Americana

1. Youngkin vs. Spanberger
2. Dems and DEI
3. Virginia redistricting ads
4. California governor, polled

As I watched Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear tell Rev. Al Sharpton how honored he was to attend Sharpton’s recent conference, my mind turned to a topic I’d kept it safely away from: the Democrats’ fight over Hasan Piker.

Finished for now, impaled on Ezra Klein’s pen, the drama over a popular left-wing Twitch streamer started with a March 19 op-ed from leaders of Third Way, the centrist Democratic think tank. In their column, Jonathan Cowan and Lily Cohen told their party that “Hasan Piker and his fellow Jew-haters belong” on the other side of a bright line.

Five days later, Michigan Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed announced a rally with Piker to support his campaign. Within 48 hours, both of El-Sayed’s primary opponents had condemned Piker; state Sen. Mallory McMorrow said the streamer “says things that are misogynistic and antisemitic, and said that the United States deserved 9/11.” The rally went ahead; El-Sayed told Politico that he thought people were over “cancel culture.”

A version of this same mini-controversy played out more than 20 years ago — with Sharpton. He ran for Senate in 1992; Democrats initially refused to give him a forum, citing his links to a fringe far-left party and questioning “whether Al Sharpton is even a Democrat.” Sharpton talked his way into the race anyway, then a 1997 campaign for mayor, and then a 2004 presidential bid, which some Democrats also said the party shouldn’t have tolerated.

“A true Democratic insurgent should compare Mr. Sharpton to [Pat] Robertson and [Jerry] Falwell,” wrote Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic. “Before the Democrats can truly challenge the GOP, they have to challenge themselves.”

Piker isn’t running for office. But like the young Sharpton, he’s trying to steer the Democratic Party’s direction by encouraging people who agree with him to get involved with it. And no matter how much a party or candidate might like to try, voters can’t be controlled when it comes to what they watch and listen to.

And many voters are putting up with opinions, language, and content that used to be campaign-killers. During Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and first term, he could start a whole news cycle with a retweet of some far-right account. Democrats would pile on because they wanted to beat him and genuinely found the post to be offensive. Republicans would distance themselves.

That rarely happens anymore. (One notable exception: Trump’s sharing of an image that portrayed him as a Jesus-like figure, which got some genuine Republican outrage.) Our polity simply couldn’t contain two contradictory ideas — that Trump would say whatever he wanted, and that offensive speech must be strictly policed. The backlash to censorious liberalism has been a tremendous success, and the decline of traditional media has helped.

Republicans would still like some jokes to hurt candidates, though. The Third Way/Piker fight gave them a hook to ask if other Democrats would reject Piker. When the host said that Sen. Jon Ossoff was one of his top picks for a 2028 presidential nominee, the NRSC demanded that the Georgia Democrat “immediately condemn Piker.”

Ossoff ignored that, and I see no evidence that the people of Savannah or Marietta care that their senator, who has never appeared on Piker’s show, has a fan in a left-wing commentator who’s rooting for Hamas. Ordinary people are simply not policing this stuff.

Did Third Way’s challenge to Democrats over Piker backfire? Cowan told me, in a statement, that the goal was warning Democrats that if they embraced Piker, they’d be tagged with his radicalism, and that the gambit worked.

“Had Third Way not focused a spotlight on Piker, exposing the depth and breadth of his bigotry, mainstream Democrats might well have campaigned with him, just like El-Sayed,” he said. “Now they’ll stay away.”

Michigan primary voters, however, aren’t exactly staying away from El-Sayed, who’s running as a progressive insurgent ready to grab attention and win arguments. His campaign told me that it saw a “29% increase in volunteer sign ups, and a 221% increase in dollars raised via our website and social media” once people started talking about the Piker stop.

The Virginia GOP fights to avoid a killer map

BRIDGEWATER, Va. — Virginia Republicans faced an existential threat last year after losing their statewide elections by a landslide. Democrats had started the process of putting new congressional maps in front of voters, seeking to erase four Republican seats from the map a court signed off on in 2021.

If the April 21 redistricting vote became a referendum on Donald Trump, Republicans would lose. So the GOP tried to turn it into something else. First, they filed lawsuits in friendly jurisdictions to get temporary restraining orders against the vote. That ultimately failed, but created some controversy and confusion about what Democrats were doing.

Then, helped by conservative outlets like Fox News and Sinclair, Republicans highlighted tax bills pushed by liberal Democrats in Richmond, insisting (without clear proof) that Gov. Abigail Spanberger would sign them. By this week, as polls showed her approval rating lower than any other new Virginia governor, Spanberger’s office was putting out statements to clarify that she didn’t sign those tax hikes.

