Center-left leaders in Britain and the United States are asking the same question: What should we do about young people falling into the gap between school and work?  

Almost one million Britons aged 16 to 24, roughly one in eight members of this age group, are not in education, employment, or training—“NEET.” The situation is similar across the pond. Almost 4.2 million young people aged 18 to 24, roughly one in seven in that age group, are opportunity youth, disconnected from school and work. But in the U.S., efforts to reconnect them are scattered across states, programs, and organizations rather than led from the top. 

The latest contribution to Great Britain’s discourse is a paper called The Opportunity Bargain from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, founded by the former British prime minister. It argues that Britain’s bargain with young people is breaking down. The bargain is simple: Those who can work, learn, or train should be expected and supported to do so. In return, the country should make sure a real first opportunity is waiting. Instead, most young NEET Britons aren’t looking for work, and most have never held a job. 

The paper rests on a government review of the NEET problem led by Alan Milburn, a former Labour minister. His May interim report warned that Britain risks a “lost generation.” Calling the situation a whole-system failure, he puts the annual cost of fixing it at £125 billion, or nearly $166 billion. His final report is due within weeks.  

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham has made the issue a political priority. His goal: Ensure that “Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap.” In his first Labour Party Conference speech, he said the fault lies with government, not the young. He promised parity between academic and technical education, pathways from age 14, and an apprenticeship at 18. He also said young people must take up the help offered. Opportunity and responsibility, in other words. Readers of a certain age will recognize the language of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats and of Tony Blair’s New Labour. 

America is not Britain. Our youth disconnection rate has returned roughly to its pre-pandemic level, while Britain’s has risen from around the European average to one of Europe’s worst rates. Britain’s crisis increasingly runs through health-related inactivity and a national benefits system that can make returning to work more difficult. The Milburn review reports that health has become a central driver of youth disconnection and that 44 percent of NEET young people reported a work-limiting health condition in 2025. 

Ours looks different. A recent St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank analysis found that the U.S. youth disconnection rate remained essentially unchanged through the end of 2025, even in a generally healthy labor market. It also found that disconnected young adults were more likely to spend time caring for family, doing housework, or earning money informally. RAND’s county mapping adds that disconnection is also concentrated in places where access to opportunity is weak and ties across class lines are limited. The problem, in other words, is not simply a shortage of jobs. Britain can act through one national government. America must work through fifty states. 

But the driver of disconnection is the same in America and the UK. RAND finds that three-quarters of disconnected young Americans have a diploma or some college. In both countries, a credential no longer guarantees a start, a strong economy doesn’t reach everyone, and a first job depends too much on family networks. The Blair paper turns that diagnosis into a political argument. Young people have obligations, but so do the institutions meant to give them a first opportunity. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes the transition from school to work even harder. Routine tasks that once taught beginners how a workplace runs are now tasks machines absorb. Employers want experience, and fewer entry-level jobs supply it. The experience gap is a central problem of early adulthood. 

The employer side of the equation matters as much as the student side, and America has instructive examples, starting with paid internships. In Colorado, a state grant program, Opportunity Now, gave $1.3 million to Innosphere, a startup accelerator and nonprofit. It used part of the money to subsidize 158 internships at some 25 companies, many of them tiny firms that could not otherwise have hired anyone. The program pays the first ten dollars an hour, and the employer pays the rest. It also presses employers to drop degree requirements their jobs do not need.  

Kelsey Baun, who manages the program, calls this “training the employer, not the employee.” Metropolitan State University of Denver runs a version with Innosphere on a sliding scale, with larger subsidies for smaller firms. We don’t yet know how many of those internships became lasting jobs. But the design is sound. Public money lowers the cost of taking a chance on a young worker without removing the employer’s stake in the outcome.  

Internships aren’t apprenticeships. They are typically shorter and less structured. But both tackle the same problem. They give young people real work experience and give employers a stake in their development. Internships are a first step. The most complete answer joins work and learning from the start. Apprenticeship does this by design. The apprentice earns a wage, learns on the job, and builds relationships with people who can open the next door. 

U.S. apprenticeships now come in different forms. Pre-apprenticeships help individuals build the basic skills and job exposure to qualify for apprenticeships. Youth apprenticeships let high school students, often starting at 16, combine classes with paid work and often earn college credit. Registered apprenticeships meet standards set by the Department of Labor or a state agency. They pair paid on-the-job training under a mentor with classroom instruction and lead to a nationally recognized credential.  

The number of registered apprentices has nearly doubled in a decade to about 700,000, according to Jobs for the Future, and the federal goal is now one million. The department separately reported that more than 415,000 young people ages 16 to 24 took part in registered apprenticeships in 2025, “a dramatic increase over the past 10 years.” The figures measure different things, one a snapshot and the other a full year, but they show that apprenticeships are no longer marginal. 

These are real gains. Yet the same analysis finds that relatively few young people start as youth apprentices, and even fewer are connected to a college degree. That’s the remaining gap. Too many young people are still asked to choose between work and a degree, even as the labor market increasingly rewards both. 

One promising way to close that gap is with an Apprenticeship Degree: An academic program that provides hands-on vocational training alongside a college degree. In August, I spent a week at New College of Oxford University at a convening organized by the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree. NCAD is an initiative of Reach University, a nonprofit institution accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission, an agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education 

One goal of the conference was to develop a clear definition of an Apprenticeship Degree. Joe E. Ross, co-founder, president, and CEO of Reach, has summarized it in what he calls the ABCs. An Apprenticeship Degree must be ”affordable” without debt. It must be “Based” in the workplace. And the work itself must earn “Credit” toward an accredited degree. The point is not simply to attach work experience to a conventional degree. Work and academic learning are designed as one program, with the workplace serving as a site of learning.  

This is no longer just a Reach University phenomenon. New America’s first national landscape study identified 579 degree-apprenticeship opportunities at 346 colleges and universities in 49 states and the District of Columbia, spanning 91 occupations. New America uses a broader definition than Reach. For its study, a degree apprenticeship is a Department of Labor-recognized “registered apprenticeship” that includes an associate, bachelor’s, or master’s degree. That can include programs that do not satisfy all three of Reach’s ABCs. The terminology is still unsettled, but combining apprenticeship and college degrees is no longer an isolated experiment. 

Teaching has become the most visible American proof point. Tennessee registered the first teacher apprenticeship in January 2022. Today 44 states and the District of Columbia have teacher degree apprenticeship programs, according to recent reporting. Few education reforms have spread that far that fast. 

Reach University shows what the model can do. Its students are school employees, such as classroom aides, who earn a bachelor’s degree while they work. Their job becomes part of the degree. The pathway has grown from 67 candidates to more than 3,400.  

As the country’s only nonprofit accredited university dedicated to apprenticeship degrees, Reach University is now moving into health care and behavioral health. Health care apprenticeships have grown by 43 percent in five years, making the sector a natural test of whether the model can travel beyond teaching.  

These are promising early results, not a settled verdict. The American evidence base remains uneven, particularly on long-term completion, earnings, mobility, and employer returns. The case for Apprenticeship Degrees is therefore that they are promising enough to test, scale carefully, and measure.  

The idea is not new, and it’s not only American. Germany has long joined university study to paid work through its dual study programs. France does something similar through its apprentissage system, part of the country’s broader alternance model that combines paid work with formal study. The International Labour Organization lists Australia, India, and Switzerland among the countries that have also developed or expanded apprenticeships at the college or degree level. Together, these systems show that combining higher education with paid work isn’t an exotic idea.  

England’s degree apprenticeships program stands out for its scale. Launched in 2015, it’s funded by a national levy and guided by employer-set standards. Apprentices earn a wage and finish without tuition debt. Government figures show more than 60,350 starts at the bachelor’s and master’s levels in the 2024 to 2025 academic year, roughly 17 percent of all apprenticeship starts. That’s substantial scale.  

But the same numbers carry a warning: Much of the recent growth came at the master’s level, while the overall system increasingly served older apprentices. The Blair paper reports that England’s apprenticeship system has tilted toward older workers and higher-level training even as starts among young people have fallen sharply. A good model can drift away from the people who need it most.  

There is reason for optimism about the politics of apprenticeships in the U.S. Last month, a commission of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 30 leaders from education, business, service, and philanthropy, published the results of two years of work. They reached agreement across sectors and ideologies that young Americans need multiple pathways after high school and real support along the way. I wrote in these pages that the report is a foundation to build on. Across both countries, a broader consensus is emerging around opportunity pluralism. Young people need more than one good route into adulthood.  

Here are four suggestions for what that consensus should produce in the U.S. 

