Category: Politics

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Hours after the American military strikes in Iran started, Third Way co-founder Matt Bennett scrambled to write up a presentation on how centrist Democrats should talk about foreign policy in 2028.

On stage during Third Way’s “Winning the Middle” conference, Bennett described focus groups before the war in Iran started, where “the appetite for ongoing war among the voters we talked to was zero.”

Even though Americans usually default to Republicans on national security, they’re concerned about President Donald Trump’s “erratic” and “unstable” foreign policy, he told a crowd of early-state strategists, Democratic consultants and aides for prominent moderates and 2028 contenders. That, he added, gives Democrats the opening they need to win.

“Voters are going to ask, ‘who can steady the ship? Who’s going to avoid another endless war? Will we demand fairness from our allies?’” Bennett said during his presentation. “You must be decisive and you must be clear that American self-interest will drive your foreign policy.”

The American strikes in Iran reverberated through what was meant to be a domestic-focused conference on Monday, as the party starts to grapple with how to respond to a military maneuver that could become a flashpoint in the midterms. So far, Democrats have been largely united in attacking Trump for authorizing the attacks without Congress’ approval — or a clear exit strategy.

It’s a notable departure for moderates, some of whom backed the Iraq War in 2003, including then-Sen. Hillary Clinton. Her vote, and then-state Sen. Barack Obama’s opposition to the war, would define much of the 2008 presidential primary.

“Democrats don’t want a replay of the Iraq War and they are heeding the calls of the American people to focus on issues here at home,” Doug Thornell, a Democratic strategist who advised Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s campaign, said at the conference in an interview. “This administration has done very little to make the case that this is something worth the blood and treasure of the United States.”

There’s early evidence voters broadly disapprove of the Iran strikes: A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only one in four Americans support Trump’s decision — a data point that zinged around Democrats’ group chats during the afternoon’s presentations.

Mentions of Iran were limited during the conference’s panels, which drilled in on domestic issues: “‘Affordability’: Buzzword or Breakthrough,” and “Elevating Moderate Voices Online.” But within minutes of kicking off the event Sunday night, Third Way president Jon Cowan addressed the war.

“You can hate the regime in Iran and you can celebrate their downfall, but you can also have legitimate skepticism about the war because you can have doubts about Trump’s truthiness,” he said.

Online and in TV interviews, some fractures have begun to emerge.

Several progressives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have pushed for an immediate end to the war. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who is running for governor, called for “values-based arguments against war with Iran,” and “NOT process (‘Come to Congress’) ones,” in an X post on Saturday. That’s an apparent reference to Democrats like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffriees and battleground lawmakers who’ve taken a more measured response.

Jeffries, in his initial statement, condemned Trump for failing to seek congressional authorization and called for Iran to be “aggressively confronted.” Jeffries said Monday morning on CNN that “nothing has been presented to justify what’s taken place up until this point.”

“The crutch that the moderate, corporate wing of the party is using is a process argument,” said Usamah Andrabi, Justice Democrats’ communications director. “It’s not just that Trump didn’t come to Congress first, we need to oppose this war no matter the process and Democratic leadership has not done that clearly enough.”

One adviser to a potential 2028 candidate, granted anonymity to speak candidly, defended the more nuanced approach from moderate Democrats as a reflection of “people’s understanding that just opposing every single thing that [Trump] does, from a foreign policy standpoint, just because it was him doing it, is not a sufficient approach.”

The two-day confab was primarily focused on doling out tough-love guidance to allies, consultants and early-state strategists, some of whom are aligned with centrist potential 2028 presidential candidates, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

With an eye toward 2028, Third Way’s senior vice president Lanae Erickson presented polling dataon Democratic primary voters. She said three-quarters prefer a candidate who compromises to achieve their goals and two-thirds worry that nominating someone too far left risks losing the general election.

“If we’re going to be the ‘abolish police,’ ‘abolish ICE,’ virtue-signaling party, I don’t care who they nominate, we’re going to lose,” said Jim Messina, who served as Barack Obama’s campaign manager. “We continue to want to be ideological purists at exactly the wrong time to do that.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misidentified Barack Obama’s title at the time of the Iraq War vote. He was a state senator.​Politics

The Democratic National Committee has decided against hosting a midterm convention, as the party faces a fundraising crunch.

The DNC also announced Monday that it would hold the 2028 presidential convention from Aug. 7 to Aug. 10, 2028. Five cities — Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver and Philadelphia — are under consideration to host it, officials said.

The committee announced its decisions to DNC members during a phone call Monday afternoon, according to two people who participated and were granted anonymity to describe a private meeting. DNC Chair Ken Martin said he’d received feedback from Democrats, urging the party committee to focus its resources on campaign work in states, one of those people said.

The DNC is facing a staggering fundraising problem, with the Republican National Committee holding a $100 million cash edge over them at the start of 2026. Last fall, the DNC took out a $15 million loan to invest in the Virginia and New Jersey elections, a move that raised concerns among Democrats about the party’s financial health.

In a statement on the decision not to host a midterm convention, DNC’s executive director Roger Lau said they’d “baited” Republicans “into wasting time and money on a midterm convention,” while the DNC has “put resources where they’re needed most.”

Jessica Piper contributed to this report. 

​Politics

Americans broadly disapprove of the Trump administration’s military strikes on Iran, according to several polls conducted after the U.S. attacked Tehran early Saturday morning.

Nearly six in 10 Americans said they oppose the decision to take military action against the Middle Eastern country, according to a text poll conducted by SSRS for CNN on Saturday and Sunday. A separate SSRS poll, conducted via text message for The Washington Post, found that more than half of Americans disapprove of the strikes, with 52 percent opposing and 39 percent supporting.

The lack of public support for President Donald Trump’s decision to move forward with airstrikes comes as White House allies worry the move could throw the GOP’s fragile coalition into jeopardy ahead of this fall’s midterm elections. A POLITICO poll conducted in January, when the president was still weighing diplomatic and military options, found that nearly half of Americans opposed the possibility of military action in Iran.

Support for the attacks was largely split along partisan lines, with Democrats far more likely than Republicans to say they opposed Trump’s decision.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted over the weekend, which closed before the U.S. military announced the first American casualties in the war, found that 55 percent of Republicans approved of the strikes — but 42 percent said they would be less likely to support the attacks if they resulted in American troops being harmed or killed.

The Washington Post poll also found that Americans varied widely in their impressions of the Trump administration’s primary goal in the conflict, with some respondents citing regime change and others pointing to oil or regional stability.

The administration has repeatedly said that the strikes were motivated by the goal to destroy Iran’s conventional and nuclear weapons programs — despite Trump’s insistence that the country’s nuclear capabilities were “totally obliterated” in limited airstrikes last year.

