The Biggest Tent
In the spring of 2024, I went to one of the first meetings of what would become the succesful “Spanberger for Governor” campaign. I wrote about it in the Atlantic:
Under a clear blue sky, on a warm spring day, several dozen Virginians gathered in a suburban backyard near Richmond to plot the future of the Democratic Party. Not that this was what they said they were doing. This was a meeting of the Henrico County Democratic Committee, “dedicated to electing Democrats in Henrico County, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and nationwide,” and they had come to rally neighborhood support for Abigail Spanberger, a local girl made good.
Spanberger, a member of Congress and now a candidate for governor, lives in Henrico County—about 10 minutes away from that suburban backyard, she told me. Although she currently represents a more rural Virginia district, this is her home base, and the home team wants to help her current campaign. A local official introducing Spanberger thanked everyone present for spending “a lot of hours in offices and knocking on doors and writing postcards and delivering signs.” Another spoke about “getting the band back together,” reuniting the people who helped Spanberger during her improbable first run for Congress, in 2017, when she came from nowhere to beat a Tea Party Republican, Dave Brat.
Afterwards, I spoke to Spanberger. “We want to turn the page past the divisiveness, the angriness, and just focus on brass tacks, good policy, and governance,” she said. This was, I wrote at the time, a wildly idealistic statement. It still is. In a world where politicians are succesfully campaigning on anger and revenge, it’s not always clear that the public actually want brass tacks, or will vote for “good policy and governance.”
But I heard equally idealistic words from Mikie Sherrill when I followed her New Jersey Congressional campaign for a day.
Speaking at an event held at the Ukrainian cultural center in Whippany, the congresswoman, an Annapolis graduate and ex-Navy helicopter pilot, was introduced by Thomas “Ace” Gallagher, mayor of Hanover Township. Gallagher is a Republican, but Hanover suffers from flooding, and Sherrill, he said, had helped his district get money and attention from the Army Corps of Engineers.
“She’s on the Democratic side of the aisle,” he told the room. “But for me, there are not two sides: There’s people that serve and work together and are focused on the common good. As for everybody else, they can do whatever they want to do, as long as they don’t get in the way of our good work.” Soon, he predicted, “you are going to see many people that are more moderate working together … on true solutions to our problems.”
Sherrill, who is expected to launch a run for New Jersey governor herself, seemed as surprised by this optimistic outburst of bipartisan goodwill as I was. “I look around this room, and I’m feeling a little emotional,” she said, and paid tribute back to Gallagher. “Again and again and again, we have come together here in the Eleventh District of New Jersey, to try to problem solve, to try to address the things that are scaring people, to try to make your life a little bit better, to try to just bring some rationality and sanity to a world that right now isn’t making a lot of sense.”
Spanberger will now be governor of Virginia, and Sherrill will be governor of New Jersey. Both won their elections by huge margins, and they may herald other changes. I was writing about them last year as representatives of a specific group, mostly members of Congress who joined in 2018, a year of backlash against the first Trump presidency. Quite a few of them are military veterans, like Sherrill, or else veterans of American foreign policy or security institutions; Spanberger was an officer for the CIA.
They also include Senator Elise Slotkin of Michigan, a former defense deparatment official, as well as members of Congress: Jason Crow of Colorado, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, and Seth Moulton of Massachusetts. Most are in their 40s or early 50s; many come from purple districts and swing states. They are sometimes called the “NatSec Democrats,” I wrote last year, but that doesn’t quite encompass who they are or what they do:
National-security experience isn’t the only thing that links them. Tom Malinowski, a former State Department official who was also part of the group—he was elected to Congress from a previously a red New Jersey district in 2018, then lost in a close race in 2022—points out that although most of his cohort had never held elected office before, all of them had taken oaths to protect and uphold the U.S. Constitution. They came to Congress in that spirit. “We were very idealistic in our belief that our job was to protect democratic values and institutions in this country,” Malinowski explains, “and very pragmatic on the day-to-day work of Congress on issues like the economy, the budget, immigration and crime.” In other words, he explains, “we all believe the country would be fine if we had to compromise on issues like that. What was essential was not to compromise on democracy.”
Their real objection is to politicians who, as Spanberger says, “don’t actually want to fix anything,” because “performance is all there is.”
As an example, she cited the border-control bill that was written and shepherded through the Senate by senior conservative Republicans but was then blocked—to the surprise of the bill’s authors—by Trump, who thought that fixing the border might help Biden. Her friends, by contrast, want to fix things: the border, the health-care system, even democracy itself. Having served in places that have collapsed into chaos, they know what it’s like to live in places that don’t have governance of any kind.
