On the menu today: First, thanks to everyone who contributed to our ongoing summer webathon — you guys indeed made me look good in front of the suits. You knew yesterday’s good vibes couldn’t last, although some Republicans may injure themselves laughing at the topic of today’s newsletter. The Democrats have been flailing about since the start of Trump’s second term, and reorienting themselves for success in future elections was always going to be a difficult journey. But there are some options that are never worth considering, and high on that list is, “Let’s have the guy who was chairman of the DNC last cycle host a new podcast, featuring an interview with the former president’s spectacularly scandal-ridden son.”
National Democrats Still Don’t Get It
I’m not a Democrat. My interest in the Democratic Party is that I’d rather have it full of heterodox realists — the John Fettermans and Josh Shapiros — rather than hard-left ideologues of dubious sanity — you know, the Zohran Mamdanis and AOCs.
But I was left incandescently angry about Dave Weigel’s article in Semafor about former Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison launching a podcast, declaring himself the Democrats’ answer to Joe Rogan, and revealing that one of his first guests will be Hunter Biden.
And if you’re a Democrat, you probably should be much angrier at Harrison than me — picture Bruce Banner after getting cut off in traffic by a Tesla driven by a social-media influencer taking selfies on her smartphone while driving, with “visualize world peace” and “I bought this before Elon went crazy” bumper stickers.
If you’re asking, “Who’s Jaime Harrison?” allow me to refresh your memory.
In the 2020 election cycle, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham was running for his fourth term representing South Carolina. It’s a heavily Republican state, and I mean heavily; Democrats literally haven’t won a U.S. Senate or gubernatorial race there this millennium; their last wins were Fritz Hollings (Senate) and Jim Hodges (governor) in 1998. The last Democrat to win the Palmetto State in a presidential race was Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Democrats were not exactly lining up to take on Graham; Harrison, who had served as South Carolina Democratic state party chairman, ran for the nomination unopposed.
Independent polling was fairly sparse in the South Carolina Senate race that year, but three times during the campaign, Quinnipiac University shocked the world with surveys showing a tie. In part because the Democratic grassroots nationwide loathed Graham, and because they believed the race was competitive, Harrison shattered the Senate fundraising records, raising an astonishing $132 million. By comparison, longtime incumbent Graham raised $112 million.
In the end, Graham won, 54.4 percent to 44.4 percent. It’s fair to wonder if the race was ever all that competitive, and whether Harrison’s hype and runaway fundraising all stemmed from Quinnipiac having trouble getting an accurate reading, which spurred far-too-credulous national coverage from the likes of the Guardian, the New York Times, Time magazine, NPR, the Economist, and so on.
As I wrote at the time, Harrison was just the latest and greatest version of the “Great Southern Democratic Hope” — candidates with not-so-great chances of success running in a Republican-learning state who receive wildly optimistic coverage from national media organizations and reporters desperate to discover a Democrat who can win statewide races in the South and someday end up on a presidential ticket.
And yet somehow, based on his losing by ten points, some Democrats believed Harrison had some insight or knack on how Democrats could run winning races. In 2021, President Joe Biden extended his amazing streak of bad personnel choices by deciding that he wanted Harrison to be the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
If you squint, you can find a few areas where the 2024 election cycle wasn’t such a disaster for Democrats. The party at least kept it close in the U.S. House of Representatives; Democrats won Senate races in Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin while losing those states in the presidential race; and Kamala Harris won more than 75 million votes, the third-most ever. And on paper, Democrats had record fundraising and made record investments in state parties.
But as you probably noticed, all that donor cash didn’t translate into, you know, winning races, which is more or less the whole point of having a Democratic National Committee. Since January 20, 2025, Democrats in Washington have been effectively neutered. Trump has staffed up his cabinet with almost all of his first picks, made sweeping changes to the federal government, laid off nearly 60,000 federal workers, shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and has basically stomped through the landscape of Democratic priorities the way Godzilla went through Tokyo.
In response, Cory Booker and Hakeem Jeffries have given really long speeches.
Not all the blame for the Democrats’ current mess falls on Harrison; it’s entirely possible that a different DNC chair would have ended up with the same colossally disappointing results. But Harrison’s record also makes it hard to believe that he’s the guy who’s best situated to lead his party out of the wilderness. After all, he’s one of the guys who got them into the wilderness.
Weigel’s article begins, “The search for a liberal Joe Rogan has led Democrats to an unlikely candidate: Jaime Harrison, their former party chair.”
