Americana

Around the time Dave Weigel and I got into political reporting, 25 years ago, savvy political journalists were in the midst of an identity crisis. The old-fashioned methods of talking to random voters, stalking the Iowa caucuses, and (God forbid) hanging around diners had been ruled unscientific. “David Broder,” the name of a Washington Post reporter who’d made rambling conversations with ordinary voters a specialty, became a dirty word.

In the place of random conversations came increasingly sophisticated and plentiful polling, as well as a flood of opinions on social media.

Almost all of us got with this new program. Our bosses liked it too; struggling outlets could slash travel expenses. We wouldn’t realize until the 2016 election what we’d been missing.

Dave Weigel is an exception. He’s never stopped roaming across America, never lost his curiosity for the outsider victories in county executive races and surprisingly competitive congressional primaries.

Now American political journalism is entering its second decade of “how did we miss this?” One way we missed it is by not being enough like Weigel, and by not reading Weigel closely enough.

As Americana readers have seen since he joined Semafor at our launch in 2022, he listens seriously to the rising “fringe” voices, left and right, that have emerged to challenge the Republican and Democratic establishments. He saw the early signs of the tide turning against President Donald Trump this year, and was among the first to see the AI data center backlash coming.

I visited Weigel last week at the start of his parental leave; he showed me his Blu-ray collection and his gorgeous daughter. Weigel will be back to lead this briefing in the spring, and if you’d like to give him (or us) a head start on our next year of scoops, his inbox is open (as is mine). But I thought I’d take advantage of his absence to celebrate one of America’s greatest political observers. We at Semafor are very glad to share him with you.

As electricity bills rise, candidates in both parties blame data centers

The political watchword of the moment is “affordability,” and candidates running this year in states that saw heavy AI-related infrastructure buildout honed in early on a culprit: data centers.

The argument in favor of data centers and their diffuse benefits is more complicated to make to voters than the argument against them; they’re voracious consumers of land, water, and electricity. They also lack a natural constituency. An anti-data center campaign ad Virginia Democratic state delegate John McAuliff ran this fall depicts a brutalist, alien structure looming suddenly into view to menace a suburban cul de sac. “Do you want more of these?” he asks.

Reporting in Virginia, I could tell that anger was growing at Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s come-on-in approach to the AI industry. I was also struck that Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, running on another term of Youngkin’s policies, was not talking about it.

US shutdown isn’t landing in key 2025 elections

Every government shutdown is different, and this was the shutdown that (mostly) didn’t bark. Voters have grown used to the idea of Washington dysfunction, and both parties felt like they had stronger closing arguments for this fall’s elections. Threatened mass layoffs of federal workers have been a feature of Trump’s second presidency from the beginning.

My only regret here was not writing a punchier headline, making the point clearer: Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey expected a shutdown to help them win. There was creaky conventional wisdom, at the time, that Democrats would absorb the blame for a shutdown (some of them would eventually break ranks to end it). But talking to strategists and campaigns in both states showed that Republicans were much more worried.

Republicans replicate their anti-Harris tactics against Spanberger and Sherrill

Trump found an effective attack line against Kamala Harris last year in her “word salad” extemporaneous answers to questions, and Republican candidates reprised those tactics this fall against other verbose Democratic women running for public office. They were helped by the ease of comparing one pantsuited female candidate — and one overly long, overly cautious soundbite — with another.

“She still hasn’t answered your question,” Jack Ciattarelli, GOP candidate for governor of New Jersey, said after opponent Mikie Sherrill couldn’t clearly state whether she supported a state bill to criminalize “hate speech” directed at political figures. In Virginia, gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger got dinged in September for a 297-word answer the Democrat gave in response to a question about transgender athletes’ participation in women’s sports.

Though both Sherrill and Spanberger were victorious, moments like these were low points for both campaigns, and they made it strikingly easy for Republicans to portray their opponents as the second coming of Harris. It’s unlikely that we’ve seen the last of it.

