Politics
Biden or not, Democrats face critical choices in squabble over presidential ticket
Cornell Belcher, a prominent pollster who worked for the Democratic National Committee and both Obama campaigns, wishes the party’s leaders would shut up about President Biden’s poll numbers.
“There’s too much talk about polling right now,” Belcher said. “As a pollster, it’s driving me out of my … mind that people are trying to drive whatever narrative they want by using polling.”
In recent days, Biden has faced mounting calls to drop out of the race from members of his own party. Many have pointed to worsening poll numbers for the 81-year-old incumbent since a disastrous debate performance last month. Some fear that questions about the president’s mental acuity will doom down-ballot candidates too.
But with Biden repeatedly insisting that he is not stepping aside, Belcher said, Democrats harping on his slipping support were hurting, not helping, their cause.
Cornell Belcher, president of Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies and senior fellow in Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, appears on “Meet the Press” on Oct. 23, 2022.
(William B. Plowman / Getty Images)
“Over the last three weeks, Democrats have done more damage to our ability to win in November than what Donald Trump and Republicans have been able to do,” Belcher said. “They have to stop [the] circular firing squad that they’re currently in, because it’s a death spiral.”
While calls from Congress members and major donors for Biden to step aside have dominated headlines in recent days, plenty of other Democratic loyalists have stood by the president and dismissed those calls as damaging and dangerous — posing challenging questions for the party.
How much longer should leaders push Biden to go? Will it be possible to refocus voters on the party’s accomplishments and core message — that former President Trump represents an existential threat to democracy? Is Vice President Kamala Harris a better candidate? Or anyone else?
Perhaps most important: What is the party’s plan for right now?
“That,” said one senior House Democratic aide, “is what we’re all trying to figure out.”
‘A test of how strong the party is’
During an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Biden’s campaign chair, said Biden was “absolutely” running.
O’Malley Dillon said the campaign is “looking at polling” and acknowledged “some slippage in support” since the debate. But she said it was only “a small movement” in a “hardened” race where many Americans are already decided — meaning many were committed to Biden.
O’Malley Dillon said that internal data from door-knocking and other efforts in battleground states have shown that Biden is still a contender.
Many leading Democrats were making the opposite case.
“Simply put,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San José) wrote in a letter to Biden released Friday, “your candidacy is on a trajectory to lose the White House and potentially impact crucial House and Senate races down ballot.”
Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), center, speaks as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds its final meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington on Dec. 19, 2022. From left, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San José), Thompson and Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.).
(Jim Lo Scalzo / Associated Press)
Earlier in the week, a polling memo by the Democratic firm BlueLabs Analytics found that alternative candidates outperformed Biden in a theoretical matchup with Trump in battleground states. An Associated Press poll found nearly two-thirds of Democrats thought Biden should withdraw.
Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University history professor and author of “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party,” said the divide between Biden loyalists and dissenters presented a unique challenge.
“It’s a test of how strong the party is in many ways,” he said. “And not just how strong it is, but how united it is in believing that defeating Trump is really critical.”
Kazin said there is no doubt Democratic leaders can shift their support to a new candidate. They just need to decide if that’s what they are going to do — and before the party’s convention next month in Chicago.
A contested convention, Kazin said, would be “fraught with lots of perils” — stirring fresh divisions when the party can least afford them.
“They have to have a successful convention, one way or the other,” Kazin said. “Otherwise, they’re doomed.”
If it’s Biden
Whether Biden will drop out of the race is ultimately up to one person: Joe Biden. And if he stays the course, party officials would have no choice but to get on board, political analysts said.
Kerry L. Haynie, a political science professor at Duke University, said a Biden win in November will require all of the dissenters to swiftly offer “a full-throated endorsement of the campaign,” and then to “work in lockstep” to turn out the vote and reframe the race once more as a choice between “competent, honest Joe” and a dangerous Donald Trump.
Democrats will have to articulate well the idea that Biden “has lost a step” with age, but is “still capable, he’s still doing the job,” Haynie said.
