Welcome back to The Political Spectrum! Happy weekend. I’m still trying to process everything that happened this weekend. I want to eventually write something about what it was like to cover this independently. But for now, it’s the Midterm Media Offender Mailbag, where paid subscribers get to send notes and I try to respond. If you are not a paid subscriber, what are you waiting for? Sign up for a paid subscription.
Pablo Manríquez at Migrant Insider asks:
Will Schumer be Majority Leader? If not, who?
This is the biggest question everyone asks and sorry to be anticlimactic, but yes, Schumer will be Senate majority leader. He will ascend for three reasons.
First, he recruited most of the winning candidates. He got Roy Cooper to come out of retirement and massacre the North Carolina Republican Party. He convinced Sherrod Brown of Ohio to run again after he lost in 2024. Mary Peltola put Alaska in play. It looks like his massive gamble to support Scott Colom in Mississippi might pay off. This is to say nothing of Adam Hamilton winning in Kansas and Schumer not-so-secretly backing Josh Turek in Iowa in the Senate primary. That gives you the leadership spot.
Second, simply nobody else can raise the levels of money Schumer can. Being based in New York and his time leading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee gave him ties to major donors that others have. The majority leader has to raise dollars and count votes. Schumer does both incredibly well, even if he is not the best messenger.
His biggest failure is backing Gov. Janet Mills of Maine to challenge Sen. Susan Collins, which opened the door to Graham Platner channeling the anti-Washington anger, and then subsequently earnestly backing Platner before it all went to hell. Schumer deserves heat for that. But Troy Jackson beating Collins has a way of erasing people’s memory.
Schumer’s decision to back Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan looks terrible now. But it made a sort of sense at the time. Stevens flipped a Republican-held seat in 2018 and Michigan has a record of even-keeled Democratic women (Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, former Sen. Debbie Stabenow and current incoming Gov. Jocelyn Benson come to mind). If anything, he should lose some points for not supporting Mallory McMorrow, who would have been a “goldilocks” candidate. But again, once the primary ended, he poured money into Michigan to elect Abdul El-Sayed.
Now to the question of Angie Nixon. On one end, he deserves some blame for not getting behind her. Republican Sen. Ashley Moody only won by 2.9 percentage points. Schumer’s best argument there is that Florida had dramatically shifted to the right since Donald Trump won in 2022 and he likely did not think that a democratic socialist could not win given Miami’s Cuban-American population.
But that is a weak argument given the nation-wide Hispanic shift. And unfortunately Nixon’s best strength is that she seemed to come out of nowhere, so Republicans didn’t really plan to take her out. If she runs again, they’ll be cocked and loaded.
The more pressing question is what does Schumer do with his majority and what does he promise left-wing insurgents. But more importantly, Schumer might face a Joe Biden-style dilemma. Biden read the 2022 midterm not turning into a Democratic apocalypse as a license to run again in 2024. Schumer might misread a Democratic victory as a reason to run for re-election, only to lose a primary.
Danielle from Australia writes:
Given this is Trump and therefore not your average lame duck president, what do you think are the things we need to pay close attention to now for both sides? Loving your work from Australia.
Love you too, Danielle.
We sorta got an idea of what he’d do on Friday when he named Stephen Miller to be his White House chief of staff.
Historically, presidents reshuffle their cabinets after a midterm. Think George W. Bush firing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after 2006. After the 2014 midterm thrashing, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel resigned from the Obama administration.
But Miller’s ascent shows that Trump and company learned nothing from Latino voters overwhelmingly revolting against the administration and voting for Democrats.
Mike Madrid did a Substack Live reacting to the results from South Texas and Hispanic voters offered the clearest middle finger of any voting group this week. But he shows no signs of backpedaling on his immigration policy.
I would not expect an “Only Nixon can go to China” moment on immigration reform. Trump sees his loss as a time to double down. I also expect that the deeper investigations go, Trump will try to tire our Democrats in the House and Senate so they can’t go after everything. This was what Steve Bannon meant when he said “flood the zone with shit.”
Adeline Hutson writes:
In a campaign ad, Josh Turek claimed to support a ban on federal funding for hormone replacement therapy. Could such a measure realistically make it onto the President’s desk even with a Democratic majority in both houses?
Toward the end of the campaign, now Sen.-elect Josh Turek (D-Iowa), who is a retired Paralympian released an ad talking where he said “I oppose males competing in female sports” and “I’m against taxpayers paying for sex changes too.”
About 152,000 transgender people are on Medicaid, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of law. This would also mean that federal employees would be prohibited from receiving gender-affirming care. Transgender U.S. military servicemembers woukd also not be able to use TriCare when, before the Trump administration attempted to ban trans service members, is the largest employer of transgender people, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
Any possible standalone legislation probably dies before it goes to the Senate. But if he is on a committee like the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, he likely could vote for it. But given how big the majority is–Democrats as of publication have at least 54 Senate seats–it is likely that these types of bills die in committee. The only way it likely passes is if they go through an Appropriations spending bill, but Democrats have killed many of these amendments in the appropriations process in the past.
Rio asks:
If Peltola wins her senate bid, and Schumer is no longer leader, do you think there’s a chance we get an independent Murkowski caucusing with dems?
A week ago, I would have said “yes.” I assumed that Democrats would win 52 or 53 Senate seats. Ever since Sen. Lisa Murkowski won a write-in campaign in 2010 after losing to a Tea Party challenger, she’s relied on a fragile coalition of Democrats who cross over to support her, old-line Republicans and independents. Her vote for the One Big, Beautiful Bill cost plenty of goodwill from parts of her coalition, as Ivan Moore at Alaska Survey Research revealed last year.
A party switch or becoming an independent who caucuses with the Democrats could possibly help, especially if she joined Democrats on rolling back Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid cuts.
I’m not so convinced now. For one, Democrats will now be have least 54 seats. Democrats have less of a reason to persuade her. Collins leaving the top spot gives an opening for her to become the top Republican on Appropriations. As a Republican from a rural state, this is a very enticing offer.
Third, it’s not clear her numbers would improve if she caucuses with the Democrats. There’s also the simple fact that she would likely not want to work under Schumer or be associated with a Democratic president. So for now? I doubt it even if Peltola loses.
What I’m reading: Adam Reiner in New York Magazine asks Steve Kornacki, the patron saint of this newsletter, about his caffeine intake. Devin Gordon in The Atlantic on LeBron James vs. Philadelphia. Grace Panetta in The 19th News on the role masculinity played in the midterms.
Your regular Bam Bam post:
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