Category: Politics

The 2026 midterms are more than a year away, but some high-profile primary election battles in the Democratic Party are gaining national attention. Much of that attention is focused on the age of the candidates.

Thanks to Texas’ proposed mid-decade redistricting, a showdown is looming between two Democrats serving in the U.S. House of Representatives from that state: 36-year-old Rep. Greg Casar has made clear his intention to run against a colleague, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, despite Doggett’s public pressure on Casar to run in a different district. Doggett is 78 years old and has served in the House since 1994.

An even more stark generational divide has emerged in New York’s 12th district, where 26-year-old political organizer Liam Elkind is making a similar challenge in a Democratic primary. The 18-term incumbent in that race, Rep. Jerry Nadler, will be 79 years old by next year’s midterm election. He began his political career as a New York state assemblyman in 1977 — more than 20 years before Elkind was born.

These generational matchups have become common in the Democratic Party. They have also gained significant attention, particularly since the 2018 upset of another veteran Democratic leader, Rep. Joe Crowley of New York, in a primary challenge from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was 28 at the time.

These challengers often criticize the seniority of older lawmakers. They say seniority is not a benefit but a hindrance to effective representation because the longtime incumbents are out of touch with the needs of their districts and the country, and that remaining in office crowds out crucial younger perspectives.

As generational challenges have become more common, they’ve also become sharper in their explicit appeals to age as a key candidate quality. And candidates like Elkind have made the argument that the stakes go beyond generational “vibes.”

A geriatric Congress can also have demonstrable effects on the policymaking that happens on Capitol Hill.

Slim majorities make age a bigger issue

Why is candidate age so prominent in the current election cycle?

One big reason is that razor-thin majorities in Congress make every seat count.

Slim margins create legislative and institutional uncertainty that has very real consequences for how Congress is run and how policy gets made.

In his candidacy announcement video, Elkind makes this point explicitly: “In the last five months, three House Democrats passed away, allowing Trump’s billionaire bill, gutting health care and food stamps for millions of people, to go through by one vote.”

Although it’s likely that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would have passed even without these vacancies, the Democratic absences undoubtedly made Speaker Mike Johnson’s job of passing the bill a little bit easier.

Elkind also notes that the last eight members of Congress who passed away in office were Democrats. In essence, Elkind is arguing that Democrats must elect more young members not just as a matter of representation but as a way of preserving power in Congress.

How do vacancies occur?

Seat vacancies caused by the early departures of members of Congress happen regularly, and in a variety of ways.

The 118th Congress, which met from Jan. 3, 2023, to Jan. 3, 2025, set a modern record with 17 vacancies, a rate unmatched going back to the 1950s. This was partly because of four member deaths, including Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas.

Other high-profile vacancies in the 118th Congress were due to different causes. Some members were forced to resign or even expelled from Congress because of scandal, like GOP Rep. George Santos of New York, who was convicted in 2024 for a range of crimes and subsequently sentenced to several years in prison.

Others cut short their current term due to political defeats: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California, resigned after being ousted from his leadership post in 2023. The current 119th Congress has seen additional resignations from members who took positions in the second Trump administration.

Resignation is the most common reason for departure in recent Congresses. However, at least one member – and often more than one – has died in all but one Congress in the past 70 years. The number of deaths that regularly occur among members is more than sufficient to change how the majority party functions in a closely contested Congress like this one.

And for Democrats, three member deaths in the first nine months of the current Congress is far ahead of previous years’ paces, making incumbents’ advanced age a relevant issue on the campaign trail.

How are vacancies filled?

Although U.S. Senate vacancies are often – though not always – filled through an appointment by the governor of that state, the Constitution mandates that House vacancies be filled by special elections scheduled by the governor.

These elections usually happen within a few months of the vacancy. What this means is that there are real possibilities for the size of a party’s majority to shrink, or grow, between election years, in ways that have profound impacts on policymaking. And even if a majority party shift doesn’t happen, a district could still replace a moderate departing representative with an extremist, or vice versa.

What does this mean for the 2026 midterms?

Whether younger candidates’ message will resonate with primary election voters remains an open question. Longer-serving incumbents hold major advantages like deeper campaign experience. Younger candidates traditionally lack the name recognition and donor bases that older incumbents have built up over decades.

But given the public concern over the high-profile declines of candidates for president – like former President Joe Biden – and for Congress, like Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell, generational politics may be more important than ever, and help reverse this trend.

This story contains material from a previous article published on Jan. 3, 2023.

Charlie Hunt 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

When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign.

It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power.

It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has revealed his ambitions to rewrite America’s official history to, in the words of the Organization of American Historians, “reflect a glorified narrative … while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.”

This ambition was manifested in efforts by the Department of Education to eradicate a “DEI agenda” from school curricula. It also included a high-profile assault on what detractors saw as “woke” universities, which culminated in Columbia University’s agreement to submit to a review of the faculty and curriculum of its Middle Eastern Studies department, with the aim of eradicating alleged pro-Palestinian bias.

