Americana

1. Dems score in Florida
2. Not-so-great debate
3. Anti-Trump ad BTS
4. Ad watch: Wisconsin high court
5. Poll watch: New Hampshire primary

The Sunrise Movement, a nine-year old climate nonprofit, is politically inseparable from the Green New Deal that it organized hundreds of town hall meetings and rallies to promote.

Except that it barely talks about the idea anymore.

Instead, from Colorado to Illinois, Sunrise members are focusing their direct actions on letting Democratic candidates know how toxic AIPAC is with their party’s base.

So what happened to a group whose leaders were invited to help craft Joe Biden’s climate platform, whose activists called his 2022 Inflation Reduction Act a good start toward their lower-emissions future? It’s not just Sunrise — even as Donald Trump’s second term sees a remarkable reversal of the environmental movement’s hard-fought wins, the visibility of Green New Deal-style climate activism is on the decline.

In a recent teach-in for members, Sunrise shared its latest four-step plan: “Slow the authoritarians” through the midterm elections, win an “electoral breakthrough” in 2028, carry out a “political revolution” in a new president’s term, and inaugurate a “new system” in 2032.

“As Sunrise has pivoted to addressing Donald Trump’s authoritarianism, we see these [GOP] funders in our politics as ultimately tied to how we can build a Democratic Party that can fight back against Donald Trump,” said Sunrise spokeswoman Denae Ávila-Dickson.

The Green New Deal has faded in Democratic politics, rarely mentioned in primaries. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who introduced a Green New Deal resolution in 2019, 2021, and 2023, did not introduce one in this Congress.

Its promise of a vast economic and environmental reorganization for the benefit of workers is now living on, somewhat, in the growing progressive blowback against AI data centers. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., released high-profile legislation imposing a moratorium on the data centers just this morning.

This isn’t where Sunrise hoped it, or climate activism, would be by now.

GOP drops two Florida state-level seats

Florida Democrats flipped two Republican-held seats in the state legislature on Tuesday, including the Palm Beach district where President Trump votes. Democrat Emily Gregory won that seat by 2.4 points, a 13.4-point swing against the GOP since 2024 in a district that trended its way after 2016. In the Tampa Bay area, Democrat Brian Nathan more narrowly won the state Senate seat vacated when Lt. Gov. Jay Collins left to join the Ron DeSantis administration; Collins is now running for governor.

“It’s clear voters at the polls are fed up with Republicans,” said Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which invested in both races but was outspent by the GOP.

Registered Republicans out-voted Democrats in both seats, locking in what seemed to be a lead before Election Day. Democratic candidates won with a surge of independent voters, which they claimed they could repeat in November.

Democrats have now won 31 Republican-held state legislative districts since losing the 2024 election; Republicans have not flipped any Democratic-held seats. But Democrats face trouble on another part of Florida’s east coast: Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, who was federally indicted last year on charges of misusing FEMA money, will face a House ethics hearing tomorrow, just a month before her trial begins.

California Democrats’ gubernatorial struggles continue

California Democrats canceled a planned gubernatorial debate this week after four non-white candidates, excluded from the stage because of low poll numbers, convinced their competitors to skip it.

Their specific gripe: The University of Southern California came up with rules that allowed San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan onstage, even though he’s polling about even with former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Meanwhile, Mike Murphy, the co-director of USC’s politics center, is serving as adviser to a pro-Mahan PAC.

“Matt Mahan is lower than some of us, period,” Villaraigosa told the Los Angeles Times, calling out a qualifying rule that rewarded “average” daily fundraising; that disadvantaged his campaign, which began a year ago, and helped Mahan’s, which began in January.

The California Democratic Party has urged lower-polling candidates to pull out of the race if they can’t get traction before the middle of next month, when the ballot will be set. Two Republicans, Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco, led the party’s own polling for the top-two June primary, accentuating the risk of a “lock-out” that would keep Democrats off the ballot for the November election. Rep. Eric Swalwell, former Rep. Katie Porter, and investor Tom Steyer each came in with 10% support; Mahan and the four non-white candidates polled at 3% or less.

