Hello, and welcome to Saturday, Sept. 12, 2026.
My calendar says it's the Day of Encouragement, Video Games Day, Chocolate Milkshake Day, Hug and High Five Day, and Iguana Awareness Day. Encourage somebody, blend up a chocolate milkshake, hug a friend and high-five a stranger, and give an iguana its due respect — busy little Saturday.
Today in history: 1609:
English explorer Henry Hudson sails up the river that now bears his name.
1846: Elizabeth Barrett secretly marries Robert Browning at St. Marylebone Church in London.
1914: The First Battle of the Marne ends in an Allied victory against Germany, halting the initial German advance in World War I.
1938: Adolf Hitler demands self-determination for the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, escalating tensions that lead to war within the year.
1942: A German U-boat torpedoes the RMS Laconia off West Africa, killing more than 1,600 people before an American bomber attacks the German rescue effort, prompting Germany to ban future rescues of survivors at sea.
1943: German paratroopers free Benito Mussolini from the hotel where the Italian government is holding him.
1953: Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy marries Jacqueline Bouvier in Newport, Rhode Island.
1960: Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy addresses concerns about his Catholic faith before a Houston ministers' group, telling them, "I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me."
1974: Ethiopia's military deposes Emperor Haile Selassie after 58 years of rule.
1977: South African student leader Steven Biko dies in police custody, triggering an international outcry.
1992: The space shuttle Endeavour launches, carrying the first married couple in space and Mae Jemison, the first black woman in space.
Birthdays Today include: H.L. Mencken, writer, journalist, critic; Yao Ming, NBA Hall of Famer; Barry White, singer ("You're the First, the Last, My Everything"); Emmy Rossum, actor (Shameless).
If today's your birthday too, happy birthday — you're in good company.
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Here's a question that has more weight than you might think: If Democrats were to hold a midterm convention along the lines of the one Republicans just held, who would be the headliner? More to the point: Who could they put on that stage who actually embodies where the Democrat Party is going? Not merely who polls well. Not merely who holds an important office. Not merely who can deliver a reasonably competent speech. Who is the person around whom the movement itself is coalescing?
The question sounds academic until you think about what a political convention is actually supposed to accomplish. It isn't simply a four-day infomercial. At its best, a convention tells voters: “This is who we are. This is where we're going. And this is the person who best represents it.”
Republicans have an obvious answer: Donald Trump's MAGA. That doesn't mean every Republican agrees with everything Trump says or does. It doesn't mean every Republican candidate wants to make every race a referendum on Trump. But there is no serious question about who the center of gravity of today's Republican Party is. The GOP can put Trump on a stage, and everybody in the room knows why he's there.
And yes, Trump is done in two years. But even Democrats seem to feel the GOP bench is far deeper. We're not going to have much trouble coming up with a MAGA Republican to run for POTUS, or any of the congressional seats.
Now ask the same question of Democrats. Who gets the microphone?
Gavin Newsom? I doubt it.
Newsom certainly has national visibility, and he has been cultivating a national profile with increasingly aggressive attacks on Trump. His political operation is plainly looking beyond Sacramento. But there's a problem: the disaster that is California. The same state that provides Newsom his platform also hands his opponents an enormous amount of ammunition. And while Newsom can generate attention, attention isn't the same thing as movement leadership. His national profile still depends heavily on the very thing Democrats supposedly want to move past: Donald Trump. Beyond his opposition to Trump, he isn't bringing much else to the table. That's a weak foundation on which to build a post-Trump political identity.
Kamala Harris? Uhhhhhh…. no.
Giggles is probably the least likely to be what I will call a movement leader, or a “spiritual leader.” She's currently the nominal frontrunner by the numbers — leading most 2028 primary polls, usually in the high-20s to low-40s, depending on the pollster, and running strongest with black voters, the most important bloc in a Democrat primary. But leading the polls and leading a movement are two different things, which is precisely the distinction this entire discussion turns on. Harris represents the most recent defeat. That, among Democrats, is the kiss of death. Putting her on a midterm convention stage would read less as "this is who we are becoming" and more as "we're re-litigating the loss of 2024" — which is close to the last thing vulnerable House Democrats running in swing districts would want as their backdrop. In truth, the only thing she’s got going on for her is that she is the anti-Kelly candidate for the role. And I’ll get to Kelly. In the end, Harris might be the most plausible nominee, but she doesn’t answer the question of what comes after Trump, policy-wise. She ran on that question in 2024 and lost not only the White House, but both houses of Congress as well. And by the way, that she's the most plausible candidate doesn't speak well for the rest of the Democrat stable, now, does it?
Hakeem Jeffries? Again, I don't see it.
Jeffries holds House Democrat leadership, and that makes him important. But institutional importance and movement leadership are two different things. He has to balance a caucus containing both progressives and centrists while presenting a unified national message. That's a difficult job. It doesn't exactly scream movement.
Ken Martin? (Dry chuckle) Not a chance.
Martin is a party mechanic, and that's not an insult — parties need mechanics. They need people who understand organization, fundraising, state parties, candidate recruitment and the thousand small pieces that have to fit together to make a national political operation function. But nobody shows up at a rally because Ken Martin is speaking. He's the guy who runs the building, not the guy who fills it. He's furniture, not a focal point, and furniture rarely starts political movements. Besides, most Dems are still ticked at his handling of 2024, and the resulting autopsy report. Hard no.
