On Tuesday night, oyster farmer and combat veteran Graham Platner overwhelmingly sailed to victory in the Democratic Senate primary in Maine. His opponent, Gov. Janet Mills unofficially dropped out in late April, leaving Platner effectively unopposed. But a series of scandals rocked his candidacy, leaving his viability against Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November in question.

The veteran has repeatedly emphasized the way his combat trauma made him a worse version of himself, and how in later years he has been able to heal and evolve. In Maine, Democrats so far appear to have accepted that message of redemption, and his promise to provide a progressive economic agenda for Maine.

“It’s a very working-class state that has been very badly impacted by job loss and then, in recent years, by a pretty extreme wave of gentrification,” Intercept reporter Noah Hurowitz says. “The progressive policy agenda of Graham Platner combined with the perceived authenticity of his ‘I am a fighter, I will actually do this,’ whereas Janet Mills who has been in power and overseen a lot of this and has not been perceived to bring a lot of the changes that Mainers seek” is resonating with voters.  

We also check in on California, where Intercept contributor Jordan Uhl breaks down the latest conspiracy theories about voter suppression, which conservatives have hinged on the defeat of former reality TV star Spencer Pratt, and the early results in the governor’s race. Uhl also breaks down how betting platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket are adding to the confusion, and what that could mean come November. 

“If they don’t like the outcome, it’s rigged. If they like the outcome, it’s fine,” says Uhl. “At the gubernatorial level, you can see how Megyn Kelly pointing to prediction market data is symptomatic of a larger problem here. People weren’t looking to actual polling data. They were looking to the behavior of gamblers to inform their analysis.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept. 

Noah Hurowitz: I’m Noah Hurowitz, I cover federal law enforcement, immigration, and elections at The Intercept. 

JW: Noah, it’s great to have you on again. This week we wanted to check in with you about the Democratic Senate primary in Maine where Graham Platner, the combat veteran and oyster farmer, faced a series of scandals.  

But before we do all of that, let’s get into the results from Tuesday night. So Maine Gov. Janet Mills had already suspended her primary race against Platner in late April, so he was effectively running unopposed in the primary. But Noah, what were the results from Tuesday night, and what do they tell us about Mainers and what they want?

NH: The results were an overwhelming win for Platner. He came in at over 70 percent of the vote. The AP called it on Tuesday night with 8 percent showing. It was just very clear that he had carried the day, and I think a big part of that was because Governor Mills had unofficially suspended campaigning earlier in the cycle in April.

But in light of some of the news that came out the week before the primary, Janet Mills had slyly reminded people that she was still on the ballot. So there was a question going into Tuesday night of what is her showing going to be and what will that tell us about general support for Platner.

She did carry about 19 percent of the vote last time I checked which does show that one in five Democratic primary voters in Maine at least had some issue with casting a ballot for Platner in the primary. I don’t know if it tells us much about what his support is going to be in the general, because that is going to be a much more pitched battle.

It’s going to be much more Democrat versus Republican, rather than a vote where people felt like they could cast, let’s say, a protest vote against a candidate that they were not sure about.

JW: Yeah, and I really want to get more into the general election, because I think that’s going to be pretty interesting.

But we obviously can’t talk about Graham Platner without talking about the scandals that have emerged in the last few months. I’m just going to read through some of them. So until October of last year, he had a tattoo of Nazi iconography. He had previously made rape apology posts on Reddit. He was accused and admitted to sending inappropriate messages while married.

And I would argue most damning, an ex-girlfriend, who we should note is currently a Republican operative, accused him of physically restraining her and locking her in a room overnight. She also claimed that he was well aware of the meaning of the Nazi tattoo. Now, Platner has denied both allegations from his ex-girlfriend, but he has admitted to having the tattoo, which he covered up last year, and making the posts.

Do you think that these scandals hurt his campaign, or do you think that people perceive these stories as political attacks from the establishment? And by the establishment, I mean both in Maine and then also, I would argue, in the form of mainstream media like The New York Times and Politico. And I’m wondering, did those attacks maybe actually increase his support? I tend to think the latter.

NH: Yeah, the stuff about the tattoos and the Reddit posts came out pretty early into the campaign last fall. To be honest, I thought that they were going to sink him. I don’t know how you survive, having a Nazi tattoo. But he steamrolled right through that.

A big part of his message about himself has been a story of redemption. He was a combat veteran. It took him a long time to overcome a lot of the effects of that. He’s talked openly about his struggles with alcohol, about his post-traumatic stress disorder, and about how he was a very angry young man and found some level of peace after he came back to Maine, where he grew up.

Related

Graham Platner Wins in Maine, Turning Anti-Establishment Fight on Susan Collins

The new stuff in the week before the primary, first there was an article about him having sexted with women after he was married, quite recently. And then, of course, as you mentioned, the The New York Times story, where there were allegations of physical abuse, allegations of him physically restraining his ex-girlfriend.

That, I think, did prompt a much more serious reckoning. A lot of his supporters were, A, yes, outright dismissive of what they saw as an establishment attack on an insurgent populous candidate. But I think it also, whether this is canny politics on his part or whether you choose to believe him, it was possible for him to say that, “Look, that’s just not who I am anymore. I regret deeply a lot of my actions when I was struggling in that way, and, here I am, a changed man fighting for you.” And that was a big part of his speech on Tuesday night when he accepted the nomination. He spoke a lot about redemption and about grace.

This was something that came up in my conversations with people in Maine in the run-up to the election was that, look, Maine is a state with high levels of substance use disorder. Maine is a state where there’s a lot of poverty, and there’s a lot of people who are veterans. And I think that the message of, “I was having a rough time, and I got my act together,” really does resonate. So I think there’s a combination of seeing this as an establishment attack, but also in accepting his story of getting his act together.

JW: It’s understandable, and I think at the same time, there is something to the narrative of an angry young man who really took it out allegedly on the women in his life, and then also making some of these posts that are obviously really offensive. I think particularly for female voters, I have to imagine there are a lot of women who are thinking, “I knew an angry young man, and I’m still living with the consequences of that angry young man. And it’s great for him to find redemption, but I’m still in this.” Those stories can be both triggering, but, and I imagine hopeful for some of those men who still find themselves in that place. But I think it’s a complicated space to walk.

NH: Yeah, no you’re absolutely right. And I think when it comes to someone running for office on a message of fighting for the common man or whatever. I think that a lot of the people who support his candidacy have this attitude of, yes, he had a messy personal life. Yes, some of these things that are described are inexcusable. But should that consign us to another Susan Collins term? Should that consign us to a more watered-down Democratic candidate who is not going to bring the same fire? And I think for a lot of people the answer is no. A lot of the people who I spoke to were wrestling with those questions. That’s something that’s going to continue to be in the discourse for sure.

JW: In your conversations, did you feel like people were more so focused on his progressive economic agenda, or did they feel more anger at the establishment? Is this about sticking it to Janet Mills, sticking it to Susan Collins, or is this about— He’s really putting forward a very progressive economic agenda for Maine. What do you feel resonated with people you spoke to?

NH: I think they go hand-in-hand. One of the biggest issues for Mainers is affordability. The state has been in a prolonged job crisis basically for decades.

Everybody knows someone who has been laid off from the paper mill. Because the paper mill closed, they lost their logging trucking route. People know lobstermen who have been forced off the water. It’s a very working class state that has been very badly impacted by job loss, and then in recent years by a pretty extreme wave of gentrification.

I  went to school in Maine in Portland, and I don’t think I know anyone who still lives in Portland. Everyone has had to move to other cities like Lewiston and Auburn, which then in the chain reaction of gentrification and displacement then sees higher prices. But the jobs haven’t really come. 

I think that the progressive policy agenda of Graham Platner combined with the perceived authenticity of his, “I am a fighter, I will actually do this,” whereas Janet Mills has been in power and overseen a lot of this and has not been perceived to bring a lot of the changes that Mainers seek. 

JW: We have seen a knee-jerk reaction from some people on the left to dismiss outright the concerns around some of Platner’s actions, and accuse those who raise the issue of being a centrist or a corporate shill.

But at the same time, it’s clear that he is not the establishment pick, and his campaign has been heavily reported on and scrutinized in the media. Noah, you’ve done a lot of really great nuanced reporting on this race, which by the way everyone should check out, but what do you make of the reaction to Platner from both sides of this political divide?

NH: There’s two things. There’s what is being talked about in Maine and what is being talked about in national media. This was something that I didn’t quite get to when we were talking about the scandals, but another thing that came up in multiple conversations with political knowers of things in Maine, is that it’s not just the establishment that people see behind these attacks, but also national media — the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post. People in Maine are generally suspicious of what they call folks from away. 

Maine is a very unique political landscape. I hesitate to even call it purple because it is this mishmash of some right-leaning tendencies. People tend to be very pro-gun. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of more socially liberal or libertarian tendencies among Mainers. There’s people on the hard right who hate Platner because they think he’s a stooge, because they think he’s pro-immigrant, because they are in the tank for, if not Susan Collins for the power of the Trump administration, which would be badly affected by losing a Republican senator.

On the left in Maine the support is just generally there for Platner. He’s done very well there. More toward the center in, let’s say, national politics, I think that there has definitely been a lot of wariness around Graham Platner whether that’s because they think he’s going to be another Fetterman, which by the way, I don’t think he’s going to be another Fetterman. That’s best exemplified by John Fetterman going off nonstop against Graham Platner. 

There’s a worry that they don’t know what direction he’s going to go in, that they can’t control him or that they just worry about his electability. But knowing Maine and having reported on this now for a while, I think that if anything he’s going to be more electable than a Janet Mills. Susan Collins has fended off pretty formidable challenges in the past. In 2020, she faced a challenge from Sara Gideon, who was a very well-known Democratic politician in Maine, fairly progressive. But she didn’t have that sort of insurgent credibility that Platner brings to the race.

And despite polling well, Sara Gideon lost badly. She lost by eight points. So I think that if anything, Maine specifically demands an outside-the-box challenge to someone as entrenched as Susan Collins.

JW: What is your expectation of how these scandals will follow Platner into the general election against Susan Collins?

Obviously she’s going to use them. I also would imagine, thinking about how things have come out so far, that there could be more things coming out. How do you imagine this is going to affect him in the general?

NH: I think that people are going to be digging. I think that national reporters and local reporters are going to be looking for anything that they can find. Just based on the kind of behavior that was described in these stories, one could assume that a messy life yields a lot of opposition research. I do think that some of the main points have already been arrived at in The New York Times reporting, and the tattoo and the Reddit post.

Susan Collins will definitely use these stories against Platner in the general but frankly, I think that it might hit a little bit less than it would coming in a primary from a Democrat, because another thing that people brought up multiple times in my reporting over the last week was that there’s this double standard.

It’s not just that, oh, Trump’s behavior has lowered the bar. It’s that Susan Collins has supported Donald Trump every step of the way, despite the Access Hollywood tape. She voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh despite the allegations against him. She enabled the elimination of Roe v. Wade. One issue that I think matters a lot to people in Maine and has a distinct intersection here with issues of women’s rights and women’s health is that affordability is not just, “Oh, I can’t pay my rent.” Hospitals are closing in Maine, specifically OBGYN units.

So a lot of people in Maine are having to go either to Portland or to Boston for procedures that they might otherwise have been able to get at units that closed in the mid-coast area or farther north. This was something actually that Platner brought up in his speech. 

So I think if you’re saying that he is bad to women based on the reporting so far, I think you can definitely make that argument, and I don’t think that Graham Platner would disagree. Ultimately I think that the Platner campaign strategy is going to be, “This is not about necessarily like personal taste. It’s about what I will deliver for the people of Maine.” And what Susan Collins has delivered for the people of Maine is Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s consistent hatred of and demeaning attitude towards women, the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and this affordability crisis where hospitals are closing in the state and forcing women to go for procedures to Portland or to Boston,

JW: So it sounds like we’re going to have a lot to watch in this race come November. Noah, we’re going to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us.

NH: Thanks so much for having me.

JW: Next, we head to LA, where the mayoral primary has become the latest victim of right-wing panic and false claims of election fraud with Intercept contributor and my co-host, Jordan Uhl. But first, a quick break.

[Break]

JW: Hey, Jordan. Great to have you here.

Jordan Uhl: Hey, it is great to be here on the other side of the conversation.

JW: Jordan, you’ve been following the primaries for California governor and LA mayor quite closely. And because vote counting can take weeks in Los Angeles and the state generally for various reasons, including there being huge population centers and a lot of vote-by-mail ballots, it has become the latest target of claims by Republicans that there is election fraud.

President Donald Trump posted on social media, “Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the LA runoffs after the big lead he had.” By the way, Pratt is the Republican candidate in the LA primary. In an interview with NBC “Meet the Press,” Trump stormed off after being pressed for evidence of his claims that the California governor’s race and the 2020 presidential elections were rigged.

[Clip plays]

Kristen Welker: …presented in a court of law-

Donald Trump:  The election was rigged. It was a dirty election.

Kristen Welker: Mr. President. 

Donald Trump: And it’s happening again right now in California. 

Kristen Welker: You’ve never presented evidence that the 2020 election was rigged.

Donald Trump: It’s happening right now in California. Right now, it’s, look at what’s happening in California.

Kristen Welker: Where’s the evidence to that?

[Clip ends]

JW: As Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton and Pratt’s leads dwindled, conservative commentator Megyn Kelly parroted really similar talking points on her show.

Megyn Kelly: No one is going to trust this outcome if those two are eliminated from the general election given the leads that we’ve seen. … If you look at the betting markets, and they don’t know anything more than we do, generally they don’t, they’re all now voting against Spencer Pratt and Steve Hilton even making it.

JW: We’re going to end the clip there. Kelly goes on to complain about the mail-in ballots coming in as if that’s nefarious, when it’s just a continuation of legitimate vote counting.

It’s worth noting a few days later, as more votes have come in, Hilton is now set to face Democrat Xavier Becerra in the state’s general election come November. But that hasn’t stopped loud MAGA voices from claiming the LA election was stolen from Pratt. 

Now, it seems to me that if you can believe an election was rigged in Los Angeles because a conservative former reality TV star with no experience and a reputation for wasteful spending and explosive outbursts didn’t win, you can believe anything.

But Jordan, how has the right tried to spin his defeat? What does it tell us as we head into November? Are there trends you’re seeing in the LA mayor’s race that mirror national trends in elections across the country? 

JU: I mean, that is just patently ridiculous. The trends that we’re seeing are just continuations of trends or behavior patterns that Republicans have already exhibited in elections previously.

If they don’t like the outcome, it’s rigged. If they like the outcome, it’s fine. More of the same here. At the gubernatorial level, you can see how Megyn Kelly pointing to prediction market data is symptomatic of a larger problem here. People weren’t looking to actual polling data; they were looking to the behavior of gamblers to inform their analysis.

So Hilton, now we know, is making the runoff. She was certain — based on gambling behavior — that he wouldn’t. So in her mind, the only conclusion was fraud. 

There were many people who waited until later to decide who to vote for, that may not inform who they vote for in the general. But conservatives didn’t have a menu of options.

The field was largely consolidated behind Pratt in LA, and for the most part, you had the Trump endorsement of Steve Hilton for governor. While Chad Bianco, the sheriff from Riverside, did pull some votes, for the most part, they were lining up behind [Hilton]. So it was much more clear who they would vote for, so it allowed them to cast their vote early.

JW: Thinking just about Pratt, we’ve seen him on television as this kind of outrageous figure. I want to just play a couple clips just to give an idea of what millennials have going on in their mind when they hear the name Spencer Pratt.

[Clip montage plays]

Spencer Pratt: Wah, wah, wah, wah. What are you crying about, Stephanie? What the f— are you crying about? …

That’s why you’re not in my life, you crazy bitch. …

Your mom is just the vagina that made Heidi come onto Earth. Your mom is not Jesus or God!

Brody Jenner: Dude, relax, bro. What the hell is wrong with you?

Spencer Pratt: I hate that bitch. Excuse my French. 

[Clips end]

JW: OK, so now that everyone’s gotten a taste of Pratt — if I’m being honest, I did that mostly for fun. But to talk about something a little bit more serious, as you’ve pointed out, betting markets are playing a role in this election. So Kalshi, Polymarket, can you explain briefly what Kalshi and Polymarket are, and how they’re factoring into this election and more elections around the country?

JU: These are, you could say, loopholes to current gambling laws. Well, you’re not actively betting in a sportsbook, you’re making a prediction about an outcome, and somehow — I’m not a lawyer — somehow that is legal. In California, sportsbooks are illegal. So in states like California, these platforms thrive. But they operate nationally for the most part.

They have been pumping a ton of money into advertisements, but also through influencers in paid promotional posts. Now, what that looks like is influencers or creators will point to prediction market data. The example that we saw with Megyn Kelly: Oh, well, the prediction markets are saying one thing, but then a different outcome occurred.

That’s not actual polling data. And this blurring of the lines is deliberate by Polymarket and Kalshi — not because they want people to have a clear picture, but because they want people to use their platforms. They want to bring in new customers. Ideally, they want those customers to lose money so they make increased profits.

Related

We Need to Kick Prediction Market Betting Out of Journalism While We Still Can

Now, the argument that I’ve heard against this from people who have been approached by these companies is, “I don’t want anything to do with it,” because in a sense it could be seen as a form of voter suppression.

Let’s take the New York mayoral election as an example. If betting market data said that Andrew Cuomo had a 90 percent chance of winning the election, and you are a supporter of Zohran, you might see those odds and think, “It’s not worth it. He’s going to win.” But as we saw in that election, Zohran Mamdani brought the vote out and won. He is now mayor of New York. So polling showed a much closer race.

Polling in the LA mayoral primary showed in the last reputable poll before the election that Councilmember Nithya Raman was in second place. Spencer Pratt was in third. And now as these results are counted, it matches the polling data. It did not match the behavior of gamblers. 

I think the biggest issue here, Jessica, is that Republicans only make up around 15 percent of the population in Los Angeles. If you look at the 2024 presidential election data, Spencer Pratt got, as it stands right now, within 1 percent of the vote share that Donald Trump got in the election. So the idea that he would somehow outperform Trump, just pull all of these votes from two Democrats in the city to somehow either make the runoff or, as he claimed in the eve of the election, win outright in the primary, which would be more than half of the vote — it was never rooted in reality or past elections.

JW: Yeah, it really concerns me. The idea that we would be replacing polls, which are, admittedly imperfect, but at least they’re scientific and evidence-based, not just vibes and guesses.

And not to air out the business of my co-host, but you’ve been approached by one of these companies. Can you tell us about that? What are they offering people to partner with them, and what are the expectations?

JU: They did. Kalshi has reached out to me twice with offers of “partnerships.” And what that looks like isn’t explicit pitching, “Hey, use this platform. I use this platform,” like you would in a traditional product placement.

It’s much more covert. They want you to integrate that betting market data into your content. It’s kind of a backdoor way of advertising. I had said no, just cut them off from the beginning in both offers; I’m not interested in that. But I have friends with representation who heard them out just to get a sense of what they were offering. I have heard from multiple people: They’re throwing around six-figure offers and, in many cases, multiple six-figure offers. We’re talking mid-six figures. 

The people that I’ve talked to all said, no, they didn’t feel good about it, for the concerns that we’ve laid out. In their opinion, these companies are predatory, and it could have a suppressive effect on the vote. And there just aren’t really guardrails on these platforms which allows them to prey on people.

JW: Wired reported that both Kalshi and Polymarket had to ask influencers they were partnering with to take down paid partnership tags after they falsely claimed the LA primary results were dubious. Semafor reported that Kalshi asked one of its MAGA influencers — who wrote, “Is California cheating to get Spencer Pratt out?” and “They’re stealing it, aren’t they?” to their 1.7 million X followers — to take down the post. Jordan, what do you make of that?

JU: This is a problem of their own making. I’d say a less charitable interpretation of their marketing strategy on social media would be to pay people who would likely be ideologically aligned with candidates who have no hope of winning to boost the prediction market data that shows that they are either outperforming or, in Pratt’s case, making the runoff or winning outright.

Those outcomes were not rooted in polling data. But to a client base or a customer base who would believe those things are possible based on data from bettors — that’s just free money for Kalshi. All of those people would lose their bets, and that’s a windfall of cash.

So it seems like they were trying to walk things back when they had already paid these people to promote somebody who had no real prospects.

JW: I have to say, there is something interesting to me that this is the same year I found out what a “parlay” was, and it’s also the same year that the betting markets are trying to take over the election. But just coincidence, I guess. 

So Vanity Fair just put out an article, “Spencer Pratt’s Mayoral Campaign Proves It Takes More Than Mastering the Algorithm to Get Elected.” He really did pop off with these AI videos that didn’t do it for me personally, but seemed to really be catching attention.

He had all this celebrity endorsement, but it didn’t go anywhere for him electorally. He, I think, did worse than just any kind of standard Republican probably would have done. Jordan, what do you make of the ways in which we’re maybe noticing the attention economy isn’t the exact same thing as electoral success?

JU: Spencer Pratt learned a lesson that many lefty progressive candidates over the past several years have learned the hard way, that simply running an online or Twitter-focused campaign does not lead to votes. Spencer Pratt had a lot of buzz, but that buzz was national. So of course, that’s not going to lead to votes in the city of Los Angeles.

The AI ads, some of them weren’t even made by his campaign, while they did use AI-generated images for posters and campaign art. To me, that kind of illustrates the hollowness of that campaign. It was much more sensational. It was more of a spectacle than substance. And to my knowledge, I don’t know what kind of ground game Spencer Pratt had. You need to get out and knock on doors. That it is campaigning 101. 

