#final-campaign-days

#final-campaign-days

The group practiced a conversation with faux voters, with some new members still getting comfortable reading from the script. They were soon dispatched in pairs to the Sunset District to find actual voters.

Maddow stated, 'I am very disinterested in him as a person.' She emphasized that she does not have an interest in his opinions or in putting him on camera.

By rallying behind Talarico, the party sided with someone who pledged to change Washington while finding consensus. The 36-year-old state representative's win over Crockett cements his status as a rising star and will likely make him one of Democrats' most prominent candidates this year. He campaigned with denunciations of 'politics as a blood sport' and an insistence that people want 'a return to more timeless values of sincerity and honesty and compassion and respect.'

Affordability has been, understandably, the watchword for Democratic candidates over the last year. After downplaying inflation under Joe Biden, the party learned a brutal lesson when Donald Trump rode the cost-of-living crisis back to the White House in 2024. In 2025, Zohran Mamdani put affordability at the center of his own campaign and surged from the back of the pack to City Hall.

In perhaps a vain attempt to prove themselves moderate, the Democratic lawmakers helped override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's vetoes. Voters responded with the kind of ballot-box fury that should serve as a lesson to other incumbents. It wasn't just a case that the incumbents lost. They were buried, with several of them getting trounced by margins of 40 points or more.

We need someone who has new ideas, new energy and a new perspective to be an advocate for our community. I'm not running against a person, I'm running against the problem, and the problem is the status quo.

They want to cheat, he said of Democrats. They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that their only way to get elected is to cheat. And we're going to stop it. Trump has put action to his long-debunked claims this year, with FBI agents seizing 2020 election documentation in Fulton county, Georgia, and the Department of Justice pursuing voter data from state elections officials across the country.

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen to receive our twice-weekly News & Politics newsletter. The Washington Roundtable is joined by Robert Kagan, a historian and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, for a conversation about the pressures facing American democracy, the security of elections, and how these domestic tensions interact with the collapse of international norms.