A majority of the people surveyed by CNN said they anticipate that a long-term military conflict between the U.S. and Iran is likely, a possibility Democrats are raising alarm about as they push for a vote on congressional war powers resolutions. Trump said Monday his administration had initially “projected four to five weeks” of conflict but had the capability to fight for longer, if necessary.

Support for the war also plummeted when Americans were posed with the possibility of gas prices rising due to the conflict. More than a third of Republicans polled by Reuters said they would be less likely to support continued attacks if oil or gas prices increased in the U.S., and 38 percent of registered voters polled by Morning Consult on Saturday said the U.S. should seek a diplomatic solution if the conflict leads to “significantly higher gas prices.”

That comes after oil prices jumped more than 10 percent Sunday after Tehran launched retaliatory attacks on several oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, which facilitates more than a fifth of the world’s waterborne crude oil transportation.

​Politics

DALLAS — James Talarico is fond of saying that the “closest thing we have to the Kingdom of Heaven is a multiracial, multicultural democracy.” But Texas’ battle royale of a Democratic Senate primary feels far from heaven.

Talarico, a white state representative, is facing off with Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), who is Black, in a contest that’s turned increasingly bitter. It has ignited a fierce intraparty debate — with racial overtones — about what type of candidate Democrats need to nominate to win in tough places as they look to rebuild the racially diverse coalition that President Donald Trump shattered with his 2024 victory.

“Neither candidate can afford to crack Democrats’ multiracial coalition, and each candidate is going to have to work really, really hard to build, maintain and hold that coalition if they want to have any opportunity in a general election,” said Jeff Rotkoff, a veteran Texas Democratic strategist who is neutral in the race. “It is clear that from the math, in order to win Texas, you need to try to get everything right.”

In a state like Texas, Democrats will need every vote. They are desperate to win statewide after three decades of losses and fear that they could blow it this year when the environment feels riper than ever. Trump’s low approval ratings, especially with the young, Hispanic and Black voters he made strong gains with two years ago, gives them hope that flipping the Senate seat is within reach. So does the likelihood that scandal-plagued Attorney General Ken Paxton will win the GOP nomination.

The race has been fought much more over candidate style than any ideological or policy differences. Crockett, a political firebrand who spars regularly with Republicans, is focused more on turning out progressive, Black and Hispanic voters in record numbers. Talarico, a seminarian fond of quoting Jesus and the lyrics of John Prine, is pursuing a more big-tent approach that welcomes moderate Republicans and independents exhausted by abrasive GOP tactics. Those stylistic differences have led to questions from some Talarico allies about whether a candidate like Crockett can win a general election — and charges from Crockett’s supporters that those questions themselves may be racist.

Crockett famously responded to then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) saying her fake eyelashes interfered with her reading ability, a comment she and others viewed as racist, in a committee hearing by slamming her “bleach blonde, bad built, butch body.” She’s also mocked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as “governor hot wheels.”

Prominent Democrats have cautioned that her pugilistic rhetoric could be a problem in the red-leaning state. Democratic strategist James Carville warned last month on his podcast, for instance, that “anybody that has any sense of humanity” would find her Abbott remark offensive (though the governor himself has embraced it, putting on a campaign bumper sticker).

The debate over whether those are real concerns or coded racism has been a hot topic among the hyper-online, drawing in prominent figures within the party and pitting Talarico and Crockett’s supporters against each other in emotional fights on social media.

Crockett’s supporters see the electability conversation as a racist and sexist dog whistle that white male candidates like Talarico never have to engage with.

“Electability is rooted in racism,” said E.J. Carrion, a Fort Worth political activist and Crockett supporter. “James [Talarico] is less threatening to people, and I think if just those people who say that actually voted for the most qualified candidate, you wouldn’t have a problem.”

The first major dustup happened in January, when the hosts of the popular podcast “Las Culturistas” urged people not to send money to Crockett because she had a history of “making it too obviously about” herself rather than the voters, a comment that hosts Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang later apologized for after a furious online response from Crockett supporters who accused them of being racist and sexist.

Tensions ratcheted up further when an influenceraccused Talarico of referring to Rep. Colin Allred as “mediocre Black man” in a private conversation. Allred, who dropped out of the Senate primary the day Crockett announced, took to Instagram to lambast Talarico for the alleged remarks, further heightening the situation.

Talarico defended himself by saying his comment was referring not to Allred’s race but to the quality of his campaign efforts against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in 2024.

Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who is Black, said the Allred video “certainly didn’t help and it’s hard to measure how much it hurt, but I’m sure it hurts” Talarico’s standing with Black voters.

“I suspect he took it as a wake up call, and probably had to start spending more money and spending more time, and will probably be a lot more cautious,” said Ellis, a Houston power broker who endorsed Crockett.

Their primary has shown a sharp divide in support from different demographics, a sign both candidates have serious work to do if they win the nomination.

According to most polls of the race, Talarico pulls in the most white and Hispanic voters, while Crockett draws the vast majority of Black support. Polls show a mixed picture of who leads the primary. There has been little nonpartisan public polling for the general election. Talarico has polled a bit better than Crockett against their likely GOP foes in some surveys — but she appears competitive as well, especially against Paxton.

Talarico has been working hard to make inroads with Black and Hispanic voters. At a recent Dallas rally, he was introduced by Carlos Eduardo Espina, a Hispanic content creator with 14 million TikTok followers. The crowd was largely white and Hispanic.

Talarico acknowledged the current limitations of his coalition.

“We’re trying to build that, and we will build that for the general election,” Talarico said in an interview with POLITICO, as a stream of young voters waited in a snaking line to snap a photo with the candidate. “I completely understand if I’m not Black Texans’ first choice in this race, but I would love to be their close second choice. And what we’ve seen in our polling is that my approval rating among Black Texans has continued to rise: It’s at the highest point it’s ever been. They may not vote for me in this race, and that’s quite alright. I’m competing for their votes.”

He added, “But if I don’t get it in this race, I’ll hope to have it in the general election.”

For her part, polls indicate Crockett has struggled to win over many Hispanic voters, and she has faced criticism for stating in a 2024 interview that Latinos who support Trump’s immigration policies exhibit a self-hating “slave mentality.” She also said on CNN in December it’s not her goal to win over all of Trump’s supporters.

At a rally in a downtown Houston beer garden last Saturday, speaking to a crowd of mostly Black supporters and elected officials, Crockett took a jab at Talarico over his thin resume, a common attack line from her campaign in its final stretch.

“Some people say, ‘Listen, there’s no way that Texas will support a Black woman,” she said. “We are a majority-minority state, we can start there. The reality is that I didn’t run because I was a woman. I ran because I’m qualified. At the end of the day. I just happened to be Black and woman, but I am the most qualified person in this. Period.”