He threw some parties. He cut a couple videos. He had some really slick ads. But are you talking about issues that matter to all of Los Angeles? The way he talked about the unhoused population in Los Angeles was seen by many as cruel and insensitive.

When talking about the fires, the fires of last year, which were a centerpiece of his campaign, it always seemed to come back to him. He lost his home. I know multiple people who lost their homes, and they didn’t resort to demonizing homeless people. 

Even the frustration with the city’s response or the state’s response, no objective observer can look at those fires and the conditions that worsened them — the Santa Ana winds — that came in and made it difficult, and in many cases impossible, for helicopters to get into the hills to fight those fires, which is how they do combat wildfires in the hilly parts of the city. 

The speed of those winds were 70, 80 miles an hour. You can’t get a helicopter up there. No rational person is going to see that and say, “Yes, this is clearly the mayor’s fault.” This is just a tragic disaster. 

So for him to insinuate that this is all Mayor Bass and Nithya Raman’s fault is insulting to voters’ intelligence. They can recognize maybe the way it was responded to wasn’t great, but they’re not the reason the fires started in the first place.

JW: I did want to get into one positive takeaway from the LA mayoral primary that Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones editor-in-chief and my former boss, pointed out on Blue Sky, that now that the race will be between incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and Council Member Nithya Raman, we might actually get a real conversation around affordable housing and housing policy in general. Jordan, can you tell us a bit more about Raman and the issues on the table heading into November?

JU: This is going to be a very fascinating race to watch, and it has already started with Karen Bass blaming problems of homelessness on Nithya Raman. I think what she’s going to need to navigate is, Bass, the current mayor, will need to navigate is helping her potential voters understand that the city council does have a lot of power, more power in LA than city councils around the country.

Now, you can’t blame all of LA’s problems on one single council member, but I’m going to be very interested to see how this plays out. Yes, I think on the policy front, that’s great. We actually can have, ideally a substantial policy debate in a general election. This is typically not something that we see.

That’s why a lot of people, I think, were hopeful that Tom Steyer could make the runoff, because that potentially could force the favorite, Xavier Becerra, into tacking to the left on some of his positions, like oil, housing, and the billionaire tax. Unfortunately, he has nothing to hold him accountable. There’s no leverage to force him to shift positions now that he’s going to be facing Steve Hilton. 

There is a shifting landscape in the LA mayoral race, which is going to be very fascinating. Nithya Raman, certainly not without critics, but she is widely seen as to the left of Karen Bass, and potentially we could see Karen Bass make promises that if she does defeat Raman in the general, will then be used to hold her accountable.

JW: Yeah, it is hard to imagine any kind of substantive debates happening in the alternate reality where we had a Spencer Pratt, Mayor Karen Bass race. Jordan, we’re going to leave it there, but thank you so much for joining me on the Intercept Briefing.

JU: Thank you so much for having me.

JW: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy-editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com. What issues are you following in the midterms, send us an email or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post The Right’s “Election Fraud” Cry for Midterms Previewed in Primaries appeared first on The Intercept.

His opponent, City Council and Democratic Socialists of America member Janeese Lewis George, was “sitting on her hands and playing politics” by opposing a police-enforced curfew for minors, McDuffie said.

So-called “teen takeovers,” or large, coordinated meetups of teenagers in public spaces, have become a key political cause in D.C., where McDuffie argues the city needs to crack down to stave off the worst excesses of the federal government. His critics say he’s falling into a rhetorical trap laid by the Trump administration.

“When teen takeovers threaten the safety of residents and the young people themselves,” McDuffie wrote in a letter to the City Council, “the Council cannot afford to leave law enforcement and communities without every appropriate tool at their disposal.” 

Last summer, before the federal takeover of D.C., McDuffie and Lewis George both voted in favor of broad emergency curfew powers that allowed Mayor Muriel Bowser to create targeted zones that youth could not enter after certain hours, enforced by local police. D.C. has long had limited curfew laws on the books, and an update to the city’s permanent curfew law with new restrictions on enforcement is set to go into effect mid-July.

The candidates, who will face off in a Democratic primary to replace Bowser on Tuesday, have since split. Lewis George voted against both extending the emergency and implementing the new permanent law. McDuffie, though no longer on the council, said he supported both. 

To some, the scene at the Chipotle represented lawlessness and amplified their fears around the city’s youth. To others, the incident, which police told local media caused no injuries or damage, failed to warrant curfew policies which would increase arrests and police harassment of teenagers, primarily Black teens. 

The neighborhood around the Chipotle is beautiful, said Alex Dodds, “designed as a space where people should come and gather.”

“When Black children do that, they are seen as criminals,” said Dodds, campaign director for Free DC, an organization advocating for the city’s sovereignty that has endorsed Lewis George. “I don’t even understand what we want children to do.” 

A few miles away from McDuffie’s Chipotle press conference, Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, struck an eerily similar chord to McDuffie. 

“Teen takeovers … have terrorized our neighborhoods,” said the former Fox News host. “They have shut down businesses, and they have wasted hard-earned tax dollars of law-abiding residents who just want to live and work in peace.” 

Federal law enforcement officials would soon begin a “summer surge” targeting teenagers, Pirro warned. She added that her office would begin “aggressively prosecuting parents” whose children violated curfew laws, threatening them with up to six months in prison.    

McDuffie has weaponized the teen gatherings in campaign advertisements and public comments to argue that strict curfew zones — and the tough-on-crime mayoral candidate pushing them — will help forestall more aggressive actions by the Trump administration.

But advocates for D.C. sovereignty and youth in the criminal justice system warned that his rhetoric would only legitimize the administration’s efforts to incarcerate D.C. youth on a large scale, and that there is no evidence teen curfews reduce violent crime. Instead, they say, such curfews would increase the rates of arrest and harassment, particularly of Black teens, at a time when the city is swarming with federal agents. 

“Kenyan McDuffie is much more buying into the Trump administration’s playbook of lock-them-up and using fear to gain support,” said Dodds. “It’s so frustrating for our elected leaders … to obey in advance and go out of their way to press for a youth curfew.”

Trump personally weighed in on the race on Thursday, threatening to “take back Washington, run it on the federal basis,” if Lewis George were elected.

The theory in favor of juvenile curfews is that if you deter teens from gathering, they’ll have fewer opportunities to commit crime. But that relies on a misconception, said Riya Saha Shah, chief executive officer of the Juvenile Law Center.

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“Social science research has shown us that [curfews] are actually not effective at reducing crime or victimization,” said Shah. “It could result in increased crime or displaced crime in different places or at different hours of the day.” 

In 2015, research on juvenile curfews in D.C. found that they actually increased rates of gun violence among youth. Researchers theorized that the emptier streets that resulted from curfew policies could make “remaining offenders more comfortable opening fire.” 

While juvenile curfews do not reduce crime, Shah said, they do increase run-ins with police, particularly for Black and brown children. A 2011 study found that African American youths were 269 percent more likely to be arrested for violating curfew laws than white ones. The laws can also end up criminalizing teenagers for being unhoused, and an estimated 10,000 children in D.C.  experience housing insecurity or homelessness every year. 

“They may be brought into a system by virtue simply that they don’t have the ability to go home,” Shah said.

In D.C., where nearly 20 federal agencies have been deployed, these types of curfews pose immense risks for teens. “There are so many different kinds of law enforcement all over the city now,” said Shah. “It really increases the likelihood that children will be arrested.”   

In his letter to the City Council urging extended youth curfews, McDuffie argued the curfews were necessary to protect “Home Rule,” the 1970s law that gave Washington, D.C., relative independence from the federal government. 

“President Donald Trump has deployed the National Guard on D.C. streets and floated proposals to try 14-year-olds as adults. Every week that this Council allows curfew authority to lapse, it hands the White House and its allies fresh evidence for that narrative and justification for federal intervention,” he wrote. 

Lewis George, by contrast, has emphasized that her primary objection to the curfew extension is the intense presence of federal law enforcement in the city.

Despite the lack of evidence to support the idea that teen curfews lower violent crime rates, the policy is overwhelmingly popular with D.C. voters. A Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 71 percent of voters supported imposing curfews in certain parts of the city at night.

Though her current position is unpopular, Lewis George has continued to surge in the polls, leading McDuffie by 11 points in the same poll. Internal numbers shared with The Intercept have her up further. 

But Lewis George has not done as well as her opponent with Black voters, a key constituency in the capital sometimes known as Chocolate City. In the Washington Post-Schar School poll, she trailed McDuffie by 5 points with Black voters. A spokesperson for her campaign said that Lewis George was proud of the multiracial coalition she had built, and argued that she does best in the most racially diverse areas of the city. 

The relationship between race and power is complicated in Washington D.C. Rapid gentrification has pushed out much of the city’s Black population, displacing an estimated 20,000 between 2000 and 2013. Between 2000 and 2020 Black residents went from being 59 percent of the population to 41 percent. And yet, the city’s political leadership has largely remained Black — it’s had a Black mayor since Home Rule was established. 

Kurtis Hagans, chair of Metro DC DSA, which endorsed Lewis George, said it is understandable that people with long-standing ties to the city would be skeptical of someone promising change at the scale Lewis George is calling for. She has pledged to build 72,000 new homes in five years to deal with the city’s housing affordability crisis — double the goals set by McDuffie and Bowser; called for stronger labor protections; promised to vigorously enforce wage theft laws; and vowed to establish a Federal Workforce Transition Center to retrain the thousands of federal workers who were laid off by the Trump administration.

Lewis George strongly outperforms with voters 18-39, and she does the worst with voters 65 and older. 

“There’s an element of disappointment with the Democrats in the city, folks who have before promised big change and transformative change, and then have let them down,” said Hagans, referencing previous mayors Vincent Gray and Adrian Fenty. “I can imagine that’s like, OK, well, at least we know Bowser.” 

Mayor Bowser has not officially endorsed a candidate, but she has clearly made known her preference for McDuffie, who has benefited from her coalition of more centrist Democrats and the city’s business community. 

In Dodds’s view, Bowser has spent much of her final term in office attempting to appease Trump with little to show for it. 

“If appeasement was working,” she said, “we wouldn’t be getting attacked, and they wouldn’t be sending in troops, and they wouldn’t be escalating law enforcement, and they wouldn’t be overturning our laws, and they wouldn’t be attempting to destabilize our budget. But they are still attempting to do all of that, so what good has appeasement gotten us?” 

She noted that crime rates had been declining for two years and that the Trump administration still deployed the National Guard and federalized the police force in August 2025. A month later, Trump pushed a House bill to charge children as young as 14 as adults. 

Alignment between local leaders and the White House on pushing carceral policies predates Home Rule. 

In “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America,” scholar James Forman explains how many Black leaders in Washington and elsewhere were complicit in pushing the carceral policies of the 1970s, including teen curfews, that eventually led to the mass incarceration of Black Americans. 

As Forman and scholars like Elizabeth Hinton have noted, those leaders were asking for support services alongside these carceral policies, as McDuffie is doing now. But those large-scale investments failed to materialize. Instead, their communities were ravaged by policing and mass incarceration policies that tore families apart. 

Lewis George, who initially ran for her council seat on a platform of divesting from the police, is no stranger to attacks calling her soft on crime. But for some it’s disappointing to see those same attacks coming from McDuffie, who previously was largely aligned with Lewis George on issues of criminal justice. 

McDuffie had previously expressed skepticism over the emergency teen curfews, though he and Lewis George both voted in favor.

“The research has shown that curfews do not prevent violence,” McDuffie said at a City Council meeting last year. 

McDuffie has taken progressive actions on policing in the past. In 2020, amid heightened political energy around police brutality and broader calls to defund the police, McDuffie voted to pull $15 million from the Metropolitan Police Department’s budget. And in 2021, he said that “we need to redirect funding away from the police department.”

Dodds said it concerned her that McDuffie’s campaign appeared to be capitalizing on D.C. residents’ fears. She argued that’s what the Trump administration wants.

“They very much want us to feel afraid of young people and of Black children in ways that are inherently racist,” said Dodds, “because when we feel afraid, we fight each other instead of fighting for one another.” 

The post D.C. Mayor Candidates Are Fixating on Teen Hangouts — and Turning the Cops on Them appeared first on The Intercept.

Steve Hilton, a conservative former political aide and commentator, finished second Tuesday, a week after the state’s nonpartisan primary day. He will compete with Xavier Becerra, the former Health and Human Services secretary under President Joe Biden. The pair edged out Tom Steyer, a billionaire philanthropist who ran on a progressive platform.

The ascension of Hilton, a conservative power player endorsed by President Donald Trump, suggests dissatisfaction with the slate of Democratic candidates on offer in the open primary and an inability for Steyer, who has never held elected office, to break through with a campaign vowing to help redistribute the wealth.

It also offers Becerra an easier path to election, with California voters expected to skew heavily Democratic in November.

Becerra, who ran a relatively quiet campaign focused on his credentials, previously served as California attorney general under Govs. Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom. He came under fire for his work in that office, as The Intercept reported last month. In 2018, Becerra’s office pushed for the state Supreme Court to artificially inflate the IQ of an intellectually disabled Black man in order to execute him, and he fought to uphold death penalty sentences during the Covid pandemic, despite a moratorium Newsom imposed. Becerra has also been criticized for his alleged mishandling of migrant children who were in his office’s care while serving as HHS secretary. 

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His primary campaign managed to overcome those criticisms, racking up high-profile endorsements from figures including Reps. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., and Ted Lieu, D-Calif., as well as several notable labor unions. Becerra’s campaign was also boosted by the rapid and scandalous departure of former front-runner Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including rape. Swalwell denied the allegations but swiftly resigned from Congress and ended his gubernatorial campaign, clearing a path in the centrist lane that Becerra quickly filled. 

Hilton, meanwhile, spent months neck and neck in the polls with Steyer, a former hedge fund manager who used his immense wealth to fund his campaign yet ran on what was widely considered the most progressive platform in the race, earning the head-turning endorsement of Our Revolution, the group founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. 

While he’s a relative unknown in the United States, Hilton has a reputation in the United Kingdom for helping to orchestrate the rise of former British Prime Minister David Cameron. If he manages to defeat Becerra in November, Hilton will be California’s first Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger, the architect of the state’s open primary system.

The post In California, a Former Biden Official Will Face Fox News Personality for Governor appeared first on The Intercept.

Plainspoken populism won the oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran support among fed-up Mainers, who nominated him in a landslide that The Associated Press called with just 8 percent of the vote in.

“Over the last nine months I have seen Mainers come together behind a vision to take back our power from corporations and billionaires,” Platner said in his acceptance speech Tuesday. “I love every single one of you. Everyone who has shown up at a town hall, who has knocked on a door, who cast their vote — not for me but for a vision of a life in Maine that you can afford; a life of dignity and a government that actually serves its people.”

Platner’s appeal seemed unshaken amid months of negative press stemming from his inflammatory comments on Reddit and an ill-advised tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol. But a recent series of damaging stories in national media, including revelations in the Wall Street Journal about extramarital sexting and allegations in the New York Times of abusive behavior in past relationships, have given some voters and political observers pause. Others say that in Maine, a fiercely independent state where residents nurse a healthy suspicion of influence “from away,” Platner supporters have dismissed those stories as meddling from an establishment fearful of a political maverick.

“From what I can tell, I don’t think the Times piece moved the needle much,” said Shay Stewart-Bouley, a longtime Maine resident who has written both critically and supportively of Platner on her blog, Black Girl in Maine. “I heard some women say it made them uneasy, but I haven’t heard anyone say it changed how they’re going to vote.”

In other cases, the coverage appears to have cemented Platner’s status as an outsider to an establishment embodied by Collins, who has represented Maine in the Senate since 1997. Like many incumbents nationwide, the Republican senator will have to run amid a shrinking job market and rising costs, points that Platner has seized on throughout his campaign. And Collins’s association with the establishment could prove a major liability, even among onetime supporters of President Donald Trump, according to Charles Pray, a former state senator and veteran figure in Maine Democratic politics.

“Part of Trump’s rise was a total frustration with incumbents and people in power, and a lot of people who were Trump supporters who hoped he was going to address rising grocery prices and stuff now see him saying that affordability is not an issue,” said Pray. “Well, affordability is a big issue in Maine, and I think that hurts Collins.”

Platner faced a nominal challenge in Tuesday’s primary from Maine Gov. Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April but remained on the ballot, and from David Costello, a former Democratic nominee in the 2024 Senate race who was little more than an afterthought in the latest contest.

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Just days before the primary, the Times reported disturbing allegations about Platner, including that an ex-girlfriend accused him of drunkenly locking her in a room during a fight and physically restraining her at times. (Platner has acknowledged the relationship with the accuser, a longtime Republican operative in Washington, but denies he engaged in violent behavior.)

Pray said that among people he’s spoken with, the allegations, while concerning, are undercut by Collins’s support for the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh despite the sexual assault accusations against him, and by her support of Trump despite the many accusations against him and his consistently hostile behavior toward women interviewers.

“I think people aren’t buying the double standard. She confirmed Kavanaugh, she supports Trump despite his behavior,” Pray said, pointing to the president’s recent outburst on NBC News. “I spoke to three women, including Republicans, who were very upset by that and who said ‘Susan just goes along with that.’”

To Platner’s most ardent supporters, the revelations look like meddling by an establishment that never wanted him to be the candidate, said Andy O’Brien, a former state senator who writes about politics in the state and supports Platner. (O’Brien works for the AFL-CIO of Maine, which has endorsed Platner, but did not speak to The Intercept on behalf of his employer).

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“So many people know Graham, and they listen to what he says, they don’t listen to all the crap coming from Washington and New York and California,” said O’Brien. “They like Graham because he speaks to them, and they believe him and trust him. They know he had a messy personal life. I think that there’s a lot of grace that they’re showing him, partly because of his post-traumatic stress from combat and also because there’s this sense that Trump has already lowered the bar so much.”

Mostly, however, Mainers are weary of the national attention the primary brought to their state — with little hope in sight of a let-up, Stewart-Bouley said.

“The general mood is people are really tired of this primary,” she said before Platner’s Tuesday night victory. “But if Platner wins, I suspect we’re not going to be out of the woods.”

In his remarks Tuesday, Platner acknowledged errors in his past and thanked the people of Maine for putting their trust in him despite them.

“Redemption is not just some simple or easy destination. It’s a journey. I’ve made mistakes in my life. Mistakes that I regret, that I live with and that I continue to learn from. And I’m still far from perfect. But every day I wake up and I try to be a little bit better and a little bit kinder than I was before,” Platner said. “And if you give me the chance, I will be a senator for the people who cannot afford to buy a senator.”

Update: June 9, 2026, 9:39 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with news of Platner’s victory in the Maine primary.

The post Graham Platner Wins in Maine, Turning Anti-Establishment Fight on Susan Collins appeared first on The Intercept.

The second-place finish for Raman means that in the coming months, Bass will have to grapple with a challenger from her left. The incumbent mayor’s establishment bonafides at once lend her a strong political apparatus and make her the object of voter frustration. Raman, meanwhile, will face an uphill battle against the entrenched Democratic machine, which helped Bass easily secure a first-place finish. The embrace of mail-in voting by Angelenos slowly turned the tide for Raman, who initially trailed Pratt when polls closed last Tuesday.

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Under California’s nonpartisan, open primary system, all viable candidates stood for the same June election — putting Pratt, a Republican, in the same primary as the heavily Democratic field. The top two advance to a runoff in November, meaning Los Angeles voters will choose between two Democrats in the general election ballot.

The emergence of Pratt, who rode a wave of outside conservative funding, prompted an intense debate among the city’s left on how to vote in the open primary. Rae Huang entered the race early on a progressive platform of strident police accountability measures, free and fast buses, and public housing. Raman, a city councilmember, decided to run at the last moment, with polls quickly showing she had a clearer path to a November runoff to fend off Pratt. Huang and her supporters insisted that she had the bolder leftist vision for the city, while Raman’s backers accused the Huang campaign of splitting the left amid a real threat from Pratt. The left is now faced with the task of repairing its fractures ahead of the November runoff. 

Following Zohran Mamdani’s successful run for mayor in New York City, pundits were quick to ponder whether Los Angeles might be having its own Mamdani moment. But closer watchers of LA politics have been asking whether a different New York import could improve elections in the nation’s second biggest city: ranked-choice voting.

A ranked-choice voting system allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. The system often leads to opponents with similar platforms and voter bases to cross-endorse, as was the case with Mamdani and his fellow progressive opponent Brad Lander, which helped stave off the more conservative-leaning former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In the LA race, ranked choice would have allowed Raman and Huang to forge a similar alliance without compromising their positions and cooling the fierce debates among their supporters.

“We’ve heard lots of voters that they are voting strategically, they try and follow the polls instead of supporting their real favorite — that’s the narrative that I think ranked-choice voting would solve,” said Rachel Hutchinson, deputy director of research and policy at FairVote, a nonprofit that is pushing for ranked-choice voting across the U.S., including in Los Angeles, where City Council has until June 26 to decide whether to place a measure on the November ballot that would implement the system in future elections.

“Not only do people not have to drop out, but they can actually act civilly toward each other, especially if they share an ideology or they represent a similar community,” Hutchinson continued. “Voters under this system would feel more empowered to vote their conscience because they can still support their candidate.”

