The Rebels Already Won

It's lame duck hunting season

Francesca Hong speaks to supporters

Wisconsin votes today. If Francesca Hong loses the Democratic gubernatorial primary, mainstream media will file the story they’ve been dying to do all year: that the anti-establishment fever is breaking and the grown-ups are back.

Don’t fall for it. The insurgency already won months ago, before anyone in Washington even knew who Hong was. It’s lame duck hunting season, an electoral massacre of do-nothing political incumbents and the old ways of politics in general. Think DOGE, but for politicians. I’ll call it DOPE (Department of Politician Efficiency).

There’s the famous examples like Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed, but countless others. Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old barista, took out 15-term Colorado congresswoman Diana DeGette, age 69. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old grad student, did the same to congressman Adriano Espaillat (71), who has held elected office in upper Manhattan since 1997. Donavan McKinney, a 34-year-old union organizer, ousted 71-year-old congressman Shri Thanedar in Michigan.

And contrary to the media’s lazy comparisons to the Tea Party — which defeated just three House members — this cycle has already seen primary defeats of nine House members. That’s the most in a non-redistricting year since 1970, with more primaries yet to come.

But there’s more carnage still. A much larger number of politicians ran the “you can’t fire me, I quit” play, rather than face the humiliation of an election defeat. As a result, sixty-two House members are not seeking reelection. That’s the second-highest number not to seek reelection in American history.

Also unlike the Tea Party, DOPE is not confined to one political party. Thirty-five of those House members not seeking reelection are Republicans. Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who herself chose not to seek reelection, plans to launch a third-party bid for the presidency, along with recently-ousted Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson.

Then there’s the survivors who are not long for this world, politically and often literally given their health issues: people like Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer, members of the crypt caucus.

Being in the middle of all this, I don’t think we fully appreciate how monumental this political realignment is. And DOPE’s influence is only growing.

When Mamdani won the New York mayoral primary, the response from Democratic “leadership” was awkward silence. Chuck Schumer never endorsed him. Hakeem Jeffries spent month studying his shoes before finally endorsing, only after Mamdani had promised to retain police commissioner Jessica Tisch, the national security schoolmarm who would keep the bucking bronco in line.

Last week though, Democratic officialdom couldn’t get in line fast enough after El-Sayed won the Senate primary in Michigan. Haley Stevens, the leadership-backed candidate he’d just beaten in a bruising primary, endorsed him immediately and without any apparent bitterness. Gavin Newsom endorsed him within minutes of the race being called, then flew to Michigan to campaign with him. Kamala Harris endorsed him Friday. Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand put out a joint statement.

These are not backbenchers. Newsom and Harris, both contenders for the next Democratic Party presidential nomination, evidently concluded that something so big was transpiring that they were willing to stand next to the guy their donors just spent millions of dollars trying to bury. None of them asked El-Sayed to walk anything back, or mentioned his supposed negatives they’d spent months insisting would prompt the sky to fall.

The party bigwigs clearly see the writing on the wall. It’s even changing how they talk. The most striking example is Biden’s former Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, who now says his experience in the administration “radicalized” him — presumably a move to build up populist cred for a presidential run.

Compare that to his 2020 presidential campaign, when Buttigieg couldn’t seem to find an Iowa fairgoer he could resist telling he was a Rhodes Scholar, speaks six languages (or eight depending on the day), and how much he loves the James Joyce novel, Ulysses. The former McKinsey consultant was the walking embodiment of why the Democrat Party sucks: over-educated, out of touch and fixated on wonky, small-bore bullshit lacking any bold vision.

Now he turns up on popular podcasts like Diary of a CEO, where he does some stupid things — like pandering to conspiracy heads by implying that Jeffrey Epstein compelled Trump to bomb Iran. But he also says things that suggest people’s rage is breaking through.

“ Democrats have a responsibility to present something that is better, not just better than now, but it’s gotta be better than before,” he told Diary.

On Democrats fundraising off Trump’s collapse: sure, it raises money and it gets votes, but the trap is that it leaves the party “relieved of having to generate ideas,” Buttigieg told Politico recently. In the same interview, he also slammed the party’s habit of acting like we just need to return to some idyllic pre-Trump era, saying:

“There’s a kind of unspoken Democratic assumption that we're trying to take us back to, I don't know what. Is it 2012? Is it 1992? Is it 2021? Whatever it is, we can't go there. We shouldn't try. We shouldn't want to.”

These criticisms of the party are present in virtually all of his recent interviews, which come off like a repudiation of his own political career.

Sounds to me like DOPE found its way up Mayor Pete’s nose. Jokes aside, that’s a good thing. Sincere or not — and I suspect it's mostly sincere — it means the most calibrated politician in the party has read the room and concluded the old lines don't work anymore.

In other words, pissed off voters won.

A political realignment doesn't get certified on election night. You find out it happened when you notice the establishment has quietly adopted the insurgents' vocabulary and ideas — like Mamdani’s “affordability” focus — and delivers them back to you as conventional wisdom.

This is already happening; the media just hasn’t noticed. As with the Francesca Hong phenomenon, they’re too busy fixating on “electability.” There’s a word I’d be glad to never hear again.

— Edited by William M. Arkin