Crockett declined an interview for this piece. In a statement, a campaign spokesperson said that Crockett “has a broad coalition of support across demographics and is leading with key constituencies that are critical to rebuilding the winning Democratic coalition.”

“Congresswoman Crockett has built strong relations and rapport with voters across Texas long before entering this race, which is why she has such strong support and is able to energize turnout,” Crockett spokesperson Karrol Rimal said.

Asked whether he thought the concept of electability had functioned as a dog whistle in the race, Talarico said: “I guess it can be. I believe Black women are electable.”

When asked why he thought he was more electable than Crockett, Talarico said he was “concerned” when Crockett said she didn’t have to win over any Trump voters.

“I’m the only candidate in the race who has competed in a tough general election. I got elected to the statehouse by flipping a Trump district, and I held onto it after millions of dollars were spent against me, and it’s because I was able to build a big tent, a big coalition,” he said.

But he said that he thought Crockett could also win the general election — and promised he would campaign for her should she win the primary. A spokesperson for Crockett said the congresswoman has expressed she would “absolutely” support Talarico.

His team argues that the contest isn’t about the candidates’ own race and gender but about how well they can build out the diverse coalition necessary to win.

“It starts from a racial profile of one being a white candidate and one being a Black candidate, but then there’s also a difference in the philosophy, and who can actually connect with this new swing vote in Texas,” said Chuck Rocha, a 36-year veteran of Texas and Hispanic Democratic politics and a senior adviser to Talarico. “It’s not about James maximizing the white vote or Jasmine maximizing the Black vote to win a general. It’s about running a campaign that reaches across racial lines.”

Crockett is betting that she can turn out those Black and Hispanic voters who rarely show up in primaries in historic numbers. It will test whether she can translate the cultural status she earned by attacking Republicans into a surge at the ballot box. She’s running ads on BET, bar-hopping in Houston and holding rallies with prominent Black leaders. She campaigned in the Hispanic-heavy Rio Grande Valley on Thursday. Crockett’s campaign materials focus heavily on depicting her as the toughest fighter against Trump.

Her turnout operation also leans on the political power of Black churches. At a breakfast with Black faith leaders in Houston last week, Crockett walked a room full of pastors through how they could guide their congregations in the voting process. “We need you to make sure that you emphasize the importance of this election,” she told them.

Beyond the pews and in the streets, grassroots groups like Texas Organizing Project PAC are deploying members on Crockett’s behalf across major cities with a canvassing plan focused on connecting with Black and Latino voters. TOP helped Crockett get elected to the state House in 2020 in a primary she won by 90 votes, and for this primary they set a goal of knocking on 82,000 doors.

“Our theory of change in the state of Texas is that if we expand the electorate enough, driven by Black and Latino voters, we can win statewide office and we do that starting in cities and counties,” said Brianna Brown, co-executive director of TOP. “A lot of the Black folks we’re talking to at the doors, especially older Black women, are just excited about the idea that who they are is reflected back to them on a ballot and the years that they’ve waited.”

The primary is a significant test of old assumptions about the increasingly swingy Latino vote, said Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump GOP consultant and founder of the Latino Working Class Project who is neutral in the race.

“If Latino voters do break towards Crockett, then there is some evidence there’s a solidarity between voters of color, and that has been the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party for the past three decades,” Madrid said. “If Talarico wins, and if he wins by a good measurable margin, then I think that we will probably be able to finally put that to bed.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misspelled Karrol Rimal’s name and misstated the name of the Texas Organizing Project PAC.

​Politics

Four years ago, Valerie Foushee’s support of Israel helped get her to Congress. On Tuesday, it could send her home.

The politics surrounding Israel have shifted so much since the war in Gaza began in 2023 that a candidate who benefited from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spending more than $2 million to shore up her 2022 primary win has now disavowed the group entirely. Now, Foushee has spent her reelection bid fending off well-funded attacks from the left over her former ties to the group.

And that was before this weekend’s joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran cast an even brighter spotlight on the issue.

Foushee is locked in a tight and expensive rematch of her 2022 race with Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam, a Bernie Sanders-backed progressive who is the first Muslim woman to hold political office in the state. This time, Allam is backed by heavy spending from a coalition of groups, led by a new super PAC founded to counter AIPAC’s influence, and supporters of both candidates say the race is vanishingly tight.

The election is being fought over a whole slew of issues and interests, including cryptocurrency and AI, but it’s Israel as a political issue that has fueled the big spending against Foushee. The new anti-AIPAC group, American Priorities PAC, is the single largest advertising spender in the race, and it makes up the majority of pro-Allam advertising spending. And Allam and her allies have leaned into the topic: Every single ad supporting her over the last week has mentioned AIPAC.

The joint attack on Iran has pushed the U.S.-Israel relationship into the headlines again in the final days of the primary — and Allam has jumped on the topic.

“Trump’s illegal and reckless war will inevitably be on voters’ minds as they head to the ballot box on Tuesday. They are ready to hold every leader who co-signed a blank check to the Israeli war hawks accountable — including my opponent,” Allam said in a statement to POLITICO after the attack.

Foushee has also been sharply critical of Trump’s attacks on Iran, promising to do everything she could to stop Trump’s “illegal war with Iran.” She also defended her views on Israel again in the wake of the Iran strikes, emphasizing that she broke with AIPAC last summer during a town hall and urging voters to “check my voting record to see how I have voted and what I have voted for as it relates to the people of Gaza.”

“My voting record and support for legislation to stop arms sales to Israel speaks for itself. It is clear to me and my constituents that the Netanyahu government’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinians cannot continue,” Foushee said in a statement, highlighting her votes against military aid to Israel and her refusal to attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress in 2024. That came after she was part of an AIPAC-organized trip to meet Netanyahu in March of 2024, something her opponent has mentioned repeatedly on the campaign trail.

It’s the latest flashpoint in a primary that’s been consumed by nearly all the tensions rippling through the Democratic Party — generational change versus institutional experience, the U.S.-Israel relationship, battles over Big Tech, the influence of dark money, Black leadership in the party.

The primary results from the safe-blue chunk in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, coming Tuesday, could yield early clues for the rest of a chaotic and crowded primary season for a party still finding its way out of the political wilderness.

“It’s establishment versus upstart … it’s a debate about style versus substance,” said North Carolina Democratic state Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, who has endorsed Foushee in the primary, adding that the results “could provide a peek into what the 2026 primaries and the 2028 presidential nomination fight might look like.”

The race has attracted more than $3 million in outside spending, part of an explosion of money that special interests from crypto and AI-backed super PACs to pro-Israel groups are dumping into Democratic primaries across the country, looking to shape the internal politics of the party.

