Category: Politics

Democrats seem to think they can talk their way out of the political wilderness.

Listen closely and you can hear it through the din of their all-caps Trumpian X feeds, their hourslong “manosphere” podcast interviews and their more frequent swearing.

Nearly 10 months after the 2024 elections, and the party is still embroiled in self-recriminations over where they’re talking, what they’re talking about and, now, the actual words they’re using. Or, more precisely: which words they shouldn’t utter.

In a new memo, shared exclusively with POLITICO, the center-left think tank Third Way is circulating a list of 45 words and phrases they want Democrats to avoid using, alleging the terms put “a wall between us and everyday people of all races, religions, and ethnicities.” It’s a set of words that Third Way suggests “people simply do not say, yet they hear them from Democrats.”

They span six categories — from “therapy speak” to “explaining away crime” — and put in sharp relief a party that authors say makes Democrats “sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness.” In the document, titled “Was It Something I Said?” Third Way argues that to “please the few, we have alienated the many — especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant,” according to the memo.

Among the blacklisted terms: privilege … violence (as in “environmental violence”) … dialoguing … triggering … othering … microaggression … holding space … body shaming … subverting norms … systems of oppression … cultural appropriation … Overton window … existential threat to [the climate, democracy, economy] … radical transparency … stakeholders … the unhoused … food insecurity … housing insecurity … person who immigrated … birthing person … cisgender … deadnaming … heteronormative … patriarchy … LGBTQIA+ … BIPOC … allyship … incarcerated people … involuntary confinement.

“We are doing our best to get Democrats to talk like normal people and stop talking like they’re leading a seminar at Antioch,” says Matt Bennett, Third Way’s executive vice president of public affairs. “We think language is one of the central problems we face with normie voters, signaling that we are out of touch with how they live, think and talk. In recent weeks, this has become a bit of a thing, with comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman highlighting how insane Dems can sometimes sound. Also, elected officials like [Delaware Rep.] Sarah McBride and [Kentucky Gov.] Andy Beshear are begging their colleagues to just be normal again.”

“People can’t relate to something unless it has some edge about it,” Lanae Erickson, Third Way’s senior vice president, tells Playbook. “And we had shaved off all of our edges in an attempt to never make anyone upset about anything.”

The group doesn’t base its list on any specific polling. And the authors don’t offer specific counter recommendations for these terms. But they do outline the values their vision of the party includes.

“We will never abandon our values or stop doing things to protect those who need help, encouragement, trust, a second chance, acceptance, a fair shake, and the opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness But as the catastrophe of Trump 2.0 has shown, the most important thing we can do for those people and causes is to build a bigger army to fight them,” the memo reads. “Communicating in authentic ways that welcome rather than drive voters away would be a good start.”

It’s worth noting that in certain parts of the country, a lot of people, especially now, do talk in this language and use the phrases Third Way recommends against, even if it doesn’t scream big tent enough. It’s also worth noting an inherent irony in all of this: it’s hard to police how politicians talk at the same time that you’re asking them to be authentic.

The memo’s authors write “we are not out to police language, ban phrases or create our own form of censorship. Truth be told, we have published papers that have used some of these words as well. But when policymakers are public-facing, the language we use must invite, not repel; start a conversation, not end it; provide clarity, not confusion.”

“The Democratic Party brand is toxic across the country at this point with way too many people — enough that there’s no way for us to win a governing majority without changing that,” Erickson said. “Part of the problem was that we were using words that literally no normal people used — that we were sticking to messages that were so overly scripted that they basically sounded like nothing.”

What about bright spots for the party? Erickson cited three potential 2028 Democratic presidential contenders who she says are good examples of how to communicate: Beshear, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.).

• “Gallego is doing a great job talking about economic success,” she says. “He goes into communities and he’s like, ‘I want you to have a big ass truck, if that’s what you want.’”

• Buttigieg, she said, is “doing a great job of going into spaces that are maybe not hostile, but unusual spaces for him to be in and having real conversations about complicated topics, like transgender people in sports, and saying, ‘you know, I think you should have empathy toward people that are figuring this issue out for the first time. And you should have empathy toward transgender kids and their families.’ But he’s not afraid to say those things, and he’s getting yelled at.”

• And Beshear is “getting this so exactly right, talking about how these terms aren’t even what those communities use to call themselves,” she said. She recalled Beshear “talking about the fact that ‘justice-involved individuals’ is not a thing that any justice-involved individual would call themselves. They would call themselves incarcerated, call themselves convicted, or they would call themselves a whole lot of other things, but that’s not what they or their families would call themselves. So inventing terms that the people that we’re talking about and trying to protect don’t even use, and then enforcing that that’s the only way you can talk about those people, is crazy.” 

So, can Democrats really talk their way back to power? It’s an Aaron Sorkin-eqsue idea to think that everything can be solved by the right words and a compelling speech. (And it’s one that the party has been tantalized by, on and off, for decades.) Of course, Democrats face bigger and deeper problems — a yawning voter registration gap among them — and are still figuring out which policies to advocate.