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Raman joined the LA City Council as part of a wing of left-leaning victories that shifted the city’s political calculus, and has cast herself as a pragmatic leader with an eye for policy. But she faced challenges garnering support from the left amid accusations of flip-flopping and cozying up to entrenched local power. Despite running on defunding the police in 2020 as the first member of the Democratic Socialists of America elected to the council, Raman repeatedly voted to expand the Los Angeles Police Department budget, although she has pushed back on plans to expand the force. In 2024, Raman accepted an endorsement from Zionist group Democrats for Israel–Los Angeles, which opposed a ceasefire in Gaza, for which she was widely rebuked and even censured by DSA–LA.

Even though Raman and Huang are both DSA members, the local chapter declined to reopen the endorsement process for them. Raman’s three DSA colleagues on the City Council opted to endorse Bass. 

Bass focused much of her fire on attacking Raman, despite arguably having the biggest ideological disagreements with Pratt. Bass and Raman were once allies: Bass campaigned for Raman in 2024, and Raman supported Bass in her previous mayoral race. But once Raman launched her last-minute campaign, Bass criticized her for claiming to be an outsider with no control over the current issues plaguing the city, despite Raman having spent years in City Hall. 

On Monday, the local publication LA Material released a text message Bass sent Raman shortly after the latter filed to run; it contained only a tweet announcing Raman’s filing and a woman shrugging emoji.

Bass’s tenure as mayor has been rife with controversy, particularly over her handling of the deadly 2025 Pacific Palisades fire. The mayor was in Ghana attending an embassy party when the fire broke out, and she returned home the following day, with her city and reputation in tatters. Bass’s office has also been criticized for watering down an after-action report on the Palisades fire, including allegations that she scrubbed the most damning findings about the city’s shortcomings in responding to the blaze. 

Her supporters are quick to point out that the Santa Ana winds, and not Bass, fueled the intense fire. And in fact, President Donald Trump, who endorsed Pratt, also shares blame for the slow recovery effort. The president and Republicans in Congress have declined to release the $34 billion in Federal Emergency Management Agency aid requested by California Gov. Gavin Newsom for assisting fire survivors. 

The controversy over the fires largely fueled the campaign of third-place finisher Pratt, a former television star on “The Hills” who has never worked in politics and is best known for getting into public spats with his female co-stars. He centered his pitch on his anger at Bass’s handling of the Palisades fire — which consumed his home as well as thousands of others — as well as his disdain for the city’s homeless population, whom he called “bums” and “zombies” and argued should be arrested en masse.

Housing experts told The Intercept that Pratt’s assertions were completely divorced from reality. But they pointed out that the lack of significant progress on the issue of homelessness in Los Angeles under Bass has emboldened figures like Pratt to swoop in and spread misinformation and dangerous propaganda.

The post Democratic Socialist Overcomes GOP-Funded Opponent to Advance in Los Angeles Mayor Race appeared first on The Intercept.

In the race for Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s seat in San Francisco, the YIMBY state Sen. Scott Wiener secured a comfortable victory with more than 40 percent of the vote, according to The Associated Press, which made the early call. Local politician Connie Chan earned the second spot, leaving Saikat Chakrabarti, a prominent figure in national progressive politics, off the general election ballot in November.

In Los Angeles, AIPAC-backed incumbent Rep. Jimmy Gomez easily won a spot on the November ballot, according to a call from the AP. Despite the election-day revelation of a House Ethics Committee investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against him, Gomez fended off a challenge from the progressive insurgent Angela Gonzales-Torres by a wide margin. Results are still coming in, but Gonzales-Torres appears likely to face off against Gomez again in the general election thanks to California’s “jungle primary” system, in which the top two candidates move on to a runoff.

Meanwhile in Sacramento, longtime establishment Democrat Rep. Doris Matsui is currently leading progressive City Councilmember Mai Vang, though that race remains too close to call. 

In these three solidly blue districts, each race has been viewed as part of a wider battle for control between a Democratic establishment seen as faltering in the face of the second Trump administration and a progressive wing that has grown in influence in the decade since the 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — and argues the establishment strategy gave rise to Trump in the first place.

Chakrabarti, Gonzales-Torres, and Vang all had the backing of Justice Democrats, a group that supports progressive challengers in primary elections and helped elect members of the Squad in Congress. Earlier in the evening, Justice Democrats notched a victory when Dr. Adam Hamawy, a former combat surgeon who volunteered in Gaza and faced a barrage of attacks that often peddled in Islamophobic tropes, comfortably beat a crowded field of Democrats in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District.

Justice Dems Co-Founder Won’t Replace Pelosi

Justice Democrats had hoped to elevate Chakrabarti, one of its co-founders, to Congress. After earning his fortune at the tech firm Stripe, the centimillionaire worked on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and became chief of staff to New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Chakrabarti grew to become an influential activist in progressive politics, but he was often a divisive figure, known for riling Democrats online and antagonizing Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who he hoped to succeed. Pelosi, who won her last reelection with 82 percent of the vote in her district, ultimately endorsed Chan, a San Francisco Board of Supervisors member. When The AP called the race for Chan, she held a lead of 13 percent over Chakrabarti.

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Chakrabarti, Chan, and Wiener all jockeyed to be seen as the progressive in the race: All three campaigns call for Medicare for All, the overturning of Citizens United, and abolishing or defunding Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Yet differing views on Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and wealth taxes on billionaires, which Wiener and some of his richest tech-and-development-friendly backers oppose, became notable wedge issues. 

While Wiener and Chan have come to embrace placing conditions on offensive weapons to Israel, Chakrabarti advocated for a total arms embargo on the country. Wiener’s previous support for pro-Israel bills in the state legislature and his earlier opposition to a ceasefire in Gaza drew intense scrutiny during the race, and anti-genocide and anti-Zionist protesters at times disrupted his events on the campaign trail. 

The weekend before the primary election, the race was jolted with final-hour reporting from Drop Site News that revealed the pro-Israel lobby giant, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and its offshoot, Democratic Majority for Israel, had been funneling money into a super PAC supporting Chan. Chakrabarti used the revelation to claim that AIPAC had attempted to keep him out of the general election because of his support for Palestinian human rights, suggesting a degree of collusion between Chan and AIPAC.

Chan, in turn, rejected Chakrabarti’s claims as “absurd and laughable.” She restated her campaign pledge against accepting AIPAC donations and her advocacy for Palestinian rights.

AIPAC-Backed Incumbent Holds Strong Amid Scandal

In Los Angeles, Gonzales-Torres, a community organizer, also made her opposition to the pro-Israel lobby and Israel’s genocide in Gaza a major part of her platform against Gomez. Despite the incumbent’s earlier vows that he would try to rid his fundraising of corporate backers in favor of grassroots support, Gomez’s previous two reelection bids in the 34th Congressional District have been fueled by special interest groups, such as the cryptocurrency industry and AIPAC and DMFI.

AIPAC has continued to support Gomez in the current election cycle, pouring nearly $150,000 into his 2026 run, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Gomez has consistently voted to send military aid to Israel. 

The race was rocked after CNN reported Tuesday that Gomez was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations of sexual misconduct against Gomez. The news came months after the New York Post alleged Gomez, who is married, was spotted kissing the staffer of another member of Congress in 2023 at a party hosted by then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. Swalwell resigned from Congress and ended a California gubernatorial campaign earlier this spring after reporters unearthed allegations of sexual assault from a former staffer, as well as accusations of sexual misconduct from other women, which he denies.

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Gonzales-Torres had previously called into question Gomez’s close relationship to Swalwell and asked whether Gomez, who backed Swalwell’s campaign for governor, had knowledge of the incidents at the time. On Tuesday, she wrote on X that if Gomez “has nothing to hide, he should have no concern. But if there was any criminal behavior that he witnessed, participated in, or helped conceal, we will find out and we will help ensure accountability and justice.”

Gomez, in a statement to CNN, admitted to “personal mistakes outside my marriage that have caused real pain to my wife and family,” but insisted he did not break the law or House ethics rules.

Gomez has thrice fended off another progressive challenger, attorney David Kim, who in 2020 trailed by 6 percentage points in the November general election and came only 3 points from winning in the 2022 general election. Gonzales-Torres, who had previously volunteered for Kim’s campaign, believes her campaign can build on that success and defeat Gomez. 

Insurgent Against Husband-and-Wife Dynasty

In California’s 7th Congressional District, Vang is facing off against a powerful Democratic family. Matsui has held her House seat since 2005, winning after the death of her husband, Bob Matsui, who had represented Sacramento in Congress since 1979.

Vang’s campaign criticized Matsui’s acceptance of corporate donations and painted Matsui as out-of-touch with a transforming Democratic voter base. Vang championed policies that have animated the left, such as Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Green New Deal. At the time of publication, Vang is in a tight battle with a pro-Trump Republican candidate, Zachariah Wooden, a student at California State University, Sacramento.

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Many primaries across the state, such as the Matsui–Vang contest, remain too close to call, with huge numbers of votes left to count and final positions far from settled. That includes the race for California governor, where moderate Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican commentator Steve Hilton are neck-and-neck, with billionaire Tom Steyer, around whom progressives had coalesced, trailing in third at the time of publication. In the LA mayor’s race, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass secured her spot in a November runoff, with reality TV personality Spencer Pratt leading Nithya Raman, a progressive councilmember. 

Other progressive candidates led their races on Tuesday, including Jane Kim, who is running for the state’s insurance commissioner with the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders. In Los Angeles, city attorney candidate Marissa Roy, who drew support from the city’s progressive base, is ahead of the incumbent, Hydee Feldstein Soto, who caught heat for defending LAPD’s brutal tactics against protesters and for deciding not to charge members of a Zionist mob that attacked UCLA’s pro-Palestine encampment.

This is a developing story and will continue to be updated.

The post Establishment Dems Stave Off the Left in Key California Congressional Primaries appeared first on The Intercept.

Adam Hamawy beat a crowded field of Democrats in the state’s 12th Congressional District. The winner of the primary is expected to coast to victory over Republican Gregg Mele in the November general election.

His victory came despite a flurry of right-wing media reports that sought to tarnish the progressive candidate as an Islamic extremist because of his 1995 trial testimony for a religious leader convicted of plotting terror attacks.

Hamawy said he was being targeted with outdated “tropes” as a Muslim in politics. His campaign, which was supercharged by an ad campaign from the independent super PAC American Priorities, demonstrated the growing influence of pro-Palestine donors in contested Democratic primaries.

Hamawy stood out among the 13 candidates in the race vying to replace retiring Democratic Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman because of his compelling backstory and the large ad spend on his behalf by American Priorities, the super PAC founded to counter AIPAC’s influence in Democratic politics.

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Working as a combat surgeon in Iraq in 2004, Hamawy helped save the life of Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., when her helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, which led to the loss of both her legs. In 2024, he also went to Gaza to provide medical aid to Palestinians wounded by Israeli forces and was temporarily trapped there after Israel closed the Rafah border crossing. When the crossing was reopened, Hamawy was among a small group who refused to leave on demands that more medical workers be let in.

Pointing to his experience as a physician, Hamawy staked out policy positions that included support for Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and opposing military aid to Israel. He drew endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, and the Sunrise Movement, in addition to Ocasio-Cortez.

In a joint statement, two progressive, pro-Palestine groups hailed Hamawy’s win. The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project and Justice Democrats said they spent a combined $200,000 in support of his campaign.

“Voters were drawn to Dr. Hamawy’s candidacy because he knows firsthand the reality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza like few do — having worked to save the lives of Palestinian children under bombardment and unimaginable conditions,” the groups wrote. “His experience is necessary in Congress now more than ever, as too many of the people meant to represent us continue to look the other way while our tax dollars fund injustices here and abroad.”

Trailing Hamawy was East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen, a centrist with the backing of his county party who ran as a pro-Israel candidate.

Hamawy competed for the progressive vote against Sue Altman, a longtime activist in New Jersey who served until recently as the state director for Democratic Sen. Andy Kim. Her endorsements included former Sen. Bill Bradley and the New Jersey Working Families Party, which she previously led from 2019 to 2023. She ran far behind Hamawy.

Hamawy’s win was a notable accomplishment for American Priorities, which only launched in February. The group’s first major pick, Nida Allam, fell just short of toppling incumbent Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee in North Carolina. It had better luck in Pennsylvania, where progressive state Rep. Chris Rabb won his district’s Democratic primary last month.

Hamawy’s campaign represented an even bigger test for American Priorities, since he was a first-time politician with a relatively low profile before launching his campaign. The group said at the end of April that it was planning to spend $2 million to boost Hamawy.

Hamawy was polling at only 5 percent of the electorate in a March 30–April 1 poll sponsored by his campaign. By the first week of May, however, the outside support helped power him to first place, with 19 percent support compared to Altman’s 12 percent, according to another poll sponsored by his campaign.

The wide-open nature of the primary and large number of undecided voters helped make it hard to gauge who had the edge. Further complicating matters was a surge of negative press focusing on the brief testimony Hamawy, then 26, gave at the 1995 trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, commonly known as the “The Blind Sheikh,” who was convicted of planning terror attacks.

Hamawy said he had known Abdel-Rahman as a leader in the Egyptian community in New Jersey and condemned extremism of all stripes. He noted his own long service for the U.S. military as well as his experience as a first responder during the September 11, 2001 attacks. “Any Muslim is going to be called a terrorist at some point, and these tropes are outdated and worn. Unfortunately, they continue to be used right now,” Hamawy told the New Jersey Monitor. “These are not serious arguments, and they’re getting old.”

This developing story has been updated.

The post Adam Hamawy, Doctor Who Volunteered in Gaza, Poised to Become Pro-Palestine Rep. From New Jersey appeared first on The Intercept.

Rae Huang and Nithya Raman have each, at varying times, been hailed as Southern California’s analogue to Zohran Mamdani. Yet when the rallies and canvassing sessions have wrapped up, leftists admit that neither has the coalition nor the talent that fueled the New York City mayor’s rise. Huang voices the platform they like; Raman has demonstrated some political chops. Mamdani won because he had both.

With less than a week to go before election day in a crowded nonpartisan primary, Huang, Raman, and 11 other candidates are all vying for second place to the presumed front-runner, incumbent Democratic Mayor Karen Bass. Unless someone gets over 50 percent of the vote, the top two candidates will advance to a runoff in November.

There’s little chance either slot will go to Huang, a Presbyterian minister and activist who jumped into the race last November with plans to run from Bass’s left by campaigning on free buses, affordable housing, and police accountability. She has struggled to break 10 percent in the polls.

Raman, a city councilmember representing a sprawling district that spans the Los Feliz, Hollywood, and San Fernando Valley neighborhoods, surprised her allies and opponents alike when she joined the race just hours before the February filing deadline, but she has since amassed enough support that she could conceivably compete with Bass — or with Spencer Pratt, a right-wing reality TV star whose candidacy has fractured the city’s already divided left.

Pratt has built a campaign attacking Bass’s handling of the Pacific Palisades fire, calling unhoused people drug-addicted “zombies,” and arguing that LA’s housing crisis should be solved with police force. In the eyes of some leftists, a vote for Raman is the pragmatic choice to stop Pratt from making it to November, and a vote for Huang is a throwaway in the name of ideological purity. 

“While I understand the desire to vote for the most value-aligned candidate,” said Leslie Chang, a Raman supporter and co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America–Los Angeles, “if it comes at the cost of everyday people being able to live a better life, that’s not something I have sympathy for.”

Huang’s supporters, meanwhile, argue that Raman’s platform offers little daylight from Bass, whose status quo gave rise to Pratt in the first place.

“Those who consider themselves progressive, or even on the left, have kind of gone into retreat and not let themselves imagine a better political future,” said Michael Burns, a writer and performer who mailed in his vote for Huang. “And for me, supporting candidates with a bold vision, with a left vision, is part of contributing to that imaginary.”

Though both Huang and Raman are Democratic Socialists of America members, the local chapter has not endorsed either candidate, and Raman’s three DSA colleagues on the City Council have endorsed Bass. Huang and Raman’s campaigns did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Despite being a DSA member, Nithya Raman has at times aligned herself with more conservative forces and struggled to build coalitions on the left. After running in 2020 on calls to defund the police, she voted to expand the Los Angeles Police Department budget in 2021, 2022, and 2023. But she also voted against police raises in 2023, and this year, she opposed a plan by Bass to hire 170 more officers. In 2024, Raman accepted an endorsement from the Democrats for Israel–Los Angeles, a Zionist organization that opposed a ceasefire in Gaza, which earned her a censure from DSA–LA.

“I don’t know what version of Nithya I’m ever getting on anything,” said William Gude, a Hollywood resident. Known as @FilmthePoliceLA on social media, Gude is a fierce police accountability advocate who said he would have voted for Raman had she maintained her policy positions from her rise to City Council in 2020. Now, he says he finds it difficult to get responses from Raman’s office regarding police misconduct.

Raman’s supporters argue that at least their candidate has a political record to scrutinize. Huang has never held elected office, and her lack of campaign experience has shown itself on the trail. Earlier this week, the LA Reporter exposed that the Huang campaign had misrepresented its fundraising totals by claiming publicly that Huang had raised enough to qualify for public matching funds, when in reality she’d fallen far short. (The campaign has chalked the mistake up to clerical errors and lack of capacity.) 

“The reason why I’m not voting for Rae Huang is kind of like a pragmatic approach and a belief that change comes incrementally,” said Sean Wakasa, who co-chairs DSA–LA along with Chang. “You have to make a power analysis about what’s achievable and what’s likely to happen, and that’s what keeps my vote for Nithya going strong.” 

The most recent poll in the race, released from the Los Angeles Times and University of California, Berkeley on Thursday, has only increased the stakes. It shows Raman in striking distance of Bass, with 25 percent support to the incumbent’s 26, and ahead of Pratt, at 22.

In the eyes of the most ardent Raman backers, Huang’s voters, who made up 9 percent of respondents, are both delusional and important. Raman supporters call for Huang to drop out and for her voters who have yet to cast their ballots to jump ship. But not all leftist Raman skeptics favor Huang: Roughly 10 percent of voters remain undecided. Gude said he’s considering sitting this election out.

Raman also has a tendency to struggle during debates and public conversations; in an appearance on influential political commentator Hasan Piker’s stream earlier this month, she stumbled over questions about the sale of property in illegal West Bank settlements and the LAPD’s training collaboration with the Israeli military. Combined with the Huang campaign’s messy rollout, it’s possible neither candidate is quite spotlight-ready to command an audience the size of LA.

Leftist, liberal, and moderate Angelenos alike fear there’s someone else who is.

You might have seen Spencer Pratt on television 20 years ago, screaming “What are you crying about, Stephanie?” and calling his little sister, the target of his ire, a “crazy bitch.” He made millions on the reality TV show “The Hills” — then blew most of it on crystals, expensive wine, and other luxury habits. His campaign, too, is predicated on the idea of great personal loss: His platform centers the destruction of his home in the Palisades fire, for which he blames Bass (and not climate change, which, on one of many podcast appearances with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, he implied was a hoax). 

Pratt, who did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, has sought to paint himself as a regular guy fed up with the corruption of “elites” like Bass and Raman, and desperate to get the “bums” off the street. In one ad, he stands in front of an Airstream trailer, where he claimed to be living after his house burned down. (He was actually staying at the Hotel Bel-Air for over $1,000 a night.)

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His situation has not translated into a drop of empathy for the people who actually cannot afford homes. “This idea that they’re forced on the street right now is a lie that our city is perpetuating,” said Pratt during a local ABC interview, referencing the city’s unhoused population. He has claimed they are on “super meth,” and argued that they don’t want to go into shelters, in part, because they want to continue to “abuse” animals on the street. Pratt has said that if elected, he plans to have police “arresting people and the people that aren’t getting arrested, we’re getting to mandatory medical treatment.” He argued that whoever was left would go to Seattle once his administration stopped providing resources and housing services — or, as he called it, “unplug them.”

Those “talking points” are “disconnected from the data and the reality of the situation,” said Benjamin Henwood, director of the Homelessness Policy Research Institute at the University of Southern California. Homelessness has nearly doubled in Los Angeles over the last decade, though it’s dipped slightly in the last couple of years. “We know from research and data that [homelessness] really is driven by housing affordability.”

The idea that Los Angeles has enough beds, and people just don’t want to use them, is belied by the available data. As of 2023, an audit from the LA city controller’s office found that roughly 46,260 unhoused people live in Los Angeles, but there were only 16,000 interim shelter beds available. And while the city has added some new beds since then, Henwood said they’re not nearly enough for everyone.

Substance abuse and mental health problems are also not the main drivers, though they are often the most noticeable to the general public. And it’s not clear if Pratt’s arrest-first strategy would even be legal, Henwood said. But, “practically speaking, that’s one of the most expensive ways to try to address homelessness,” said Henwood. “It uses a huge amount of resources, and at the end of the day, people can only be incarcerated for short periods of time, and then they’ll have to be released. So I don’t actually know how that translates into any kind of longer term goal, but it does spend a lot of public tax dollars.” 

Matthew Lewis, director of communications at California YIMBY, an organization that pushes for more development of high-density housing to solve the housing crisis, argues that Pratt, who he vehemently disagrees with, and the wave of anti-homeless legislation across the country is a reaction to policy failures in Democratic cities to adequately address the housing crisis. “You see the same thing play out all over the place,” he said, “and what that suggests is that this is not a Spencer Pratt phenomenon, this is an American city phenomenon. Spencer Pratt is a consequence of pretending we could brush it under the rug.” 

But Bass has been the subject of LA-specific grievances. She faced intense scrutiny for her handling of the twin Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires, which destroyed thousands of homes and killed dozens of people. Despite promising not to travel abroad during her tenure as mayor, Bass was in Ghana attending an embassy party when the fires broke out and returned the following day, leading to widespread condemnation and accusations of mismanagement and apathy. (Her defenders point out that strong Santa Ana winds whipped up last year’s fires, and a mayor cannot control the weather.)