Now, the administration has shifted its sights from formal educational institutions to one of the key sites of public history-making: the Smithsonian, a collection of 21 museums, the National Zoo and associated research centers, principally centered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

On Aug. 12, 2025, the Smithsonian’s director, Lonnie Bunch III, received a letter from the White House announcing its intent to carry out a systematic review of the institution’s holdings and exhibitions in the advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

The review’s stated aim is to ensure that museum content adequately reflects “Americanism” through a commitment to “celebrate American exceptionalism, [and] remove divisive or partisan narratives.”

On Aug. 19, 2025, Trump escalated his attack on the Smithsonian. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was…” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.”

Such ambitions may sound benign, but they are deeply Orwellian. Here’s how.

Winners write the history

Author George Orwell believed in objective, historical truth. Writing in 1946, he attributed his youthful desire to become an author in part to a “historical impulse,” or “the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”

But while Orwell believed in the existence of an objective truth about history, he did not necessarily believe that truth would prevail.

Truth, Orwell recognized, was best served by free speech and dialogue. Yet absolute power, Orwell appreciated, allowed those who possessed it to silence or censor opposing narratives, quashing the possibility of productive dialogue about history that could ultimately allow truth to come out.

As Orwell wrote in “1984,” his final, dystopian novel, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Historian Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska has written about America’s bicentennial celebrations that took place in 1976. Then, she says, “Americans across the nation helped contribute to a pluralistic and inclusive commemoration … using it as a moment to question who had been left out of the legacies of the American Revolution, to tell more inclusive stories about the history of the United States.”

This was an example of the kind of productive dialogue encouraged in a free society. “By contrast,” writes Rymsza-Pawlowska, “the 250th is shaping up to be a top-down affair that advances a relatively narrow and celebratory idea of Americanism.” The newly announced Smithsonian review aims to purge counternarratives that challenge that celebratory idea.

The Ministry of Truth

The desire to eradicate counternarratives drives Winston Smith’s job at the ironically named Ministry of Truth in “1984.”

The novel is set in Oceania, a geographical entity covering North America and the British Isles and which governs much of the Global South.

Oceania is an absolute tyranny governed by Big Brother, the leader of a political party whose only goal is the perpetuation of its own power. In this society, truth is what Big Brother and the party say it is.

The regime imposes near total censorship so that not only dissident speech but subversive private reflection, or “thought crime,” is viciously prosecuted. In this way, it controls the present.

But it also controls the past. As the party’s protean policy evolves, Smith and his colleagues are tasked with systematically destroying any historical records that conflict with the current version of history. Smith literally disposes of artifacts of inexpedient history by throwing them down “memory holes,” where they are “wiped … out of existence and out of memory.”

At a key point in the novel, Smith recalls briefly holding on to a newspaper clipping that proved that an enemy of the regime had not actually committed the crime he had been accused of. Smith recognizes the power over the regime that this clipping gives him, but he simultaneously fears that power will make him a target. In the end, fear of retaliation leads him to drop the slip of newsprint down a memory hole.

The contemporary U.S. is a far cry from Orwell’s Oceania. Yet the Trump administration is doing its best to exert control over the present and the past.

Down the memory hole

Even before the Trump administration announced its review of the Smithsonian, officials in departments across government had taken unprecedented steps to rewrite the nation’s official history, attempting to purge parts of the historical narrative down Orwellian memory holes.

Comically, those efforts included the temporary removal from government websites of information about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The plane was unwittingly caught up in a mass purge of references to “gay” and LGBTQ+ content on government websites.

Other erasures have included the deletion of content on government sites related to the life ofHarriet Tubman, the Maryland woman who escaped slavery and then played a pioneering role as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom.

Public outcry led to the restoration of most of the deleted content.

Over at the Smithsonian, which earlier in the year had been criticized by Trump for its “divisive, race-centered ideology,” staff removed a temporary placard with references to President Trump’s two impeachment trials from a display case on impeachment that formed part of the National Museum of American History exhibition on the American presidency. The references to Trump’s two impeachments were modified, with some details removed, in a newly installed placard in the updated display.

Responding to questions, the Smithsonian stated that the placard’s removal was not in response to political pressure: “The placard, which was meant to be a temporary addition to a 25-year-old exhibition, did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation.”

Repressing thought

Orwell’s “1984” ends with an appendix on the history of “Newspeak,” Oceania’s official language, which, while it had not yet superseded “Oldspeak” or standard English, was rapidly gaining ground as both a written and spoken dialect.

According to the appendix, “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”

Orwell, as so often in his writing, makes the abstract theory concrete: “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds.’ … political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts.”

The goal of this language streamlining was total control over past, present and future.

If it is illegal to even speak of systemic racism, for example, let alone discuss its causes and possible remedies, it constrains the potential for, even prohibits, social change.

It has become a cliché that those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it.

As George Orwell appreciated, the correlate is that social and historical progress require an awareness of, and receptivity to, both historical fact and competing historical narratives.

This story is an updated version of an article originally published on June 9, 2025.

The Smithsonian is a member of The Conversation U.S.

