By Chris Stirewalt | Friday, July 17
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By Chris Stirewalt
Friday, July 17
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Trump’s election obsession is a midterm loser
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It isn't that Republicans couldn't pass a single major piece of immigration legislation in the 18 months that their party has had unified control of Washington. It's that they wouldn't.
None other than the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) long predicted as much. Way back in January 2024, when Republicans had then-President Biden over a barrel on immigration, Graham was one of the high-ranking Senate Republicans urging his colleagues to get behind a compromise package hammered out by a bipartisan group, including Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.).
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From the start, House Republicans, then believing that they would expand their House majority in November (they didn’t) and certain that their party would recapture the Senate (they did), had been dismissive of the Lankford-led effort as not going far enough and for giving political cover to Biden, who had belatedly realized his massive blunder on immigration enforcement.
“To those who think that if President Trump wins, which I hope he does, that we can get a better deal — you won’t,” Graham told reporters at the time. Trump, then in the process of locking up the Republican nomination for a third time, told Republicans to wait until after the election to pass a “perfect” bill.
What followed was as predictable as a July heatwave in Washington: Congressional Republicans jumped at the plan that included zero action and zero risk. But House Republicans’ majority actually shrank by two seats in 2024, and while the GOP recaptured the Senate, a three-vote majority just wasn’t anything like the big numbers they would have needed to push through a major immigration overhaul.
So, Graham was right. Or, rather, would have been right if Republicans had even bothered to try.
In some alternate reality, Republicans would have used their leverage over Democrats on immigration in early 2025 to put forward a bill as tough or tougher than the one Lankford got Biden to assent to and then hammer away at red-state and border-state Democratic senators to try to get 60 votes. A tall order, since the new party out of power likely would have returned the favor to the Republicans who had voted the year before to deny Biden “a win.”
Short of that, Republicans might have pushed “messaging” legislation and forced Democrats to vote repeatedly against reasonable-sounding fixes to a system that is nearly universally acknowledged as ineffective, incoherent and chaotic.
But that’s the thing: They didn’t even try. It isn’t that the members of the new Republican majority couldn’t get an immigration bill through. It is that they wouldn’t.
When we look back in another 18 months at how Republicans went from vibe shift to short shrift after Trump’s return to power, there will be many explanations. The bungled Iran war, and its attendant economic miseries, will and should figure prominently in the story. Another major factor will be corruption and Trump’s self-dealing. To a lesser extent, so will Trump’s turn as Kublai Khan of the Potomac, decreeing various stately pleasure domes.
But very high on the list will be how Republicans took their strongest suit — immigration — and turned it into a mess. And that happened because Republicans in Congress didn’t lift a finger to do anything on the subject except to give Trump a great deal of enforcement money and next to no guidance on how to spend it. And the president certainly wasn’t going to ask for instructions. Like Democrats in the Obama era did on immigration, the GOP squandered its opportunity of unified control and preferred to let the president act unilaterally, thereby protecting themselves from primary voters.
That money for Trump’s now-unpopular enforcement push represents one of only two big legislative pushes from this administration. The billions came in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which consumed all of the limited legislative strength of the first year of Trump 2.0.
The second major push from the White House has been around a federal takeover of state elections, the SAVE America Act. If it were, as Republicans often suggest, a measure that required voters to show photo identification to cast ballots in federal elections, it might be a real winner for the GOP. Big majorities across ethnic and ideological lines support that. But the bill would essentially ban voting by mail and many forms of convenience voting that are, even with many Republicans, quite popular. And that’s before adding in the president’s other demands for the final bill, including restrictions on transgender athletes.
It is a poorly crafted, overreaching, potentially unconstitutional bill — perhaps as ill-conceived as the Biden-era elections legislation. Democrats tried to nuke the filibuster in order to pass that measure in 2021, but failed. But no other piece of legislation has consumed the imagination of the president and his core supporters as much. Imagine a worse kind of political malpractice than in a difficult election year for your party, squelching enthusiasm for popular bipartisan legislation: a housing package that Democrats supported despite giving a “win” on a key issue to Republicans. The president refused to sign and threatened to veto the bill in order to try to force an election takeover that will never get 60 votes in the Senate.
