Tom Tiffany, the new Republican nominee for governor in Wisconsin, is not just a passive supporter of President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election. He is an active promoter of them.

In December 2020, when he was a member of Congress, he signed on to a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate Joe Biden’s victory. On January 6, 2021, he voted against certifying the results in Pennsylvania and Texas just hours after rioters threatened to kill his colleagues. He has stated he would have overturned Wisconsin’s results too, and just this year endorsed an FBI investigation into the state’s elections. And though the national climate in 2026 favors Democrats, Wisconsin is a closely divided state: Tiffany could beat the odds and win the general.

There is, in short, a very real chance that someone who doesn’t believe American elections are legitimate may soon be supervising them in one of the 2028 presidential cycle’s most important swing states.

It’s not just Wisconsin. In each of the other most critical 2028 states — Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada — Republicans have chosen an election denier as their nominee for governor, secretary of state, or both. If any of these candidates win, they will have at least some degree of authority over the administration of elections in a state that could determine the outcome of the next presidential election. 

So could the outcome of the 2026 midterms ultimately lead to a stolen election in 2028, as some are already warning? Election experts say it’s very unlikely.

State election laws contain numerous overlapping checks on interference from top officials. The judiciary has a pretty strong track record in stopping election malfeasance. A reform to the Electoral Count Act, passed quietly during the Biden presidency, significantly improved federal protections against election interference. And in 2028, the man uniquely responsible for previous pushes to invalidate the 2020 election won’t be on the ballot.

“[There are many] reasons why one should not be concerned,” said Rebecca Green, the co-director of the Election Law Program at the College of William and Mary. “Even in circumstances where there is a single partisan in control of a state’s election process, there are numerous checks on that power.”

That said, the risk isn’t zero. There is a remote chance, if the election is extremely close, that a well-placed election denier could swing the outcome. And even if they don’t outright steal an election, someone like Tiffany could still use their office to damage the electoral system in some pretty important ways.

“We have to be walking between complacency and alarmism,” said Rick Hasen, an expert on election law at UCLA. “Both of those are bad.”

Why the 2028 election is more secure than you think

Election law varies from state to state. Most of the time, the state’s secretary of state (SOS) is in charge of elections, but sometimes it’s the state board of elections. Sometimes the SOS is directly elected, and sometimes they’re appointed by the governor. 

But in broad strokes, there are three ways for governors or an allied SOS to attack an election. They can try to suppress opposition voters before the voting starts, by (for example) purging them from the rolls or putting insufficient polling stations in their neighborhoods. They can try to interfere during the vote count, by trying to disqualify outparty ballots or even falsifying the vote count. Or they can try to interfere afterward, by refusing to certify election results.

“Courts have shown themselves to be pretty good against election denialism. That’s true of both Democratic and Republican appointed and elected judges.”

Rick Hasen, UCLA election expert

Each of those is exceptionally, perhaps even prohibitively, difficult to pull off — even for a committed election denier.

Voter suppression is hard because the tactics are legally limited. Current federal law bans voter roll purges within 90 days of the election, which allowed Democrats to simply re-register voters disqualified in previous Republican purges (though the Supreme Court may overturn this provision in an upcoming case). Impediments like polling station placement are, per Hasen, hard to target; they are most likely to affect low-income and low-propensity voters, who have trended Republican in recent elections.

Interfering with the counting of votes is made difficult by what Green terms “adversarial election administration”: basically, the fact that partisans from both parties are involved in multiple different stages of the counting process. Every state has strict rules governing the counting process, and observers from both parties can see if they’re being breached in the other party’s favor. If there is an irregularity, courts are empowered to step in and correct it.

And it is simply illegal for governors or secretaries of state to refuse to certify legitimate elections. State laws in all relevant battleground states allow courts to issue a writ of mandamus requiring officials to certify duly counted results, which they have done repeatedly since 2020 when Republican-controlled county election boards withheld certification.

“Courts have shown themselves to be pretty good against election denialism,” Hasen said. “That’s true of both Democratic and Republican appointed and elected judges.”

The 2022 reform to the Electoral Count Act added several additional safeguards for presidential elections specifically, including a requirement that Congress defer to court determinations on electoral legitimacy if a governor attempts to defy them. 

And all of that assumes that a Republican who denied the result of the 2020 election would necessarily attempt to steal future elections. That may not be the case. 

“Just because you have partisan control of an election, and just because that person has cast doubt on previous elections, doesn’t mean that person is not going to be committed to running a fair election,” Green said.

Such a sentiment may sound naive, but it also may reflect the reality of post-Trump politics. The president was the driving force behind the attempt to overturn the 2020 election; his insistence that he did not lose, and his iron grip on the hearts and minds of the GOP base, pushed the party onto grounds that its other leaders clearly feared to tread. 

While Republicans certainly attempted to stack the electoral deck in their favor prior to Trump, these brazen attempts to overturn or steal legitimate elections are a product of his time in office. Whether he has permanently changed the Republican Party into an entity that will regularly reject elections they lose is very much an open question.

Why electing election deniers could still matter

All of this should give us some comfort about the upcoming state-level races: It is simply very hard for a governor or SOS to steal a presidential election even if they want to. While American democracy is weak in many different ways, the security of its election architecture specifically is actually one of its strong points.

But even the most impregnable-seeming fortresses can be breached. And there are reasons to worry that, in an extreme case, an election denier in key positions could well damage the integrity of the 2028 presidential election.

In a 2022 paper, the law professor Lisa Marshall Manheim argued that conventional legal analysis has proven inadequate for addressing the threat of election subversion. While legal experts are correct to say that the law makes stealing an election hard, the most dangerous threat to US elections — Trump’s 2020 campaign — was essentially extra-legal in character.

While American democracy is weak in many different ways, the security of its election architecture specifically is actually one of its strong points.

While “superficially” operating through the legal system, Trump was actually asking officials from Congress on down to engage in obviously unlawful behavior. When Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes to overturn the state’s results, or for Mike Pence to find the “courage” to nullify the results on January 6, he wasn’t asking these two men to act according to their legal duties. He was asking them to step beyond law, to embrace a reading of their office’s powers so obviously absurd that it amounts to declaring the text of the law to be no limit at all.

This is the nightmare scenario: one in which officials in key positions simply decide that they no longer have to follow a good-faith reading of the law. If enough officials in the right places decide to cast off legal shackles, no carefully crafted statute can stop them. We will, as Hasen put it, exit the domain of law into “something else”: the politics of raw power.

Anyone who endorsed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election — let alone actively attempted to act on them — has already shown a degree of contempt for election law. That means that one can’t rule out a similar display of contempt in the future, only this time with the power to turn that into impactful defiance of law.

It’s vastly too early to say the conditions under which such a radical breach might occur, in 2028 or in the future. A lot depends on the makeup of the Republican Party; whether leaders after Trump embrace or downplay his hostility to the electoral system itself. But we now know that the risk is there. And the more election deniers we have in key positions, the greater the odds are that the risk becomes real — even if the baseline probability remains low in absolute terms.

This connects to another, more insidious risk: that electing election deniers could exacerbate the ongoing crisis of electoral confidence since 2020.