In some ways, Third Way is reaching the same political conclusion VP JD Vance arrived at during his interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham this week. “I mean, look, the autopsy for the Democrats, some free political advice from the president of the United States is: stop sounding like crazy people,” Vance said.

Vance’s remarks came on the same day he had burgers with the National Guard troops at Union Station. Which is itself a glaring reminder of some of the stakes if Democrats don’t get this right.

Erickson mentioned crime as a key issue on which Democrats need to recalibrate, citing Trump’s “invasion of D.C.”

“It shows that people don’t think Democrats want to hold criminals accountable at all,” she said. “Like we don’t care about violent crime and we don’t care if someone hurts someone, that they should be held accountable. That’s not true. We’re afraid to say that because we’re afraid that someone is going to criticize us for being too ‘tough on crime.’”

Third Way sees it as a place to start. “We need to reflect on the ways that our bubble and our fear of being criticized by anyone on the left has led to a problem with both our policy and our language,” Erickson said.

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​Politics

Congressional redistricting – the process of drawing electoral districts to account for population changes – was conceived by the Founding Fathers as a once-per-decade redrawing of district lines following the decennial U.S. census. Today it has devolved into a near-constant feature of American politics – often in response to litigation, and frequently with the intent of maintaining or gaining partisan advantage.

Polls show widespread public disapproval of manipulating political boundaries to favor certain groups, a process known as gerrymandering. However, we currently see little hope of preventing a race to the bottom, where numerous states redraw their maps to benefit one party in response to other states drawing their maps to benefit another party.

The most recent round of tit-for-tat gerrymandering began in Texas. After drawing their post-census congressional maps in 2021, Republicans in the Texas Legislature, at President Donald Trump’s behest, are advancing a new set of maps designed to increase the number of Republican congressional seats in their state. The goal is to help Republicans retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections by converting five Democratic seats to ones that will likely result in a Republican victory.

In response, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing to redraw his state’s map. Under Newsom’s plan, Democrats could gain five House seats in California, offsetting Republican gains in Texas. The California Legislature approved the new maps on Aug. 21 and Gov. Newsom signed the bills that day. Next, the maps will be presented to California voters on the November 2025 ballot for approval.

Newsom vows that he isn’t trying to disband the independent redistricting process that California enacted in 2021. Rather, he proposes to shift to these partisan gerrymandered maps temporarily, then return to independent, nonpartisan redistricting in 2031.

Democrats in Illinois and New York, and Republicans in Indiana, Missouri and South Carolina, have signaled that they may follow Texas and California’s leads. Based on our research on politics and elections, we don’t expect that the wave will stop there.

Rules for mapmakers

Redistricting has always been an inherently political process. But the advent of widespread, easily accessible computer technology, increasingly predictable voting patterns and tight partisan margins in Congress have turbocharged the process.

There are ways to tweak this gerrymandering run amok and perhaps block a bad map or two. But none of these approaches are likely to stop partisan actors entirely from drawing maps to benefit themselves and their parties.

The most obvious strategy would be to create guardrails for the legislators and commissions who draw the maps. Such guidelines often specify the types of data that could be used to draw the maps – for example, limiting partisan data.

Anti-gerrymandering rules could also limit the number of political boundaries, such as city or county lines, that would be split by new districts. And they could prioritize compactness, rather than allowing bizarrely-shaped districts that link far-flung communities.

These proposals certainly won’t do any harm, and might even move the process in a more positive direction, but they are unlikely to end gerrymandering.

For example, North Carolina had an explicit limitation on using partisan data in its 2021 mapmaking process, as well as a requirement that lawmakers could only draw maps in the North Carolina State Legislative Building. It was later revealed that a legislator had used “concept maps” drawn by an aide outside of the normal mapmaking process.

In a world where anyone with an internet connection can log onto free websites like Dave’s Redistricting to draw maps using partisan data, it’s hard to prevent states from incorporating nonofficial proposals into their maps.

Courts and commissions

A second way to police gerrymandering is to use the courts aggressively to combat unfair or discriminatory maps. Some courts, particularly at the state level, have reined in egregious gerrymanders like Pennsylvania’s 2011 map, which was overturned in 2018.

At the national level, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering claims presented “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts” and ultimately were better suited to state courts. There are still likely to be claims in federal courts about racial dilution and other Voting Rights Act violations in gerrymanders, but the door to the federal courthouse for partisanship claims appears to be closed for the time being.

A third option is for states to hand map-drawing power to an independent body. Recent studies show that independent redistricting commissions produce maps that are more competitive and fairer. For example, a nonpartisan scholarly review of the 2021-2022 congressional and state legislative maps found that commissions “generally produce less biased and more competitive plans than when one party controls the process.”

Commissions are popular with the public. In a 2024 study with political scientists Seth McKee and Scott Huffmon, we found that both Democrats and Republicans in South Carolina preferred to assign redistricting to an independent commission rather than the state Legislature, which has been in Republican control since 2000.

Studies using national polling data have also found evidence that redistricting commissions are popular, and that people who live in states that use commissions view the redistricting process more positively than residents of states where legislators draw congressional lines.

