a net 50,000 or so since Trump lost the state by six points last year and by more than 200,000 since 2022.
Axios reports that Ciattarealli is on pace to spend $2 million more on ads between now and Election Day than Sherrill.
Virginia: Democrats are in a real bind in Virginia. Attorney general nominee Jay Jones (D) is now suffering from two extreme scandals that seem likely to undo him.
The first scandal involves a reckless driving conviction. Jones was pulled over for driving 116 miles per hour. When sentenced to community service, he apparently deceived the courts by serving several hundreds of hours of his sentence of on behalf of his own political action committee.
The second scandal, however, is far worse.
Jones sent text messages in 2022 advocating the assassination of a Republican political rival and his family — advocating violence against the children on the grounds that Christopher Gilbert and his wife were “raising fascists.”
The extremely woke reasoning was that people only start to question their political assumptions when they suffer personal tragedies — specifically, having oneself or family members killed.
“Three people, two bullets,” Jones wrote, in arguing that a former Republican Virginia legislative leader should be shot twice if the choice were between shooting him, Hitler, or genocidal Cambodian communist dictator Pol Pot. “Gilbert gets two bullets to the head,” Jones wrote. “Spoiler: Put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know, and he receives both bullets every time.”
When questioned about these seemingly psychopatic texts by the colleague who received them, Jones defended his position, both in texts and in subsequent conversations over the phone. Today, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the sociopathic and even psychopathic nature of these conversations is quite evident, and there are really no available defenses of his behavior.
That is why the controversy has sent even left-wing media into a panic, with even the Washington Post editorial board and New Democrat figures such as David French demanding he drop out of his race — which he of course refuses to do. Needless to say, every Republican with a voice is calling on him to drop out, including President Trump.
But Virginia Democrats, perhaps still sensing a chance to win across the ticket by keeping party morale as high as possible, are behaving much more opportunistically. Not a single Democrat who endorsed Jones has withdrawn his or her endorsement as of Sunday night, as this is being written.
Gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger (D) and others have been extremely reluctant to distance themselves from Jones, because it would harm their overall campaign effort and their party’s psyche, extremely fragile in the Trump era. This opportunism has given Republican gubernatorial nominee and underdog Winsome Earle-Sears (R), currently the state’s lieutenant governor, an opening to release new advertisements that focus closely on Jones as the main issue in the campaign’s last month.
Jones’s own race against incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) was always going to be the closest of this year’s three statewide races. At this point, Jones may already be a fallen star in his party. But he might well be giving Republicans a chance in the other statewide races, where previously they seemed to have little or no chance of winning.
Senate 2026
Texas: Democratic state Rep. James Talarico (D), who attained some notoriety through his recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, is apparently a force to be reckoned with in his nascent bid for Senate, launched just three weeks before the quarter’s end. In that period, Talarico significantly outraised former congressman and 2024 nominee Colin Allred (D) in the first quarter of 2025. Talarico brought in $6.2 million to Allred’s $4.1 million, according to news reports.
