Monday's Campaign Round-up, 6.9.25: Democrats prevail in San Antonio mayoral race
* Republicans made a significant effort to win San Antonio's mayoral election, but in Texas' second-largest city, Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones, an Iraq war veteran who served as the under secretary of the U.S. Air Force, prevailed with roughly 54% of the vote.
* On a related note, in Mississippi's largest city, former Democratic state Sen. John Horhn easily won Jackson's mayoral race last week, finishing with roughly 67% of the vote.
* How difficult have things become inside the Democratic National Committee's leadership team? According to a new Politico report, DNC Chair Ken Martin told party leaders in a recent private conversation that he's unsure about his ability to lead the party because of infighting created by Vice Chair David Hogg. 'I'll be very honest with you, for the first time in my 100 days on this job ... the other night I said to myself for the first time, I don't know if I wanna do this anymore,' he said in a May 15 online meeting of DNC officials.
* With New Jersey's gubernatorial primaries just one day away, Donald Trump reiterated his endorsement of former state lawmaker Jack Ciattarelli, adding, in reference to the other Republican candidates, 'I don't even know who they are!'
* Prominent players in the cryptocurrency industry were heavily involved in boosting some GOP Senate candidates in the 2024 election cycle, and Punchbowl News reported that crypto advocates are already starting to make significant investments into former Rep. Mike Rogers' Republican candidacy in Michigan.
* Unrig Our Economy and Families Over Billionaires are launching a $5 million ad campaign, urging Republican senators to oppose their party's domestic policy megabill. The initial round of ads began airing late last week in North Carolina, Maine and Iowa, with plans to expand to Alaska, South Carolina, Missouri and Ohio.
* In related news, House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNBC late last week that he believes Republicans will lose their majority unless they approve their far-right reconciliation package. What he didn't mention was the likelihood that if the party does approve the legislation, Democrats will spend the next year using it against them.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
UPI
22 minutes ago
- UPI
3 reasons Republicans' redistricting power grab might backfire
Texas state Democratic representatives, shown at a rally in Washington, previously left the state in 2021 to try to prevent the state's Republicans from reaching a quorum and passing new voting restrictions legislation. File Photo by Michael Reynolds/EPA The gerrymandering drama in Texas -- and beyond -- has continued to unfold after Democratic state legislators fled the state. The Democrats want to prevent the Republican-controlled government from enacting a mid-decade gerrymander aimed at giving Republicans several more seats in Congress. The Texas GOP move was pushed by President Donald Trump, who's aiming to ensure he has a GOP-controlled Congress to work with after the 2026 midterm elections. Other Republican states such as Missouri and Ohio may also follow the Texas playbook; and Democratic states such as California and Illinois seem open to responding in kind. But there are a few factors that make this process more complicated than just grabbing a few House seats. They may even make Republicans regret their hardball gerrymandering tactics, if the party ends up with districts that political scientists like me call "dummymandered." Democrats can finally fight back Unlike at the federal level, where Democrats are almost completely shut out of power, Republicans are already facing potentially consequential retaliation for their gerrymandering attempts from Democratic leaders in other states. Democrats in California, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, are pushing for a special election later this year, in which the voters could vote on new congressional maps in that state, aiming to balance out Democrats' losses in Texas. If successful, these changes would take effect prior to next year's midterm elections. Other large Democratic-controlled states, such as Illinois and New York -- led by Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Gov. Kathy Hochul, respectively -- have also indicated openness to enacting their own new gerrymanders to pick up seats on the Democratic side. New York and California both currently use nonpartisan redistricting commissions to draw their boundaries. But Hochul recently said she is "sick and tired of being pushed around" while other states refuse to adopt redistricting reforms and gerrymander to their full advantage. Hochul said she'd even be open to amending the state constitution to eliminate the nonpartisan redistricting commission. It's unclear whether these blue states will be successful in their efforts to fight fire with fire; but in the meantime, governors like Hochul and Pritzker have welcomed the protesting Democratic legislators from Texas, in many cases arranging for their housing during their self-imposed exile. Dummymandering Another possible problem for either party looking to gain some seats in this process stems from greediness. In responding to Democrats' continued absence from Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott threatened even more drastic gerrymanders. "If they don't start showing up, I may start expanding," Abbott said. "We may make it six or seven or eight new seats we're going to be adding on the Republican side." But Abbott might think twice about this strategy. Parties that gerrymander their states' districts are drawing lines to maximize their own advantage, either in state legislatures or, in this case, congressional delegations. When parties gerrymander districts, they don't usually try to make them all as lopsided as possible for their own side. Instead, they try to make as many districts as possible that they are likely to win. They do this by spreading groups of supportive voters across several districts so they can help the party win more of these districts. But sometimes the effort backfires: In trying to maximize their seats, a party spreads its voters too thin and fails to make some districts safe enough. These vulnerable districts can then flip to the other party in future elections, and the opposing party ends up winning more seats than expected. This phenomenon, commonly referred to as "dummymandering," has happened before. It even happened in Texas, where Republicans lost a large handful of poorly drawn state legislative districts in the Dallas suburbs in 2018, a strong year for Democrats nationwide. With Democrats poised for a strong 2026 midterm election against an unpopular president, this is a lesson Republicans might need to pay attention to. There's not much left to gerrymander One of the main reasons dummymandering happens is that there has been so much gerrymandering that there are few remaining districts competitive enough for a controlling party to pick off for themselves. This important development has unfolded for two big reasons. First, in terms of gerrymandering, the low-hanging fruit is already picked over. States controlled by either Democrats or Republicans have already undertaken pretty egregious gerrymanders during previous regular redistricting processes, particularly following the 2010 and 2020 censuses. Republicans have generally been more adept at the process, particularly in maximizing their seat shares in relatively competitive states such as Wisconsin and North Carolina that they happen to control. But Democrats have also been successful in states such as Maryland, where only one Republican serves out of nine seats, despite the party winning 35% of the presidential vote in 2024. In Massachusetts, where Democrats hold all eight seats, Republicans won 37% of the presidential vote in 2024. There's also the fact that over the past half-century, "gerrymanderable" territory has become more difficult to find regardless of how you draw the boundaries. That's because the voting electorate is more geographically sorted between the parties. This means that Democratic and Republican voters are segregated from each other geographically, with Democrats tending toward big cities and suburbs, and Republicans occupying rural areas. As a result, it's become less geographically possible than ever to draw reasonable-looking districts that split up the other party's voters in order to diminish the opponents' ability to elect one of their own. Regardless of how far either party is willing to go, today's clash over Texas redistricting represents largely uncharted territory. Mid-decade redistricting does sometimes happen, either at the hands of legislatures or the courts, but not usually in such a brazen fashion. And this time, the Texas attempt could spark chaos and a race to the bottom, where every state picks up the challenge and tries to rewrite their electoral maps - not in the usual once-a-decade manner, but whenever they're unsatisfied with the odds in the next election. Charlie Hunt is an associate professor of political science at Boise State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions in this commentary are solely those of the author.