Even if Tiffany or someone like him doesn’t try to outright prevent or nullify Democratic victories in their state, they could still declare that they lack confidence in the result’s integrity. That they tried to run a fair election, but that Democrats or the courts prevented them from doing so — and thus, despite their lack of legal powers to stop it, that they believe the election to have been compromised or even stolen.

This may not lead to a series of January 6s across the country. But even if it didn’t, it would deepen the lack of trust Republican voters have in the electoral system. If Republicans post-Trump continue to believe that Democrats are engaged in widespread cheating, that could contribute to an environment where the kind of extra-legal shenanigans Manheim warned of could look more tempting.

So while it is quite unlikely that the 2026 elections will lead to a crisis in 2028, it could play a role in dashing the possibility that American democracy moves on from the dangerous Trump-era fighting over elections. And as long as that fighting persists, another 2020-style crisis will remain a live possibility.

The American right has a new enemy.

In a new report on Cuba, the State Department argued that Havana has become “the beating heart of a new and distinct kind of Marxism” — which the State Department calls “Third Worldism.” Cuba is spreading this doctrine, per Secretary of State of Marco Rubio, with the explicit intent of fomenting revolution in America.

Here, the Trump administration is following conservative influencers — who in recent months have become increasingly preoccupied by the “third worldist” threat. 

“The Left is moving from ‘woke’ to Third-Worldism,” Chris Rufo, perhaps the right’s leading activist, recently wrote. “Third-Worldism is a more serious threat to life, liberty, and property.” 

Ben Shapiro, one of conservatism’s leading media voices, declared in April that “the future of the Democratic Party is radical third worldism.”

And Reihan Salam, the president of the influential Manhattan Institute (which employs Rufo), has warned that “Third Worldism, left unchecked, won’t remain on the radical fringe” — citing New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as the chief example of a third worldist in power.

All of this may be news to Mamdani and other Democrats, who virtually never use the term to describe their own views. So what are Rubio, Rufo, and Shapiro talking about? And is there any truth in the various claims about rising third worldist influence?

The answer is more complicated than it might seem.

Conservatives are using “third worldist” a lot like the terms “woke” and “critical race theory” before it: as an ill-defined concept that serves as a clearinghouse for various right-wing grievances and can be used as a slur to discredit and demonize the left.

Yet at the same time, they’ve actually put their fingers on something real. Among a very specific and visible sub-section of the socialist left, a set of views that can be reasonably termed “third worldist” are rising in prominence. For progressives outside this camp, deciding what comes next will require engaging with the right-wing critique directly and not dismissing it as a smear. 

What “third worldism” means, on both the left and the right

The term “third world” itself originated in a 1952 article by the French thinker Alfred Sauvy. 

The capitalist West was the “first world,” and the Communist Eastern bloc “the second.” Most countries outside of North America and Europe were, at the time, aligned with neither bloc — making up the “third world.” 

For this reason, the earliest ideology that fits the term “third worldism” was not Marxist, but rather efforts like the Non-Aligned Movement to build global solidarity between post-colonial states who were trying to avoid being dominated by the two competing world powers.

But Communist regimes in the Global South — most notably, China and Cuba — became inspirations for a distinctively Marxist spin on third worldism that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s.

This theory held that the locus of revolutionary activity had shifted to 1) armed revolutionaries of the Global South and 2) militant movements within the capitalist world led by oppressed minorities. Out with the Communist Party USA and the Soviet Union; in with the Black Panthers and the Viet Cong.

This broad worldview had many ideological influences — ranging from Mao’s Little Red Book to the French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Some leftist writings, like the Weather Underground manifesto Prairie Fire or the well-known pamphlet The Mythology of the White Proletariat, are clear examples of what might be termed “third worldist” thought.

But on the whole, this kind of third worldism is frustratingly tricky to pin down. It has no authoritative spokesperson, no text or movement that clarified its core principles in any detail. It is a label attached to ideas from the outside, as often by those ideas’ enemies as by their allies.

“‘Third worldist’ is almost a pejorative [term] you would use on the left,” said Bhaskar Sunkara, the president of The Nation magazine and author of Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World.

The Trump administration and its allies are basically arguing that people like Sunkara are trying to trick you. Whatever the modern left’s protestations, their actual views are still basically pretty similar to those of Cold War American radicals who apologized for the Khmer Rouge. Only in this case, the most admired Third World militants are now jihadists rather than Communists.

The most influential work in this vein comes from Zineb Riboua, a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute think tank. She sees third worldism as a joint product of anti-American governments, including Cuba, and leftist intellectuals in American universities. Its recent prominence, in her view, is a function of October 7 and the Gaza war — which allowed third worldist logic to fuse “seamlessly with the decolonial language” that became popular during the woke era.

“In this viewpoint, a terrorist organization like Hamas comes to be seen as the armed expression of a national liberation struggle,” Riboua writes. “The question ceases to be what Hamas actually did and becomes what Israel is presumed to represent. And because Israel is positioned as the forward post of American imperial power, defending Hamas becomes, almost automatically, a moral gesture directed against the United States itself.”

But Riboua does not stop with foreign policy. In her view, third worldism has become a kind of “universal ideology” that is “applied to everything from university hiring and border policy to museum curation.” When leftists talk about “decolonization,” she argues, they are really talking about the planned demolition of America from the inside.

“The ideology asks a country to accept that its power is a historical accident awaiting either correction with a sort of new Red Terror or annihilation,” she writes. 

This, for the right, represents the left’s emerging “post-woke” animating doctrine. While the 2020-era left was interested in policing conservative speech on social issues, it is now interested in acquiring political power and using it to tangibly transform America’s policy and political institutions along Marxist and third worldist lines. It is “a vicious, lowest-common-denominator leftism that imports anticolonial resentments to the metropole,” writes Sarah Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy.

The effect, ultimately, will be to transform the American governing model into something that more closely resembles that of a “third world” country: corrupt, lawless, violent, and chaotic. The language they use to warn of this can be unmistakably racialized.

“Mamdani wants to plunder New York like the Somalis plundered Minnesota,” Rufo writes. “Legal or illegal, it’s all piracy, looting, and expropriation. Pure third-worldism.”

What the right gets wrong about third worldism — and what it gets right

By the time we get to “Zohran Mamdani is a pirate,” it’s clear that the analytic train has gone off the rails. Third worldism is no longer being used to define a specific and recognizable approach to geopolitics, but rather a pure insult with ugly racial insinuations.

Indeed, while Mamdani is certainly a socialist with pro-Palestine politics — he announced this week he looked into arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but lacked legal authority — there is no evidence to suggest he is an anti-American Hamas admirer.

As mayor, his governance has focused primarily on quality of life and cost of living issues. And far from couching his arguments in the language of anti-American revolution, Mamdani’s recent address on July 4 was a classically patriotic text, whose praise for American soldiers and meditations on our “grand experiment in self-governance” sound far more like Lincoln than Fanon.

The attempt to lump Mamdani into a scary, foreign-sounding category recalls nothing more than the efforts to rebrand other left-wing ideas — like “critical race theory” — into millstones to hang around Democrats’ necks. Rufo was the intellectual force behind the CRT panic, back in 2021, and admitted at the time that his intent was political warfare rather than rigorous analysis. By coming up with a catch-all term for problematic left-wing politics, they could apply it not only to the real “critical race theory” — which were largely abstruse academic texts — but also ordinary Democratic policy or generic liberal ideas. 