Voters do care about elections and “democracy,” broadly defined. And they are worried about its health — with good reason, given both parties’ grasping. But compared with other concerns for voters, it’s not even in the top five. In 2024, Democrats said “democracy is on the ballot” and voters blew them off. Why would Republicans possibly imagine that it would be different this time? And while they’re at it, the GOP continues to turbocharge Democratic turnout by stoking fears of Trump suppressing their votes.
In the meantime, Trump will be antagonizing moderate Republicans — both in the Senate, where his current nominees and funding requests now languish, and in the suburbs, where, as voters proved in the 2021 Georgia Senate runoff, they will punish Trump’s party for his electoral excesses.
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Watch Whole Hog Politics live: Join us today at 9 a.m. ET at TheHill.com as Chris Stirewalt and host Bill Sammon break down this week’s political news and answer questions from a live online audience.
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Programming alert: Watch “The Hill Sunday” with Chris Stirewalt — Get the latest from decisionmakers from around the country and Washington insiders including this week’s guests Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) And, as always, we’ll get expert analysis from our best-in-the-business panel of journalists, including Tia Mitchell of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Robert Draper of The New York Times and Seth Mandel of Commentary. Be sure to catch us on NewsNation at 10 a.m. ET / 9 a.m. CT or your local CW station.
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Women
2020: 53 percent lean Democrat, 39 percent lean Republican, 7 percent no lean
2023: 52 percent lean Democrat, 40 percent lean Republican, 8 percent no lean
2026: 52 percent lean Democrat, 38 percent lean Republican, 11 percent no lean
Men
2020: 48 percent lean Republican, 45 percent lean Democrat, 7 percent no lean
2023: 51 percent lean Republican, 42 percent lean Democrat, 8 percent no lean
2026: 49 percent lean Republican, 43 percent lean Democrat, 8 percent no lean
White voters
2020: 53 percent lean Republican, 41 percent lean Democrat, 6 percent no lean
2023: 55 percent lean Republican, 39 percent lean Democrat, 6 percent no lean
2026: 54 percent lean Republican, 39 percent lean Democrat, 7 percent no lean
Hispanic voters
2020: 56 percent lean Democrat, 32 percent lean Republican, 12 percent no lean
2023: 55 percent lean Democrat, 32 percent lean Republican, 13 percent no lean
2026: 57 percent lean Democrat, 29 percent lean Republican, 14 percent no lean
Black voters
2020: 81 percent lean Democrat, 14 percent lean Republican, 5 percent no lean
2023: 77 percent lean Democrat, 14 percent lean Republican, 9 percent no lean
2026: 73 percent lean Democrat, 14 percent lean Republican, 13 percent no lean
Asian voters
2020: 62 percent lean Democrat, 29 percent lean Republican, 9 percent no lean
2023: 61 percent lean Democrat, 35 percent lean Republican, 4 percent no lean
2026: 59 percent lean Democrat, 32 percent lean Republican, 9 percent no lean
High School degree or less
2020: 45 percent lean Democrat, 45 percent lean Republican, 10 percent no lean
2023: 45 percent lean Republican, 43 percent lean Democrat, 12 percent no lean
2026: 45 percent lean Republican, 41 percent lean Democrat, 14 percent no lean
College degree
2020: 50 percent lean Democrat, 45 percent lean Republican, 5 percent no lean
2023: 51 percent lean Democrat, 46 percent lean Republican, 4 percent no lean
2026: 51 percent lean Democrat, 43 percent lean Republican, 6 percent no lean
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IS IT TOO LATE TO SAVE FACE?