Dissecting a profane anti-Trump ad

The first ad for Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton’s Senate campaign couldn’t be played in full on TV. It begins with one Chicagoan saying “F— Trump,” then another, and then four more — including Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth. Stratton, who came from behind to prevail in last week’s Democratic primary, doesn’t say the four-letter word herself, appearing instead next to her political mentor, Gov. JB Pritzker, and promising to “abolish ICE.”

“The wording was our way of capturing voter sentiment,” Adam Magnus of MPWR Media Strategies, the consultant behind the spot, told Semafor. “It was almost like a cleansing exercise for people.” Stratton later defended the ad in a TV debate (a moderator wondered what “happened to when they go low, we go high”). But it was meant to get voters and reporters talking, and it worked, leading to the first memorable spot of the midterms.

Dueling abortion messages in Wis. supreme court race

Republicans are nervous about next month’s state supreme court election in Wisconsin, after the sort of money that flowed into last year’s race — including nearly $25 million from Elon Musk — never showed up. Democratic messaging hasn’t changed much in 12 months. In “On the Ballot,” Democratic-backed candidate Chris Taylor goes after Republican-backed candidate Maria Lazar for her positive comments on the rollback of Roe v. Wade and her work for anti-abortion groups, a contrast with Taylor’s Planned Parenthood work.

The threat of a conservative court banning abortion in the state remains potent for Democrats, even though a Lazar win would keep the 4-3 liberal majority in Madison. Lazar’s ad, “The Choice,” tries to win the issue, calling Taylor an “activist” who advocated for no abortion restrictions, while Lazar is a “constitutional conservative” who won’t bring her causes to cases.

Vance, Newsom down as 2028 gets closer

If you’re running for president, and want a dose of humility, look up poll numbers from two years before any New Hampshire primary. You’ll find Hillary Clinton’s 50-point lead, Rudy Giuliani’s frontrunner moment, and zero-point showings for people who’d eventually win or come close. We are at that fan-fiction point in the 2028 cycle, but the results aren’t meaningless. Pete Buttigieg, who visited the state last week, is about as popular with New Hampshire Democrats now as he was when he narrowly lost the 2020 primary to Bernie Sanders.

The “progressive” vote, post-Sanders, isn’t big enough to win even a crowded primary; in Ocasio-Cortez’s first appearance in this poll, she does best with “very liberal” voters and voters with advanced degrees, but still loses them to Buttigieg.

Buttigieg and Pritzker run stronger with women than men; Newsom and Ocasio-Cortez are significantly stronger with men than with women.

Democrats haven’t set their primary calendar yet, and one factor — how competitive the GOP primary ends up being — is out of their control. (“Undeclared” voters, registered with neither party, can vote in any primary.) Vance is stronger than some other vice presidents were at this point ahead of a possible succession run, but the secretary of state’s glowing, meme-filled coverage since the Venezuela operation has given him a surge of new support. Most Republicans are still shopping around.

This April, Howard Lutnick, US Secretary of Commerce, will join global leaders at Semafor World Economy — the largest convening of top global CEOs and government officials in the United States — to sit down with Semafor editors for conversations on the forces shaping global markets, emerging technologies, and geopolitics. See the full lineup of speakers, including Global Advisory Board members, Fortune 500 CEOs, and top elected officials from the US and across the G20.

Amazing things can happen in county party meetings. Last week, Maine Gov. Janet Mills zoomed into a Hancock County Democratic event, taking skeptical questions from attendees and not hiding her disbelief at questions supportive of Democratic Senate rival Graham Platner. When an online questioner asked if big money from DC should be picking the nominee, Mills said she wasn’t getting any: “What, are you kidding me?” When an attendee called her first negative ads against Platner “odious,” Mills chuckled. Her answers weren’t state secrets — she called Platner’s old Reddit posts a “massive election vulnerability” that Republicans would use to beat him — but Nathan Bernard’s shrewdness in getting the video and publishing it told us new things about the primary, like how unconvinced some active Democrats are by Mills’ Platner attacks.

• 13 days until Wisconsin’s state supreme court election
• 27 days until Virginia’s referendum on re-drawing congressional districts
• 41 days until primaries in Indiana and Ohio
• 223 days until the midterm elections