If you listened to the Friday show last week, you heard Jon referring to the “buzz around the office,” after Dan taped an interview with Rev. Adam Hamilton, the Democratic Senate candidate in Kansas. That “buzz” was all of us on the production team gushing in Slack about how much we were loving Hamilton’s answers. In the week since, Hamilton has moved to the very center of the conversation about Democratic pickups. A Times/Siena poll showed him tied, and other surveys are showing him ahead. The Cook Political Report moved the race to toss-up. The main Republican super PAC is shifting spending there to prop up incumbent Senator Roger Marshall, who started running an attack ad against Hamilton. The think pieces are suddenly everywhere. Kansas within reach! What a dream.
Part of what makes this storyline so satisfying, it seems to me, is how little griping there’s been within the party about Hamilton ▶criticizing the DSA or breaking from Democratic orthodoxy on things like investigating Trump. Everyone seems to get how big it would be simply to win in Kansas, for the statement it would make and for the size of a potential Democratic majority. It helps that there’s also very little in Hamilton’s pitch for progressives to get upset about.
It’s become an article of faith in Democratic politics that if you’re running in a red district or a swing district, you need to present yourself, essentially, as a Republican Lite. That’s not what Hamilton is doing. Yes, he put out that ad rejecting socialism and “politicians on both extremes.” But he doesn’t appear to be obsessively triangulating, and he’s certainly not running screaming from the party label. “I’m proud to be a Democrat,” ▶he said in our interview, which is way farther than a lot of other frontline candidates are willing to go. Hamilton, as Dan pointed out, has gotten a lot of attention for saying he’s “both” liberal and conservative. But Hamilton made clear he doesn’t see it as a hedge:
“To be liberal means to be generous of spirit. It means to be open-minded. It means to be willing to reform or change how you see things. And I think we all need to be liberal in that sense. And then on the other side, to be conservative means to be conservative is conserving values, traditions, things that are important. I think at our best, we conserve
andwe’re liberal.”
That’s not really centrism. It’s more — what to call it? — dual-polarity. It speaks not so much to the voters who identify as being “down the middle” as it does to the voters who find themselves pulled back and forth between the arguments the two sides are making. Who, perhaps, often give up on politics because they don’t see it as having space for people who think both sides have a point.
Standard caveats: it’s a wave year, Hamilton is running against a 𝕏deeply unlikeable incumbent, and being a megachurch pastor and ex-Republican isn’t a template available to most other Democrats. Still, if Hamilton wins this race, or manages to lose only narrowly, I think you’re going to see a lot of candidates starting to think differently about how to excite people who live — and think — far afield from the progressive heartland. And that, in itself, is a victory.
We’ll have Jon in the studio and Dan remote for a standard taping this week — though the flood of positive storylines for Democrats is anything but standard. Trump is doing a “New Golden Age Summit” at the White House today, where he plans to give actual medals to tech leaders including Elon Musk. We’ll monitor to see if it’s interesting. We also have Lovett’s conversation with Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon, whose emotional “why I fight” answer we discussed on the Tuesday show. Here’s our plan for new blocks:
**Trump on the stump.**You have to love how confident Trump is that getting out on the trail is going to save all the Republican candidates he cares about. Doesn’t seem to be happening so far! Last night, as you probably saw, Trump was in San Antonio campaigning for Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott (whodidn’t show up). But basically the only moments that got any coverage is Trump𝕏musing againabout Iran nuking LA and San Diego and promising to send everyone checks.**Republicans in disarray.**There are loads of stories out there this week about the failures of the GOP’s midterm strategy and the inevitable back-biting that follows. As The Washington Post points out, Republicans have spenton the most contested races, and the polls haven’t moved in their favor. What’s more, Politico reports that the spending barrage hasn’t even been effective inhalf a billion dollars since Labor Daygetting their ads in front of voters. No wonder your average Republican is feelingalienated and unmotivated, per the Times, and that Trump’s own top political advisors are offworking for a pro-Russia governmentin the Balkans. Not JD Vance, though: he’s engaged in a quiet campaign to stop thedefection of young menfrom the MAGA movement.**Campaign updates.As we did on Tuesday’s show, we’ll go through some updates in individual races. Speaking of Paxton, yet more𝕏leaked audio of him droppedjust as I was sitting down to write this. This time, he’s telling donors that he would push for cuts to “mandatory spending” — that is, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — and that Americans will just have to “suck it up” in the name of bringing down the national debt. It’s debate night tonight in Michigan, where Mike Rogers is now trying to𝕏portray himselfas an opponent of Trump’s trade war on neighboring Canada. Rogers will also probably have to answer for Trump’sTruth Social postlast night calling Abdul El-Sayed “Mohammed,” and saying he “goes back to the days of Jihad.” Sadly, the debate starts after we’re done taping, and the same is true of Maine — but there, at least, we have moments from a Collins-Jackson faceoff earlier in the week, including this𝕏incredible exchangeabout healthcare.‘Honey please.’**Did you know that Kimberly Guilfoyle — former Fox News host, former fiancée of Don Jr. (and, in fairness, ex-wife of Gavin Newsom) — is now our ambassador to Greece? Would it shock you to learn that, in addition to not being overly qualified, she’s also, perhaps, not overly ethical? Yesterday,The Wall Street Journalreported that days before her confirmation hearing, Guilfoyle sent Signal messages to a wealthy Trump donor asking him to discretely send $100,000 to her Amex account. “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she wrote. There follows a long read about big cash payments and promises of access. (A lawyer for Guilfoyle disputed the authenticity of the texts, without specifics.) Guilfoyle’s boss, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, declined to comment on the situation before jetting off to Greece to deliver remarks lecturing Europeans about upholding Western values, with Guilfoyle seated in the front row. “Our ambassador has been a strong ambassador,” he said. Honey, please!
This week’s Open Tabs: the conscience-shocking reality of capital punishment, teachers caught between AI-written assignments and the faulty technologies they use to detect them, and a look at Ukraine’s cutting-edge arms industry.