“We have successfully frozen their brand — ‘critical race theory’ — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,” he wrote. “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

Read in this light, the right-wing allegation that third worldism is supplanting woke is more confession than anything else. From McCarthyism to the Reagan era and on through Newt Gingrich warning of Barack Obama’s “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview, the right has deployed fearmongering about foreign subversion as a central tactic to delegitimize its opponents and rally the base. The sweeping allegations about the entire Democratic Party being overtaken by third worldism represent a fusion of this old Red Scare blueprint with the new Rufo tactics of mimetic-conceptual warfare.

“There’s really nothing new here,” said David Austin Walsh, a historian of the right at the University of Virginia. “Third worldism is a term that’s being utilized to describe the exact same thing as what was meant by ‘the international Communist conspiracy’ back in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Yet Walsh, who is himself a DSA member, also acknowledges that there’s a nugget of truth here. Much as the Communist Party USA actually was a Soviet cut-out, there are people and factions on the American left that actually fit the description of “third worldism” advanced by Riboua and her fellow travelers.

The most obvious example is Hasan Piker, the streamer and provocateur who has become a lightning rod in debates over the Democratic Party’s direction.

Piker has repeatedly expressed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party, despite its vicious authoritarian tendencies, and said he would vote for Hamas “1,000 times” over Israel. My colleague Eric Levitz described his worldview as “campist,” an old leftist term for someone who aligns themselves with any government that opposes the American-led bloc, and one that I think is a bit more precise than “third worldist.” But Piker’s fascination with anti-American militancy and terrorists — he once gave a fawning interview to a Houthi fighter on stream — suggests that third worldist is at least a reasonable descriptor.

Another example is Neville Roy Singham, a Chicago businessman who sold his consultancy for $785 million and has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to leftist causes around the world. Singham, who was known to monologue to his employees about the virtues of Che Guevara, is at the center of what the New York Times describes as “a lavishly funded influence campaign that defends China and pushes its propaganda.” Though he funds American leftist organizations like Code Pink — in fact, his wife, Jodie Evans, is its cofounder — he currently resides in Shanghai.

There is also a third worldist activist current. The International Caucus of the DSA, one of many sub-organizations within the leftist faction, has celebrated the “achievements” of Cuba’s authoritarian government and whitewashed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which, again, is more precisely campist than third worldist). Students for Justice in Palestine, the leading pro-Palestine campus activist group, praised the October 7 attacks as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.”

And this tendency could be gaining its first representative in Congress. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a DSA candidate who recently unseated a multi-term House incumbent in a Democratic primary in New York, has accused Black and Latino men of “fetishizing ugly colonizer women” and retweeted a message praising Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro. While her public statements are more limited than those of Piker or the DSA IC, there’s at least reasonable grounds for believing that she’s cut from the same cloth.

The left’s third worldist problem

So what to make of all this?

Right-wingers like Riboua are picking up on real trends in leftist ideology, ones that are reflected to some degree in its institutional infrastructure. And interestingly, the leftists I spoke with conceded that there were some things to worry about here. Arash Azizi, a socialist historian at Yale University, said that this “negative third worldism” was a “serious trend” on the broader left. Sunkara was more skeptical of the term “third worldist, but he did express concerns with the DSA IC’s tendency to forget “first principles” — by which he meant core commitments to democracy and anti-authoritarianism. He also critiqued pro-October 7 statements on the left as “antiquated, ineffective, and morally questionable.”

At the same time, it is concomitantly clear that people on the right are overstating the significance of the problem.

Views that might accurately be called “third worldist” are controversial inside the left and even within the DSA. And the left does not currently dominate the Democratic Party, despite a handful of primary victories this cycle. To say that third worldism has conquered the Democrats, or even that third worldism is the new “woke,” is to get miles ahead of the evidence.

Putting those two conclusions together yields a more precise diagnosis: that third worldist views are, by virtue of the DSA’s electoral success, becoming a more prominent part of the broader left coalition even as its reach remains limited overall.

While Mamdani cannot reasonably be described as a “third worldist,” he operates in coalition with people who are. He filmed chummy videos with Hasan Piker; his endorsement rocketed Darializa Avila Chevalier to her primary victory. Like any political faction, the socialist left depends on alliances between sub-groups who have real and meaningful differences in worldview and approach.

When talking about this, Sunkara tried to disassociate the broader left from the third worldist subcurrent by analogy.

“It would almost be like me saying ‘the Republican Party is programmatically committed to white nationalism’ as opposed to saying ‘the Republican Party sure does have some vocal white nationalists around,’” he said. “The difference is key.”

But of course, the Republican Party’s relationship with white nationalists has been a significant political problem — and a moral one. However Democrats ultimately decide to handle these ideas floating around progressive circles, the process starts with acknowledging that they’re real. 

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump has seemingly called off a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia after his energy secretary already formally signed it.

What happened? On Wednesday, the Trump administration formally concluded what’s called a “123 Agreement” to work with Saudi Arabia on the development of its civilian nuclear power infrastructure. This kind of deal allows the United States to provide another country with nuclear fuel and equipment on the condition that they submit to safeguards against building a nuclear weapon.

But on Thursday morning, after the negotiations were quite literally concluded, Trump threw a monkey wrench into things — posting on Truth Social that the deal was “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.”

The Abraham Accords are a series of agreements from Trump’s first term that normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and some nearby Arab states. In effect, then, Trump is saying that Saudi Arabia will not get its 123 Agreement unless it formally recognizes the State of Israel. Which the Saudis are unwilling to do absent the creation of a Palestinian state.

Why is Trump doing this? As is often the case with his strange last-minute decisions, no one really knows. There are a few leading guesses, though.

The first is that the agreement with Saudi Arabia was a bad idea on the merits. Experts on nuclear weapons, the Middle East, and international relations more broadly all said that the deal gave Saudis exactly what they wanted with virtually nothing in return, effectively surrendering a key piece of leverage Washington has on Riyadh.

The second is that other American friends in the Middle East got angry. The Israelis are a leading candidate, as they have long opposed any agreement that might bring the Saudis closer to a nuke. The Emiratis, often in competition with Saudis for regional influence, are another; their nuclear deal with the US, inked in 2009, is a lot stricter.

The third is bipartisan opposition in Congress, which would need to approve any deal.

What’s the takeaway: Unless something changes radically, Trump has blown up a nuclear deal that’s already been signed — humiliating his negotiators and angering the Saudis.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

As of today, we are officially two weeks away from the NFL’s first preseason game. Our long national nightmare of calling soccer “football” is almost over.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump announced giant new tariffs on Canada, which are scheduled to start in 30 days. Now negotiators from both countries are scrambling to see if they can be avoided.

What happened? Late on Monday, the White House announced 50 percent tariffs on a slew of Canadian goods — including whiskey, cheese, down jackets, and (naturally) hockey sticks. Because the Supreme Court sharply limited his tariff powers earlier this year, Trump is invoking a largely forgotten and possibly defunct authority under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930.