A national solution or bust

While redistricting commissions are popular and effective in states that have adopted them, current actions in California show that this strategy can fail if it is embraced by some states but not others.

Unfortunately, there is no simple solution for tit-for-tat gerrymandering. Litigation can help at the margins, and independent redistricting can make a difference, but even the best intentions can fail under political pressure.

The only wholesale solution is national reform. But even here, we are not optimistic.

A proportional representation system, in which seats are divided by the portion of the vote that goes to each party, could solve the problem. However, removing single-member districts and successfully implementing proportional representation in the United States is about as likely as finding a hockey puck on Mars.

A national ban on gerrymandering might be more politically palatable. Even here, though, the odds of success are fairly low. After all, the people who benefit from the current system would have to vote to change it, and the filibuster rule in the Senate requires not just majority but supermajority support.

So, brace for what’s about to come. As James Madison famously observed, forming factions – groups of people united by a common interest that threatens the rights of others – is “sown in the nature of man.”

Gerrymandering helps factions acquire and retain power. If U.S. leaders aren’t willing to consider a national solution, it won’t disappear anytime soon.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has not spared the U.S. agricultural industry, with agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement frequently raiding farms across the country in search of undocumented workers.

Now, farmers are facing a crisis the administration has helped create: not enough people to pick crops.

On a recent call to CNBC, President Donald Trump said, “We can’t let our farmers not have anybody.” To assure farmers that he had their back despite the immigration raids, he sought to distinguish immigrants he called “criminals” and “murderers” from nonthreatening farm laborers who have been picking crops for years.

To do so, Trump used an old stereotype for farmworkers: “These people do it naturally, naturally.” Trump recounted asking a farmer: “What happens if they get a bad back? He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die.’”

“In many ways, they’re very, very special people,” said Trump, referring to undocumented farmworkers.

Trump is labeling some of the people his administration has targeted for deportation as naturals.

As a historian of American agriculture and labor, I think the Trump administration’s contradictions on farmworkers are part of a long history of idealizing farming in America. It’s a history in which race, nature, exploitation and the very identity of America itself have all been involved.

From Jefferson to Sunkist

Thomas Jefferson, most famous for writing the Declaration of Independence, also declared, “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God.”

Jefferson thought America’s true calling was to be an agrarian nation, for virtuous and independent farmers would also be perfect citizens. But Jefferson didn’t actually get his own hands dirty. He told John Quincy Adams that he “knew nothing” about farming.

The Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, in the musical “Hamilton,” crystallized the critiques against what came to be called “Jeffersonian agrarianism,” which praises agricultural life and the virtues of farmers, but fails to acknowledge it was not the planters who did the backbreaking work: “‘We plant seeds in the South. We create.’ Yeah, keep ranting: We know who’s really doing the planting.”

The image of America built up by white farmers contrasted with a reality that “those who labour in the earth” were often enslaved people. As the cotton empire expanded, so did slavery.

Apologists for this system of inequality argued that the “natural station” of Black people was to be enslaved. Black people were portrayed as natural manual laborers – and by extension, the institution of slavery itself was defended as natural, rather than an abrogation of the “natural rights” promised to all men in the Declaration of Independence.

American agricultural leaders in the early 20th century, as I document in my book “Orange Empire,” adapted these forms of “naturalization” – the process, as developed by cultural theorists, through which man-made things such as racial hierarchies are made to appear natural.

In this naturalizing mode, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce argued in 1929 that “much of California’s agricultural labor requirements consist of those tasks to which the oriental and Mexican due to their crouching and bending habits are fully adapted, while the white is physically unable to adapt himself to them.”

As I describe in my book, the president of the citrus growers cooperative Sunkist insisted in 1944 that Mexicans “are naturally adapted to agricultural work, particularly in the handling of fruits and vegetables.”

Through this naturalization, racism appeared to be made in nature. Everything in farming – all of the food grown in what author Carey McWilliams called “factories in the field” in his 1939 exposé – was carefully constructed by farmers, their lobbyists and their advertisers to appear natural. That includes the racism and labor exploitation at the heart of it.

While naturalizing workers as evolutionarily adapted to stoop labor, this system all but denied undocumented farmworkers legal access to the other kind of naturalization: becoming full citizens.

So when anti-immigrant ideology sparks ICE raids and deportations, the nation’s farms end up losing the labor they have long relied on.

Whose homeland?

On X, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been presenting itself as if it’s on a mission to secure a white homeland. It has posted videos of white people enjoying America’s natural wonders to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” and paintings that propagandize manifest destiny, the idea that the U.S. is destined to extend its dominion across North America.

Homeland Security recently posted John Gast’s 1872 painting “American Progress” as a “Heritage to be proud of.” It depicts a luminous white goddess flying west over the American landscape, with white farmers plowing the soil beneath, while petrified Native Americans, shrouded in darkness, are being chased from their homelands.

As I and others have pointed out, Homeland Security is using coded messages to affirm white supremacists’ vision of turning America into a white homeland.

On the ground in America today, nonwhite immigrants are fleeing from immigration agents, as if the Gast painting is coming to life. The United Farm Workers union, referring to “videos of agents chasing farm workers thru the field,” says that “workers are terrorized.” One worker said they are “being hunted like animals.”

