Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: why fascists fear teachers. Randi Weingarten will explain. But first: some good news for Democrats – from all the recent special elections. John Nichols will report–in a minute.
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We’re told the Democratic brand is in deep trouble, but Democrats have been winning special elections for the last few months — lots of special elections, all over the place. For comment, we turn to John Nichols. Of course he’s executive editor of The Nation. We reached him today at home in Madison. John, welcome back.
John Nichols: It’s great to be with you, Jon.
JW: I want to talk about three special elections. Last week, in a special election to fill a congressional seat in northern Virginia, the Democrat, a guy named James Walkinshaw, won by 50 points. Now, this is a blue district. It’s a middle class suburban area south of Washington, DC. No one is surprised that the Democrat won. But winning by 50 points in this district is a surprise. Kamala Harris won this district last year by 34 points. So that’s a 15 point gain for the Democrats in less than a year.
And that’s not the only one. There’s two others in state senate races. One, in Pennsylvania in March, the Democrats flipped a state senate district in Lancaster County, a district that Trump won by 15 points just a year ago. A Democrat has not represented that district in the state legislature for 136 years.
And a few weeks ago, a Democrat won an Iowa State Senate seat by nearly 10 points — in a district that Trump had won by 11. That’s a 21 point swing towards the Democrats just in less than a year.
So this is suburban DC, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and Sioux City, Iowa. Very different places. What do you make of this?
JN: What’s significant is that, for instance, in that Virginia district, that was an area where Republicans used to do pretty well and notably where, even as recently as 2021, when the Republicans were doing very well in state races in Virginia, that was a place where they were making up some ground. They were closing the gap. Now the gap is widening out massively. Part of that has to do with the fact that this is suburban Washington. These are people who work for a federal government that has been under assault by Elon Musk and a lot of Republicans. So that makes sense.
But it’s a little more interesting in places like Clinton, Iowa and in industrial areas of Pennsylvania where we are seeing seats flip, where we’re seeing better margins. And what I think that tells you is a couple things. One, there is frustration with the Trump administration. It’s very real. It’s very passionate in a lot of places. Number two, at the level of energy mobilization, just the desire to come to the polls, all the pollsters tell us, the Democrats are super excited to come. That bodes very well for the fall off your elections and votes very well for the midterms. And I think it’s something that those who simply look at polling data that says the Democratic Party itself is not particularly popular, miss, because in America, whether we like it or not, and I happen to favor multi-party politics, but whether we like it or not in America, you generally have two choices. And what we’re seeing in these special elections is given the two choices and given the chance to send the messages that they want to send, people are lining up to vote for Democrats even if they’re frustrated with some of the party’s national leadership.
JW: So that’s some recent elections which have already happened. Of course, in just what– six or eight weeks, w’re going to have the off-year elections of November, 2025. Some of those are pretty important and significant. New York City, of course, is going to elect a mayor. And for the future of the Democrats, this is a really big one. Zorhan Mamdani has a huge lead in the race for mayor of New York City. The New York Times most recent poll has him ahead of Andrew Cuomo, 46 to 24.
In Virginia, Democrats are hoping to flip the governorship. Democrat Abigail Spanberger is ahead, 49 to 40.
And then the election that a lot of us regard as the most important of the year: The California referendum on redistricting, which is the Democrat’s response to Trump’s only way of maintaining control of the house gerrymandering to create new Republican seats that they’re not going to be able to win. Otherwise, the referendum in California on redistricting would create five new Democratic seats, which matches the five created for Republicans in Texas. Both sides are spending tens of millions on this race. The poll that we have so far on California redistricting shows it well ahead, 46 to 36. That’s what we know about polls for elections coming up in just six weeks.
JN: The big one and the one that I would point to is that New York mayoral race, because that allows us to go deeper and to analyze a question of where the Democratic party itself should go. And remember a few minutes ago we were referencing the fact that the Democratic party doesn’t poll very well. There’s a tremendous number of Americans who don’t like the Republicans, but they’re not overly thrilled with the Democrats. And in part that is a reflection of the fact that Democratic party is seen by a lot of its base as having been way too cautious in recent elections, not taking the bold stance that might actually define it as a super clear alternative to Trump and Trumpism, and frankly to neoliberalism, to a lot of economic policies that have become very unpopular.
