Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Leigh Ann Caldwell
on Canada’s Election Day.
Today, my partner Abby Livingston has notes on Senator Jon Ossoff’s comments about impeachment, plus the tremors inside the Democratic establishment after Trump’s assault on ActBlue. And John Ourand, the author of our private email on the sports business, The Varsity, has some fresh
reporting on the Commanders’ return to D.C.
But first, a few other notes from around town…
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- A.O.C.’s loss is A.O.C.’s gain: Gerry Connolly, the well-liked Democratic congressman representing the D.C. suburbs in Northern Virginia, announced today that he will not run for reelection because his esophageal cancer has returned, which is sad news indeed. Connolly will also be “stepping back” from his role as ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, which means Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts will fill in for him. Lynch, who’s
next in line to run the committee, would fill his role if Connolly formally steps down.
It’s also something of a poignant twist for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who squared off with Connolly late last year in the high-stakes, high-profile election for the top Oversight job, despite his cancer diagnosis. Her resounding loss demonstrated how much work she still had to do inside the Democratic caucus to gain her colleagues’ trust. It also
raised questions about how the setback would impact her career.
Since then, of course, A.O.C. has more than recovered. At the time, she wanted the Oversight position largely for the megaphone that the job would provide her to attack the Trump administration. But now, instead of being bogged down with committee responsibilities and
tasked with creating viral moments from a dais, she’s embarked on a cross-country tour that has attracted tens of thousands of people, generating endless campaign-style footage for hype videos and freeing her to spread her own message. One senior Democrat noted that her campaign-style blitz isn’t necessarily tailored to the message the Democrats are using to take back the House, but it is definitely helping her as she contemplates her next steps.
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- Trump’s poll plunge: The White House is touting Trump’s first 100 days in office as the most productive, successful, and consequential of any president, with comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. But as Naftali Bendavid of The Washington Post wrote,
“Roosevelt’s onslaught … was aimed at expanding the federal government’s presence in Americans’ lives. Trump’s crusade is aimed largely at dismantling it.”
As it turns out, Americans don’t necessarily want a diminished government or a president who ignores its other two branches. A series of new polls over the past few days indicate that Trump’s approval rating is tanking, with two of them putting it at 39 percent (AP-NORC and Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos) and one at 42 percent
(New York Times/Siena). Still, there are no signs the president is backing down from his unpopular policies, despite voter dismay over how he’s managing the federal government (a –8 net approval rating) or handling the economy and trade (–11 and –12, respectively), per the Times poll.
The public is also souring, though less spectacularly, on Trump’s deportation and border security policies—topics that the president and his administration are far more comfortable
defending. At an 8:30 a.m. press briefing this morning to herald the 100-day milestone, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s special guest was border czar Tom Homan, which ensured that there would be more questions about the administration’s legally questionable deportation tactics than about the continuing economic fallout of tariffs.
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John Ourand
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- The Goodell-Harris
Doctrine: Over the past few decades, as the value of sports franchises has exploded, ass-covering local politicians have learned to model a familiar behavior anytime one of their teams tries to whip up fervor in support of a new stadium: Publicly balking at any suggestion that public funds be used to build an arena for a billionaire owner. “Chicagoans love the Bears,” they’ll say, “but not enough to support deploying taxpayer dollars for a new stadium.” And local voters seem to
mostly agree: A year ago, Kansas City voters soundly rejected a tax increase that would have been used to refurbish Arrowhead Stadium (home of the Chiefs) and Kauffman Stadium (the Royals). A year prior, Tempe voters rejected a taxpayer-funded arena to keep the Arizona Coyotes in the state. Earlier this month, San Francisco Giants C.E.O. Larry Baer candidly discussed
his team’s do-or-die private financing journey to move the team from the dregs of Candlestick to a waterfront ballpark downtown.
Roger Goodell and the NFL, however, have developed a public-private partnership playbook that has made these deals more palatable to pols and voters alike. And its winning formula was lurking in the background amid the news, announced earlier today, that the Commanders plan to move back to D.C. from the wilds of Landover, Maryland, to the tract
that houses the old R.F.K. Stadium. The Commanders will invest $2.7 billion in a new stadium at the R.F.K. site, and the city is being asked to put close to $1 billion toward the development.
While several members of D.C.’s City Council have already signaled their opposition to the deal—the body needs to ratify the proposal—the league and the team have expressed confidence. After all, this sort of financial structure has succeeded in the past. During today’s press conference, Goodell
compared the Commanders’ deal with D.C. to the Rams’ deal that led to the opening of SoFi Stadium in 2020, and the Falcons’ deal that led to the opening of Mercedes-Benz Stadium in 2017—and even the Lions deal that led to the erection of Ford Field way back in 2002. “There are many cities where they have seen the reinvestment into that community with the stadium being surrounded by development, such as this, and that is very powerful,” Goodell said. “They’ve all been successful, both in the
community’s mind and our mind. But they’ve also been successful from an economic standpoint.” SoFi, for example, was built in Hollywood Park and features restaurants, cinemas, retail… and even Cosm. [Read More]
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News and notes on the mixed reaction on Capitol Hill to Jon Ossoff’s
flirtation with the “I” word. Plus, what Democrats are really saying about Trump’s frontal assault on ActBlue.
