On the menu today: I understand if lots of right-of-center folks look at some of last night’s primary results and shudder at the socialist wave emerging from New York City. But ask yourself if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar have been principally assets or liabilities for House Democrats over the past few years, and then think about how the broader national electorate will respond to a likely future New York representative who believes “no more police at all, ever,” national borders should not exist, all deportation is wrong, and the state of Israel doesn’t exist. You’ve heard of addition by subtraction? Darializa Avila Chevalier may well be subtraction by addition.
Elsewhere, I’m cheery about South Carolina Republicans not just making the right choice in their gubernatorial primary — congratulations, state Attorney General Alan Wilson, and thank you voters, for listening to me for once — but making the right choice overwhelmingly; Wilson had 68.6 percent of the vote to Lieutenant Governor Pamela Evette’s 31.4 percent.
But last night also reaffirmed that 2026 is not such a great year for table-pounding celebrity House candidates. We’ve already seen Texas Democrat Jasmine Crockett and South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace lose statewide primaries, and Kentucky’s Thomas Massie get sent into involuntary retirement because of “them” — them not being the Israelis, as he would like to believe, but “them” as in almost 55 percent of primary voters in his district.
Also in Texas, Al Green was already used to getting involuntarily removed from the State of the Union address, but now he must get used to being involuntarily removed from his career in the House. Now, two other guys who ran on their celebrity status and personal fights with someone connected to Donald Trump have faced the voters and been deemed insufficient. Read on.
NYC’s Celebrity Candidates Take a Tumble
Back in November, I wrote that the people of New York’s twelfth congressional district, covering midtown Manhattan, deserved better in their next representative than “a shameless carpetbagger best known for cable news and his ex-wife, or one of the lesser man-children of the Kennedy clan.”
Last night, the Democrats of this district made a comparably good choice and picked state Assemblyman Micah Lasher. I’m not saying Lasher is good from a conservative perspective — he’ll be just another progressive in Congress, endorsed by every major New York Democratic establishment figure — although I would note he wants to continue arms sales to Israel and does not agree that Israel has committed a “genocide,” at a time when almost everyone else in the Democratic Party is only slightly less intensely opposed to Israel than, say, Hamas. Lasher has lamented, “I worry, sometimes, that our political dialogue and the political dialogue in this race is obsessed with Israel.”
No, there were two celebrity candidates in the district’s Democratic primary who had no business getting serious consideration, and judging from last night’s results, they never got it. Here’s something I don’t say often: Good job, Democratic primary voters.
Heading into this campaign, George T. Conway III was a ubiquitous face on cable-news talk shows, a founding member of the Lincoln Project, and the ex-husband of former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway. When he announced his bid, he did not actually live in the district; he moved to Washington in 2017. As I wrote last autumn, “I used to live here, about a decade ago” and “you know me from appearing on cable news a lot” are lousy reasons to make someone your representative in Congress.
Looking back, it is a bit surprising how little we outside of the district heard about Conway’s House bid; apparently an anti-Trump cable news talking head running for Congress just isn’t that interesting. Even when the New York Times wrote its profile on him two weeks ago, it concluded, “Mr. Conway is a candidate made for cable TV watchers, the ones who self-consciously correct themselves when they refer to the channel as MSNBC instead of MS Now.” That demographic is not a majority, not even in this district (the most heavily Democratic district in New York) and not even in a Democratic primary.
In what might be an ominous note for congressional Democratic candidates this autumn, the Times wrote, “Conway’s campaign is in some ways a test of whether the fixation on Mr. Trump — the rage that fueled the Women’s March and early waves of resistance, the emotions that were plastered on T-shirts — feels quite as potent, politically, more than a year into his second term.”
As of this writing, with 87 percent of the votes in, Conway is running a distant fifth with 6.1 percent of the vote, or 6,212 votes. In a big-spending primary, in the heart of the media capital of the country and perhaps the world, where more than 100,000 people voted, Conway got fewer votes than Vivek Ramaswamy did in the 2024 Iowa presidential caucus.
As of June 3, Conway’s campaign had spent $5,697,418.54. Assuming Conway finishes with 7,000 votes, he spent about $813 per vote.
That Times article quoted Molly Jong-Fast — a regular Times op-ed contributor — as a “closer friend of Conway” who chose not to tell the reporter who she intended to vote for in the primary. When even your “closer” friends don’t want to publicly say they’re supporting your campaign, it’s a bad sign.
At one point during the campaign, Conway declared, “Confronting authoritarianism requires more than speeches and social media posts.” This was intended as a shot at one of his rivals, Jack Schlossberg, son of Caroline Kennedy and grandson of former president John F. Kennedy. The New Yorker kindly described him as “best known as a social-media jokester.”