Foushee has the backing of a mysterious pop-up super PAC and one aligned with the AI company Anthropic, which together have spent more than $1.1 million on ads boosting her campaign.

Foushee, a former state legislator, is endorsed by dozens of elected Democrats in the state, including Gov. Josh Stein, as well as the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The 69-year-old sophomore lawmaker, facing an opponent less than half her age, pushed back on the idea that the seat needed a younger face.

“I think the American people are looking for strong leaders, and I don’t think that they’re attaching a generation to it,” she said in an interview.

Allam is a 32-year-old savvy social media campaigner who worked on Sen. Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. She has argued Democrats must be more forceful in attacking Trump over his immigration crackdowns, which included the Raleigh-Durham area last fall.

Democratic voters in 2026 want to “use the leverage that a safe blue seat has to put up the strongest fight against right wing extremism,” she said in an interview.

The multi-candidate primary in 2022 drew nearly $4 million in outside spending, a record for a single North Carolina congressional primary at the time. Foushee was the primary beneficiary of that cash, with help from both AIPAC and a pro-cryptocurrency super PAC funded by Sam Bankman-Fried, and she defeated Allam by nine points.

The outside spending landscape has shifted this year.

Allam initially benefited from the lion’s share, with American Priorities PAC’s $1 million supplemented by $400,000 in spending from David Hogg’s Leaders We Deserve, a group focused on electing generational change candidates, and a smaller sum from the left-leaning Justice Democrats.

That left the incumbent heavily outspent, since Foushee’s biggest 2022 backers stayed out this year: Bankman-Fried is currently serving time in federal prison for fraud and AIPAC is staying out after Foushee disavowed them.

“Rep. Foushee rejected AIPAC support and we are not involved in or participating in any way in this race,” Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, told POLITICO.

But a pair of super PACs have popped up in the last two weeks to back Foushee, helping even the scales. Jobs and Democracy PAC, the Anthropic-aligned super PAC is spending nearly $1 million to boost her in the final days, while Article One PAC — the new group whose funding will not be disclosed until after the primary — has spent about $300,000.

“The establishment at the last minute is panicking and throwing in millions of dollars when the cake is baked,” Hogg said.

Allam and her allies are attacking Foushee over her backers. Sanders (I-Vt.) says in an Allam campaign ad that she is the only candidate with “the courage to take on all of these special interest groups who think they can buy American democracy.”

In a video posted to Instagram, Foushee said there has been a lot of “misinformation” surrounding her position on data centers and that she does not support one being built “in the heart of our district.” Still, she said she trusts local leaders to make the final decision.

But progressives are still attacking Foushee’s credentials, and hoping to make her an example of what’s to come.

“This primary is a massive signal to the Democratic establishment and their corporate backers that Democratic voters are fed up with feckless leadership that fails to meet this moment,” said Justice Democrats spokesperson Usamah Andrabi.

Some establishment Democrats believe targeting a Black woman is the opposite of what the party needs.

“For Justice Democrats to target an African-American female, is just, is disappointing, very, very, very disappointing,” said former Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.).

Butterfield said it “is important to reelect Valerie, not just because she’s an African-American female, but because she’s getting the job done.” But he acknowledged that “there is an element within the fourth district that just wants change.”

CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to clarify that American Priorities PAC is the largest spender on advertising in the primary.​Politics

The United States’ attack on Iran is stirring up an already-roiling Democratic debate over Israel, just as primary season kicks off.

The joint U.S.-Israel military operation has put the countries’ relationship squarely at the center of the national political debate — and the role of its big-spending allies like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which praised President Donald Trump’s strikes, front-and-center in the Democratic primaries where the group is spending.

A heated House race in North Carolina whose election is Tuesday, several contests in Illinois two weeks later and an already stormy Michigan Senate primary have been impacted by tensions over Israel’s war in Gaza and fury over heavy spending by pro-Israel organizations.

“Palestine has become a litmus test in the party,” said Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and executive vice president at the progressive think tank Center for International Policy. “You see this in both the Michigan and Illinois primaries, where candidates are being pushed to acknowledge that Gaza is a genocide and to pledge not to take AIPAC donations. That was definitely going to continue as we move toward the 2028 presidential primary. This war [in Iran] will amplify it even more.”

AIPAC’s involvement has already upended multiple elections in Illinois, where groups aligned with the lobbying group have spent close to $14 million on four House races ahead of the state’s mid-March primary. In Tuesday’s North Carolina primaries, Israel has been a hot topic in Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee’s reelection bid. And Middle Eastern politics loom large in Michigan’s blockbuster three-way Democratic Senate race, where there have already been sharp divisions between the candidates over Israel. Elected officials and operatives there have been fretting for months about how AIPAC could turn the race on its head and pave a way for a Republican victory for the first time since 1994.

“The war [in Iran] accentuates the risk that AIPAC’s intervention will result in electing the most anti-war, anti-Israel progressive of the available candidates in some of these districts — just as it did in mine,” said former Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), who recently lost a hotly contested House primary to now-Rep. Analilia Mejia, a much sharper critic of Israel, after AIPAC spent more than $2 million against him in a failed bid to elevate a more unabashedly pro-Israel candidate.

AIPAC isn’t backing down. In a statement Saturday, the group hailed the U.S.-Israel-led strikes as “decisive action against the terror-supporting regime in Iran.” Its super PAC, United Democracy Project, had nearly $100 million in the bank at the end of January and plans to be active in dozens of races this year, including both Democratic and Republican primaries.

“Anti-Israel candidates should be on notice that we are looking closely at their races,” United Democracy Project spokesperson Patrick Dorton said in an interview. “Our goal is to elect the biggest possible bipartisan pro Israel majority in Congress, no matter which party is in control, and we are singularly focused in this election year on electing a pro-Israel majority in Congress.”

Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said that Democrats are “gonna have to answer for” AIPAC support in primaries. “Any of those Democrats that take AIPAC money, they’re going to have a reckoning,” he said. “How can they stand for peace and the billionaire backers that are supporting them are advocating for this war?”

The Iran strikes did not initially split Democrats as deeply as Israel’s war in Gaza has over the past few years, with most in the party accusing Trump of embroiling the Middle East in conflict, even as disagreements emerged on what comes next.

“I don’t think anyone wants to be seen on the side of Iran, and I think Democrats are generally united on the idea that the president needs to explain to the American people, what the strategy is, what the endgame is,” said Brian Romick, president of Democratic Majority for Israel, a group that supports pro-Israel Democrats.

Several Democratic strategists said it’s too early to predict how much Iran will be on voters’ minds over the next few months, let alone for the next presidential election.