Zorhan Mamdani in New York has mounted a campaign that is really a challenge to both major parties. He has the Democratic nomination, but in a sense he is arguing that our politics needs to be different and better. It needs to be a politics that reflects the demands of working class people that really reaches out to multiracial multi-ethnic coalitions in ways that the Democrats have tried to do, but not only succeeded at, and then frankly is very blunt about a host of issues including Gaza, including taxing billionaires, including the need to really expand the role of government in all sorts of ways. And frankly, to protect the citizens of New York from Trump administration policies, what is sometimes referred to as Trump proofing the city. And so Mamdani’s running on that.
You had a lot of the pundits, a lot of the political insiders say, well, this is a disaster. Democrats are going to be harmed by this. They’ll lose the mayoralty to an independent candidacy perhaps out of Andrew Cuomo. And also the signal from New York will be, oh, the Democrats don’t want to be like Mamdani, right? He’s too far out. He’s too whatever. See, then the opposite.
The fact of the matter is that as Mamdani has campaigned, he’s expanded his coalition. He’s gotten endorsements from people that didn’t back him in the primary. He’s gotten big endorsements from unions that had backed Cuomo in the primary. And what we’re starting to see across the country is people get into races for offices in other states, in other contests, and openly acknowledge that they’re borrowing a page from Mamdani, that they are trying to be candidates who speak more boldly, especially on economic issues, especially on affordability, and it looks to be working. So I think that’s one of the reasons why this week we saw Governor Hochul of New York, who had been resistant to endorsing Mamdani, give him actually a very warm and enthusiastic endorsement.
JW: And then we have new polls on presidential approval ratings. It’s all terrible for Trump in the NBC poll that came out last week, now more disapprove than approve of what he’s doing. We call that being underwater in the polls. Even on border security, which was the one where he was a little bit ahead. His overall favorability ratings have dropped 20 points since he took office. He’s the most unpopular president in American history. Americans opposed, pretty much everything he’s done, including most recently. Do you favor or oppose Trump sending troops to American cities favor 42, oppose 58%. Do you favor or approve Trump’s tariffs favor 38%. Oppose. 62%. The economist, you go, Paul, from last week. Americans say the most important issue is inflation and prices, 32% approve of what Trump’s been doing. 62% disapprove. We call that 30 points underwater, 41 points underwater with independent voters. And it’s not just that every single thing he’s done since he took office has gone immediately negative. It’s the intensity of the opposition. The number of people who tell pollsters they are strongly opposed, that has hit record levels in the history of polling. And Trump knows this. He reads these polls and that’s one reason why he’s become wilder and more threatening.
JN: whether you like Donald Trump or not, you must accept the fact that in November of last year in a very contentious race, he prevailed and though it was a narrow victory, and it’s important to understand, it was one of the closer presidential elections in recent history. It was still a genuine victory that gave him the presidency control of the House in the Senate. And so I think they came in assuming that they had something more than just a victory. They were busy claiming a mandate. Now as they have done many of the things they’ve wanted, they’ve found they become dramatically less popular. Trump got a strong vote last fall from people who were just upset with where politics were at and upset with the economy, upset with a sense that things were unaffordable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so he was given a chance, but having been given a chance as President, what he has done has caused it looks like a tremendous number of Americans to have buyer’s remorse and to say, look, we don’t like where this administration’s headed and we don’t approve of it.
And I think it’s summed up by the big beautiful bill or the big ugly bill depending on your politics. The Trump administration, which is often tried to present itself as being different from a lot of the previous Republican administrations in this regard, went to the classic position, which is cut programs for working people and shift the money over to the billionaires, right? It’s a very simple model and it’s always unpopular, but this one’s dramatically unpopular because in such aggressive ways it went after Medicaid, it went after snap benefits for people who need food. It just seems so blatantly cruel. And I think that this has caused a real political blowback. And as a result, you’ve seen Trump and his administration kind of desperately seeking to change the subject to shore up their basis of support. But in talking to political analysts on both sides, Republicans and Democrats, there is a strong sense that we are headed toward a midterm election in which this administration could take a real hit politically. And so I guess that’s in a sense why we’re seeing such a churn right now and such intensity, because I can tell you this, I haven’t covered Donald Trump for a long time. He doesn’t like to lose.