Laura Beers 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

With an inescapable, smashmouth, all-caps-laden and meme-filled X account, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is holding a mirror up to MAGA — and MAGA doesn’t like what it sees.

There’s Newsom on Mount Rushmore. There’s Newsom getting prayed over by Tucker Carlson, Kid Rock and an angelic, winged Hulk Hogan. There’s Newsom posting in all caps, saying his mid-cycle redistricting proposal has led “MANY” people to call him “GAVIN CHRISTOPHER ‘COLUMBUS’ NEWSOM (BECAUSE OF THE MAPS!). THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

If this genre of social media post provokes deja vu, there’s a good reason for that.

“He’s trying to mimic President Trump,” MAGA vanguard Steve Bannon tells POLITICO. “He’s no Trump, but if you look at the Democratic Party, he’s at least getting up there, and he’s trying to imitate a Trumpian vision of fighting, right? He looks like the only person in the Democratic Party who is organizing a fight that they feel they can win.”

For a decade, President Donald Trump has blazed trails online. And now, Newsom has found that by replicating Trump’s posts to the point of outright parody and trolling, he’s effectively gamed social media algorithms and colonized X’s typically right-coded “for you” tab.

In doing so, Newsom is not only getting on Republicans’ nerves, but also potentially redefining how Democrats function as the opposition party in the age of Trump.

Michelle Obama famously advised Democrats to live by a dictum: “When they go low, we go high.” Newsom has approached it a bit differently: When they go low, we go low, and — backed by lots of AI-generated slop — end up high in the algorithm.

“I’ve changed,” Newsom told Fox LA when asked about his new media approach in an interview that posted overnight. “The facts have changed; we [Democrats] need to change.”

Newsom’s MAGA-flavored posts have birthed an organic outburst of user-generated memes — not dissimilar to the dynamic Trump has inspired (and from which he has drawn over the years in posts on his @realDonaldTrump accounts). There’s Newsom riding a raptor into battle, a tattered Old Glory rippling in the wind behind him. There’s Newsom riding a different dinosaur while shirtless and sporting an eight-pack of abs, raising pistols in the air. (Newsom’s office tells POLITICO they don’t use AI to generate written content, though lean on it to create visuals.)

Newsom “isn’t just trolling MAGA; he’s proving to Democrats that stepping off your digital high horse and entering the fray is both messy and worth it,” says Stefan Smith, a digital strategist who was online engagement director on Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign. “The man was political roadkill a few months ago but, with a shift in strategy, he’s become a cause célèbre of the Resistance 2.0. No doubt the rest of the 2028 shadow primary entrants are taking notes.”

In some ways, it’s like peering into the near future of what a post-literate presidential campaign might look like. (In case you have trouble imagining who might occupy such a race, look no further than the side-by-side post of Newsom and fellow meme lord Vice President JD Vance, which has been seen on X at least 54 million times.)

“Newsom has entered the digital dojo, and he’s performing the sort of memetic jujitsu that’s scaring Republican white belts unused to actual competition,” Smith tells POLITICO. “For too long, Democrats have been posted up in the parking lot, too afraid of getting it wrong to throw a jab. This should energize folks to get into the octagon.”

Voices on the right are noticing, too. “If I were his wife, I would say you are making a fool of yourself,” Fox News’ Dana Perino said, speaking of Newsom’s antics on X. “He’s got a big job as governor of California, but if he wants an even bigger job, he has to be a little more serious.”

In private, staffers in Newsom’s press office smiled. Perino said nothing about the leader of the free world’s own social posting — the very thing Newsom is emulating.

“ALMOST A WEEK IN AND THEY STILL DON’T GET IT,” the account responded. The next morning, “Governor Newsom Press Office” again flickered to life. “FOX IS LOSING IT BECAUSE WHEN I TYPE, AMERICA NOW WINS!!!”

Newsom’s press office says that Trump has used all-caps less in his own posts of late. White House communications director Steven Cheung is posting about the account, and recently said that Newsom is a “coward and Beta Cuck” for not fielding questions at a press conference. (He was, in fact, as a livestreamed video showed.) Newsom’s press office shot back: “Steven Cheung (incompetent Trump staffer) doesn’t know how to use his computer. SAD!” White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson called Newsom’s posts “weird and not at all funny.”

Newsom’s staff count these critiques as wins. In their minds, the Trump aides are, in an indirect way, critiquing their own boss when attacking Newsom’s tactics.

“I hope it’s a wake-up call for the president of the United States,” the California governor said recently, breaking character when asked about his X posts. “I’m sort of following his example. If you’ve got issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns about what he’s putting out as president. … I think the deeper question is how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets, Truth Social posts over the course of the last many years, to go without similar scrutiny and notice?”

Asked for a comment, the White House sent POLITICO an original meme, referencing a famous scene from the show “Mad Men.” (It is, to our knowledge, the first official White House press statement delivered exclusively in meme form.)