‘Grounds for dreaming’

Trump told CNBC that he does not believe that “inner city” people can come to the rescue of farmers, whose source of labor has been decimated.

As Politico reports, Trump is now floating the idea of expanding an existing visa program for temporary agricultural workers and creating a new program that requires them to leave the U.S. before reentering legally. If so, he would essentially be reinventing the Bracero Program – the U.S. guest worker program with Mexico created at the behest of California growers during World War II that lasted until the 1960s.

Ian Chandler is an Oregon farmer whose cherries are rotting on the trees because he’s lost the farmworkers who normally pick them. He recently told CNN that these people “are part of our community, just like my arm is connected to my body, they are part of us. So it’s not just a matter of like cutting them off … if we lose them we lose part of who we are as well.”

The Spanish word bracero roughly translates to someone who works with their arms, but the earlier guest worker program didn’t have the same inclusive meaning Chandler intends. Instead, it racialized Mexicans as natural farmworkers, as mere brawn extracted from human beings who were otherwise excluded from the community.

As historian S. Deborah Kang notes, “Sumner Welles, former under secretary of state to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, excoriated the ‘poisoning discriminations’ faced by bracero workers and equated their experiences with the ‘Juan Crow’ racism.”

Over the course of its history, many Americans have held out hope that the U.S. would create a farming nation that lives up to the original promise of an organic democracy – the democracy Jefferson mythologized and one where all Americans are included – built from the ground up.

As historians Camille Guerin-Gonzales and Lori Flores have shown, farmworkers, whatever their official status, have worked hard to find “grounds for dreaming” in America.

Making that American dream a reality involves seeing farmworkers for who they are, I believe: vital members of the body politic who reconnect all Americans to nature through the foods they eat.

Doug Sackman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Former DNC Chair Jaime Harrison is jumping on the Substack trend, but he seems to have overlooked the fine print.

Harrison appears to have run afoul of Substack’s terms of service by mass-subscribing his former campaign email list and other personal contacts. Substack’s rules say: “Don’t add people to your mailing list without their consent, and don’t import your contacts list or social graphs.” And Substack emphasizes that subscribers should have “explicitly opted in,” according to a Substack spokesperson.

Harrison recently uploaded those on his 2020 Senate campaign list and other contacts he had collected over the years, though he made that clear to subscribers when he started his Substack. His introductory email last week stated, “As a past member of my email list, you have been automatically subscribed to my new hub on Substack.” Harrison has a Substack podcast where he’s interviewed Democrats including Hunter Biden, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and he also started a paid subscription section for superfans to get early access to podcasts and bonus content.

The way he built his Substack list, however, has attracted negative attention online, with several X users expressing outrage that they were added to his Substack without their permission or even knowledge. One user wrote, “The horrors of giving my email to Democrats never cease. Why tf did I get auto-subscribed to Jaime Harrison’s Substack,” while another wrote, “Just found out I was automatically subscribed to Jaime Harrison’s Substack without my knowledge or consent.”

The spokesperson for Substack, granted anonymity to speak freely, declined to comment on Harrison’s case but said the company’s guidelines “require that any mailing list a publisher imports be made up of people who have explicitly opted in to receive emails from that publication” and that lists purchased or collected without consent (which frequently happens on campaigns) are not permitted. The spokesperson bolded the phrase “explicitly opted in.”

The spokesperson said Substack runs basic checks for issues including invalid addresses but that it doesn’t have a way to verify how emails were collected.

Harrison said in a brief phone interview that he “assumed” his team had followed Substack’s rules but added, “For me, knowing email stuff and all that other stuff, I don’t follow this stuff.” In a follow-up text message, he said he had abided by all Substack policies and that his team “worked directly with Substack to upload our list, which was collected from my Senate campaign and other personal activities.” A spokesperson for Harrison declined to give POLITICO the name of the Substack representative they dealt with and said such interactions were done only over the phone.

Several other Democratic politicians with Substacks have chosen different ways to build up their newsletter lists. A person familiar with Pete Buttigieg’s Substack, granted anonymity to discuss the matter, said the former transportation secretary is only using organic ways to grow his Substack, which has around 600,000 followers, and that his team doesn’t pull any lists over.

A spokesperson for Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said he’s also grown his Substack organically and didn’t think it was necessary to pull subscribers from his campaign email list. The person said the video interviews the senator has done with anti-Trump influencers Jim Acosta and Jennifer Rubin, as well as journalist Anand Giridharadas, have been very helpful in adding new subscribers, now totaling more than 65,000.

Last week, Harrison’s Substack showed that he had a million subscribers, but most of Harrison’s posts have less than a dozen likes. After POLITICO started asking questions, the number of subscribers became private. A Harrison spokesperson declined to comment on why the subscription number is no longer public.

For years, Democratic consultants have raised concerns that Democratic politicians are exhausting donors with too many emails, but Substack is a new platform on which Democrats can grow — and annoy — people in their orbit.