Despite the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in Pratt’s plan, Henwood said his message is landing with voters in LA for a reason. “People are frustrated,” said Henwood. In 2024, Angelenos voted to increase the sales tax rate to fund homelessness programs and, Henwood argued, Democrats set expectations too high on what the tax would really be able to achieve. “People in LA did that because they’re like, this is bad, we’ve got to do something about it, and they did that, and yet the problem still wasn’t fixed, and so they’re frustrated.”

Frustration with a Democratic establishment that has struggled to improve the city’s core issues has always been the key sell of Huang’s campaign.

She seizes on some of the same ire that motivates Pratt’s base but wields it to nearly opposite ends. Huang’s platform calls for public and social housing that would be owned by the city, immune from the whims of the profit-driven market. Raman calls for social housing too, but has also pushed for new exemptions to the city’s “Mansion Tax,” a progressive tax on the sale of certain high-value property. Huang and supporters have criticized the reforms as catering to corporate real estate lobby interests.

Wakasa, of DSA, said he remains excited about the fact that there are two democratic socialists in the race and the necessary debate it has sparked. As DSA grows as a political force, it’s received scrutiny for declining to endorse in the race, though it did ultimately “recommend” Raman in a voter guide.

In his rounds canvassing for DSA–LA City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, Wakasa said most of the voters he encounters aren’t caught up in leftist infighting. They’re more concerned about the lack of street lights amid a rash of copper wire theft or unfixed potholes and damaged sidewalks. 

“Overall, there’s definitely a wider frustration with feeling like day-to-day activity in the city is not very smooth,” Wakasa said, “and just a kind of that burning question of, ‘How do we fix this and how do our electeds fix this?” 

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A second-place finish for Raman would be seen as a major victory for LA’s progressive left with the potential to reverberate for years in city hall politics. Failing to make the runoff could be an equally large disappointment: a flawed yet promising candidate whose abbreviated campaign squandered a viable path to the seat, leaving behind a fractured left that couldn’t coalesce around a candidate.  

Burns, the Huang voter who lives in Los Feliz and has twice voted for Raman’s city council runs, said he understands the outcome will likely leave Huang out of the runoff, but he believes her candidacy can translate into energy for future leftist campaigns.

“I genuinely believe that Rae’s primary goal isn’t just winning this election,” Burns said. “It’s really trying to build momentum for a different political future in Los Angeles.”

“Rae Huang is a real one,” Pratt wrote on X on Thursday, “i respect that she actually walks the walk.” In the post, he lumped Raman in with  “corrupt champagne socialists,” earning a short-lived share from Huang, who added, “It’s clear that LA is fed up with the status quo and is looking for new leadership.” 

She quickly deleted her post and within a few hours had replaced it with a new statement. “Spencer is an opportunist dehumanizing the vulnerable to advance his media career,” Huang wrote, “he has no interest in meeting the needs of the majority of Angelenos.”

The post The Los Angeles Left Is at War With Itself Over the Mayor’s Race appeared first on The Intercept.

One of the most enduring points of contention between the Democratic Party’s left and right wings is “vote blue no matter who,” a demand almost exclusively made of progressives to shelve principle over party when it comes to elections. 

But as we head toward the midterms in a year where the base is angry and ready for a change, centrists are now hearing that familiar refrain aimed at them — much to their horror. 

Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Massachusetts Democrat, was confronted with this new reality earlier this week. He told CNN on Monday that he hoped Maine voters would reject Graham Platner, the state’s presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate, over his controversial tattoo, which Auchincloss called “personally disqualifying.” Critics quickly pointed out that the congressman was effectively offering a tacit endorsement of Sen. Susan Collins, the milquetoast moderate Republican incumbent who has for years infuriated Democrats.

By Tuesday afternoon, the congressman issued a mea culpa on X and disputed that his remarks were an endorsement.

“If it were me I’d vote for someone else in the Maine Democratic primary,” he said, without indicating who that “someone else” might be. “Regardless of what happens in Maine, Democrats need to take back the Senate and I’ll keep working hard to make it happen.”

Platner’s campaign exemplifies the kind of coalition-building that the left has engaged in over the past decade. He goes across the state, meeting voters where they are, and has built relationships with community groups and activists. It’s a marked difference from the campaign of Gov. Janet Mills, Sen. Chuck Schumer’s pick for the seat who dropped out of the race last month after failing to gain momentum, and the retail politics go a long way toward explaining Platner’s success.

Outside of Maine, Platner has been a lightning rod for centrists eager to seize on his Senate race as a battleground for litigating broader divisions in the party’s anti-Trump coalition. Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, said on social media on Tuesday that anyone who endorsed the Uncommitted movement, which aimed to hold President Joe Biden accountable for his role in supporting the Israeli genocide of Gaza, couldn’t object to centrists doing the same over Platner — a comparison so out of proportion it defies rational explanation. 

Score-settling seems more important than keeping the party together and taking the Senate. Melissa DeRosa, the Andrew Cuomo loyalist, told Fox News on Tuesday, “There are a lot of moderate Democrats like myself who will not cry tears should we lose Maine.” John Fetterman, who has broken with his party over his zealous support for Israel, bemoaned Platner’s presumptive nomination after Mills dropped out. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia centrist who served in the Senate for over two decades as a nominal Democrat, implicitly endorsed Collins in a glowing address in late April. 

Politicians who are actually popular with Democratic voters, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., are backing Platner. The former hosted two raucous get-out-the-vote events for Platner over the holiday weekend; the latter is coming to Maine on June 5 to show his support. 

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With a glide path to the nomination — state Democrats are expected to fall in line after the vote out of respect for Mills — Platner is consolidating his support. National Democrats like Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, both of whom are in party leadership in the chamber, have pledged their support (however begrudgingly). 

Platner’s consistent presence across Maine and his populist, left message are resonating with voters. On Memorial Day, Sanders went as far as to compare the energy around Platner to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “Maine now has the opportunity to show the world that we could do the same thing in one of the most rural states in this country,” Sanders said. 

In an off-year election where Democrats are expected to deliver a shellacking to the GOP — a prospect that doesn’t seem to bother President Donald Trump much at all — the appeal of progressive politics a Platner win would represent has the centrist wing of the Democratic Party in an existential crisis. 

After decades of scolding the party’s left flank and left-leaning independents over their hesitation to vote for corporate, hawkish Democrats, the shoe is finally on the other foot. Now, centrists are going to be expected to fall in line vote for the likes of Platner. It’s a daunting proposition for the party’s more conservative wing, who will have to either bite the bullet and pull the lever for their ideological opponents or risk another two years of unfettered Republican rule. 

Perhaps that’s preferred. A GOP win means redoing the election in two years with potentially better results, and in the meantime, blaming the left for losing.

There’s precedent for supposed liberals choosing Republicans over progressive Democrats. After Barack Obama won the party’s nomination for president in 2008, a number of Hillary Clinton supporters went over to John McCain. Dubbing themselves “PUMAs” — for “Party Unity My Ass” — these diehard Clinton-backers were thrilled at the opportunity to cast their ballots for McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin. “I’m voting Republican,” Amy Siskind (yes, that one) said at the time. 

But in 2026, the likelihood of conservative Democrats throwing the midterms to the GOP by switching sides or sitting out is low (although a rash of redistricting in the South has somewhat narrowed the gap). The base is fired up, angry at the establishment, and primed to turn out in droves to vote out Trump’s enablers.

For centrists, this is the worst possible outcome: Their vote-scolding tactic exposed as a lie and a failure to prove they still have the clout to swing an election. For progressives, it would be a welcome break. 

The post Graham Platner Is Forcing Centrist Dems to Reckon With “Vote Blue No Matter Who” appeared first on The Intercept.

The youth climate group shared its endorsement with The Intercept with early voting underway in California and less than a week to go before primary day. Chakrabarti will face off against state Sen. Scott Wiener and San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Connie Chan, both Democrats, in a heavily contested primary race to succeed Democratic former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in California’s 11th Congressional District.

“For years, the Sunrise Movement has shown us the power that people like all of us have when we organize strategically,” Chakrabarti wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “Together with Sunrise, we pushed Washington to respond to the needs of working people when most Democrats (and of course Republicans) refused to do so. We were able to change political reality in Washington, and we’ll do it again.”

Chakrabarti rose to national prominence after co-founding Justice Democrats in 2017 alongside other former presidential campaign staffers for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to support progressive primary challengers to establishment Democrats. He has been a thorn in the side of moderate Democrats ever since. 

Chakrabarti became Ocasio-Cortez’s first chief of staff after her upset victory over longtime incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in 2018, a win that helped put Justice Democrats on the map and ushered in the first members of the progressive Squad in Congress. In Ocasio-Cortez’s office, he worked with the Sunrise Movement and other stakeholders to draft the Green New Deal. Elements of the bill were later included in the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, which invested $369 billion in fighting climate change but ultimately fell short of progressives’ loftiest ambitions. 

Chakrabarti has long espoused progressive views and is expected to vote with Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad if elected to Congress. But despite his prominent role in Ocasio-Cortez’s early rise, his former boss has not endorsed Chakrabarti. That has driven speculation of a rift, which the candidate has continuously denied. Progressive Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., have endorsed Chakrabarti, as has former Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y. Justice Democrats, the group Chakrabarti helped found, is also backing his campaign.

After leaving Ocasio-Cortez’s office, Chakrabarti went on to lead New Consensus, a progressive environmental policy think tank that recently released the Mission for America, which he bills as a “successor” to the Green New Deal. The policy proposal seeks to “rapidly slash emissions” and help “build a new, clean economy” to protect workers against the threat of job cuts driven by the rise of artificial intelligence.

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“We’re proud to endorse Saikat Chakrabarti. Saikat has spent years fighting for the Green New Deal, taking on corporate power, and delivering for working people, not billionaires and special interests,” Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, wrote in a statement to the Intercept. 

The climate justice group pivoted this cycle to emphasize its explicit opposition to President Donald Trump and sees Chakrabarti as a candidate “ready to fight back with courage and vision,” Shiney-Ajay added. “We know he’ll be instrumental in helping build a Democratic Party that is unapologetically for working people, serious about confronting the climate crisis, and ready to take on authoritarianism head-on.”

Chakrabarti has relished his role as an opponent of entrenched political power. He has long antagonized the 20-term congresswoman he seeks to replace, slamming her in a series of 2019 tweets after then-House Speaker Pelosi penned an op-ed critical of AOC, who at the time was Chakrabarti’s boss. (Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez, who hold divergent ideologies but are both known for their political savvy, have built bridges in the years since.)

While running for her seat, Chakrabarti has continued to provoke Pelosi, calling her out in a recent video after she endorsed Chan against him. He launched his campaign to challenge Pelosi before she announced her retirement in November, unlike his two opponents, who jumped in once it was clear they’d be competing for an open seat. 

“My goal, honestly, is to replace a huge part of the Democrat establishment,” Chakrabarti said in November during an episode of the Intercept Briefing. “I’m calling for primaries all across the country. … I think we actually have to get in there and be in a position of power where we can do all that, so it’s not going to be this constant compromising with the establishment, trying to figure out how we can push.”

Politics is Chakrabarti’s second act. The tech entrepreneur made millions as a founding engineer of the payment process platform Stripe.

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But in the tech-dominated district where Pelosi won reelection with 81 percent of the vote last cycle, Chakrabarti faces an uphill battle. Wiener, a state senator who has the support of the California Democratic Party, has a clear lead over both Chan and Chakrabarti, who appear to be neck and neck for second place. The top two candidates next Tuesday will advance to the general election in November.

“I believe we can improve the material lives of working people and build a future we all actually want to live in,” Chakrabarti told The Intercept. “I’m grateful to the Sunrise Movement for joining our coalition, and I look forward to working with them again in Congress.”

The post Sunrise Movement Backs Saikat Chakrabarti, Progressive Firebrand Behind the Green New Deal appeared first on The Intercept.

“Lisbon, here we come!” Marcotte, a retired advertising executive, captioned her Instagram post on June 16, 2024. 

Stevens and her mother then boarded a plane, seated in business class, according to a congressional ethics disclosure form. The following day, the pair checked into The Ivens, a luxury hotel where Stevens and other members of Congress spent the next four days attending a conference with panels that included a cryptocurrency industry executive, bankers and other corporate leaders. The conference was hosted by the centrist, pro-corporate think tank Center Forward, which has received donations to its nonprofit arm from major pharmaceutical companies and has a super PAC funded by big oil companies. 

Center Forward covered the full $27,779.86 trip for Stevens and her mother — a drop in the bucket compared to what the group’s political funding arm would later spend supporting her run for U.S. Senate.

Now, as Stevens is embroiled in a contested three-way race for a vacant United States Senate seat, Center Forward and its super PAC have spent $2.4 million on television advertisements in Michigan, where the only campaign the group is known to be backing is hers, The Intercept found in a review of advertising data accessed from AdImpact. The group’s first round of ad purchases supporting Stevens, totaling $855,000, was reported last week by State Affairs. Center Forward Committee has also bought at least $50,000 in online ads for Stevens over the past two weeks, according to Google’s ad transparency tracker.

One of the commercials, which ran on broadcast, cable and streaming services across Michigan starting May 12, shows Stevens “standing up to Trump” and “standing up for Michigan,” pointing toward her bills calling for accountability for ICE agent misconduct and seeking to prevent the Trump administration from deploying the U.S. military domestically. “I answer,” Stevens says in a clip from the House floor, “to the people of Michigan.”

A Stevens campaign spokesperson repeated a similar statement in response to queries from The Intercept.

“Haley fights for Michigan and only Michigan,” said her spokesperson Arik Wolk. “She’s spent her time in Congress working to bolster Michigan’s manufacturing economy, Michigan innovation and Michigan jobs — and as Michigan’s most effective Democrat in Congress, she has a track record of doing just that.”

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Stevens’s campaign has been dogged by criticism for her corporate backing. Both of her opponents – Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed – have sworn off corporate contributions. 

The Lisbon conference in 2024 sponsored by Center Forward featured panels led by executives from banks and holdings companies, such as Bison Bank and Bay Street Capital Holdings. One panel, titled “Blockchain Regulation in Portugal (EU),” included the CEO of crypto company Q Blockchain, in addition to bank executives and other boosters of the crypto industry. Prior to the panel, a business school professor gave a lecture on “what the EU’s approach to digital asset and blockchain regulation looks like” and “how the U.S. may be falling behind comparatively.”

At the time, Portugal boasted one of the most tax-friendly systems for cryptocurrency investments and the European Union installed its newly approved crypto regulatory system known as MiCA.

A supplement to the congressional disclosure form described the trip as intended to “bring a bipartisan group of pragmatic policymakers and influencers from various industries and organizations to focus on common-sense solutions” by discussing “foreign direct investment, healthcare, renewable energy, data privacy” and economic ties between the U.S. and Portugal.

The group said its overall mission is “to provide centrists” the information needed to “craft common-sense solutions and provide support in turning those ideas into results.” 

It’s common for congressional delegations to go on international trips paid for by third parties. But Stevens attending a trip sponsored by a pro-corporate group and then receiving significant campaign support from the group two years later raises concerns, said Jeffrey Hauser, a critic of corporate political influence.

“I am worried about what it says, that an institution that has been created to look after corporate interest in Washington had their staff spend a ton of time with the congresswoman, and they came away convinced that she would be loyal to their funders,” said Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project. “The travel and the campaign finance expenditure in tandem are worse together than on their own.”

Center Forward also covered additional travel expenses for Stevens’s staff, including $10,844.33 for Stevens’s legislative director to go on the Lisbon trip and $7,198 for her staffers to attend other Center Forward conferences, including one in Mexico where attendees met with executives with Meta, Walmart, Amazon, 3M and General Motors Mexico, according to further disclosure forms.  

Stevens was joined at the Lisbon conference by conservative lawmakers who have supported pro-crypto legislation, such as Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter, R-Ga., a member of the Blockchain Caucus, and Rep. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., who chairs the House Homeland Security committee, according to the congressional disclosure form. The delegation also included prominent Democrats, such as Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., and then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, also a California Democrat who has since resigned amid sexual assault allegations. 

Congressional delegation trips are designed to form relationships between advocacy groups and lawmakers with the goal of “persuading a politician of a worldview,” Hauser said. He noted that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee had fine-tuned the model with its annual congressional visits to Israel, which Stevens also attended with her mother in 2019. Rapport is easier to build in an international travel setting than a visit to a member’s office, Hauser added. 

“I think this trip should be seen more as a cultivation method that Stevens agreed to undertake,” he said, “and the independent expenditure in 2026 as an indication that the 2024 travel was well executed.”

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Since 2022, Center Forward Committee has received $400,000 from Chevron, including $100,000 from the big oil giant during the current election cycle; an additional $300,000 from the oil corporation ConocoPhilips in 2023; $500,000 in 2022 from former New York City Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg; $100,000 from big tobacco company Philip Morris last July; and in March, Center Forward Committee and its related PAC, Center Forward Initiative Inc., together received $31,000 from United Health Group.

Center Forward’s nonprofit arm was also at the heart of battling Congressional efforts to lower drug prices under the Biden administration. The group received $7.8 million in donations from the pharmaceutical lobby from 2016 to 2023, according to Sludge, the bulk of which arrived during the Biden era. Center Forward spent those years also pouring money into candidates who were opponents to drug pricing reform.

Stevens, for her part, introduced a 2019 bill that attempted to lower prescription drug prices. She currently supports the expansion of Obamacare and the creation of a public option, but she does not support a Medicare for All policy, marking a contrast with her opponent El-Sayed, who has made the policy a core tenet of his platform. 

Center Forward’s ad spending in Michigan arrived as a separate dark money group, the Center for Democratic Priorities, which uses the same consulting firm as AIPAC does for other “pop-up” super PACs, bought $5 million in TV ads for Stevens this month. 

Marcotte and Center Forward did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment on the relationship between the campaign and the organization.

Stevens’s opponents, who are polling neck-and-neck with her ahead of the August primary, criticized the representative’s support from the group. 

“Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and Big Insurance are spending millions to save Haley Stevens from her own record on ICE,” said Jackson Boaz, spokesperson for the McMorrow campaign. “That tells you everything about who she’ll work for in the Senate – and everything about how her campaign is going.”

El-Sayed offered a more terse indictment: “Corporate candidate takes money from corporate lobbies to take corporate trips and do corporate dirty work in Congress.”

The post Corporate Interests Paid for Haley Stevens’s Trip to Portugal — and Her Campaign Ads appeared first on The Intercept.

The 3rd Congressional District race unfolded along key fault lines animating the Democratic Party, from the influence of special interest groups to Israel and its genocide in Gaza. It staked out a clear contest between the party’s progressive and moderate wings.

The split marked a contrast to the 7th Congressional District primary in the Lehigh Valley, where the left and the establishment united behind Bob Brooks, a firefighters’ union chief who sailed to victory Tuesday night.

Brooks will run in what’s expected to be a tight general election in November against freshman Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie. Rabb is all but guaranteed to win the deep blue seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Dwight Evans.

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Rabb, who has been a vocal critic of U.S. military support for Israel, attracted endorsements from progressive members of Congress like Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. One of his top opponents, state Sen. Sharif Street, earned the support of Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., while Dr. Ala Stanford, a pediatric surgeon, was backed by a pro-Israel super PAC. Also on the ballot was Shaun Griffith, an attorney who never broke through in the polls. 

In a statement released Tuesday night, the Democratic Socialists of America celebrated Rabb, who recently joined the group’s Philadelphia chapter, and pointed to key political causes for the left in Congress.

“There is a new Democratic Socialist in Congress,” the group wrote on X. “We will be with Congressman Rabb every step of the way in the fight to abolish ICE, free Palestine and win Medicare for All.”

Rabb has collected endorsements from 10 members of Congress, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and progressive groups including the Pennsylvania Working Families Party, the Philadelphia chapter of DSA, Justice Democrats, and Jewish Voice for Peace Action.

“Chris Rabb is exactly what Democratic voters nationwide are demanding — progressive trailblazers who fight for their communities, not just when it’s politically convenient but when it’s morally necessary,” said Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, in a statement. “While the party machine has spent decades failing to meet the needs of its voters, Rabb has taken the fight to corporate interests, billionaire CEOs, and Republican extremists his whole career.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, considered one of the Democratic Party’s moderate rising stars, waded into the race in its final weeks to try to stop a powerful Philadelphia union backing Street from inadvertently boosting Rabb’s campaign with attack ads against Stanford, Axios reported. Nevertheless, Stanford and Street appeared to split establishment-friendly support, trailing late Tuesday night with about 30 and 25 percent of the vote, respectively, to Rabb’s 44.

Union Boss to Compete for Key Swing Seat

In the Lehigh Valley, Brooks handily defeated his primary opponents in the 7th Congressional District, marking a win likely to be claimed by the left and center alike.

Brooks campaigned on affordability and fighting corruption, highlighting his union bona fides rather than aligning with a specific wing of the Democratic Party. By late Tuesday night he had secured more than double the support of any of his competitors: former federal prosecutor Ryan Crosswell; former Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure; and Carol Obando-Derstine, an engineer who previously worked for former Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and former Gov. Tom Wolf.

On the campaign trail, the retired firefighter argued that the real divide in his district was between the working class and the billionaire class and their allies. “The whole system is rigged against us, and the only way we’re going to fix it is by sending people like us to Washington, D.C., to represent us,” Brooks said at a recent event.  