“We know Trump ran against wars just such as these, and the close collaboration with Israel on it may play into ongoing debates in the primary,” David Axelrod, a longtime Democratic strategist, wrote in a text. “But the unknown is the length and level of loss this will entail. The longer, the more costly, the deeper the debate will be.

In Illinois, AIPAC-aligned groups have already spent heavily

Perhaps nowhere on the map does Iran loom larger than in Illinois, whose March 17 primary is just weeks away.

Democratic strategists in the state expect the attacks on Iran to call attention to the role of Congress and the broader implications of partnering with Israel.

“Now this isn’t just about Israel and Gaza,” said an Illinois political consultant granted anonymity because they’re working on multiple local campaigns. “This is about standing with Israel to wage a broad war in the Middle East that has a lot more ramifications.”

An AIPAC-aligned super PAC has already spent more than $1 million supporting state Sen. Laura Fine and attacking one of her top primary opponents, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, in the race to replace retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky.

Biss and Fine’s other opponents have criticized AIPAC involvement in the race. He issued a lengthy statement Saturday slamming Trump and Netanyahu for “pushing America into another reckless and illegal regime change war.”

A separate AIPAC-linked group is set to target progressive activist and digital strategist Kat Abughazaleh, who is Palestinian American.

In an interview, Abughazaleh said Iran will be a crucial focus in her race’s closing weeks.

“We will be talking about it very vocally and often because this is very much a topic on people’s minds,” she said. “People care about this for a lot of reasons, whether it’s our tax dollars, whether it’s because you have family in Iran, whether you’re just horrified by the humanitarian implications of these strikes, or because you’re very afraid of a forever war that you may be moved into against your will.”

War in Iran isn’t the same issue as Israel’s war in Gaza, and in the first hours after Trump launched the operation, Democrats were much more unified in their opposition — including Democrats who have AIPAC’s support.

After the attack, Fine posted on X calling for Trump’s impeachment, warning that he “is leading us into another military conflict to distract from his own failures that puts American lives at risk and threatens to send the Middle East into further chaos.”

Congressional candidates Donna Miller in the 2nd District and Melissa Conyears-Ervin in the 7th, who are supported by AIPAC-aligned committees, respectively called the attacks “reckless” and “immoral” in separate statements. And Melissa Bean, who has support from an AIPAC-aligned group in the 8th District, said “Congress has the sole power to authorize acts of war.”

North Carolina presents an early test

Tuesday’s primaries in North Carolina will give an early indication of how Democratic primary voters may be considering Israel.

Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-N.C.) was first elected to the seat in 2022 with AIPAC help — its super PAC spent more than $2.1 million to boost her to victory. But in 2025, Fousheesaid she would no longer accept the pro-Israel group’s money.

“Check my voting record to see how I have voted and what I have voted for as it relates to the people of Gaza,” she said at a town hall in August.

Dorton, the spokesperson for the AIPAC-aligned super PAC, said Foushee “rejected AIPAC support and we are not involved in or participating in any way in this race.”

But Foushee’s primary opponent, Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam, has attacked Foushee for being insufficiently tough on Israel. A new super PAC created to push back against AIPAC from the left has spent heavily in support of Allam.

Trump’s “illegal and reckless war” in Iran “will inevitably be on voters’ minds as they head to the ballot box on Tuesday,” Allam, North Carolina’s first Muslim woman elected official, said in a statement.

Foushee was also quick to condemn Trump’s “illegal war with Iran.” In a statement, she said her “record and support for legislation to stop arms sales to Israel speaks for itself.”

“It is clear to me and my constituents that the Netanyahu government’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinians cannot continue,” she continued.

Israel was already a major topic in Michigan

The Gaza conflict has already been a major issue in the three-way Democratic battle to succeed retiring Sen. Gary Peters in battleground Michigan, a state with the highest percent of Arab-American residents in the country. More than 100,000 people voted “uncommitted” instead of backing then-President Joe Biden in the 2024 primary over his administration’s support of Israel.

Layla Elabed, one of the founders of the Uncommitted movement who now leads the progressive Arab Americans for Progress, said Democrats “do not want to see their dollars continuing to fund Israel’s genocide and now a war on Iran, especially without congressional approval.”

She said Trump’s Iran attack underscores that Democrats need candidates who “stand up to pro-war lobbies like AIPAC, who have poured money from right-wing MAGA donors into our Democratic primaries here in Michigan.”

Rep. Haley Stevens, who has been supported by AIPAC in the past, said in a statement that Trump “has once again put Americans in harm’s way without consulting Congress,” but warned that a nuclear Iran “would bring even more violence and chaos to the Middle East and the entire world.”

Her foes in the August primary took a different approach. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow said the president “has chosen a war overseas at the expense of everyone back home;” physician Abdul El-Sayed, the most progressive candidate in the field, declared “this war must end” and Trump “must be held accountable.”

Brakkton Booker contributed to this article.

​Politics

President Donald Trump’s Iran strikes are forcing a hypothetical debate into reality.

And a president with extraordinary control over his party’s base will test how far his supporters will follow him on an issue that polling showed divided his coalition.

Just half of 2024 Trump voters, 50 percent, supported military action in a POLITICO poll last month — but 30 percent opposed it. Those fractures, combined with largely unified opposition from Democrats, meant Americans broadly did not want an attack on Iran.

In the January POLITICO poll, nearly half of Americans, 45 percent, said the United States should not take military action in Iran; fewer than one-third, 31 percent, said it should. An Economist/YouGov poll conducted last weekend similarly found broad public opposition to military action in Iran.

The stakes are particularly high for a Republican Party already staring down a difficult midterm landscape, where even small defections from their winning 2024 coalition could carry outsized consequences.

Part of the challenge for Trump is that support for military intervention in Iran was strongest among Trump’s base — and far weaker outside of it. A 61 percent majority of Trump voters who self-identified as “MAGA Republicans” said they support military action, according to The POLITICO Poll conducted Jan. 16 to 19, when Trump was ramping up his rhetoric against Iran but an outright attack remained hypothetical. That’s much higher than the 42 percent of Trump voters who do not identify as “MAGA” who said the same.

That leaves Trump navigating an evolving issue where support within his coalition — at least before the strikes — was real but not overwhelming and where overall public opposition outweighed support.

Democrats were largely unified. Two-thirds of voters who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 said the U.S. should not intervene in Iran, while just 18 percent said it should, the POLITICO survey conducted by Public First found. The Economist/YouGov found 76 percent of Democrats opposed an attack. That Democratic unity is a warning sign for the GOP: It means that before the strikes, there were not enough pro-intervention Democrats to offset the anti-intervention Republicans.

Trump has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to reshape Republican public opinion, bringing his voters along on issues including trade and foreign policy. Whether that pattern holds here may depend on how the conflict unfolds.