President Biden speaks at the 115th NAACP National Convention in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Democrats at the highest levels are making a critical push for Biden to reconsider his election bid. Former President Obama has privately expressed concerns to Democrats about Biden’s candidacy.
(Susan Walsh / Associated Press)
Democratic leaders also could emphasize that voting for Biden ensures a Democratic administration — one that will protect access to abortion, take a humane stance on immigration, appoint liberal judges and defend organized labor, LGBTQ+ people and other groups.
But Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, said Democrats have to be careful with that message given today’s political atmosphere and distrust in bureaucrats.
“There are some people who hear that and they think ‘deep state,’” she said. “It is compelling to some, but it is repelling to others.”
Belcher, the pollster, said that if poor poll numbers this early in a race were an acceptable reason for ousting a candidate, “most of the greatest candidates in history” would never have been elected — including the Black one-term senator “with a Muslim-sounding name” he once worked for.
Democrats need to drive home the idea that Biden has made people’s lives better in regular ways, he said. They have to contrast Biden’s plan with Project 2025, the ultraconservative playbook devised for Trump’s second term by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, he said, and “lean back into America’s fear and anxiety about the chaos and dangers of four more years of Donald Trump.”
Most of all, Belcher said, Democrats need to get behind Biden as surrogates and champion his campaign message in as many places as possible.
“The best arguments for Biden that I have heard in the last two weeks haven’t been from anyone on CNN or MSNBC,” Belcher said. “It’s been on TikTok and Instagram, from people doing it in their cars.”
If Biden steps aside
If Biden steps aside, the party could coalesce around another candidate, or hold a contested convention where candidates vie for delegates.
Several experts said early, unwavering support for Harris was clearly the best option.
Gillespie said if Harris were “somehow overlooked” without convincing evidence that her candidacy would fair dramatically worse than another candidate’s, the party would “risk alienating the most loyal Democratic constituency in Black women.”
Vice President Kamala Harris arrives to attend the opening of a pop-up ice cream shop owned by Tyra Banks, left, in Washington, on Friday.
(Nathan Howard / Associated Press)
Haynie said Harris would bring new energy and important strengths to the ticket as a younger woman of color who has already been leading the Biden campaign’s message on abortion rights, and as the daughter of immigrants, given Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
But she also would have to defend the Biden administration’s record even as party insiders try to pull her in new policy directions, including on U.S. support of Israel in its war with Hamas. She would have to rebuff legitimate criticisms about her clumsy 2020 presidential campaign and how she’s performed as vice president.
Harris also would face racist, sexist challenges that other candidates, especially white men, would not.
“She is going to face unique challenges as a woman of color in terms of the tenor of the attacks,” Gillespie said. “She is going to have to be able to anticipate those attacks, and have a ready response to them.”
Amy K. Dacey, executive director of the Sine Institute of Policy & Politics at American University, was formerly CEO of the Democratic National Committee, and before that of Emily’s List, a national group that works to elect Democratic women.
Dacey said that despite Harris’s hurdles, she is a known entity to voters who has been tested on the national stage — unlike some other names that have been floated for the ticket.
Dacey said the party process is playing out as intended, and Democrats still have time to land on a final ticket. But the sooner they can do that — and refocus the race on policies over people — the better.
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Some of the top rumored Democratic potential candidates for president in 2028 are showing a united front in opposing U.S. strikes on Iran, with several high-profile figures accusing President Donald Trump of launching an unnecessary and unconstitutional war.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris said Trump was “dragging the United States into a war the American people do not want.”
“Let me be clear: I am opposed to a regime-change war in Iran, and our troops are being put in harm’s way for the sake of Trump’s war of choice,” Harris said in a statement Saturday following the joint U.S. and Israeli strikes throughout Iran.