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The New Yorker: “To borrow a phrase from Simone de Beauvoir, the face is not a thing but a situation—one that is, increasingly, more technically beautiful but more spiritually unattractive, replete with new information but devoid of human meaning. Today, the young inject their faces and look old; the old inject their faces and look uncanny; a twenty-year-old got famous for hitting himself in the jaw with a hammer to become hotter; teen-agers ask strangers on the internet if a facelift is their only hope. The internet casually scrambles basic ideas of personhood, reframing people as commodities and stripping us for parts. But only recently has this process been encoded so specifically onto the face, traditionally thought of as a portal to our humanity. The face is separating from the person, and the person is separating from the soul, and this is happening in front of us, on our phones, in the most banal fashion, every day. … These ideas—of ceding ground, of viewing another as infinite rather than as a means to address our own unfreedom—are of no use to the industries and technologies that treat the face as a display commodity before all else. The face is no longer supposed to be something that holds intimate, idiosyncratic human information; it has been reconfigured as a consumer guide and a disciplinary manual.”
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Stevens leads El-Sayed in Michigan: The Detroit News: “U.S. Senate Democratic hopeful Haley Stevens holds a nearly 7-percentage-point lead over rival Abdul El-Sayed in a new statewide poll of Democratic primary voters, with about 10% of respondents saying they remain undecided three weeks out from the Aug. 4 election. Stevens received 48% of support compared with 41% for El-Sayed, according to the Detroit News/WDIV-TV (Channel 4) poll of 500 likely Michigan Democratic primary voters conducted last week after their first one-on-one televised debate. About 0.2% of voters surveyed volunteered that they chose state Sen. Mallory McMorrow of Royal Oak, who dropped out of the race on July 5. The Stevens-El-Sayed contest tightens to a dead heat when considering primary voters who say they're definitely committed to voting for one candidate or the other, with 34.1% identifying as 'definite' Stevens supporters and 33.7% as 'definite' El-Sayed supporters."
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But will Democratic Michiganders pick populism?: The Dispatch: “Abdul El-Sayed’s signature policy pitch as he seeks the Democratic nomination for Senate is 'Medicare for All,' a universal health insurance program that would be administered by the federal government. Just don’t ask the progressive populist for the cost to the average taxpayer. He knows; he just isn’t going to tell you. ‘I’m not going to give you that number because it’s going to be used against me, because you’re going to say: "He wants to spend X amount of money in taxpayer dollars." And it’s going to be meaningless to most people,’ El-Sayed told reporters last week following a rally with roughly 200 voters in suburban Detroit, responding to a question from The Dispatch. The former Wayne County health director would say only that his plan eliminates all co-pays, premiums, and deductibles, and would be subsidized strictly through higher ‘FICA’ rates—the federal payroll tax on wages typically deducted from paychecks. El-Sayed claims that whatever the price tag—the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget puts it at $2.5 trillion to $3.5 trillion annually—individuals and families would save money: ‘I think that’s a great trade-off.’”
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El-Sayed releases tax return after pressure from Stevens: WLNS: “According to the return, a joint filing with his wife, Sarah Jukaku, El-Sayed’s reported total income for 2025 was $686,069 and adjusted gross income was $675,246. The couple reported $130,749 in wages, $262,299 in capital gains and $292,881 in additional income reported on Schedule 1. … El-Sayed, a physician and former Wayne County health director, had faced criticism after seeking an extension to file his personal financial disclosure until Aug. 13 — after the primary — which he attributed to overseas property held by his wife’s family. At the candidates’ first one-on-one debate July 7 on WOOD TV8 in Grand Rapids, Stevens said she had already released her own returns and pressed El-Sayed on why he had not, telling voters she is ‘the only one running for United States Senate in Michigan who is not a millionaire.’ The return does not establish net worth, which measures assets rather than income. El-Sayed’s June 2025 financial disclosure estimated his net worth at between $580,000 and $1.7 million. Stevens’ 2025 tax return shows an adjusted gross income of $169,970.”