• States should define the Apprenticeship Degree and build a clear pathway into it. Treat the ABCs as a floor, not a settled template. States should connect the stages of work-based learning so that pre-apprenticeship leads to youth apprenticeship and youth apprenticeship can lead to a degree. They should also make it easier for on-the-job learning to count toward the degree, rather than requiring apprentices to duplicate in classrooms what they have already demonstrated at work. 

• Policymakers should keep most earn-and-learn programs focused on young people and fund intermediaries. Britain’s drift toward older workers is a cautionary example. Governors and state legislatures should fund the intermediary organizations that connect employers, colleges, and schools. Small and mid-size firms often cannot build apprenticeship programs on their own. Intermediaries can lower those transaction costs, while cost sharing like Colorado’s keeps employers invested and lowers the barrier to participation. 

• High schools and community colleges should make paid work experience and strong relationships part of the basic model. Young people need a first rung before they enter the labor market, and they need more than a credential once they do. Mentors, supervisors, and employer contacts build the social wealth that helps turn education and training into a career.  

• Federal and state leaders should measure outcomes and pair support with expectations. Agencies should track where young people are a year after leaving school and publish the results so families, educators, employers, and policymakers can see which pathways lead somewhere. Leaders in both parties should also say plainly that public support for these programs should come with clear expectations for completion, employment, earnings, and advancement. That is especially important for Apprenticeship Degrees, where the early evidence is promising but long-term outcome data on completion, earnings, mobility, and employer returns remain limited.  

Britain has named the problem and priced it. Its prime minister has taken ownership. America has neither a Milburn review nor a single government capable of acting alone. What we have is growing agreement on what needs to be built and a set of models, from pre-apprenticeship to the Apprenticeship Degree, moving from promising experiments to a broader system.  

The British and American center left helped write the language of opportunity and responsibility a generation ago. The youth-disconnection problem gives them a reason to revive that language now. The bargain is the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Young people owe effort. Government, educators, and employers owe them a real first rung. 

The post Fixing America’s Broken Workplace Bargain with the Young appeared first on Washington Monthly.

After Richard Nixon’s narrow loss to John F. Kennedy, Jr. in the 1960 presidential election, Republicans faced an electoral choice: court the growing Black vote in urban centers, or woo disaffected southern Democrats disappointed with the party’s championship of civil rights. 

The GOP chose the latter. “That’s where the votes are,” as the infamous political analyst Kevin Phillips would later write in The Emerging Republican Majority. 

Thus was born the “Southern strategy,” which helped propel Nixon to the White House in 1968. Capitalizing on racial resentment and white discontent, “it was premised on the alleged hostility of Irishmen, Italians and Poles, whose ethnic traits were conservative, toward Jews, Negroes and affluent Yankees, whom history had made liberal,” reported the New York Times in 1970. 

By all accounts, the Republican Party’s initial embrace of xenophobic populism was strategic, not ideological. Phillips, for instance, cynically recommended that Republicans not dilute the Voting Rights Act because “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.” 

Today, however, xenophobic populism is a feature, not a bug, of the modern GOP. It fueled Pat Buchanan’s nativist campaign of 1992; it ran beneath Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” in 1994; and it was the raison d’être of the Tea Party revolt of 2010. Seen in this light, Donald Trump is no anomaly, but rather the apotheosis of a long-running historical trend, catalyzed by a deliberate political calculation half a century ago. 

Yet Trump’s ascent is also unique, political scientist Seth Masket argues, because it happened in defiance of the GOP establishment. While the party elite had been able to neutralize, harness, or contain the ugliness of its xenophobic elements in the past—Buchanan’s campaign, for example, was a novelty and a nuisance, but not a real threat—it could not contain Donald Trump. Trump is the raging id of the GOP set free. 

In his new book, The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders, Masket points to several phenomena that led to the emasculation of the GOP establishment by Trump and his MAGA backers. These include the rise of conservative talk radio; the growth of social media; and the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, which enabled an explosion of independent spending outside the party’s control. Another key element was the adoption of primaries, which shifted the power to choose nominees from party bosses to the party faithful. (Democrats, incidentally, were the first to shift to primaries, after their chaotic 1968 convention led to major reforms in the party nomination process.) 

Trump’s profligate use of endorsements (down to county supervisors and local judges) is another source of leverage over the establishment, Masket argues, by ensuring loyalty among “his” elected officials. Moreover, these endorsements have real power. According to an analysis by Masket and his colleagues, a Trump endorsement translates to a 16-point advantage in a primary. “That’s a ridiculously large effect for one person’s endorsement to have,” Masket says. 

The big question, of course, is what happens after Trump. Masket says there’s little reason to believe that the establishment will bounce back right away. The more likely scenario, at least in the short term, is factionalism and chaos as the various wings of the party fight for control. 

Reading Masket’s book, I couldn’t help but notice parallels between what’s happened to the GOP and what’s happening now within the Democratic Party and its struggles with the DSA. I asked Masket this very question in this week’s podcast, which you can preview on Substack. The Elephants in the Room could prove a cautionary tale for Democrats in 2028. 

Don’t miss from the Monthly…

Permitting progress. Congress is on the verge of passing bipartisan permitting reform legislation—a rare but significant instance of responsible governing that could bring down consumers’ utility prices and strengthen the nation’s grid. Among other things, the legislation would speed up approvals for large new energy projects, a process that can otherwise literally take decades if multiple states and jurisdictions are involved. Adherents of the “Abundance” movement are the legislation’s loudest champions, but progressives should find plenty to cheer too, argues Editor Kainoa Lowman, because it promises to rein in utilities. In particular, he writes, the bill “would take meaningful steps to prevent unpopular corporate interests—namely, utility companies—from hindering the transition to cheaper, cleaner energy sources.” Read here.

A rogues’ gallery of candidates. They’re potential child abusers. They’ve hired Nazis. They’ve stolen from taxpayers and donors. They’re Islamophobic. They’re election deniers. And they’re all running for Congress. Editor Nate Weisberg chose ten of this year’s worst candidates in a fine collection of scoundrels, scalawags, and the downright scary. See if your picks match his. (And no, not all of them are Republicans.) Read here. 

Talarico vs. El-Sayed. Politics Editor Bill Scher contrasts the defensive styles of Democratic Senate candidates James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed, both of whom have come under a barrage of attacks from their well-heeled GOP opponents. Talarico, running in Texas, is facing criticism over his remarks on transgender rights, while El-Sayed is weathering accusations of his family’s sympathy toward the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood. One is conciliatory; one is combative. See which strategy Bill considers more effective. Read here. 

Plus…

• James Zirin responds to NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s controversial efforts to mark the horrific events of October 7. 
• Tamar Jacoby writes that as Europe runs low on cash to support Ukraine, it may resort to leveraging Russian Central Bank assets held in European financial institutions. It’s a controversial move that could invite retaliation, but Europe may soon have no choice. 
• In his second column of the week, Bill Scher reflects on the likely futility of Trump’s last-minute cross-country tour to save the Republican majority.

Parting Note

The GOP’s Billionaires… 

As much as the Republican Party has been captured by its populist base, it’s equally at the mercy of its billionaires. 

According to a new analysis by the fundraising platform Oath, U.S. billionaires have plowed about $433 million into the 2026 midterms, with about 80 percent of the spending going to Republican candidates up and down the ticket.

Outside spending can have an outsized influence and undercut party leadership. This is another way Trump has tipped the scales in his favor. The chart below, based on data from OpenSecrets, shows the staggering sums individual donors spent on outside spending in 2024. Keep in mind that these figures exclude both direct giving to candidates and so-called “dark money” spending that doesn’t have to be disclosed under federal campaign finance laws. All told, the top 20 individual donors to conservative groups in 2024 spent $1.22 billion—compared with a mere $185 million from liberal donors. 

The chart also raises an interesting dilemma for Democrats. On the one hand, the absence of a bevy of billionaires puts Democrats at a severe financial disadvantage. In 2024, Democrats’ spendiest billionaire—Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz—gave just $50 million to outside groups (compared to $290 million for Elon Musk). If Republicans manage to salvage seats in Congress this fall, it’ll be because of their access to massive amounts of cash. On the other hand, the lack of billionaires could be helping to preserve the Democratic Party’s relative independence. Billionaires don’t yet control the Democratic Party in the same way they control the GOP. 

At least not yet.

As always, thanks for reading, sharing, subscribing, and commenting. 

Have a great week!

Anne Kim, Senior Editor

The post How Trump Crushed the GOP Establishment appeared first on Washington Monthly.

