Candidate News: Governors, Part I

There was some big, if expected, news in the Alabama governor's race yesterday. So, we're going to put this item first, and also use that news as an excuse to do a rundown of all the gubernatorial news from the last week or so. Well, some of it, at least. There's enough that we'll have to split it over two days:

• Alabama: Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) made it official, and announced that after having prayed on it, he's going to run for governor of his "home" state. We put that in quotations because there's considerable evidence his actual residence is in Florida. We wonder, in these circumstances, if God says "run" and Jesus says "don't run," does the Holy Ghost get the tiebreaker vote? Is the Holy Ghost, in effect, the J.D. Vance of the Great Beyond? Someone should ask the theologians about that.
  
  Tuberville's reported interest had already kept any Republicans from getting in, and now that it's official, it's hard to believe he'll draw a serious challenger. Gov. Kay Ivey (R-AL) is term-limited, of course, and Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth (R-AL) and AG Steve Marshall (R-AL) have said they are not interested. The closest Tuberville might get to a real challenger is if someone who is not currently in office, and who has nothing to lose, decides to jump in—say, former Alabama SoS John Merrill. Even if that happens, Tuberville will eat any primary challengers for lunch.
  
  The Democrats, meanwhile, don't have anyone other than former senator Doug Jones, and he's not likely to get in. The Alabama Democratic Party does intend to challenge Tuberville's eligibility, pointing out that state law requires the governor to have lived in the state for 7 years prior to their election, and that it seems unlikely that the Senator has been letting his $4 million mansion in Florida rot since 2019, so that he could live in his $270,000 homestead in Alabama. It's possible the Democrats will prevail here, but not too likely, because Tuberville switched his voter registration to Alabama in 2019 (i.e., 7 years before 2026), and because since then he largely has not been living in Florida OR Alabama, but instead in Washington, DC. Surely he would not abandon his Senate seat if he was not certain he'll meet the gubernatorial eligibility requirement. And even if the Democrats do disqualify him, they'll just end up handing the race to some other Republican candidate.
  
  Tuberville's retirement from the Senate immediately raises two questions. The first is who will replace him in the Senate. Obviously, while he was expected to run for reelection, nobody else declared. But now, any up-and-coming Alabama Republican is far more likely to enter this race than to try to take on Tuberville for the governor's mansion. Marshall is likely to enter the race, and there are a bunch of current and former representatives who might do the same. That includes former representative Mo Brooks, who has already twice tried for the Senate, and twice been told by Alabama GOP primary voters that he's too nutty even for them. There are rumors that Bruce Pearl might jump in, but these appear to be based entirely on the fact that he's a sports coach (men's basketball at Auburn) and that Alabamians love sports coaches, particularly sports coaches from Auburn. We can find no evidence Pearl has expressed any interest in the job.
  
  The second question is: Once Tuberville departs his current job, who will inherit his crown as the dumbest person in the Senate? This is a very difficult question to answer, since Tuberville has so thoroughly left the competition in the dust, like Secretariat winning the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths in 1973. No other horses were, and no other senators are, even within the field of vision. That said, we're a full-service site, so we'll tentatively guess that the betting favorites are Sens. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), Tim Scott (R-SC) and Tim Sheehy (R-MT). A year ago, this would have been a fairly easy question to answer, because Bob Menendez is a special kind of stupid. But the New Jersey Democrat is not in the Senate anymore, and will be reporting to the hoosegow in a couple of weeks, because of the aforementioned special kind of stupidity.
  
  
• Alaska: One upside of ranked-choice voting is that ranked-choice systems tend to attract a broader array of candidates, and so to give voters a broader variety of options. That is certainly proving to be true in Alaska, where in the last week, three different people have declared their intent to run for governor.
  
  The first person to make it official is former state senator Click Bishop (R). He was known as a moderate during his 12 years in the state Senate, and was a member of the bipartisan caucus that largely controls the flow of business in that body. He welcomes comparisons to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).
  
