Americana

1. This week’s election highlights
2. Poll watch: Iran
3. Ad watch: Illinois
4. Q&A
5. Dave Recommends

Every Democrat agrees that the next election will hinge on which party is better at lowering the cost of living. They’re starting to disagree about how to make their case.

For Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., it means a new tax cut that would double the standard deduction and push millions of people off the income tax rolls. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., is preparing to outdo Booker and propose an even larger income tax cut, nearly doubling the number of people who could ignore the IRS.

“Overwhelmingly, the response has been positive,” Van Hollen told Semafor.

Booker and Van Hollen are both dream presidential candidates for some Democrats, but they’re stuck below the first tier of early 2028 hopefuls. Neither might run in the end. Still, the two senators’ tax plans have sparked the first real debate about what Democrats should stand for when they next face voters, beyond saying “affordability” and prioritizing health care.

Critics of Booker and Van Hollen’s plans, including older-line progressives at the Center for American Progress and newer post-Biden players on the left, argue that the party’s mission depends on doing good things with public funds — not pitching taxes as a pox that people need “relief” from.

While populism is gaining steam with Democrats, exempting huge numbers of people from taxes struck many on the left as “slopulism,” stirring voter passions without advancing the party’s vision of government.

Backers of the tax relief ideas see them differently, as a way to channel President Donald Trump’s talent at marketing memorable ideas — affordable or (typically) not, while Democrats fumble with their spreadsheets.

What we learned from races in Georgia, Mississippi, and New Hampshire

Northwest Georgia will get another month to pick a successor to former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene after Trump-endorsed local District Attorney Clay Fuller and 2024 Democratic nominee Shawn Harris got the most votes in Tuesday’s primary.

As both men advanced to an April 7 runoff, the combined vote for all Republicans hit 60% — that’s an 8-point under-performance from Trump’s 2024 margin in the district. But it’s still unlikely to move national Democrats, who aren’t seriously contesting this race.

Democrats did contest a state House seat in New Hampshire this week, electing Bobbi Boudman in a special election after she’d lost the GOP-trending district twice; Trump beat Kamala Harris there by 9 points. It was their third flip of a Republican-held seat this year, and their 28th flip since Harris’ defeat.

Republicans did flip a northern Virginia county board seat where the Democratic nominee was scandalized by racist social media posts from a decade earlier. That Democrat ran as a write-in candidate even after losing the nomination, letting the GOP win with a plurality.

Neither party got surprised by primaries in Mississippi, where no seat is competitive in November. Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who arrived in DC 33 years ago, won a 74-point landslide over attorney Evan Turnage.

The race hadn’t come on the radar of the progressive groups trying to replace as many incumbents as possible this year, but Turnage ran on generational change for the “poorest district in the poorest state.” But Thompson ran just as strong in the poorest, fastest-shrinking parts of the district, which connects the city of Jackson to the Black belt of the Mississippi Delta.

Angst grips Americans as war continues

The theme of polling since the Iran war started is angst; some about the current moment, more about what’s coming. NBC News’ national poll (Feb. 27-March 3, 1000 registered voters, 3.1% MOE) found 48% of voters saying that the president’s policies had “hurt” economic conditions, the highest-ever number answering that way.

Ahead of Trump’s 2018 midterm, that number was 26%. A 38% plurality of voters said that conditions were “getting worse” for them, another high compared with Trump’s first term, pre-pandemic.

The president is trying to put an optimistic spin on the party’s problems, telling House Republicans in Florida on Monday that “inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising, the economy is surging.” Voters are more nervous, and nervous about the war in Iran in particular.

In the Quinnipiac Poll (1,002, registered voters, March 6-8, 3.8% MOE), just 21% of voters predicted that the war would be over in “weeks” or less. A third believed that it would last for “months,” and the rest expected it to last longer. 

The shaky claim in a pivotal Illinois Senate ad

“Juliana Stratton’s Super PAC is Funded by ICE Contractor.” The source of this claim, according to the first negative ad from the campaign of her Democratic Senate primary rival Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, is a Feb. 13 article in CBS News — but no article exists with that headline.

The actual CBS reference is to a donation the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association (of which Stratton is a member, given her position in Illinois) received from CoreCivic. It’s become a popular line: One week later, the crypto PAC Fairshake cited the same story, referring to the DLGA’s “six-figure donation from [an] ICE contractor.”

The CBS story also noted that the embarrassed group donated the politically-toxic cash to the National Immigration Law Center. But the clean-up didn’t make it into these ads. And Democrats expect this sort of attack to come up again and again as PACs try to boost their candidates in races with progressive primary electorates. CoreCivic gave to the Democratic Governors Association, too.

Semafor Washington, DC is expanding to twice a day, with an afternoon edition of the must-read email briefing. This new edition harnesses the expertise and intelligence of our extremely well-sourced Semafor Washington, DC team, now strengthened by new congressional reporter Nicholas Wu. Delivered to inboxes every weekday around 4:30pm ET, the afternoon edition delivers a sharp snapshot of the day’s developments driving Washington and a clear-eyed preview of the narrative shaping the next 12 hours. Sign up for the twice-daily briefing here.

PAC attack

Four years ago, the pro-Israel juggernaut AIPAC launched a super PAC and became a massively important source of money to elect more moderate Democrats and beat progressives. This year — with the Democratic base’s support for Israel in free fall — progressives fought back.

American Priorities launched with an aggressive ad buy in North Carolina’s 4th district, catching Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee by surprise, and convincing some Washington Democrats that she might lose to a pro-Gaza, anti-war challenger. Pro-Israel and pro-AI money surged in to help Foushee, a somewhat pyrrhic victory; she’d renounced AIPAC last year and endorsed legislation to block new weapons for its war. But it dealt a blow to the new PAC, which intends to spend at least $10 million on like-minded candidates, and got a lesson in how fast the other side can move.

“We’re still taking stock of what worked,” said the PAC’s founder Hannah Fertig, a veteran of progressive Bernie-wing Democratic politics. She talked about what’s next, in primaries already shaped by pro-Israel money.

Dave Recommends

Ten years ago, when Lionel Shriver was getting retroactively de-platformed by the Brisbane Writers Festival for essentially defending cultural appropriation, A Better Life might have been unpublishable. It’s a nightmare novel about immigration, following a Brooklyn family whose matriarch allows one migrant, then another, then another, into her Queen Anne house.

Her children, childless themselves, are shocked; the authorities don’t even try to prevent the takeover. The novel is a sensation with nationalist conservatives, worth reading to understand the right’s current immigration backlash — and how unafraid its participants are about being called “mean” or “racist” after the Biden years.

The Dems-in-disarray beat is busy, but Politico’s Andrew Howard identified something new in it: Independent candidates who are running even if Democrats don’t want them to. That’s actually a twist, after a number of races that Democrats stepped back from, hoping that independents who shared some of their views would be more electable.

In Montana, Democrats won’t get out of the way for an independent backed by former Democratic Sen. Jon Tester; one state over, a Democrat-turned-independent still has to deal with a fringe candidate who wants the party’s vestigial nomination.

• 6 days until primaries in Illinois
• 55 days until primaries in Indiana and Ohio
• 237 days until the midterm elections
• 880 days until the Democratic National Convention