Mary Peltola launches her campaign as a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Anchorage, Alaska, U.S., January 17, 2026. REUTERS/Kerry Tasker
Hey, Raw America family. John here, and this is the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, and I want to spend some time today giving you some good news for a change.
This week, Democrats saw their chances of retaking the Senate — which seemed like a pipe dream just a year ago — significantly improve, all thanks to a handful of Senate races in red states. And the illusion of absolute power Trump keeps trying to project is being complicated by embarrassing leaks and a wave of high-profile resignations.
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Something remarkable happened this week. In Alaska’s open U.S. Senate primary — in which four finalists advance to the general election ballot regardless of party — Democrat Mary Peltola not only became the Democratic nominee, but she actually got more votes than incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska).
Peltola, the state’s former at-large congresswoman, has a six-point lead on Sullivan with 80 percent of ballots tallied as of this writing. Sullivan also has to compete with another Republican candidate named Dan Sullivan, who placed third and will also be on the November ballot.
Alaska hasn’t had a Democratic U.S. senator for more than a decade. And if Peltola wins, Democrats could win control of the upper chamber of Congress by just flipping three more Republican-held Senate seats. Democrats were previously pinning their hopes on purple states like Maine and North Carolina, where Republicans are already battling to hold onto seats in states with other Democratic statewide elected officials. But lately, it’s been reliably red states where Democrats are seeing the biggest gains. Not only Alaska, but now even Iowa, Ohio and Texas are up for grabs.
In the Lone Star State, Democratic state representative James Talarico has been turning heads by actually leading in multiple consecutive polls against Republican Ken Paxton, who ousted longtime Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) after winning Donald Trump’s endorsement. Talarico’s campaign even recently hired former Cornyn staffer Jacob Smith, who said Talarico “speaks to the needs of everyday people who day in and day out work too hard for too little.”
Ohio’s Senate race is shaping up to be another potential flip, with Democrat Sherrod Brown (who represented the Buckeye State in the Senate between 2007 and 2025) hammering Republican Jon Husted over his support for AI data centers. In a memo recently leaked to ABC News, Republicans admitted that data centers are politically toxic, and that if Husted loses his reelection bid, it could lead to politicians across the country going out of their way to keep data centers at arm’s length. From their lips to God’s ears.
All of this has led Cook Political Report, one of the most respected political forecasters in the country, to update its assessments of several races in Democrats’ favor. Both the Iowa and Texas Senate races were changed from “lean Republican” to “toss-up,” while gubernatorial races in those states were updated from “solid Republican” to “likely Republican” in Texas, and “toss-up” to “lean Democrat” in the Hawkeye State.
In the 2018 midterms, Democrats flipped 40 House seats and won back control of the House in what was known as the “blue wave” election. And while they flipped Senate seats in Arizona and Nevada, they also lost Senate races in three other states for a net loss. If Democrats succeed in flipping both the House and Senate in 2026, that would mark the biggest midterm victory for Democrats since 2006, which was defined by opposition to George W. Bush’s illegal war in the Middle East, his poor response to natural disasters and stubbornly high gas prices. Sound familiar?
Last week’s news cycle was dominated by coverage of Natalie Harp, who is Trump’s 35 year-old executive assistant who has access to his Truth Social account and is reportedly even a gatekeeper for foreign leaders who want to talk to the president. All it took was for Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia to mention her by name during a campaign rally for MAGA world to have a week-long meltdown.
The sheer volume of leaks about Harp has been staggering in the past week. She was apparently the leading voice calling for the demolition of the East Wing of the White House — where the Office of the First Lady of the United States is located. She reportedly once climbed into the trunk of an SUV when she was told there was no room for her in Trump’s motorcade. Unnamed Trump campaign staffers gave the Daily Beast the full text of her gushing love letters to the president. And a bestselling Trump biographer even said that Trump’s 2024 campaign staff openly wondered whether Trump was “spanking Natalie.”
It’s worth noting that in Ossoff’s speech, he never made a salacious claim about Harp, only that Trump seems more focused on his own vanity projects like his $400 million ballroom and “traveling with Natalie” on a jet gifted to him by the Qatari royal family than on actually doing his job. And the response from both the White House and MAGA commentators was telling in that it didn’t address Ossoff’s fundamental argument: that Trump has all but checked out of his duties.
The Georgia Democrat also demonstrated that he’s adept in an area where a lot of Democrats fall short: how to drive the news cycle for maximum effect. Pat Dennis, who is president of the Democratic opposition research PAC American Bridge, 𝕏wrote on social media that the week-long Natalie Harp news cycle “is a good example of how you can get a disproportionate amount of coverage by giving reporters an excuse to talk about the thing they want to talk about but don't have a good enough excuse to talk about yet.”
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The White House leaking like a sieve apparently got to White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, who on Thursday posted a late-night rant directed at unnamed aides leaking the details of the chaos engulfing the West Wing to various media outlets.
All of the leaks trickling out are coinciding with a staggering exodus of top White House officials just 19 months into Trump’s second term. This week, James Braid, who is the White House’s director of legislative affairs, announced he was leaving the Trump administration. Braid was a key member of the West Wing, as he was in charge of making sure Trump stayed in Congress’ good graces. His resignation comes as Trump faces even more dismal polling numbers while his war in Iran drags on and Republicans are already fearing a midterm blowout.
Braid’s exit follows that of outgoing White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who will be leaving her role at the end of August. White House deputy chief of staff James Blair is also leaving the administration to work on Trump’s political operation outside of Washington. That’s three senior officials all heading out the door in less than two weeks — notably after it was revealed that Trump left top Cabinet officials on a decoy jet that could have potentially been shot down by an Iranian missile.
As Capitol Hill Republicans panic over November and the White House leaks like an old faucet, Democrats appear to be uniting around an agenda that may be the most ambitious since the Great Society-era programs of the 1960s, or even since the New Deal.
In a brilliant analysis this week, the indefatigable Thom Hartmann laid out how progressives like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Angie Nixon in Florida are becoming the faces of the Democratic Party by uniting the party around bold policies like Medicare for All and getting big money out of politics. El-Sayed overcame a flood of big money from groups like AIPAC, which out-spent him by tens of millions of dollars to no avail. And like El-Sayed, Nixon also prevailed against big money by winning her own primary despite being outspent by nearly $2 million.
Their victories are far from certain: Republicans are likely to flood Michigan with money in the coming months aimed at scaring and confusing voters about Medicare for All. Nixon is in an uphill battle of her own, running in Donald Trump’s adopted home state and likely to face a deluge of dark money as well.
But the fact that the Wall Street bankers and health insurance executives that have had the Democratic Party in a vicegrip since the 1990s are now no longer able to hold sway over the direction of the party is a positive development, and voters across America are repeatedly demonstrating that they want candidates who actually stand for something and who refuse to compromise on their core values. And that’s something worth celebrating.
It’s easy to surrender to the doom and gloom. A quagmire of a war in the Middle East. The Supreme Court letting Trump keep building his ballroom. Seemingly non-stop food recalls. It’s tempting on hot and humid late summer Sundays like this to check out and just ignore it all.
But stories like this are great reminders that this government’s insistence on its inevitability is actually just projection. They’re barely holding on, and it’s all slipping through their fingers. And meanwhile, independent news outlets like Raw America will keep shining a light where the billionaire-owned outlets won’t.
That’s the job of the free press: to be the light in the darkness.
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Stay in the fight. We’ll see you next Sunday.
—John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story
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