Democracy

to be Laverne.

But my serious answer really is that the question comes at a great time because I'm working on a YA young adult book aimed at, you know, eighth grade to 12th grade students.

And Inevitably, in writing this book aimed at them and exploring various careers I've had, which are, as you know, many, some of which you still don't even know about.

I love surprising you guys.

And so I have so much advice for this group that I can't possibly give them one.

So I'm going to stick with don't dress in style if it's really awful.

But the other advice is read my book if it gets published.

Okay, so I'm almost ready to start submitting it to publishers.

My bad.

You, you pulled off a upset in the Democratic primary.

Yes.

Like, what, what did the political establishment misunderstand about Florida voters that you, that you understood?

They really manipulated congressional lines there.

to favor Republicans at the expense of Democratic voters, to squeeze more Republican seats out of the electorate than the actual voting would have justified.

And several plaintiffs, including Common Cause, League of Women Voters in North Carolina and others, brought a lawsuit to say, you know, it's our view that – Partisan gerrymandering violates the Constitution, violates the First Amendment right to free association, it violates equal protection.

And we brought that case to court, took it to the US Supreme Court, and also it came with a companion case out of Maryland in which the Democrats had manipulated districts there for partisan advantage for them.

Becky, thank you very much.

Dan, do you have anything on Jersey in particular? I think it wasn't that long ago that Jersey's House delegation was about 50-50.

Now it's largely Democratic.

And I honestly don't know if that's from redistricting or if that's just from, you know, the trend of the Northeast going more Democratic over a period of years and decades.

It's not just Republicans.

Voter distrust is powering support for Democratic socialists and other candidates on the left, while the Democratic establishment's early support for data center development in the critical swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania is souring some voters there on their elected leaders.

Phyllis Pohm, 65, a retired utility company worker in Archbald, Pennsylvania, said she was a lifelong Democrat, but that she would not vote for Governor Josh Shapiro's re-election because of what she described as his political about-face on a proposed data center in her town.

"I don't trust him now," she said.

I no longer believe in either party.

They both abandoned us.

In neighboring Carbon County, residents were so frustrated with their state representative, a Republican who ran unopposed in the May primary, that hundreds of people wrote in the name of Christian Bartolovic, a 37-year-old manager in the medical device industry and registered Republican, getting him the Democratic nomination for November.

I'm getting all these text messages saying, I've never donated to a Republican in my life.

Right.

But all of these, uh, Democratic socialists that have been winning primaries, for instance, that's a real disruption.

And- It certainly is a status quo change, yes ...

it, it certainly is.

You got a president who's very d- divisive.

You've got his opponents that are just as divisive.

But because it's a midterm, it is very likely the House and Senate are gonna flip, and a lot of it's gonna have to do with some of those Democratic socialist candidates because they're new, they've got fresh ideas.

They're not fresh.

crazy if you say that now it's like oh we've absolutely bottomed out we've diverted every person we ever could we cannot tell you why we think that but we believe that to be true and if you challenge it you're the crazy one

And I view this as the overtime window shifting ever so to the right, which is what bourgeois politics does, specifically lesser evilism, specifically the Democratic Party.

And thinking that you need to constantly get more and more and more conservative to appeal to some center and go campaign with Dick Cheney.

And then all of a sudden you're going to get all these amazing people on board when actually they don't give a fuck about you.

Two out of three, mate, are looking forward to it.

So Democracy wins on that one, I think.

I like that everyone else

wins.