Midterms: Get Out of Your Bubble

There’s plenty of outrage so we aren’t going to do that. Instead, we’re creating a place with new tips, tools, insights, sources, and stories that can help us understand how to win this November.

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Corruption is the issue that is actually peeling swing voters away from Trump — a $1.8 Billion fund for criminals is just that.

The administration is preparing to drop Trump’s ludicrous $10 billion IRS lawsuit in exchange for creating a $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded commission to compensate his allies — Jan. 6 defendants, pardoned and reoffending criminals and entities associated with Trump himself — through a process he controls, can’t be audited, and whose recipients can be kept permanently secret. ABC News broke the story, and even Trump acknowledged in the Oval Office last year that it “sort of looks bad.” It looks bad because it is bad — and it’s exactly the kind of documented, undeniable self-dealing that doesn’t just fire up the base, it moves the persuadable middle. Every Republican incumbent in a competitive district now owns this.

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When a sitting Republican senator goes on record calling Trump’s advisers “stupid” and says “stupid stuff is killing our chances,” that’s not just a satisfying moment — it’s a real signal that the fear of losing in November is starting to outweigh the fear of Trump himself. 

In a remarkable Politico interview published this week, retiring North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis names Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (whom he calls “incompetent”), and others as the advisers steering Trump toward decisions that will cost Republicans the Senate. Trump’s response? Attacking Tillis as a “QUITTER” on social media. The fracture is real, and it matters in our target districts. But here’s the problem: Democrats are largely still running the same playbook — waiting for Republicans to collapse rather than giving voters something to vote for. Flip the States was built to do the second thing. That’s what the impact score, the targeted giving, and the focus on the 11 highest-opportunity House seats is about.

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Take direct action to target vulnerable Republicans this Spring. Our campaign to flip 5 seats is focused on targeting Republican incumbents and tying them to Trump’s abuse of power and corruption. We can take power together. Support our campaign now.

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The DNC finally released its 2024 autopsy, and the document itself is almost a metaphor for the problem it’s trying to diagnose: 192 pages, no executive summary, no conclusion, and a chair facing calls to resign.

DNC Chair Ken Martin’s message accompanying the report acknowledges messaging that “created tensions with key constituencies” on the economy, a late and under-resourced ground game, and a fundamental misalignment between the party’s big-money super PAC and the actual campaign’s voter contact strategy. The Democratic brand is at historic lows. That is not an argument for despair — it’s the clearest possible argument for doing something different. We can’t wait for the party to fix itself before November. Flip the States exists precisely because donors who want to make a real difference can’t afford to fund the same infrastructure that produced this autopsy.

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The economic promise at the center of Trump’s coalition — that tariffs would bring back blue-collar manufacturing jobs — now has a data point that’s hard to spin away: American men have lost 155,000 jobs since Trump took office, with blue-collar and manufacturing sectors leading the decline.

Economic analyst Steve Rattner laid out the numbers this week, and they land hardest in exactly the communities Trump promised to revive. This isn’t a reason to relitigate 2024 or to lecture voters who backed him. It’s a forward-looking opportunity: in every competitive House district on our target list, there are working-class voters who were told to wait for results. The results are in, and we should be the ones showing up with a credible alternative — not just an “I told you so.”

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Before we treat the current maps crisis as a uniquely Trump-era invention, it helps to understand that gerrymandering is as old as the republic itself — and that understanding the history makes the fight more urgent, not less.

Political scientist Lee Drutman’s brief 237-year history of gerrymandering traces the practice from 1788. The core argument: it has never been good, but it has never been this legally protected or systematically applied. Previous generations found ways to push back and win anyway. Knowing that should sharpen our focus on the structural fights, the map fights, and the specific seats where our votes can actually change the composition of the House.

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