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Obama looms over Senate contest: Semafor: “The real battle for centrist advantage is being waged in Michigan. PACs supporting Rep. Haley Stevens for Senate are massively out-spending El-Sayed, tying her to former President Barack Obama (whom she worked for, on the 2009 auto industry bailout). El-Sayed and his allies are bristling at that tactic, since Obama has remained neutral in the Senate primary. … But the entire argument about Obama’s ties to Stevens is one that centrists relish. El-Sayed is rooted in the Sanders faction, which has always portrayed Obama as a missed opportunity — a vessel for progressive energy who, while in office, left the door open for Trump by failing to channel it into lasting change. Obama ‘was someone who was, at the end of the day, not able to inspire the people on the other side of the aisle to see things his way,’ El-Sayed told Vox during his 2018 campaign for governor. ‘He and I were very different people. Obama was a very cool, cautious, collected person.’”
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Peters endorses Stevens: The Hill: “Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) is backing Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) to replace him ahead of the Michigan Senate primary next month. ‘Colleen & I are all in for Haley Stevens for U.S. Senate. Michigan – and the country – can’t afford to lose this seat. @HaleyforMI is the fighter we need and she has the record to back it up. She’s won tough races and delivered for Michiganders. Let’s go win!’ Peters said in a post on the social platform X on Monday morning. Stevens, a moderate, is facing off against progressive Abdul El-Sayed, a former health director for Wayne County, Mich., for the Democratic nomination, with the primary scheduled Aug. 4.”
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A mad dash in Maine: CNN: “County party chairs inundated with calls. An endless stream of Google sign-up forms and spreadsheets. And a disgraced former nominee looming over it all, haunting the party’s hopes of starting anew. The snap Democratic election to replace Graham Platner and face Republican Sen. Susan Collins this fall is off to a hectic and dramatic start. The implosion of Platner’s campaign after he was accused of rape – an allegation he denies – left Maine Democrats scrambling to create a highly unorthodox process that reflects the high stakes for the battle to win control of the Senate. On July 25, just 15 days after Platner formally dropped out, 601 delegates will meet in Bangor to vote on a new nominee. Most of the delegates – 500 – will be picked this weekend at county meetings across Maine. The other 101 delegates will automatically come from Maine’s Democratic State Committee, and they are already being heavily courted.”
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Fatal ICE shooting increases heat on Collins: AP: “Maine Democrats are seizing on a new fatal shooting by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in their state, fighting to link Republican Sen. Susan Collins to the embattled federal agency — and to shift the conversation away from the unrelated scandal that threatens to undermine their strength in a high-stakes U.S. Senate race. A federal immigration agent fatally shot a motorist just south of Maine’s largest city on Monday, the second time in a week that ICE has used deadly force on American soil and at least the ninth death since President Donald Trump began his immigration crackdown. It was the first for Maine, a Democratic-led state with a relatively large immigrant population that Trump targeted earlier in the year immediately after two high-profile ICE shootings in Minnesota. The agents involved in the Maine incident were not using body cameras, and the victim, a 26-year-old Colombian national, was not the target of their probe, officials said.”
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Hispanic Texan Trump voters shaky on Paxton: Politico: “One in five Hispanic business owners in Texas say they’ve had an employee deported in the past year, according to a new survey commissioned by the U.S. Hispanic Business Council and shared first with POLITICO. Seven in ten said their businesses had been impacted by Trump’s tariffs. Among those surveyed, [James] Talarico holds a seven-point lead over Attorney General Ken Paxton, the GOP nominee, even though a plurality of the over 1,000 respondents self-identify as Republican. Almost one quarter who supported Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary now say they’ll back Talarico, while over half say they’ll back Paxton. The survey is the clearest sign yet of Paxton’s vulnerability among Texas’ robust Hispanic business community amidst broader signs that Hispanic voters around the country are swinging hard against him, thanks to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and the shaky economy.”
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Dems pounce on Paxton ‘family’ gaffe: Houston Chronicle: “Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is making ‘faith, family and freedom’ a central theme of his U.S. Senate campaign, using a campaign stop in the Rio Grande Valley to draw sharp contrasts with Democratic nominee James Talarico on immigration, religion, transgender rights and the economy. ‘What are the differences between me and my opponent?’ Paxton asked the crowd. ‘One of them is family—Actually, let me talk about faith first.’ But an excerpt of the speech posted to X quickly sparked a different conversation online. Rather than debating Paxton's criticism of Talarico, many commenters focused on the attorney general's own personal history, referencing his well-publicized extramarital affair.”