“The political risk depends on the outcome,” Michigan-based Republican strategist Jason Roe told POLITICO. “If we break Iran without terrorist attacks coming to America or harm coming to allies in the region, it will be a political win for Trump. … If this expands into a protracted conflict, or ends up with troops on the ground, it will be a liability.”

That dynamic underscores the broader tension inside the modern GOP — a party base deeply loyal to the president and largely unified around an “America First” prerogative, now being tested by his own foreign policy decisions.

The divide also illustrates the longtime debate within the Republican Party between the hawks favoring a more aggressive posture on the world stage and those skeptical of intervention.

Mercedes Schlapp, a senior fellow at the Conservative Political Action Conference, said the length and severity of conflict could determine how Trump’s MAGA base responds.

“I think that the MAGA base will make it very loud and clear to the President that they will not necessarily agree, if it becomes a situation that it becomes a prolonged war,” she said on C-SPAN’s Ceasefire earlier this week.

Polling was already showing early signs of skepticism about overseas entanglements, including among Republicans. A February POLITICO Poll found that 47 percent of Americans said the U.S. government is too focused on international issues and not focused enough on domestic ones, while roughly one-quarter said it is striking the right balance.

The question did not reference Trump directly. Even so, 41 percent of his 2024 voters said the U.S. government is too focused on international issues, including about half — 49 percent — of Trump voters who do not consider themselves MAGA Republicans.

Those non-MAGA Trump voters are especially important for the GOP heading into November, and the president’s ability to overcome their initial opposition could prove crucial to maintaining control of Congress. Otherwise, if they swing back to Democrats — or sit out the midterms — Trump’s base alone is not enough to carry his party to midterm successes.

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Democrats of all stripes quickly accused President Donald Trump of starting another prolonged conflict in the Middle East on Saturday and demanded limits to his war powers.

That’s where their agreement ended.

Progressives castigated the president for pursuing “dangerously illegal,” “totally unnecessary” and potentially “catastrophic” military action when diplomacy was still on the table. Some, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), declared “no war with Iran.”

But several lawmakers from battleground districts adopted a more cautious tone, calling for Trump to justify his actions to Congress but stopping short of demanding an end to the operation.

And moderate Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), both staunch supporters of Israel, which aided the U.S. in the strikes, praised Trump for defending national security and being “willing to do what’s right and necessary to produce real peace in the region.” Gottheimer also requested a classified briefing and said he expects Trump to “comply with the War Powers Act.”

The breaks in their responses reveal the underlying divisions that have shadowed the party for two decades, and the challenge Democrats face in presenting a unified foreign policy message ahead of the midterms, where Trump’s aggressive use of the military could become a defining flashpoint.

“There’s always been a peace wing to the Democratic Party and there’s always been a more interventionist wing to the party. That has narrowed over time, but it is still there,” said veteran Democratic strategist Mark Longabaugh.

Democratic lawmakers split over the Iraq vote in 2002, the Yemen war powers vote in 2019 and the first Trump administration’s strike on Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020.

Now they will have to navigate yet another politically thorny foreign policy vote — one that is playing out against the backdrop of a yearslong intraparty struggle over Israel as public support for the longtime U.S. ally slides.

Congress is set to vote next week on ending Trump’s military campaign in Iran through a pair of resolutions Democrats are pushing alongside GOP Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). Fetterman has said he’ll oppose the effort. A spokesperson for Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) said he would as well. And House Democratic leaders believe moderates in their caucus could join them.

Many Democrats opted for careful messaging as the situation unfolded on Saturday, attempting to strike a balance between the need to crack down on Iran and the desire to denounce Trump’s unilateral action and its potentially deadly consequences.

Democratic congressional leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries both focused on the process Trump should follow: Iran must never obtain a nuclear weapon, they said, but lawmakers need to be briefed and vote on further action.

Schumer said in a statement he had urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “be straight with Congress and the American people about the objectives of these strikes and what comes next,” adding that the Senate “should return to session to pass a war powers resolution.”

Jeffries similarly pressed for classified briefings and a vote.

“Iran is a bad actor and must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies like Israel and Jordan in the region,” Jeffries said in a statement. But, he added, “The Trump administration must explain itself to the American people and Congress immediately, provide an ironclad justification for this act of war, clearly define the national security objective and articulate a plan to avoid another costly, prolonged military quagmire in the Middle East.”

Neither leader is expected to break ranks with the majority of their fellow Democrats, who plan to vote to bar Trump from taking further military action against Iran without congressional approval.

Still other members, including lawmakers in battleground districts or with military and national security backgrounds, stopped short of explicitly calling for the operation to end.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) slammed Trump on X for not providing justification for “committing our nation to war” and said Congress “should come back to Washington to debate these issues.” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) said the administration “must immediately brief the full Congress and clearly explain the scope, strategy, and expected duration of this operation.”

Rep. Tom Suozzi, a swing-seat New York Democrat, even appeared to defend Trump, saying the president briefed appropriate leadership ahead of the attack — though he still called for Trump to seek congressional authorization going forward.

“I agree with the President’s objectives that Iran can never be allowed to obtain nuclear capabilities,” Suozzi wrote on X. “The President must now clearly define the national security objective and articulate his plan to avoid another costly, prolonged war in the Middle East.”

But progressives — including possible 2028 contenders Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) — were adamant about drawing a red line, saying that Trump was steering the U.S. toward another “disaster” in the region.

They found a surprising ally in former Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I am opposed to a regime-change war in Iran,” Harris said in a statement. “I know the threat that Iran poses, and they must never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, but this is not the way to dismantle that threat.”

Where Democrats did find more uniformity on Saturday was in their attempts to turn Trump’s strike on Iran into a campaign cudgel, accusing the president of again violating his “America First” doctrine and breaking the compact he made with voters to end “endless wars.” Some began circulating Trump allies’ past comments denouncing the notion of war with Iran and other prolonged conflicts in the Middle East.

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) relayed the party’s message bluntly, rejecting the war in Iran as “wrong.”

“Trump ran on exposing the pedophiles and stopping wars,” he wrote on X. “Trump is now protecting pedophiles and starting wars.”

​Politics

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz finally got President Donald Trump on the phone seven weeks into the administration’s crackdown on Minneapolis — and the president had a complaint.

Trump told the Democratic governor he didn’t “know what’s wrong with Minnesota,” comparing the state to cities like Louisville and New Orleans where there had been less fierce resistance to his immigration surges.

Walz was furious. “You didn’t kill anyone there,” he fired back, two days after public outrage over Alex Pretti’s death at the hands of Customs and Border Protection agents forced Trump to change his approach.