“Substack prohibits unsolicited spam for a reason,” said Josh Nelson, CEO of progressive ad platform Civic Shout. “Jaime Harrison, as a former DNC chair, should know better than to add people to an email list without their knowledge or consent.”

Another Democratic consultant, granted anonymity because of fear of business consequences, said leaders of many progressive organizations and other influential Democrats now have Substacks that he joked they view as their “retirement plan.”

“It’s so dumb because obviously there’s not enough people on Substack to pay $5 a month for all these people, and they all use tons of organizational resources to pump up their own Substacks, which is so corrupt and such a misallocation of resources,” the consultant said.

A version of this story first appeared in POLITICO Pro’s Morning Score newsletter. Sign up for POLITICO Pro.

​Politics

NEW YORK — The former top aide to New York City Mayor Eric Adams ran audacious bribery schemes out of City Hall — selling off her help as a public official four different times to people willing to shower her with money or gifts, according to a series of indictments unsealed Thursday.

Ingrid Lewis-Martin, the former chief adviser to the mayor, is accused by a grand jury of helping friends secure lucrative city contracts and expediting their regulatory issues with city government in exchange for cash payments to her son, free home renovations, nearly $10,000 worth of seafood for city events and even a guest appearance on the TV show “Godfather of Harlem.”

Lewis-Martin used her influence as Adams’ longest-serving aide and “overrode other City officials’ expertise and decision making to ensure that certain required actions were accomplished for the benefit of her co-conspirators,” prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office wrote in a sweeping and detail-rich summary of the indictments.

Adams, who is facing long odds as he runs for reelection as an independent, is not accused of wrongdoing in any of the cases. But they are just the latest allegations of corruption to cloud Adams’ time in City Hall — an issue that seems destined to define his tenure in office.

That includes the mayor’s own federal corruption charges alleging a bribery conspiracy by the Turkish government — a case that was dismissed following the intervention of President Donald Trump’s administration. But the allegations also include state corruption charges against Adams’ former buildings commissioner, a series of guilty pleas involving straw donor schemes to the mayor’s campaign and other federal criminal investigations leading to the resignation of several high ranking administration officials.

Lewis-Martin was arraigned in criminal court in Manhattan Thursday morning and pleaded not guilty to four counts of conspiracy in the fourth degree, and four counts of bribe receiving in the second degree. Her lawyer downplayed the charges and specifically denied the accusation she received a $2,500 cash payment in exchange for fighting against a street safety redesign.

“Her only so-called ‘offense’ was fulfilling her duty—helping fellow citizens navigate the City’s outdated and often overwhelming bureaucracy. At no point did she receive a single dollar or any personal benefit for her assistance,” Arthur L. Aidala said in a statement.

“Yet, the District Attorney seeks to portray a dedicated and honest public servant as a criminal. This is not justice — it is a distortion of the truth and a troubling example of politically motivated ‘lawfare,’” Aidala added, saying Lewis-Martin will “vigorously fight these charges.”

Adams defended Lewis-Martin in a statement, and said he wouldn’t let the indictments distract him.

“I have not been accused of any wrongdoing, and my focus remains on serving the 8.5 million New Yorkers by making our city safer and more affordable every day,” Adams said. “While Ingrid Lewis-Martin no longer works for this administration, she has been a friend and colleague for over 40 years, and I know her as a devoted public servant; she has declared her innocence, and my prayers are with her and her family.”

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office alleges four different schemes.

Another longtime Adams ally Jesse Hamilton, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, is charged alongside Lewis-Martin in one case where the pair is accused of promoting real estate developer Yehiel Landau’s projects in exchange for more than $5,000 worth of renovations on homes owned by both city officials.

Hamilton resigned Thursday, DCAS Commissioner Louis Molina said in a statement, and noted that Hamilton never had independent authority to execute leases and he was subject to increased oversight.

In another case, Lewis-Martin is accused of steering city contracts providing housing for asylum seekers to a friend who owned a karaoke club. In return, prosecutors allege Tian Ji Li paid Martin’s son Glenn Martin II $50,000 and provided karaoke parties for Lewis-Martin.

“Whatever site TJ wants, I need him to get them,” Lewis-Martin texted Hamilton about Li, according to the indictment, “Because that’s our fucking people.”

In a third case, Lewis-Martin is accused of advocating against the city’s plans for a street redesign to help Gina and Tony Argento, leaders of a film production company who opposed the project. Gina Argento paid Lewis-Martin $2,500 for her help, prosecutors claim, provided free catering services to the city and helped Lewis-Martin secure a speaking role on the TV show “Godfather of Harlem.”

From her perch in City Hall, Lewis-Martin eagerly fought the redesign plan that had been chosen by the Department of Transportation. Prosecutors say she texted Gina Argento a flyer promoting the plan. “We do not care what they say,” Lewis-Martin wrote. “We are ignoring them and continuing with our plan. They can kiss my ass.”

And finally, Lewis-Martin is accused of helping expedite issues with the Department of Buildings for an unnamed friend in exchange for “free seafood … valued at almost $10,000” for various events at City Hall and the mayor’s residence in the spring and summer of 2024.