JW: One last thing: the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Of course, we condemn all political violence. Trump and his people this week said they would go after what they called far left groups that promote violence and terrorism. And JD Vance said on Monday that two foundations in particular were going to be targeted because they fund the Nation magazine. Vance said during a podcast quote, “I read a story in The Nation Magazine about my dear friend Charlie Kirk.” Then he said, “George Soros’s Open Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement.” He pointed to an article at thenation.com headlined “Charlie Kirk’s legacy Deserves No Mourning,” by Elizabeth Spiers. But she said in this piece, “I do not believe anyone should be murdered because of their views.” She did have a sharp critique of those views. So we want to talk about this just for a minute. For starters, is Vance correct that the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations fund The Nation Magazine?
JN: The Nation has not received money from Soros that I know of. There may have been a small grant from Ford to support an internship program —
JW: The Ford money came in six years ago. And I understand The Nation magazine has not received any Soros money in the last five years.
JN: Yeah. Yeah, in this case. But first off, I don’t like the demonization of the foundations. I think that Open Society and Ford have done a lot to promote and advance democracy.
JW: Going after Soros and Ford–This is going after the Harvards of the liberal nonprofit world. It’s consistent with their attack on liberal institutions.
JN: Well, indeed, and in fact, it’s even stated as such. But I was of course intrigued by the highlighting of the nation and the notion that the nation, which by the way, is primarily funded by a lot of retired teachers and students and working class folks across the country who subscribe to the magazine and have helped our subscription and our support base to grow in recent years. And that’s something we’re excited about. But at a fundamental point, it was intriguing because the Vice President said, well, here’s this esteemed magazine that published things that were critical about Charlie Kirk.
People can debate how you respond to these jarring, horrible moments in our society. I know that for myself as somebody who had met and talked with Charlie Kirk, I do find it especially shaking to me that we’ve seen a political assassination, just as it was horrifying to me a few months ago when we saw the assassination in Minnesota of Melissa Hortman, one of the leading legislators in the United States, as well as her husband, a political assassination.
All these things that have been happening, it tells me that we live in this very dangerous, very volatile time, and it’s a time when we ought to be dialing tensions down. And here we have the Vice President and Steven Miller and others talking about targeting groups they don’t like and things like that. What I think is important to understand is this, in our discourse, we can have an honest discourse where we fundamentally disagree and we point out the reasons for our disagreement and in a healthy society so we can go back and forth, but it ought not lead to efforts to destroy or harm or violently attack. Those we disagree with.
The Nation’s been around for 160 years. We’ve been read by people in the White House for most of those 160 years. We have been criticized by presidents and vice presidents over the years, and we have criticized them. As long as JD Vance wants to criticize the nation using his First Amendment rights, and as long as we can respond to that criticism using our First Amendment rights, then I think things are good. Right? That’s as it should be. I don’t mind criticism, but what I mind is a suggestion that we ought to discard a robust discourse and discard an honest dialogue because somebody doesn’t like what they hear. At the end of the day, we should be able, as a country to have real debate, real discourse, real expression of First Amendment rights, but with an understanding that we do it as Americans and in our Americanism and in our commitment to this shared commitment to the First Amendment, that we come away from it with a choice to say, well, we’ve stated our views. Let’s have an election. Let’s see how things turn out.
JW: So The Nation will continue to criticize the ideas and actions of the Trump administration, especially their efforts to intimidate and silence those who speak truth to power. John Nichols is Executive Editor of the Nation. John, thanks for talking with us today.
JN: Thanks, Jon. It’s a great honor to be with you and a great honor to talk about these important issues.
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JW: It has been a rough year for schools, for kids, and for teachers, with Trump’s attacks. But in many ways, there’s nothing new about what he’s doing. For a hundred years, attacks on schools and on teachers have been a hallmark of fascist regimes. For that, we turn to Randi Weingarten. She’s president of the AFT, a union of 1.8 million teachers, healthcare workers and public employees. She started out as a social studies teacher at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn. Now she’s a leader of progressive Democrats nationally, and her new book, just published, has the wonderful title, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy. Randi Weingarten, welcome back.
Randi Weingarten: It’s always an honor to be with you, Jon. Thank you.