“This is a dangerous and unnecessary gamble with American lives that also jeopardizes stability in the region and our standing in the world,” she continued. “What we are witnessing is not strength. It is recklessness dressed up as resolve.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are leading Democratic 2028 hopefuls who spoke out against U.S. strikes on Iran. (Big Event Media/Getty Images for HumanX Conference; Reuters/Liesa Johannssen; Mario Tama/Getty Images)
California Gov. Gavin Newsom delivered some of his sharpest criticism during a book tour stop Saturday night in San Francisco, accusing Trump of manufacturing a crisis.
“It stems from weakness masquerading as strength,” Newsom said. “He lied to you. So reckless is the only way to describe this.”
“He didn’t describe to the American people what the endgame is here,” Newsom added. “There wasn’t one. He manufactured it.”
Newsom is currently promoting his memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry,” with recent and upcoming stops in South Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada — three key early voting states in the Democratic presidential calendar.
Earlier in the day, Newsom said Iran’s “corrupt and repressive” regime must never obtain nuclear weapons and that the “leadership of Iran must go.”
“But that does not justify the President of the United States engaging in an illegal, dangerous war that will risk the lives of our American service members and our friends without justification to the American people,” Newsom wrote on X.
California is home to more than half of the roughly 400,000 Iranian immigrants in the United States, including a large community in West Los Angeles often referred to as “Tehrangeles.”
DEMOCRATS BUCK PARTY LEADERS TO DEFEND TRUMP’S ‘DECISIVE ACTION’ ON IRAN
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., a leading progressive voice and “Squad” member, accused Trump of dragging Americans into a conflict they did not support.
“The American people are once again dragged into a war they did not want by a president who does not care about the long-term consequences of his actions. This war is unlawful. It is unnecessary. And it will be catastrophic,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“Just this week, Iran and the United States were negotiating key measures that could have staved off war. The President walked away from these discussions and chose war instead,” she continued.
“In moments of war, our Constitution is unambiguous: Congress authorizes war. The President does not,” she said, pledging to vote “YES on Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie’s War Powers Resolution.”
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker criticized the strikes and accused Trump of ignoring Congress. (Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images for Vox Media)
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, another Democrat often mentioned as a potential 2028 contender, also criticized the strikes and accused Trump of ignoring Congress.
“No justification, no authorization from Congress, and no clear objective,” Pritzker wrote on X.
“Donald Trump is once again sidestepping the Constitution and once again failing to explain why he’s taking us into another war,” he continued. “Americans asked for affordable housing and health care, not another potentially endless conflict.”
“God protect our troops,” Pritzker added.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro focused his criticism on war powers, arguing Trump acted outside constitutional guardrails.
“In our democracy, the American people — through our elected representatives — decide when our nation goes to war,” Shapiro said, adding that Trump “acted unilaterally — without Congressional approval.”
JONATHAN TURLEY: TRUMP STRIKES IRAN — PRECEDENT AND HISTORY ARE ON HIS SIDE
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro focused his criticism on war powers, arguing Trump acted outside constitutional guardrails. (Rachel Wisniewski/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Make no mistake, the Iranian regime represses its own people… they must never be allowed to possess nuclear weapons,” he said. “But that does not justify the President of the United States engaging in an illegal, dangerous war.”
Shapiro added that “Congress must use all available power” to prevent further escalation.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also accused Trump of launching a “war of choice.”
“The President has launched our nation and our great military into a war of choice, risking American lives and resources, ignoring American law, and endangering our allies and partners,” Buttigieg wrote on X. “This nation learned the hard way that an unnecessary war, with no plan for what comes next, can lead to years of chaos and put America in still greater danger.”
Buttigieg has been hitting early voting states, stopping in New Hampshire and Nevada in recent weeks to campaign for Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who has been floated as a rising national figure within the party, said he lost friends in Iraq to an illegal war and opposed the strikes.
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“Young working-class kids should not pay the ultimate price for regime change and a war that hasn’t been explained or justified to the American people. We can support the democracy movement and the Iranian people without sending our troops to die,” Gallego wrote on X.
Fox News’ Daniel Scully and Alex Nitzberg contributed to this report.
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Politics
Commentary: With midterm vote starting, here’s where things stand in national redistricting fight
Donald Trump has never been one to play by the rules.