Added Abigail Jackson: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

The “Governor Newsom Press Office” account has humble origins. The handle, @GovPressOffice, was created by aides to Jerry Brown — a man more given to Zen Buddhism than the fever swamps of the internet — and belongs to the California governor’s office. Because of that, just as Brown’s aides passed it off to Newsom in January 2019, Newsom will hand it off to his successor in January 2027; he won’t be able to take what he built with him when his term ends.

And what his team has built is substantial. As of this writing, the “Governor Newsom Press Office” account has 408,000 followers on X. Since the beginning of August, it has gained more than 250,000 followers and earned more than 225 million impressions, according to Newsom’s office.

Though some online observers speculated that Newsom digital director Camille Zapata primarily steers the effort, POLITICO has learned that the account is helmed by a team of four or five people — a sort of “brain rot” trust that includes Newsom communications director Izzy Gardon and rapid response director Brandon Richards. Newsom’s office declined to describe the governor’s level of involvement, but told POLITICO that he leads the effort.

No other prospective 2028 candidate — Democrat or Republican — is breaking through in the online attention economy like Newsom. And it’s not just his press office’s account: His campaign X account tops 2.4 million followers. On his campaign accounts alone, since 2025 began, Newsom has gained 2.96 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, X and Substack. All of that has earned him a billion-plus views and impressions, his team tells POLITICO.

Still, AI slop and dinosaur memes don’t vote in Democratic primaries. But Democrats who are way more offline — and who hail from far beyond the Golden State — are also noticing Newsom.

“I’ve heard a lot of people say how happy they are to see a Democrat fighting back,” says Jim Demers, a former New Hampshire state representative and member of Stand Up New Hampshire, a group organizing town halls in the early primary state. “There’s this feeling that Democrats are not fighting hard enough, and he’s showing the fight people are looking for.”

“People in the MAGA movement and the America First movement should start paying attention to this, because it’s not going to go away,” Bannon tells POLITICO. “They’re only going to get more intense.”

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​Politics

Pennsylvania spends roughly US$200,000 a year for each juvenile it incarcerates, according to a 2021 report from the bipartisan Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Task Force.

That’s 50 times the cost to deliver evidence-based family therapy that could prevent kids from entering the justice system in the first place.

In Philadelphia, juvenile incarceration involves confinement in the city‑run Philadelphia Juvenile Justice Services Center or other residential placement facility.

Young people leave these facilities with lower chances of graduating high school, frayed mental health and a higher likelihood of rearrest or being shot.

The social, emotional and economic costs of incarcerating young people are compounded in Philadelphia where, on any given day, dozens of youth may be held in the Juvenile Justice Services Center after they have been sentenced because a secure facility bed is not available.

That waiting time, which can be months, is punitive and unjust because it is not credited toward their sentence.

Drawing on almost 35 years of work in Philadelphia and other cities to understand what makes neighborhoods safer, I believe the surest returns come from prevention strategies aimed at young people who are not yet enmeshed in robberies, shootings and gang activity.

Homicides in Philadelphia are at their lowest levels in 25 years. In my view, this is an opportunity to redirect even youth who are already involved in violence away from the costly and counterproductive cycle of incarceration and into targeted, relationship-focused intervention programs that are humane, voluntary and effective.

At least two such programs exist here in Philadelphia – but on a modest scale.

School-based case management at Bartram High

In Southwest Philly, John Bartram High School’s Youth Violence Reduction Initiative launched in 2023.

It was designed by former School Safety Chief and now Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, School Safety Officer and Program Manager Kevin Rosa, criminal justice researcher Brandy Blasko and me.

Students who have been involved in fights or show other risk factors for violence and street gang involvement are referred to the program.

The initative’s core idea is simple: Earn students’ trust through consistent, credible mentorship and step in when needed. Stepping in means teaching conflict resolution skills, running engaging workshops, buying a meal, or intervening when a fight is brewing or a student is on the verge of being expelled.

Each week a team of administrators, counselors, school safety officers and community outreach workers, most of whom are based in the school, review every participant’s progress. They track follow-through on referrals and coordinate communication with families and school staff.

The tightly managed, relationship-driven safety net gives students quicker access to help and makes the school climate calmer and safer.

Prior to 2023, on average, five Bartram High students were victims of firearm assault – at least one fatally – each school year.

At the 2025 National Conference on Juvenile Justice, program leaders presented evidence of an 80% decrease in firearm assaults by students and a 31% decrease in student-on-student assaults that did not involve guns. They also reported a 92% decrease in gang-involved group assaults, a 67% drop in student-on-staff assaults and a 62% drop in school incidents involving police.

More rigorous analysis needs to be done to verify that the program itself produced these results and some other factor wasn’t involved.

The program costs roughly $120,000 to serve 30 to 35 teenagers over a school year. That covers two full-time case managers, one part-time program manager and a small discretionary fund. The fund can be used for things such as local trips to museums, paying guest speakers and incentives for participant milestones.

Community-based support in West and Southwest Philly

The nonprofit YEAH Philly launched its Violent Crime Initiative in late 2020 for young people ages 15–24 from West and Southwest Philadelphia who have been charged with a violent or gun-related offense.