“If you’re explaining, you’re losing” is an old political adage sometimes attributed to Ronald Reagan, but it probably predates him. The axiom justifies campaign operatives launching harsh attacks on opponents, regardless of veracity, because it forces the accused to either defensively explain themselves or let the charge go unanswered. And for the accused, it argues for choosing the latter tack to stay on offense.  

In two separate media appearances on Wednesday, we saw a clear difference in how two Democratic U.S. Senate candidates, Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and James Talarico of Texas, have chosen to handle the toughest attacks lobbed against them. 

Talarico participated in a televised town hall sponsored by CNN and the YouTube channel Jubilee. He has been pummeled by Republican attack ads highlighting his past comments supportive of transgender rights. One Republican voter raised some of Talarico’s remarks in a question challenging “the authenticity of your faith,” including “things such as God is non-binary” and “how many genders there really are.” 

The candidate, who also happens to be a Presbyterian seminarian, opted to respond with a lot of explaining. 

He noted that disagreements over interpreting Scripture are “something that we should be comfortable with” and could be done “with love.” But then—as he has previously in the campaign—Talarico accepted criticism for some of his past statements: 

The first comment, about God not being defined by gender, when I said that I was being provocative, and I want to admit that and come clean about that. But I think what I was saying is actually not controversial theologically, the idea that we can’t define God using human categories. Not only did I say that, but the late Charlie Kirk said that. The late Pope Benedict said that. And so, yes, I was doing it maybe in an annoying way. I can admit that … I think that is very fair criticism …  

… I’m a seminary student, as you know. My granddad was a Baptist preacher, and I’m following in his footsteps, hopefully going to become a minister one day. And preachers often will say something shocking in a sermon to get your attention. And that’s something I’m still learning how to do in a responsible way. And so I’m always going to take feedback from my fellow Christians, from my constituents, on how to do that in a responsible way where I’m actually communicating what I mean and not muddying the waters. 

Talarico’s willingness to share his thinking on such polarizing topics stands in stark contrast to how El-Sayed handled the toughest questioning he has received so far in his campaign. 

On Sunday’s Meet the Press on NBC, El-Sayed was asked if he or any of his family members had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the century-old international Islamist organization, three chapters of which were designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department last January. El-Sayed gave a flat “no.” But in 2012 his half-sister Eman Abdelhadi had posted on social media about their Egyptian mother’s “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood” while in college, writing that “my family has long been MB.” In 2013, she made several posts expressing concern about the safety of Egyptian family members in the Muslim Brotherhood, claiming that some had been “jailed” previously.  

On Wednesday, NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Llamas interviewed El-Sayed and asked him to reconcile his statements with his half-sister’s.  

LLAMAS: Can you just explain it? 

El-SAYED: Tom, it’s funny to me. I was born in 1984 down the street in Rochester Hills … and you want to ask me about what was happening in Egypt in 1970? Are you serious? 

LLAMAS: I get it, but you were asked a question. You gave an answer — 

EL-SAYED: Yeah, I’m telling you, like, I have no ties. We have no ties.  

LLAMAS: So your mother had no ties? 

EL-SAYED: I never had these conversations with my mother. I wasn’t raised by my mother.  

LLAMAS: So you were unaware? 

EL-SAYED: But I’m just telling you that, like, you’re using hearsay evidence from a Tweet. [UNINTELLIGBLE] is not serious, it’s not serious— 

LLAMAS: But you’ve also gone after the President for truthfulness. So when people ask you a question, they all do expect the truth. 

EL-SAYED: And you think—do you think—are you insinuating that somehow I was lying?  

LLAMAS: I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking you. 

EL-SAYED: And I’m telling you I was not.  

El-Sayed did everything in his power to avoid “explaining” his half-sister’s admission. He dismissed the admission as “hearsay.” He mocked the interviewer for asking questions. He avoided direct answers. He answered questions with questions, trying to put the reporter on the hot seat instead of himself. 

Which approach worked better? If you watch each video clip, you will likely give the nod to Talarico. He was relaxed, personable, and showed not just confidence in himself but in his audience’s ability to process a nuanced answer. El-Sayed was defensive, evasive, and agitated, qualities which will likely fail to reassure anyone who might be on the fence.  

But that doesn’t fully answer the question of which approach worked better because, in all likelihood, most voters will not see these video clips. If El-Sayed had opted to try to defend himself with convoluted explanations, he may have inadvertently given the story more legs and drawn more voter attention to his family history.

However, we can’t test what would have happened if El-Sayed explained instead of evaded. 

El-Sayed could have offered many explanations. He could have pleaded ignorance about his mother’s or other distant relatives’ activities. (He began to go down that path but fell back on challenging the question’s premise). El-Sayed could have pointed out that the Muslim Brotherhood is a sprawling political organization with a long, complicated history and that not everyone in it supports violence. (In Abdelhadi’s view, “Any serious student of #MB history knows violence is not their thing.”) He could have underscored that one of his half-sisters’ posts said their family members in the Muslim Brotherhood had “respect for individual liberties & secular state.” When she was expressing concern about their safety, it was in the summer of 2013 when the Egyptian military executed a coup that ousted the elected President Mohamed Morsi, who was in the Muslim Brotherhood, and ended Egypt’s brief fling with democracy. El-Sayed could argue that guilt-by-association attacks are always bunk and whatever his family members may have said or done, he should be judged on his own record.  

El-Sayed has faced a months-long barrage of Islamophobic guilt-by-association attacks on the airwaves and on social media, which arguably is part of the reason El-Sayed—while leading his Republican opponent Mike Rogers in polls—isn’t earning as much support as the Democratic nominee for Michigan governor Joyce Benson and hasn’t put Rogers away. Evidence of family members in the Muslim Brotherhood reinforces those often unfair attacks, making explanation especially difficult. It’s reasonable for El-Sayed to conclude that he’s better off deflecting questions about the Muslim Brotherhood so he can focus on cost-of-living concerns that are top of mind for Michigan voters. 

What El-Sayed can’t know for sure is whether the disconnect between his total denial of familial ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and his half-sister’s recollections is too glaring, and will become too well known, to avoid the necessity of explanation.  

Talarico clearly made the judgment that the clips of his remarks about transgender rights, amplified in a multi-million-dollar Republican ad blitz, were not something that could be breezily dismissed as out-of-context and had become too well known to ignore. So he leaned in. 

Karl Rove, the campaign strategist who masterminded George W. Bush’s political career, is often associated with the “if you’re explaining, you’re losing” mantra. But in a 2012 Wall Street Journal column, Rove added some nuance. “It is said that in politics, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. That’s not always true,” Rove wrote. “Sometimes when you’re explaining, you’re reassuring voters and undermining your opponent’s credibility.” Considering that he has held a steady lead in polls, even after giving broader context to his past comments about transgender rights, it would appear that Talarico has been successfully reassuring voters. One conservative Catholic participant in the televised town hall said afterward, “I was really impressed with Talarico … I found a more balanced politician. I was surprised at how centrist he was on many of the issues, and I think that has brought me to a deeper understanding.” 

El-Sayed is betting that reassurance isn’t necessary, that voters are primarily mad about their depleted bank accounts, and won’t take seriously any notion that he has terrorist sympathies. We have precedent for this. Toward the end of the 2008 presidential campaign, as the economy was tanking, Republicans furiously tried to yoke Barack Obama to Bill Ayers, who had been in the militant Weather Underground during the 1960s and in 1995 held a meet-and-greet event for Obama in his home. A Republican consultant tested a hard-hitting attack ad against Obama and, as Politico reported, one participant reacted with a garbled-yet-charitable understanding of Obama’s past: “I don’t know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy, but I’m sick of paying for health insurance at work, and that’s why I’m supporting Barack.”  

However, seven months before that voter’s disinterest in Ayers, Obama delivered one of the all-time great explainer speeches: The “More Perfect Union” address, given during the presidential primary to disassociate himself from the anti-American remarks made by his pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright and reassure voters of his own values. Perhaps because of the strength of this speech, Republicans had a much harder time linking Obama to Ayers six months later. 

If polls continue to show El-Sayed holding on to an average lead of about three to four points, sticking to a “if you’re explaining, you’re losing” strategy may be a reasonable bet. But if that lead starts to diminish, El-Sayed might think about emulating the man with the middle name Hussein whom he credits for inspiring his entry into politics.

The post Is It True That If You’re Explaining, You’re Losing? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Four years ago, the Washington Monthly dove into the ample dumpster of dubious candidates seeking public office and selected the worst ten. Among these were Kari Lake, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Arizona so devoted to Donald Trump that she not only repeated his lies about the 2020 presidential election but bragged of taking hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to ward off COVID-19. The Monthly also included that state’s Republican Senate nominee, Blake Masters, who praised the Unabomber as an “underrated subversive thinker.”

