Democrats Have A Long Road To November
Seven months out, the structural situation does not look good
On Monday morning, Harry Enten and John Berman informed the CNN audience that Democrats have the lowest generic ballot lead of any comparable midterm election in the 21st century. Over two decades, the pendulum-swing effect of a polarizing Republican presidency has diminished by half. As Enten explained, this means Democrats might be able to win a narrow House majority, but they will not win power in the US Senate back, if things stay this way.
Of course, things will not stay this way. A lot will happen between now and November. However, the clear implication of this polling data is that voters will not punish the Republican Party over Trump. As the Democratic Party became ideologically narrow, substituting unpopular identity politics for popular causes in the time of Trump, its mass support has suffered commensurately. No matter what Americans think of Donald Trump, or the GOP, they think even less of Democrats, and this is not going to change because Democrats refuse to change.
Put another way, Democrats are unwilling to change back to what they believed before the advent of woke progressive ideological straitjacketing deranged them as a party. For example, here is the late Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada explaining succinctly that unrestricted immigration leads to theft of public services for American citizens. Few Democrats are able to articulate this point, anymore, much less admit their soft immigration policies have been taxpayer robbery. Instead, they spout slogans, No one is illegal on stolen land! being the most obnoxious.
Speaking of frauds on the taxpayer: First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli tells The New York Post that Gov. Gavin Newsom has allowed “hundreds of billions of dollars” of fraud in the Golden State. In fact, there is so much patent fraud going on that he does not have enough prosecutors to punish all of it. “I think it would be the end of a lot of people’s careers in Sacramento” if a full investigation took place, Essayli said.
Essayli suggested the enormity of such alleged fraud will be difficult to tackle, but told The Post they’ll go with a “quantity over quality” approach to prosecute as many fraudsters as possible.
“So maybe we just do a bunch of the smaller frauds. Most frauds are not in the hundreds of millions. Most of the fraudsters are taking a few 100,000 or one or 2 million, that’s the majority of the fraudsters. But those numbers add up really quick when you multiply by the amount of people engaged in this,” he said.
Reader, do you remember the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in which American taxpayers bailed out the global banking and monetary systems to the tune of trillions of dollars? Anyone 25 or older ought to remember how controversial this was. Set aside whatever you thought at the time, however, because history has weighed in. About half of the allocated $900 billion was loaned out, and all but $31 billion eventually repaid.
Let us do the math together TARP, the single biggest controversy to happen parallel to the election of Barack Obama, ended up costing American taxpayers about $50 billion in today’s dollars. The current conflict with Iran has so far cost about $50 billion. Every hundred billion dollars of California taxpayer fraud is as expensive as two whole 2008 bank bailouts or two wars with Iran.
This ripoff has been wide, deep, and systematic. Christopher Rufo recently reported that Medicaid and Medicare fraud in California alone add up to $146 billion ripped off the taxpayer. Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Dr. Mehmet Oz notes that eliminating fraud would double the expected life of the Medicare trust fund. Appearing on Fox News, he called out Democrats for avoiding accountability.
Dr. Oz described a whole-of-government approach to the investigation and an emerging pattern of fraud centered in immigrant communities that “don’t share our values”. California “does sloppy work, or frankly looks the other way” rather than enforce laws or regulations that prevent fraud, Oz said. He mentioned Flushing, New York, where Chinese adult day care centers have come under scrutiny for hundredsd of millions of dollars in alleged fraudulent billing.
Blue or red state, the fraud is endemic — Oz averred that there are more medical equipment suppliers than McDonalds restaurants in southern Florida, with possible Cuban government ties to the fraud. Like Americans, Oz is asking each state: “Is this a flaw, or a feature, of these programs?”, and the answers are decidedly bad for the bluest states. Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Maine have all created permissive environments for fraud, whereas Idaho, Florida, and Ohio are cracking down.
Minnesota has been particularly notorious for soft judges issuing light sentences to people convicted in the schemes, with repayment being a small fraction of what was stolen. Feeding Our Future fraud defendant Abdul Abubakar Ali, who pleaded guilty to a count of wire fraud in 2022, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison. He has paid just $92,500 in restitution out of his $3 million share in a $250 million fraud. The second defendant has gotten off even lighter. Prosecutors insist that the earliest defendants get the best deals, but the overall impression the public is getting, right now, is of a famously-blue state letting favored immigrants rip them off.
