u/siwibot

May 20, 2026 - Fulltext

Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, was censured by his own party on Wednesday night over his decision to free Tina Peters, a high-profile election denier and supporter of President Trump who had been serving a nine-year prison sentence for tampering with voting machines.

The censure by the Colorado State Democratic Party came after more than 700 infuriated Democrats signed onto a grass-roots effort to rebuke Mr. Polis for commuting Ms. Peters’ prison sentence last week. The censure measure, voted on during a state party central committee meeting on Wednesday night, passed with 89.8 percent support.

Ms. Peters had been perhaps the highest-profile election denier still in prison — in her case, for actions related to a failed effort to prove that voting machines under her control had been used to rig the 2020 election.

Dozens of Democratic leaders in Colorado — and some Republicans — spent months beseeching Mr. Polis in public and private to reject Ms. Peters’ application for clemency. They argued that despite her age, 70, and status as a first-time felon, Ms. Peters posed a threat to elections and democracy and was unrepentant.

Mr. Polis, however, said he believed Ms. Peters had been given an unfairly harsh sentence because of her embrace of election conspiracy theories, not the severity of her crime. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the censure.

The commutation Mr. Polis issued last Friday clears the way for Ms. Peters to be freed from a state prison in Pueblo, Colo., on June 1, after serving fewer than two years.

Democrats have been fuming ever since, searching for some way to punish the lame-duck governor, who has at times rankled Democrats by vetoing their bills, endorsing the vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary and fighting in court to cooperate with federal immigration subpoenas.

“The man is wildly out of touch with the party he effectively leads,” Ian Coggins, 33, a political consultant and local Democratic captain who started the censure effort, said in an interview.

On Wednesday night, more than 250 party activists and state and local officials joined a Zoom meeting where many slammed the governor for what they called “conduct detrimental” to their party.

Supporters of the censure demanded a formal investigation into the governor’s action, and wondered whether the commutation would affect Denver’s bid to host the Democratic National Convention in 2028.

“We cannot as a party or state allow this commutation to go unheeded,” Andrew Brandt, one of the Democrats on the Zoom meeting, said.

But a few argued that censure was unnecessary, and that Democrats in Colorado should focus on the midterm elections. In November, voters will decide who will succeed Mr. Polis as governor, a seat that political analysts expect Democrats to hold. In more challenging races, Democrats are also trying to flip two Republican-held congressional seats.

“The governor made a brave decision, unpopular as it is,” Ann la Plante, a criminal defense lawyer in Greeley, Colo., said.

Mr. Polis is hardly the first politician to be censured by his own party’s loyalists.

Republicans in Arizona censured then-Senator John McCain in 2014 over his voting record, and seven years later, censured his wife, Cindy, as well as a former Republican senator who supported Joseph R. Biden Jr. over Mr. Trump in the 2020 election. In 2022, Arizona Democrats censured Senator Kyrsten Sinema for opposing efforts to get rid of the filibuster.

Like those earlier censures, the Colorado Democratic Party’s action on Wednesday is largely symbolic. It does bar Mr. Polis from speaking at Democratic Party events, such as the upcoming DemFest in Denver, a showcase for candidates.

May 20, 2026 - Fulltext

Is Donald Trump strong or weak right now?

Usually, telling whether a president is up or down isn’t difficult, but the past few weeks have offered reasons to believe both.

Last night, Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who has been publicly critical of Trump’s policies throughout his second term, lost a primary to Ed Gallrein, a candidate recruited and backed by Trump. The president’s attempt to turn that race into a referendum on himself seems to have worked: Massie, who’s just as idiosyncratic now as he was when the voters of his district elected him to the first of seven terms, ended up about 10 points behind Gallrein.

This flex was the latest in a string. On Saturday, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, whom neither Trump nor voters ever forgave for his vote to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial, came third in a Republican primary. And earlier in May, several Republican state legislators in Indiana who had opposed Trump’s gerrymandering push lost primaries to Trump-backed challengers, fulfilling a vow of revenge from the White House.