This year, the field of hucksters and prevaricators, haters and boneheads, is even deeper, and the weirdness extends well beyond races for Congress. Consider four of the contenders for powerful state and local offices.

Michael Caruso, appointed Palm Beach County clerk of court by Governor Ron DeSantis, refuses to quit his reelection bid even after DeSantis suspended him following his arrest on five felony charges involving the alleged sexual abuse of a young relative. In Texas, Railroad Commission nominee Bo French wants to remove 100 million people from the country, has urged conservatives to embrace “Islamophobia,” and infamously used a photo of South Asian Longhorns fans as evidence that Americans are being “displaced by foreigners”—all while retaining the support of Governor Greg Abbott and the state oil-and-gas lobby. In Colorado, Republican gubernatorial nominee Victor Marx, a Marine veteran and likely fabulist, says his abusive stepfather forced him to behead a dead cat during a voodoo ritual when he was three. Four years later, Marx claims, his stepfather took him to rural Mississippi and forced him to participate in the shooting of a man, though Marx says his stepfather pulled the trigger. (Local authorities have found no record of a matching homicide.) Marx has also claimed to cast demons out of people, even over the phone, and once said he called in a U.S. airstrike that killed 70 ISIS fighters. (He later backed away from the airstrike claim.) Asked by a Denver television reporter how many people he had killed as an adult, Marx replied, “Does it matter?”

To keep this list manageable, we limited our ten worst to candidates for the U.S. House and Senate. Even then, paring the field down to ten wasn’t easy.

MAX MILLER Republican—Ohio 7th Congressional District

Most politicians under investigation insist the inquiry is a witch hunt. Max Miller took the unusual step of requesting an ethics investigation into himself. Miller’s ex-wife, Emily Moreno—the daughter of Bernie Moreno, the U.S. Senator from Ohio—has accused her ex-husband in court filings of physical abuse, including holding a gun to her head and throwing her against a wall. She has alleged that he injured their two-year-old daughter, who suffered a broken collarbone. Miller denies abusing either of them; police and child-welfare investigators were unable to determine who caused the child’s injury, and prosecutors brought no charges. The House Ethics Committee is nevertheless reviewing allegations of domestic violence, abuse, and illegal drug use.

Miller attempted to clear his name publicly by releasing hundreds of pages of records online—only for his ex-wife to sue after an unredacted nude photograph of their toddler was allegedly included in the files. His attorney acknowledged that sensitive images had been posted by mistake. Many GOP officials called for Miller to step aside, including his former father-in-law. But he refused, and so now national Republicans are spending heavily to save his seat in a district that supported Trump in 2024 by 11 percentage points. Cook, Inside Elections, and Sabato’s Crystal Ball all rate Miller’s race a toss-up.

KEN PAXTON Republican—U.S. Senate, Texas

Ken Paxton has accumulated so many scandals that it’s hard to decide which ones fit in a paragraph. Shortly after becoming Texas attorney general in 2015, he was indicted on securities-fraud charges; the case ended nine years later under an agreement requiring restitution, community service, and legal-ethics courses but no guilty plea. In 2023, the Republican-controlled Texas House impeached him after his own senior aides accused him of flagrantly abusing his office to benefit donor Nate Paul; the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him. (His wife, who serves in the chamber, was barred from voting, but later filed for divorce citing adultery.) A recent Associated Press investigation found that Paxton had taken over 275 out-of-state trips as attorney general, left roughly 730 workdays blank on his official calendars, and racked up at least $1.9 million in taxpayer-funded security expenses while visiting California wine country, ski resorts, Caribbean destinations, and European tourist spots. And on October 13, The Wall Street Journal reported that Paxton rang in 2025 in Dubai with his girlfriend (who is not his wife) and two fugitive Americans who had already been indicted on federal health-care-fraud charges and had not returned to the United States; one had donated $190,000 to Paxton. Trump won Texas by nearly 14 points in 2024, but Paxton’s race against James Talarico is a toss-up.

ROGER MARSHALL Republican—U.S. Senate, Kansas

Senator Roger Marshall spent 25 years as an obstetrician before entering office—and, according to a New York Times review of Kansas court records, sued more than 700 patients over unpaid medical bills along the way, including working-class patients struggling to make ends meet. His lawyers sought 18-percent annual interest, garnished wages and bank accounts, and repeatedly asked judges for arrest warrants when patients failed to appear at debt hearings. Eighty-one former patients were ultimately arrested; the bills ranged from several thousand dollars to as little as $101. One couple was taken into custody on Easter weekend while their grandchildren waited for an egg hunt. At issue: a $4,561 bill from an emergency hysterectomy. The couple spent two days in jail. Another woman said that after childbirth she sometimes had to choose between paying Marshall and paying her electric bill. Marshall’s campaign emphasizes that judges—not doctors—issued warrants, that patients were jailed for missing court proceedings rather than merely owing money, and that Marshall treated patients regardless of ability to pay. Fair enough. But Marshall’s lawyers repeatedly requested the warrants.

Then, earlier this month, a Kansas bakery owner revealed that Marshall’s 2020 Senate campaign had ordered $678.75 worth of cookies, cupcakes, brownies, and other treats for its primary-night party—and, she said, ignored her attempts to collect for nearly a year. The bill remained unpaid for six years, until her Facebook post went viral this month. Marshall’s campaign said it had “no idea how or why that happened” and promptly sent the bakery $1,300, roughly double the original invoice. “Better late than never,” the owner wrote. The senator whose lawyers once pursued patients over debts as small as $101 finally settled his own campaign’s cookie bill. Marshall won his last Senate race in 2020 by 11 points, but Cook now rates his contest against Democrat Adam Hamilton, a prominent cleric, as a toss-up.

BRANDON HERRERA Republican—Texas 23rd Congressional District

After Republican incumbent Tony Gonzales resigned amid a scandal over his affair with an aide who later died by suicide, Brandon Herrera inherited the GOP nomination. Known as “The AK Guy” to more than four million subscribers, Herrera has goose-stepped to Nazi marching music while firing an MP-40, displayed a vintage copy of Mein Kampf on his podcast, called the Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression,” belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and reenacted the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., while discussing the ballistics of the shot. Herrera says the Nazi material is historical humor, not an endorsement of national socialism. CNN then reviewed his enormous video archive and found years of crude remarks about women: comparing feminists’ weight to whales, elephants, and a nuclear bomb. He described one liberal woman talking about guns as “both fat and wrong,” and made sexual insults about gun-control activist Shannon Watts that CNN deemed too vulgar to repeat on air. Herrera dismissed the material as comedy. Trump and House Republican leaders endorsed him anyway. He is now the Republican nominee in a district that includes Uvalde, the scene of a gruesome school shooting in 2022. His Democratic opponent is attorney and former teacher Katy Padilla Stout, and the DCCC has added the district to its target list as a potential pickup. Cook moved the seat from Solid to Likely Republican after Herrera became the nominee.

SCOTT PERRY Republican—Pennsylvania 10th Congressional District

Scott Perry was not only one of the 147 Republicans who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory after the Capitol riot in 2021. According to the January 6 Committee, he helped connect Donald Trump with Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who was prepared to use the department to challenge Biden’s win, and pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to elevate Clark as January 6 approached: “11 days to 1/6,” Perry texted. “We gotta get going!” The committee concluded that Perry worked with Clark, Trump, and Meadows to reverse the Justice Department’s findings and overturn the election result; Perry has never been charged with a crime.

In 2024, Perry’s campaign Facebook account shared an image of stereotypically Jewish bankers with hooked noses gathered around a Monopoly board resting on the backs of naked people. “Says it all…,” Perry wrote. His campaign removed the post after Jewish Insider contacted it, saying it had not known the image’s antisemitic history. Around the same time, Perry told colleagues that “replacement theory is real,” adding, “They added white to it to stop everybody from talking about it.” Perry is now seeking an eighth term against former local news anchor Janelle Stelson, whom he narrowly defeated in 2024. Cook rates the R+3 district, as of October 9, Lean Democratic.

RANDY FINE Republican—Florida 6th Congressional District

Randy Fine’s 2026 legislative agenda includes a bill called the Protecting Puppies from Sharia Act, which is not a parody. Fine introduced it after declaring on social media, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” The measure would cut federal funding to jurisdictions that prohibit residents from owning dogs—despite the fact that no American municipality has enshrined Sharia law and that Sharia law does not prohibit dog ownership. This followed an already extensive record of anti-Muslim rhetoric: he has called Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib “Muslim terrorists,” responded to reports of hunger in Gaza with “starve away” and “#KeepOnStarving,” and suggested Gaza should be treated like Hiroshima and Nagasaki—before clarifying that nuking it would be a “terrible idea” because “the fallout would drift into Israel.” And this is not a doomed protest candidacy: Fine is a sitting member running in a R+14 district; Cook rates the race Solid Republican.