Ezra Klein has argued this week that the Democratic party should embrace the Spanberger and Sherill victories, not in opposition to the victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayor race, but alongside it. In his New York Times video essay, Klein argues that winning back the House or even Congress in the midterms next year—and the White House in 2028—is not about moving left or right, but about expanding the party’s tent to make room for radically different candidates who can win in both urban America and rural America. Listen here:
I agree. In fact, I would add that when countries have successfully beaten back authoritarianism, they have often done so by building wide coalitions. I saw this happen in Poland in 2023, when a broad center-left/center-right coalition defeated an authoritarian-nationalist party that was beginning to consolidate power. It is happening in Hungary now, as a formerly divided opposition have united behind a single political leader, Peter Magyer, and are finally in a position to threaten the autocratic Viktor Orban. I don’t know whether he will let them succeed, but he might not be able to stop them.
Because America is so big, and because we only have two political parties, we have always needed coalitions to win national elections. Polarization now means those coalitions have to stretch a lot wider. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to Mamdani over the past few weeks, I am impressed with his knowledge of the issues and his ability to connect to people. I can envision a world in which he and Spanberger and Sherrill, together with red state governors and blue state Senators, work together to create pragmatic solutions.
In his Substack, my Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson adds one more element: He thinks that Democrats have in fact found a unifying theme: “affordability.” In 2024, the only issue that a majority of voters considered “extremely important” was the economy. Some 80 percent of those who said they were worse off financially backed Trump over Harris.
But Trump has not lowered costs. Instead of working to make life more affordable for Americans, Trump has imposed tariffs, which raise prices on consumer goods; militarized immigration enforcement, which will lead to higher food prices; started building a White House ballroom; put gold objects all over the Oval Office; personally enriched himself and his family. By contrast Mamdani talked about affordability in his campaign, as did Spanberger and Sherrill, and it worked, even in these very different places. Read more here:
Read the original Atlantic article
Kleptocracy Tracker
Continuing to monitor conflicts of interest, ostentatious emoluments, outright corruption and policy changes that will facilitate outright corruption. (Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc.)
October 31
The Pentagon will award a $2 billion contract to Musk’s SpaceX to develop satellites for Trump’s Golden Dome project.
November 1
Kash Patel has been using the FBI’s private jets to visit his girlfriend—and has also fired the agent who oversees the bureau’s fleet.
After soliciting hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations—including government contractors—to fund renovations to the White House ballroom, Trump aides agreed to withhold the names of additional donors seeking to secretly purchase influence with the president.
November 2
Trump hosted a “Great Gatsby”-themed party at Mar-a-Lago as 42 million Americans were about to lose the SNAP benefits they rely on to feed their families amid the ongoing government shutdown.
November 3
Before Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, Zhao’s firm built the code for World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin—which an Emirati hedge fund then used to invest $2 billion into Binance.
November 4
More than half of the firms that donated to fund Trump’s ballroom have received a combined $279 billion in government contracts over the past five years.
Eric and Donald Trump Jr. have used two small, obscure banks—one located in Manhattan’s Trump Tower and another between a junkyard and a funeral parlor in New Jersey—to facilitate their cryptocurrency transactions.
Trump enlisted two private investors as partners to fund a $1.4 billion deal with rare earth miners aimed at boosting production.
November 6
Serbia’s governing party drafted a law specifically to advance Jared Kushner’s $500 million real estate project in Belgrade—at a site that had been protected as a cultural monument commemorating the 1999 NATO bombing campaign until November 2024.
Trump pardoned the former Speaker of the Tennessee House and one of his co-conspirators, who had been convicted on corruption charges including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The Biltmore Estate
Speaking of kleptocracy, and of a new Gilded Age…I went to a wedding in Asheville, North Carolina this weekend and had a look at the Biltmore Estate, America’s largest private home, built by a member of the Vanderbilt family in 1895. The house is a strange combination of mock-medeival and mock-baroque, but on a gargantuan scale. There are rooms with two or three huge stone fireplaces, something you would not find in an actual medeival castle or an acutal baroque palace. I liked the two-story library a lot, and admired the design of the extensive kitchens and laundry rooms, but it was easy to see where the backlash against that era’s uber-wealthy came from.
Later, there was a lovely sunset:
Please enjoy what remains of the weekend
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