Unlike in the 3rd District, progressives and more mainstream Democrats united behind Brooks. Shapiro, the governor, has been an outspoken surrogate for Brooks, who was also endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Working Families Party.

In a statement celebrating Brooks’s win on Tuesday night, Sanders pointed to two other candidates with union backgrounds who prevailed in primaries this year.

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Brooks’s win “follows the recent progressive victories of iron worker and union leader Brian Poindexter in OH, and union organizer Analilia Mejía in NJ,” Sanders wrote on X. “We’re making progress!”

“We deserve representatives who come from the working class and will stand up for the working class, and that’s what Bob has done for his entire life and career,” said Nick Gavio, mid-Atlantic communications director for the Working Families Party, in a statement announcing the party’s endorsement.

The Cook Political Report rates the general election for the 7th District a toss-up, and Brooks is expected to face a tight contest against Mackenzie, who narrowly flipped his Lehigh Valley seat from blue to red in 2024 and is widely considered to be one of the most vulnerable members of the House this cycle. 

As of late Tuesday night, Brooks had nearly 42 percent of the vote, while Crosswell and McClure came just shy of 21 percent each, and Obando-Derstine received just over 17 percent.

Brooks benefited from critiques of his opponent, Crosswell, a former Republican who launched his campaign after quitting the Department of Justice in the early days of the Trump administration, when federal prosecutors were under pressure to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams in return for Adams’s cooperation on immigration enforcement. Crosswell faced criticism for his previous role in prosecuting “many, many” immigration cases as an assistant U.S. attorney while running for district with one the largest, but politically diverse, Latino communities in the state. 

“Trump has built his agenda on targeting our immigrant community. I’ve seen exactly what that means for families like mine,” Obando-Derstine, who was born in Colombia, wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “Anyone who chose to carry out those attacks against our community has no business being in office. We deserve leaders who stand with us when it matters, not just when it’s easy.”

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Advertisements from a mysterious super PAC called “Lead Left” also became a backdrop to the race. The ads attacked both Brooks and Crosswell on their progressive credentials, and sought to curry left-leaning support for McClure. “Lamont McClure kicked ICE out of Northampton. He takes on Trump and wins,” says the narrator in one of the advertisements.

Although the donors are anonymous, the super PAC reportedly has connections to a prominent Republican donation-processing firm.

This developing story has been updated.

The post Pennsylvania Results: Chris Rabb to Join the Squad in Congress as Bob Brooks Tries to Flip Key Seat  appeared first on The Intercept.

It also reaffirmed the grip of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in GOP politics.

AIPAC’s super political action committee and two other groups backed by pro-Israel donors poured more than $15.8 million into the race either opposing Massie or supporting his opponent, former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, according to Federal Election Commission reports released through Tuesday.

That blizzard of cash may not have been as important for Republican primary voters as Trump’s hatred of Massie. Still, it helped make the 4th Congressional District race the most expensive House primary in history, with overall spending reaching $32 million, topping the 2024 New York Democratic primary in which AIPAC’s super PAC aided Westchester County Executive George Latimer in ousting then-Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

Massie had framed the race in terms that led to accusations of antisemitism, calling it “a referendum on whether Israel gets to buy seats in Congress.” He denied the charge and repeated similar language in his concession speech Tuesday night. “For 14 years, those S.O.B.s in Washington tried to buy my vote,” Massie said. “Why did the race get so expensive? Because they decided to buy the seat.”

Massie is a libertarian contrarian who reliably votes for the conservative position on measures in the House — but he has generated headaches for Trump on everything from the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein to the NSA’s surveillance of Americans.

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He has also been a critic of U.S. funding for Israel and the war on Iran. His vote has helped make every attempt at blocking the conflict through a war powers resolution bipartisan, although so far all of them have fallen short.

A spokesperson for AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, described Massie as “the most anti-Israel Republican in the House.”

The Kentucky representative says he is taking a stand on principle: He has always opposed foreign aid in general.

“I have never voted for foreign aid to Egypt, to Syria, to Israel or to Ukraine,” Massie told CBS News. “But the ones in Israel, since they’re the biggest recipients of it, that makes them a little bit mad.” 

Republicans still overwhelmingly support Israel, according to public opinion polls. But the share who do so has declined significantly over the last few years, and younger GOP voters are much less supportive of unconditional funding for Israel.

When he emerged for his concession speech on Tuesday, a grinning Massie told the crowd, “I would have come out sooner but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

In a statement congratulating Gallrein on Tuesday, AIPAC announced that voters “support Democratic and Republican candidates who view a strong U.S.-Israel relationship as an American interest and reject those who focus on attacking that alliance and pro-Israel Americans.”

“Massie has been one of the most consistently hostile voices in Congress toward the U.S.-Israel relationship and the millions of Americans who support it,” read the AIPAC statement posted on X. “Our community was proud to support Gallrein and help ensure Massie’s defeat.”

The race was dogged by accusations of antisemitism and salacious, negative advertising. Massie’s opponents seized on a pro-Massie super PAC’s television ad that featured a picture of anti-Massie billionaire donor Paul Singer with a rainbow Star of David and that accused Gallrein of being backed by “the gay mafia.” Meanwhile, the anti-Massie camp created a deepfake artificial intelligence ad pointing to the few times he crossed party lines to accuse him of being in a “throuple” with progressive Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.

Singer was the largest donor to MAGA KY, the Trump-supported super PAC that was created specifically to oust Massie.

Also spending against the representative were the United Democracy Project and the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund.

This developing story has been updated.

The post Thomas Massie Loses His Seat in a Win for Trump — and AIPAC appeared first on The Intercept.

Following the lead of his predecessor, former California Attorney General Kamala Harris, Becerra’s office was battling a defense that argued Robert Lewis, originally sentenced to death in 1991, was ineligible for execution because he was intellectually disabled. Lewis’s attorney, Robert Sanger, told The Intercept that while individual attorneys general can’t control everything their deputies do, he was disappointed with how Becerra’s office handled the case. 

“I was kind of feeling like it would be a good time for the AG to say, ‘OK, we tried and he’s intellectually disabled. We got that determination made. Let’s just let it go,’” Sanger recalled. “Instead, it went all the way to oral arguments in front of the [state] Supreme Court.”

The effort failed: The Supreme Court of California overturned Lewis’s death sentence in 2018, and the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a measure banning the practice of adjusting IQ based on race in death penalty cases two years later. 

Becerra is now polling first in the crowded race to replace term-limited Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom. His campaign had at first lagged behind his opponents, but then-Rep. Eric Swalwell was hit with explosive sexual assault allegations — which he denies — and dropped out, and Becerra surged to the front of the field. He’s just ahead of Trump-backed Republican candidate Steve Hilton, followed by Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire racking up endorsements from progressive groups including Our Revolution and praise from the California chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. 

In Lewis’s case, Becerra picked up where Harris left off; her office had been the first to ask the courts to artificially inflate Lewis’s IQ so the state could execute him. 

“On the one hand, he’s part of a long line of Democratic attorney generals who have taken this approach of, ‘It’s not my problem,’ not accepting responsibility for what their criminal attorneys are doing in court,” said Natasha Minsker, who leads the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition, which helped push the bill banning the practice of race-based IQ adjustments for people on death row. “On the other hand, it just demonstrates where their true priorities and values are.” 

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Becerra has not taken a clear public position on the death penalty in his gubernatorial campaign, but his critics have raised concerns about his pursuit of executions at a time when his party was moving in the opposite direction. He has said he has “serious reservations” about the death penalty and voted for a 2016 state ballot measure to abolish it in California, where the state hasn’t executed anyone since 2006. Still, two years after his vote, Becerra’s office argued to execute Lewis. Though Newsom imposed a moratorium on capital punishment in 2019, Becerra fought to uphold death penalty sentences during the Covid-19 pandemic. And though he oversaw law enforcement for four years in California, a state that has significantly cut its prison population in recent years and adopted other reforms under pressure from activists, Becerra’s criminal justice record has not played a large part in his gubernatorial campaign. 

After serving as California attorney general, Becerra was named secretary of Health and Human Services during the Biden administration. His name recognition from that post, plus 24 years in Congress, have earned him endorsements from Democrats including Reps. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., and Ted Lieu, D-Calif.; state and local elected officials; and several labor unions including SEIU California, California State Council of Laborers, and the United Nurses Associations of California.

Still, his former colleagues from his time leading HHS raised eyebrows as his campaign gathered speed after Swalwell’s exit, and some of Becerra’s critics have seized on his overseeing of migrant children as HHS secretary. Also looming behind his surge is a criminal trial involving his former political adviser and Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, who pleaded guilty on Thursday to three felonies in a corruption case involving scheme to steal money from Becerra’s campaign. In a statement last week after the plea, Becerra said; “As I said from day one, I was not involved, I did nothing wrong. And now the record confirms it. We can close the book on this.”

Becerra’s criminal justice record has received less scrutiny in the gubernatorial race, where Becerra is competing with Republican opponents stressing their own tough-on-crime bonafides. 

Becerra’s campaign website outlines his priorities as fighting Donald Trump, building more affordable housing, lowering costs, building clean energy, improving California’s disaster preparedness, channeling AI “for human benefit,” and addressing homelessness. It does not have a specific page devoted to criminal justice. 

In response to a questionnaire from the political arm of the California chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, which declined to comment on Becerra’s record for this story, Becerra said he agrees with reforms like prioritizing prevention strategies over punitive sentencing and improving funding and staffing for public defender’s offices. He also said he would support banning facial recognition in police body cameras, more public access to police records, and having social service workers respond to homelessness and mental health crises instead of police. 

“We see this repeatedly,” Minsker said. “Democratic politicians want to take credit for the progressive things they did as attorney general, but they are not taking responsibility for the regressive positions that the office advanced under their leadership.” 

Becerra’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

While Becerra has not had to thoroughly address his criminal justice record yet on the campaign trail, the topic plagued his predecessor as attorney general, Kamala Harris, when she ran for president in 2020. 

Harris, who served as California attorney general from 2011 to 2017 and San Francisco district attorney before that, faced myriad attacks from left and right that hampered her first presidential bid over her prosecutorial record while she campaigned as a reformer. 

At the time, activists across the United States were animated by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which set off a wave of protests and heightened scrutiny of so-called “tough on crime” politics. Six years later, the political winds have largely shifted.

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Sanger, the attorney in the IQ death penalty case, said he felt that some of the attacks on Harris were unfair, because attorneys general “can’t go through and regulate every single thing that their deputies do in these very complex cases.” But, he added, he’s been generally dissatisfied with California’s last three top prosecutors. 

“I have been disappointed in each one of those attorneys general in not taking a more active role with their deputy attorneys general, and with them not taking a position on the death penalty,” Sanger said. 

As attorney general, Becerra also faced criticism for shielding police from measures designed to hold them accountable. Two major California newspaper editorial boards wrote scathing criticisms in 2019 saying Becerra sided with law enforcement “against public transparency” and had betrayed both “public trust and the law” by not complying with a state police transparency law. 

At the time, Becerra threatened to charge journalists with crimes unless they destroyed a list of police officers convicted of crimes. Becerra took more than $300,000 in campaign funds from law enforcement unions in his run for attorney general. The political action committee for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, a state prison guards’ union, gave $320,000 to a group backing Becerra and other candidates that cycle. News outlets raised questions about his ability to “police the police,” while owing much of his campaign support to their unions. 

The prison guard’s union gave $25,000 in March to a group opposing Steyer. The group, “California is Not for Sale, No on Steyer for Governor 2026, a Coalition of Housing Advocates, Labor and Small Business,” is spending $24 million against Steyer and is backed by the state’s real estate and energy industries. Steyer is self-funding his campaign with more than $120 million. The CCPOA did not respond to a request for comment.

The prison guards’ union is one of many special interest groups that have played an outsized role in California politics, said James King, a formerly incarcerated prison reform advocate in Oakland. King, who is supporting Steyer, said the CCPOA was spending against Steyer because he is campaigning against those kinds of special interests. Plus, the union wants to preserve its budget, which has increased even as the state has shrunk its prison population in recent years, King said.

“It’s deeply ironic” that groups including the CCPOA “are funding an initiative called ‘California is Not for Sale,’” King said. “They have shown time and time again that they are only interested in advancing the status quo. And it’s clear that any candidate they are working to oppose and spending money to oppose, they must see as a threat to the status quo.” 

In 2020, Becerra sided with law enforcement again to oppose a bill to require independent state investigations of police killings after previously having refused to conduct an independent investigation into the police killing of 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa, whom a police officer shot in the back of the head. Becerra’s office later launched an investigation into destruction of evidence in the case. 

Monterrosa’s sister, Michelle Monterrosa, told the San Francisco Standard last week that she won’t vote for Becerra in the gubernatorial election. “How can we trust someone who continues to put his own advancement before actually standing with the people?” Monterrosa said. 

The post Xavier Becerra Pushed to Inflate a Black Man’s IQ to Execute Him as California AG appeared first on The Intercept.

The group had an anodyne name — the Center for Democratic Priorities — and no track record in Michigan politics. It was incorporated in Delaware seven months ago under a shroud of secrecy.

Online sleuths soon discovered, however, that whoever was behind the group had used the same consulting firm employed by a super PAC affiliated with AIPACs to buy the ads. Suspicions fell on the pro-Israel lobbying shop or its super PAC affiliate, which has repeatedly created so-called “pop-up” super PACs to influence elections elsewhere. AIPAC issued a denial that it was funding the ads.

Thanks to Federal Election Commission rules, voters may not know the true source of the ad campaign for months.

With the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision 16 years ago, special interest groups began using a raft of loopholes to pour money into elections without disclosing who was doing the spending. Super PACs can take in unlimited donations and spend unlimited amounts — as long as they do not coordinate directly with candidates. Now, big money forces in politics are growing ever more sophisticated about exploiting legal loopholes to obscure their identity.

Today, groups are setting up pop-up affiliates, gaming disclosure deadlines, and using party-specific conduits — akin to a sub-political action committee — to help deflect attention away from the origins of their cash.

“All their spending on election ads immediately before a primary or general election is anonymous to voters — particularly when they use names that have no meaning and have no indication of the broader groups they are tied to,” said Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center and a former attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement division. “They are very damaging to transparency for that reason.”

In the 2026 election cycle, front groups are proliferating, with cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries getting in on AIPAC’s game.

Groups aligned with the two tech industries have split their operations into Democratic- and Republican-aligned affiliates. The benefit can be twofold: obscuring the ultimate source of the donations, while also attracting from the large pool of partisan funders who want to give donations solely to one party.

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The “pop-up” super PACs and party-affiliate PACs are not always “dark money” — a loosely defined term that generally refers to political operations that don’t disclose their donors’ identities. Nevertheless, the way they are set up can make it much more difficult for voters to follow the lavish campaign spending.

Campaign finance experts say the trend is poised to continue unless Congress and the FEC decide to act. Until then, here is a guide to who is funding the groups, what they are called and how they work.

Pop-Up Politics

AIPAC used a complicated web of political committees to influence the Illinois primary elections in March. Whether or not it is using the same tactics in Michigan — the group did not respond to a request for comment — observers expect it to continue to hide its campaign spending in the months to come, as primary candidates battle over AIPAC’s influence.

AIPAC itself is a tax-exempt nonprofit, which prohibits direct engagement with electoral politics. But the group is publicly affiliated with a traditional political action committee that can take donations of up to $5,000 per year; AIPAC PAC can donate directly to candidate campaigns.

AIPAC’s supporters can also give to United Democracy Project, a so-called “super PAC.” United Democracy Project is openly affiliated with AIPAC, an increasingly toxic brand among Democrats.

As AIPAC weighed involvement in the recent Illinois primaries, three new “pop-up” super PACs took advantage of campaign finance reporting loopholes to hide their donors’ identities. The groups — Elect Chicago Women, Affordable Chicago Now, and Chicago Progressive Partnership — were created so late in the campaign that they were only required to disclose their donors after voting in the primary was over.

The groups’ donors were finally revealed after the election. They included two wealthy Chicago political donors: Michael Sacks, the CEO of an asset management firm, and Anthony “Tony” Davis, the co-founder of a private equity firm.

Before those groups filed official campaign finance reports, journalists had built a circumstantial case linking them to AIPAC through the use of campaign vendors linked to the pro-Israel lobby group.

Eventually, the hard truth emerged. FEC reports filed after the election revealed that Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago Now got funds from United Democracy Project. Then Elect Chicago Women turned around and handed $1 million to the third group, Chicago Progressive Partnership.

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That complicated two-step helped Chicago Progressive Partnership conceal its donors as it was running ads that many observers said were misleading. In Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, the group attempted to boost one pro-Palestinian candidate in an apparent attempt to harm another, the influencer Kat Abughazaleh. Abughazaleh ultimately lost.

In the same congressional race, Elect Chicago Women spent money to support state Sen. Laura Fine and oppose progressive Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who won.

In other races, it was easier for voters to track how AIPAC-aligned groups were spending their money. In some of the contests, the pop-up super PACs never popped up. Instead, United Democracy Project spent directly.

In Michigan, the new group Center for Democratic Priorities has yet to file any registration documents with the FEC. If it is classifying itself as a super PAC, it will not have to file disclosures revealing its donors until July 15, according to Ports.

Gambling on Races

With AI and crypto becoming increasingly ubiquitous, Washington is trying to sort out the regulations that could have huge impacts on these industries. In turn, crypto and AI businesses are making huge investments in electoral politics. So far, however, crypto and AI have taken a different approach to influencing elections than AIPAC. Rather than using “pop-up” super PACs, they have divided their influence operations into Republican and Democratic affiliates.

The biggest crypto super PAC is called Fairshake. The group is funded by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, as well as two crypto companies the firm has invested in, Coinbase and Ripple Labs.

The venture capital firm’s co-founder Marc Andreessen rose to fame in the 1990s for co-founding the web browser Netscape. More recently he has become notable as one of Donald Trump’s biggest defenders in the tech world and a frequent visitor to Trump’s Florida estate Mar-a-Lago.

Fairshake spends money on Republican primaries through its GOP affiliate, Defend American Jobs, and Democratic races through an outfit called Protect Progress. Fairshake has portrayed itself as an equal-opportunity shop, but the group’s extraordinary spending in favor of Republican candidate Bernie Moreno in 2024, when he ousted former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, opened it up to accusations of partisanship.

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Brown is now running to return to the Senate against JD Vance’s Republican replacement, Jon Husted. His rhetoric this time around has been notably more muted when it comes to crypto.

Fairshake’s split personality allows donors to pick a single-party affiliate for its campaign giving. Democratic megadonor and angel investor Ron Conway donated to Protect Progress in 2024, for instance, only to announce later that year that he was breaking from the network over its support of Moreno.

The model of using party-specific affiliates may be less deceptive than “pop-up” super PACs, Ports said, but it is still misleading.

“They know that a Republican voter doesn’t want to hear from a super PAC that supports Democratic candidates. [Republican voters] are not going to trust that messaging as much, or vice versa,” she said. “They are dividing this money up to try to present their message as persuasively as possible to their target audiences.”

Fairshake’s spending on Republicans has not gone far enough for some figures in the fractious crypto world. The Winklevoss twins — the brothers behind a top Coinbase competitor, a cryptocurrency exchange called Gemini, which is distinct from Google’s AI assistant — have given millions’ worth of bitcoin to the Digital Freedom Fund PAC, which is explicitly opposed to the Democratic Party. The Digital Freedom Fund has also drawn donations from crypto exchange Kraken, another Coinbase competitor. So far the PAC has not spent heavily on political campaigns, but that could change as the midterm election season heats up.

Yet another crypto political action committee, The Fellowship PAC, is chaired by an executive at the domestic affiliate of the international stablecoin company Tether, which has recently begun mounting a push into the U.S. market. The company is backed by $10 million in donations from Cantor Fitzgerald, the bank that holds the U.S. Treasury notes backing Tether’s stablecoins. Former Cantor Fitzgerald chief Howard Lutnick serves as Trump’s commerce secretary. The PAC has endorsed only Republican candidates thus far.

Artificial Interference

Two of the artificial intelligence industry’s biggest players are backing rival political influence operations. OpenAI and Anthropic have picked their fighters in a battle over how much of a role the government should play in regulating AI.

On one side, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife have donated to Leading the Future, a super PAC that aims to be an umbrella organization for the industry along the lines of Fairshake.

Perplexity AI and Andreessen Horowitz — which was an early investor in OpenAI — have also given money to the umbrella super PAC.

Leading the Future has a Democratic affiliate, Think Big, as well as a Republican arm, American Mission. Conway, the Democratic megadonor, has given only to Think Big, while Joe Lonsdale, the voluble right-wing venture capitalist, has given to American Mission.

If that structure sounds eerily similar to Fairshake, that is no accident. One of Leading the Future’s shot-callers is Josh Vlasto, a political operative who once worked for two powerful New York Democrats: former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

OpenAI has generally favored a more relaxed approach to AI regulation. One of its top competitors, Anthropic, has staked out a position — at least rhetorically — in favor of stricter rules.

To pursue that aim, Anthropic recently created a traditional corporate political action committee, AnthroPAC, that can donate directly to politicians.

The $380 billion company has also made a major donation to a political nonprofit called Public First Action. That group sits at the heart of a network of affiliated super PACs: the bipartisan Public First PAC, the Democratic-aligned Jobs and Democracy PAC, and the Defending Our Values PAC for Republican causes.

The Republican and Democratic affiliates are led respectively by former Reps. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, and Brad Carson, D-Okla.