“What Abigail Spanberger has done is lie to everybody in the Commonwealth,” former Gov. Glenn Youngkin told voters here on Saturday. He endorsed the GOP’s message that the Democrat ran as a moderate, then betrayed voters — who could take their power back if they opposed redistricting this fall.

2028 Dems tell Al Sharpton what they can and can’t do

NEW YORK — When Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network hosted 10 Democrats who might run for president in 2028, the largest one-room gathering of potential candidates so far, all of them got a positive review from the activist and multimedia host.

But no Democrat had a real answer on what could be done to roll back the Trump administration’s reversals of policies on affirmative action policies and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, not to mention legal assaults on the Voting Rights Act.

Kamala Harris, who told Sharpton that she was looking at a 2028 bid, said that the Supreme Court was likely to gut the VRA. Pete Buttigieg compared the administration’s dismantling of DEI to the aliens in the movie A Quiet Place, which hunt humans based on the sounds they make.

“This administration has adopted a seek-and-destroy approach to anything that even looks like it might have something to do with helping disadvantaged communities or addressing inequity,” he said.

The dueling messages behind Virginia’s map question

Republicans haven’t been as dramatically outspent on Virginia’s redistricting ballot question as they were in California, where Gavin Newsom’s political operation ran countless ads voiced by influential Democrats calling for new congressional maps.

Yet that’s the same strategy Virginians for Fair Elections has used, putting former President Barack Obama and Gov. Abigail Spanberger on camera to explain why they’re asking voters to redraw the state’s House districts.

In “Extraordinary,” Spanberger says that she’s “voting yes” because Trump has said he’s “entitled” to more safe seats in Republican states. The Republican group Virginians for Fair Maps countered with “Vote No,” using quotes from Spanberger and former GOP Gov. George Allen (who unsuccessfully, but newsily, asked Spanberger to debate him) to say that a no vote will protect “bipartisan reform.”

Democrats have gotten more worried about ads that mislead their voters, like direct mail to Black Virginians that suggests that redistricting would take away their representation and false claims that Spanberger has already backed tax hikes.

In the ad “Spanberger’s Taxes,” the nonprofit Unleash Prosperity massages that line like this: “Under her leadership, Virginia Democrats want to tax your dry cleaning.”

How Swalwell changed the California field, again

The implosion of Eric Swalwell is spreading effluvia over his friends, endorsers, and donors. It’s also an opportunity for fellow Democrats who want to grab his shipwrecked voters and avoid a lockout in the November election. Trump’s endorsement of Steve Hilton over Chad Bianco may have helped Democrats with that, but Hilton couldn’t secure the California GOP’s official endorsement at last week’s convention. Just as there’s no agreement on which Democrat should get out next, there’s none about whom Swalwell’s exit helps. Allies of former Rep. Katie Porter released polling, conducted in February, that found her to be the overwhelming second choice of Swalwell voters.

Then allies of Tom Steyer released polling from March that showed him as Swalwell backers’ top second choice. Kalshi bets on San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan surged after the Swalwell scandal broke, then plunged again, in a possible signal that donors who had resigned themselves to Swalwell but wanted Steyer to lose were now moving to get behind Mahan. (That’s not untrue.)

In the only public poll conducted while the news was breaking, Swalwell actually lost no support — but the pollster left the field before he ended his campaign. While in the race, he ran strongest with liberals (19%, tied with Steyer) and rural voters (16%, ahead of all other Democrats).

Politico’s Adam Wren shows up a lot in this space. While I was in Manhattan, he was in Cincinnati talking with Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., and drawing her out more than a lot of other reporters have on what she’s actually up to. She’s not running for president right now but not ruling it out; she’s not going to appear with Hasan Piker, but dismissed him in a way that, arguably, fulfilled her promise of Democratic “alpha energy.” Thanks to Wren, I got a stronger sense of what Slotkin is doing: Sating the appetite for political news that, when moderate Democrats clam up — as they’re known to do — is filled by left-wing Democrats.

There’ll be many more stories about the fall of Swalwell and how he got away with it for as long as he did. But the single best story about what happened is from California-based Politico reporters Melanie Mason and Jeremy B. White. It bursts with detail about why so many Democrats heard but didn’t believe the worst about him, and features rich anecdotes about Swalwell running for one of the country’s most powerful jobs despite not knowing much about it. (He spotted construction on the state Capitol building and “asked if they were building condos.“) Laugh so you don’t cry, as the saying goes.

• One day until the special election in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district
• Six days until Virginia’s referendum on re-drawing congressional districts
• 20 days until primaries in Indiana and Ohio
• 27 days until primaries in Nebraska and West Virginia, and runoffs in North Carolina
• 202 days until the midterm elections