Along with Lewis-Martin, her son and Hamilton, the four business people were charged with conspiracy and bribery Thursday. All pleaded not guilty.

Judge Daniel Conviser expressed frustration trying to schedule the first appearance for the defendants across four cases. “I’m sorry, there’s like ten people, and I’ve got to have everybody here at one time and everybody’s got different schedules,” he said, predicting there would be “a massive amount of discovery.”

Lewis-Martin resigned from City Hall in December before being indicted on separate corruption charges to which she pleaded not guilty. She continued to volunteer for Adams’ reelection campaign despite that, playing the role of political adviser in which she served Adams for two decades.

Married to one of Adams’ friends from his time in the NYPD, Lewis-Martin helped Adams get elected to the state Senate in 2006, and the two of them masterminded a long-term plan to make him mayor — culminating in his 2021 election.

The indictments were unsealed just a day after another longtime Adams aide, Winnie Greco, gave a reporter from THE CITY cash stuffed in a potato chip bag in an apparent bribery attempt, the nonprofit news outlet reported. Greco has been mentored by Lewis-Martin and worked with her in City Hall until she resigned under pressure last October.

​Politics

Texas Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett said he will not run for reelection in his home district if the Texas redistricting proposal is approved, avoiding a potential member-on-member primary with Rep. Greg Casar, who was drawn into Doggett’s district in the new maps.

Doggett did not say whether he would retire from Congress if the maps are approved or if he plans to run in another Texas district.

The 78-year-old lawmaker has faced pressure from some Democrats to allow Casar to run in the new Austin-area district. A primary in the 37th District between Doggett and Casar could have reopened old fissures in the party over elderly incumbents — a debate amplified last year by Doggett, who was the first Democrat in Congress to call on then-President Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race.

“If the courts give Trump a victory in his scheme to maintain control of a compliant House, I will not seek reelection in the reconfigured CD37, even though it contains over 2/3rd of my current constituents,” Doggett said in the statement.

Doggett said he will run for reelection in his current district if Texas Republicans’ “racially gerrymandered Trump map” is rejected. Doggett’s office did not immediately respond to requests for clarification about his intentions if the maps are approved.

A spokesperson for Casar declined to comment.

Doggett quickly announced his intention to run in his home district last month after Texas released its redrawn maps. Last week, he leaned on Casar to run in the new 35th District, a bloc east of San Antonio where Trump won 54 percent of the vote last year.

Days later, Casar’s chief of staff said he would only run for Congress in his native Austin, and chastised Doggett for attempting to force him to run elsewhere.

“I had hoped that my commitment to reelection under any circumstances would encourage Congressman Casar to not surrender his winnable district to Trump,” Doggett said in the statement. “While his apparent decision is most unfortunate, I prefer to devote the coming months to fighting Trump tyranny and serving Austin rather than waging a struggle with fellow Democrats.”

Pressure against Doggett ramped up in recent days after David Hogg’s super PAC said it planned to financially support Casar if the two members squared off in a primary. Doggett, who holds over $6 million in his campaign account, had said he planned to spend significantly to defend his seat. Hogg’s group said they had intended to help Casar make up some of the difference.

“Thank you, Congressman Lloyd Doggett, for letting the next generation lead and for your decades of progressive service. I hope more members of Congress follow his example and pass the torch,” Hogg said in a statement to POLITICO.

​Politics

Donald Trump has strong-arming Congress down to a science. Now his redistricting gambit is putting his methods through a stress test.

It’s a strategy of intensifying levels of private coercion and public threats of consequence, driven by Trump and amplified by aides and allies behind closed doors and through the online MAGA echo chamber: White House visits, calls from the president, online insults and even primary threats.

The more-stick-than-carrot approach has delivered Trump major wins in Washington by helping him barrel through initial GOP resistance to controversial Cabinet picks and a politically perilous policy package in a stunningly short turnaround.

That machine is whirring into gear again as the White House pushes Texas, Missouri and Indiana to gerrymander their congressional districts to protect Republicans’ House majority in the midterms. Vice President JD Vance and top aides have been dispatched to Indiana and staffers have phoned into Missouri. Trump is summoning Hoosier Republicans to the White House next week. Both his political operation and right-wing influencers have begun floating primary challenges.

“These folks are not sitting around thinking about redistricting. But in an instant, Trump can prioritize that issue for them and subsequently he can mobilize them on his behalf,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist who has worked for House GOP leadership and on presidential campaigns. “I think he recognizes that formidable power and he’s willing to apply it far and wide.”

Now that redistricting pressure campaign is providing a significant test of whether the approach Trump has near-perfected within his governing trifecta in D.C. can translate beyond the beltway.

Every president has the power of the bully pulpit, wielding the heft of the Oval Office and inside-the-beltway pressure tactics to advance his agenda. But Trump also retains a uniquely powerful hold over the most enthusiastic voters in the GOP, and is able to leverage the grassroots support of his MAGA movement and Truth Social platform to compound pressure on any resistant Republicans to accede to his demands.

Marrying the two, Trump has a singular strategy that he’s employed to great effect so far this term to compel Republican lawmakers into supporting his appointees and legislative agenda.