JOHN McGUIRE Republican—Virginia 5th Congressional District

When the Virginia Senate voted in 2024 to raise the state’s minimum marriage age from 16 to 18, the tally was 39 to 1. The one was John McGuire. Now a member of Congress, McGuire was asked this year whether he regretted the vote. He did not. “We need more families,” he said, arguing that if “a young man and a young girl get pregnant, they need to have a marriage.” The former Navy SEAL attended Trump’s January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, though he says he never entered the Capitol. He later promoted a local screening of the discredited election-fraud movie 2000 Mules, and was elected to Congress in 2024 by challenging fellow Republican Bob Good in a primary that became, according to The Washington Post, “a proxy for a Trump loyalty contest.” McGuire won that race by 374 votes and survived a recount. Now he is seeking another term against former Congressman Tom Perriello in Virginia’s 5th, where Cook recently shifted the contest from Solid to Likely Republican.

MIKE COLLINS Republican—U.S. Senate, Georgia

At the first of their two October debates, Senator Jon Ossoff told his Republican challenger, Representative Mike Collins, that he “hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office,” and later added: “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” David Brooks, for his part, thought Ossoff went too far, but you decide. Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, is a social-media influencer who has said, “there’s nothing wrong with White Nationalism,” promoted the white supremacist and neo-fascist hate group Patriot Front, circulated Nazi imagery, and blamed Jews for everything from gun control to pornography. Scheer lives at a property owned by Collins and attended Collins’s primary-night victory party. Collins says his son-in-law has never worked for the campaign and that he condemns racism and antisemitism. Then Collins replaced a congressional chief of staff after reporting revealed that the aide had participated in a group chat with white nationalists Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer while trying to secure the release of an imprisoned Holocaust denier. Another former Collins staffer posted swastika and apparent Ku Klux Klan imagery. In 2024, Collins shared a video of mostly white students confronting a Black pro-Palestinian protester at Ole Miss while one student made monkey noises and gestures, captioning it “Ole Miss taking care of business.” Collins later said he had not noticed that as the focal point and condemned racist behavior. He has also approvingly reposted an account mocking a Washington Post reporter’s Jewish identity, while insisting his criticism concerned her views, not her religion. The pattern has become central to his Senate race against Ossoff, who is Jewish. Recent polls put Collins about eight points behind Ossoff, so far behind that national Republican and Democratic groups alike are shifting advertising money out of Georgia to more competitive races.

DARIALIZA AVILA CHEVALIER Democrat—New York 13th Congressional District

Two things distinguish Darializa Avila Chevalier from the other candidates on this list: She is the only Democrat, and she is the only one running in a district so safe that Cook rates it D+32 and Solid Democratic. The two facts might be related. Her deleted-post archive is an oppo researcher’s dream. CNN uncovered posts and reposts advocating abolishing police, prisons, and national borders, seizing private property, and nationalizing major industries; one called for “no more police at all ever.” In a 2019 post, she disparaged interracial relationships with white women, mocking Black and Arab men for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women.” She still identifies as a democratic socialist but says she has grown since writing much of the material, though she still opposes all deportations (including for violent criminals). Her assessments of Democratic leaders were hardly more restrained: she called Joe Biden a “rapist” during the 2020 campaign and responded “F— Kamala Harris” after Harris told prospective migrants in Guatemala not to come to the United States; she later apologized for the Harris comment and noted that she voted for the ticket. Avila Chevalier emerged from Columbia’s pro-Palestinian activist movement and defeated longtime Representative Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary. In NY-13, her primary victory was the decisive electoral hurdle. Soon, she’ll be posting from inside the Capitol, where she will also be helping write the nation’s laws.

DARLINE GRAHAM Republican—U.S. Senate, South Carolina

Darline Graham became a United States senator two days after her brother, Lindsey Graham, died unexpectedly in July, when Governor Henry McMaster appointed her to fill his seat. She had little conventional political experience, but Donald Trump urged her to run for a full term. A month later, during a Republican debate, a moderator asked whether Taiwan and the South China Sea were national-security issues for the United States. Graham asked for the question again and then answered with unusual candor: “I’m not that informed on national security.” She added, “National security is not my thing, not my area of expertise, but I do support the military,” citing her brother’s Air Force service and her father’s Army service. The audience audibly reacted. Graham defended the answer as honesty—and then won the Republican nomination. Later, Graham was conspicuously absent from a bipartisan letter signed by 12 senators, including six Republicans, urging Trump to reverse his deal allowing Russian diesel sales and enforce a sanctions law named for her late brother—a law she herself had sponsored. Now she is running for a full six-year term, and the race has become uncomfortable enough for Republicans that the Senate Leadership Fund announced $5 million in spending to bolster her against Democrat Annie Andrews, while Trump is heading to South Carolina to campaign for her. Cook and Crystal Ball have moved the race from solid to likely Republican.

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“If you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad, I earnestly beg that you will express yourself unmistakably to that effect by returning a Democratic majority to both the Senate and the House of Representatives.” Such was President Woodrow Wilson’s appeal to voters in late October ahead of the 1918 midterms. He was in the midst of negotiating Germany’s surrender in the Great War, so he warned, “This is no time either for divided counsel or for divided leadership.”  

Wilson’s plea backfired completely, and Republicans seized control of both chambers. According to Wilson biographer John Milton Cooper, Jr., two of Wilson’s top administration officials said “Democrats would have won if Wilson had just kept his mouth shut.”  

That may have overstated the impact of Wilson’s statement. Cooper noted that “high prices, wartime shortages, and myriad inconveniences worked against the president’s party.” (Sound familiar?) But Wilson certainly didn’t help matters and probably had no capacity to help matters. 

Since Wilson, many presidents have futilely campaigned during the midterm election only to expose the limits of their power. In October 1986, Ronald Reagan brought his high job approval ratings to 14 states before his Republicans lost eight Senate seats and control of the upper chamber. Barack Obama, whose job approval had dipped below 50 percent, embarked on a similar tour in 2010 but failed to prevent the loss of 63 Democratic-held House seats and control of the lower chamber. In October and November 2018, Donald Trump, whose job approval has always been bad, held 23 rallies in 15 states on the way to losing 41 House seats and the Speaker’s gavel.   

Despite this sad history, so far the president has spent almost all of October on the road. Trump’s schedule from October 1-20 includes 15 rallies in 13 states. Preceding this tour was an unprecedented Republican National Midterm Convention in Dallas, Texas, where he delivered two primetime addresses.  

Trump’s travel itinerary and rhetoric are squarely aimed at juicing turnout among his loyalists, not at persuading swing voters. This is not totally without logic; in midterm elections the president’s party often suffers a decline in base turnout. But the presidential bully pulpit does not provide a quick fix. The 1986 midterm that embarrassed Reagan featured the third-lowest turnout in American history. Many in Obama’s youth brigade stayed home in 2010 after a mid-October televised town hall geared to younger voters was marked by pointed questions and defensive answers. Researching the effects of Trump’s 2018 campaign blitz, Alan I. Abramowitz, an Emory University political science professor, concluded, “Trump’s campaign rallies appear to have had a minimal impact on the outcomes of Senate contests. A few Republican candidates did better than expected based on ‘fundamentals,’ but others did worse than expected.” 

There are examples of respectable performances by a president’s party in a midterm, with either minimal seat losses or even small gains, but those circumstances usually involve a president with high job approval ratings such as Bill Clinton’s Democrats in 1998 or George W. Bush’s Republicans in 2002. (Clinton, facing a House impeachment inquiry in October 1998, largely stayed off campaign stages, but First Lady Hillary Clinton spoke at a whopping 60 rallies that year.) 

We have one example of an unpopular president playing a constructive midterm campaign role—the oft-maligned Joe Biden. In 2022, Biden’s campaign trail activity, according to NPR, was “decidedly low key.” A mid-October West Coast tour had “no rallies, just small audience speeches about his accomplishments thus far, and a couple of fundraisers.” Biden’s greatest contribution to his Democrats was not appearances with candidates, but two speeches bookending the general election season that framed the stakes. 

A September 1 address at Independence Hall in Philadelphia was delivered with memories of Trump’s still-fresh attempted coup on January 6, 2021, and the tangible impact on women of the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade. Biden urged voters of all political stripes to oppose “MAGA Republicans” who were waging an “assault on democracy” and were “determined to take this country backwards—backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.” 