Public First Action has donated to all three super PACs. In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson called the three PACs “aligned” but said they all operate independently and that Anthropic does not play a role in directing any of the groups’ political spending.

“Public First Action did not establish Jobs and Democracy PAC, Public First PAC, or Defending Our Values PAC, all of which are independent from Public First Action and were established separately,” said the spokesperson, Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez.

In a recent North Carolina primary, Public First Action’s Democratic affiliate spent $1.6 million boosting incumbent Rep. Valerie Foushee over her opponent Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner who has supported a moratorium on AI data center construction.

Allam told The Intercept that she believes the Anthropic-backed super PAC network has split its spending arms into Democratic and Republican affiliates to blunt attacks like those that have dogged United Democracy Project. AIPAC’s super PAC has long faced criticism in Democratic primaries for drawing donations from Trump-supporting billionaires.

Anthropic and its backers “are trying to confuse folks to say, ‘we’re not the same,’ so that their spending is not on the same FEC reports,” she said.

Anthropic voluntarily disclosed its donation to Public First Action. But since the group is set up as a nonprofit rather than a campaign committee, voters may never know who Public First Action’s other donors are. And the group does not intend to disclose them, Rivera-Rodriguez said.

“We’d welcome a broader conversation about transparency in political spending, starting with the hundreds of millions Big Tech companies are spending to prevent any regulation of AI whatsoever,” he said. “That said, Public First Action, Jobs and Democracy PAC, Public First PAC, and Defending Our Values PAC make all public disclosures required by law either to the FEC or the IRS, and those filings are publicly available online. Additionally, all advertisements by those groups include the required disclaimers identifying who is paying for the advertisement.”

Allam is convinced that spending from AIPAC and the Anthropic-backed groups helped tip her race. She claimed 48.2 percent of the vote compared to Foushee’s 49.2 percent.

“For the incumbent to not receive more than 50 percent of her district’s support, that shows you that working families want change, they want something different,” she said. “We can build a progressive grassroots movement without being aligned with the same people who gave us Trump and MAGA Republicans.”

Correction: May 18, 2026, 12:53 p.m. ET
A graphic previously featured the Winklevoss twins as represented in the 2010 movie “The Social Network”; the images have been replaced with photos of the Winklevoss twins.

The post Who’s Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms. appeared first on The Intercept.

California state Sen. Scott Wiener’s opposition might seem uncharacteristic for someone running a progressive campaign, but it’s consistent with the priorities of two top donors to a super PAC backing his candidacy.

Crypto mogul Chris Larsen and venture capitalist Garry Tan — a pair of wealthy Bay Area tech executives funding a pro-Wiener super PAC called Abundant Future — have been outspoken advocates of stopping the taxes, both of which aim to help fill funding gaps in healthcare and social services after the Trump administration’s recent cuts to Medicaid. Larsen has poured millions of dollars into the fight.

The statewide tax, known as the Billionaire Tax Act, would levy a one-time 5 percent tax on the state’s billionaires’ wealth and assets. The local San Francisco proposition, colloquially known as the Overpaid CEO tax, would tax companies whose CEO makes 100 times more than their median worker, which mostly applies to companies with billionaire CEOs. Both will likely be on the ballot in November, as Wiener also hopes to be.

Larsen, the billionaire co-founder and executive chairman of the blockchain service Ripple Labs and now a mainstay in Bay Area political funding, has donated $100,000 to the PAC backing Wiener — the most of any individual donor — and $700,000 opposing the Overpaid CEO tax, according to federal and San Francisco city records. He’s spent far more fighting the statewide billionaires’ tax, sinking $5 million of his own wealth and another $5 million from Ripple into the Golden State Promise PAC, an anti-tax PAC he founded, per state records. Larsen gave an additional $2.5 million to a separate anti-billionaire tax group, Building a Better California, founded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. (Brin has reportedly already left the state to avoid the tax.)

Tan, the CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator, has less money to throw around, but he’s made vocal opposition to the tax measures a key part of his brand. He frequently invokes the specter of billionaires and startups fleeing the state and spreads claims that the statewide tax would mean Google’s founders would owe 50 percent of their stocks, which the tax’s backers have dismissed as false. He’s contributed $25,000 to Abundant Future.

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Larsen and Tan likely see their support as “political investments that they expect a return on,” said Jeremy Mack, executive director of Phoenix Project, which tracks corporate spending in San Francisco politics. Wiener owes much of his political strength to the donors who have boosted his housing causes during his state Senate career, including Larsen and Tan. With those backers now animated against the wealth taxes, Mack said that supporting them would be “political suicide” for Wiener.

But Wiener’s opposition to the taxes positions him against the political currents now driving the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. California’s major labor unions, a supermajority of San Francisco’s board of supervisors, and national progressive leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., all support the pair of taxes. Even Pelosi, Wiener’s would-be predecessor and a known moderate, is in favor of the local San Francisco tax. SEIU California, one of the state’s largest labor unions, withdrew its endorsement of Wiener in early April over his opposition to the tax measures.

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Both of Wiener’s opponents in the three-way June 2 primary — progressive member of San Francisco’s board of supervisors Connie Chan and Justice Democrats co-founder Saikat Chakrabarti — are in favor of the taxes. Most California voters support the statewide billionaire tax, according to a March poll, including 72 percent of Democratic voters. 

“If you look at who is bankrolling [Wiener], he is doing the bidding of massive corporate interest,” Justin Dolezal, a San Francisco bar owner and co-founder with Small Business Forward, an advocacy group that supports both wealth taxes, told The Intercept. “That’s what he’s looking out for, rather than the average, everyday working San Franciscans.”

Wiener’s campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

While Wiener in the past has brushed off concerns of corporate backers influencing his policy, saying that he and his wealthiest donors “have agreements and disagreements,” their alignment in opposition against two popular wealth taxes has drawn concern from housing and homelessness advocates, who were already skeptical of Wiener for boosting housing development in the city that they argue favors real estate corporations. The real estate industry was consistently among his top donors during his state Senate elections.

Wiener is a proponent of the “Yes in My Backyard” movement that seeks to address the housing crisis by increasing the housing stock, while opponents criticize it for its emphasis on boosting development rather than redistributing wealth. The movement has morphed over the past several years with the growth of the abundance movement, which is popular among San Francisco’s powerful billionaires and aims to remove regulations and red tape to speed up development.

In addition to being top donors to Abundant Future, Tan and Larsen, along with Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman, have been consistent supporters of Wiener’s YIMBY vision. During his decade in the state Senate, Wiener introduced a series of bills that cut regulations to accelerate housing development across the state, a core tenet of YIMBYism and abundance. Critics on the left dismissed his policies as rewards for corporate commercial real estate developers that failed to meet San Francisco and the state’s housing needs, as well as exacerbating gentrification and displacement of its low-income residents. Opponents instead argue for redistribution of wealth, using the housing that already exists and direct investment in services for low-income people. 

Confronting challenges over his support from wealthy donors during his campaign for Congress, Wiener often refers to his track record of taking on corporations, such as introducing AI regulation bills, one of which drew the ire of some of his tech backers, including Tan. But earlier this year, Wiener and Tan partnered on a failed state bill that would have restricted Big Tech companies from self-preferencing their products over smaller companies. While Wiener touted the legislation as a way to rein in the likes of Apple and Google, Tan’s company, Y Combinator, likely would have benefited because it helps launch new startups.

Tan has also worked to insulate the tech sector from organized labor, accusing the state’s labor leaders of having the goal of “killing the tech golden goose and taking maximum waste into the budget … until CA ceases to work for everyday Californians.” 

Larsen, meanwhile, railed against unions at a San Francisco business event in January, calling on his peers to “start fighting on par with the unions when they propose these absolutely stupid propositions like this crazy CEO tax.” Larsen echoed the message at a separate tech donor gathering Tan hosted months later. 

Larsen did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. A spokesperson for Tan told The Intercept to “look at Mr. Tan’s posts on X/Twitter,” where Tan has called the billionaire tax “a destroy tech in California proposition” and the overpaid CEO tax “bad policy wrapped up in anti-billionaire bullshit.”

Wiener’s legislative record reveals an inconsistent history of supporting progressive taxation. In 2018, he opposed a successful local tax on big businesses to fund homelessness services. Two years later, Wiener supported the first iteration of the CEO tax, the first of its kind nationwide, before it was undone in 2024. 

At a candidate forum in January, Wiener said he supported progressive taxes, but he would wait until the Billionaires Tax Act got on the ballot to decide. In April, Wiener said he opposed the local CEO tax, saying he didn’t want to interrupt San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s economic recovery agenda and that he would pursue similar progressive tax reform in Congress. And last week, after the state billionaire tax’s backers announced they had the necessary signatures to enter it on the ballot, Wiener said he was also against the statewide tax.

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“California already has an unstable boom-bust tax system because of the devaluation of property taxes and reliance increasingly on income taxes on wealthy residents,” Wiener told the San Francisco Standard. He said he disagreed with the approach, especially given that it’s a one-time tax.

“It sounds like a person that’s in opposition, but doesn’t want to be seen as Republican,” said Paul Boden, a longtime advocate for people living unhoused. “It’s the neoliberal justification for continuing down the same neoliberal path since Reagan: that doing something that might impact some wealthy people is bad for all of us.” 

Boden, the executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, has long sparred with Wiener on his housing and homelessness policy. In 2016, when Wiener was a San Francisco board supervisor, Boden spoke out against a letter Wiener wrote to the city’s police chief, which had called for a sweep of homeless encampments amid that year’s winter storms. He has criticized Wiener’s housing policies, arguing they prioritize middle-income San Franciscans over the city’s poor.

The results of Larsen and Tan’s ad spending can already be seen on the airwaves in and around San Francisco. Abundant Future has been running ads and sending mailers that paint Chakrabarti, who is advocating to nationalize AI by turning struggling AI companies into public utilities, as a carpetbagger amid his surge in recent polls. Larsen has said that he supports candidates promoting AI regulation, and he plans to spend millions backing Alex Bores, a New York congressional candidate facing heavy oppositional spending from a PAC backed by openAI.

Larsen-funded ads released by his Golden State Promises PAC aired during California’s recent gubernatorial debate, saying the billionaire tax would “backfire and hurt you.”

Supporters of the local and state wealth taxes argue that more revenue is needed to address California’s shortfall due to federal healthcare funding cuts, which is estimated at a $100 billion loss over the next five years. There are more than 200 billionaires who live in the state, according to Forbes data compiled by tax advocates. Most of the revenue from the one-time state tax would go to healthcare, with some set aside for food assistance at schools and other education programs. 

Revenue from San Francisco’s local Overpaid CEO tax — which has been estimated to bring in $250 to $300 million each year — is designed to go to the city’s general fund, with its supporters hoping to invest in healthcare, mental health treatment, and housing support. Larsen and opponents are also funding support for a dueling “poison pill” measure, which would negate the Overpaid CEO tax if approved.

To Mack of the Phoenix Project, this kind of spending is par for the course in politics but should inspire voters to think critically about whom they support.

“The more politicians are in their pockets,” said Mack, referring to wealthy donors, “the less we can expect regular Californian/San Franciscan people’s voices to matter.”

Correction: May 14, 2026, 4:05 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article misstated the first name of a San Francisco bar owner and co-founder with Small Business Forward; he is Justin Dolezal, not Jerome.

The post This California Congressional Hopeful Opposes a Billionaire Tax. So Do His Tech CEO Backers. appeared first on The Intercept.

The ink had barely dried on the Supreme Court’s ruling to gut the Voting Rights Act when Republican lawmakers raced to deliver on the barely veiled promises of the court’s decision: the decimation of Black political power and a revival of Jim Crow-era racist voter suppression.

In Tennessee on Thursday, Gov. Lee signed a bill that repealed a half-century-old law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, and then the overwhelmingly Republican legislature passed new redistricting maps that eliminate the state’s only Black-majority district. The 9th Congressional District, also Tennessee’s only reliable Democratic seat, will be carved into three — purposefully redrawn for each piece to have a white-majority and Republican-leaning electorate. The votes of Memphis’s 63 percent Black population will be diluted to near irrelevance; the entire state will be handed to Republicans.

No one can act surprised. This was the predicted outcome of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which decimated Section 2 of the embattled Voting Rights Act, a provision that had protected minority voters from redistricting. With the right-wing justices’ blessing, Republican lawmakers can now enact segregationist gerrymandering and reestablish the pre-civil-rights-era status quo ante.

It stands to reason that Republicans are not representing the interests of Black Tennesseans, some 17 percent of the population, overwhelmingly Democrats. These residents only have one representative in Washington, Rep. Steve Cohen — the lone Democrat among the state’s nine congressional seats. That is the seat being eliminated by the new maps passed by Tennessee’s largely white legislature.

The situation is already one in which Black working-class interests are hardly represented — and nor would greater Black representation in the state necessarily ensure the delivery of racial justice and the economic justice it requires.

The point is that Black disenfranchisement both reflects and produces conditions of white supremacist rule, wherein greater anti-Black oppression is assured.

“These maps are racist tools of white supremacy, at the behest of the most powerful white supremacist in the United States of America, Donald J. Trump,” said Democratic state Rep. Justin Pearson at the Tennessee statehouse on Thursday. Pearson, a progressive activist and one of the state’s few Black representatives, is running for a seat in Congress and was neck and neck in polling for his August primary against Cohen, the 76-year-old incumbent. The redrawn maps would likely foreclose his chance to represent South Memphis in Washington.

Pearson called the gerrymandered maps a “political lynching” that “set our state back over 150 years.”

Trump’s Larger Project

Trump, who is historically unpopular, has every reason to push his GOP to use newly unconstrained gerrymandering capacities in advance of the midterms. Right-wing redistricting efforts go beyond a scramble for November, though, and sit within a larger project of white supremacist backlash.

Like in Tennessee, Republicans in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina all called special legislative sessions — as explicitly ordered by Trump — to push new redistricting maps that will decimate majority-Black districts and deliver congressional seats to Republicans.

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According to the cynical rationale of the Supreme Court conservatives, such maps would not violate what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, because the GOP is not openly describing their gerrymander as targeting Black voters.

“The more racist you are as a party, the more insulated you are from Voting Rights Act liability under this decision,” Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, told Bolts Magazine about the Callais ruling. “If there were a party called the Klan party, right now, it would trigger an awful lot of nonwhite opposition based on the party’s platform. But this opinion says, you have to set the party’s platform entirely aside to figure out if there’s been any damage based on race. So the more you can tie the two together, the more insulated you are.”

In short, as Levitt put it, “the most racist partisan gerrymandering is going to be the most immune from a VRA challenge.”

Tennessee Republicans proved precisely this point on Thursday. Striding into the statehouse to disenfranchise Black voters, Republican state Rep. Todd Warner wore a giant Trump 2024 flag as a cape.

As other states follow Tennessee’s example, the consequences of Callais could see the largest-ever drop in the number of Black lawmakers in Congress. The previous record was set, NPR reported, in the post-Reconstruction backlash, by the Congress that began in 1877 with four fewer House districts represented by Black lawmakers than the previous session.

In response to racist Republican gerrymandering, Democrats can play their own game of redistricting — but there’s a reason the Callais decision is understood as a gift to Republicans.

“The states controlled by Republicans where there are majority-minority districts have no internal constraint on how much they can screw over Black voters, because Black voters are not voting for that party,” Pamela Karlan, law professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, told Slate.

Democrats could expand a small number of safe seats in New York and California, for example, by eliminating minority voter districts. As Karlan noted, however, this would be politically unpalatable because “the politics of the state are not going to look favorably on that, and the Democrats in those states depend on Black and Latino voters in statewide races.”

According to Karlan, in this race to the bottom, Republican-led election fixing will not be addressed without a different Congress, a different president, and a powerful political movement to hold politicians accountable.

“Voters have to first build a political movement around this that makes elected officials afraid to do this,” she said.

Meanwhile, Democratic redistricting efforts in Virginia were dealt a blow on Friday, when they were struck down by the state’s Supreme Court. Voters had approved in a referendum to redraw the state’s congressional map, but the court’s ruling hands Republicans a fierce electoral advantage.

After Thursday’s vote, Tennessee Democratic state Rep. Justin Jones burned a paper Confederate flag in the statehouse rotunda, surrounded by protesters who had gathered to decry the racist gerrymandering.

“We saw a time like this, in this building before,” Jones told his fellow lawmakers earlier this week during the unprecedented redistricting special session. “If you study Reconstruction. We had Black lawmakers after the Civil War, then from the end of the 1800s to the 1960s, we had no Black folks here” — meaning the statehouse.

On Thursday afternoon, the NAACP’s Tennessee chapter filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the new congressional map, which is likely to be the first of several legal efforts against the rushed, conniving, and unrepentantly racist gerrymander.

The post Tennessee GOP Moves to Decimate Black Voting Power After Supreme Court’s Blessing of Jim Crow appeared first on The Intercept.

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act, triggering a new wave of redistricting fights in the midst of midterm primary elections. Last week, the court struck down a Louisiana congressional map with a second majority-Black district. The decision requires there to be evidence of intentional racism to prove that a map is discriminatory, making it nearly impossible to successfully challenge racial gerrymandering. 

Following the 6-3 decision along partisan lines, Louisiana suspended its already active congressional primary, throwing out cast ballots. Alabama’s Republican governor took steps to gerrymander her state’s maps ahead of November elections. Tennessee GOP leaders also convened a special session to eliminate the last remaining Democratic stronghold in the state, home to Memphis, a majority-Black city and district; the new map would split Memphis into three districts and further split Nashville and the surrounding counties into five districts. On Thursday, Tennessee Gov. Lee signed a bill that repealed a state law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, and the new map was passed by Tennessee Republicans.

The primary goal state Rep. Justin J. Pearson tells The Intercept Briefing “is to dilute Black political voting power and representation, and it’s starting at the U.S. congressional level.” The Democratic Tennessee state representative for Memphis is running for U.S. Congress in the district at the heart of the state’s re-districting fight. “When you look across the South, the truth is about at least a dozen seats are likely to be taken in this very racist redistricting era that we are in, but it won’t stop there,” Pearson says. “We have over 200 legislative seats in the House and the Senate that are also likely to be eliminated through racist redistricting that is happening.” 

Voting rights journalist and author Ari Berman says SCOTUS’s latest blow to voters’ rights is a “power grab.”

This week on the podcast, Berman and Pearson speak to host Jessica Washington about how the latest Supreme Court decision bolsters President Donald Trump and Republicans’ aims to take control of voting in the country.

“This is now the third major decision by the Roberts court gutting the Voting Rights Act,” says Berman. “You can’t understand this latest attack on the Voting Rights Act unless you understand the attacks that came before it, and how this is part of a pattern. … This is part of a larger conservative counterrevolution against the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

Berman says that this ruling could bring us back to the “dark days” before the Voting Rights Act made the United States a “multiracial democracy.” Now you look at what’s going to happen in these places, in places like Tennessee, in places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi. If they eliminate all of their Black members of Congress, that’s going to make politics a white-only game. If politics is a white-only game, that’s going to mean that white supremacy in some form or another is going to be the dominant politics in those states. It’s already the dominant politics in lots of these states, but it’s going to become much more explicit in terms of how it’s expressed.”

Pearson says that the Supreme Court’s assertion that these protections are no longer necessary is a lie. “The hatred that hung us on lynching trees did not disappear. It dissipated into institutions of power, into state houses, into governor’s mansions, into the U.S. Senate, into the U.S. House, into the presidency of the United States,” says Pearson. “Everybody has to do more than they are currently doing in this moment in time in order for us to preserve this modicum of a democratic constitutional republic. … Because what is likely to happen is the most significant purging of Black political power and elected Black leaders since the end of Reconstruction.”

“The litmus test for America’s progress is not Massachusetts, New York, and California,” says Pearson. “The litmus test for America’s progress is what happens in the South, where 50 percent of Black African American descendants of enslaved people live.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor of The Intercept.

JW: Midterms are heating up this week, and Maia, on top of being my editor, you also manage our election coverage. So what’s sticking out with you this week?

MH: This was a really weird week because we’re coming off some primaries where the most-watched races in the country were actually a set of state Senate races in Indiana. And that’s weird because most people don’t even know who their state senator is. It’s very rare to be focused on state legislative elections as the top race.

But this one was seen as a huge test for Trump because essentially he was on this revenge path where a handful of Indiana state senators, Republicans, part of his party, had defied the president when he wanted them to redistrict the state. So he said, I’m gonna primary you, and I’m gonna kick you out of office for not doing what I wanted.

In all but one or maybe two of those cases, the people that Trump backed — so the challengers taking out the incumbents — won. So it looks like, if that was a test of Trump’s power in his base, at least in Indiana, at least there, it looks pretty good for him on that front.

JW: Trump has really set off this redistricting war that’s happening across the country. There was this idea that Donald Trump was going to be weakened by the war in Iran, by the economy. The fact that we’re also seeing redistricting, which generally makes people really angry, also doesn’t seem to be weakening Trump, that sets the stage for something really interesting in the midterms.

MH: It’s a really interesting question because I think it gets at the constant tension in politics between the politician’s identity and the issues.

So on the issues, the conventional wisdom right now is that Trump and the Republicans look really weak going into the midterms, right? People don’t love it when you’re running on lowering the cost of living and not starting new wars — and then you start a new war and spike the cost of living.

But it is still, in my view, a cult of personality around Trump in the Republican Party, and it seems like he still holds a ton of sway over what the Republican base thinks. That’s really interesting if we think ahead, not just to the midterms, but to 2028, which unfortunately we’re already thinking about because even if Democrats have a stronger footing perhaps on a lot of these popular issues right now, they don’t have that figurehead.