But the governor’s staffers, who were listening in, quietly urged him to “slow it down,” Walz said in an interview with POLITICO earlier this month. They feared if he let his rage take over he would antagonize the president.

“It’s infuriating that you got to let him think he won or whatever,” Walz recalled. “That’s not how adults usually negotiate.”

The call was one moment in an agonizing stretch for Democratic state and local officials as they sought to weather the Trump administration’s crackdown. In interviews with POLITICO, Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Attorney General Keith Ellison and more than a half-dozen state and city officials described a concerted campaign to fight Trump’s immigration enforcement in the courts and through the media while coordinating with each other to keep the city from spinning out of control under immense pressure.

The behind-the-scenes effort was the crescendo of a broader, yearslong push to prepare the city for the worst, after surviving the upheavals that followed the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, when protests spiraled into looting and violence and Minnesota Democratic leaders faced criticism from both the left and right for their response.

Before Pretti’s death, Trump White House officials were “in dialogue” with Walz, but they had not engaged in “any urgent or meaningful way,” said a Democratic state official, who was granted anonymity to describe private interactions.

The two-term governor and former vice presidential nominee, well aware of the president’s personal enmity for him, said he understood that Trump was only now calling because “this had become a disaster for him politically, and he needed me to help him get out of it.”

A White House official said that Trump had always wanted to work with local officials and that the recent drawdown in personnel was because they were now working with them.

For all the fury the governor hoped to channel, for himself and for his constituents, he acknowledged Trump “holds all the cards in this — a lot of them, certainly.”

Walz’s careful approach to the president on that call — and other public flashes of anger, when Frey seethed at ICE to “get the fuck out” after Renée Good was killed — represents the push-pull for Minnesota leaders, who were desperate to end the lengthy immigration showdown while not setting a precedent of submission, these Minnesota Democrats said. At least 3,000 ICE agents were deployed to Minneapolis, vastly outnumbering the city’s police force, as Trump officials said Minnesota leaders had “incited this violent insurrection.”

Democrats were united in their desperation to head off any scenes of destruction, which they believed would lead to Trump invoking the Insurrection Act — something the president threatened to do multiple times for Minneapolis and during other immigration crackdowns in Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago. The Pentagon ordered 1,500 active-duty soldiers to prepare for possible deployment to Minnesota.

Privately, Walz and Frey enlisted business leaders and state Republicans to urge the Trump administration to change course in Minnesota. In phone calls and text messages, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) urged White House officials to deescalate after the shootings of both Good and Pretti, according to a person briefed on her conversations and granted anonymity to describe private interactions. Publicly, Walz and Frey pleaded for protests to stay peaceful, and urged Minnesotans to document on video everything they saw. “Carry your phone with you at all times,” Walz said at the time. 

“I think the feds were waiting and expecting for Minneapolis to devolve into chaos and for these protests to get out of hand,” one Democratic city official said, “and so much of what we did was just focused on preventing that from happening … even if those were sometimes hard or stressful calls to make in the moment because you don’t want to upset residents.”

Minnesota Democrats leveraged local outrage until it combusted into a national backlash after Pretti’s killing, caught on video from multiple angles, rocketed across social media and cracked the country’s consciousness. As Republicans started to call for “thorough” investigations into Pretti’s death, Trump called Walz, then Frey. The president pulled Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino from the city and dispatched his border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota. On Feb. 12, Homan announced the end of “Operation Metro Surge.”

It’s a playbook other Democrats from blue cities and states are eager to replicate. Officials from San Francisco and Portland have already reached out to Frey and his staff for advice, two Minneapolis city officials confirmed. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Frey met earlier this month to discuss what Minneapolis had been through, and the mayors’ respective chiefs-of-staff shared similar intel with each other over the phone.

The Trump administration is also looking to copy its own playbook from Minnesota, the one implemented by Homan since he took over in early February. Last week on CNN, the border czar described “unprecedented” cooperation from Minneapolis leaders and police force since he arrived. He said “the streets of Minneapolis, the streets of Minnesota, are safer today,” adding that he isn’t surprised state and city leaders disagree with that assessment because they don’t want to give Trump “a win.” He said he expected ICE to return to its “regular footprint” within a week.

A White House official said that new cooperation allowed them to scale back personnel, adding that details of that cooperation are considered law-enforcement sensitive and declined to share specific details on it.

“Tom Homan’s critical work in Minnesota has secured new agreements to cooperate moving forward. These agreements, paired with pledges from local police to respond to our officers’ call for help, take down roadblocks, and respond to agitator unrest, represent unprecedented levels of cooperation that did not exist before,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement. “Democrat officials should want to work with federal law enforcement, not against them, to keep communities safe for law-abiding Americans.”

But Frey forcefully pushed back on the characterization that Minneapolis had changed any of its pre-existing policies. The separation ordinance, which prohibits city police officers from enforcing federal immigration law, is still in place, Frey noted.

“There were no deals cut,” Frey said in an interview with POLITICO. “There were no trade-offs of our values.”

***

Minnesota state and city officials began preparing for a federal crackdown long before ICE descended on Minneapolis last December. It started in 2020, after Floyd, a Black man, suffocated under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer. Floyd’s death triggered a wave of protests in the city, some of which turned violent and destructive, while state and city officials struggled to respond.

“In those first few moments after Renée’s death … my first thought was George Floyd,” Walz said.

Ellison echoed him: “It was on everybody’s mind.” he said.

In the five years since Floyd’s death, local officials have overhauled the city’s emergency management protocols, incorporating 27 recommendations from an after-action report that was released in 2022. That included attending a four-day retreat to the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where more than 70 city officials, including Frey, simulated realtime emergencies. They practiced how to respond to massive civil unrest that pitted residents against a military force and game-played when to ask the governor to call in the National Guard.

Walz had faced intense criticism for not activating the National Guard faster in 2020 — and he and Frey had pointed fingers at each other for the delay. “There was a real breakdown in communication at that time” between the two officials, said a Minnesota Democratic operative who was granted anonymity to describe private conversations. Walz’s role in the delay followed him into the 2024 presidential campaign, when he served as Kamala Harris’ running mate.

When the city officials returned to Minneapolis after their training, one aide wrote out a one-page checklist for requesting National Guard activation and displayed it prominently on an office wall so they could move as fast as possible should the need arise. It’s still hanging in the aide’s office now. By the time Minneapolis requested the National Guard last month, they knew what to do.

Minnesota Democrats redoubled those efforts after observing and talking with officials in Los Angeles and Chicago, two early targets of Trump’s crackdown. Frey’s office drew up — and signed, once ICE arrived in Minneapolis — one executive order to ban ICE from conducting operations on city-owned parking lots, after they’d seen what happened in Chicago, one city official confirmed. Ellison and his Democratic attorneys general colleagues regularly meet to discuss shared strategies for dealing with the Trump administration.