Then a November 2 address in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station was delivered a few days after Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in their home and suffered a skull fracture, prompting chuckles from Trump. Biden tied the attacker to the January 6 rioters who trashed Pelosi’s House office and, with so many election deniers running for office, underscored four times that “democracy is on the ballot.” 

In the months preceding the midterm, American bank accounts and Biden’s job approval had been savaged by runaway inflation. For an unpopular president to help successfully shift voter attention away from the typical economic concerns is highly unusual. But he correctly identified and elevated other issues that were animating voters. 

Trump is trying to do something similar in his October rallies, by defining Democrats as “radical left Dummocrat communists” who will “loot your wealth, raise your taxes by $5 trillion, annihilate your borders” and push “transgender mutilization of your children.” But Trump’s credibility is shot after promising to lower prices, then deliberately doing the opposite.  

Plus, Biden was accurate four years ago when he warned about an army of election deniers on the ballot. Today, only a smattering of Democrats on the ballot have ties to the Democratic Socialists of America, and even fewer in the most hotly contested races. Trump simply has less to work with.  

What Republicans could use to try to avoid being drowned in a Blue Wave is a few days without Donald Trump making news, but the president is too addicted to the crowds and the cameras to ever let that happen. 

The post Trump’s Midterm Rally Blitz Probably Won’t Work appeared first on Washington Monthly.

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In September, after months of negotiations and to much fanfare, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a major package of energy reforms. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) has been enthusiastically championed by luminaries of the “Abundance” movement, since parts of the bill would ease regulatory bottlenecks that hinder new energy projects. Economic populists on the left have not embraced the bill in the same way, though they should. BAAJA would take meaningful steps to prevent unpopular corporate interests—namely, utility companies—from hindering the transition to cheaper, cleaner energy sources. 

America’s flimsy electrical grid is the top constraint on clean energy expansion. To avoid overwhelming the strained system, developers must complete complex grid-impact assessments for projects they propose. This study process takes three to five years on average and has created a backlog of over 8,000 proposed projects—most of them renewable—waiting to connect to the grid. Even after years of waiting, developers often discover their projects require expensive upgrades to the wider grid, not just a simple connecting line. Faced with exorbitant costs, many abandon their projects altogether. 

America needs a massive expansion of its electrical grid—particularly long-distance transmission lines connecting remote clean generation sites to population centers. But utilities are averse to building these kinds of lines. They earn more reliable returns on smaller, piecemeal upgrades within their own service areas, while larger transmission projects require costly coordination with neighboring utilities. Long-distance lines also threaten the profits of utilities that own power plants by exposing them to competition from cheaper electricity elsewhere. Consumers ultimately pay the price through wasteful utility spending on upgrades that do little to strengthen the grid, and high electricity bills that competition would help bring down. 

BAAJA would jumpstart the long-distance transmission buildout in a couple of ways. First, the bill makes it easier for private “merchant” transmission developers to build these lines. Today, merchant projects are rare because developers struggle to secure private financing and obtain regulatory approval from multiple jurisdictions that interstate lines cross, often amid local opposition. To ease the financing challenge, the bill allows merchant developers to recover the costs of new lines from ratepayers who stand to benefit—effectively allowing developers to usurp local utilities and do their job for them. As for permitting, the bill empowers the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to approve high-priority interstate transmission lines if states and municipalities don’t do so within a year. 

Allowing merchant developers into the market could also spur utilities to build long-distance lines themselves. Today, utilities prefer investing in smaller projects, but “if a big new interregional line comes in and it relieves a ton of congestion and adds a bunch of reliability, the smaller projects they wanted to do are no longer justified” in the eyes of regulators, Aidan Mackenzie, an infrastructure analyst at the Institute for Progress, says. Better for utilities to cooperate on long-distance lines than have developers beat them to it. The bill further facilitates cooperation by mandating new long-distance planning processes based on nationally standardized models. 

Another provision discourages utilities from pursuing wasteful local projects in the first place. Local transmission projects appeal to utilities partly because many fall outside state or federal regulators’ purview. BAAJA allows FERC, at a state’s request, to review such projects and penalize utilities for imprudent investments.

Together, these competition and oversight provisions would squeeze utilities towards investing in long-distance transmission. “Essentially, the bill would make it harder for utilities to act on their incentives,” Mackenzie said, adding that it would represent “a pretty big expansion of what federal power over utilities has been.” 

To be sure, BAAJA is not a panacea for America’s inadequate grid. As Grayson Flood of Groundwork Collaborative notes, much would depend on how FERC implements and enforces key provisions, and the bill does not deliver the centralized transmission planning and financing authority Flood and other progressives have called for. Still, it is a big step forward—“necessary, but insufficient,” he told me. Preliminary modeling suggests it could shave billions from Americans’ electricity bills and promote renewable power. 

But that depends on whether BAAJA’s transmission provisions survive the utility lobby. Some have argued that the very introduction of these reforms reflects a decline in the industry’s political power amidst public outrage over skyrocketing utility bills. But David Pomerantz, Executive Director of the Energy and Policy Institute, told me it would be unwise to write off a well-resourced adversary that has defeated numerous congressional and regulatory efforts to make it easier to build transmission lines in the past. “Electric utility companies will do anything they can to undermine the elements of the BAAJA that seek to encourage regional transmission planning and development that they find threatening to their monopolies,” Pomerantz said. 

Industry opposition makes for good populist politics. Congressional Democrats should welcome the utility companies’ hatred, vote to pass BAAJA in the lame-duck session, and tell voters all about it.

The post The Senate’s Surprisingly Populist Permitting Reform Deal appeared first on Washington Monthly.

October 7 is a day that will surely live in infamy, both at home and in the Middle East. Marking the first anniversary of the attacks on Israel since taking office, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used the occasion to trash Israeli policy rather than mourn the lives of Israelis and foreign nationals slaughtered by Hamas’s Nazi-style Einsatzgruppen death squads.

Eschewing a simple statement of commemoration for Hamas’s victims, or adding a more oblique call for peace, Mamdani excoriated the Israeli “ongoing genocide” of the Gazans, continuing Israeli “war crimes,” and “apartheid.” Going so far as to blame Israel for the massacre of October 7, he added: “The suffering did not begin nor end that day.” “That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing.” The mayor seemed to forget that Hamas fought from hospitals, schools, and mosques, and posed as journalists.

In his 211-word statement, the bulk of which denounced Israel’s military actions in Gaza since the attacks, Mamdani described Jerusalem’s actions as a “devastating, ongoing genocide” rather than a war, which it was. His statement referred to but did not condemn “the horrific war crimes” committed by Hamas, which Mamdani called “profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers.” So, he admits it was a war after all.

Foreign policy experts like Johns Hopkins Professor Michael Mandelbaum seriously dispute that anything Israel has done fits any definition of genocide. Regardless, why not take one day off issuing the genocide charge?

Mamdani did not delve into Israeli counterattacks having collateral damage ratios well within historical norms for difficult urban environments, or Hamas using hospitals, schools, and mosques, posing as journalists, and building a military tunnel system for urban warfare that its citizens were not allowed to use as shelters.

Criticizing Israeli tactics is, of course, fair game, and recent reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received warnings about the attack from the Saudis and Egyptians only underscore the need for a full investigation of October 7 and the war that he has resisted as he faces a fierce reelection battle.

That Mamdani faced fierce protests at a commemoration of victims of the Hamas attack and Gazans who died in the subsequent war from pro-Hamas demonstrators might be seen as an illustration of the adage that revolutions often consume their own. The Hamas supporters feel he has sold out the Palestinians and want him to fire New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. It might help the mayor somewhat that he has extreme left critics. But none of that erased the mayor’s failing to, for one day, put aside his criticisms of Israel and instead commemorate the Muslims, Christians, and Jews who died in the Hamas attack.

October 7 must be a star-crossed date.

On October 7, 2016, the Washington Post broke the story of the so-called Access Hollywood tape, a video from 2005 in which Donald Trump told television host Billy Bush about his approach to women. “I don’t even wait” to start kissing them, he said. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ‘em by the p***y. You can do anything.” Interestingly, we still don’t know who leaked the tape. Like “Deep Throat,” Bob Woodward’s source for essential parts of his co-authored Watergate investigation for the same paper, it may be years before we do.

On October 7, 2021, the Democratic majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee released a draft report about Trump’s attempt to use the Department of Justice to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The report found that Trump repeatedly tried to get the Department of Justice to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to overturn its results, singling out nine specific attempts to change the outcome. Trump, the report says, “grossly abused the power of the presidency.”