JW: Republicans have been unleashed by the Supreme Court ruling striking down Louisiana’s congressional map with a second majority-Black district. The ruling also required there to be evidence of intentional racial discrimination to prove that a congressional map is discriminatory.

Obviously, we know that there’s going to be many new redistricting efforts as a result of this ruling, and we’re going to get into the ruling itself a little later in the episode. But Maia, where are we seeing pushes from Republicans to reshape the map?

MH: Right now, this is according to The AP, as of Thursday, there are four states that are still in flux. Louisiana, as you mentioned; there’s also Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee. 

This is such an interesting issue because gerrymandering to help your party get seats or keep seats is frankly anti-democratic in the simplest, most literal possible sense of the word. You’re taking some of the power of choice away from the people. But it also puts politicians in a really weird bind because if one party’s doing it, how is the other party supposed to not?

JW: Yeah, as you point out, there’s been a lot of news on that front. On Wednesday, Republicans in Tennessee unveiled a new congressional map that would split Memphis into three distinct districts and further split Nashville and the surrounding counties into five districts. The new Memphis district would span nearly 300 miles. On Thursday, the Tennessee House passed this new map.

Then there’s Virginia. The FBI raided the office of Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas on Wednesday. She’s one of the leaders in the Democratic-led redistricting fight there, and she’s been a real target of Trump and Republicans’ ire.

On the podcast today, we break down the latest Supreme Court decision with voting rights journalist Ari Berman and Justin J. Pearson. He’s a Democratic Tennessee state representative for District 86 in Memphis. He is also running for Congress in the district at the heart of these redistricting fights. Pearson lays out Republican strategy to eliminate the last remaining Democratic district and gut Black voting power in the South.

But first, we’re going to start with Ari. He’s going to give us more of a bird’s-eye view of what this decision actually means for voters and democracy as we head into an election.

MH: Cool. I’m excited to hear that conversation.

JW: Ari, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Ari Berman: Hey, Jessica. Great to see you. Thank you.

JW: Glad to have you on. I want to get into the news of last week. As you’re well aware of, last week, the Supreme Court dealt another blow to the Voting Rights Act, striking down Louisiana’s congressional map with a second majority-Black district, and requiring there to be evidence of intentional racial discrimination to prove that a map is discriminatory.

Ari, you wrote that the Louisiana v. Callais decision “narrows Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to the point of irrelevance, making it nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of voters of color.”

What did you mean by that, and what does this decision mean for voters?

AB: What I meant by that is that the last remaining weapon of the Voting Rights Act is essentially gone. The Supreme Court has already narrowed other parts of the Voting Rights Act, or struck them down altogether, so that the law has lost almost all of its teeth. And now they took away the last part of it, which was the protections against racial gerrymandering — the ability of voters of color to elect candidates of choice.

Basically what they said is, those districts in which voters of color can elect their preferred candidates are unconstitutional. At least, that’s what they ruled in Louisiana. The expectation is that’s what they’ll rule in other places as well. 

My big fear with this ruling is that it’s going to lead to a major rollback in representation for candidates of color. It could lead to the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction. You could have a situation throughout the South — where the largest percentage of Black Americans live — there could ultimately be no Black representatives. That would take us back to the Jim Crow era, in terms of how representation looks in America.

JW: You’re laying out a really scary scenario where we no longer have any of the protections that the Voting Rights Act — that was obviously so hard-won and fought for — those protections are now mostly gone. I guess my question is, for voters as they’re thinking about primaries, November, what does that mean for them?

AB: Voters are going to have less choices. It’s going to mean that red states, in the South in particular, are going to maximize Republican representation. The way they’re going to do that is by eliminating Black representation, because in the South, voting is very racially polarized. By and large, white people vote for Republicans, and Black people vote for Democrats. That was one of the really insidious things that the Supreme Court said in their opinion in Callais was basically that, if Black people support Democrats and Republicans are just targeting Democrats, then it doesn’t matter that Black voters are disenfranchised.

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But the fact is that even if race and party are intertwined, this is ultimately about race. This is ultimately about white legislators in all of these states — because all of these Southern states have white-majority legislatures and governors — eliminating Black districts. That means that in a place like Mississippi, for example, that’s 40 percent Black, you could have no Black representatives. In states like Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, states with large Black populations, there could be no Black representatives, and that means those communities are going to be underrepresented.

A lot of these communities are already underrepresented in Congress, and a lot of these communities are already among the poorest, most impoverished areas with the greatest need for representation, and now they’re going to have the least amount of representation. It’s really going to skew representation all across America.

JW: You just brought up Louisiana. And in this episode, we also are going to speak to Justin J. Pearson, a Democratic Tennessee state representative for District 86 in Memphis, about how after the Supreme Court ruling last week, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, called for eliminating the one remaining Democratic-held House seat, which is home to Memphis, a majority-Black city.

What’s your reaction to that redistricting effort?

AB: It just reminds me of what happened when Reconstruction ended in the South. That you had a situation where there were Black members of Congress from the South elected during Reconstruction after the passage of the 15th Amendment. And then you had violence, you had fraud, and then you had, ultimately, changing of the laws: things like literacy tests and poll taxes and gerrymandered districts and all-white primaries.

Suddenly, there were no more Black representatives, and that situation lasted for nearly 100 years in the South. When I see states rushing to immediately get rid of majority-minority districts, immediately get rid of districts in which there are Black majorities after this ruling, I think of what happened at the end of Reconstruction.

So it’s a very dark chapter in our history. It’s one that we would like to think we’ve moved past. In his opinion in Callais, Justice [Samuel] Alito talked about all the progress that America has made on race, but he completely ignored the dark parts of American history that could return when laws like the Voting Rights Act no longer exist or are functionally irrelevant.

JW: Do you take the court at face value when they argue that racism, racial gerrymandering, these are issues of our past? Should this be understood as more of a conservative power grab, or are these genuinely held opinions that the court is expressing?

AB: It’s impossible for me to get inside Alito’s head and know that, but I think it’s a power grab, ultimately.

The fact that they not only dismantled the Voting Rights Act but did so leaving Southern states time to actually redistrict for 2026 makes me believe that this is ultimately about a power grab. Because at the very least, they could have waited until June when it was too late for most of these Southern states to be able to redistrict.

Instead, they did it with just enough time for Southern states to redraw their maps. The Supreme Court has said over and over, you shouldn’t change voting laws too close to an election. And now they’ve basically allowed all of these Southern states to change their voting laws in the middle of an election — in some cases, canceling elections to put in place new maps.

This is extremely political to me. It’s extremely partisan. This decision just underscores how partisan, how political, how authoritarian the Roberts court has become.

JW: In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan touches on just how big of a decision this actually is, and how the court is trying to hide the extent to which this is going to change what voting looks like in this country.

So I’m going to just read a small piece of her dissent: “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic.”

What do you make of what Kagan wrote there? Is this a fair reading of the decision?

AB: Yes, because Alito basically made it sound like he was just updating the VRA, it was just these technical changes, and what Kagan said was, this was a demolition of the law. And it wasn’t the first demolition of the law; it was part of a pattern. This is now the third major decision by the Roberts court gutting the Voting Rights Act.

In 2013, they ruled that states with a long history of discrimination no longer need to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That was the first blow against the Voting Rights Act.

In 2021, they ruled that it was going to be much harder for voters of color to challenge discriminatory voting laws. That was a second major blow against the Voting Rights Act.

Now they have essentially overturned majority-minority districts, which is a third major blow of the Voting Rights Act.

You can’t understand this latest attack on the Voting Rights Act unless you understand the attacks that came before it, and how this is part of a pattern. A pattern that the Court wants to dismiss, but a pattern that is now impossible to ignore.

JW: To your point, the echoes of the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision are clearly felt throughout both the dissent and the opinion. For those who don’t know, the Shelby County v. Holder decision effectively struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required certain states and localities to seek preclearance before changing their voting laws. Can you set the stage a little bit more for us about what happened in Shelby County v. Holder, and how we’re still feeling that to this day?

AB: Shelby County v. Holder eliminated the most important part of the Voting Rights Act, because the requirement that states with a history of discrimination, largely but not exclusively in the South, had to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That stopped attacks on voting before they even occurred.

It was like stopping a crime before it had been committed. It was such a powerful tool the federal government had to block voting discrimination. It meant that when all of these Southern states had to do new redistricting plans, they had to be approved with the federal government. Now they no longer have to be approved with the federal government, but they can openly discriminate in terms of these maps.

What was clear at the time was that the Shelby County decision was going to open the door to new attacks on the Voting Rights Act, and the court denied this at the time. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion in that case, said this attack on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act will not affect Section 2, the other part of the Voting Rights Act.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened in 2021, and again in 2026. They attacked the other remaining part of the Voting Rights Act, which makes me believe that they’re not out to get one part of the Voting Rights Act or another part of the Voting Rights Act. They’re out to get the Voting Rights Act altogether, and this is part of a larger conservative counterrevolution against the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The Voting Rights Act is the most important law of the civil rights movement, of the civil rights era, and that’s why this has been the top target of the right for so many years.

JW: As you point out, it’s been a while since this decision. We’ve had over a decade in between. Do we have any sense that the Supreme Court has been looking at the track record of what happened, the aftermath of them undermining Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act?

Do we have any sense in any of their opinions or writings that they’ve noticed what’s happened, the kind of carnage that they’ve unleashed on the country in this decade-plus since?

AB: No, the Supreme Court completely got all the facts about the aftermath of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act wrong.

Justice Alito said the Black and white turnout gap is narrowing. Well, the elections that it narrowed were 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama was on the ballot. If you look at what happened after that, in the wake of Shelby County, the Black and white turnout gap has widened. So Justice Alito was just completely wrong in terms of the statistics that he talked about in terms of Black/white turnout, in terms of racial polarization in voting.

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The only time that the court has reversed itself was two years ago in Alabama, when they upheld a second majority-Black district in Alabama. That makes the Louisiana ruling even more confounding because the Louisiana case followed from the Alabama case in 2023. It was only because of the Alabama decision, which was authored by John Roberts and joined by Justice Kavanaugh, that Louisiana created a second majority-Black district.

So some of the justices clearly had buyer’s remorse from that decision. Basically, what happened was Alito’s dissent in the Alabama case in 2023 became the majority opinion in the Louisiana case in 2026. 

At some point, someone’s going to write a backstory of how that occurred, but it’s clear that the small victories from voting rights that emanated from the Roberts court have been the exception, rather than the rule. And the rule more often than not has been a steady stream of weakening things like the Voting Rights Act, and more broadly attacking voting rights.

JW: I would definitely read a book on that backstory. I want to ask a little bit more about the history of the Voting Rights Act, because I think to understand what’s happened in the decade-plus since Shelby and what’s likely to happen now, we have to understand how we even got the Voting Rights Act in the first place.

Can you tell us a little bit of that history and how the Voting Rights Act came to be?

AB: The Voting Rights Act was meant to rectify the widespread disenfranchisement of Black Americans in the South who couldn’t vote because of things like poll taxes and literacy tests and grandfather clauses and all-white primaries.

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There was a situation where in states like Mississippi, for example, only 6 percent of African Americans were registered to vote. That was a situation that existed for many years in the South. It only changed when there were huge protests of the civil rights movement that people are very familiar with. For example, the march, in Selma, Alabama, on “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, when John Lewis and civil rights marchers were brutally beaten by Alabama state troopers. The footage from Selma, Alabama really transformed the nation and led to LBJ introducing the Voting Rights Act and Congress passing it overwhelmingly.

It really was a transformative law because of what it did. It got rid of, overnight, those literacy tests and those poll taxes and those things that had disenfranchised Black voters for so many years. It led to a huge registration of previously disenfranchised Americans. Then over a longer period of time, the law was broadened so that it didn’t just help Black Americans, but it helped Americans of color throughout the country, whether it was Latinos or Asian Americans or other language minority groups.

It really made America a multiracial democracy for the first time. It was the first time that you had a situation in which people of color could vote broadly throughout the country, candidates of color could win office, and you had multiracial coalitions being built in America. So it really profoundly shaped American society and American democracy. And I’m very concerned that without that, we’re going to go back to the dark days of racially polarized voting, of Black voters and Black candidates being disenfranchised, of one-party rule and white supremacy being enshrined, particularly throughout the South.

So I think it’s a misnomer to look at the Voting Rights Act in terms of just Black and white. That’s why I always talk about the fact that it made multiracial democracy possible. Because it had a big impact on white voters as well and on white politicians as well, that you didn’t just have to pander to race, and you didn’t just have to appeal to white supremacy to get elected anymore.

Now you look at what’s going to happen in these places, in places like Tennessee, in places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi. If they eliminate all of their Black members of Congress, that’s going to make politics a white-only game. If politics is a white-only game, that’s going to mean that white supremacy in some form or another is going to be the dominant politics in those states. It’s already the dominant politics in lots of these states, but it’s going to become much more explicit in terms of how it’s expressed.

JW: The nightmare scenarios that you’re describing are happening against the backdrop of what the Supreme Court did, but also what the Trump administration is trying to do and Republicans are actively trying to do.

Wired recently ran a story about how the Department of Justice under Trump has essentially dismantled its voting rights [division], going from 30 attorneys to two since he started a second term. What are the implications of this broader attack, both from Republicans and the Trump administration, and now the court as well?

AB: That’s right. You can’t divorce the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act from the larger context of the attacks on voting rights we’re seeing from the Trump administration. There’s already a mid-decade redistricting war going on that’s trying to eliminate representation for Democrats, and particularly targeting communities of color.

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There’s already a huge rollback in civil rights enforcement. The Department of Justice basically doesn’t enforce civil rights laws in America anymore. They’ve weaponized those laws, in fact, to defend white people at the expense of communities of color that these civil rights laws were meant to protect.

You already have the Trump administration, for example, going after elections in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing ballots, demanding names of election workers in the largest county in Georgia, home to Atlanta, which has a huge Black population. So it’s very clear that over and over, the Trump administration has tried to target certain communities.

They’ve tried to target communities that ally with Democrats, and so often those are Black, Latino, other minority communities. That’s why this attack on the Voting Rights Act is part of this larger effort to, in Trump’s words, “take over” the voting system. Some of it succeeded, some of it hasn’t succeeded, but the fact that all of these things happened at the same time is very alarming.

JW: Do voters have any recourse to defend themselves against what appears to be a blatant power grab?

AB: I think, more broadly, there needs to be a lot more investment in the South. A lot of these places, these “red states,” places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, they’ve been ignored by the national Democratic Party, and I don’t think that can happen anymore.

There has to be investment in these places because if these districts no longer exist, then there’s going to have to be efforts to win in new places and build new coalitions that haven’t existed before. That’s going to take new leaders. It’s going to take new investment. That’s something that needs to be created. That’s one part of it. 

I also think that some of the bigger issues that come out of this decision, for example, the need to reform the Supreme Court, the need to actually do something at a national level about the problem of gerrymandering — those are things that voters can demand from their politicians.

What are you going to do about a completely unaccountable and lawless Supreme Court? What are you going to do about the problem of gerrymandering so that states just don’t redraw their maps every year or two when they feel like it because of the political circumstance? 

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Then I think in terms of what voters can do to protect the election system, voters can become poll workers. Voters can become election monitors. Voters can decide to volunteer for civil rights organizations, things like that. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for democracy, and people are going to have to get involved in whatever way they think can make the most difference.

JW: Ari Berman, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

AB: Thank you so much for having me, Jessica.

[Break]

JW: After the most recent Supreme Court ruling further gutting the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn immediately called for eliminating the one remaining Democratic-held House seat in the state. 

Justin J. Pearson is a Democratic state representative in Memphis running for Congress for the district at the heart of Tennessee’s gerrymandering fight. We spoke with Pearson on Tuesday evening as that fight began. 

On Thursday afternoon, the state legislature concluded the special session, eliminating the only remaining Democratic-held House District. We speak to Rep. Pearson about the impact this will have on his district and Black voters statewide. 

Rep. Justin J. Pearson, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Justin J. Pearson: Thank you so much for having me.

JW: After the Supreme Court’s ruling last week invalidating a Louisiana map that — in line with the Voting Rights Act — created two majority-Black districts, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, called for eliminating the one remaining Democratic-held House seat in your state, which happens, of course, to be the seat you’re running for and part of your district. What impact is that going to have on your state? 

JP: The removal of the only Black-majority district in the state of Tennessee will have detrimental ramifications for our representation and our right to be able to select elected officials of our choosing.

The fact is, this is a racist redistricting and gerrymandering attempt. It is a coup. It is the stealing of a congressional seat on behalf of the president of the United States, the governor, and white supremacist leaders in the state House and state Senate. And I’m using that language very particularly. 

This is an election cycle. This is a moment where white supremacy is governing. It’s not what’s best for our citizens. It’s not what’s best for our constituents. But it is a weaponization and a mobilization of power. And stealing it is what this president has asked for the state government of Tennessee to do on his behalf, and it is what they are doing and have done right now in the state.

JW: We’re speaking Tuesday evening after that first redistricting special session that you were part of. What can you tell us about how the first of these sessions taking place this week went down?

JP: Today, committees were assigned, and each of those committees, the biggest ones in the House, was the Congressional Redistricting Committee, there’s a resolutions committee, and a couple of other ones.

But my big concern is these committees are set to operate at the speed of lightning to make a decision that actually undos current statute, which says that there can be no redistricting between apportionments of districts between the census. Now we’re going to undo that law in an attempt to now take a congressional district that would otherwise be directly in contradiction.

There’s an expectation that we’re going to hold those committees, and that those committees are going to be presented with new gerrymandered maps that break up the only Black-majority district. And the only reason that this is happening at this point in time is because Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has been gutted, and the ability of Black folks to seek remedies in the judicial system no longer exists in the way that they had before.

They still do exist, but the fact of racial animus and the racial intention has been severely weakened — which is why this case is so devastating. Because our ability to go to the courts and seek remedies from those decisions is really something that has been able to keep the Voting Rights Act in effect. It’s been able to keep Black representation as a possibility in our democracy. 

It’s really important to realize we aren’t at this point in our nation’s history of needing a Voting Rights Act because people were just bad, right? It was because of centuries of systematic oppression.

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It was violence, lynching, the murdering of people whose bodies were found in the Mississippi River and other small towns all across the South in particular, just for registering to vote or trying to vote. We have to realize the ramifications of what has happened in the state of Tennessee and what is likely to happen in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and across the South — the Confederacy states — are going to have far-reaching implications for us in this generation and generations to come

JW: People bled out for this. They fought for this. These are rights that are hard-won. In your district, what are you hearing from people in Memphis about, particularly Black people, about how this is going to impact them and the kind of rights that they’re, I’m sure, terrified of losing right now?

JP: I think the first feeling for a lot of people is fear. Fear that they’ll never ever again have the opportunity to send a Black person to the U.S. Congress, that they’ll never — and we’ve been on the campaign trail since October 8 — but that they’ll never really be able to have a voice in the national government is deeply concerning to them as Black people and also for folks who are Democrats. They’re deeply concerned that this won’t happen again because of, again, mid-decade racist redistricting that is happening. 

There is some organizing and some energy that has mobilized people into action. We’ve had two busloads of people come up to Nashville every single day — it’d be on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday — who are speaking up and speaking out and saying, “No, this is unfair. This is unjust. This is wrong.” They’re not just coming from Memphis and Shelby County, which I have the privilege of representing in the [Tennessee] House of Representatives for District 86, but these folks are coming from all across the state in small rural counties and other places who fear that their representation will no longer be proximate to them because districts are being created that in some cases stretch 200 miles, just to break up the compactness of our district, just to break up our ability to have Black political power. 

That is what is the primary goal of what they’re doing. It is to dilute Black political voting power and representation, and it’s starting at the U.S. congressional level. When you look across the South, the truth is, about at least a dozen seats are likely to be taken in this very racist redistricting era that we are in, but it won’t stop there. We have over 200 legislative seats in the House and the Senate that are also likely to be eliminated through racist redistricting that is happening. 

We just have to have people’s eyes wide open to what is going on and to the far-reaching implications this is going to have when you no longer have advocates and people who speak to the concerns, the issues, the culture, the identity of our community.

JW: There’s precedent for what you’re talking about here, for that kind of impact. Back in 2022, Republicans redistricted Nashville in a way that diluted Democratic voters’ influence, making the district lean more toward the GOP. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened then, and what that could mean for the district you represent?

JP: Absolutely. So we did see this in Nashville when the maps were redrawn in 2022. They were forced to have three different congresspeople all representing the city of Nashville. The intention there was to dilute Nashville’s political power, putting them inside of districts where the majority of people probably live very differently, much more rural, vote much more conservatively, and have much less diversity than the city of Nashville does.

Since then, people who live here don’t have representation in the U.S. Congress. The congresspeople don’t have any offices near or around Nashville, and even elected officials that I’ve met who represent Nashville have a hard time accessing any of the people who supposedly are representing them on the federal level.

So the voices in this community have, in effect, been silenced when it comes to the federal government and national government issues, and that has really been detrimental to this community, and many people here will tell you that.

I am deeply concerned that that is the exact same thing that’s going to happen in Memphis. We won’t have a voice in Washington, D.C. We won’t have someone advocating about the issues from the socioeconomic perspective, from public health perspective, from an educational perspective, that can elevate the problems that we know acutely exist in our city. 

My city’s the most beautiful place in the world, but we have problems.