There are very few exceptions, in part because Trump has made clear the consequences for dissent. Trump and his team have repeatedly threatened primary challenges for GOP lawmakers who do not bend to his will, going as far as standing up a super PAC that’s raising millions of dollars to target Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) for voting against the “big, beautiful bill.” And the White House is vetting potential primary challengers to Massie, including Kentucky state Sen. Aaron Reed, who traveled to Washington for a meeting last month, two people familiar with the trip confirmed to POLITICO.

“Incumbent presidents have broad sway over their party…The only real difference is that Trump will operate with language and threats we haven’t seen from other presidents,” said Doug Heye, a GOP strategist who has worked for House Republican leadership. “He’s more YOLO than lame duck.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Now Trump and his team are trying their playbook on GOP governors and state lawmakers as they push as many red states as possible into mid-decade redistricting. They are on the cusp of success in Texas, where the Republican-controlled Legislature is imposing a new map designed to net the party five seats.

Missouri Republicans are widely expected to follow suit when they return to Jefferson City in September for their annual veto session — despite still smarting from a knock-down, drag-out redistricting fight just two years ago in which they ultimately rejected drawing an additional GOP district.

While Republicans in the state Legislature are reluctant to revisit the difficult inter-party politics at play, the Trump administration is working to force them to submit anyway, calling up Gov. Mike Kehoe and local lawmakers who have expressed skepticism about the effort.

There’s also a less direct form of pressure at play — one that has guided GOP decision-making throughout Trump’s time as the party’s standard-bearer.

“No one wants to be seen as anti-administration or anti-Trump,” said a Missouri GOP operative granted anonymity to speak candidly about private deliberations. “That does not do anyone any good when they go back to their district.”

But the potential limits of Trump’s pressure-campaign playbook are showing in Indiana, where Republicans are so far resisting a more intensive — and public — push. That includes several GOP state lawmakers who have publicly panned the effort, with one hard-right representative slamming it as “politically optically horrible.”

The White House dispatched Vance and top administration aides to Indiana to pitch the governor and GOP legislative leaders on gerrymandering the map. White House Intergovernmental Affairs Director Alex Meyer, in his personal capacity, hascalled several lawmakers to press them to redistrict. A group called Forward America flooded voters’ phones with robocalls and text messages urging them to call their lawmakers to back the effort. Trump’s political operation is considering primarying lawmakers who refuse to fall in line — a threat amplified by MAGA influencer and Turning Point USA CEO Charlie Kirk.

As the pressure mounted, all seven of Indiana’s Republican representatives in Congress issued a series of rapid-fire statements over six hours on Monday supporting Trump’s redistricting push — a clearly coordinated piling-on of pressure as state House Republicans huddled behind closed doors. The state’s two Republican senators backed the effort the following morning.

But progress remains elusive: Gov. Mike Braun is still undecided on whether to call a special session to advance a new map, and GOP resistance is still flaring from within the state house.

Trump and his team show no signs of letting up, bullish about Republicans’ advantages in the redistricting arms race that has exploded between red and blue states. The administration is planning to court more than four dozen Indiana Republicans — including the state House speaker and Senate president — at the White House next week.

And Trump’s allies believe his ability to get his party to fall in line on his agenda is nearly infinite.

“As Trump has said before: The party is what I say it is,” said David Urban, a Trump 2016 campaign adviser and longtime ally. “And that is largely true.”

Adam Wren contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misidentified the state Vance visited. It was Indiana.

​Politics

During the 2024 election campaign, the Republican Party’s historically fraught relationship with organized labor appeared to be changing. Several influential Republicans reached out to unions, seeking to cement the loyalties of the growing ranks of working-class Americans who have been backing Donald Trump’s presidential runs and voting for other members of his party.

During Trump’s first bid for the White house, the percentage of votes in households where at least one person belongs to a union fell to its lowest level in decades. In 2021, Marco Rubio, a U.S. senator at the time, wrote a USA Today op-ed supporting a unionization drive at an Amazon facility. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, walked a United Auto Workers picket line in 2023 in solidarity with striking workers.

As the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, Trump spotlighted International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien with a prominent speaking slot at the Republican National Convention – rewarding the union for staying neutral in that campaign after endorsing Joe Biden four years earlier.

Yet O’Brien shocked many in the convention crowd by lambasting longtime GOP coalition partners such as the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable for hurting American workers.

Once in office, Trump continued to signal some degree of solidarity with the blue-collar voters who backed him. He chose former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Teamsters ally, to be his second-term labor secretary.

I’m a sociologist who has been researching the U.S. labor movement for over two decades. Given conservatives’ long-standing antipathy toward unions, I was curious whether the GOP’s greater engagement with labor portended any kind of change in its policies.

Fumbled at the starting line

The GOP’s various outreach efforts during the 2024 campaign led University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, a scholar of declining labor power, to write, “Is a pro-labor Republican Party possible?”

More than six months into Trump’s second term, I would say that based on the evidence thus far the answer to Posner’s question is a resounding no.