On October 7, 2026, from the Oval Office, Trump told reporters: “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama. I thought it was inappropriate to do so because you have to treat the office of the presidency with respect. Then I found out that they impeached me twice, and I … can do whatever I want, if I want. They’ve done some very bad things … many illegal things, but I view the presidency as a very sacred position.”

Yes, it is a “very sacred position“ so long as the president doesn’t think “I can do whatever I want, if I want.” Provided you’re a star.

October 7 revealed the president’s and the mayor’s myopia. Too bad, it seems on display more often than not.

The post The Mamdani Tightrope is Slippery appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Ukrainian Finance Minister Serhii Marchenko was in Brussels on September 28, when a Russian drone flew into the National Academy of Sciences, one of the country’s leading research institutes and a symbol of Ukrainian identity. Moscow’s new strategy of round-the-clock bombardment of civilian targets was already more than a month old, but the strike, which killed two academy employees, still came as a shock. The elegant 19^th-century building in the center of Kyiv burst into flames, and a huge cloud of black smoke billowed from the open roof as terrified researchers inched out onto window ledges before climbing down ladders to the street.

“War is longer, war is harder,” Marchenko explained soberly to his audience in Belgium. “Russian jet drones are destroying our logistics, our retail storage, our refueling stations, our data centers.” Tax and customs revenues are falling short of expectations, and Kyiv will need more help than anticipated to get through the winter, not to mention the year ahead.

For many in the minister’s audience in Brussels, it isn’t a question of whether to help, but how—where to find the money. Unlike President Donald Trump, who moved last week to lift sanctions on Russian diesel exports, Europe is determined to stand with Ukraine and keep the pressure on Moscow. “There’s no option where we do nothing,” centrist French member of the European Parliament Nathalie Loiseau explained to me a few days after the academy bombing. “We can’t say to Ukraine, ‘Okay, you’re on your own,’” leaving Kyiv to lose a war that many Europeans believe is all that’s stopping Vladimir Putin from turning his guns on NATO.

But after nearly five years of fighting, Europeans are running out of options, which is why the debate is circling back again to an idea proposed and rejected several times in the past—leveraging the Russian Central Bank assets held in European financial institutions.

Europeans—both nation-states and the European Union—have tried just about everything else. Continental capitals have donated $152 billion in military, financial, and humanitarian aid. European institutions have allocated an additional $107 billion—bringing the European total to nearly twice Washington’s $130 billion. Many countries have dug into their own weapons stockpiles to send planes, tanks, and missile systems. Others have invested directly in the Ukrainian defense industry, enabling it to produce drones, missiles, and other weapons for use on the front.

Much of this assistance came directly from European taxpayers. But when that wasn’t enough, the EU turned to the Russian assets in European financial institutions. The EU froze these funds—just over €210 billion in repositories across the continent—days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Then, in 2024, as other funding ran out, the bloc began to think about how to tap the money.

The first step—taken only after months of EU debate—was to skim off the interest earned on the frozen accounts, channeling the revenue to Ukraine as a cash contribution. More than a year later, when that wasn’t enough to meet Kyiv’s growing needs, the union considered borrowing against the Russian funds and lending the proceeds to Ukraine. After another prolonged debate, members rejected this option, voting instead to borrow against the EU’s own budget for a €90 billion loan to Ukraine—money meant to cover Kyiv’s unmet funding needs through the end of 2027.

Still, as finance minister Marchenko and others have made clear in recent weeks, even this will not be enough. Just to get through the end of 2026, according to Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi, Kyiv needs an additional $27 billion. As for 2027, Marchenko told his audience in Brussels, Ukraine faces a budget gap of $32.6 billion and a second shortfall of $45 billion to cover unmet defense expenses.

Staggering as the numbers are, they don’t surprise EU officials like parliamentarian Loiseau, a former career diplomat with a brown bob and round, open face. Loiseau and a small group of international legal and financial experts understood from the start that Kyiv was heading into a long war with an unpredictable price tag. “The €90 billion is just enough for Ukraine to survive,” Loiseau asserts, “but not enough for Ukraine to prevail.” That’s why she and her allies set their sights on the frozen assets—in their eyes, the only long-term answer for covering what they see as the West’s costs in Ukraine.

It was British financial journalist Hugo Dixon who brought the group together in early 2024, and the idea of using the frozen assets was based on an American precedent: George W. Bush’s 2003 decision to appropriate $1.7 billion in Iraqi assets in U.S. banks—money later used for postwar reconstruction in Iraq.

Dixon’s group draws a line at seizing enemy assets. “We do not propose to confiscate the money,” Loiseau insists. “We have no right to do that—and we respect the rule of law.” What the group proposes instead—an idea they call the “Russian Transfer“—is to use the funds as a wartime advance against what Moscow will owe Ukraine in postwar reparations.

Dixon and the others see the 2022 UN General Assembly vote declaring Russia the aggressor in Ukraine as an all but certain guarantee that Moscow will be legally bound to pay reparations. But Ukraine needs the money now, and the EU can advance it as a loan. In the unlikely event that the Kremlin were to agree to reparations, Ukraine would have to repay the loan, and Moscow could reclaim its frozen assets.

The EU debate a year ago put this idea to the political test, and it failed miserably, foundering on Belgium’s stubborn refusal to participate. The Dixon group blames EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who they say, borrowed their idea, garbled it, left out several essential components, and tried to ram it through politically without the necessary consultation and persuasion. “She prepared exactly no one,” Loiseau complains—no private conversations, no “massaging of egos,” no listening to others’ input, no consensus-building. “She wanted to be the lone mother, and she killed the baby.”

The Dixon group has taken the opposite tack—they’re now heading into a third year of arduous, behind-the-scenes lobbying and consensus-building. Even more important, they want to correct what they see as Von der Leyen’s misappropriation of their idea—restoring the essential steps she left out and the guarantees she forgot to offer. (Von der Leyen remains a staunch advocate of finding a way to use the frozen assets to augment EU support for Ukraine.)

It’s no accident that Belgium was at the heart of last year’s debate and the final obstacle to enactment. The lion’s share of the Russian assets frozen in Europe—some €180 billion of the €210 billion total—are held in Belgium in the privately owned financial services company, Euroclear.

Many Belgians believed that Von der Leyen’s proposal to use the money for a Ukraine loan would make them a priority target for Russian retaliation, and they weren’t wrong. Even as debate swirled in the EU, a wave of mysterious drone sightings forced Belgium to close its two biggest airports. According to Loiseau, several Belgian decision-makers also received personal threats. “Classic mafia tactics,” she says angrily. “But no surprise. The gang running Russia today is a mafia.”

The Dixon plan—both the original 2024 version and the one under discussion now—has an answer for this. It sounds technical—a distinction without much difference. But according to the group’s lawyers, it would make all the difference in the world. The core idea: the EU would transfer the entire Belgian account—not just the assets, but also Euroclear’s liability to the Central Bank of Russia—to a new financial vehicle controlled by the European Commission.

Belgian officials could argue that the EU made them do it, absolving Brussels of responsibility for relinquishing the money. Alongside the transfer, the EU would agree to compensate Belgium and Euroclear—and other Western repositories that agreed to transfer assets—for any financial losses they incur as a result.

Perhaps most meaningful, if Moscow decided to retaliate, it would now have to go after the entire EU, not just tiny Belgium. “If Russia wants to sue someone,” Loiseau explains. “They will have to sue the European Commission. Be my guest—they’re welcome to try. They will never prevail.”

Loiseau sounds a little weary when she describes the Dixon group’s two-and-a-half-year, continent-wide lobbying campaign—tours of European capitals, jawboning fellow members of the European Parliament, importuning the European Commission, and more than a dozen high-profile op-ed pieces. But she thinks the campaign is paying off, particularly in the European Parliament, where she says all the pro-European political groups and a majority of legislators are on board. A handful of national capitals have also come out in favor. But many are still noncommittal, and Belgium remains a potential obstacle.

Still, Loiseau is convinced the hard work will bear fruit, including with the dug-in Belgians. “They need to be reassured and pressured at the same time,” she explains, crediting a kind of old-fashioned politics we’ve almost forgotten in the U.S. “You meet, you talk, you argue. Maybe you give a little to reassure the other side. Then you go back and forth until, in the end, everybody believes it’s their idea.”

Meanwhile, as important as the lobbying campaign may be, circumstances on the ground in Europe are changing. A punishing trifecta of U.S. tariffs, Chinese competition, and energy shortages triggered by the fighting in Ukraine and Iran is choking the European economy. Nearly one-third of EU member states are facing budget crises, and only a handful are growing at anything like a healthy rate.

