Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, and this morning, I’m not going to walk you through the week’s outrages. Two days before an election, I want to talk to you about something else.
First, a thank you. This week you brought us closer to 10,000 paid subscribers than I thought possible when we set that goal. Each of you who stepped up did it for the same reason I started Raw America: because somebody has to tell the truth when the people with the microphones won’t. You’re the reason this publication exists. We don’t have a billionaire. We have you.
If you’ve been reading us for free, this is the day to join us. Annual subscriptions are 20% off through Tuesday, about $1.20 a week. Become a part of a community that shares your values. Make today the day you fight to take our country back.
Anyone who’s grown up in New England knows the feeling. Your fingers freeze. The snow sits on the ground for a month. You slip every time you leave the house. Then suddenly, one morning, you see the crocus shoots poking out of the soil.
That’s what this week felt like. Something is building.
I’ve been doing this a long time. I started Raw Story in 2004, the year George W. Bush got reelected, running on a campaign of homophobia. I was 23 and thought gays would be pariahs for good. In 2012, Obama’s courageous vice president — Joe Biden — voiced support for gay marriage. In 2015, gay marriage became legal nationwide.
It wasn’t something I expected in my lifetime.
Progress is slow. Change comes gradually. But the moment things look most hopeless is usually the moment right before they turn.
Let me tell you about Hungary.
I wrote to you about this in April, the morning after it happened, and it’s been in the back of my mind almost every day since.
For sixteen years Viktor Orbán ruled Hungary like a man who’d solved democracy. He took over the courts. He turned state television into a propaganda machine. He seized the newspapers or crushed them. Republicans flew to Budapest every year to meet the master and learn how it was done.
In 2022, when the opposition finally united and threw everything at him, he beat them. People wrote obituaries. Hungarian democracy, they said, was finished.
Then a man named Péter Magyar, who’d spent his career inside Orbán’s own party, walked out. He criticized a child-abuse pardon scandal and went on YouTube to say that the machine was corrupt. Within two months he’d taken over a dormant party, and within four he’d snagged 30 percent of the vote.
On April 12 of this year, Hungarians went to the polls in the largest numbers in their post-Communist history. They gave Magyar a two-thirds majority. Orbán went on television and conceded.
Orbán ruled for sixteen years. He controlled the courts, the airwaves — all of it. And it fell in one day to ordinary people who had been told, over and over, that nothing could change.
Brazil just beat back Bolsonaro. South Korea watched a president declare martial law and removed him within months.
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Here are the Democrats bringing it home.
A doctor who ran Detroit’s health department is ahead in Michigan (Abdul El-Sayed). A seminarian and former public school teacher is up by five points in Texas (James Talarico).
In Iowa, Josh Turek, who won Paralympic gold in wheelchair basketball before he ever ran for office, is leading Ashley Hinson. In Kansas, which Trump carried by sixteen points, Adam Hamilton is skating within one point of Roger Marshall. And in South Carolina, Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, is in a coin toss for the seat Lindsey Graham held until he died.
Kansas, Iowa, and South Carolina.
A few weeks ago I talked about the red undertow, Republican voters in places like Michigan who aren’t switching sides so much as staying home. This is how the undertow looks when it hits the Senate map. Democrats haven’t won yet. But every one of these races is winnable, and a year ago not one of them was.
Raw America launched in January, just a week before federal agents executed Alex Pretti on a street in Minneapolis. I remember wondering if we were literally at the end of the road. Trump was raiding cities and talking about the Insurrection Act.
Instead, more than 270,000 of you showed up. You participated in No Kings marches in towns where nobody expected a crowd. You flipped a state Senate seat in Michigan by 19 points in May. You turned out last November in Virginia and New Jersey and handed this administration decisive defeats.
I’ve watched U.S. politics from a newsroom for twenty-two years. And I’ve never seen a year like this one.
This is the kind of story the billionaire press won’t tell, because the oligarchs have bet their money on the regime. Raw America is funded by you instead. If you think what we do is worth $1.20 a week, become a paying subscriber today.
What does it look like for Republicans?
Trump’s approval has cratered to the low thirties. Only 20% of Americans approve of how he’s raised the cost of living. His own party’s candidates are quietly scrubbing him from their mailers and websites.
Last week in Sioux City, Trump warned a crowd about communists taking the Senate when his voice devolved into a sound nobody could transcribe. Last weekend, photographers caught him after an Ohio rally, slumped with his mouth open and his head on his chest. The devil turned 80 in June.
I take no joy in a man’s decline. But notice what’s happened as he’s spiraled. The threats have gotten wilder. The lawsuits have gotten more bizarre. Former FBI Director James Comey is being prosecuted, again.
In Orbán’s last campaign, he erected billboards warning Hungarians that his opponent would drag them into a war. Strongmen are always loudest when they’re near defeat, because they can feel the tide turning, and they don’t know what to do.
In May, when Ted Turner died, I wrote that the system only works if people show up. In August I wrote that they’re betting we’ll get tired. Every week since, you’ve proved we won’t.
So here’s what I’ll say now, and here’s what I’ll say Wednesday morning, whatever the map looks like.
If we take the Senate, we’ll have done what the Hungarians did: beaten a captured system with nothing but turnout. We’ll celebrate, and then we’ll get to work, because a majority is a tool, not a trophy.
If we fall short in the Senate, we’ll have done what the Hungarians did in 2022. We’ll have lost a round in a fight we’re still going to win. We’ll have won the House, and Democratic investigations will build the runway for a Democrat winning the presidency in 2028.
Either way, we’re on the path together.
Urgent message before we go. We’re running out of October and we’re quite a bit behind our paid subscriber goal for the month, which matters more than usual right now because Facebook has slashed our distribution and Elon Musk’s X is doing the same thing on his troll-filled platform. Meta zapped us after we called Mark Zuckerberg out for cozying up to this president, and Musk is squeezing us while pouring money into Republican campaigns. A paid subscription runs 17 cents a day, less than a dollar and change each week — and it funds a newsroom that answers to readers instead of owners.
I can feel something in the air. Go vote, and let’s find out what it is.
See you next week.
— John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story