Previously, these goods had been covered under the USMCA, the trade deal Trump negotiated with Canada and Mexico in his first term to replace NAFTA. But on July 1, the agreement expired and the US declined to renew it. 

Why is Trump doing this? The White House claimed three key grievances: Canadian duties and restrictions on American alcohol, dairy products, and automobiles. Liquor appears to be a special irritant: All but two Canadian provinces have pulled US-made booze from government liquor stores, and even some Democrats have complained.

However, the alcohol boycott began as retaliation for the trade war Trump launched in early 2025, when he was talking regularly about Canada becoming America’s 51st state. Much like his effort to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Trump is trying to fix a problem he caused in the first place.

Interestingly, the tariffs will not go into effect for 30 days. This suggests that they may be less a serious policy initiative than a negotiating tactic. 

What’s the takeaway: Trump’s lifelong fascination with economic warfare has survived the Supreme Court’s rebuke, and he continues to fixate on Canada as a special target of his ire. It is unclear why; both countries have suffered from the breakdown in bilateral relations. 

But whatever the motivation, the ultimate outcome is clear: Icy relations to the north are a permanent fixture of the Trump presidency.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

The Odyssey officially had the biggest opening of any live-action movie of the year, as the new Avengers: Doomsday trailer is greeted with yawns. Here’s to the new MCU: the Mycenaean Cinematic Universe.

If you’re worried about American democracy, President Donald Trump’s primetime address should give you some hope. 

This might sound bizarre at first blush. Trump’s speech was full of lies, innuendo, and half-truths about the security and safety of American elections, all clearly designed to support his longstanding belief that the system is rigged against him. The president claimed that China had stolen sensitive voter data, that the intelligence community concealed the truth about Chinese interference from him, and that American elections had been “left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen.”

These claims were almost entirely false, exaggerated, or misleading (for example: the data China allegedly “stole” is actually taken from publicly available voter files). The president, it appeared, was clearly manipulating intelligence to cast doubt on the security of US elections — and, potentially, even lay the groundwork for an attempt to reject the legitimacy of the 2026 midterms. That is, objectively, a bad thing. 

So, why is the speech a cause for hope? Because it was weak.

Trump’s claims were not only false, but surprisingly minimalist. He didn’t claim to have proof that the midterms were going to be rigged or even to have new evidence that 2020 was stolen from him. Afterwards, one of Trump’s own staffers admitted that no votes had been altered in 2020, and his handpicked CIA director refused to allege fraud. Even if everything in Trump’s speech were true, it wouldn’t matter very much, which is why most conservatives were uninspired by the address. Even Fox News, which aired the speech live, has been notably muted afterwards.

This is not the kind of thing that can power a campaign to suborn some of the most protected elections in the world. If this is what Trump is resorting to, then it’s actually a hopeful sign that the midterms will indeed be free and fair.

Trump’s weakness is democracy’s strength

It is extremely hard to steal an election in the United States.

In the American system, election administration is primarily local and non-partisan, making it very difficult for any national party to coordinate a theft campaign. Vote counting is transparent, with observers from all parties involved throughout the process. Tamperproof seals on paper ballots, security cameras, and audits all provide additional layers of security. 

Perhaps, for these reasons, every reputable study has found that voter fraud — including non-citizen voting — is extremely rare. 

Also, for these reasons, it would be very hard for Trump to use presidential powers to steal the 2026 midterms.

While Trump has gutted or politicized most federal election authorities, their powers are limited. To actually alter the vote count or effectively block Democrats from voting, he would need to somehow nationalize election administration or use soldiers to physically seize ballots. He does not have the legal power to do anything like this.

To steal the midterms despite lacking authority would require a truly brazen defiance of both law and fact. Trump could have started that process on Thursday; he could have simply asserted that the 2020 election was stolen and tried to pressure a crony, like the Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, to manufacture fake “proof” for his claims. Instead, he gave a small-ball, low-stakes address that relied on real intelligence to make claims both misleading and minimalist. Why?

Perhaps he recognizes that US military, intelligence agencies, and federal law enforcement are too professionalized to do the kind of lawbreaking this would require. Perhaps he sees that he has a weak grip on Congress, where his prior election lies are coming up in Senate hearings to confirm a new intelligence director and attorney general. He might not trust his party to do more than humor him at the state or federal level; Republicans showed very little enthusiasm for his speech, even as almost none challenged it. He might assume the federal courts, which overwhelmingly rejected his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and more recently his administration’s scheme to obtain state voter rolls, will not comply. Perhaps he’s scared of the consequences of going too far. Or, maybe, he just doesn’t want to.

Ossoff: Who won the 2020 election?

Clayton: I’m not going to get into that with you.

Ossoff: Isn't it humiliating to be unable to answer this question, to have to indulge the president's delusions? pic.twitter.com/omHN7SYdBP

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 15, 2026

Whatever the specific reasons are, the speech fits a general pattern: Trump is either unwilling or unable to simply assert naked, violent authoritarian control over the US political system. When he makes moves in that direction, as in the ICE operation in Minneapolis or the effort to silence Jimmy Kimmel, he tends to back down in the face of resistance. Trump clearly wants to accrue unchecked power and rig elections in his favor, but there are lines he seems forced to toe. As long as he keeps acting like this, the odds that he’ll be able to directly compromise the midterm elections are very low.

Now, this isn’t to say American democracy is in the clear. Trump will certainly try to stack the deck in his favor; indeed, he already has through Republican states’ mid-cycle redistricting campaigns. There is a small-but-real chance that gerrymandering allows Republicans to keep the House despite a mass public revolt against them, which would very much be a kind of democratic crisis. And Trump seems to be, at minimum, pre-spinning a midterm loss — most likely by claiming fraud yet again and blaming Congressional Republicans for not passing his desired SAVE Act — in ways that will further undermine faith in elections.

But the worst case scenario, the president forcibly and unlawfully asserting control over election administration, is looking even less likely today than it did yesterday. And that’s a cause for hope.

In 2023, the Indian director Honey Trehan was on the verge of a breakthrough. His film Punjab ’95, which told the story of a human rights activist murdered for investigating mass killings of Sikhs in the state of Punjab, had been given a prominent slot at the Toronto International Film Festival. Trehan was convinced the film would be big; its star, Sikh Bollywood A-lister Diljit Dosangh, believed in the project so much that he didn’t even ask for a salary. 

But the premiere never happened. According to Trehan, his producer got a threatening call from someone affiliated with the Indian government, saying that if the film screened in Toronto, it would never appear at home. Trehan and his producer agreed, but the approval never came. India’s ratings agency, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), demanded 127 cuts — including cutting the word “Punjab” from a film about the state. If implemented, they would have left the film (in Trehan’s words) as little more than a “trailer.”

After years of court cases and failed wrangling, Trehan and his producer gave up on a theatrical release. They signed an agreement with Zee5, an Indian streaming service, to premiere the film exclusively on their platform in July under the new name Satluj.

But just two days after the film’s release on July 3, Zee5 removed Satluj for Indian viewers at the request of the government, which claimed the film threatened public order and national security. This weekend, it was removed from Zee5’s international service as well, meaning the film was no longer legally accessible anywhere on the planet.