It takes the same relationship-based playbook the Youth Violence Reduction Initiative uses and amplifies it.

Court advocacy, cash stipends and intensive case management stay on tap for as long as a young person wants them. Since its inception, the voluntary program has served almost 200 people. Currently, 22 Philly youth receive Violent Crime Initiative services.

Flexible funding enables case managers to address nearly any support need that arises, going well beyond standard program budgets. This could mean a young person receives full tuition support for a two-year dental technician program while also attending intensive remedial writing workshops. Meanwhile, a partnership with Project HOME can secure them subsidized housing at Kate’s Place in Center City.

The approach emphasizes connection, case management and skill-building – key elements shown to help young people thrive when supported by caring, consistent adults.

I analyzed arrest data following a cohort of 93 young people who received Violent Crime Initiative services between January 2020 and April 2025. Among participants with two or more prior arrests, the rearrest rate was 60%. That’s compared to over 80% documented in a 2023 report prepared for the Philadelphia district attorney’s office that analyzed data on Philadelphia juveniles arrested in 2016. However, we haven’t been collecting data on all of the Violent Crime Initiative participants for as long, so the two figures are not perfectly comparable.

The power of credible, caring adults

Fostering deep engagement with positive role models is not a feel-good add-on. It is evidence-based public safety policy.

Research shows clearly that one of the most reliable turning points for high-risk youth is a stable, caring relationship with an adult who refuses to give up on them. This can be a teacher, coach, grandparent or any other trusted adult who provides consistent positive support and guidance and opens doors to new opportunities.

My own research on how and why young people leave street gangs underscores just how powerful such relationships can be. I also led a three-study synthesis with colleagues from Arizona State University and the University of Colorado-Boulder that reviewed research involving 784 former gang members in 13 U.S. cities. We wanted to understand what actually moves young people out of gang life.

The clearest pattern was positive relationships. “Push” forces, such as fatigue from violence or pressure from police, opened the exit door for many. But lasting change required equally strong “pulls” toward stable, positive relationships.

Data-sharing enables early intervention

After decades of evaluating both successful and failed public safety initiatives, I can say the biggest hurdle to developing cost-effective policies that reduce youth violence is the lack of coordinated, cross-agency use of data.

Cities need more than justice system records to guide their efforts. They need integrated information from schools, housing, behavioral health and community services.

With the right tools, early warning signs such as chronic school absence, school and neighborhood fights, and gun carrying can be flagged and young people matched with evidence-based programs and services they choose to participate in, rather than being mandated by the court, before a major crisis occurs.

Philadelphia already has the technical backbone for this work.

The Integrated Data for Evidence & Action or, “IDEA,” warehouse is a secure, city-run system that links administrative records across agencies. It allows officials to analyze patterns of risk across education, justice, housing and health systems, and it is used to support policy priorities such as Mayor Cherelle Parker’s public safety goal of reducing homicides by 20%.

Philadelphia also uses multidisciplinary planning meetings to configure services after a juvenile is released from incarceration – but only after incarceration. The meetings bring together the young people and their families with probation officers; attorneys; school, court and community representatives; behavioral health clinicians; and case management teams to coordinate supports that ease reentry and reduce recidivism.

Philadelphia city leaders could apply this coordinated approach earlier in a young person’s life and replace expensive and counterproductive confinement with voluntary, relationship-centered programming, using data from the IDEA warehouse to address early risk, pilot new ideas and track outcomes in real time.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia.

Caterina G. Roman consults for the Office of School Safety within the School District of Philadelphia which runs the Youth Violence Reduction Initiative. She is also supported by the Neubauer Family Foundation as the evaluation partner for YEAH Philly’s Violence Crime Initiative. She is a member of the Advisory Board for Everytown for Gun Safety’s Community Safety Fund.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Republicans have a warning for their base: If you let Democrats retake the House, they’ll impeach Donald Trump again.

“Democrats would vote to impeach (Trump) on their first day,” Speaker Mike Johnson claimed in an interview with the Shreveport Times this month. Conservative columnist Bryon York warned Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to redistrict California was a veiled threat to “end the Trump presidency by using the constitutional procedure to end presidencies — impeachment.” And the National Republican Congressional Committee recently unleashed a digital ad framing the stakes of the midterms this way: Democrats’ “Project 2026” agenda is to “impeach President Trump.”

As the GOP is girding for potentially tough midterms battles, it sees the spectre of impeachment as a reason for conservative-leaning voters to come to the polls in a year when Trump is not on the ballot.

But so far, at least, Democrats seem wary of even talking about it. In conversations with roughly a dozen Democratic strategists and elected officials, there is little consensus about the party’s strategy on impeachment. Many warned against focusing on it.

“We should never, at least in the near future, use the ‘I’ word,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.). “One of the things we learned is that articles of impeachment are also articles of recruitment for Trump.”

Trump survived removal efforts and found his way back into power, even though Democrats said he was a threat to democracy. If anything, impeachment and his legal troubles before returning to office resulted in a fundraising boon for Trump.