  The second person to get in is Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahsltrom (R), who has an unusual electoral history. She ran for a seat in the Alaska state House and lost, but then was appointed to the seat anyhow when Lisa Murkowski vacated it after being appointed to the U.S. Senate. Serving in the lower chamber for 7 years, Dahsltrom left politics for nearly a decade, then ran for reelection to her old seat and won. She declined to take office, however, instead accepting appointment as Commissioner of the Alaska Department of Corrections, After 4 years there, she was elected to her current post, having served as Alaska's #2 (and de facto state secretary of state) since 2022. In 2024, she tried to get away from the cold with a seat in the U.S. House, but finished a distant third in the primary and dropped out. The upshot is that Dahsltrom's record is mixed, particularly when she's not running for a job she already holds by virtue of having been appointed to it. She's a little to the right of Bishop, but only a little. Think Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK).
  
  And the third person to throw their (fur-lined) hat into the ring is Bernadette Wilson. She is a fire-breathing Trumper who owns a trash-collection business, and who has no experience is elective office. She is also a great-niece of a former Alaska governor, namely Republican Wally Hickel. That said, the population of Alaska is about 750,000 people, so being related to someone who once held political office is about as rare as having some Cherokee heritage in Oklahoma.
  
  No other Republican, and no Democrat, has declared yet. It's still pretty early in the cycle, by Alaska standards, and undoubtedly aspiring politicians from both parties are also keeping a close eye for any developments in next year's U.S. Senate race.
  
  
• Florida: The Florida GOP gubernatorial primary has been quite a soap opera so far. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) is in, and has Donald Trump's endorsement. Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis (R) was clearly signalling a run but, as we have noted a couple of times, she's now got a couple of problems. The first is that she's enmeshed in a scandal involving charity grift, and the second is that her husband has become quite unpopular (see tomorrow for more).
  
  Sensing an opening, and apparently finding that life out of politics isn't turning out quite the way he planned, former representative and failed U.S. Attorney General candidate Matt Gaetz is now making noise about joining the contest. Gaetz had hinted at this before, then backed off, but now he's hinting at it again. If he does take the plunge, Trump will have an interesting choice to make, as Gaetz is a shameless Trumper and a loyal lapdog, but he's also likely to lose the GOP primary. A poll of the race puts his support at... 10%. The residents of Gaetz's former district (FL-01, which is basically the panhandle) very much liked his brand of crazy, but Republicans statewide... not so much.
  
  
• Maine: The Democratic primary already had the potential to be a barnburner, with three serious candidates in the race: Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, former President of the Maine Senate Troy Jackson, and son of Sen. Angus King (I-ME) Angus King III.
  
  Now, the Republican primary also has barnburner potential. There were three candidates in the race before this week, but only one of them, former Asst. U.S. Secretary of State Robert B. Charles, was serious. This week saw two more folks jump in from the right side of the aisle. State Sen. James Libby is a college professor and has served six terms in the state legislature, two of those in the state House and four in the state Senate. Like Charles, Libby is a Rockefeller Republican, which is how they like 'em in the Pine Tree State.
  
  Also joining the race this week was David Jones, who is in search of Fame... Fame, which makes a man take things over; Fame... Fame, which lets him loose, hard to swallow. No, wait, that is a different David Jones. This one is a political newbie who makes his living as a realtor, and is—wait for it—a fire-breathing Trumper. He even co-founded the Make Maine Great Again Super PAC. That's not a great match for the state's GOP electorate, but if the two normal Republicans split the sane Republican vote, then... maybe? Maine does use ranked choice voting for primaries, but if Jones is the first choice of 30%, then strange things can sometimes happen. Democrats would be very happy to have Jones claim the nomination, because he would be the most beatable candidate.
  
  
• Ohio: Ohio AG David Yost (R) has concluded that, in the race to replace term-limited Gov. Mike DeWine (R), Vivek Ramaswamy has the MAGA lane all locked up. That is probably a sound conclusion, as polls give Ramaswamy a lead of 50-60 points (that is not a typo). So, this week, Yost dropped out. It's possible he could challenge Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) next year, since Husted is appointed, and appointed senators only keep their jobs about half the time. Although if only 10% of Ohioans like what a person is selling as a would-be governor, it's hard to believe that what a person is selling as a would-be senator is all that much more appealing.
  
  DeWine, who is close to Elon Musk, and is VERY close to Elon Musk's money, does not like Ramaswamy. This may be related to the fact that Musk does not like Ramaswamy. So, DeWine is trying very, very hard to get Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel (R-OH), former Ohio State football coach, into the race, declaring that "He (Tressel) IS Ohio." Thus far, Tressel is playing his cards close to the vest. If he gets in, he'll probably make a contest of it, though we don't know for sure because pollsters haven't been asking about him. If he doesn't get in, the nomination, and probably the job, are Ramaswamy's.

Tomorrow, we'll have big news from Georgia, and updates from Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey. and Virginia. As always, we welcome comments about local races, and suggestions about news we should note, at [email protected].

We also had items planned about pardons, Harvard and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), but it's getting late and this is getting long, so those will have to wait, too. Nuts. (Z).

Joe Biden Continues to be the FORMER President, Part I: On Human Decency

We had an interesting question that we're going to share and answer now, as opposed to waiting until the weekend:

You mentioned a couple times that last week was a particularly bad week in politics. There has been so much bad stuff since January 20 that I was wondering, what made last week stand out to you in its badness? Was it mainly the bill the House passed? I was quite surprised by how quickly that was rammed through. I worry about that provision to defund the judiciary.

That's from reader D.S. in Pittsburgh, PA.

We thought about our answer, and certainly, the budget—specifically, the grossly anti-democratic/fascist elements of it—is not good news. There was also the day (last Tuesday) where the amount of incredibly disturbing news was just... out of control—Donald Trump taking the Qatari plane AND holding the selling-the-presidency-to-get-people-to-buy-my-memecoin dinner, the overtly racist decisions to stop oversight of problematic police departments AND to accuse Cyril Ramaphosa of perpetrating white genocide, the sending of people—without due process—to South Sudan, etc. It's also somewhat tough when this happens at exactly the same time that one of us is traveling, leaving the other to engage with the stuff every single day, without respite (though respite was created, by fiat, over the weekend).

That said, the real dealbreaker—more than any of the rest of this—was the Biden cancer news, and the response to it, especially from Trump and the MAGA crowd, but also from some non-MAGA Republicans, and from certain media figures, and even from some Democrats. There was a time—we can remember it—when serious health problems were off-limits, and any person who was stricken, even if they were a public figure, were given some space. Not that (Z) can remember this, mind you, but when Richard Nixon got a severe knee infection during the 1960 campaign, John F. Kennedy sent his (genuine) well-wishes, and suspended his own campaign while Nixon recovered, out of a sense of honor and fair play. It was obviously a different time.

Most people who become president use their high office to try to do their best, as they understand it, for the American people. That understanding might not agreeable to all of us, and a president is going to make mistakes, often big ones. Still, we believe that Gerald Ford was trying to do his best, as he understood it, and Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush, and Barack Obama, to take four examples. And we think the same is true of Biden, both before the White House, and during. He give over his life to public service, and now he's both retired and an ailing old man, and people will not leave him alone.

We obviously have no use for the vulgar attempts by Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, etc. to weaponize all of this, and to create a Biden-cancer-dementia-cover-up narrative. But we are almost equally disgusted by CNN entertainer Jake Tapper and his co-author, Axios muckraker Alex Thompson. We imagined that the cancer news would make them think better of doing the normal media tour to promote the book about Biden's alleged mental decline. Ha! How foolish we were! Tapper and Thompson have been absolutely shameless, not only appearing on any outlet that would have them, but throwing out plenty of red meat for the right-wingers who are the target demo for their book. For example, last week, Tapper appeared on Fox and told a story about how he called up Lara Trump and apologized for her, telling her she was right all along about Biden's supposed dementia. Yesterday, Tapper and Thompson were on Piers Morgan, and Tapper decreed that the so-called "Biden cover-up" is "maybe even worse than Watergate."

It is evident that, at least in the world of cable "news," decorum and decency are as passé as fax machines, Jell-O salad and wingtip shoes. Heck, at around the same time Tapper was sharing his insights about Watergate, Alan Dershowitz was on a different show using the Israeli embassy killings to try to hawk HIS book. Clearly, Tapper and Thompson (and Dershowitz) are hoping for a boatload of that sweet, sweet royalty money. It's not a coincidence that they are picking mostly right-wing programming for their appearances, whether it's Fox, or Morgan, or Clay Travis. Oh, and by the way, during the Watergate scandal, Nixon consciously deployed significant elements of both the government and the Republican Party apparatus—sometimes illegally, sometimes just very unethically—against both the Democratic Party and the foundations of democratic government. Even if one accepts the alleged Biden cover-up as truth, the goal was to protect Biden, and his administration continued to function normally and legally. To suggest there is any meaningful parallel between the Biden and Nixon situations serves only to out Tapper as a whore who will do anything to sell books.

As you might be able to tell, we have been building up a head of steam on this subject for several days. And we have a lot to say, so much that if we tried to put it in just one posting, it would be 10,000+ words. This being the case, we're going to split things up over 3 days—today, tomorrow, and Friday. For now, having reminded readers of our perspective, we are going to do two things. The first is share a reader comment we got late last week, from reader F.F. in London, England, UK:

Your pieces this week on BDS seem to me to miss the mark. Without getting into the minutiae, it's clear that Biden was not up for another term, and that his hubris in not dropping out of the race at the right time could be the reason we have Trump as president. So we have a deception and some pretty bad effects downstream of that deception, which are legitimate topics of interest.

This is, in effect, the argument that Tapper, Thompson, et al. are making: This is newsworthy, it's important, it's a legitimate subject of interest.

We have already responded to that basic assertion before, and now we will do so again: Why? Why is it important? And maybe a better way to approach this is to deploy a question we have often used before: What is actionable here? Even if we concede the entire narrative Tapper and Thompson are peddling—Biden was hopelessly compromised, his staff knew that to a certainty, and in response, they engineered a massive cover-up to keep him in office—then what positive good comes from knowing that? What is the value in taking potshots at a sick, old man who is no longer in public life? It is not enough to make vague claims of newsworthiness or significance; those are gut-feel responses. We want to know a specific answer as to WHY it's important to know exactly what happened. Because absent that answer, then this is not only taking cheap shots at someone who doesn't deserve it, it's also inadvertently (or deliberately) helping advance Republican messaging about how Democrats are hopelessly dishonest, corrupt, etc., and can't be trusted with power.

Nobody seems to have much of an explanation as to the value of this story, and this book, beyond the vague platitudes about newsworthiness, and we suspect we know why. We'll explain in the other two installments, but for now, we will just say that, unlike so many others we have read on the subject, we actually do have an answer to the question, an answer that was evident in yesterday's posting. Maybe that clue is enough to figure it out; if not, readers will eventually know what we are talking about.

The other thing we are going to do today is share a couple of messages from readers on this subject, messages we thought raised some important points. The first reiterates some of what we've said here, including our finding Tapper's motives to be less-than-honorable. The second talks about one way the latest Biden news COULD be actionable (though it's not anything that Trump, Tapper, etc. are thinking about, and is also not the answer we're going to give later in the week):

D.A.Y. in Troy, MI: My friend's father died from the cancer Joe Biden has been diagnosed with. All I can say is it is a horrible way to die, as he disintegrated from the inside out. In his last months, he was in agony and effectively restricted to the ground floor of his house. One can hope they can mitigate it for Biden, but they might just be delaying the inevitable.

However, I want to talk about how we have treated a President who was not in perfect health. Thank god we did not have the 24/7 news cycle with a camera at every possible angle and social media back in the 1930s and 1940s. Could you imagine FDR having to try to navigate half the bovine excrement Biden was subjected to? The narrative would be about his disability night-in and night-out, with Nazi sympathizers being frequent guests on news outlets. Hitler would also tweet nonstop about how weak America is for allowing itself to be led by a cripple.

Was Biden in perfect health during his presidency? No. He was an 80-year-old man with an 80-year-old man's body and a stutter. Yet, everyone had to jump on any show of physical weakness, no matter how minor.

And frankly, Jake Tapper's new book is only good for lining birdcages. The debate was a disaster because he and Dana Bash let Donald Trump Gish gallop the whole night and did such a bad job moderating that a laptop opened to ChatGPT would have done better. Yet, Tappers wants us all to believe it was because of Biden.

Meanwhile, we now have a raving lunatic as our president. Yet I do not see the mainstream media holding him responsible for his mental state, which is actually damaging the country.

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A.H. in Knoxville, TN: First and foremost, I hope that Joe Biden gets the best possible medical care. Advancements in the treatment of prostate cancer are being made every day, and there is a real possibility of him living out the normal lifespan for an otherwise healthy 82 year old.

Second, I hope that Joe Biden uses this as an educational opportunity. As the news reports have pointed out, about one in seven men (and about one in six men of color) will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during their lifetime. All men 40 and over should be discussing the disease with their primary care physician at each physical. Vince Flynn died at age 47 from prostate cancer. Ben Stiller was diagnosed and treated at age 48. James Michael Tyler died at 59 from the disease. About 10% of the diagnoses occur in men under 55. I was diagnosed with it at 57. Luckily, my doctor still did annual PSA tests and he caught a spike in my PSA level—when diagnosed, I was totally asymptomatic. I have been living with early Stage 4 disease for almost 8 years now, due to the efforts of dedicated top-notch doctors and practitioners, and advancements in medical science.

There is a stigma associated with prostate cancer. My heartfelt advice for your readers is that they do not let that stigma stand in the way of being evaluated by their family doctors. If a person's family history includes prostate cancer, breast cancer, or pancreatic cancer, they may be at a higher risk for developing prostate cancer at a relatively young age. And any of your readers (or readers with loved ones) that have been diagnosed with the disease—please talk about it with your family and friends—you may help someone to be diagnosed and treated early, before symptoms appear, and while the disease remains manageable.

Thanks to both of you. Next installment tomorrow... (Z)

The Sound of Silence

In yesterday's posting, we made a couple of references to the fact that Truth Social was not working properly on Monday night. For most of that time, if you went to Donald Trump's feed, this is what you saw:

So, there are no truths to be found in Donald Trump's Truth Social feed. If that's not hitting it on the nose, we don't know what is.

As we allude to in the previous item, it sometimes gets very dispiriting to have to write item after item about the undemocratic and/or harmful and/or mean-spirited actions of Donald Trump and his administration. However, the only thing worse is... not writing those items. The Washington Post may be compromised these days, but there was much truth to the slogan the paper had in place from 2017-25: "Democracy dies in darkness."

Yesterday, we got a question from reader D.S. in Davis, CA:

Are there any news sources that just don't talk about Donald Trump? I'm OK with outlets that talk about the impact of policy, or refer to Trump with the same frequency as say the chancellor of Germany. But it seems he has simply and completely monopolized every news feed I can find—including Political wire and Electoral-Vote.com. The political discourse is completely broken. I don't care what he says any more, he'll just say something else tomorrow. And if he isn't saying something, it's people talking about him. I want to get back to talking about the real impact of actions rather than humanizing every single attention-grabbing headline. I want to talk about immigration with data, not anecdotes, and school funding policy and impact, not attention-grabbing headlines. What is in the bill, not how it was made. Don't get me wrong, the real impact of actions on people are important. I just need to opt out of the echo chamber for a while. Does anyone have any suggestions?

We read a lot of news, and... we don't have any suggestions. We can certainly come up with sites where Donald Trump is a minor player, but that would be because those sites are focused on India, or Japan, or some other non-American concern. For example, L'Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of Vatican City, has only mentioned Trump twice all year. But unless you really want to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in Roman Catholicism, it's not the paper for you. In any event, if readers have suggestions, presumably of outlets that cover world/American news without talking about Trump, please send them to [email protected], ideally with subject line "Trump-free Zones."

For our part, we think very carefully about every story we write up, and we try hard to cover only those things we think are essential, or that readers will need to know if they want to stay on top of the political discussion. Not talking about Trump, or talking about him much less, just is not possible, given both our focus and the "democracy dies in darkness" problem. We have pondered the possibility of declaring one day every week to be Trump-free, but that just does not work either. What if, say, Tuesday is the Trump-free day, and on Monday afternoon, he authorizes a military strike against Iran?

That said, the Saturday and Sunday posts play by different rules, since they are not as news-driven. This week, the Saturday post was nearly Trump-free, but for the "reader question of the week" responses that had been set in motion a week earlier. And the Sunday post was entirely Trump-free. These got a good response from a lot of readers, who appreciated the breather. So, we're going to do what we've previously hinted at, and declare that, henceforth, the last weekend of the month will be dedicated to non-politics questions and letters. Further, barring some major development (like Trump ordering the arrest of Joe Biden), his name will not appear on those days. We think that's a good choice for us, and a good choice for the readers. (Z)

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