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Paxton’s pricey purchase prompts new questions about possible paramour: The New York Times: “Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas recently bought three condominiums at a luxury resort in Utah, a set of purchases that offered fresh insight into his wealth amid his run for U.S. Senate, according to property records reviewed by The New York Times. … Mr. Paxton, 63, purchased the condos, worth a total of $1.6 million, in February, according to local property records, and transferred them to his blind trust. On the deeds, Mr. Paxton listed his address as a Dallas-area home. Police records indicate a woman who is not his wife lives there. Mr. Paxton, who has been photographed vacationing with the woman, has not directly addressed the relationship.”
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Jumbled field in Aug. 11 snap primary to replace Graham: The Hill: “There is not a clear favorite in the GOP Senate primary race to replace the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), according to a new poll. … In the Emerson College Polling/Nexstar Media poll released Thursday, none of the potential candidates cracked a clear lead among the respondents — no candidate even garnered 20 percent support. The most popular answer, chosen by 17.9 percent of respondents, was ‘undecided.’ Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) led with 16.4 percent support, and [Graham’s challenger in the original June 9 primary] Mark Lynch came in second with 12.5 percent. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) garnered 10.1 percent support, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette got 9.9 percent, Rep. Russell Fry (R-S.C.) earned 9.4 percent, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster locked down 7.7 percent, and former Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) received 5.4 percent. Current Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-S.C.), who succeeded Graham, her late brother, after McMaster appointed her Monday, obtained 5.9 percent support in the poll. She is set to hold the seat until Jan. 3, 2027.”
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Vice President Vance accuses Israel of ‘well-funded’ campaign to undermine him — The Jerusalem Post
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Most Americans stay on the sidelines; just 9 percent ‘mobilized’ — Pew Research
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Every party needs a pooper … RSVPs slow for September GOP convention — Politico
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Trump backs ‘Stop the Steal’ stalwart Mike Lindell for Minnesota governor — The Hill
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TABLE TALK: THE QUOTABLE LINDSEY GRAHAM
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“It’s one thing to shoot yourself in the foot. Just don’t reload the gun.”
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— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), speaking to CBS in 2012 on why Republican congressmen should support bipartisan immigration reform.
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“That’s the first thing I’m going to do as president: We’re gonna drink more.”
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“Or if all else fails, you can always give your number to the Donald. This is for the veterans!”
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— Graham in a video titled, “How to Smash a Cellphone,” after Trump publicly shared his number at a rally.
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“The funniest senator is Lindsey Graham.”
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WTVJ: “As the 2026 Florida Python Challenge is underway, one Florida restaurant will let you cash in your catch for a pizza. The python challenge kicked off on Friday as avid and amateur hunters alike compete for cash prizes as they work to rid the Everglades of the ravenous, invasive Burmese python. The ultimate grand prize is $10,000, but another $15,000 in cash is available across different categories. This year’s event, hosted by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the South Florida Water Management District, features Everglades National Park as a partner and one of eight official competition locations. … A restaurant in Everglades City called Wildman's Pizza, Pasta and Python will accept pythons in exchange for a free pizza. ‘I'm the first place in the world to accept python as currency,’ said Dustin Crum, owner of Wildman's Pizza, Pasta and Python. ‘So you can trade in a python for a pizza. We do python toppings, python pizza, iguana, you know, whatever.’ At Wildman's, customers will get to learn everything they need to know about pythons, and be able to buy items made from python skin. ‘The fat I use to make the snake oils for the skin, creams, soap,’ Crum said. ‘The bones we make jewelry, everything gets used.’”
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Chris Stirewalt is political editor for The Hill and NewsNation, the host of "The Hill Sunday" on NewsNation and The CW, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of books on politics and the media.
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