Ken Martin tossed a phone at a junior staffer's desk. Not at him. Near him. The nuance is vital to lawyers and completely lost on everyone else. What am I saying here? If you are even losing a phone from winging it, no matter what, or swinging your arm in any throwing motion, you lost the fight. You cannot do that to people. Those are fighting words. Anyone would have the right to pop that guy in the face, or at the very least get in his face saying something along the lines of, we can talk anytime, but if you motion like that again, I will F*ck you up. That is what could have, or by law should have, happened in self defense, and I will say it again, he should be fired for acting that way. Whether he wound up to pitch the ball like Steve Carlton, or whether he swung his arm and lost the phone, however, wait a second, he said that he threw it at his or her desk. That does not make that action okay or right by any standard, let alone with regard to Human Resources. You and I would have been fired for way less than tossing a phone at a desk. This single detail, above all the fundraising and polling and internal DNC wrangling, defines the Democratic Party's prospects ninety-nine days out from midterms they have no reason to expect will be anything less than a layup.
A layup. Think about that for a second, because that’s precisely what it should be. Donald Trump is on pace to well exceed his previous approval ratings, with his promises on prices and groceries evaporating like so much hot air, cabinet and court nominations whittling down his avenues of defense, and a second term spent playing at politics from the opposite side of the field from where he was four years ago. In other words, every gift the political opposition could hope for as it prepares to defend the federal government from a Democratic takeover in 2025 is on display for all to see, and the DNC’s response to this existential crisis? Mortgaging the headquarters, eighteen million in liabilities against roughly fifteen million in cash, and getting caught threatening to sue its own staff for signing NDAs before an internal review could commence. The campaign finance numbers tell a similar story; the RNC has a commanding lead over the DNC in cash on hand, a hundred and twenty eight million to the DNC's shortfall, the RNC carries no debt at all, and Trump's personal PAC has four hundred million in reserve. This is all easily understood and obvious common sense, and yet a hundred and ten million dollar campaign finance disadvantage has proven insufficient to shake Democrats out of a defensive crouch when it comes to actually winning either chamber of Congress. Shit, I meant to say both branches of government.
This, however, is not what I am writing about. The issue is not one of resources and it is not even strictly one of messaging, as cynics might suggest who believe the DNC’s internal discussions about a ‘prevent defense strategy’ were merely posturing. It is a question of posture. The Democratic Party has decided, at the institutional level, that prevent defense is the way forward. It is not. It is a philosophy for when a football team is up by two scores with four minutes to play, and the opposing coach wants to make sure the game clock runs all the way down without having to kick a single field goal.
The Democratic party is not a football team that is up by two scores, and it is not even close to having the game clock run out. It is, at best, tied to the opposing team, which is currently in the process of self immolation in front of the entire country, and it is playing not to lose. That is malpractice, and malpractice is the exact word used by Ken Martin when describing the consultant class selling his party on a billion dollar tv buy rate, so that they could pocket fifteen to twenty percent in commission, and then quietly leak out that his internal review would not include certain topics he personally found objectionable, all while keeping the same consultative services. Winning one house will not be enough, and I want the people who read this newsletter to understand that. If the Democrats win back the House but not the Senate, or the Senate but not the House, and the party’s messaging apparatus begins to parse this as a general election mandate, I will be the first one to say out loud that it was a stupid mistake to have taken either chamber under those circumstances.
Both chambers, please. Anything else is a participation trophy.
The part of this argument I am most concerned with is not strictly about the money or the messaging, though all of this is undeniably important. Say what you want about the Republicans, as I have done extensively in this very newsletter, but they are demonstrably better at politics than the Democrats, and acknowledging that fact does not make you a Republican, or even remotely conservative. They have discipline, which means everyone says roughly the same thing at roughly the same time in roughly the same channel, without needing to have everyone in a single room at the same time. They have grit, which means if a regulation is inconvenient to the people in charge, they find the regulation to be inconvenient to everyone and then they move on to the next one. They have no shame, which means if an action does not violate the letter of any regulation, it is executed with full confidence of not violating the spirit of any regulation either, and then they do it again and again until someone stops them. That is not a conservative value, it is not even a particularly Republican one, it is just an accurate assessment of how politics works at the highest levels, when they are being treated as a contact sport, which they demonstrably are. You do not have to like the behavior of a heavyweight champion to recognize that they are one, or to say that they continue to win because they are one.
The Democrats have moments of that same sort of contact sport competitiveness, and they have it in the same places as always, among the combatants willing to actually fight for something larger than themselves. There are individual members of Congress who understand press conferences as weapons, who do not hesitate to use them, and who have been repeatedly praised for doing so in public by many of the same people who would read this newsletter. It is easy to believe that this sort of partisan engagement could return, and it is not impossible to believe that it will, especially since I am seeing it more often in the proceedings of the House and Senate than I have in years. It is these moments, however, and not anything else that prove my point, because they are the only parts of the Democratic party that engage in contact sport politics, even if it is on a small scale. The institutional machinery does not, and it is that machinery where the responsibility lies for producing a unified and effective campaign to take back the federal government. Until they do produce it, all of the press conferences and weaponized speeches and public combats will happen at the federal level, and they cease the moment someone walks into the Rayburn building. A national committee that continues to demand pauses in spending from its vendors while simultaneously having a public relations crisis and financial liabilities in excess of its liquid assets is not built by people who intend to win. It is built by people who want to avoid losing, and it is possible to recognize that distinction without being remotely cynical about the entire enterprise. It is simply a matter of understanding the difference between someone who intends to win, and someone who intends to lose less, and understanding that those are two entirely separate things. Voters can smell the difference, even if they cannot articulate it.