This is a nice way of saying that Schlossberg, at 33 years old, has not done much with his life so far, unless you want to count his 2018 cameo appearance in the CBS cop drama, Blue Bloods.
The New York Times is not exactly a persistent scathing critic of the Kennedy family; here’s one of the newspaper’s critics, Alexandra Jacobs, discussing Love Story, the FX limited series about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s relationship:
Well, I think that’s partly because of the continued participation of the Kennedys in public life. They carry themselves as standard bearers for certain American values. They seem to embody a time of America, rightly or wrongly, where there was sort of a sense of promise and expansion and dream, American dream. I think, for years, they embodied a realization of the American dream, which is that you could come from an ethnic group that was frowned upon. . . . Marginalized, exactly, and achieve the highest office of the land and the ultimate glamour and success, business success, romantic success, while, yes, also having tragic elements that give it that Shakespearean quality.
The Kennedys are indeed standard-bearers for certain American values, such as seducing 19-year-old interns and waitress sandwiches.
Anyway, here’s what the Times found when they went over Schlossberg’s resume:
After he earned undergraduate, law and business degrees at Yale and Harvard, one of his longest work engagements appears to have been a few months as a political correspondent for Vogue covering the 2024 campaign. He wrote six short articles, and a spokeswoman for the publication said he was considered a freelancer, not a staff writer.
Mr. Schlossberg likes to mention his work at the State Department, where he helped plan a conference on oceans, but his tenure there as a staff assistant under Secretary John F. Kerry, a family friend, lasted less than four months, according to a department spokesman. . . .
On the financial disclosure form that Congress requires candidates to submit, Mr. Schlossberg reported no earned income for 2025, but did disclose trust funds and other assets worth as much as $32 million.
Jack Schlossberg is the walking, talking embodiment of “Nepo Baby.” He can’t control which family he was born into, but he can decide what he wants to do with his life, and what he’s chosen to do is expect an electorate to hand him a congressional seat because of his family. Who does he think he is, Patrick Kennedy?
As of this writing, Schlossberg has 11,036 votes, or 10.8 percent. Last night, the Times lamented, “Schlossberg’s Defeat Dampens Dream of a Renewed Camelot.”
If you were 21 years old and voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960 — remember, the voting age wasn’t lowered to 18 until 1971 — you are 87 years old now. Seeking to restore a Kennedy dynasty in 2026 is like thinking about restoring a Woodrow Wilson dynasty in 1980.
Please let last night’s results be a message to the entire Kennedy clan that the inheritance has been spent, the memories of “Camelot” are almost all forgotten, and the country has moved on — even in heavily Democratic districts. The last time Ted Kennedy won a political race, Barack Obama was a senator, the iPhone wasn’t for sale yet, and the late senator never started an Instagram account because it wasn’t invented until after he died.
You want to see a weird historical echo?
Senator Kennedy, interviewed by Roger Mudd, November 4, 1979:
Roger Mudd: Why do you want to be president?
Senator Kennedy: Well, I’m . . . uh . . . Were I to make the, uh, the announcement to run, the reasons that I would run is because I have a great belief in this country and that it is, there’s more natural resources than any nation in the world. There’s the greatest educated population in the world. The greatest technology of any country in the world. And the greatest capacity for innovation in the world. And the greatest political system in the world. And yet, uh, I see that the current time, that, uh, most of the industrial nations of the world are exceeding us in terms of productivity, uh, doing better than us in terms of meeting the problems of inflation, that they’re dealing with the problems of energy, and the problems of unemployment. And it just seems to me, that, uh, this nation can cope and deal with its problems in a way that it has in the past. We’re facing complex issues and problems in this nation at this time. But we have faced similar challenges at other times. And the energies and the resourcefulness of this nation, I think, should be focused on these problems in a way that brings a sense of, uh, restoration, uh, in this country by its people to, in dealing with the problems we face, primarily the issues on the economy, the problems of inflation, and the problems of, uh, energy. And, uh, I would basically feel that, uh, that it’s imperative for this country to move either move forward, that it can’t stand still. Or otherwise it moves backward.
Jack Schlossberg, interviewed by The New Yorker’s David Remnick, June 5:
David Remnick: Why are you running for Congress? You’re in my district!
Schlossberg: Well, I’m running because I want to pass laws. I want to pass laws that help the people in this district and in our country. I want to fight for federal funding for the district New York 12, and I’ve released plans that I want to pass in Congress, like passing a renter’s deduction so people can deduct their rent from their taxes.
How can you be a Kennedy running for office, and your gut-instinct answer is, “I’m running because I want to pass laws”?
ADDENDUM: Yesterday at “Boston Stadium” — the temporary name for Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass. — the English soccer team tied Ghana in the World Cup tournament, 0-0. As disappointing as the result was for English fans, that’s an improvement over how the English traditionally perform in Boston.