House Democratic leaders appear vexed at the prospect of making a third run at removing Trump from office after previous attempts ended in acquittals in the Senate. With the party needing only a handful of seats to take back the majority in the House, it is not clear the broader electorate is clamoring for another impeachment fight.

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ office declined to comment for this story. But a person close to House leadership, granted anonymity to discuss campaign strategy, blasted Republicans for going into “full fear mode” about the midterm elections.

“There will be some emotional members who want to grab headlines with impeachment, however [House Democratic] leadership has thus far shown that it’s not a tool in our box” to hold Trump accountable, the person added, with House Democrats blocking attempts by some members to impeach him.

“Of course impeachment is a tool of the Congress that should always be available and appropriate,” said Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), who also chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “But right now, I think we’re in a stage where we’re trying to try this case out in the court of public opinion before we do anything else.”

Even outside groups that were leading agitators for Democrats to launch impeachment efforts during Trump’s first term seem reluctant to deploy that same strategy again.

“Impeachment is good, but it’s a symbolic act. It’s not enough,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible.

So far this year, House Democrats have doomed efforts by their own caucus members to impeach Trump, including a majority of the caucus joining House Republicans to kill an impeachment push from Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) over Iran airstrikes in June. House leadership successfully dissuaded Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) from moving forward with another article of impeachment stemming from Trump’s push to annex Greenland and on tariffs.

Green plans to keep trying.

“I will not stop and I promise you this president is going to be brought down. He’s got to be brought down,” Green said during a press conference this month in suburban Chicago. Speaking alongside several Democrats from the Texas legislature that left the state to prevent a quorum in Austin to pass the new Texas maps, Green vowed: “He will be impeached again.”

For now, Green is considered an outlier among the caucus, but he was in 2018, too.

Back then, House Democrats, led by then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, were initially uneasy about leaning fully into impeachment talks heading into the midterms. But the burgeoning blue wave that helped Democrats take back the House was propelled by a broader message from the party’s base, who harnessed anti-Trump sentiment promising to hold Trump to account.

Just two weeks after Trump was inaugurated in 2017, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said her “greatest desire is to lead him right into impeachment,” and she continued to call for his impeachment. Four articles of impeachment were introduced in that Congress, by Reps. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) and Green of Texas on a range of offenses ranging from obstructing investigation by firing then-FBI Director James Comey, violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution and a pair of articles citing Trump’s use of “racially inflammatory statements.”

By 2019, about a week after being sworn in, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) revved up an anti-Trump audience proclaiming, “We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!”

While many of these key figures from past impeachments are still in Washington, the politics of impeachment have changed. Democrats have struggled to craft a coherent message and maintain a sustained fight against Trump and his Republican allies.

Many Democrats see it as a fool’s errand to go down that path again.

“Absolutely not. It is bananas to even think about it,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way.

His organization has been trying to warn Democrats against engaging in maneuvers that make them look weak compared to Trump’s aggressive dismantling of federal government and political norms. Impeachment would be a “Trump dream,” he said, that plays into the president’s political strengths.

Some frontline Democrats aren’t running away from impeachment, but they caution that more energy needs to be spent convincing voters Democrats have an agenda worth supporting.

“Impeachment is simply one tool in the tool belt of opportunities to hold the other branch to account,” said Rep. Janelle Bynum, one of incumbent House members Democrats are preparing to defend in next year’s midterms.

There are other tactics Democrats should deploy, according to Levin of Indivisible: “We want hearings, investigations, subpoenas, testimonies, oversight. Trump isn’t the only or even the most important target here — collaborators, capitulators, and enablers should know what’s coming.”

For some, that includes going after those in the president’s orbit who are ramping up pressure campaigns on elected officials in red-leaning states like Texas, Indiana, and Missouri to take up off-year redistricting to create more winnable districts for Republicans to maintain control of the House.

As both parties become entrenched in redistricting battles, some GOP operatives fear it may muddle the party’s ability to elevate a third Trump impeachment as top issue in the midterms.

Republicans worry that without control of the House, Trump’s agenda will grind to a halt. Even with their slim control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans have had difficulty passing much legislation. Trump’s signature tax law was passed through a special reconciliation process requiring a simple majority of both chambers to pass.

If Democrats get power back, Republicans warn, they’ll be looking to wield it.

“If Hakeem Jeffries and Democrats get the majority, day one they’re going to pass articles of impeachment,” said Indiana Republican strategist Pete Seat, pointing to calls from the Democratic base to push back against Trump.”How could they not?”

Shia Kapos contributed to this report.

​Politics

Texas Democrats who left the state to stymie Republicans over redistricting have returned to Austin, ending a two-week standoff over President Donald Trump’s plan to carve out five new GOP congressional seats.

Their return to the state means the Texas House now has the sufficient number of legislators needed to pass a new map benefiting the GOP. Democrats had used the gambit to stall legislative business and bring national attention to Republicans’ decision to pursue off-cycle redistricting ahead of the midterms.

