The Briefing, Vol. XIV, Issue 19
May 11, 2026
This week:
- In case you were wondering, it’s still Trump’s party
- Democrats’ cynical Virginia plan backfires
- Becerra’s rise leads to sniping over his invisible Cabinet job
Outlook
Still Trump’s party: In case you were wondering how solid President Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is, a few obscure state Senate primaries in Indiana last Tuesday tell the entire story. Trump targeted seven incumbent state senators after they refused to redistrict the state to add one or two Republican seats. Five of the seven lost, and a sixth is clinging to a four-vote lead, pending the potential counting of 17 provisional ballots and a likely recount.
There has been a lot of discussion about the Trump voter base going forward. Given that the Republican Party in the Trump era has shifted toward a lower-propensity voter base, there are some questions about whether Trump Republicans will show up once Trump is out of politics for good.
This election — a low-turnout primary over a relatively inside-baseball issue like redistricting — may offer a few hopeful signs in this regard.
As for those believing that Trump’s influence over the party is fleeting or disappearing now that his polling numbers have taken a hit, the answer is no, definitely not. With a few celebrity exceptions, the Republican base is very much on board with Trump.
House 2026
Virginia: Virginia Democrats spent tens of millions to squeak through a referendum to gerrymander their state in order to strike back against Republicans in other states.
All for naught, it turns out.
As we had pointed out, there was always a chance that Democrats would have the rug pulled out from under them by Virginia’s Supreme Court. The court had declined to settle the issue before the referendum, but its judgment always loomed over the vote.
The ruling just came down last week, and it was the biggest news story of the week by far. In putting the question on the ballot, Democrats in the legislature had failed to follow the required procedures to amend their state constitution. Now they pay the price. Their guaranteed gerrymander has now fallen aside, even as Republican states are looking at possible redistricting plans due to an unrelated U.S. Supreme Court ruling we discussed last week.
We are in a midterm year with a Republican president, and so all of the historical trends still favor Democrats. But they have just wasted a ton of money and lost the expected boost that their severe gerrymander of Virginia was intended to win for them. Virginia’s Supreme Court probably would have done them a favor had it prevented the referendum. But even after it had happened, the arguments against this referendum’s legality were quite sound.
Now Democrats are talking about changing the rules once again. They are even talking about trying to force the entire Virginia Supreme Court to resign by lowering the retirement age from 75 to 54. This should be a red flag to the entire electorate: Democrats are drunk on power, even at a moment when they don’t even have much of it. As in the past, they are making the mistake of promising to abuse power before they even have it.
This is just like their promise of “judicial reform” on a national level — that is, their desire to pack the U.S. Supreme Court by adding multiple additional leftist justices in order to change the court’s composition, then to add new states to the union in order to build a permanent Senate majority.
For context, note that conservatives spent decades losing Supreme Court cases and respecting the outcomes. Democrats have stopped getting their way for just a year or two, and already they can’t handle it.
In the short term — in this political cycle — Democrats will have to find a way to win without their cynical attempt to disenfranchise most Virginians with their cynical map. But they still must be favored to win in the midterms. Republicans need to be ready and do what they can to make preparations to defend against the abuses of power they are promising. Whenever they regain unified control of Washington.
Governor 2026
California: It is gratifying after all this time to see Biden staffers finally saying what seemed obvious during his presidency but which nobody was willing to talk about at the time: Xavier Becerra (D) was a complete non-entity — almost totally invisible — throughout the entire time he was serving as Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services.This was especially bizarre because Biden took power at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. One would therefore have expected Becerra to play a significant role, even though his nomination was somewhat baffling, given that he was a state attorney general with no experience in the area of public health. Becerra is described as being ineffective and as having shown up to brief President Biden at times completely unprepared.
The tepid defenses of his record in the Politico piece on this topic by former chief-of-staff Ron Klain and others only make things worse — they are probably even more damning than the allegations of his incompetence.
But this sort of crabs-in-the-bucket fight is also just the sort of thing one would expect in a hotly contested primary election with several Democratic candidates fighting for a spot in the general election. Becerra is now surging in polls of the jungle primary for governor in the wake of former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s (D) implosion, and this may be an attempt to dissuade Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) from endorsing Becerra, whom he seems to be quietly supporting. Also in the running are billionaire Tom Steyer (D) — who wants to be governor yet incredibly has no opinions about how the current incumbent is handling the job — and former Rep. Katie Porter (D), whose numbers have suffered since video of her verbally abusing staff was released.
The two leading Republicans are Steve Hilton (R) and Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco (R). It is not considered likely that both Republicans will advance to the runoff, locking the Democrats out, but it is not impossible.
Senate 2026
Texas: Although it is his own internal poll, there is now for the first time a poll showing Sen. John Cornyn (R) leading Ken Paxton in their May 26 runoff election. Cornyn’s poll shows a 47 to 46 percent nailbiter, whereas a new Paxton internal poll released last week shows him leading comfortably, 47 to 36 percent. An independent poll from the University of Houston shows the two nearly tied, with Paxton leading, 48 to 45 percent. In short, all signs point to a very close finish, and there is still some time left.