A fourth of our adults are living in poverty. We got poor kids because we got poor parents. We haven’t increased the minimum wage to $25 an hour. We need access to universal healthcare in a state that has refused to expand Medicaid. We need housing, 55,000 units of housing for people who make $17,000 a year.

When you understand that history, that tradition, those statistics, not just as numbers on a page, but as something that you feel an accountability to do something about because it’s the community where you live. It’s the community where I’ve grown up. It’s the place that has made me into who I am. That is very different than being connected or thrown into a district that is majority-white in an attempt to silence our voices.

JW: The conservatives on the Supreme Court obviously hold a very different opinion of this issue from you. In this case, and obviously in the Shelby County decision as well, they argue that these protections are no longer necessary because the South has made great strides on racism. As a Black representative who represents a majority-Black district in the South, what do you make of the notion that racial gerrymandering and voter suppression are issues of the past?

JP: Anyone who says that racial gerrymandering and voter suppression and racism no longer exist are lying. The fact that they are saying that shows the depth of racism and the institutionalization of white supremacy in our country, that some people are so enamored with whiteness being right that they don’t see the disparities that are vast and right in front of them.

Black people are still being deprived of educational opportunities. As it relates to housing, Black folks are still living in some of the most segregated neighborhoods in the United States of America. The wealth gap remains about 10 to 1. At every level, Black folks and African American folks are being deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In fact, there’s even a case right now of a man named Tony Carruthers who is on death row to be killed on May 21 in the state of Tennessee. Because we know the people who are on death row disproportionately are Black African American people, and even though 10 percent of them could be exonerated, states are using death by lethal injection, or now the federal government wants to do firing squads as a new form of lynching.

Twenty-one percent of Black people can’t vote in the state of Tennessee. Already, 1 out of 5 Black people cannot vote in the state of Tennessee due to felon disenfranchisement. And so for people who are trying to articulate some false narrative and argument that racism is no longer a problem, you are lying.

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You are lying to yourselves, and you are lying to communities that are feeling the impacts of racism every single day. Those vestiges are very real, and the hatred that hung us on lynching trees did not disappear. It dissipated into institutions of power, into statehouses, into governor’s mansions, into the U.S. Senate, into the U.S. House, into the presidency of the United States, and that is what we are dealing with right now.

So the Supreme Court has it wrong, but John Roberts has been going after the Voting Rights Act, I think, for [more than 40] years he’s been trying to gut it, since he was a staffer in the White House. So the fact they passed Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted Section 5, and now they passed anti-affirmative action. They wrote an opinion against affirmative action, which again targeted race consciousness, and now gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is all in sequence of their goal to try and make us somehow believe we live in a colorblind society that just so happens to leave Black African American people at the bottom every single time. 

JW: The forces that you’re talking about here of white supremacy are just incredibly strong. We can talk about racial gerrymandering, all of the other issues with racism that we’re dealing with in this country that you just mentioned.

How do we do anything about that? What does resistance look like in this moment? Obviously, in 2023, you were famously expelled from the state legislature for protesting for stronger gun control laws in the wake of a mass shooting in Nashville. That expulsion disenfranchised the voters in your majority Black district.

But instead of accepting an early retirement, you went on to win your district in the next election and continue to fight Republicans in the legislature. Do you think your story has any lessons for how people fight back against this behemoth of white supremacy and this energy of racial disenfranchisement?

JP: It’s multifaceted, the fight back. Here we are three years later from April 6, 2023, and Republicans are at it again disenfranchising our community and seeking to disenfranchise 750,000 people, both white and Black, but majority-Black district here in District 9. The fact of the matter is this: We did not quit then, we must not quit now.

As horrible as this decision is by the U.S. Supreme Court, what we also need to internalize is we need to organize for the next 50 years. Because I do not believe that when I die, this is the type of America that we’re going to live in. But that isn’t going to happen if we throw our hands up, if we quit, if we say, “Oh, there’s nothing we can do.”

Certainly, you can go quit and go get a job in corporate America, make six figures doing all those other things. But the reality is, if you are living in a society that structurally is designing itself to make you less than, structurally designing itself to tell my wife she is less than, my nephew’s sons, that they are less than American citizens, they’re less than human beings — if you sit on the sidelines at such a time in a critical and crucial moment as this, you are a part of the problem.

I understand some folks are working 80 hours a week just to make it. I get that. But there are some people who are retired, and they’re sitting on the couch, and they won’t pick up the phone to call their state House member, their state senator, and their governor. There are some people who are just hoping and praying in pews, but they’re not willing to show up and help people get to the polls.

That is what we have to quit on. Everybody has to do more than they are currently doing in this moment in time in order for us to preserve this modicum of a democratic constitutional republic that very quickly is being disrupted and destroyed at every single turn. Because what is likely to happen is the most significant purging of Black political power and elected Black leaders since the end of Reconstruction.

That’s what we’re looking at here. This is not a joke. This is not a game. And to anyone who says I would have been there with Dr. King, I would have been marching in the 1960s and 1950s. As one pastor said to me, “Whatever you are doing now is what you would have done then.” And people need to realize they have a responsibility now to do more.

JW: Do you feel as if your Democratic colleagues, both in the state legislature and nationally in Congress, do they have your back on this? Are they allies in this? Do you feel like they have that fight in them that you’ve mentioned?

JP: I am seeing more fight right here in the statehouse than I’ve seen in the last three years. People realize that the racism, the bigotry, the white supremacy that for too often has been cloaked in decency and niceness was all a façade.

We get caught up being told you have to learn to work across the aisle. I have done it. I passed resolutions with Republican co-sponsorship, signed on to some Republican bills, but we cannot forget that the roots of the institution are rotten.

They are designed to defeat our ability to resist, to speak up, to stand up against what’s happening.

In this moment in time, what I will say is, we need more support. We need more support. We need in every state, in every city that this is happening, we need a cadre of Congressional Black Caucus members coming to speak and to testify. We need dozens of nonprofit organizations, like we have right here in Tennessee, coming together to fight back and to resist and to speak up and to shout and to sing and to testify and to speak and to organize power at the ballot box. Not just registering people to vote, but making sure people actually get to the polls.

The South is where the litmus test for America’s future is, and I’ve said this for years. The litmus test for America’s progress is not Massachusetts, New York, and California. The litmus test for America’s progress is what happens in the South, where 50 percent of Black African American descendants of enslaved people live.

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If we continue to be neglected, millions of us, tens of millions of us, are going to continue to live under authoritarian, anti-democratic, mobcratic rule, and that is wrong. That should rouse this nation into action. It should force people who might not otherwise show up to show up and to speak up and to do more because their voices are the voices that we’re going to lean on and rely on to help change the status quo that is deeply impacting our states.

JW: Thank you, Rep. Pearson. Those were all of my questions, but do you have any final thoughts to share with our audience?

JP: I think what’s really important here for Black America is to realize this: We did not just come this far to get this far, and our ancestors who marched, who protested, who bled, who died, who were assassinated, who were taken from their families much too soon and too young, like 39-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., like Medgar Evers, who was quite young and in his 30s, and Fannie Lou Hamer, who was beaten by police officers and other folk. We didn’t come this far easily. This is a difficult road that we trod, as our Black National Anthem says, but we were built for this moment in time.

As a spiritual person who practices Christianity, I have to tell you this: I think we have been sent for such a time as this. And everybody who is alive right now has a responsibility in this moment to do something. So if that is march, do that. If that’s protest, do that. If that’s run for office, do that. If that’s sign a petition, do that. 

But you’ve got to do something because the moment is coming where somebody’s going to look you in the eyes, somebody who is not born yet, and they will say, “What did you do in the year 2026, in our 250 year of this country, when democracy was crumbling?” And you need to have a response.

JW: Thank you, Rep. Pearson. We really appreciate you coming on The Intercept Briefing.

JP: I appreciate you, too, and thanks so much for having me.

JW: And that does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Claire Mullen mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us. Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington.

The post The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It  appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter to Twitch and Amazon, New York Democratic Rep. Richie Torres once slammed Hasan Piker, the popular political streamer, for his “depravity” and called him “the poster child for the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism.” While mainstream Democrats and their allies have for months weighed the “problem” of Piker for the party, his star has only continued to rise. Insurgent candidates on the left are now making him their go-to surrogate, with Piker as a new kind of kingmaker, one they hope can shepherd his mass of online supporters behind them.

Piker recently touched down in Missouri to lend his star power to Cori Bush, who is looking to reclaim her position in the House after serving as the first Black woman to represent the state’s 1st Congressional District from 2021 to 2025. During her first term in office, Bush authored a bill calling for an “immediate deescalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” In what was widely read as retribution, Bush was primaried by a Democratic opponent, Wesley Bell, who ended his own Senate campaign against Republican Josh Hawley for the run; Bell defeated Bush with the help of an unprecedented nearly $9 million in spending from the super PAC for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

Now Bush is back, and like Piker, is unbowed: During the rally, she wore a T-shirt with her campaign slogan “FIGHT BACK” in big, bold letters. 

“I love seeing you all,” Bush told the May Day crowd. “I just don’t love why I keep seeing you all.”

Bush, who rose to prominence as an activist with the Black Lives Matter movement, quickly gained a reputation in office for bucking establishment Democrats — even outpacing other members of “the Squad” — and being outspoken in her criticism of party leadership.

On his wildly popular Twitch stream, Piker has argued that “80 percent of the Democratic Party now agrees with the principles that Cori Bush was defending at a time when it was inopportune for her to do so.” Piker’s visit to St. Louis coincided with weeks of national media scrutiny condemning the popular streamer’s views as antisemitic, culminating in Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., pushing a bipartisan bill to explicitly denounce Piker.

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But for the left, the criticism rings more like an endorsement, and Piker has hit the campaign trail for a number of progressive Democrats including Abdul El-Sayed, who’s running for the Senate in Michigan; Dr. Adam Hamawy, who’s running for a New Jersey House seat; and Rep. Ilhan Omar, who’s up for reelection in Minnesota. 

On stage with Bush, Piker described Bell as an “AIPAC stooge,” and urged St. Louisans to rally around the Bush campaign. “Republicans are monsters who traffic in hatred,” said Piker. “But we’re no longer going to vote for do-nothing Democrats, either.” He told the crowd about a St. Louis woman at the airport who was shocked to see him, visiting the city. “There’s this attitude in places like Missouri where city slickers like myself, the bicoastal elite, don’t come to places like St. Louis. Like, she genuinely was shocked,” Piker said on a stream re-cap.

At the rally, Piker described St. Louis as part of a growing coalition of the discontented. “I’ve seen a lot of places like St. Louis. Places that have been left behind by wealthy corporations that pollute your waters and steal your productive output … but today we say, ‘No more!’”

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for Bell pointed to common criticisms from mainstream figures over Piker’s past online comments. “If Cori Bush spent as much time meeting with her constituents as she does associating with people who condone sexual assault and blame America for September 11th, she may have fared better in her last election,” said Bell campaign spokesperson Jordan Blase.

Before Piker and Bush, historian Ángel Flores Fontánez took the stage as an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, anchoring the day in proud St. Louis labor history. One of the first American general strikes took place in the city in July 1877, when railroad workers across the United States objected to immiseration imposed by Gilded Age robber barons.

In 1877, railroad workers across the United States shut down rail line capital from New York to Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania to Ohio, all the way out west to Missouri. In St. Louis, the strike escalated, evolving into a general action which drew river levee roustabouts, coopers, newsboys, foundry workers, and refinery laborers into a weeklong action. 

The strike was a multiracial coalition, and the strike’s executive committee briefly ran St. Louis as one of the first commune governments before it was violently suppressed.

Fontánez recalled the city’s legacy of socialists, which dates back to the abolitionist German ’48ers, and the Funsten Nut Strike of May 1933. As University of Missouri history professor Keona Ervin notes in “Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis,” the Funsten strike was one of the first successful strike actions of the era, with the Communist Party USA using the strike as a moment to “mark the urban Midwest as a new hotbed for radical labor politics spearheaded by black working women.”

In the aftermath of the 2014 Black Lives Matter movement, which began in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, many hoped to see St. Louis once again become a beacon of progressivism. But Missouri poses a cadre of challenges: The 1st District is a gerrymandered product of a red state that used to be purple. Missouri was a bellwether for a century, but as polarization intensified in the early 2000s, Missouri Republicans successfully drew maps that neutralized the state’s urban progressive centers.

Most Missourians live in the blue islands of St. Louis, Kansas City, and Springfield, which also make up 80 percent of the state’s annual GDP. Previously, the state elected Democratic governors, senators, and controlled a handful of congressional seats. But now the 1st District is one of the few remaining positions not controlled by Republicans.

Decades of state and federal Republican rule have been disastrous for the Greater St. Louis area, plunging the city into a pattern of capital flight and population loss. The city is still reeling from the May 2025 tornado which ripped through the city and hit historically Black neighborhoods in North St. Louis the hardest.

From the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the St. Louis mayor’s office, many residents feel the recovery has been botched and worry that the North Side will not be rebuilt. Last month, protesters confronted Mayor Cara Spencer over the sluggish cleanup effort, where houses have been left half-destroyed and their residents sleeping in tents. 

“When we’re going to our electeds, we’re saying fully fund the North Side,” Bush told the crowd. “If you can’t stand up to Donald Trump and his administration — at the city level, the state level, or the federal level — then you’re no representative for us. If you can’t stand up to Donald Trump and his allies, then how are you supposed to stand up for us?”

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St. Louisans are calling on their elected officials to fight for more disaster relief, and also against attacks by the state legislature. At the direct request of President Donald Trump, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe, a former car dealership owner turned Republican politician, is attempting to further gerrymander the voting map for Kansas City. 

Kehoe also wants to abolish Missouri’s income tax, which critics say will send the state into a budget tailspin not unlike Sam Brownback’s failed tax-cutting policy, the “Kansas Experiment.”

The governor also caused an uproar by legally invading St. Louis in 2025, taking over state control of the city’s police department. In doing so, Kehoe defied a 2012 statewide vote which granted local control of the police to the St. Louis mayor. Missouri is the only state in the U.S. where the governor controls the police of the major cities, including the police budget.

Many St. Louisans are vehemently opposed to the police takeover and disgruntled with the status quo, but Missouri’s 1st District includes several neighborhoods in St. Louis County that went heavily for Bell in 2024. G Gamache, a union organizer with Starbucks Workers United who attended May Day rally, told The Intercept that Bush is still the fighter St. Louis needs.

“When you see her in person, you see how much she hasn’t changed who she is. … She’s still 10 toes down on things like Medicare for All, affordable housing, and ending the genocide of Palestinians by Israel. A wide majority of Democratic voters, and even many Republican voters, even in Missouri, support all these things,” he said.

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Back in August 2025, Bush’s opponent, Wesley Bell, held his first and only in-person town hall, which was disrupted by protesters. Local activists challenged the congressman on his support of Israel, his refusal to call Gaza a genocide, and his trip to Tel Aviv, which was sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation.

During the town hall, a man providing security for Bell was caught on video attempting to forcefully physically remove the protesters. 

Between Missouri Republicans and Bell, the 2.8 million St. Louisans living in the greater metropolitan area are generally represented by pro-Israel politicians. According to the Pew Research Center, most U.S. voters have soured on Israel, which is now engaged in an invasion of Lebanon, continued violence in the West Bank, the further annihilation of Gaza, and now an ongoing conflict with Iran, which has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping lane. As of April 2026, 60 percent of U.S. adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53 percent last year, and the trend seems to be accelerating.

Bell has tried to square this circle by recognizing the Armenian genocide, voting against Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, and denouncing Kehoe’s attempts to redraw Missouri’s congressional maps. Since the initial almost $9 million, AIPAC has continued supporting Bell, directing donors through its PAC’s portal to fund his campaign.

Blase, the Bell spokesperson, told The Intercept that “Congressman Bell remains focused on standing up to Trump and fighting for the people of Missouri’s first Congressional District.”

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While Bush called for a ceasefire early on, her criticisms of Israel don’t quite explain why AIPAC would spend so much on a Missouri congressional campaign.

A more complete answer may lie in Missouri as a node in the country’s military–industrial complex. St. Louis is home to several Boeing facilities, with the Seattle-headquartered aerospace company selling a range of weapons to the Israeli military, including F-35 and F-15IA fighter jets, missiles, and smart bombs.

In 2020, pro-Palestine student groups in St. Louis protested the St. Charles Boeing facility over a $2.2 billion contract to manufacture small-diameter bombs sold to foreign nations, including Israel, and in 2024, the Washington University Student Union Senate passed a resolution to divest from Boeing.

In one of its corporate PR products, a 2025 Boeing video highlighted St. Louis as “Fighterland U.S.A.,” nicknamed for its importance in military jet manufacturing across the Lambert International Airport and Scott Air Force Base complexes. In February 2026, the company announced the return of its Defense, Space & Security headquarters to St. Louis. Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base in Knob Noster, near Kansas City, made headlines in June 2025 as playing a key role in launching strikes against Iran.

St. Louis is also home to a number of companies on pro-Palestine boycott lists. The North American headquarters of Israeli Chemical Limited Group — which manufactures fertilizers, metals, and chemical products including white phosphorus — is in Creve Coeur, Missouri. As Human Rights Watch reported, Israel used white phosphorus in populated areas of Gaza and Lebanon in October and November 2023.

Bush told The Intercept that Missouri voters are agitated enough to show up and oust Bell, pointing to polling that shows the race to be neck and neck. But Bush is positioning herself as a fighter for people who have long felt left behind by the Democratic Party.

“If you hurt my people, I can’t sit back and do nothing. … If we wait on the feckless people in some of these seats to do it, it’ll never happen,” she promised.

The post Hasan Piker Is the Democrats’ New Man on the Trail, Whether They Like It or Not appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee issued a coveted endorsement of state Sen. Joe Baldacci in the primary race, prompting angry protests from the three other candidates in the race to replace outgoing Democratic Rep. Jared Golden.

In response to the endorsement, the Penobscot County Democratic Committee — in Baldacci’s home county, which includes the city of Bangor — will vote Saturday on a measure to condemn the endorsement. The language of the proposal, which was put forward by former Maine state Senate President Charles Pray, denounces the endorsement as being in “total disregard and willfully ignoring” local party rules that bar the Democratic state and county chapters from backing a candidate in a primary.

“With the DCCC deciding to throw itself into the mix here, truthfully that just kind of aggravated me,” Pray told The Intercept. “I’m going to support whoever wins the Democratic nomination, but I just think it was an unfair position on their part of trying to dictate or trying to boost up a candidate. Point is, let the people decide. Let the voters in the primary make that determination.”

Pray, who previously worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations and described himself as “a progressive moderate with liberal tendencies but conservative perspectives,” has personally backed State Auditor Matt Dunlap in the race, but said his pique at the DCCC’s endorsement isn’t about any one candidate.

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“This has nothing to do with Joe — I think all four of them have an equal chance,” Pray said. “It’s a primary, and, by the way, our state party rules and our county rules are that the party organization cannot endorse or support a candidate.”

A spokesperson for the DCCC said the group was focused on winning in the general elections and beating back President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“It’s imperative that Democrats must take back the House to hold Trump accountable and deliver on what truly matters to voters,” said the spokesperson, Viet Shelton. “That’s why we are proud to announce our latest round of Red to Blue candidates who span the ideological spectrum, are authentic voices in their districts, and are best positioned to win in November.”

Four-Way Race

The race to replace Golden — who announced in November that he would not seek reelection — is being closely watched nationwide ahead of the midterm elections. Whoever takes the Democratic primary will square off against Paul LePage, a brash, plainspoken businessman and Republican former governor whose time running Maine was marked by proto-MAGA far-right populism.

Baldacci is facing off against Dunlap, who is also a former Maine secretary of state; Jordan Wood, a longtime Democratic fundraiser and political operative; and Paige Loud, a social worker and first-time candidate. In the wake of the DCCC endorsement of Baldacci, the other candidates in the race took aim at D.C. Democrats for picking a side.

“It’s undemocratic for national establishment Democrats to put their thumb on the scale in any primary,” Dunlap said. “Just like in certain other races across Maine this year, they won’t decide this one — the people of Maine will.”

With Dunlap picking up endorsements from Our Revolution, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and other progressives, Baldacci — who enjoys name recognition as the brother of former Gov. John Baldacci — is widely seen as the establishment candidate in the race. Reached by phone Thursday, Baldacci declined to comment on the Penobscot County party proposal condemning the endorsement, but said he was glad to have the backing of Democrats in Washington.

“I’m pleased that they did it,” Baldacci said, referring to the endorsement. “My understanding is they based it on polling to determine who is the best candidate to run against LePage.”

Wood said the DCCC move demonstrated the problems with Washington party politics.

“The fact that the national Democratic Party would come in and try to decide this primary literally weeks before we vote is just another example of how broken our Democratic leadership is,” he said.

A Pan Atlantic Omnibus poll in March put Baldacci well ahead of his opponents, but there is little in the way of recent polling to indicate a current popular favorite in the race. Following the stunning collapse of Gov. Janet Mills’s bid for the U.S. Senate — despite the backing of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — against populist insurgent Graham Platner, not everyone in Maine sees the DCCC as the best political oracle to follow.

“It’s annoying that the DCCC thinks they know better than Mainers,” said Loud, the left-leaning social worker. “We just saw the DSCC’s endorsement of Janet Mills, and we all saw how that turned out. I don’t think they have the finger on the pulse.”

Update: May 7, 2026, 5:12 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include Jordan Wood’s experience as a political operative.

The post Maine Dems to Vote on Condemning DCCC Interference in House Primary appeared first on The Intercept.