This is all to say, in summation, that the Democratic Party should only impeach the president if only it wins back both branches of the Government. At the very least, doing so would slow his agenda to a crawl. I want to be clear that I was, and still am, very much against saying or advocating for that word, impeach, out loud. However, if Democrats were able to win back both the Senate and the House, I would honestly say to go on the attack in that regard, especially if there are legal ways to compound the first two impeachments along with everything he has done over the last year and a half of his second term. I maintain that so many things he did were impeachable, and I also thought the first two impeachments should have waited for a clearer pattern to emerge. Even setting that aside, when you consider what he has done in the last year and a half alone, even if his lawyers found loopholes, which they are very good at doing, so many of his actions qualify as impeachable. I am not even certain why I brought that up today, other than it being a tactic to slow him to a crawl for the next few years. But again, the Democrats need to win back two branches of government, or it will never work.
Yeah, I am not even sure why I talked about it today. It is not even part of the story, aside from me wanting the Democrats to act more like Mitch McConnell and think more strategically, even ruthlessly, for now at least. I do not condone that style of politics, but it is part of the reason the GOP wins. They are diabolical, and they make no apology for it.
Let me get back to the point here. The whole point of a united front is to keep the other party from ever establishing a united front of its own while preventing divisions within your own coalition at the same time. That is what happened last time, and that is what will happen again unless the machinery changes. Right now, it is not at all obvious to me that it will.
Look at what happened this time, step back and look at the whole damn thing, because it happened for a reason, and it is instructive to understand why. Ken Martin promised to deliver a full public accounting, of his party’s failures, when he took on the chairmanship, and all he delivered on was the promise itself. He tried to bury the damn thing ten months later, claiming that it was a distraction, and only relented when his own party began to publicly revolt. When it finally saw the light of day, entire sections were blacked out, there was no summary, and no conclusion, and Martin was still doing his day job while he did it, according to his own testimony. Democratic strategist Amanda Litman said the quiet part on twitter, when she noted that the consultant who produced it was still being paid to fix the party’s problems, even after he’d made them. And, no, I am not talking about people in the GOP. All of that was before the donor issue broke, before the phone tossed at the junior staffer's desk, before the NDAs, and this is not four separate scandals, it is one single operation run by one man who holds the job for the duration of one term, which ends in 2029. Read that last sentence again, because it is important, whoever is losing patience with this long argument at this late stage, it is vitally important, because whoever it is has to understand that whoever has this job has to stick around for another three years, even if they want to leave, or organize an effective enough opposition that they do not have to, and right now it is not obvious to me that either has happened. The entire apparatus is said to be so thoroughly toxic and dysfunctional that the group dedicated exclusively to recruiting and training new Democratic politicians, called Run For Something, has already decided not to even try and replace him, if and when the time comes.
It is hard to believe that the Democratic party has any viable path to victory in November, other than the one currently being pursued by the Republicans, because it is the only one that works, demonstrably. The President has an indictment waiting in the wings for any ally who proves useful, and an entire legal infrastructure committed to finding the edges of the law and staying exactly inside them, and his cabinet and court nominations are all designed to keep him insulated from the kinds of oversight his opponents take for granted. His promises on inflation and prices have proven to be precisely that, promises, and he has an entire legal infrastructure in place to keep those promises from being taken seriously, and he has already seen his approval ratings balloon in the process.
If Ken Martin needs to go, he needs to go before November, not after, because he will not win the argument the way he is currently positioned. He threw a phone in an office. That is not allowed in any corporation or company in America, unless, of course, you are Les Grossman, in which case, so be it. I'd bet Joe Scarborough, like me, watched Tropic Thunder last night. But anyway, if he needs to go, it is because he is in the process of losing right now, in real time, and it may already be too late to turn that around before the election actually happens. Worse, the day after the midterms, the party needs to start campaigning for the next presidential race, and that is not a good position to be in with no cash on hand. Unless the people who are losing patience with him right now organize themselves effectively and begin the long march toward his removal, nothing changes, and right now, they do not appear to want to do that at this stage in the game. Fix that, or don’t be surprised when we are all back here in December of 2026, trying to decide what should be done about the next round of Democratic losses and the next round of internal party criticism, and it turns out there isn’t anything anyone can do about it, because it is all the same thing: the whole apparatus, the whole system, and the whole methodical, almost sadistic devotion to obstructing whatever the opposition puts in its way, while doing very little to actually win anything itself.