Whether it’s stiffing contractors as a real estate developer, defying court orders he doesn’t like as president or leveraging the Oval Office to vastly inflate his family’s fortune, Trump’s guiding principle can be distilled to a simple, unswerving calculation: What’s in it for me?
Trump is no student of history. He’s famously allergic to books. But he knows enough to know that midterm elections like the one in November have, with few exceptions, been ugly for the party holding the presidency.
With control of the House — and Trump’s virtually unchecked authority — dangling by a gossamer thread, he reckoned correctly that Republicans were all but certain to lose power this fall unless something unusual happened.
So he effectively broke the rules.
Normally, the redrawing of the country’s congressional districts takes place once every 10 years, following the census and accounting for population changes over the previous decade. Instead, Trump prevailed upon the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, to throw out the state’s political map and refashion congressional lines to wipe out Democrats and boost GOP chances of winning as many as five additional House seats.
The intention was to create a bit of breathing room, as Democrats need a gain of just three seats to seize control of the House.
In relatively short order, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, responded with his own partisan gerrymander. He rallied voters to pass a tit-for-tat ballot measure, Proposition 50, which revised the state’s political map to wipe out Republicans and boost Democratic prospects of winning as many as five additional seats.
Then came the deluge.
In more than a dozen states, lawmakers looked at ways to tinker with their congressional maps to lift their candidates, stick it to the other party and gain House seats in November.
Some of those efforts continue, including in Virginia where, as in California, voters are being asked to amend the state Constitution to let majority Democrats redraw political lines ahead of the midterm. A special election is set for April 21.
But as the first ballots of 2026 are cast on Tuesday — in Arkansas, North Carolina and Texas — the broad contours of the House map have become clearer, along with the result of all those partisan machinations. The likely upshot is a nationwide partisan shift of fewer than a handful of seats.
The independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which has a sterling decades-long record of election forecasting, said the most probable outcome is a wash. “At the end of the day,” said Erin Covey, who analyzes House races for the Cook Report, “this doesn’t really benefit either party in a real way.”
Well.
That was a lot of wasted time and energy.
Let’s take a quick spin through the map and the math, knowing that, of course, there are no election guarantees.
In Texas, for instance, new House districts were drawn assuming Latinos would back Republican candidates by the same large percentage they supported Trump in 2024. But that’s become much less certain, given the backlash against his draconian immigration enforcement policies; numerous polls show a significant falloff in Latino support for the president, which could hurt GOP candidates up and down the ballot.
But suppose Texas Republicans gain five seats as hoped for and California Democrats pick up the five seats they’ve hand-crafted. The result would be no net change.
Elsewhere, under the best case for each party, a gain of four Democratic House seats in Virginia would be offset by a gain of four Republican House seats in Florida.
That leaves a smattering of partisan gains here and there. A combined pickup of four or so Republican seats in Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri could be mostly offset by Democratic gains of a seat apiece in New York, Maryland and Utah.
(The latter is not a result of legislative high jinks, but rather a judge throwing out the gerrymandered map passed by Utah Republicans, who ignored a voter-approved ballot measure intended to prevent such heavy-handed partisanship. A newly created district, contained entirely within Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County, seems certain to go Democrats’ way in November.)
In short, it’s easy to characterize the political exertions of Trump, Abbott, Newsom and others as so much sound and fury producing, at bottom, little to nothing.
But that’s not necessarily so.
The campaign surrounding Proposition 50 delivered a huge political boost to Newsom, shoring up his standing with Democrats, significantly raising his profile across the country and, not least for his 2028 presidential hopes, helping the governor build a significant nationwide fundraising base.
In crimson-colored Indiana, Republicans refused to buckle under tremendous pressure from Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other party leaders, rejecting an effort to redraw the state’s congressional map and give the GOP a hold on all nine House seats. That showed even Trump’s Svengali-like hold on his party has its limits.
But the biggest impact is also the most corrosive.
