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1. Hopium
Last week Tim talked with Jesse Lehrich, who walked through a scenario where the D’s wind up with 54 Senate seats a few weeks from now.
54.
That’s crazy. But not as crazy as it sounds. There is a path. All Dems have to do is run the table on the Big 5 races,¹ win a gettable Iowa, and then luck into Kansas. Hell, if you want an even bigger hit of the dragon, you can get to 56 seats if there’s a backlash to Darline Graham in South Carolina and Dan Osborn overperforms in Nebraska.²
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What would Democrats do with 56 senators?
This would be a caucus with instantly vulnerable freshmen in Alaska and Texas. The South Carolina senator would be an assumed one-termer. There would be an independent from a red state. And John Fetterman.
Suddenly that 56-seat best-case scenario looks awfully soft.
But today I come with solutions. One of the lessons of the Iran war is that a governing party has to prepare voters. It needs to make the case for its policies prospectively, feeding a public desire and creating an expectation for its actions.
That’s how you give vulnerable legislators the cover to support your program. Democrats need a governing framework. I’m here to give you one. It’ll be your job to come up with branding at the end.
First, let’s spec out our needs. The framework has to be able to house three broad types of policy:
We want our first question to be “Is it true?”—not “Will somebody important be mad at us?” The point of independent media is that nobody tells us what not to publish. And it’s the support of our Bulwark+ members that makes that possible.