The last thing most governments want to do is to raise taxes, asking voters to foot a growing bill for increased support for Ukraine. Watershed national elections loom across the continent—in France, Spain, and possibly Germany, among other countries. And the EU is under pressure to trim, not increase, its next seven-year budget—a deal members hope to lock down before the end of 2026.

Bottom line: deploying the Russian assets on behalf of Ukraine remains a tough slog, with many in Europe still unpersuaded and others actively opposed. But it looks increasingly—to the Dixon group and others—like the only possible long-term answer.

What can the U.S. do?, I ask Loiseau as our conversation winds down. “Wake up!” she exclaims impatiently. The U.S. holds only about $5 billion of the $300 billion in Russian sovereign funds frozen in repositories across the West. Still, Loiseau says, every little bit helps.

“What’s important is that Moscow feels the pressure,” she explains. “We need to make clear that we’ll stand with Ukraine not just ‘for as long as it takes,’ as Joe Biden often said, but also for as much as it takes. Putin needs to hear this from Europe, but it would also help to hear it from the U.S. This is our only hope of bringing him to the table for a serious negotiation.”

The post Europeans Look for Options as Costs Mount in Ukraine appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The morning after the midterm elections—November 4—marks the unofficial start of the 2028 presidential campaign. Over the next two years, candidates and the Democratic Party will grapple with one big question: What is the message and agenda that can successfully win the White House? 

Progressive groups have long prepared for this moment, and it’s safe to say that candidates will be awash in competing proposals from organizations old and new. 

Among established players, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has offered a “New Affordability Agenda,” while the Center for American Progress recently launched its “Path Forward” series. Newer efforts include Project 2029, led by White House veterans Chad Maisel and Andrei Chernei; Inclusive Abundance, based on the framework championed by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson; and the “American Security Guarantee,” forthcoming from Senate veteran Adam Jentleson’s Searchlight Institute.

Over the coming months, I’ll be talking to many of the people competing in this “ideas primary” so you can hear their pitches yourself. 

First up is Third Way’s Executive Vice President for Policy, Jim Kessler, the subject of this week’s interview and a principal author of the organization’s “New Economic Bargain: 20 Ideas to Change the Lives of Working America.” (You can also watch the video on our Substack.)

Big disclosure: I was the director of Third Way’s economic program in the organization’s infancy (longer ago than I want to admit), and among my first tasks with Jim was to develop an agenda for the middle class, which we called a “New Middle Class Compact.” The purpose of this set of ideas was to help Americans cope with what we called a “New Rules Economy,” where the rules for achieving success were being upended in a dramatically changing economy. (And this was waaaay before AI.) 

What you’ll hear in this discussion with Jim is how the fortunes and aspirations of middle-class Americans have shifted over the last decade, as has the need for government intervention. We also talk about something that hasn’t changed: voters’ skepticism of Democrats as stewards of middle-class prosperity. Jim argues this new agenda can help overcome this obstacle. Key to that, he says, is this plain-language promise he hopes Democrats will make: “If you’re busting your butt, you should be able to get ahead.” 

Among the specific ideas he offers is a proposal for cheaper used car loans (auto debt is an increasing driver of financial precarity, so to speak) and a plan for universal pensions, which would be a boon for gig workers in particular. 

Jim also argues that Third Way’s agenda offers “ruthless pragmatism,” rather than ideas he says are politically infeasible. “If you look at our ideas one through 20… you could see it happening in a functioning government,” he said. “I can’t imagine, under any scenario, Medicare for All passing Congress and being signed into law. I see no scenario where that that could happen.”

I hope you’ll watch and then let us know what you think. 

Don’t miss at the Monthly…

Why a red wave of cash can’t stop a Blue Wave. Republicans have been hoping that their formidable cash advantage heading into this fall’s elections will insulate them from the wrath of voters and a humiliating wave of defeats. Yet all this GOP spending hasn’t seemed to make much of a difference so far, writes Politics Editor Bill Scher. First, he argues, money can’t make up for crappy candidates. Second, says Bill, “Republican ad buyers are learning the hard way that millions in dark money funneled to super PACs don’t go as far as money sent directly to candidates.” Read here.

What the life of Hannah Arendt can—and can’t—teach us. The late German theorist Hannah Arendt has become fashionable of late, not least because her seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, has become frighteningly relevant. Some of her adherents argue that we have as much to learn from Arendt’s life and ecumenical friendships as we do from her work. But as Features Editor Gillen Tener Martin writes in her review of Roger Berkowitz’s new biography, “Arendt’s relationships were unique, by both the standards of her day and modern metrics.” As a portrait of Arendt, Berkowitz’s work is an important contribution to the scholarship around her legacy. But as a model for how to heal a fractured world, Arendt herself might fall short. Read here. 

Don’t weaken antitrust in the name of AI safety. Big AI is asking Congress and regulators for an exemption from antitrust enforcement, on the grounds that the industry needs to work together in the name of AI safety and protecting the rest of us from their products. Don’t fall for it, argue Daniel Hanley and Arnav Rao of the Open Markets Institute. “Skeptics note that privately set safety standards, enabled by an antitrust waiver, may aim to shore up these corporations’ dominant market position and reduce spending on new model development ahead of their planned IPOs,” they write. Hanley and Rao propose a better alternative. Read here. 

Les enfants noble? Hundreds of thousands of student protesters have taken to the streets of France in recent weeks to condemn poor conditions in the nation’s schools and uneven opportunities for jobs and education. “But as the protests have grown and diversified, what began as a call for better conditions has become something bigger: a denouncement of France’s centrist government and its proposed austerity budget about six months before a presidential election; a nebulous demand for a brighter, more just tomorrow; or ‘an exercise in nihilistic resentment’ that’s costing France tens of millions in damages, depending on the observer’s interpretation, and on which particular protest (of thousands) they observed,” reports our Paris-based Features Editor Gillen Tener Martin. Read her dispatch here.

Plus…

• Contributing Editor Steve Waldman lauds the passage of California’s Community NEWS Act, landmark legislation that could revitalize local news. 
• Contributing Editor Jonathan Alter condemns misguided “celebrations” of the October 7 massacre. 
• Ralph Nader ponders whether the thought of a miserable lame-duck presidency could be enough to persuade Donald Trump to resign. 
• Richard Kahlenberg and Lief Lin make the case for three years of high school civic education.
• Bill Scher argues in his second column for the week that the Blue Wave could be big. Really big.
• Paul Glastris hosted our annual College Guide webinar with the New America Foundation, featuring Kevin Carey, Debra Humphreys, Paul LeBlanc, and yours truly.

Parting Note

“Brad” is not the problem

MAGA got its knickers into a twist last week over a campaign ad posted by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders touting the state’s new work requirements for Medicaid recipients. 

The video featured a clownish young white man named “Brad,” chomping cheeseballs and playing video games instead of contributing meaningfully to society. Right-wing commentator Jack Posobiec called the ad “Antiwhite,” while commentator Matt Walsh complained that “Republicans don’t have the balls to do this ad with ‘Shaniqua’ as the villain.” (The irony kills me.) 

You pay taxes to cover welfare for people who just choose not to work. That’s why I launched a welfare-to-work requirement.

If you’re young, healthy, and get government assistance, you should work, go to school, or volunteer. pic.twitter.com/M83nxNMdry

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) September 28, 2026

Let’s set aside for a moment the racism and hypocrisy animating the backlash against Sanders’ ad, as well as the fact that a large majority of Medicaid recipients in Arkansas are, in fact, white. Sanders’ ad points to a genuine crisis among young people in America: “disconnection” from work and school. 

When I wrote a book about this topic in 2020, 4.5 million young adults ages 16 to 24—or more than 1 in 10—were neither in school nor working. That was before the pandemic. New research from RAND now estimates that nearly one in four young adults experiences disconnection, and often for periods lasting six months or more. 

The mental toll is especially high for disconnected young men, two-thirds of whom reported “no in-person time with friends in the prior week”—a shocking sign of their social isolation. These young men are not “Brad,” living it up online and “choosing” not to work, as Sanders so blithely puts it. 

Rather, they’ve been failed by the institutions charged with helping them make a meaningful transition to adulthood: High schools that don’t prepare them for the world after graduation; colleges that are out of reach; and employers and policymakers who don’t create opportunities for young people in their communities. 

According to the nonprofit Measure of America, Arkansas has one of the highest rates of youth disconnection in the country. That’s the real objection to Sanders’ record as governor—not that she’s created an ad that “villainizes” men but that she’s done too little to help disconnected young adults find a path forward in her state. 

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Have a great week! 

Anne Kim, Senior Editor

The post Democrats’ Next Big Ideas appeared first on Washington Monthly.