E&E News
23 minutes ago
- E&E News
GOP looking again at imposing a federal fee for electric cars
Republicans in both chambers are looking to revive the idea of creating the first-ever annual federal fee for electric vehicles — despite the political uproar generated by a broader car fee proposed in a draft of the GOP's megalaw. The fee would help address — but not completely close — the country's infrastructure spending deficit, offering the Highway Trust Fund its first significant revenue expansion in decades. But getting it through Congress will be a challenge. House Transportation Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.) generated a bipartisan backlash this spring when he proposed annual registration fees — $250 for electric vehicles, $100 for hybrids and $20 for all other vehicles — in the initial House version of the GOP's megabill (H.R. 1). He almost immediately had to strip out the $20 fee, and the other fees died in the Senate before the bill was signed into law. Advertisement But Graves wants to resurrect some version of that fee in the next surface transportation bill, which needs to be reauthorized by September 2026. The exact fee structure is far from determined, though it's clear that any new fee for vehicles that run purely on gasoline is not politically viable.
Forbes
24 minutes ago
- Forbes
Media Confidence and the Pollsters
Confidence in the media is abysmally low, a finding confirmed regularly by many pollsters asking many different questions. This is hardly news, but it has significant implications not only for the media itself but also for the media's polling partners. Gallup's recent updates to their substantial trends on the media reveal the depths of the problem. Gallup has been measuring confidence in newspapers since 1973, when 39% expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence. In their poll this July, that response was 17%. Gallup added television news in 1993, when 46% had a high confidence. Now, this figure has dropped to 11%. There are partisan differences, but confidence in the media is low across the board: in 2025, 12% of Republicans expressed high confidence in newspapers while 24% of Democrats did. As for television, 11% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats expressed strong confidence. Hardly votes of confidence. Gallup looked at the honesty and ethical standards of different professions in late 2024, and majorities gave the low or very low response to three of the 23 the surveyors examined. These were TV reporters (55% said they had low or very low standards), members of Congress (68%), and lobbyists (68%). Newspaper reporters fared only slightly better. Forty-five percent said their standards were low or very low. Response to a broader Gallup question on trust and confidence in the mass media 'such as newspapers, TV, and radio – when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly' has fallen significantly since they asked this question in 1997. In their 2024 reading, 31% overall had a great deal or a fair amount of trust and confidence, but more, 36%, had no trust at all. Gallup notes that this is the third year in a row in which more people had no trust than had a great deal or fair amount of it. Gallup has been asking this question regularly since 1997, and the no confidence response has risen sharply. A Pew 2025 survey that provides trend data back to 2016 shows more stability in 'information' provided by the national news media, but only 17% had a lot of confidence in it in 2025, and 50% some. For social media sites, those figures were 7% a lot and 35% some. Analyses of the decline in trust in the media today are numerous. A Pew Charitable Trust analysis focused on polarization and economic disruption in the industry. There are also concerns about bias, a new cohort of progressive journalists who are part of an out-of-touch media elite, relentlessly negative coverage, and incessant scandal and celebrity stories. I'll leave the diagnosis to the experts, but I do often wonder what happened to the old journalism maxim of telling readers the who, what, where of news events. The pollsters feed the journalistic maw with breathless findings on Trump's up and downs, on scandal, etc. Don't get me wrong. I want to know how Donald Trump and the political parties are faring, and I'm even mildly interested in polling about the 2026 elections, even though they are over a year away and a lot can change. Polling will always be a valuable way to take the public's temperature, but something seems to be missing as modern pollsters have tied themselves so closely to the old and new media. To this long-time observer, it feels as if the pollsters once had more involvement in setting the agenda for each poll than they do today. Despite the explosion of polling, there seems to be less interest in trends or how Americans live their lives. Political coverage, and especially celebrity and scandal stories, are central to the news media and the pollsters now, as if these were the main or only topics that interest Americans. Pollsters have had media partners for decades. They help them get their findings out and burnish their reputations. George Gallup relied on newspapers to publicize his polls. Elmo Roper polled for Fortune magazine, starting in the mid-1930s. Media-polling partnerships flowered starting in the mid-1970s with the CBS News/New York Times poll which began in late1975. ABC and the Washington Post started partnering in 1981 and NBC and the Wall Street Journal followed suit in 1985. Today pollsters change partners often as they navigate the new media environment. There is no indication of an impending divorce or even a trial separation between the pollsters and the media, but the pollsters have tied themselves to a widely unpopular institution and that's a problem.