When we spoke on Monday, Trehan was still unsure why the government had gone to such great lengths to suppress his film. He claims to have heard nothing beyond vague public claims about the film threatening public safety and Indian sovereignty. But it’s clear that the events had rocked his faith in his country.

“When all these kinds of things happen,” he says, “you are bound to ask this question to yourself: Are we still living in a democracy?”

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Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014, the Indian film industry — which has a cultural footprint that rivals Hollywood and even surpasses it in some regions — has undergone a transformation. Once seen as a bastion of Indian multiculturalism and secularism, the kind of business where Muslims and even Pakistanis could be stars, the Indian film industry has increasingly been remade in its right-wing government’s image. Films that celebrate Hindus and demonize Muslims make up an ever-growing share of industry output; films that take up politically difficult topics, like Satluj, are becoming scarcer.

This is by design. As part of its broader assault on democratic freedoms, the Modi government has taken a series of very visible steps to reward ideologically simpatico filmmakers — and punish dissidents. The industry has gotten the message, and shifted its output accordingly. Those filmmakers willing to speak publicly, like Trehan, describe a widespread climate of self-censorship, painting a portrait of an industry that has chosen compliance over courage.

“There are so many things I want to make and I get told, ‘No one will touch it,’” the Indian director Shruti Ganguly tells me. “Actors who speak out against the government — they don’t get work.”

Understanding how this happened matters to Indians — but not only them. The Trump administration has, in several ways, laid the groundwork for a similar attack on cinematic free speech. While the American version is vastly less developed than what’s happening in India, the subordination of Bollywood has exposed the general means through which a powerful and seemingly liberal entertainment industry can be brought to heel by a determined government.

In today’s America, “you can see an [early stage] of what happened to allow institutions to be captured and politicized” in India, says Sadanand Dhume, an expert on Indian politics at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

The fall of Bollywood

Censorship in Indian film is hardly new. The CBFC, created in 1951, is empowered not just to rate movies but to block their release outright if it finds a film contrary to any of the sweeping categories in Section 5B of the Cinematograph Act: the sovereignty of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign countries, public order, decency, or morality.

It is a power that certainly had been abused prior to Modi’s premiership. Aman Bhargava, a data scientist based in Bangalore, recently examined data on over 8,000 Indian films censored by the CBFC between its founding and the end of the 20th century. His investigation found extremely high levels of censorship in the board’s first three decades, focusing primarily on depictions of sex and violence. But political censorship was hardly unheard of. During the Emergency, a two-year period from 1975 to 1977 where Prime Minister Indira Gandhi assumed essentially dictatorial powers, censors literally burned the prints of a film satirizing her leadership.   

“There are so many filmmakers whose film is stuck. But they are not ready to speak out of fear.”

Honey Trehan, director

By the 1990s, instances of CBFC censorship had declined dramatically. Modi has not only revived it, but significantly expanded its scope — creating a new censorial regime even worse than what came before. “The past was problematic. The present is worse,” Dhume says.

This judgment is backed by extensive evidence, published in both the Indian and American press, demonstrating the government’s increasingly tight grip over Hindi-language filmmaking.

The most obvious mechanism has been politicization of the CBFC. The current chair — a poet named Prasoon Joshi — is a vocal ally of the prime minister; in a phone call, the Indian film critic Sucharita Tyagi described him as a government “stooge.” Trehan, similarly, says the body is working “hand-in-glove” with Modi’s Ministry of Information “to control the narrative” on politically sensitive topics.

Over time, the Modi government has moved to remove checks on its allies’ power. In 2021, it eliminated a decades-old special appellate board that allowed filmmakers to contest CBFC rulings — forcing them instead to go through regular litigation for relief. But India’s justice system is slow and expensive, often an unrealistic option for movies that need to make their budgets back in a timely fashion. Trehan’s Satluj shows how difficult it is to fight the censor, and why so few in Bollywood are willing to do it.

“Over the past decade, the CBFC has become less a certifying body and more an arm of state-sponsored and sentiment-driven censorship,” journalist Saurav Das wrote last year in Frontline, an English-language Indian magazine published by The Hindu newspaper. “With every decision, every inexplicable demand for cuts, and every instance of folded resistance in the face of fringe protests, the Board has revealed what it truly is: a morality police in disguise.”

Nor is the CBFC Modi’s only weapon. “The tax authority,” Dhume says, “is basically completely politicized in India” — and can be wielded against filmmakers and studios who step out of line. So can the police: Five years ago, Indian police arrested the son of Muslim megastar Shah Rukh Khan on drug charges. The move was widely interpreted as retaliation for Khan’s outspokenness on violence against Muslims. Khan’s son was detained for three weeks and released on bail; prosecutors dropped the charges seven months after his arrest, ultimately admitting he never had possessed drugs in the first place.

Modi’s BJP party also has something no prior Indian government possessed: a fervent online cadre that directs waves of threats and harassment at dissident directors, actors, and even film critics. In January 2021, a Muslim supporting actor in an Amazon-hosted streaming show called Tandav — a soapy political drama that took shots at life under the BJP — became deluged by online hate. Angry Modi fans repeatedly reported him to the police for alleged insults to Hinduism; Amazon eventually cut one of his scenes to try and appease the mob.

But the Modi government hasn’t been satisfied with only punishing critical filmmakers. It has also provided ample incentives to studios who wish to make ideological propaganda.

This began with 2022’s The Kashmir Files, a movie about very real killings of Hindus in the contested territory of Jammu and Kashmir that exaggerated the scope and severity of the situation to demonize Muslims. Widely panned by critics as dishonest shlock, the film received a huge promotional push from the ruling party. Modi personally endorsed it, and at least eight BJP-governed states gave it a special exemption from entertainment taxes to lower ticket prices. BJP states also gave government employees time off from work to go see the film, and even hosted screenings. As a result, it was one of the best-performing movies of the year.

The success of The Kashmir Files showed that there was a real audience for aggressively nationalist films — as makes sense in a country that has elected Modi to the premiership three times, and where he currently enjoys a roughly 70 percent approval rating. As such, it has spawned more sophisticated imitators.

In 2025, a film called Dhurandhar — a slick action movie about an Indian sleeper agent killing his way through mafia and terror networks in Pakistan — dominated the box office, becoming the third-highest grossing Hindi film of all time. Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge premiered this year, and is more nakedly propagandistic: Variety’s reviewer wrote that it “practically features Modi as a supporting character through endless news snippets.” It has already surpassed the box office total of its predecessor. 

The end result is a kind of profit-minded self-censorship. Increasingly, Indian film studios shy away from financing movies with controversial themes and shovel money at jingoistic fare like Dhurandhar. An 11-month investigation by the Indian publication Article 14 concluded that this has effectively transformed the most prominent sector of the Indian film industry.

“Barring a minuscule minority, Hindi filmdom has collectively capitulated before the BJP government, thus handing a virtual cakewalk to the right-wing in India’s most high-profile film industry,” Article 14’s Anna M M Vetticad writes.

To be clear: It’s not that critical voices in the film industry have been silenced entirely. Independent-minded films still get made — like 2023’s Jawan and Pathaan, Shah Rukh Khan-led action films that The Atlantic described as “littered with subversive commentary on India under Modi.” The environment is markedly freer outside Hindi-language cinema; the Malayam and Tamil film industries have been more resistant to government pressure. 