By redrawing political lines to predetermine the outcome of House races, politicians rendered many of their voters irrelevant and obsolete. Millions of Democrats in Texas, Republicans in California and partisans in other states have been effectively disenfranchised, their voices rendered mute. Their ballots spindled and nullified.
In short, the politicians — starting with Trump — extended a big middle finger to a large portion of the American electorate.
Is it any wonder, then, so many voters hold politicians and our political system in contempt?
Politics
Mamdani’s response to Trump’s Iran strike sparks conservative backlash: ‘Rooting for the ayatollah’
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New York City’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing blowback from conservatives on social media over his post condemning the U.S. attack on Iran that led to the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
On Saturday, as a joint strike on Iran by the United States and Israel was developing, Mamdani blasted the Trump administration’s decision in a post on X that has been viewed roughly 20 million times.
“Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression,” Mamdani wrote.
“Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war. Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks to reporters during a news conference in New York Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Mamdani said Americans prefer “relief from the affordability crisis” before speaking directly to Iranians in New York City.
“You are part of the fabric of this city — you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders,” Mamdani said. “You will be safe here.”
The post was quickly slammed by conservatives on social media making the case that Mamdani’s response appeared sympathetic to Iran’s brutal regime and pointing to his lack of public reaction to the Iranian protesters killed in recent years.
“Comrade Mayor is rooting for the Ayatollah,” GOP Sen. Ted Cruz posted on X. “They can chant together.”
OBAMA OFFICIAL WHO BACKED IRAN DEAL SPARKS ONLINE OUTRAGE WITH REACTION TO TRUMP’S STRIKE: ‘SIT THIS ONE OUT’
“Do u say anything pro American ?” Fox News host Brian Kilmeade posted on X. “do u know any Iranians – ? they hate @fr_Khamenei they celebrate his death, you should be celebrating his death ! hes killed thousands of American’s and just killed 30k Iranians, did u even say a word about that? You are an embarrassment !! Please quit.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, questions Pam Bondi, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing in Hart building Jan. 15, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“I don’t feel safe in New York listening to someone like you, Mamdani, who sympathizes with the regime that killed more than 30,000 unarmed Iranians in less than 24 hours,” Iranian American journalist Masih Alinejad posted on X.
“We Iranians do not allow you to lecture us about war while you had nothing to say when the Islamic Republic shot schoolgirls and blinded more than 10,000 innocent people in the streets. You were busy celebrating the hijab while women of my beloved country Iran were jailed and raped by Islamic Security forces for removing it.
“And NOW you find your voice to defend the regime? No. I will not let you claim the moral high ground. The people of Iran want to be free. Where were you when they needed solidarity?”
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“How is it that you can’t differentiate between good and evil?” Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman posted on X. “Why is this so hard for you?”
“It takes a particular kind of audacity, or ignorance, for a city mayor to appoint himself the conscience of American foreign policy while his constituents step over garbage on their way to work,” GOP Rep. Nancy Mace posted on X. “History will not remember his bravery. It will not remember him at all.”
“Iranian New Yorkers are thrilled today and see right through you,” Republican New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino posted on X.
Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management LP, speaks during the WSJ D.Live global technology conference in Laguna Beach, Calif., Oct. 17, 2017. (Patrick Fallon/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
“When Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, UAE, Bahrain all support today’s operation eliminating world’s #1 sponsor of terror, but New York City’s Mayor @ZohranMamdani is shilling for Iran,” Republican New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov posted on X.
Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani’s office for comment.
Shortly after Mamdani’s post, it was announced by President Trump and Israeli officials that the military operation resulted in Khamenei’s death.
Israeli leaders confirmed Khamenei’s compound and offices were reduced to rubble early Saturday after a targeted strike in downtown Tehran.
“Khamenei was the contemporary Middle East’s longest-serving autocrat. He did not get to be that way by being a gambler. Khamenei was an ideologue, but one who ruthlessly pursued the preservation and protection of his ideology, often taking two steps forward and one step back,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of FDD’s Iran program, told Fox News Digital.
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