Mark Kelly? No. More interesting, but he also comes out a hard no.
Kelly has a biography that practically writes its own campaign ad: astronaut, combat pilot, senator, husband of Gabby Giffords, a figure with genuine personal credibility on guns and violence. His 2024 convention remarks leaned heavily on his military and space background, and the idea of teamwork and national strength. But there's a difference between an impressive biography and political magnetism. Kelly's political identity is built largely around competence, moderation and pragmatism. And of course, let's not forget his well-entrenched case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. That's a recognizable political lane. But a movement requires something else: emotional identification. It requires people to look at the person on the stage and say, That's us. Kelly doesn't have that.
And that brings us to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
AOC unquestionably has something the others lack: base energy. She generates enthusiasm, at least among the hard left. Certainly, she’s strongly identified as a victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome. She has a recognizable political identity and a substantial following among the activist wing of the Democratic coalition, and she can produce the sort of emotional response that makes politics feel like something more than a committee meeting. But that's also the problem. The Democratic institutional establishment — and particularly its donors — have never fully embraced her as the party's national face. And that tells us something: The people paying the bills view her as a nice face with little else behind it. In short, the proverbial DEI hire.
Democrats have plenty of politicians. They have plenty of people who can raise money, generate headlines, give a speech, poll reasonably well. But do they have someone who can stand in front of the entire coalition and say, This is where we're going? That's the question, and it's a very different one from "Who is leading the polls?" The distinction matters.
The leader of a political movement isn't necessarily whoever currently holds the highest office or has the highest name recognition. Sometimes the person who defines a party's future appears before the party itself is ready to recognize it.
Consider Ronald Reagan's challenge to Gerald Ford in 1976 as one example of how a movement can exist inside a party before it controls the party. Reagan lost the nomination, but the ideological conflict exposed a changing Republican coalition — a split significant enough, I'd argue, to help hand the country the disaster that was Jimmy Carter. Four years later, Reagan was the Republican nominee and won by overwhelming numbers. Establishment GOP types and the Democrats both have never gotten over that.
Barack Obama offers a cleaner example. His keynote at the 2004 Democratic National Convention didn't make him the nominee. But it introduced a national audience to a politician who would become the party's standard-bearer just four years later. That's what I mean by a spiritual leader.
And by "spiritual," I don't mean religious. I mean the person who gives a political coalition its sense of identity — who doesn't merely tell the party what it believes, but makes its supporters believe he understands what they believe.
That is something Donald Trump possesses in abundance. Whatever else one thinks of Trump, there is no ambiguity about his relationship to the contemporary Republican movement. The GOP's 2026 midterm convention made that explicit, with Trump placing himself at the center of the party's congressional campaign message.
Democrats don't appear to have an equivalent figure. And that raises a far more important question than who would give the keynote address: Are Democrats actually leaderless? I'm not suggesting Democrats lack leaders. They obviously don't. What they may lack is a movement focal point. Those are not the same thing.
One could argue that 2018 provides Democrats a counterargument — that they don't necessarily need a single charismatic figure to win a midterm election. The Democratic resistance to Trump that year was diffuse. It wasn't organized around one national tribune. It was an anti-Trump movement involving activists, candidates, women's groups, suburban voters, progressive organizations and a wide assortment of local and national figures. Brookings' contemporary analysis described the period as one of unusually intense Democratic mobilization, with large numbers of candidates entering races and organizations expanding their efforts.
And it worked.
From that, you might conclude Democrats don't need a Trump — that "anti-Trump" is enough. There's a problem with that theory, though: They already tried it.
In 2024, opposition to Trump was again central to the Democratic message. Once again, the was no focal point beyond Trump hate. The Democratic convention itself explicitly framed the choice around Trump versus the Harris-Walz vision for the country. And Democrats lost. Which brings us to the more fundamental problem.
What comes after "No Trump"? That's the question Democrats still haven't answered convincingly from 2024. I suggest it’s mostly because they don’t have that answer. They can tell us what they oppose. They can tell us what they fear. They can tell us what they think Trump represents and what they believe Republicans are doing wrong. But what is the affirmative vision? Where is the destination? And, perhaps most important, who represents it?
One faction of the Democratic coalition has a very clear answer, and that faction spells real trouble in a general election: the Democratic Socialists of America and the broader socialist left have a vision. They want the Democrat Party — or at least a significant portion of it — to move substantially further left on economics, government and social policy. That's a non-starter for the average American voter, and with the votes in the last few cycles running close to 50/50, particularly for the all-important swing voter.
The people who represent the institutional center don't necessarily inspire the activist base. And the people who might appeal to swing voters don't necessarily generate much ideological enthusiasm. The result is a split Democrat Party, and a loss come 2028.
If you put the people listed above on a stage and ask, "Which one of you represents the future of the Democratic movement?," I'm convinced there's no clear answer among Democrats. And if there isn't, that's not merely a problem with the convention program. That's a problem with the party itself.
The key element here is that voters, particularly swing voters, notice these things, and elections are won and lost on those points.
Thought of the Day: To trust someone with your future, you need to know where they're going to take you.
VIP members: Your turn. Let's hear what's in your head.
Take care, gang. I"ll see you tomorrow.
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