Stevens bets against a Democratic shake-up in Michigan

The grassroots revolt against incumbent Democrats has manifested in many candidates’ hesitancy to accept PAC money and in their eagerness to attack the party’s current congressional leadership. Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens — who a November poll showed leading two progressive Democrats in a three-way Senate primary — has beaten a different path.

She declined to condemn the influence of corporate PACs when asked point-blank on PBS in late October, instead preferring whenever possible to court union endorsements and demonstrate wide-eyed ardor for skilled labor.

My sense of the Democratic primary electorate, by mid-summer, was that it was angry at the party establishment for losing to Trump again. In Michigan, this seemed to be manifesting as a rejection of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the big PACs — AIPAC especially — that preferred Stevens as the party’s Senate nominee.

From the ground, I explained Stevens’ style and strategy (which was never going to impress extremely online people). And I saw why her opponents thought her closeness to party leaders could be a weakness.

Zohran Mamdani brings the Bernie Sanders method to New York

Four years ago, Democrats saw their future in Eric Adams, a tough-talking Black ex-cop who seemed to synthesize calls for racial justice and safer streets. Now, as its Washington wing frets about finding moderate candidates to remake the party’s damaged, elitist image, the biggest city in the country has moved decisively in the opposite direction.

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is a proud socialist and critic of modern Israel in the Bernie Sanders mode, promising huge new taxes and an expansion of city government. Some of the year’s most important political stories were told in one New York election: The discovery that post-Biden Democrats could run on “affordability,” the party’s declining support for Israel, the general-in-his-labyrinth end of Andrew Cuomo. 

My interview with Mamdani, before he won, got to the point: A socialist who’d bought into the 2020 “racial reckoning” thinking about crime and capitalism realized that to win power, his movement needed to prove that it could govern while the media ran around talking about something else.

Join us on the promenade for another year of world-class live journalism. Semafor editors will host on-the-record conversations with industry leaders, delivering clear insight into the forces reshaping business, technology, and geopolitics.

Native American woman gets a chance to topple Hogg at DNC

The school shooting survivor and gun-control advocate David Hogg appeared after the 2024 election like a kind of avenging angel for Democrats, castigating party leadership for its messaging problems and overall “uncoolness” while expounding upon the need for “fighters.”

He also refused to beg off supporting primary challenges to old or unpopular Democratic incumbents through the Leaders We Deserve PAC while simultaneously serving as DNC vice chair. That set off an intra-party fight and, eventually, Hogg’s exit from the DNC.

The Hogg Wars are already fading in Democrats’ memories. Winning, as they did in 2025, has a nice way of smoothing over tensions.

But the party’s confusion over how to rebuild didn’t end in November. And the conflict between Hogg, who wanted to challenge doddering incumbents from inside the DNC, and Ken Martin, the chair who wanted the party to move on, did not end after months of infighting. This was how it started.

A new ‘war on terror’

I wrote early on about the deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadoran man and Maryland resident who the government accused of being in a “foreign terrorist organization” stemming from an unproven affiliation with MS-13.

Before public opinion curdled regarding the US’ invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and while the Bush-era GOP was riding high, Republicans got a lot of mileage from accusing defiant political opponents of being pro-terrorism. So when Democrats began to protest Ábrego’s deportation, the Trump administration knew to argue that a new war on terror was underway, and that critics of how it’s conducted, or who it ensnares, are part of a new fifth column.

When reports emerged earlier this month that the US had conducted a “second strike” on survivors of a hit on an alleged drug boat off the coast of Venezuela, it put the White House on defense. Some Republicans — and even, at one point, Trump himself — ended up keeping their distance from the Pentagon’s decisions.

Readers of Americana wouldn’t have been surprised by some of that blowback. You just needed to read ahead in the script.

• 38 days until the runoff for Texas’s 18th congressional district
• 69 days until Texas’ Senate primary elections.
• 314 days until the 2026 midterm elections