In a statement, the Texas House Democratic Caucus said that members returned on Monday morning “to launch the next phase in their fight against the racist gerrymander that provoked a weeks-long standoff with Governor [Greg] Abbott and President Trump.”

The drama in Texas set off a national redistricting battle, most prominently with California Gov. Gavin Newsom vowing to retaliate against Texas Republicans by extracting an equal number of Democratic-leaning districts from California’s congressional map. Trump has also been pushing to take his redistricting plan to other Republican-led states, like Indiana and Missouri.

After Democrats returned to the state capitol, the House gaveled into session Monday afternoon with enough members to make quorum and conduct official business for the first time in weeks. The map and other legislation now heads to committees before the session resumes Wednesday.

That prompted one more public show of force from the GOP: House Speaker Dustin Burrows on Monday assigned state law enforcement officers to escort the returned Democrats over the next two days, ensuring they come back to Austin on Wednesday. Texas Republican leaders had previously authorized Department of Public Safety officers to canvass the state and stationed them outside lawmakers’ homes while they were outside the state.

Texas Democrats debated how long to stay away from the state, but ultimately laid out two conditions for their return: that the legislature end its first special session and that California lawmakers introduce their own map granting Democrats five more seats to counter Texas. Both of those occurred on Friday, prompting the Texas lawmakers to start returning home.

By breaking quorum, the members racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. It also set off a legal fight brought by Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sought to remove some of the Democrats from office.

Aid for Central Texas flood victims was held up by the standoff. Republicans put redistricting first on the legislative calendar, ahead of disaster relief considerations — a move that Democrats called out as irresponsible. The GOP, in response, argued that Democrats were delaying that relief by remaining out of state.

Abbott had promised to continue calling special sessions after the first one ended, beginning with a second one that began on Friday — a move that added to the pressure he and other GOP leaders exerted on Democrats to end their protest.

​Politics

Donald Trump’s political operation is considering primarying Indiana lawmakers who don’t embrace his mid-decade redistricting plans.

“They have a mountain of cash and even more motivation to win the redistricting wars Democrats started long ago,” a person familiar with the White House’s thinking told POLITICO.

The electoral threats are an escalation of a pressure campaign as Trump and his allies try to extract more GOP seats in Congress across the country. Indiana has been a top target of those efforts, but resistance among some rank-and-file officials has grown as a number of state lawmakers have publicly opposed those efforts in recent days.

“Politics is a team sport, and they prefer to do things with the team … but if Republicans refuse to play team ball, they will very likely begin to focus on upgrading players,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to discuss private operational plans.

The comments came as Indiana House Republicans were preparing to convene for an afternoon caucus Monday to discuss redistricting. Lawmakers have already been targeted by robocalls and text messages from a mysterious group called Forward America. There is little public information about the group and its aggressive voter outreach campaign; a POLITICO reporter who lives in Indiana has received about two dozen calls and messages in recent days.

A number of Indiana lawmakers are planning a pilgrimage to the White House later this month, responding to an invitation extended prior to Vice President JD Vance’s visit to the state to talk redistricting.

“This doesn’t get any easier for Hoosier Republicans who oppose Trump on this issue,” said an Indiana Republican who supports the redistricting push. The Indiana Republican was granted anonymity to speak openly about a sensitive intraparty issue.

The threats of primaries are the latest signal that Trump’s political shop intends to amp up the redistricting arms race as Texas lawmakers move forward this week with passing a map creating five new GOP seats in Congress. It also shows they are eager to clamp down on any discomfort within the party over creating new maps ahead of the 2030 Census.

Turning Point USA CEO Charlie Kirk said on X Monday that “We will support primary opponents for Republicans in the Indiana State Legislature who refuse to support the team and redraw the maps. I’ve heard from grassroots across the country and they want elected Republicans to stand up and fight for them. It’s time for Republicans to be TOUGH.”

The pressure on Indiana lawmakers comes as Texas is moving forward with a redraw of its congressional map at the request of Trump — and California is crafting its own retaliation.

On Monday, dozens of Texas Democrats returned to Austin after protesting redistricting by remaining out-of-state for two weeks, denying Republicans the ability to conduct legislative business. As Texas Republicans are back on path to passing their new, more aggressive gerrymander, national Republicans have turned their attention to other states like Florida, Missouri and Indiana.

A spokesperson for the Indiana House Republican Caucus did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House also did not respond to a request for comment.

​Politics

If you’re confused about the aims, conduct and outcome of the summit meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin held in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15, 2025, you’re probably not alone.

As summits go, the meeting broke with many conventions of diplomacy: It was last-minute, it appeared to ignore longstanding protocol and accounts of what happened were conflicting in the days after the early termination of the event.

The Conversation U.S.’s politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed Donald Heflin, a veteran diplomat now teaching at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, to help untangle what happened and what could happen next.

It was a hastily planned summit. Trump said they’d accomplish things that they didn’t seem to accomplish. Where do things stand now?

It didn’t surprise me or any experienced diplomat that there wasn’t a concrete result from the summit.