A common thread in commentary on these races is that they demonstrate Trump’s enduring grip on power. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s break with Trump wasn’t a sign of fractures in the MAGA movement, the thinking goes; the real story was his ability to completely exile Greene, who has always been a singular character anyway, and who now has more entrée into anti-Trump spaces than MAGA outlets. “This is u/realDonaldTrump’s Republican Party. The rest of us get the privilege of living in it,” the proudly submissive Representative Randy Fine of Florida declared last night.

Yet Trump’s standing seems to also be deteriorating. This week, a New York Times/Siena poll found the president at 37 percent approval, his lowest in the poll ever and a four-percentage-point drop from January. The paper’s polling analyst, Nate Cohn, was led to wonder whether the much-vaunted “floor” in Trump’s polling is starting to crack. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday has him even lower, at 35 percent—12 points below where he began his term in the same survey. Much of his issue polling is even worse. That means some Republicans are rejecting Trump’s decisions, even if they retain a fondness for the man himself.

How do we reconcile these contradictions? If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, the answer will not surprise you: Trump’s hold on the MAGA base is still powerful, but the same actions that help him maintain it also help erode his standing with the broader public—and threaten to lead Republicans to defeat in November’s midterm elections.

Primary voters—and especially primary voters in Indiana, Louisiana, and Kentucky—are not representative of the general electorate. (Trump won those states by 19, 22, and 31 points, respectively, in 2024.) They aren’t even necessarily representative of the Republicans who vote in the general election, a group that is likely to be less engaged, less ideological, and less politically extreme overall. As a result, votes in November are more likely to hinge on issues such as inflation or the Iran war.

Sometimes the peculiar dynamics of primaries create situations that make Trump look superficially strong but actually suggest weakness. Yesterday, Trump finally issued a long-awaited endorsement in next week’s Texas runoff for U.S. Senate. The race pits Senator John Cornyn against state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Cornyn is a longtime mainstream Republican who has mostly been a loyal if unenthusiastic foot soldier for Trump; Paxton is, to use the political-science terminology, a real piece of work.

Trump was initially expected to endorse Cornyn, but polls showed Paxton ahead and one found that even a Trump endorsement wouldn’t change that. Trump dithered, then waited until the last minute to back Paxton. That effectively guarantees that Trump will back the winner, but it could be a Pyrrhic victory: Republican senators are now afraid that a Paxton nomination could cost the GOP the seat in November. Democrat James Talarico is still unlikely to win, but it’s not impossible, given the many scandals that taint Paxton.

Although the idea of a MAGA crack-up may be nothing more than a pipe dream of Trump critics, Cohn’s data are real. MAGA isn’t collapsing, and the base remains devoted, but it is shrinking. Trump’s sinking numbers may not matter as much to him, because he won’t face voters again, but they matter a great deal to other Republican officeholders. Many of them would like to find ways to distance themselves from Trump’s unpopular policies (and they may try as the general election gets close), but cases such as Massie and Cassidy remind them that the immediate political risk of crossing Trump outweighs the dangers of being yoked to an unpopular agenda. The latter might well end your career, but the former almost certainly will.

The irony is that Trump would probably benefit politically from a GOP Congress that was more willing to challenge him, because it would restrain him from his worst ideas. This is one reason the Founders designed the system this way, but Trump has no real civic awareness and his aides are determined to grant him quasi-monarchical power. An uncowed Republican Congress might have pushed Trump harder on affordability measures, and it might not have supported the war in Iran, had he asked for authorization—but he didn’t, calculating that it wouldn’t take action to block him.

Politics is a pendulum, so Trump may get a more antagonistic Congress despite—or because of—his efforts to resist it. In fact, he already has. Cassidy, in his first act since losing the primary, bucked Trump with a procedural vote to further a resolution that would end the war in Iran, and at least one moderate GOP colleague suggested that Cassidy will take more votes like that. Even if Paxton doesn’t blow the Senate race, Democrats remain the favorites to retake at least the House of Representatives. That would be one clear indication of Trumpian weakness.