Now, as many have pointed out, not too long ago, Democrats had their own Joe Rogan; his name was “Joe Rogan.” In a show in January 2020 during the Democratic presidential primary, Rogan said he had always liked Bernie Sanders and would probably vote for him, comments that were widely interpreted as an endorsement. In a foreshadowing of Democrats’ troubles to come, this was allegedly a crisis for the Sanders campaign because, as the BBC put it, Rogan “once said that a transgender woman was not ‘an actual woman.’”
[Insert “DUN-DUN-DUN” dramatic sound effect here.]
Joe Rogan didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the party cast him and his listeners out.
In the Biden years, certain corners of the Democratic Party demonized just about any expression of heterosexual masculinity as “toxic masculinity.” They became obsessed with shoehorning every American into an intersectional hierarchy of victimhood, seethed with envy of successful people, and bought into an apocalyptic environmentalism where wanting a fast or big car or eating meat were unforgivable sins. Tackle football was considered dangerous. Not finding obese people attractive was “body shaming.” A Guardian headline warned, “Getting fit is great — but it could turn you into a rightwing jerk.”
Heck, maybe the Democrats knew what they were doing with their not-so-subtle desire to feminize all aspects of American life; research indicated that higher levels of testosterone made you more open to voting for Republicans.
If you’re a young male, with a hunger for something more out of life, the Democratic Party had, and still has, close to nothing to offer you. And the podcasters with predominantly young male audiences noticed.
If any of this bothered Jaime Harrison, he hid it very well.
Now Harrison is back, with a new podcast, entitled, At Our Table.
Weigel writes, “The first episodes of At Our Table put Harrison next to 2024 vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, South Carolina kingmaker (and Harrison mentor) Rep. James Clyburn — and Hunter Biden, the prodigal former First Son who has not spoken out since his father ended his last presidential bid.”
Please identify for me the Americans who yearn to hear more from Hunter Biden, under the soft questioning of a former Democratic Party chairman.
But somehow, Harrison thinks that Hunter Biden is misunderstood and unfairly caricaturized. He told Weigel:
Well, I got a chance to get to know Hunter a lot over the last four years. I don’t know if you remember, but back in the day, when I was the South Carolina Democratic Party chair, I had this little series called “chair chats.” In chair chats, we talked about moving past caricatures. And in many ways, I think Hunter Biden has become a caricature in politics.
A lot of people don’t know how smart he is, don’t know his background, don’t know the stuff that he’s worked on. They only know what either his allies or his enemies have put out there, and he’s been defined by that.
I thought it would be really interesting to pull back the curtain so that people got a chance to understand who he is, and for him to get an opportunity to talk about some of the things that maybe he’s only been able to talk to his family members about.
Really? The lifelong drug addict who in his own words was “smoking crack every fifteen minutes”; who seduced his late brother’s widow in an extramarital affair and got her addicted to crack cocaine as well; who got a stripper pregnant and then refused to pay child support for years, and who somehow convinced a judge to allow him to pay the child support in the form of paintings; who didn’t pay taxes for years and then attempted to deduct money spent on prostitutes as a business expense; the guy who lied to a federally licensed gun dealer and then lost his gun; the guy who grabbed onto every lucrative deal from every shady foreign businessman from China to Kazakhstan to Ukraine to Romania and put them on the phone with his dad; the “failson” whose entire career was built around access to his father. . .
. . . Harrison thinks that guy has been . . . caricaturized?
Oh, stick it where the sun doesn’t shine.
Hunter Biden got his blanket pardon, the one Joe Biden repeatedly promised he would never give. Hasn’t he done enough damage? Can’t Hunter Biden go off and do something else with his life, far from the realm of politics? Does he really need to reemerge to tell Democrats that they lost in 2024 because they didn’t “remain loyal” to his doddering octogenarian father?
Jaime Harrison thinking that what the world needs now is him hosting a podcast is bad enough. But Harrison believing that Hunter Biden is unfairly criticized, and deserves a venue to defend his reputation, is absolutely, maddeningly galling, and suggests that Harrison hasn’t learned a darn thing from the debacle of the Biden presidency or last year’s presidential election.
Harrison is one of the architects of the Democratic failure of 2024. So is Hunter Biden. In fact, Tim Walz is another figure who qualifies as one of the architects. So why should Democrats listen to any of them about how the party needs to change to win elections in the future?
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