In late March 2025, Trump issued an executive order stripping hundreds of thousands of federal workers of their collective bargaining rights.

Overnight, twice as many federal employees lost their union protections as there are members of the United Auto Workers union, making the action “the largest and most aggressive single act of union-busting in U.S. history,” according to Georgetown University labor historian Joseph McCartin.

While affected unions have challenged that action and similar subsequent ones in court, the Trump administration is moving onto other agencies. In August, over 400,000 federal employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs and Environmental Protection Agency saw their union contracts terminated and their collective bargaining rights dissolved.

Everett Kelley, the American Federation of Government Employees president, described the attacks on federal workers as a “setback for fundamental rights in America.”

Tariffs, other policies aren’t helping

The Trump administration has pitched its erratic tariff policies as a boon to U.S.manufacturing, including in the automotive industry, once the foundation of the U.S. labor movement.

In reality, U.S. car producers are struggling to keep up with rising tariff-related costs of raw materials and parts. The number of factory jobs has fallen to the lowest level since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, a supporter of targeted tariffs to buttress the domestic auto industry, criticized the administration’s trade policy in April 2025, saying, “We do not support reckless tariffs on all countries at crazy rates.”

Other administration actions cast as relief for struggling workers are unlikely to deliver as advertised. The “no tax on tips” provision in Trump’s huge tax-and-spending package excludes the nearly 40% of tipped workers whose earnings fall below the federal income tax threshold. Tipped workers make up a tiny share of the low-wage workforce.

Culinary Workers Local 226, a powerful Nevada union representing many tipped workers in Las Vegas and Reno, supported the provision. Yet it blasted the overall package, calling it a “big, horrible bill” for its windfalls to the rich instead of the working class.

Removing the watchdogs

The National Labor Relations Board is responsible for ensuring management and labor adhere to provisions of the National Labor Relations Act. Passed in 1935, that law established workers’ fundamental rights to collective bargaining. The board is responsible for conducting union elections, investigating allegations of unfair labor practices and outright abuses by employers, and enforcing court orders when employers or unions are found to have broken labor laws.

Presidents regularly use vacancies to tilt the ideological balance of the board to a more or less labor-friendly position. Trump, however, went further.

Soon after he was sworn in for a second term, Trump fired the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel along with board member Gwynne Wilcox, who was only halfway through her five-year term. Wilcox’s dismissal was unprecedented and violated the National Labor Relations Act provision on board personnel changes.

Wilcox’s removal left the body without a quorum, preventing it from responding to appeals or requests for review and allowing employers accused of violating workers’ rights to delay any settlement. The Trump administration has left those important NLRB jobs vacant for months, although it has nominated two management-friendly replacements, both of whom awaited Senate approval in mid-August.

In the meantime, the agency is unable to hear labor disputes.

Disempowering the NLRB is a long-standing Republican tactic, suggesting more continuity with past GOP attacks on labor than a new era of partnership.

Hawley standing out

To be sure, Republicans don’t all agree with one another on the importance of supporting workers and labor rights. One who has stood out so far is Hawley. The relatively pro-labor Republican senator’s stance led him to partner with Sen. Corey Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, to co-sponsor the Faster Labor Contracts Act.

This new bill would force employers to negotiate a contract in a reasonable time frame with employees once they have voted in favor of forming a union.

Hawley also joined with Democrats to reintroduce a bill that would ban dangerous work speed requirements in warehouses. Hawley said, when summarizing his efforts on behalf of working people, “It’s time we deliver for them.”

The Missouri senator is not completely alone. Sens. Bernie Moreno of Ohio and Roger Marshall of Kansas, both Republicans, have backed some labor-friendly legislation in the spring and summer of this year.

GOP leaders in Congress are not moving those bills forward so far, likely in part due to pushback from Republicans and their allies outside Congress.

And there are limits to Hawley’s labor friendliness. He voted for Trump’s tax-and-spending package, despite publicly airing his misgivings about the harm it may cause his blue-collar constituents.

Meanwhile, his past partners in the more labor-friendly wing of the GOP now occupy prominent administration posts. Yet they have largely fallen silent on union issues – except, in Rubio’s case, to oversee the firing of well over 1,000 State Department employees, many of them members of the American Foreign Service Association union.

Trump labor approach echoes Reagan’s style

Another GOP presidential administration courted segments of the labor movement to divide a key Democratic constituency, only to take actions that weakened unions.

In 1980, for example, Ronald Reagan sought and won the endorsement of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. A year later, he fired 13,000 striking members of that union.

The Teamsters union also backed Reagan – twice. It endorsed him in 1980 after he pledged during the 1980 campaign not to pursue anti-labor policies. Although he broke his promise, personal outreach from Vice President George H.W. Bush in the lead-up to the 1984 election earned him the Teamsters endorsement a second time.

What seems clear in my view is that whenever the GOP has tried to cast itself as a labor-friendly political party, it has emphasized symbolism over substance, favoring using rhetoric embracing workers who belong to unions versus taking actions to strengthen labor rights.

To support his research, Jake Rosenfeld has received funding from the Economic Policy Institute, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Urban Institute, and the National Science Foundation.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation