Note: In 1988, I wrote this article, and it appeared as a cover story in the Washington Monthly. There have been myriad changes in public policy toward poverty in the intervening 35 years, including the enactment of welfare reform and the short-lived expansion of the child tax credit during the pandemic. Republicans have decimated SNAP, widely known as food stamps, and Medicaid. But I wanted to republish it on Christmas last year and this because it remains, I think, relevant. We have had great works of art that focus on the poor in the years since. HBO’s The Wire is often and rightly called Dickensian. Its societal indictments, moral complexity, attention to personal agency, and riveting installments over the years echo Dickens, whose novels were serialized. But with due respect to David Simon, the show’s creator, I’d argue that we still need a new Dickens, an artist who commands global fame and unalloyed praise and whose work helps those who need help the most. That’s a lot to ask for this troubled and war-torn Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, but we can hope as 2026 approaches.

Matthew Cooper
Christmas Day, 2025

Christmas is always the busy season for Charles Dickens, but this year there’s more going on than usual. There’s a Bill Murray remake of A Christmas Carol (playing the perfect ’80s Scrooge—a TV exec too busy to do lunch with his ghost) and, for the truly sturdy, a two-part, six-hour film of Little Dorrit. Coming soon: Disney’s Oliver Twist. And a new biography of Dickens is getting prominent reviews, including front-page billing in The Washington Post Book World.

But what’s been missing from the articles I’ve read about these works is the recognition of Dickens’s central accomplishment: He prodded (and entertained) millions of readers into caring about the poor. Instead of seeing the poor, as Malthus did, as some abstract, seething mass of “surplus population,” Dickens saw them as individuals, engaging enough to merit novels of 700, 800, and 900 pages. He made his readers see them that way too. And that was a revolutionary accomplishment.

One indication of his influence lies in numbers. He was the best-selling author in Victorian England, writing novels that became standard household items, as common as candles and brooms. In the 12 years after he died, nearly 4 million copies of his books sold in Britain alone—an amazing feat even by Stephen King standards. When it came to influence, Daniel Webster argued that Dickens had “done more to ameliorate the condition of the English poor than all the statesmen Great Britain had sent into Parliament.” Even the conservative Economist conceded that Dickens fueled “the age’s passion—we call it so designedly—which prevails to improve the condition of the working classes.” Queen Victoria hailed his humanizing influence on the nation and his “strongest sympathy with the poorer classes.”

As for the poor themselves, they not only saw Dickens as their champion, they read him. Journals of the period are filled with accounts of chimney sweeps and factory hands captured by his work. And when they couldn’t make out all the words, there were plenty of illustrations to help them along. The working classes responded by deluging Dickens with invitations to speak before their guilds. “Ah! Mr. Dickens!” shouted a carriage driver to Dickens’s son, on the day of the novelist’s funeral. “Your father’s death was a great loss to all of us—and we cabbies were in hopes that he would be doing something to help us.”

It was not without reason, then, that Dostoevsky called Dickens “the great Christian.’” Characters like Oliver Twist and Mr. Bumble, who ran the infamous workhouse, carry lessons as old as the New Testament. When Mr. Bumble terrorized Oliver for asking for a second helping of gruel, even affluent Englishmen knew how the orphan felt. They knew, too, that they had an obligation to help. That kind of empathy stoked the era’s major reform movements. The resulting bouquet of triumphs included everything from fewer working hours to free education and universal suffrage.

There’s more to Dickens, though, than misty-eyed sentiment. His was a subtle and muscular vision that recognized (and condemned) the sins of impoverished individuals as well as the collective guilt of society. Dickens gives us not only Oliver Twist but also Fagin, the criminal ringleader who press-gangs Oliver into service. He’s no victim of society. Fagin’s problem is Fagin.

Is there any relevance in this today? After all, the sprawling squalor of Victorian Britain has gone the way of the workhouse. The laissez-faire liberalism that Dickens deplored is light-years away from today’s social welfare state. (No food stamps had Oliver. No caseworker.) But America today is in at least one way like the England of the 1830s: Most of us see the underclass as a seething, abstract mob. Of course, it’s not just our artists who’ve failed us, but our politicians, too. And it’s too much to expect all art to serve as social glue, binding each of us to the concerns of the less fortunate. But today, when so much fiction is either mired in minimalist ennui or panting with the lifestyles of the rich and promiscuous, we need someone who can animate our social concern. We need a new Dickens.

A street-walking man

Where to find one? My guess is that it can only be someone who has seen poverty up close; perhaps a journalist. Dickens himself became acquainted with the poor as what today’s social scientists would call a “participant observer.” He was one of them.

His father, John Dickens, tried to give his children a life of parlors and singing lessons on the paycheck of a Navy clerk. As a result, like so many working people of the time, the Dickens family floated in and out of debtors’ prison (bringing their servant with them, as was the custom of the day). By 1822, when Charles was 10, debt’s constant tug forced his family to yank him out of school and place him in a factory pasting labels on pots of shoe polish. When not at work, he spent long days wandering the alleys of work-weary London. With his parents often imprisoned, describing what he saw became a way of mastering a hostile world. He’d jot down dozens of “sketches,” detailed descriptions of just about anything he’d run into. They captured not only turmoil and toil but character, as well. Typical was the one about his uncle’s Soho barber, a man who, playing Monday-morning quarterback, recounted how he would have guided Napoleon’s troops at Waterloo.

Eventually, his family earned its freedom, and Dickens became a law clerk, allowing him to tame “the savagery of stenography,” as he put it, and later become a reporter. At the time, reporting mostly meant taking shorthand, but Dickens was so talented one editor called him “the most rapid, the most accurate, and the most trustworthy reporter then engaged on the London press.”

With his star rising, Dickens didn’t leave the poor behind. Instead, he sketched them. Under the pseudonym “Boz,” he churned out copy about vulgar vendors, ragged children, and raging arguments. In “The Pawnbroker’s Shop,” Dickens presented his comfortable readers with a prostitute: “The lowest of the low; dirty, unbonneted, flaunting and slovenly.” In his “Visit to Newgate,” he took them inside a prison that housed children. “Fourteen terrible little faces we never beheld. There was not one redeeming feature among them—not a glance of honesty—not a wink expressive of anything but the gallows and the hulks, in the whole collection.”

This kind of firsthand experience became central to Dickens’s fiction. To write Hard Times, for instance, he traveled to the north to cover a workers’ strike. He was no sit-in-the-study author. After writing in the mornings, Dickens would take afternoon walks of 10 miles or more that returned him to the streets that powered his prose.

Obviously, it wasn’t just the reporting that made Dickens Dickens. It takes a little more than stenography, and a lot of something called imagination, to spin a 900-page novel. But Dickens’s immersion in street life made his novels richer. When a barrister picked up Dickens’s work, he saw his servants and his slums. He saw his London.

The stenographer’s eye and the novelist’s mind gave Dickens the ability—virtually unprecedented—to make the poor seem real. As Gertrude Himmelfarb explains in The Idea of Poverty, this was a time when servants were invisible, even to their masters. When a contemporary critic hailed Dickens’s talent for making a “washerwoman as interesting as a duchess,” it was a tribute not only to Dickens’s wonderful prose, but also to his new vision.

After all, one of the main characters in his first lengthy work of fiction, the serial Pickwick Papers, is Sam Weller, a servant. He not only fails to remain invisible; more often than not he seems a good deal wiser than his master. When he first signs on as Pickwick’s valet, the negotiations turn into a “Who’s-on-first?” routine that sounds like Weller is hiring Pickwick. Weller still seems in control when Pickwick checks into an inn. After Pickwick stumbles into the wrong bedroom, only to be kicked out by a very unhappy woman, it’s Weller who rescues him and guides him to his room. “You rayther want somebody to look arter you, Sir, when your judgment goes out a wisitin’,” Weller chirps. The servant’s introduction in the serial’s fourth issue sent sales surging.

In his next book, Oliver Twist, and throughout the other novels he was to write until his death in 1870, Dickens stuck to the simple proposition that no class had a monopoly on smarts or morality or decency or humor. This was a revolutionary creed at a time when the affluent saw the poor as a mob—to be feared or appeased, perhaps, but definitely not to be considered as individuals. And the rich were scarcely alone in their class-bound vision. As Dickens was spinning novels, the history of the working class in Manchester was being written by a German emigré named Friedrich Engels.

The idea of Jacobin-style revolution haunted Dickens, who poured his fears into prose in A Tale of Two Cities. In our century of failed revolutions, there’s no more haunting or timely image than Dickens’s Madame Defarge, knitting by the guillotine. He recognized that, just as the poor weren’t all good, the rich weren’t all bad. His pages brim with venal landlords, nasty bankers, and callous captains of industry; but good-guy capitalists pop up too. A product of the streets himself, Dickens saw no romance in revolution. It’s not the proletariat who overthrew Scrooge, but his conscience.

If Dickens feared revolution, he didn’t fall into the opposite trap of forgetting why mobs charged the barricades. He understood that the capitalist society was rife with institutions that kept the poor down. The villains of Hard Times aren’t just bad apples but overlords of a cruel factory system, dehumanizing in the monotony of its work. The tragedies of Bleak House, one of his last and gloomiest books, are found in the systematic injustice of the courts. By challenging these institutions, he made the lawyer or factory owner see that they shared responsibility.

The idea of poverty

And when Dickens trained his guns, liberals weren’t exempt. The workhouse that Dickens took on in Oliver Twist was one of the most prominent liberal programs of his day. Today it’s hard to think of the book’s cruel overseers as being progressive. But the Poor Law of 1834 was considered a great liberal victory, one that would segregate the indebted poor and prevent them from dragging their fiscally responsible neighbors into the red. (Talk about the unintended consequences of liberal reform.) When Oliver meekly seeks a double dose of gruel, we see unbridled cruelty. “Enlightened” Victorians saw themselves.

And what they saw was folly. Consider the way that Mr. Bumble—who runs the “progressive” workhouse—understands Oliver’s revolt.

“It’s meat.”

“What?” exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.

“Meat, ma’am, meat,” replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. “You’ve over-fed him, ma’am. You’ve raised a artificial soul and spirit in him, ma’am, unbecoming a person in his condition.”

The humor of the scene helps carry its meaning. Had Dickens’s criticisms been heavy-handed, as [the late scholar of the Victorian Era] Steven Marcus points out, middle-class readers wouldn’t have touched his works. Instead of promoting a specific alternative to the workhouse, he satirized it, appealing to his readers’ Christian charity. A second key to Dickens’s success is his choice of the symbol of the good child, in Oliver Twist or Little Dorrit or David Copperfield. He tapped the wellsprings of protectiveness that cultures can be made to feel for the young. Martin Luther King Jr. put that same insight into action when Birmingham schoolchildren stared down firehoses and police dogs, leaving us with one of the most arresting images of the civil rights movement.

But even as he skewered institutions, Dickens understood that the poor were often in the wrong themselves. If anything, there’s a schism in his writing, dividing what you might call, for lack of better terms, the worthy poor from the unworthy—between those who merit our admiration and those who don’t.

Winning hands down in the Worthy Category, family division, are the Christmas Carol’s Cratchits. It’s not just their “conditions” that make them sympathetic—the fact that they’re poor or that Bob Cratchit has a boss like Scrooge or that Tiny Tim needs crutches. It’s the family’s own nobility that lends the story such power, remake after remake. One clear signal to Victorian readers was the Cratchits’ white-glove cleanliness—a paramount virtue at a time when filth was almost always followed by disease. The Cratchits were “darned and brushed” before the Christmas feast. After supper, “the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept.” In the Cratchits, like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, or Little Dorrit, respectable British middle-class readers found an ideal of themselves.

Meanwhile, a first in Unworthiness might go to the brickmakers of Bleak House, who seem like something out of a documentary on battered wives. We spy them when Mrs. Piggle happens by. “An’t my place dirty? Yes, it is dirty—it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally onwholesome,” boasts the father. “And we’ve had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them … And how did my wife get that black eye? Why, I giv’ it her; and if she says I didn’t she’s a Lie!” Today, when many liberals still romanticize the poor, Dickens’s ability to distinguish poverty from nobility is well worth remembering.

Dickens understood that there were good and bad individuals within every class. But he rarely saw the individuals who were a mixture of good and bad. His heroes and heroines don’t whine, don’t curse, and even though they’re raised in the company of foul-mouthed, cockney villains, they speak the King’s English. To be sure, his supporting cast could include people like the Peggottys in David Copperfield, who were not so well-spoken. But they, too, were practically flawless. This strict division between the worthy and the unworthy poor is more than an aesthetic flaw. It limits Dickens’s relevance today.

Dickens makes his readers want to help the deserving poor. And, indeed, the Victorian (and New Deal) reforms that were, in part, inspired by Dickens focused on these able-to-help-themselves characters. Kids who’d be okay if child labor was abolished; workers who’d prosper with a union. This is the story of America through the 1950s: The New Deal and rising prosperity catapult the “worthy” poor into the middle class. Oliver goes to Levittown.

This left behind an underclass that seemed short on lovable Cratchits and long on pregnant teens, drug addicts, and gang members. What we don’t have is the popular literature that will jar the affluent into caring about these less savory characters. We don’t have the literature that will condemn their faults and recognize that these are people who can be helped. When I worked in a Big Brothers program in New York City, I remember noticing that there was no novel or film that got at the downright weird complexities of those tenements I visited on 102nd Street. I couldn’t point to any book that explained how those kids could be such utter failures in school, unable at age 15 to write a single sentence, and still be as sharp and savvy and as alert as any kids I had known growing up in the New Jersey suburbs. There was no film that I could tell my friends about that captured the complexity of those mothers I would meet who’d blow much of their money on VCRs and HBO but who were also selfless when it came to helping their kids. There was—and still is—no writer who combines great talent and great popularity and who captures that bizarre marriage of sin and decency I saw in those tenement families.

The Dickens character who most reflects our dilemma is the Artful Dodger, the young pickpocket who befriends Oliver Twist. He’s engaging, to be sure. The first thing we see him do is take Oliver drinking; by the end, he’s in court, trying to sweet-talk a magistrate into pardoning him. But he’s a side dish. We never understand or care about him the way we care about Oliver. The next Dickens needs to put us not in our Olivers’ shoes but in those of our own Artful Dodgers.

While a new Dickens couldn’t cure poverty, he could inspire personal commitment from the middle class. I don’t mean the anesthesia of paying for yet another government program, but involvement. And that takes understanding. Public health care won’t improve unless talented doctors and nurses want to choose Harlems over Humanas, at least for a few years. We won’t really become a kinder, gentler nation unless our leaders know something that’s true about those on the bottom. But working with or for the poor requires inspiration; it doesn’t come naturally. Individuals disappoint. Projects collapse. Easier lives beckon. Great art, as opposed to Brookings reports, can be the spur we need.

In 1945, Lionel Trilling lamented that no writer in his day had done what many of the leading Victorian writers had done—combine great literature and social concern. “In three-four decades, the liberal progressive has not produced a single writer that itself respects and reads with interest. A list of writers in our time shows that liberal progressivism was a matter of indifference to every writer of large mind—Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Mann, Kafka, Yeats.” The absence of such a writer may have been a marginal loss in the middle of this century, when the politics of the time were liberal even if the great novelists were not or when poverty seemed like it could be erased simply through economic expansion and a few social reforms. Today when politicians are retreating from helping the poor and growth offers no panacea, we need another Dickens to inspire each of us to help.

I don’t know if there will be a single figure—be it a novelist filmmaker, or journalist—who can animate a nation’s imagination the way Dickens did or whether it may take a disparate group or even an artistic movement. But I’m certain those Dickens-like qualities will not be had by some writer-in-residence strolling the hallowed halls of Haverford. The Dickens mantle demands a life outside the academy, exposed to the real world. It belongs to the writer who can make us care not only about our Tiny Tims but about our Artful Dodgers, too.

The post Why We Need a New Dickens appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When I did my first stint at the Washington Monthly in the 1980s, as a 24-year-old, the magazine was in a ramshackle office near Washington’s Dupont Circle. I worked long hours for $10,000 a year ($28,111 in today’s dollars) as we all did, including Paul Glastris, also in his 20s, who was finishing his tenure at the magazine and is now the editor-in-chief. Our boss, the magazine’s founder Charles Peters, was deeply inspiring, but he could also be, shall we say, infuriating. One night after being up for days, I went to his home amid a snowstorm to drop off copy, leaving it in an old-fashioned steel milk box on his stoop. (These were the earliest days of email. And neither the Monthly nor Charlie had a fax machine.) By the time I made it back to my garret, as sunrise approached, Charlie was calling me to tell me how I’d erred in editing a story about Gary Hart, the senator and presidential candidate. The real scandal, Charlie said, wasn’t that the Coloradan had been photographed with a young woman aboard the yacht named Monkey Business. But that Hart, whom we liked, was cavorting with the Louisiana lobbyist who owned the boat. I can’t remember what subpoint I flubbed. I do remember that I assumed wrongly, but not without reason, given his tone, that I’d been fired. 

The Washington Monthly is always trying to get at the real story, unafraid to say bad things about people we liked or good things about those we opposed. But we can’t do it without your help. Can you make a tax-deductible contribution to keep us going? 

This year was no exception when it came to challenging shibboleths of the left and right. The Monthly broke ground by raising questions about the “abundance” critique of some liberals we admire, such as Ezra Klein, who maintain that red tape and regulation are holding back the country and liberals. While acknowledging that bureaucracy is often burdensome—the Monthly was born with the idea of making government work—we found that other factors, such as monopolies and corporate lobbying, were often bigger drivers of our national dysfunction. See “The Meager Agenda of Abundance Liberals” by Glastris and my colleague Nate Weisberg, and “The Broadband Story Abundance Liberals Like Ezra Klein Got Wrong” by Glastris and Kainoa Lowman. 

Please donate now to the Washington Monthly. We depend on readers like you.  

The Washington Monthly was born 56 years ago during a crisis for liberals. It was 1969. John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon B. Johnson’s had crashed on the shoals of the Vietnam War, riots, and the 1968 presidential election, where the combined vote of Richard Nixon and George Wallace was just under 57 percent. The magazine was born to examine how government should work, where it succeeds, and where it often fails. Peters had been a New Frontiersman and a founder of the Peace Corps. 

When Glastris took over the magazine in 2001, liberals, progressives, and common-sense centrists were on their back foot after the 2000 elections. But he enriched the magazine with a newfound focus on antitrust and sophisticated, big-idea thinking about industrial policy, health care, and international trade. While some in the center pushed for incremental solutions and some on the left advocated big, but bad, ideas, the Monthly fused ideas that were both big and smart. The result was the acclaimed magazine you’re reading today, where a new breed of young editors and some wizened hands like me and Glastris keep this venerable institution going.  

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It feels like a century ago that Donald Trump stood on the west front of the U.S. Capitol and was sworn in for a second time, promising to seize the Panama Canal, slap tariffs on the world, dispatch troops to the southern border, and let Elon Musk chop down the federal government. But while the past 11 months have often been exhausting and dispiriting, they’ve also been invigorating for us at the Washington Monthly as we generate new ideas to take on MAGA, never flinch from criticizing liberals and Democrats, and offer reporting and analysis that explains what’s really going on. 

We’re not calling these 11 pieces our best (although they are among them), nor are they among our most widely read (though many are), but they are representative of the continued breadth and inventiveness of this magazine in its 56^th year. 

Of course, it takes readers like you to keep our work going, so we hope, in an age of corporate and consolidating media, you’ll support our non-profit, independent voice. Meanwhile, if you’ve read these before, see how they held up, and if you haven’t, you’re in for a treat. We’re proud of them. 

The post 11 of Our Most Memorable Pieces from 2025  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last month, Democratic gubernatorial candidates Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill notched blockbuster victories in Virginia and New Jersey. Spanberger trounced her Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by a 15-point margin, while Sherrill defeated businessman Jack Ciattarrelli by 13-points.

The Virginia and New Jersey campaigns relied on similar tactics: A core message on affordability; an emphasis on the national security backgrounds of both candidates; and a willingness to stand up against Trump. One of the chief strategists who devised this approach is pollster Angela Kuefler, a partner at Global Strategy Group who worked with both candidates. Kuefler also brought to both races her perspective as the rare female pollster in a male-dominated field. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. 

Anne Kim: Congratulations! Most polls did not indicate such large margins in these races. Did these wins outperform your own expectations as well, or did you have an inkling that this was going to happen? 

Angela Kuefler: It was always a possibility. One of the things that is true for off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey is that they become a referendum on the president who’s just been elected. If you look back to the last time Trump was elected, there were healthy wins by Democrats up and down the ticket in both states. So we always knew it was a possibility. I operate from the place of “let’s expect the worst and hope for the best,” but in our various turnout scenarios, we did see the chance of it hitting this high, especially in New Jersey.

Matthew Cooper: I’m from New Jersey, so I’ve seen my share of politicians rise and fall there, going back to the likes of Jim Florio before Chris Christie. Both Spanberger and Sherrill talked about affordability, and it was clearly on the minds of voters. But did voters think that was something governors could do much about? In other words, who are voters blaming for high prices? Or do they see it as an act of God?

Angela Kuefler: They see it as an act of a lot of politicians from the past not doing their jobs right. They see it to some extent as something that is outside any political control. 

But what was different with these two women is the strength of who they are and their past lives and bios as moms, as people with a national security background, and as folks who put mission and service above everything else. Those weren’t just talking points. Those were very important components of their story, of their brand, of their message. 

And the reason it mattered is that it allowed voters to believe that they could do something about costs and the economy because they were not traditional tax-and-spend Democrats. These were Democrats who were not viewed as extreme because of their bios and background. These were Democrats who were different from most politicians, or at least how most people perceive most politicians, and that allowed people to hear them and believe them when they said, “I’m going to do X, I’m going to do Y, to help you and your family control the cost of living.”

Matthew Cooper: There was a time when gun safety was a big issue in states like New Jersey. Of course, after the Dobbs decision, there was reason to think choice would dominate pretty much every state race in years to come. But these issues don’t seem to have really been on the radar of voters that much. Are we now in a place where in some states, choice and guns are settled enough that it doesn’t matter that much, or are they still salient issues? 

Angela Kuefler: Abortion and guns still matter to people, and abortion was a part of both of these campaigns. I think the difference is how we utilized it strategically to draw a contrast with their opponents. 

You could not get two different Republicans than Jack Ciattarrelli and Winsome Earle- Sears. But the work we did to disqualify them was relatively similar, first by disqualifying them on some of the economic brand advantages that Republicans historically have had on cost and affordability by making clear that they have raised people’s costs. And then the other component was to make it clear that they were going to be so aligned with Trump that they would not do what was right to protect the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the state of New Jersey. 

And then finally, there was a layer of extremism, of which abortion was the main proof point. Not only can you not trust either of these Republicans to do what was right because they’re so aligned with MAGA and Trump, they’re so extreme they want to ban abortion. It’s that combination that did a lot of work to disqualify both of these  Republican opponents.

Anne Kim: I want to ask specifically about Virginia. Abigail Spanberger outperformed both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in Virginia, and even though some of those corners of southwest Virginia stayed red, the losses were definitely not as severe as they had been in the past. And in Chesapeake, she did extremely well in her home territory. Do we know at this point who is making the shift back into the blue column and how durable those shifts are going to be?

Angela Kuefler: We don’t really know until the voter files are updated who actually showed up to this election. There’s always some estimation based on precincts, but the reality is we don’t know how much of it was different people showing up and how much of it was persuasion. 

I tend to think it was a combination of both those things, given that turnout—while it will never match a presidential year—was still higher. Both Abigail and Mikie have also had multiple races where they have done really great work in winning over more traditional right-leaning swing voters in many different communities. 

And that’s part of their superpower. Having a national security background just vibes to folks as not being extreme on one end or the other. It feels moderate. It feels like somebody that they think can trust.

There are certainly lessons that we should all be taking from these victories in candidate recruitment, messaging, and all of that. But I don’t think all Democratic problems are solved by one really good night with electorates that don’t look like the midterm or the presidential.

Matthew Cooper: Going back to New Jersey, all eyes were on Passaic County with its big Hispanic, Arab-American and Muslim populations after its dramatic swing to Trump in 2024. It moved back in a Democratic direction this time. Can you offer some insight about what happened there and among those communities?

Angela Kuefler: It’s probably a combination of a few things. One, we played for them hard. We were on Spanish TV. We did Latino-focused mail. We very much targeted that group. But they’re not a monolith, obviously. There are different factors that they’re persuaded by or not. 

In terms of messaging, some of it built on the overreach of what Trump is doing—the mass deportations. That certainly played a role. The bigger role though, again, was the message on cost and affordability. This is a population that is particularly attuned to cost.

Anne Kim: What do you think were the biggest mistakes that the GOP opponents made in both races? I live in Virginia and was inundated by ads from Winsome Earle-Sears that struck me as a little bit tone deaf, but what are the other ways you think in which both candidates may have misfired in their message to voters and in their whole approach?

Angela Kuefler: My job is to do the research to help inform campaign strategy. It’s a much bigger team, obviously, but the way it works is that you do the research, and you come up with the ideal message narrative. You always plan for shifts your opponent might make, and I like to assume my opponent is smarter than us and is going to do the smart thing. 

So as part of that planning, I and I think others on both these campaigns were quite sure each of these candidates would try to distance themselves from the president, try to make themselves seem more moderate, try to push back.

The vast majority of swing voters have never wanted a politician who was just going to be a party line vote. That is a longstanding belief. So regardless of who the president is, they still should have been trying to promote some separation. 

But they never even tried, and I frankly couldn’t believe it. It was a gift. I don’t know how they weren’t advising their candidate to push back against a president who is completely underwater in each of these states. The logic didn’t make sense. The best I could figure out is that maybe they recognized that turnout was the one of the key levers here and they could galvanize the Trump base and create a different electorate. But that is risky, and that has historically not happened when Trump isn’t on the ticket himself.

Part of it could be they didn’t want to upset daddy. Maybe they both knew they were going to lose and wanted to preserve that relationship. 

Anne Kim:  I want to ask a question about the business of polling before we bring it back to your advice for candidates in 2026. As I understand it, your client roster is pretty exclusively female. You have led independent expenditure polling for Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, for instance, and you’ve worked for Georgia politicians Stacey Abrams and Lucy McBath. 

Polling is also very much a male-dominated profession. What do you bring as a female pollster to the candidates you work with? And given that polling as a profession has been beaten up over the last few cycles, how does your perspective improve polling as a profession or represents perspectives that have not been represented as fully in the past?

Angela Kuefler: I don’t think I’m providing anything different or better from the literal steps of polling methodology. I do think where it makes a difference is in the team environment. It’s not just polling that is male-dominated, it’s the entire political consultant industry. 

So it helps to sometimes have a different voice. I think that how I and other women think about branding a candidate, or the narrative of a candidate, is a little bit different. It’s robust. It’s deeper. And I hadn’t even clocked that as a way that women see the world slightly differently until somebody flagged it for me relatively recently. 

For example, when I’m thinking about how to build up a candidate brand, I have a framework about how one connects to someone emotionally, how one bonds with them based on lived experience, and how one connects their motivation to run with what people believe is pure—stuff that in my experience builds a deeper candidate brand. And that’s not how a lot of folks think about it. They’re like, “We test whatever polls really well on policy, and let’s call it a day.” There’s no shame in that. That has worked for many years. But it doesn’t always work, and it certainly doesn’t work in really hard races where you need to develop deeper connections with voters, especially if you’re a Democrat running in a redder place.  

I think it’s important to have women’s perspectives on these campaign teams, which are predominantly men. And I get even more joy when I’m not the only woman on the team, which does happen sometimes.

Anne Kim: I think it’s just so important because women candidates at the presidential level just have not fared well. And it does seem that there needs to be something different that happens in order to break that final glass ceiling. 

Angela Kuefler: I think women, people of color, and people who have been historically marginalized in any way see where power lies more acutely. And so I think we tend to see our own vulnerabilities a little bit more too, which is sometimes the role I play in campaigns. 

For example, there are a lot of academic studies out there that say women candidates who go on TV and are perceived to be attacking first get more blowback. If you don’t know that, and you’re just operating with the playbook for how to win a campaign that was written for men by men, then you’re pushing your candidate and not taking that nuance into account. 

It’s the same thing when you’re balancing when you should talk about being a mom versus when you should talk about being a Navy helicopter pilot or a CIA agent. Both of those things says different things to different voters—both good things—but it’s a balance.

Anne Kim: And at the risk of going off on a tangent here, I do think that this consideration of what it means to be a woman candidate becomes even more fraught because of what’s happening on the other side of the aisle with traditional gender roles becoming so much a part of the conversation. Being that CIA analyst or being a veteran pushes against this paradigm that they’re constructing on the other side. It’s going to be really interesting to see what happens over the next few cycles with female candidates and how they brand themselves.

Angela Kuefler: Yep. It pushes against it in a way that is helpful, but because they are both moms, it also doesn’t bust those traditional rules too much to backfire. That combination has proven to be really powerful, and I think will continue.

Matthew Cooper: If you’re meeting with someone who is thinking about running in 2026, what are you going to tell them about the personal travails of running and also the landscape coming up?

Angela Kuefler: The first thing is to make sure candidates are aware how much work it’s going to be. I think a lot of them intellectually get it, but when they’re locked in call time for multiple hours a day, when they’re on the road constantly, it wears. 

Next, I’m feeling pretty bullish about 2026 at this point—all of the redistricting conversations aside, because that obviously throws a wrench into a lot of different things.

But if we think about 2026 as a replay of 2018, much like 2025 proved to be a relatively similar replay to 2017, we won big, and we won districts that were considered R+10 or up to R+13. That means compared to the national average in the last two elections, they voted Republican 10 points more than the national average or up to 13 points more than the national average.

Last time, we moved some of those really, really hard districts, and keep in mind that in 2018, Abigail Spanberger herself beat Dave Brat in an R+7 district. And he was not a hated guy. 

So I feel pretty bullish that we’ll be able to swing some of these harder places. And then it becomes: Are you a candidate who has an appealing profile and are you willing to do the work? If you are both those things, then you can catch that wave and potentially, much like Mikie and Abigail both did, in less than a decade be governor.

The post How Democrats Won Virginia and New Jersey appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Author’s Note: This article was written on the occasion of Charles Peters’s 96th birthday, but we’ve run it a few times, both to celebrate this magazine’s founder but also because—and he more than anyone would appreciate this—it’s proven a compelling fundraising letter, allowing this small publication to thrive in its 56th year. Since Charlie passed away on Thanksgiving 2023, we thought this might be a good moment again to reflect on his vision for the magazine and how it’s evolved under his successor, Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris, over the past 25 years. —MC

A little over 20 years ago, I made a short film in honor of Charlie Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly. The American Society of Magazine Editors was inducting my old boss and mentor to its Hall of Fame, a kind of Cooperstown of glossies. Held at a glitzy luncheon at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, the editors of venerable titles lavishly toasted themselves as the National Magazine Awards were handed out. (In retrospect, it had an end-of-an-era feeling, with 9/11 and the collapse of so many publications in the offing.)

My short film was a precis to Charlie getting his Thalberg. It began with shots of the Time-Life Building, the Newsweek building, and the Condé Nast tower, followed by voiceover narration: “… and this is the Washington Monthly.” Cut to rickety stairs in a dilapidated building over a liquor store in D.C.’s Dupont Circle.

Much of the crowd laughed, getting the contrast—and the improbable story of Charlie and the publication he founded in 1969, which has now survived far longer than many of the slick publications being fêted that day.

Charlie was almost 75 when he was hailed in 2001. Today, he deserves an even bigger toast as he turns 96.

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For those of us lucky enough to have visited with Charlie at his Washington home, we’ve found him physically slower but still sharp—a remarkable achievement for a man born during the Coolidge administration. When I last saw him, we talked about family and Joe Biden. Charlie remembered a moment from my 1997 wedding as if it were a month ago. (His lovely wife, Beth, a former ballerina, appears ageless.) Yes, Charlie’s body shows its age, and he doesn’t get out much, but his mind still glows.

Peters, with the Monthly as his crucible, reshaped the lives of so many young writers, including myself, who would go on to become prominent journalists. They include James Fallows, Jon Meacham, Katherine Boo, Nicholas Lemann, Michelle Cottle, Jonathan Alter, Gregg Easterbrook, Stephanie Mencimer, David Ignatius, Joe Nocera, and Michael Kinsley, another Hall of Fame winner. It wasn’t just that a bevy of smart kids passed through the Washington Monthly, as if it were another ticket to punch between college and The New York Times. It’s that we were transformed. We learned, in Charlie’s phrase, to cover Washington like an anthropologist covers a South Seas island. And not just to cover it with an eye for what’s wrong, but to write about things that work—a task that, especially at the time, most journalists eschewed, fearing that they’d seem opinionated or biased.

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I came under Charlie’s spell in the 1980s, when he hired me as an editor, and we worked in those ratty offices I mentioned (and an earlier set we vacated when the rent got too high). My salary was $10,000 a year—around $26,000 in today’s purchasing power, actually just enough to get by in pre-gentrified Washington. I’d fallen in love with the magazine when I was in college at Columbia in New York City. My best friend, Marc, subscribed, and I got hooked reading his copies.

Eventually, I became so enamored that I habitually raced every month to a nearby luncheonette/newsstand on Morningside Heights, which got the issue a bit ahead of Marc’s. I’d lap it up with scrambled eggs and a bialy. It was funny and irreverent, yes, but also softhearted and hardheaded.

Working for Charlie was not, shall we say, easy. In the days before HR departments were everywhere and the phrase “work-life balance” had become a cliché, Charlie rode us hard. Usually, he had two young editors at a time cranking out a monthly publication, a staff far smaller than even other financially strapped opinion magazines. We’d work for two years and then move on. Why endure the low pay and long hours? Charlie was not a masseur of copy (“Let’s move this paragraph here”) or a Rolodex impresario (“Call Senator So-and-So for comment”). He expressed his ideas in his inimical “rain dance,” a kind of sermon, if you will, in which he’d become increasingly animated about a point he was trying to convey to one of us. His corpus of ideas was fondly referred to as “the gospel.”

I remember one article I suggested about how our culture lacked a Charles Dickens, a first-rate writer with a large audience who could evoke sympathy for the poor, something well needed at the time (it was the Reagan era). Charlie immediately got the idea and elevated it. We need someone who not only sparks empathy with the easily lovable, law-abiding Cratchit of A Christmas Carol, he told me. But also with the criminal, decidedly non-saccharine Artful Dodger of Oliver Twist, which is much more challenging but crucial.

Charlie could also be a tough taskmaster. One night after being up for days, I went to his home amid a snowstorm to drop off copy, leaving it in an old-fashioned steel milk box on his stoop. Fearing getting stuck, my cabbie refused to take me back to the marginal neighborhood where I lived. (This sounds like a Dickensian tale, but these were the earliest days of email. And neither the Monthly nor Charlie had a fax machine.) By the time I made it back to my garret, as sunrise approached, Charlie was calling me to tell me how I’d erred in editing a story about Gary Hart. The real scandal, Charlie said, wasn’t the Colorado senator who had been photographed with a young woman aboard the yacht named Monkey Business. The scandal about the presidential frontrunner transfixed the mainstream media. Charlie understood that the real scandal was Hart, whom we liked, cavorting with the Louisiana lobbyist who owned the boat. I can’t remember what subpoint I flubbed. I do remember that I assumed wrongly, but not without reason, given his tone, that I’d been fired.

At 96, Charlie is still a lodestar guiding me. Part of it is political. He has retained his belief, born of experience during and after the Depression, of how government can change lives for the better. As a supporter of John F. Kennedy in the crucial 1960 West Virginia primary and later as the director of evaluation of the Peace Corps, he saw how politics could inspire and how government succeeded and failed.

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But much of our admiration stems from Charlie’s personal example, and not just because he was a Negroni man decades before the hipsters. So many idealists come to Washington to do good and stay, as the phrase goes, to “do well”—meaning to enrich themselves. Charlie is a huge exception. He paid himself a pittance and lived on the edge of financial ruin to make this magazine work. When Paul Glastris (also a former editor) took over the Monthly in 2001, he kept Charlie’s lessons and ethos (and necessary frugality) and put his own mark on a new range of topics from higher education—with the magazine’s revolutionary college guides—to its powerful reporting on monopolies. As Paul says, all of us have Charlie’s voice in our head, asking, “Is that good enough?”

If you think the Monthly’s brand of solutions-based policy-focused journalism is essential, and if you want to celebrate Charlie’s 96th birthday, there’s something you can do: Make a donation. In fact, do it right now.

As a nonprofit, we cannot do our work without your support. And as a celebration of Charlie Peters, I can’t think of a better gift. Plus, as a token of our gratitude, if you give $50 or more, you’ll receive a free one-year subscription to the print edition of the Washington Monthly.

Note: A version of this article originally appeared in December 2021.

The post Washington Monthly Founder Charlie Peters Died On Thanksgiving Two Years Ago. Why He Still Matters appeared first on Washington Monthly.

If you want to know how sweeping the Democratic wins were on Election Night—from Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s mayoral race to Democratic wins for governor in New Jersey and Virginia and beyond—one need only see how President Donald Trump reacted with rare brevity. The president posted on Truth Social, “‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters.”

If the 47th president was rendered terse by the Democratic sweep in the off-year contests, the opposition party was positively giddy. “American voters just delivered a Democratic resurgence. A Republican reckoning. A Blue Sweep. And it happened because our Democratic candidates, no matter where they are or how they fit into our big tent party, are meeting voters at the kitchen table, not the gilded ballroom,” said Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin. 

In New Jersey, where Democrats have been nervous about Representative Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, being able to stick the landing in the gubernatorial race, she did so easily, beating Republican Jack Ciattarelli by 13 points. In 2024, Trump only lost the Garden State by 6 points, slashing the double-digit margins Democrats had become accustomed to in New Jersey in presidential races. He did so by making inroads among key Democratic constituencies, especially among Hispanics, even flipping Passaic County and shocking Democrats by coming close in Hudson County just across the river from New York City. An 18-point swing to Democrats in Passaic and a 22-point swing in Hudson County represented a dramatic reversal of Republican fortunes. Indeed, Democrats increased their margins in every county.

In New York City, Mamdani won a majority of the vote in a bitterly fought contest, buoyed by eye-popping turnout. He carried young people dramatically while older voters went with disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to the young state assemblyman by 13 points. Mamdani’s campaign on affordability eclipsed his past statements about defunding the police, and while his years-long criticism of Israel—and his refusal to endorse it as a Jewish state—cost him the majority of Jewish votes in a city where one in 16 of the world’s Jews live, it was not enough to deny him a majority and becoming the first Muslim mayor of America’s most populous city and the youngest mayor in over a century. 

In Virginia, where former Representative Abigail Spanberger won by over 15 points, Democrats were on track to have a supermajority in the House of Delegates, flipping 13 seats in the state’s northern suburbs near Washington, D.C., where the federal government shutdown has been felt painfully. Ghazala Hashmi, the Virginia Lieutenant Governor-Elect, became the first Muslim-American to win a statewide contest, and the Democratic sweep pulled Jay Jones into the Attorney General slot, despite the revelation of texts he’d made calling for GOP politicians and their children to be murdered. 

Republicans tried to console themselves by saying the Democratic wins in blue states were no harbinger of next year’s midterm elections. However, Democrats easily held on to three state Supreme Court seats in battleground Pennsylvania and won two statewide slots on the important Public Service Commission in Georgia, a positive sign for the party. 

On television, GOP pundits, incumbents, and consultants pointed to Mamdani’s victory and tried to paint the Democratic Party as having embraced his Democratic Socialists of America vision for the country. While it’s true that the DSA’s Mamdani is now a leading light in the Democratic Party, given the centrist races won by Spanberger and Sherrill, depicting the Democratic Party as a quasi-Marxist project is a stretch. There is no question that voters embraced Mamdani’s charm and relentless focus on affordability and willingness to challenge the Democratic Party’s mainstream leadership and norms. The night could boost the determination, if not the fortunes, of progressive office seekers like Graham Platner, running for the U.S. Senate nomination in Maine.

Democrats were in a combative mood to take on the Trump administration. That was as true in Virginia as in New York City, where Spanberger was unflinching in her criticism of the administration. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom’s gambit to have voters approve a change in the state’s nonpartisan redistricting regimen so that the Democratic controlled statehouse could redraw the state’s Congressional districts to counter the mid-decade gerrymandering going on in red states paid off handsomely, easily winning at the ballot box, and setting up Democrats to pick up as many as five congressional seats in the Golden State in next year’s elections. Newsom, who has positioned himself as a leader of the Trump opposition, raised over $100 million to back the measure.

Underlying the night’s results was President Trump’s unpopularity and failure to live up to his promise to lower prices and end wars. Instead, the most notable events for the president in the last few months have been his destruction of the White House East Wing to make room for a new ballroom, the federal government shutdown, airstrikes on boats in Latin America allegedly running drugs, and a continued war in Ukraine, albeit with a high-profile but shaky ceasefire in the Hamas-Israel war. 

If there was any solace for Trump, it was the truth in his statement that he was not on the ballot. Since 2016, Democrats have overperformed in years when he’s not on the ballot. Now that he’s a lame duck president, his coattails may be even shorter. Trump seemed to bow to reality last week: the Constitution prevents him from seeking a third term.

Despite worries that Democratic primaries have a way of producing weak nominees in closely fought elections, voters chose candidates who had remarkable strengths, including an ideology that matched the electorate’s concerns. By contrast, the GOP produced a series of flawed candidates, most notably Winsome Earle-Sears, the current Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, who never really had a chance to succeed Governor Glenn Youngkin, a private equity mogul, who projected a more moderate image and capitalized on and stoked the concerns of many suburban parents over transgender issues. By contrast, Earle-Sears could never shake her more combustible statements, like calling legal abortion “genocide.” 

Even Jesse Jackson used to say it takes two wings to fly, meaning the Democrats benefited from right-wing and left-wing factions. Democratic primary voters seemed to have had an uncanny sense of how to pick the right candidates this year. 

In Erie County, Pennsylvania, a swing region in a swing state, the GOP picked up the county executive position four years ago for the first time in decades. Last night, Democrat Christina Vogel, a small business owner and political newcomer, soundly defeated Republican incumbent Brenton Davis, a military vet who let inmates be released from the county prison to tend to snow removal, earning the ire of judges, prosecutors, and victims who weren’t informed, as is standard procedure. When the GOP is making rookie mistakes like that, it’s no wonder Democrats had such a remarkable night. 

The post Why Democrats Won appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Almost a year ago, I wrote “A Very Rough Day in Jersey” in these pages about Donald Trump’s surprisingly strong showing in the Garden State in the 2024 presidential race. It became the second most viewed article at the Washington Monthly in the past 12 months, which surprised me, until it didn’t. 

Why the broad audience? It may have been the mysterious workings of the Google algorithm. Still, I think the Democratic near-death experience in New Jersey, where Kamala Harris won by only 6 percent in a state that has been solidly Democratic in presidential elections for over a generation, was painfully emblematic of Trump’s 2024 triumph. I happened to write it in a way that resonated, with a lot of history and personal reflection as a Jersey native.  

That Harris couldn’t win a swing state was one thing; that she almost lost fuckin’ Jersey was jaw-dropping. In 2020, Joe Biden won New Jersey by nearly 16 points over Donald Trump, and in 2016, Hillary Clinton beat the star of The Apprentice by 13 points as she lost nationally. Barack Obama topped Mitt Romney by 18 points in 2012. Like in the Rio Grande Valley and the South Bronx, Trump had made considerable gains with Blacks and Hispanics, and New Jersey is the most Hispanic state east of the Mississippi, save Florida. In Jersey, Trump held Republicans and chipped away at young voters. No state had a more dramatic blue-to-red shift. 

In that gloomy-for-Democrats piece last year, I did see some light on the horizon for the party: Rebecca Michelle Sherrill, who had been called Mikie since she was a little girl growing up in Alexandria, Virginia. Her photo adorned the page. I wrote: 

In the hothouse atmosphere of 2025, when Trump will be in the throes of his first year, it could be a promising contest for U.S. Representative Mikie Sherrill, a Navy veteran, moderate, bipartisan Democrat who proved a very good crossover candidate. The state has only elected one woman governor, [Christie Todd] Whitman, and none to the U.S. Senate, but I’d put money on Sherrill to take the nomination and the race if she runs. 

I turned out to be right about Sherrill getting the nomination. It was more than a hunch. I’d followed Sherrill closely for some time. First, she represents my hometown, South Orange, in the U.S. House, and second, she seems to be one of the most politically talented members of the very gifted House class of 2018 elected during Trump’s first term. A former Navy helicopter pilot who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, the now-53-year-old was a federal prosecutor and mother of four who seemed like she was created in a political consultant’s lab as a symbol of change, but not scary change. Having flipped a Republican district in 2018, she seemed smart, nimble, and brave. She was just the seventh member of Congress to call for Biden to step aside after his June 2024 debate disaster, when most members were sitting tight. 

I thought Sherrill was the best-equipped candidate to take on the GOP and could win what was sure to be a tough nomination fight. The state’s two U.S. Senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim, weren’t going anywhere, so the line to run for New Jersey governor was long. (And it’s an excellent job; political scientists have long noted it’s the most powerful governorship in the country since no other official is elected statewide. The Lieutenant Governor runs on a joint ticket.) Still, Sherrill trounced a very competitive field, including Representative Josh Gottheimer, an aerobic centrist and prodigious fundraiser, as well as the mayors of Newark and Jersey City, assorted state pols, and the head of the state’s teachers’ union, because, hey, you might as well cut out the middle man.  

With just a few days left in the 2025 gubernatorial race, Democratic professionals are everywhere cautiously predicting that Sherrill is likely to pull this out in modest single digits. New Jersey reporters that I know allow a larger possibility that she could blow it. Call it a hard landing, not the easy touchdown I pictured. I still can’t help but wonder if her Republican opponent, Giacchino Michael “Jack” Ciattarelli, a businessman who was expected to lose by double digits in 2021 to Governor Phil Murphy but only lost by 3 points, and is once again the GOP gubernatorial nominee, is under polling.  But early voting is going her way, with Democratic voters outpacing their vote-by-mail turnout in the 2021 gubernatorial race.

The physics of the race are in Sherrill’s favor. This state has a huge 800,000-person Democratic registration edge, although it’s down from a million. It’s an off-year election, meaning that more affluent and educated voters make up a larger proportion of the electorate, which helps Democrats and Sherrill, who hails from the famously integrated suburb, Montclair, home of Stephen Colbert. Plus, Trump is hugely unpopular in the state, and Sherrill has done all she can to yoke Ciattarelli, a former legislator and businessman, who didn’t back Trump in 2016 but has, like so many Republicans, gone MAGA, to the 47th president. For what it’s worth, New Jersey Dems are outpacing Republicans in early voting, although that could be because Trump has returned to dissing early voting after briefly embracing the idea. 

Ciattarelli, 63, is also disadvantaged compared to successful Republican gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey. The last Republicans to win the governorship in Trenton did so the year after a new Democratic president’s popularity faltered, and the sitting Democratic governor of New Jersey was really unpopular. For instance, Christie Todd Whitman won in 1993 as Bill Clinton struggled in his first year, and the state’s Democratic Governor Jim Florio was hugely unpopular over taxes and one of those state education funding equalization crises that inflames suburban and racial passions. In 2009, Chris Christie beat the unpopular Democratic Governor Jon Corzine, as Barack Obama floated around 40 percent approval. Ciattarelli is not in such an advantageous position. 

The government shutdown doesn’t help him either. Voters tend to blame Trump and the GOP for the shutdown. While New Jersey ranks among the states with the fewest per-capita federal employees, the woes caused by the shutdown, such as overwhelmed Social Security offices, TSA delays, and other problems, can’t be good for Ciattarelli. Trump also wants to scuttle the massive Gateway Tunnel project to create a new rail line to New York City. 

But Sherrill has some handicaps. No party has held the governor’s mansion, the stately Drumthwacket, for three terms in over 60 years. New Jersey Governor Murphy (like Corzine, a former Goldman Sachs C-suite denizen) has only a modest approval rating. One poll had his popularity lower than Trump’s as Jersey residents face not only higher costs like most Americans, but also, in this, the most densely populated state, particularly steep auto insurance and housing bills. Republicans have been out registering Democrats of late, suggesting a late surge of interest. 

New Jersey’s electorate is also elastic, according to the experts. Blue states like Virginia and New York tend to stay within specific parameters, as do Red ones like Alabama or Idaho, while Jersey can swing more wildly.  

For 40 years, in the post-World War II era, New Jersey was almost solidly Republican in presidential contests except for the 1964 Lyndon Johnson landslide and 1960, when John F. Kennedy edged out Richard Nixon by less than 1 percent. It went for Thomas Dewey over Harry Truman, twice for Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson, Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern. It went for Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush over Michael Dukakis.

But starting in 1992, it went Democratic and never looked back.

Elasticity was seen in the governor’s races, where Florio’s popularity careened from a high winning in 1989 to his collapse in 1993. Christie had both the highest and lowest approval ratings for a New Jersey governor. Coming into office, he was perceived as a straight talker and, in 2012, as a competent manager after Superstorm Sandy. He was a pariah by the time of Bridgegate when he left office in 2018.

Plus, Sherrill has made missteps of her own. It’s fair to say she’s underperformed. Some errors have been widely noted, like the poor answer Sherrill gave about the millions her family made to the podcaster Charlamagne tha God, who asked her if she made millions from stock trades. “I, I haven’t … I don’t believe I did,” The truth was and is on Sherrill’s side. She doesn’t trade individual equities and seems to have seen her family’s net worth rise the way most Americans have since 2019, through a rising stock market and home prices. (Her husband is a banker and fellow USNA alum.) That she was unprepared for such a question feels like candidate malpractice, especially since her primary opponents had nibbled at her finances. In general, she’s been underwhelming on the stump. 

Sherrill has probably overemphasized her exceptional Naval service, for which she received multiple commendations. She’s to be applauded for it, and Ciattarelli never served. But as with John Kerry in 2004, you can overdo it. I sat in amazement at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in the Massachusetts Senator’s hometown of Boston, watching the RNC oppo team turn elated, as Kerry devoted most of his acceptance speech to his decision to join the Navy during the Vietnam War and his admirable opposition to the conflict. Responding to focus groups and polling showing Congress in ill repute, Kerry largely elided a distinguished career in the U.S. Senate to be seen as a better commander-in-chief than his Republican opponent, George W. Bush. When the scurrilous Swift Boat attackers went after Kerry’s Naval service on the rivers of Vietnam, he was caught unawares.  

Likewise, Sherrill seemed ill-prepared for the even more scurrilous and likely illegal leaks about her not walking at graduation with her 1994 class at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, which was embroiled in a cheating scandal. Sherrill didn’t cheat, but she didn’t turn in cheaters, which cost her a spot at the ceremony. Not ratting out friends violated USNA code, but it has a certain Jersey appeal, as any Sopranos fan knows. But Sherrill hasn’t addressed the matter in a forthcoming way and was caught off guard, but shouldn’t have been. If you put Naval symbols all over your campaign and are constantly filmed in a flight suit, being ready for a blemish on your sterling record would seem like due diligence. 

Finally, she’s probably overdone linking Ciattarelli to Trump. I can understand the impulse. It’s driven by what might be called the tyranny of focus groups. Trump tests poorly. You tell people Ciattarelli backs Trump and Trump loves Ciattarelli, and it feels like a winning issue, which it is. But as with the Navy, it only gets you so far.  

An example: 

On September 21, New Jersey’s gubernatorial candidates met at Rider College for their first debate. Sherrill did well enough, but I remember an interview with a young Black man, presumably a student there, who said he was going to vote for Sherrill and thought on balance she won the debate, but complained that she talked too much about Donald Trump. 

I agreed. Yoking your opponent to the omnipresent and unpopular Trump makes total sense, up to a point. Voters know that the governor’s job is not the same as a member of Congress and that while the 47th president and his wrecking crew stand astride the political landscape, attacking the MAGA posse is not enough. Sherrill, of course, has plenty of positions, but listening to her, the Trump bashing became repetitive. 

Of course, Ciattarelli, who tries to project as an everyman and looks like about 50 guys I knew in Essex County, has had his share of boneheaded moments. Asked by a reporter about pursuing Black and Hispanic voters, he said, “Next question.”—a particularly dumb move given Trump’s inroads with said groups. His running mate for Lieutenant Governor said he was open to tax hikes on everyone but millionaires. “Taxes are on the table, but I’d be careful of millionaire taxes,” said James Gannon. “They’re employing us … what I’m saying, the millionaires, we can’t just beat up the millionaires. The millionaires, sometimes, are employers; they’re employing us.”  

The best thing Sherrill has going for her is that no one inside the campaign thought this would be easy, and now they’ve had enough scares that they’re not taking anything for granted. The wind may finally be at Sherrill’s back, but as a helicopter pilot, she knows it can shift.  

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I grew up during a time of assassinations. I’ve no memory of President John F. Kennedy’s slaying in Dallas a few months after I was born in 1963, and hazy ones of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy’s assassinations when I was five in 1968. (The Newark riots, a few miles from my childhood home in a neighboring town, that followed in the wake of King’s slaying, still prod vivid memories of flames and federal troops.) I recall crisply the two attempted assassinations of President Gerald Ford when I was 12 years old, rarities in the story of American political violence because both shooters were women and the attempts, both in California, were just days apart. And I was a 17-year-old college freshman in New York City when John Hinckley nearly killed President Ronald Reagan. When I saw news of the Charlie Kirk assassination, I made a mental note that he was half my age.

A lot’s been said and will be said about the Charlie Kirk assassination, the conservative activist’s killer, and the political violence plaguing the country from the two attempted assassinations of President Donald Trump to the slaying of Democratic legislators in their Minnesota homes, explosions at in-vitro fertilization clinics, and inside of Tesla automobiles. Jerusalem Demsas, the founder and editor of the new publication, The Argument, wisely reminds us about Kirk that “a man was murdered” and to go easy on the noise, the retweets, the hot takes, the abstractions, and focus on the humanity of a father slain, a wife widowed, and toddlers without a dad.

But not all murders are created equal. The law makes countless distinctions between slayings, not because some people are better than others but because their societal roles differ. Their jobs, not their immutable characteristics, distinguish them. Anyone familiar with police procedurals knows the familiar scene in which detectives badger a suspect—You killed a cop!—and threaten them with the death penalty. We have special penalties for those who kill police, and with good reason.

Kirk’s murder serves as a reminder that, much like Dante’s circle of Hell, there are different penalties for different kinds of slayings—the killing of a federal official or even a candidate, as well as various federal workers. It might seem unnecessary to add penalties beyond murder for a congressional staffer or postal inspector. But there’s a reason that Heil Hitler scrolled on a synagogue’s steps carries a harsher penalty than graffiti on a bridge reading “Beat Michigan.” Hate crime laws, often dismissed as unnecessary, make sense just like those protecting cops, letter carriers, bus drivers, and presidents. It’s not a crime to joke about killing your in-laws, but it is a crime to tell jokes about hijacking while passing through an airport magnetometer, and rightly so. 

Political assassination is the final circle of Hell because it is, of course, an attack on a society, a nation, no matter whether the shooter’s motives are apolitical, like Hinckley’s desire to impress the actress Jodie Foster by shooting Reagan just 69 days into the 40^th president’s term. The action is a crime against society, a “fuck you” to elections and discourse, freedom and law, even if the intent behind it is not.

Motive matters little with these federal crimes, which is something to remember. Authorities will likely capture or kill Kirk’s killer soon, now that law enforcement has found the probable weapon and issued a photo of their prime suspect. We’ll have plenty of time to consider his motive. (The authorities only used masculine pronouns in their press conference.) But while the law makes all sorts of distinctions about motive in cases of killing citizens—manslaughter, first- and second-degree murder, and so on—it doesn’t really matter when it comes to assassinations, whether the motives were political, personal, or probably a mix of both. Charlie Kirk’s assassination will be no different.

Our contemporary woes are not the only history written in gunfire. In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, three American presidents were shot and killed within 36 years—Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), and William McKinley (1901). Imagine if three presidents had been assassinated since George H.W. Bush took the oath of office in 1989. The Gilded Age, which our era is frequently compared to, was a time of political violence—bombings and unrest after strikes like the Haymarket Riots—an anarchist slew McKinley; a Confederate shot Lincoln; a federal job seeker took out Garfield.

I’m pessimistic about political violence in the short run but an optimist in the long run. It is always with us, especially in a society as individualistic and gun-soaked as ours. It curses dictatorships but also democracies; the United Kingdom and India, Japan and Sweden have all been prey to political assassinations. But I’m betting we’re not at the edge of the abyss. The near-universal revulsion at Kirk’s assassination this week is heartening, even if the president felt the need to condemn the “radical left” instead of violence writ large, or some are vowing retribution. (I remember some campus cheering over Reagan’s shooting.) Political violence often backfires, which limits its appeal and mimicry over time (although not in the near term; beware copycats). Try to kill Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, and you make them stronger.

Part of the reason, even if little noticed, is that the law strengthens us. Its taxonomy of crimes against federal officials and office holders—echoed by state laws that do the same—reinforces the norm that thou shalt not kill but adds an important twist, especially those in the governmental and political spheres. The 31-year-old Kirk wasn’t an office holder or a fed. Still, neither were other prominent assassination victims, be it the deservedly honored Dr. King, or despicable figures like the racist Meir Kahane. But the latticework of laws still matters, and if Kirk’s assassin manages to live through his capture, his prosecution will be a triumph of good over evil and law over anarchy.

The post The Charlie Kirk Assassination: More Than Just Murder appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Editor’s Note: Four years ago, the Monthly published this piece, which remains timely today as political violence smolders and news media face continued financial challenges.

I was getting a late start, which wasn’t uncommon at newsmagazines early in the week. It was the turn of the century—and print was everything. The production of each glossy issue ran into the weekend. Work mounted on Friday and Saturday and eased at the beginning of each week. Some idiot flew into the tallest building on the East Coast, I thought, as I was getting dressed on a late-summer Tuesday. I left a phone message for the editor of Time, saying that we could dispatch our aviation correspondent to New York. I was the deputy bureau chief of the Washington bureau and in a way responsible for its—to use an ominous phrase—air traffic control.

Like everyone watching The Today Show, I was stunned when the second plane hit the South Tower. (By this time, news helicopters had moved into position to record the burning North Tower.) Despite more than two decades of magazine writing, I was denser than most viewers. It took me a couple of minutes to realize that the obliteration of a second plane, the decimation of the South Tower, with all the cameras fixed on Lower Manhattan, was not an accident but an attack, a crime scene and not a coincidence.

The following 48 hours were a blur of adrenalin and caffeine, anxiety and depression, monomaniacal focus and vacant stares. The staff of Time was galvanized, putting together one mammoth issue of the print magazine, published ahead of schedule on Thursday instead of the weekend, built mainly around one story. Written expertly by Nancy Gibbs, later to be the magazine’s editor, it was composed of hundreds of files—reporting dispatches, to the uninitiated—that she managed to synthesize into a piece that won the 2002 National Magazine Award for a single-topic issue. There was no headline on the cover, only a picture of the towers aflame. The traditional red border that had marked Time’s covers since the Henry Luce era was replaced by a mournful black. Sometimes mammoth newsweekly undertakings could be heavy-handed and eye-rolling. (A couple of years earlier, also in late summer, I’d stayed up all night in New York at Newsweek, where I’d been editing and writing for the rushed Princess Diana cover, which was exceptionally well done, although it bestowed a gravity on her death that now seems insanely overwrought.) Gibbs’s opus, though, worked. I’d always admired her opening lines: “If you want to humble an empire it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can’t be safe.”

Everyone who wasn’t a young child that day has a 9/11 story. Mine is less emotional than many. I wasn’t friends with anyone who died. My downtown D.C. was dappled with Pentagon smoke but no falling men, no cloud of ash, no paper debris. My life wasn’t in danger—although with Humvees on the streets of Georgetown, who could be entirely sure?

That day isn’t just a wound but a vantage point that offers some perspective on the present—this very different age of reporting, technology, and America’s place in the world.

In 2001, as now, there were people who hated the mainstream media. I do, too, from time to time—its banality, its focus on polls over policy, its both-sides-ism. (See Monthly alum James Fallows’s Breaking the News.) But when I hear the fake news slander from the former president or his minions, I twitch with rage. I remember how we labored on 9/11 to get things right amid a fog of war that was particularly thick. I know how hard I’ve worked on the many stories that, like 9/11, have overturned the world as we know it: on the financial crisis, the election of our first Black president, his bigoted successor, a pandemic that left everything frayed.

While conventional wisdom quickly focused on al-Qaeda as the perpetrator of 9/11, no one could really know at the time. The terror cult hadn’t claimed credit, and untangling the biographies of the foreign nationals on board the four doomed flights took time. Al-Qaeda had been linked in the 1990s and early 2000s to bombings of the USS Cole and the American embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. The World Trade Center itself had been bombed in 1993. But we were at pains not to write what we didn’t know. I spoke on background to the late diplomat Richard Holbrooke in the hours following the attack; I knew him professionally and a bit socially. (I relay his comments now because he’s passed away.) He offered a warning that al-Qaeda might not be responsible for the attack and pointed me toward a longtime intelligence hand with experience in Pakistan and the region, who played down the possibility that the mysterious Osama bin Laden might have masterminded this.

Holbrooke’s caveats were misplaced, as it turned out. But this is how reporting happens. You talk to everyone and try to make sense of it, coming up with the best shot at the truth that you can in the time you have. Criticism of journalism is fair. The charge that it’s fabricated is usually libel. (There are the fabulists who have made up stories, but news organizations are more on guard now than in the days, say, when I wrote the “White House Watch” column for The New Republic and Stephen Glass was an intern.) On 9/11, I don’t think I would have guessed that the charge of liberal bias—a mainstay of Republican critiques for decades—would morph into the Nazi Lugënpresse (lying press) slander of the Trump years.

September 11 sits in my mind like dots in a pointillist painting—getting my son out of preschool, crying when I saw the towers fall, elated when we could crack a few facts or hear from Jay Carney, one of our White House correspondents, who was part of the Air Force One pool that day. (He would later become White House press secretary under Barack Obama.) Few of us had cell phones, and those who did often couldn’t get them to work. Time’s resourceful office manager, Judith Stoler, had kept one dedicated hard line separate from the main system of desk phones, which also often failed. It became our lifeline to New York. Just as the CIA and the FBI hadn’t been talking to each other, a former Time colleague reminded me this week, it took time to get everyone to share information with ease: “I remember thinking not too long after but certainly not that day that we were as badly organized to cover it as the government had been to prevent it, that we were all in our silos, right?”

The day, of course, should offer lessons in caution as well as remembrance. If you’d told us that day that 9/11 would not usher in a wave of terror on American soil but would lead to a 20-year war in Asia that we would lose—a Vietnam for our millennium—it wouldn’t have been my first notion. In the weeks that followed, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security became a wise idea for all right-thinking people, left and right. Now it seems like an unwieldy conglomeration, combining the anti-counterfeit operations of the Secret Service with the often heavy hand of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, administering citizenship tests, policing cybersecurity, and even handing out generators after hurricanes. But then we still thought the AOL–Time Warner merger that had boosted our shares and options was also a brilliant idea.

September 11 always reminds me of the importance of where the camera is. There are no photos of United 93 crashing into the Pennsylvania dirt. The only pictures of the American Airlines plane hitting the Pentagon are from a security camera, and you rarely see them. Mobile phones with cameras weren’t ubiquitous then. If you look at photos of the stunned New Yorkers staring up at the burning towers, they aren’t holding phones; there’s no device putting distance between them and evil. George W. Bush soared in popularity after 9/11, but on the day of the attack, he was off-camera most of the time, being shuttled around the country. (Garrett Graff describes the president’s journey in incredible detail in The Only Plane in the Sky.) He had been reading to schoolchildren in Florida when the planes hit, and he chose to finish The Pet Goat even after being told of the strike. He then flew to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to make a statement and spent the rest of the day under wraps at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, only returning to Washington that night to address the nation.

That left a video void, but also a void for a media and country that ached for leadership or heroism. (The NYC firefighters perished away from the cameras.) Most of the day, the most memorable public officials were Rudy Giuliani and Donald Rumsfeld, who seemed the epitome of bravery and leadership. Never mind that each would, to put it mildly, discredit themselves in the years that followed. Or that Giuliani’s courage walking the streets of New York was in part because he had nowhere to go—he had ordered the location of the city’s emergency command center at the World Trade Center, even after the 1993 attack on the complex, a decision that was widely criticized at the time. His idiocy thus became his fortune. Rumsfeld helped remove the injured from the Pentagon. The camera showed the bravura that marked his career as a Korean War pilot and, in the course of two terms, both the youngest and oldest defense secretary. The camera didn’t—couldn’t—show how invested he was in a war with Iraq, a folly that exceeds our efforts in Afghanistan.

If 9/11 had happened 20 years later, would the country believe the president and elevate him to 80, 90 percent approval ratings? No, we’re too divided for that, which may be a good thing, given Bush’s march to war. On the other hand, would “truthers” be a fringe element or the dominant voice on one of the partisan networks? Some news organizations, like Time, now owned by Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff (who by all accounts has done a wonderful job with the place), have the muscle to do what they did. But few other news outlets could summon it. Layoffs, which have provided story lines to fictional representations of newsrooms back to The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Broadcast News, have accelerated in the years since, devastating local media.

The dynamics of the web and social media—there was no Facebook and Twitter in 2001—and the economics of modern journalism put a premium on hot takes. Would a modern Time hold its fire for two days and put it all in one mammoth issue? Probably not. I joked with a former Time Washington colleague about how most major newspapers’ opinion voices would handle 2001—with a salvo of knee-jerk takes on what it all meant. Can you imagine enduring 9/11 and then Tucker Carlson?

We at Time had the money, muscle, and restraint in 2001 to write one long history of 9/11 in a day and a half, maybe less. It’s not that there were better journalists in 2001 than today. It’s that the economics generally favored better journalism, and the country, yet to be divided by news feeds and Twitter streams, was better able to listen.

I spoke with Nancy Gibbs this week. She’s now the director of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Wise then and now, she noted that the great files she received would have all been tweeted in real time. There was and would remain a need for a narrative that made sense of the attacks, she said, but today’s readers would have already had shards of information flying at them before we’d put together a stained-glass window.

She lamented that “our attention spans have been rewired since then,” although she noted, rightly, the importance of the big general interest narrative even in an age of polarization. But her optimism has waned. “Before the last year, when I would teach about polarization, I was operating, I think, on the assumption that the only thing that could bring us together again would be another 9/11 kind of attack,” Gibbs said. “And then we get attacked, not even by a foreign adversary, but by a respiratory virus. And we find a way to divide around that. I’ve lost a lot of my optimism, because there’s so much profit in division.”

She’s right. The terrorists maimed our cathedrals, as she wrote in Time. But two decades later, we’ve done a pretty good job of defacing our institutions all by ourselves.

The post The Lost Journalistic World of 9/11 appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s been 80 years since the first nuclear summer when the U.S. unleashed the power of the atom on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Four score later, we’re in another war, despite yesterday’s declaration of a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.  

Few in the summer of 1945 and fewer still during the Cold War years that followed would have imagined that no nuke would be used on a civilian population for 80 years. The close calls during the long, twilight struggle—as John F. Kennedy described the Cold War—were chillingly numerous. Despite the Berlin crises, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan, not to mention the fall of the Iron Curtain across Eastern Europe, the hideously elegant logic of deterrence proved ironclad. Nuclear powers would be mad to fight directly. So, they have not, even as proxy wars between the U.S. and Russia and, sometimes, China have cost millions of lives from the rice paddies of Southeast Asia to the frozen Chosin Reservoir to the jungles of Bolivia and the sands of Sinai.  

But the logic of 20th-century deterrence that kept the nuclear peace for 80 years, combined with 21st-century events, means the desire for nuclear weapons among the nuke-less has gone up, not down. That is especially true this week, and why more countries will want nuclear weapons, not only because of recent history, Iran’s deadly ambitions, and the wild oscillations of the 45^th and 47^th presidents of the United States, Donald Trump. 

There are 195 members of the United Nations. Only nine have nuclear weapons—the U.S., Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Democratic nations that might occasionally daydream about acquiring nuclear weapons but have heretofore forsworn them—such as Germany, Japan, Poland, South Korea, to name a few—have shown restraint either because of their fraught histories and, more importantly, because they enjoy (or enjoyed) nuclear umbrellas, specifically American atomic prophylaxis.  

One irony of Trump’s second term is that while he’s helped Israel’s effort to set back Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, the showman’s erratic temperament and manic ability to shred once sacred alliances have made it much more likely that Seoul, Warsaw, Taipei, or even Berlin and Tokyo will want to consider spinning centrifuges. Can anyone count on the American nuclear umbrella when the president is mercurial and mendacious, when he seems more likely than not to jettison NATO? French President Emmanuel Macron has not only returned to Gaullist ideas of French nuclear independence, with its force frappé, but has also offered to bring other European nations under Paris’s nuclear protection. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made similar moves. They would be foolish not to do that.  

That is the sober thinking among American traditional allies. Imagine what it is in the minds of America’s enemies and frenemies. Think of the view from Caracas. If you’re Nicolas Máduro, the Venezuelan strongman, and the U.S. has vowed regime change and told the U.S. Supreme Court that your country is currently invading America thus allowing mass deportations (read: immigrants escaping your destruction of a once-prosperous economy) how would you assess the situation in Iran this week and the events of last 25 years? The lessons of the 20th century are that deterrence works between nuclear powers: the U.S./USSR, India/Pakistan. Tensions may flare, but everyone steps back from the brink. The lesson for 21st-century dictators like Máduro is that you can be invaded/thrown out of power if you do not have a nuke.  

Iraq (which feigned having one but did not), Ukraine (which gave them up under Bill Clinton’s administration), Libya (which gave up its weapons of mass destruction program under George W. Bush), Iran (which tried to build one and got bombed), Syria (which tried to build one and got toppled) are cautionary tales. North Korea’s regime survives because it has nukes and a mammoth conventional army. Why wouldn’t Máduro want nuclear weapons? It’s unlikely he can get them, but not impossible. What’s important is that the calculus of risk and reward has made nukes seem more attractive to many leaders. That may sound counterintuitive given the degree to which American administrations have gone to keep the Mullahs of Tehran from joining the nuclear club, especially this week. But not all countries are Iran, and most could anticipate a very different reaction from this president. 

If you are an intelligence official in Riyadh or a defense planner in Taipei, the events of the last week only confirm why you would want a nuke. And unlike Máduro, these prosperous nations have the means. Taiwan may or may not be able to count on an American defense of the island but given the chip maker’s strategic importance and a bipartisan consensus in the U.S. opposing Chinese hegemony, it probably can. Probably. These days, the famed “strategic ambiguity” of what the U.S. would do in the face of a Beijing assault, promoted by presidents since Richard Nixon went to “Red China,” is ambiguous. Acquiring a nuclear weapon would have risks for prosperous Taiwan, but it could also add to its deterrence.  

Likewise, will Trump keep American forces on the Korean peninsula, where they have provided a nuclear tripwire for more than 70 years? Will the new center-right government in Seoul be able to rely on it, or will it want its own deterrent?  

The Saudi ambitions to cut a nuclear deal with the U.S. and Israel, while perhaps moribund given the disaster in Gaza, still have a compelling logic behind them. Whatever shape Iran is in right now, Tehran’s very public and very proud national project of building a large nuclear sector—celebrated in postage stamps and holidays, begun during the era of the Shah—cannot be utterly obliterated any more than Riyadh’s can. The smarts and know-how of the Persian nation with 90 million citizens, mountains taller than the Alps, and a capital more populous than London will not be evaporated by Mossad commandos or U.S. bunker busters. If you are Mohammad Bin Salam, MBS, you still want a Saudi nuclear sector—weapons to repel the Shia, power for when the oil runs out. Who is to say Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, eager for wins, won’t find a way to get him one? 

The grand irony is that Trump brought us to this moment where nuclear non-proliferation, always a struggle to enforce but mostly a successful one, is threatened globally by the effort to eliminate one nation’s nuclear capacity. (See this excellent NBC News piece by Alexander Smith, citing proliferation experts from Seoul to Washington, D.C.) “The signs are that a new arms race is gearing up that carries much more risk and uncertainty than the last one,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Director Dan Smith said Monday as his group unveiled its 2025 yearbook. 

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) forged during the Obama administration wasn’t perfect, nor intended to be so. It did what it was supposed to, as did arms agreements during the Cold War. The agreement between Iran and the five members of the United Nations Security Council—the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia, and China (plus Germany) did not seek to contain Iranian proxies in the region or its Medieval oppression at home. The JCPOA limited Tehran’s nuclear possibilities, not its conventional ambitions, just as Cold War arms treaties contained the arms race without challenging Soviet oppression at home and abroad. Limiting nukes is quite enough. 

While conservatives sounded alarms over allegations of Iranian cheating on enrichment, just as they often pointed to violations during decades of American-Soviet arms control pacts, Tehran was basically in compliance. The West not only had eyes and ears on the ground in Tehran but an unprecedented inspection regime and a formula for snapback sanctions. To quote Yiddish, today the West has bubkes in terms of inspection. There have been some International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors on the ground since the JCPOA collapsed, but the Iranians are unlikely to let them back in to what remains of the nuclear program. And if Iran withdraws from the global nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), even that cursory accounting will be gone.  

An insider deeply familiar with the Mullahs’ regime told me it could have fallen had the U.S. kept up with the JCPOA instead of unceremoniously withdrawing from it during Trump’s first term.  

It would have been one thing if Trump had withdrawn from the JCPOA with a consistent hardline approach like the one long touted by John Bolton, the Bush-era arms-control official and U.N. ambassador, who became Trump’s National Security Adviser before being fired. Today, the delicate, honest-broker role of the National Security Adviser as envisioned in the post-World War II world has been upended by Trump putting Secretary of State Marco Rubio, an Iran Hawk, in the position, precisely the kind of scale-tipping in policy-making that the National Security Act of 1947 was designed to prevent. Bolton did not believe an inspection regime would work with the Iranians, and their nuclear program had to be destroyed, and Rubio’s views are more Boltonesque than not. 

However, in his second term, Trump seemed to abandon Boltonism and the views of the hawkish Rubio, at least for a time. Trump literally abandoned the mustachioed Bolton himself by withdrawing the Yale diplomat’s security detail, which President Joe Biden never let lapse even after Bolton returned to private life; such is the nature of Iranian threats against him.  

Instead, in his second term, art-of-the-deal Trump opened the souk, he saber rattled Iran but was, unlike Rubio and Bolton, seemingly eager to cut his version of the JCPOA, much as he cut his own NAFTA deal, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, that bore a striking similarity to the 1990s agreement he’d long denounced as a betrayal of American workers. Given his TACO reputation (Trump Always Chickens Out), the 47^th president probably would have cut a far weaker deal than the JCPOA engineered by Secretary of State John Kerry had the Iranians played him more adroitly. No wonder Netanyahu, whose belli needs no casus, acted to box Trump in by striking Iran. (The Likud prime minister had that ability because President Joe Biden had armed Israel so heavily since October 7, 2023, and coordinated the extraordinary regional defense of Israel from Iranian ballistic missiles last year.) Trump took Bibi’s bait and dispatched the B-2s, which, in fairness, may have been the least bad option at that point. But the JCPOA abrogation, one of Trump’s original sins from his first term and Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons, brought us to this.  

It’s too early to know much, my contact and many others say—what damage was done to the Iranian program, what Trump will do next, what the regime will do (we know about Iran’s performative Qatar attack and the ceasefire), and what, perhaps most importantly, the Iranian people will do. Will they overthrow the 46-year-old theocracy, rally around the flag, or continue grumbling to themselves? We can’t know what was buried or unleashed by Sunday’s American bombing of Fordow, Natanz, and other Iranian sites, except sadly, a growing desire in many of the world’s capitals for a nuke of one’s own. 

The post Will Trump’s Strikes on Iran Unleash a Global Arms Race?  appeared first on Washington Monthly.