But the Hindi industry is the biggest and most influential: The term “Bollywood” itself generally refers only to Hindi studios. And it’s clear that the balance is off there — leading the government’s anti-Muslim narrative to dominate in one of India’s most important cultural spheres.

“There are so many filmmakers whose film is stuck,” Trehan says. “But they are not ready to speak out of fear.”

The future of Hollywood?

What Modi has done to Indian film carries clear lessons for other backsliding democracies — most notably, the United States.

The first lesson is that free expression in major industries depends, in large part, on preserving nonpartisan leadership and norms in powerful government agencies.

India’s CBFC, tax agencies, and law enforcement have long had problems, including abusive political interventions. But Modi has made these problems considerably worse, to the point where it is less a change in degree than in kind. Today, key agencies have become staffed by political cronies who act like extensions of ruling parties. This capture of nominally nonpartisan institutions is what enabled him to bring so much political pressure on studios, producers, and actors. 

The second lesson is that big cultural industries — whatever their professed political values — are first and foremost profit-seeking entities. Bollywood has a reputation as a more culturally progressive space, even casting Pakistani actors in prominent roles during the early Modi years.  But when it became clear that the balance of financial power favored the government, that critical films might never see the light of day and propagandistic ones would make bank, Indian film studios shifted accordingly. 

“Movie-making is an expensive business, so you understand where they’re coming from.” Dhume says. One film critic, granted anonymity by Indian journalist Kaashif Hajee, was even blunter: “The only God is the box office.”

We have seen both of these mechanisms at work in the second Trump administration.

President Donald Trump has famously demolished the independence of agencies like the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission, and even tried to weaponize them against its enemies in the entertainment industry — most notably when it tried to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air earlier this year.

That effort failed. But there are also many examples of American conglomerates seeming to bow to government pressure, like CBS’s decision to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s show while its parent company awaited FCC approval for its merger.

There’s even a handful of examples of studios pushing out films nakedly bidding for the president’s favor, like Amazon’s Melania documentary. While that film was a box office dud — it made just $16.7 million on a $75 million budget — it was widely seen as an effort to win favor with the administration on other regulatory matters. Ted Hope, one of the founders of Amazon’s studio arm, called the film “an outright bribe” in an interview with the New York Times.

Overall, however, these cases remain exceptional. There is no evidence that the American entertainment industry is shifting toward MAGA propaganda in any mass way; Trump critical-fare (like the Star Wars series Andor or the superhero satire The Boys) remains vastly more popular with critics and audiences.

This owes partly to structural dissimilarities between the United States and India. The American ratings board has long been far weaker than the CBFC, and the First Amendment is far stronger than India’s constitutional speech protections. We are less than two years into Trump’s second term; Modi has been in power continuously since 2014. It would be very surprising to do in a year and a half what Modi accomplished over a decade.

The lesson of India’s film industry is not, then, that Trump is on the verge of conquering Hollywood. Rather, it’s that he has identified the right mechanisms for pressuring the entertainment industry: using politicized agencies to both raise the costs of free speech and create incentives for companies to toe a state-friendly line.

That these lines of attack are at present underdeveloped in the United States does not mean they could not, eventually, become something more serious. Any effort to future-proof American democracy, to safeguard its foundations from further assault, requires serious study of how these tactics worked in places like India and identifying means of blocking them.

“The situation with a film like Satluj…is a warning call — not just for Indians, but other countries around the world when it comes to how governments are going to control the creative business,” Ganguly says.

This week, Rahm Emanuel — a chief of staff in the Obama White House and widely rumored 2028 candidate — went to Tel Aviv to deliver a stern message to the Israeli public: If Israel wants to keep America as an ally, it needs to change. 

“Without question, the alliance is at a crossroads. It cannot stand or survive as it has been,” he said. “To maintain the strength of our ties, we need significant changes and a new direction.”

The problem, per Emanuel, is that Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has become “a modern-day Sparta” — a militarist, expansionist state that sees no alternative to crushing Palestinians under its foot. Such a country does not deserve the “unconditional support” Emanuel believes it has gotten from the US, which is the geopolitical equivalent of giving vodka to an alcoholic.

“Unconditional support has allowed you to deny food and medical relief to innocent Palestinians in Gaza, leaving the world to conclude that Israelis not only want to kill Palestinians, but they are completely indifferent to their death, to their destruction, and completely indifferent to their suffering,” he wrote.

Instead, he said, the United States needs to push Israel to be a better version of itself. This means sanctioning Israeli political and business leaders who enable terrorism against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, ending US military aid to Israel, and launching a new framework for peace negotiations with the Palestinians built around support from other Arab countries.

No one thinks this speech will change American policy. Rahm Emanuel very much does not speak for President Donald Trump. Rather, the speech should be understood in the context of intra-Democratic politics. 

While both Barack Obama and Joe Biden clashed with Netanyahu at various points, both attempted to keep those disagreements mostly private and their public steps to punish Israeli misbehavior relatively muted. Even as multiple administrations called for a Palestinian state and opposed new settlements in the West Bank, sanctioning Israeli leaders and cutting off military aid were completely off the table — the sort of thing that only a left figure like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would even dare suggest. 

Emanuel is not Sanders. In his memoir The World as It Is, Obama adviser Ben Rhodes recalls Emanuel repeatedly mocking his concerns for Palestinians in internal administration discussions — giving Rhodes the nickname “Hamas” and accusing the advisor of making “it impossible for my kid to have his fucking bar mitzvah in Israel.”

That a Jewish Democrat like Emanuel is now comfortable with once-marginalized rhetoric and policies is a marker that the old pro-Israel consensus is well and truly dead among Democrats. What’s coming in 2028 and beyond is going to be very different — and much tougher for Israel — than what came before it.

“I think [Rahm’s position] becomes the baseline of Democratic primary candidates,” Ilan Goldenberg, the chief policy officer at the liberal J Street lobby, said. “You can’t go to the right of this.”

The new center on Israel is the old left

For pretty much all of 2026, Rahm Emanuel has been positioning himself to capture the centrist lane in the Democratic primary.

In interview after interview, he has argued that the party has become unduly influenced by left-wing activists who are obsessed with unpopular trans issues, defunding the police, and abolishing capitalism. Instead, he argues, the party should refocus on “middle class values” and “pocketbook issues” — meaning deprioritization of social issues, stronger border enforcement, and welfare state expansion.

In the past, this type of centrist candidate would almost invariably be taking a lockstep pro-Israel stance: unconditional military aid and diplomatic support. Democratic presidents, House speakers, and Senate majority leaders used to be regular attendees at AIPAC’s annual conference — signalling their alignment with the pro-Israel lobby’s stance.

This old approach reflected public opinion. Most Americans were broadly supportive of the US-Israel alliance, and had been for decades. The basic centrist impulse — that politics should be about winning the median voter — militated in Israel’s favor, leading both Obama and Biden to keep their frustrations with Netanyahu and clashes with him over policy as private as possible while in office. 

But the outcome of the Gaza war has changed everything. In February, Gallup’s annual survey found that more Americans sympathized with Palestinians for the first time in the poll’s history. A brand-new Pew survey found that 62 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Israeli government. This new American hostility is overwhelmingly driven by Democrats, with just 16 percent of Democrats expressing a favorable view of the Israeli government in Pew’s data.

