On the menu: Tillis draws a top Dem opponent; Paxton, Cornyn headed for brutal battle; old is out for Dem challengers; fat suits; sign of the times

Politics is like investing or shooting skeet: You don’t want to be on the target, you want to be just ahead of it.

In our crazy, fugazi, reverse-engineered parliamentary system, the principal questions at all times are which party will control the White House and then whether the president can eke out a bare majority in Congress to start ramming and jamming mostly unpopular items through. Through the combined effects of partisan primary elections, siloed media and legislative gerrymandering, we’ve replaced the constitutional separation of powers with the power of party unity.

That means that Democratic members of Congress, who have large enough minorities in both houses to have had a meaningful influence on governance in the traditional American system, are reduced to being bystanders and grandstanders as Republicans shoot their shot. House and Senate Democrats don’t have much to do now but wait for the seemingly inevitable midterm punishment ahead for Republicans. Then the blue team can get control of at least one chamber and again do nothing, but do it with the special verve that comes from gridlock: power without responsibility. How sweet it is.

While Democrats await their 2026 windfall, the real work of the party is figuring out who they will put forward for president in 2028, the one whom they could anoint with the power to start ramming and jamming as soon as she or he takes office. Who will lead them out of the wilderness … and then right back into it?

Eight years ago, Democrats thought they knew where their champion would rise. The answer to Republican populism, it was broadly concluded, was Democratic populism. Rather than correctly concluding that Hillary Clinton was a generationally awful candidate in 2016, Democrats mostly decided that it was the strength of the ideas of her main primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

This was the period in which 2020 Democratic hopefuls lurched to the left, embracing ideas like “Medicare for All,” the Green New Deal and intense criminal justice reform. Onetime moderate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) became a single-payer health care enthusiast. Conspicuous corporatist Joe Biden learned to love the Green New Deal. Former prosecutor Kamala Harris praised the movement to defund the police. These normie candidates were certainly following the rule that you go where the voters are, and the Democratic base, or certainly the very online version of it, looked like it was way out to the left. With Sanders running again and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) coming into the race with lots of love from hardcore progressives, the squishes were looking for ways to not get steamrolled.

They were, of course, wrong. What rank-and-file Democrats really wanted was someone who could beat Trump, not the vanguard of radical change. The same intense partisanship that makes Washington dysfunctional made Democrats inclined to act rationally about picking a broadly appealing candidate.

The questions before Democrats today: 1) What do ambitious Democrats think that their voters want and 2) What will their voters actually want three Januaries from now.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) definitely managed to miss on the first question this week. Attempting to show that she was a real Rust Belt moderate, she got an Oval Office audience with Trump, who praised her as having “done an excellent job” and as a “very good person.” The pain was evident on her face as she stood by while Trump fired off executive actions targeting his political enemies and riffed to the press about his own genius at tariff negotiations.

Some combination of bad staff work and bad judgment on her part led Whitmer to be used as a political prop who lent some nominal bipartisanship to an episode that Democrats would very much like Trump to have sole ownership of.

She probably wanted what Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) got with his trip to Mar-a-Lago at the very beginning of Trump 2.0. “It wasn’t in any kind of theater. It wasn’t trying to get your picture taken to kind of put something out on social media,” he said afterward. “It was just, really, a conversation.” Whitmer got the exact opposite, and her fellow potential 2028 contenders won’t let her forget it.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) has made a habit of defying progressive orthodoxies in the Centennial State with a technocratic, limited-government approach, and he did not miss the chance to paint Witmer’s support for tariffs as support for Trump.

“While sanctions (Russia, Iran) can have a geopolitical national security role, it should always be considered eyes wide open that sanctions harm both ourself and others,” he said in a statement after Whitmer tried to massage her points of agreement with Trump.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has been making his own moves to the middle, and doing so more adroitly than Whitmer …

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