First, the two parties, Russia and Ukraine, weren’t asking to come to the peace table. Neither one of them is ready yet, apparently. Second, the process was flawed. It wasn’t prepared well enough in advance, at the secretary of state and foreign minister level. It wasn’t prepared at the staff level.

What was a bit of a surprise was the last couple days before the summit, the White House started sending out what I thought were kind of realistic signals. They said, “Hopefully we’ll get a ceasefire and then a second set of talks a few weeks in the future, and that’ll be the real set of talks.”

Now, that’s kind of reasonable. That could have happened. That was not a terrible plan. The problem was it didn’t happen. And we don’t know exactly why it didn’t happen.

Reading between the lines, there were a couple problems. The first is the Russians, again, just weren’t ready to do this, and they said, “No ceasefire. We want to go straight to permanent peace talks.”

Ukraine doesn’t want that, and neither do its European allies. Why?

When you do a ceasefire, what normally happens is you leave the warring parties in possession of whatever land their military holds right now. That’s just part of the deal. You don’t go into a 60- or 90-day ceasefire and say everybody’s got to pull back to where they were four years ago.

But if you go to a permanent peace plan, which Putin wants, you’ve got to decide that people are going to pull back, right? So that’s problem number one.

Problem number two is it’s clear that Putin is insisting on keeping some of the territory that his troops seized in 2014 and 2022. That’s just a non-starter for the Ukrainians.

Is Putin doing that because that really is his bottom line demand, or did he want to blow up these peace talks, and that was a good way to blow them up? It could be either or both.

Russia has made it clear that it wants to keep parts of Ukraine, based on history and ethnic makeup.

The problem is, the world community has made it clear for decades and decades and decades, you don’t get what you want by invading the country next door.

Remember in Gulf War I, when Saddam Hussein invaded and swallowed Kuwait and made it the 19th province of Iraq? The U.S. and Europe went in there and kicked him out. Then there are also examples where the U.S. and Europe have told countries, “Don’t do this. You do this, it’s going to be bad for you.”

So if Russia learns that it can invade Ukraine and seize territory and be allowed to keep it, what’s to keep them from doing it to some other country? What’s to keep some other country from doing it?

You mean the whole world is watching.

Yes. And the other thing the world is watching is the U.S. gave security guarantees to Ukraine in 1994 when they gave up the nuclear weapons they held, as did Europe. The U.S. has, both diplomatically and in terms of arms, supported Ukraine during this war. If the U.S. lets them down, what kind of message does that send about how reliable a partner the U.S. is?

The U.S. has this whole other thing going on the other side of the world where the country is confronting China on various levels. What if the U.S. sends a signal to the Taiwanese, “Hey, you better make the best deal you can with China, because we’re not going to back your play.”

At least six European leaders are coming to Washington along with Zelenskyy. What does that tell you?

They’re presenting a united front to Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to say, “Look, we can’t have this. Europe’s composed of a bunch of countries. If we get in the situation where one country invades the other and gets to keep the land they took, we can’t have it.”

President Trump had talked to all of them before the summit, and they probably came away with a strong impression that the U.S. was going for a ceasefire. And then, that didn’t happen.

Instead, Trump took Putin’s position of going straight to peace talks, no ceasefire.

I don’t think they liked it. I think they’re coming in to say to him, “No, we have to go to ceasefire first. Then talks and, PS, taking territory and keeping it is terrible precedent. What’s to keep Russia from just storming into the three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – next? The maps of Europe that were drawn 100 years ago have held. If we’re going to let Russia erase a bunch of the borders on the map and incorporate parts, it could really be chaotic.”

Where do you see things going?

Until and unless you hear there’s a ceasefire, nothing’s really happened and the parties are continuing to fight and kill.

What I would look for after the Monday meetings is, does Trump stick to his guns post-Alaska and say, “No, we’re gonna have a big, comprehensive peace agreement, and land for peace is on the table.”

Or does he kind of swing back towards the European point of view and say, “I really think the first thing we got to have is a ceasefire”?

Even critics of Trump need to acknowledge that he’s never been a warmonger. He doesn’t like war. He thinks it’s too chaotic. He can’t control it. No telling what will happen at the other end of war. I think he sincerely wants for the shooting and the killing to stop above all else.

The way you do that is a ceasefire. You have two parties say, “Look, we still hate each other. We still have this really important issue of who controls these territories, but we both agree it’s in our best interest to stop the fighting for 60, 90 days while we work on this.”

If you don’t hear that coming out of the White House into the Monday meetings, this isn’t going anywhere.

There are thousands of Ukrainian children who have been taken by Russia – essentially kidnapped. Does that enter into any of these negotiations?

It should. It was a terror tactic.

This could be a place where you can make progress. If Putin said, well, “We still don’t want to give you any land, but, yeah, these kids here, you can have them back,” it’s the kind of thing you throw on the table to show that you’re not a bad guy and you are kind of serious about these talks.

Whether they’ll do that or not, I don’t know. It’s really a tragic story.

Donald Heflin 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