This has been brewing for years. Netanyahu’s involvement in American politics — including his 2015 effort to sabotage Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran — has long been driving down Israel’s numbers. But it was the Gaza war that finally pushed Democratic voters to snap, with a July AP poll finding that a majority of Democrats now believe Israel committed genocide during the conflict. 

Today, anger at Israel is a potent voting issue. Left-wing candidates, including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Graham Platner in Maine, have used the issue to burnish their anti-establishment identity and rocket to the top of hotly contested primaries. Mainstream Democratic candidates are using the word genocide to describe what happened in Gaza. AIPAC is frequently denounced as an enemy, if not outright evil.

This is where Emanuel’s speech is coming from. A consummate centrist, he has decided that what used to be the far-left position among Democrats — that America should use its leverage to try and push Israel to change for the better — is the center. It’s the latest sign that the old pro-Israel consensus within the party is dying, and something new is emerging to replace it.

The new Democratic debate on Israel

So if the Democratic debate on Israel has changed fundamentally — if the old consensus is well-and-truly dead — what does the future look like?

Goldenberg is a helpful guide here. J Street, his organization, has long occupied the ground Emanuel is now attempting to claim. Indeed, J Street hosted Emanuel on their podcast in March, and his speech is very clearly influenced by their ideas. His proposal for reviving the peace process — a “23 state solution” in which Israel works with Arab governments to bring about a Palestinian state as part of a regional settlement — is directly taken from J Street literature.

Unsurprisingly, Goldenberg liked the speech, telling me he agreed with “80-90 percent” of what Emanuel said. His critiques were less with its policy vision and more with some specifics: Emanuel offered a view of the peace negotiations of the 90s and 2000s that put nearly all the blame for their failure on the Palestinian side, which Goldberg thought was unfairly one-sided. This reflected, in his words, an “Israel-centric” worldview that took the perspective and needs of the Palestinian side less seriously than he’d like. 

But the fact that the disagreements between Emanuel and Goldenberg are this narrow reflects just how far the Democratic center has moved. When they were founded in 2008, J Street’s views represented the left fringe of the Democratic coalition. Now, one of the party’s consummate insiders is literally lifting its talking points.

Matt Duss is perhaps the leading left-wing policy wonk on Israel-Palestine, having advised both Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the topic. He tells me that he found real things to like in the Emanuel speech — in particular, that it marked a decisive break with the lockstep pro-Israel past. 

But he was more exercised about its discussion of the conflict’s history than Goldenberg was. “To call this a tendentious presentation of history would be to give it too much praise,” Duss wrote in the Nation. In general, he thinks, the speech simply didn’t go far enough, describing it as a “landmark,” but one “we should’ve passed long ago and should quickly leave in the rear view mirror.”

This is the future of the Democratic party conversation on Israel. Gone are the arguments over whether the US should put pressure on Israel to change; the questions now are what kind of pressure, how much of it should be applied, and what the ultimate end goal of said pressure should be. 

Emanuel’s view will hardly be the only one. Just as J Street has moved from the left to the center of the party, the growing discontent with Israel has also elevated competing groups and ideas into the conversation that were almost invisible in the halls of power until recently, like the rising slate of DSA-aligned candidates. 

One can imagine a spectrum of views here. The J Street side wants to preserve both Israel’s existence and its strong relationship with the US, conditional on Israel ending its occupation of Palestinian land. There’s a more left position, that the US no longer has any interest in being an ally of a country like Israel. And there’s a lefter-still position, in which US policy should actively aim towards a one-state binational solution that dissolves Israel’s identity as a Jewish state.

The boundaries between these positions are not always clear in policy terms, and they can blur together at the edges. It’s hard to know exactly what the balance of forces will be in the 2028 election, let alone beyond it. A lot will depend on Israel’s own election, scheduled for this fall, in which lightning rod Netanyahu might finally lose power.

But the forces behind this change run deeper than one prime minister. Through its occupation of the West Bank, wanton violence in Gaza, and direct partisan interference on behalf of Republican priorities, Israel’s leadership has fundamentally broken its relationship with the Democratic party. That’s not something that’s fixable without a fundamental transformation of Israeli policy — one that doesn’t seem especially likely in the short term.

There is, thus, every reason to believe that the Emanuel speech is, as Duss said, a “landmark” — another all-but-formal codification of the reorientation of the Democratic party. 

“If you’ve lost Rahm Emanuel,” Goldenberg said, “you’re kind of toast.”

For the past month, one name has dominated discussions of the 2028 Democratic primary: Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff.

Though Ossoff is running for reelection in a crucial swing state, his consistent polling lead is prompting national observers to leapfrog all the way to 2028. Features in both the New York Times and Politico have touted him as a leading candidate. His odds on the Polymarket prediction site have more than doubled since late May: he’s now given a better chance than Vice President Kamala Harris (who is currently the leader in nearly all national polls).

There are good reasons for this. Ossoff is a repeat winner in one of the most important presidential battlegrounds who appeals to everyone from the Never Trumpers at the Bulwark to leftist streamer Hasan Piker. His rhetorical focus on Trump’s corruption elevates a theme that energizes Democrats of all stripes. And his background as a filmmaker makes him almost uniquely well-suited to the short-form video age.

“I have been jokingly calling him…the Lisan al-Gaib, which is a Dune reference to the Timothée Chalamet figure — essentially, the chosen one,” Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host, said on a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show. “I think he has figured out a way, in a broadly palatable ideological fashion, to leverage a populist moral critique of the rot of Trump that can appeal across the different Democratic factions.”

And yet, there’s some reason to think this hype is getting over its skis.

Ossoff is a certain kind of archetype who often emerges in divided parties: The mythical “unity candidate.” 

These figures are typically broadly appealing elected officials without any one defined base of supporters. They have traits that seem to correct for the party’s failures in the previous election, have qualities that can attract fans from a wide range of factions and demographics within it, and they have yet to alienate anybody important. But the “unity candidate” has a mixed record in recent contests — they often look perfect on paper, then struggle in practice. 

Whether Ossoff is the Democratic savior or another unity candidate poised to flame out remains to be seen. There’s a reasonable case in either direction.

But the fact that Ossoff is already generating so much attention tells us something undoubtedly important: that Democrats are deeply frustrated with their early frontrunners and looking for alternatives. That could augur a wild, perhaps even unpredictable, outcome in the eventual primary.

Why Ossoff has so many Democrats excited

Let’s start with one important caveat: Ossoff might not run. He has steadfastly denied rumors of presidential ambition, saying he’s focused on the Senate race. 

Of course, that’s what anyone in his position should be saying — even if it’s insincere. But many in Democratic and Georgia politics seem to think that it might not just be for show. It will be harder for him to run if Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms doesn’t win the governor’s race, which would allow her to appoint a Democratic replacement for his seat. It will be harder still if fellow Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, a star in his own right, launches a bid.

But should he run, there are considerable reasons why so many Democrats believe Ossoff is poised to take off in 2028. 

He’s a proven winner in the swing state, an excellent public speaker, a telegenic young guy with an inspiring and unifying message: he’s basically the stuff that Democrats dream of. It makes sense that pundits and bettors would anticipate a boom even before it emerges among voters; the raw material is all there.