Blue-state administrators have created environments where fraud thrives, and certain immigrant networks have exploited them at industrial scale. Voters are noticing both the cultural overreach and the fiscal rot. This scandal began with the ‘Quality Learing Center’, but child care is just one of a thousand ways that Somalis have allegedly bilked the taxpayer: autism services, meals for the poor, Medicaid services, assisted living, all at “industrial scale”, to quote federal prosecutor Joseph H. Thompson. Rep. Ilhan Omar clearly does not share American values, least of all honesty and transparency in her personal finances.
There are enough billions in fraud to occupy a whole midterm election cycle with discoveries of Democratic ties. Gov. Tim Walz is a lightning rod who cannot stop making statements of fealty to his favored immigrant group. The ads write themselves. More to the point, political advertising does not pay for itself, which brings us to the most consequential fraud investigation of the year, from the perspective of Democrats.
Democrats are completely dependent on ActBlue, which has effectively monopolized their small-dollar donations, for their access to grassroots campaign funding. That is, ActBlue has become the singular financial entity through which Democrats can lay claim to being a popular political party. It is therefore not good news, indeed it is terrible for Democrats, that ActBlue appears to be under investigation by the Department of Justice for knowingly laundering foreign donations in violation of federal law.
The New York Times dropped this story last week. However, muckraker James O’Keefe found elderly Democrats listed submitting hundreds of daily donations that they denied making in 2024, clear evidence that fraud (‘smurfing’) was being committed in their names, potentially to launder foreign cash. As the NYT does acknowledge, this scandal was “years in the making”.
During 2025, three US House committees opened investigations into potential fraud at ActBlue. Thereafter, seven senior ActBlue officials, including their last in-house lawyer, reportedly resigned after the Covington & Burling law firm warned CEO Regina Wallace-Jones that the company’s testimony to Congress may have been criminally false. The company’s written statements to the committees were “revised”.
“It can be alleged that ActBlue accepted and/or facilitated the acceptance of foreign-national contributions into American elections,” one memo states. “In addition, because ActBlue’s staff was aware that its system was not as robust as necessary, it could be alleged that these violations were ‘knowing and willful,’ a standard that both increases the penalties the F.E.C. might seek and gives the Justice Department jurisdiction for a potential criminal investigation.”
This would be a more manageable scandal if not for the pre-existing shortfall in large donations after the fiasco of the Harris/Walz ticket in 2024, which still has the big donors leery of a repeat. At roughly a seven to one ratio of contributions, Republicans have a persistent and growing cash advantage: “The DNC has just $15.9 million in cash on hand compared to $109.3 million in the RNC’s coffers” with “nearly $17.4 million in debts and obligations, including a $15 million loan taken out last October.”
Add in the cash advantages of outside groups, and the GOP will have no funding problem to put out endless ads across media telling voters that they cannot afford to elect Democrats who use the word “affordability” while sucking the taxpayers dry: We can’t afford Democrats, the ads will say. And they will have the virtue of being truthful.
Abigail Spanberger, who ran on the “affordability” platform in last year’s Virginia gubernatorial election, has already seen her approval ratings sink to just one point above water — 47 percent approval to 46 percent disapproval. In office, she has already raised the cost of living for Virginians, leading to this “stunning” decline, as Larry Sabato calls it.
The basic problem for Democrats is that they cannot deliver on their campaign promise of making things affordable through government action. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will find the rich resist being cannibalized to feed the masses. From AI to the minimum wage, the investor class is no longer buying what the progressive left is selling. Meanwhile, Democrats are trapped by ideology, unable to admit they have any problems.
At the moment, they are depending on the fog of war to promote themselves as the saviors of the nation. But Democrats will have to run against Republican opponents who are not named Donald Trump, while the Republicans make endless use of prominent Democrats, and seemingly-endless fraud scandals, to frame their opponents as an expensive mistake. If the only response Democrats have is to call Republicans racist, it’s going to be a bad November for them, historically-speaking. As unpopular as he becomes, they are even less popular.