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Last Friday, the 38-year-old Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff
surprised Hill Democrats when he declared, at a town hall in Cobb County, that President Donald Trump “has already exceeded any prior standard for impeachment.” The remark struck a chord for a couple reasons beyond the obvious jitters that attend any deployment of the “I” word. First, in Democratic circles, the idea of attempting
to impeach Trump at this stage—despite the deportations, constitutional crisis fears, tariffs, etcetera—is considered a nonstarter. The party all too keenly remembers the impotence of their past two impeachment attempts. And these days, throwing the word around is widely perceived on both sides as little more than an attention-seeking stunt.
But what insiders found more intriguing about Ossoff’s stray remark was that he isn’t some lawmaker in a safe seat looking
for a quick cable news cycle. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, introduced a resolution to impeach Joe Biden just one day after he took office. More recently—earlier today, in fact—Michigan Democrat Shri Thanedar
unveiled seven articles of impeachment against Trump, apparently without bothering to consult House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Perennial impeacher Al Green is planning to
introduce articles of impeachment as well.
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Ossoff, on the other hand, faces arguably the toughest general election campaign of
any Senate or House Democrat on the map in 2026. And yet, given that he likely won’t face a viable primary challenge that would force him to tack performatively to the left, some insiders have surmised that Ossoff’s response was more an off-the-cuff answer to a constituent question, rather than indicative of a newly embraced hobbyhorse.
Impeachment, of course, hasn’t been considered smart politics since 1998, when Democrats won seats in that year’s midterms amid Republicans’
attempt to throw Bill Clinton out of office. It took a violent mob chasing Nancy Pelosi out of the Capitol for her to finally, after years of resisting any talk of impeachment from her party, show a measure of enthusiasm for going after high crimes and misdemeanors. These days, the consensus on the Democratic side is that if Senate Republicans were unwilling to convict Trump over the 2021 insurrection, then there’s virtually nothing he could do
that would secure the 67 votes necessary (including a minimum of 20 Republicans) to convict him.
Predictably, my first call to a Hill Democrat on the Ossoff matter was met with grumbling. “It is a waste of time,” this person told me. Still, one Republican operative reasoned that the rash of bad polls for Trump over the weekend had given Dems an opening. “Because Trump’s polling is historically low, they don’t see a risk in advocating for impeachment, and they know it will go over very
well with their base,” this Republican said. The risk of activating the Republican base in Trump’s defense was probably minimal, he continued, precisely because impeachment is now seen as so ineffectual.
In any case, I’ve started to detect a shift in tenor among Democrats in establishment circles who might have otherwise rolled their eyes at Ossoff’s town hall remarks. One Democratic ex-House staffer, who was at the Capitol during the first two impeachments, applauded
the move (at least from a tactical standpoint), noting that it’s impossible for a Democrat to win in Georgia without riling up the base. “We can’t prosecute [Trump] anymore,” he said. “The Supreme Court gave him a literal get-out-of-jail-free card. So, what’s the answer? You gotta impeach him. Are we going to impeach him? No. But how else do you answer the question?”
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At first blush, it seems entirely sensible that Democrats would freak out over the news,
late last week, that Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the Democratic fundraising powerhouse ActBlue. Indeed, many sources on the Hill, and among the party’s professional donor class, were rightfully alarmed by the president’s executive action suggesting the platform had been compromised by “foreign nationals” to “improperly influence American elections.” (ActBlue
called the order “blatantly unlawful.”)
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ActBlue, of course, is central to Democratic campaigns, and is responsible
for having raised billions of small-dollar donations online over the past two decades—an essential resource for practically every Democratic candidate, campaign committee, and political group. It also operates as a sort of rapid response unit to breaking news: When Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away in 2020, for instance, Democrats used the platform to raise more than $30 million for campaigns within 12 hours.
Inevitably, perhaps, ActBlue has also become the focus of
Republicans who have long made accusations, mostly without any real basis, that the platform is a clearinghouse for illegal donations. Trump, in his presidential memoranda, claimed that a recent House investigation “revealed that a platform named ActBlue had in recent years detected at least 22 ‘significant fraud campaigns,’ nearly half of which had a
foreign nexus.” ActBlue’s president, Regina Wallace-Jones, responded by describing the allegations as “rumors and innuendo.”
Some Democrats believe it would be catastrophic if Trump managed to neuter the platform. Sure, there
are other technologies that could replace ActBlue, but any friction in making online contributions (having to switch websites, for instance, and enter credit card information to another website) is a “big effing problem,” as one Democratic operative put it to me this afternoon—especially because Republicans cleaned up on fundraising this quarter, often outpacing Democrats on several fronts. Typically, small dollars via ActBlue go a long way toward Democrats catching up later in
the cycle. The gusher of money can be so strong, in fact, that even the most rational Republican operatives can get suspicious of where it all comes from. (Exasperated Democrats are quick to point out that that’s just how motivated their base is against Trump.)
Other Dems are less worried about the tangible impact, and many doubt Trump will succeed in kneecapping the platform, which has already been the subject of Republican-led investigations. But there are conflicting
opinions among party operatives as to whether Trump’s attack on ActBlue will incite the base to donate more. “We did an email on it and we raised, like, 100 bucks,” one Democrat who works on a House campaign told me. “People don’t give a shit.” Nevertheless, they said, “There’s better technology. I don’t know why people are freaking out.”
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