The Epstein class is ruling our country. pic.twitter.com/LjJlKbTp2p

— Jon Ossoff (@ossoff) February 18, 2026

What’s especially impressive is his ability to straddle the party’s internal divides without making enemies. 

His vote to block military aid to Israel in 2024, when that position was less common among Democrats, endeared him to the left. The party’s centrist faction admires his vote for the Laken Riley Act imposing harsher punishments on undocumented immigrants who commit crimes. And he managed to avoid taking hardline stances on social issues that many Democrats took during Trump’s first term — the ones that left Kamala Harris with a trail of quotes and positions for Republicans to attack in 2024 — without alienating liberals. 

“He not only refused to join along with the craziness of 2017 to 2020, but actively explicitly rejected it without becoming defined by the negative,” said Liam Kerr, co-founder of the centrist WelcomePAC. 

Ossoff’s multifaceted appeal makes even more sense when you look at the emerging field. Across poll averages, the top four candidates are consistent: Harris on top, California Gov. Gavin Newsom in second, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg battling it out for third.

Each of those candidates has a major strike against them with at least some important corner of the party. Buttigieg is unpopular on the socialist left and has long polled poorly with Black voters. AOC is hated by Democratic centrists and will need to convince electability-minded voters that she can appeal to the center. Gavin Newsom is seen by many as oily, insincere, and a traitor on trans rights. Kamala Harris, of course, carries enormous baggage both from Biden’s presidency and her own unsuccessful presidential runs. 

In a party looking to move beyond its Trump-era doldrums, many see these choices as either uninspiring or divisive. There is a deep hunger for someone new. Ossoff, who is less weighed down by prior party debates, can fill that need. 

At the same time, Ossoff isn’t just defined by who he isn’t — he’s genuinely impressed observers with his messaging strategy. Not just the focus on corruption, though that’s part of it, but the means by which he communicates. Instead of the long-form podcast interviews and direct-to-camera videos most candidates employ nowadays, Ossoff primarily communicates through slickly produced clips of his speeches at rallies or Sunday services at a Black church (and the occasional cable news hit).

Ossoff: How much do you guys know about Jared Kushner, Ivanka's husband? He's on the Saudi payroll for $2 billion dollars. Did you know that? And now he's leading American diplomacy in the Middle East, apparently while at the very same time asking princes and sheikhs across the… pic.twitter.com/VRn425sVNq

— Team Ossoff (@TeamOssoff) April 19, 2026

Perhaps counterintuitively, this works really well in the TikTok age. The clips do great numbers — again, he’s a documentarian by training and a talented orator. Making speeches his primary means of communication also allows him to keep tight message control: There is far less risk of a slip-up where he manages to infuriate one of the Democratic Party’s various subfactions.

Why “unity” candidates often fail 

But there’s a big risk to this something-for-everyone strategy: it can leave you without a base.

In 2016, for example, Marco Rubio had a similar profile to Ossoff. He was a young Tea Party insurgent who unseated an old incumbent, but with an establishment-friendly profile on foreign policy and welfare-state politics. For electability-minded party leaders worried about Latino voters, his Cuban roots and fluent Spanish were viewed as an asset — just as some on the left now hope Ossoff’s Judaism might smooth over debates over Israel and antisemitism. 

But ultimately, he got squeezed. Ted Cruz had outmuscled him to the right with ideological conservatives, the truly moderate Ohio Gov. John Kasich had taken over the center lane, and Trump ultimately beat all of them running as the charismatic outsider with populist appeal. Rubio dropped out before the race was done.

Similarly, in 2020, Kamala Harris looked like a unifying bet on the Democratic side. She had taken some quite left-wing positions in the Senate, but also had a moderate-appealing tough-on-crime background as California attorney general. Like Ossoff, she generated excitement among voters with widely shared clips — in her case, televised grill sessions with Republicans.  Yet she flamed out even earlier than Rubio, suspending her campaign in December 2019 before the first primary vote was even cast. 

Both Rubio and Harris suffered from their lack of a clear identity and support base: In offering something for everyone, they ended up being few people’s first choice. As they filled in their platforms with more detail, each sought to find a compromise on issues dividing party factions — Rubio backtracked from his earlier support for immigration reform, Harris endorsed Medicare-for-all then put out her own plan — only to find their answers pleased no one. 

Currently, Ossoff is starting from a weaker place than either Rubio or Harris at the start of those races: 2.3 percent in the RealClearPolitics average, dead last among all included candidates. Several Democrats I spoke with questioned whether Ossoff could rise to frontrunner status without a sturdier base of support from one corner of the party or another.

“We’re seeing that play out in the Michigan Senate race,” Democratic pollster Adam Carlson said, referring to recently dropped-out Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow, a state legislator who became a rising star earlier after a speech on trans rights went viral. “McMorrow [was] kind of in the middle between [Haley] Stevens and [Abdul] El-Sayed, trying to be a little something to everybody.”

In particular, McMorrow got trapped on Israel: She angered the left by criticizing El-Sayed for campaigning with Hasan Piker in an interview, while failing to win them over by labeling Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocide.” Meanwhile, Stevens consolidated centrist support and drew in outside spending from pro-Israel groups. Ossoff has yet to face this level of sustained scrutiny on the topic, and it’s an open question whether left-wing influencers will be as willing to celebrate his partial support for their positions if there’s a rival candidate, perhaps Ocasio-Cortez, who goes significantly further.

Ossoff’s media strategy, while generally effective, might also mask upcoming challenges during a crowded primary. In our current attention economy, people build rabid fandoms by fostering parasocial connections — often by convincing fans that what they’re seeing on screen is the “authentic” version of the person. That’s harder to do when you eschew unscripted content for polished speech clips. 

“He doesn’t do longform [interviews], he doesn’t do off-the-cuff, he doesn’t do the omnipresent attention,” one Democratic strategist told me. “He’s gotta get the reps in, because he’s going to need that skill set to run for president.”

Again, prior candidates are instructive: Harris famously struggled in interviews; Rubio was wrecked by an overly scripted debate performance. Ossoff will have to prove he can operate in settings where he has less control and can handle follow-up questions that are designed to pinpoint the narrow differences between candidates.

To be clear: Ossoff’s strategy isn’t doomed to fail. Barack Obama quite famously managed to be everything-to-everyone in his 2008 campaign: appealing to the left on the Iraq war while attacking Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan from the right, all while delivering a message about bridging old partisan divides. Some have suggested Ossoff’s early criticism of Israel might play a similar role to Obama’s early war opposition, potentially allowing him to reassure the left on a key litmus test while courting the middle on substantive policy debates. 

“He seems like someone who plays to win — not someone who plays not to lose,” Kerr said.

Ossoff may, or may not, emerge as a 2028 force. But the hype surrounding his campaign, even before it exists, has clearly exposed that the Democratic primary is unsettled: the current polling frontrunners are weak, and both voters and the party elite seem to be actively searching for alternatives.

It’s a bit like where the GOP was in 2016: plenty of credible contenders, but no one who clearly stood out as a consensus favorite. And that race ended with a nominee who had seemed to most, at the outset, like an impossibility.