“If they tried to override the governor and try to nationalize our National Guard, we were ready,” Ellison said. “If they tried to invoke the Insurrection Act, we were ready.”

Walz also approached mobilizing the National Guard in a different way than he had following Floyd’s murder. When he did deploy the guard on Jan. 17 to support the Minnesota State Patrol, to help manage growing tensions between protesters and ICE agents near a federal building, he urged the Guard leadership to wear fluorescent orange vests and name tags. No masks. The Guard delivered donuts, hot chocolate and coffee to protesters.

“We addressed every single protester and introduced all of those protesters by name,” Walz said. “The goal was, ‘Minnesotans are all in this together.’ Police, National Guard, everybody.”

***

Hours after Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent on Jan. 7, Frey walked into a third-floor conference room in city hall. His senior staff was gathered to discuss what he would say at a press conference. Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser, had already cast Good’s actions as “domestic terrorism,” and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called the shooting self-defense. 

Frey, who had just watched the video of Good’s death for the first time, was planning to tell ICE to “get out of here,” he told his senior staff at the time. The expletive wasn’t in his talking points, Frey recalled, but he was angry and he wanted to be honest about his feelings. He had publicly warned in December that “somebody is going to get seriously injured or killed.”

“We felt here like we were screaming from the rooftops for weeks, and they weren’t listening, and so we needed to get attention,” Frey said of his now-viral moment. “I needed to channel the very real anger of hundreds of thousands of constituents … Because, again, I wanted to encourage [a] continuation of these peaceful protests.”

For Frey, the next several weeks would test his ability to both channel the fury of his constituents while seeking deescalation — even as Trump’s White House continued to accuse both Frey and Walz of failing to temper their own rhetoric. Their urgency to find a way out of what Frey called an “invasion” of an “occupying force” became all the more pressing after ICE agents shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant, on the North Side of Minneapolis on Jan. 14.

That night, near midnight, inside city hall, Frey was on the phone with Klobuchar, asking for help. Frey’s chief-of-staff was on the phone with Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.). A chaotic scene played out on the TVs in the mayor’s office: sprays of tear gas and vandalized cars, the images of a city reaching a “boiling point,” Frey said. The mayor was growing desperate to find a backchannel to the White House, which they’d failed, so far, to establish, three city officials said.

The next day, Klobuchar talked to White House officials about connecting them with the mayor and Minneapolis’ police chief, Brian O’Hara, said a person briefed on the conversations and granted anonymity to describe private interactions. Frey’s chief-of-staff sent a cold email to White House senior staff and ramped up pressure on business leaders and state Republicans. However, the channels didn’t “actually open up” until after Pretti was killed, one of the city officials said.

They faced pressure from the left. Democratic Socialist Minneapolis City Council member Robin Wonsley criticized Frey and Walz for failing to do more to get ICE out, like declaring a “state of emergency” or eviction moratoriums. She told CNN in late January that residents were showing extraordinary bravery that’s “not being matched by the elected officials who do have the power to protect our residents.”

“I think there’s a nearly unanimous belief that the mayor balanced two interests — fighting for the city but at the same time, understanding there needed to be an end game, which is dialogue with the administration,” said Abou Amara, a civil rights lawyer and activist in Minneapolis.

Walz was already under pressure before ICE showed up in Minnesota, after a sweeping fraud scandal engulfed the state this fall, which drew the attention of Trump. The governor ended his own reelection bid in early January, citing the scandal as influencing his decision to pull out.

It’s clear that even after a decade of Trump, Democrats — and some European leaders — are still struggling with how best to approach the mercurial president. Both publicly and privately, Minnesota Democratic leaders said they mimicked how European countries responded when Trump threatened to buy Greenland: They didn’t blink. They refused to give until it was too politically untenable for Trump to keep pushing.

“Stephen Miller talks about this whole concept of ‘might makes right.’ If you have the military muscle to do something, then you can, and that’s the right thing to do,” Frey said. “And they’ve attempted to use that methodology on an international level, and clearly that is also a methodology used at the local level.”

These Minnesota leaders were also clear about why they think Trump replaced Bovino with Homan, who ultimately ended the operation by mid-February. After Pretti’s death, Trump’s poll numbers dropped. About six in 10 Americans now think Trump’s ICE deployments in cities have gone too far, according to a recent AP-NORC poll. Just 38 percent of respondents approved of Trump’s handling of immigration, down from nearly 50 percent approval a year ago, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.

“It became urgent for them and they knew they had to cut and run,” said a state official, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “It was clear they’d lost the messaging entirely.”

After Pretti’s death and the phone calls with Minnesota leaders, Trump dispatched Homan, who he called “tough but fair,” in a Truth Social post. Of Bovino, Trump called him “very good, but he’s pretty out there” and rejected the suggestion that it was a “pullback.”

Still, the exit wasn’t without its possible derailments. One came after Frey’s first meeting with Homan on Jan. 27, when he reiterated the city’s separation ordinance in a post on X. The following morning, Trump lashed out at Frey, accusing the mayor of “PLAYING WITH FIRE.”

One of the city officials said they had been intentional with their wording of the post because “a bright red line for us was when something was said about city policies or directives that were patently false,” even if there were some Minnesota Democrats “who felt like we were poking the bear a little bit.”

“We really want to make this end, but like to what end? Because we also don’t want to set a terrible precedent for other cities,” the official continued. “You just can’t set the standard that you can bully cities into submission.”

Minnesota Democrats continue to impart the lessons they learned with other blue cities and states. A state official said Walz was in regular touch with other governors, who are “supremely worried” about being Trump’s next target and are seeking advice, particularly over National Guard deployments.

During Frey and Mamdani’s New York City conversation last week, they compared notes on how to negotiate with the president, discussing the “nuance” required to “navigate Trump,” and “how you go about running a city through this,” according to a Minneapolis city official who attended the meeting.

“We talked about the state of play, how the federal administration conducts themselves, how decisions are made — not that either one of us knows all of it,” Frey said.

Frey, too, is giving advice for anyone who wants to hear it, from other mayors to CEOs, which he summed up in three points. First, “say what you believe, and you say it loudly and clearly,” and people “probably including Trump, respect that.” Second, “take the politics out” by focusing on how people are affected because “regular-ass people have a general concept of fairness.” Lastly, “keep repeating common-sense stuff,” which he said he’d raise in every public appearance, questioning the motives of ICE’s operations.

“This is in the back of everybody’s head … ‘if I just shut up and keep my head down, maybe they won’t notice.’ You won’t attract the eye of Sauron,” Frey said. “That is a wildly incorrect assumption. By bowing your head in despair, you will be the next city.”

​Politics