JW: Trump’s most immediate threat to public schools right now is in cities like LA where ICE has been in the streets and immigrant families have been afraid to send their kids to school. The first day of classes in LA Public Schools, we record our show in LA came in mid August, and we’ve never seen anything like the way teachers and community members prepared to protect the kids from ice. The strategy involved setting up what they called safe zones, around a hundred schools in Latino neighborhoods where community volunteers joined school, police and teachers patrolling on foot around their schools on the lookout for ice so schools could be locked down and parents could be quickly notified via email and text. LA Mayor Karen Bass spoke about how profound this moment is in US history when the job of the teachers, the schools and the city, includes protecting kids from the federal government.
You know a lot about this.
RW: I think what they did in LA was really inspirational, because it shows how when community gets together, here it was the community of teachers and parents together protecting our kids. It sends not only a moral message, but it also sends a message to those anti-freedom, anti-child forces within our current government that ‘you are not welcome here,’ that we welcome the stranger, that we are a nation of immigrants, and ‘don’t use our kids as pawns’ — in whatever political battle this administration wants to do. And I think that coming together, you saw that frankly in LA, you’ve seen that in New York, you’ve seen that in Washington dc We had the Safe Passage program. You’ve seen that in Chicago.
Now, we’ve also filed a lawsuit that has said that for years, as long as I can remember, there was a prohibition against ICE going into sensitive locations, churches, obviously separation of church and state. Hospitals and schools. And I begged the president the first day of his administration when he stripped us of those protections, I begged him not to. I wrote him a letter. I said, I tried to use what all these other people are using, being very nice to him and begging. Of course they never even bothered to answer. And ultimately what’s happened is that people across America, teachers, parents are basically saying, ‘no, you can’t take our kids from schools.’
JW: And I also wanted to ask you about New York City politics. Of course, there’s an election for mayor coming up in November. The teachers Union of New York City has been pretty active there. They, and you endorsed Mamdani. He won the primary. Let’s talk about Mamdani and the significance of his campaign for teachers, for kids, for everybody.
RW: The governor of New York actually did a very good essay laying out her reasons for endorsing Mr. Mamdani because she laid out a few of the reasons why, which is what both our local college union and my local home, local UFT, what they both said, which is what Zorhan is doing, is he is responding to real needs of people in New York City. If you look at New York City, and what he did was he said, we have a real affordability crisis. We can’t afford housing. If you want to raise a family in New York City, transportation is really hard. The buses are too slow and groceries are too expensive and childcare is too expensive. And so when you add all of this up, it’s hard to raise a family in New York City anymore. And all these young people want to be in New York City now just bursting with light. And then yes, of course there are issues.
JW: Yeah there are issues. Of course, the big one, especially for you and me. is Mamdani and the Jews, New York City has the largest Jewish population of any city in the world outside of Israel. More Jewish voters I understand supported Mamdani than any other candidate, but he didn’t win a majority in the primary of Jewish voters. And there are still Jewish voters who consider him an antisemite. What do you say to them? What does he say to them?
RW: It’s frankly more important what he says to them than what I say to them. Obviously, I do not believe he is an antisemite that is based upon what he has said and what he has done as opposed to what others have said about him. Is he very concerned about Palestinians and Palestinian life? And is he very upset with what Netanyahu has done? Yes and yes. But his job in New York City is to keep, if he becomes mayor, every person in New York City safe, there is a lot of antisemitism, just like there’s a lot of Islamophobia in New York City as there is elsewhere. And it’s his job to keep people safe. And I think he’s been out there directly making that pledge. He’s apologized for calling the New York PD racist.
He is talking to Jewish voters, including making a significant change in his stance, understanding that when you say “intifada” to a Jew, that could potentially mean political violence or terrorism. And to understand that and to say not only that he will not use the term, but he’s urging his supporters not to because he understands the harm that it does.
All of these are important steps. Is it enough for everyone? No, it’s not enough for everyone. And I think what will happen if he wins six months from his term, starting when people see that he’s the mayor for everyone, that is what will change hearts and minds.
Last thing I’ll say is he, instead of ignoring it, instead of saying, ‘oh, I have enough votes that I can win regardless,’ he’s really doing this work — and I respect that.
JW: Now let’s talk about your new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers.
RW: There are Pharaohs everywhere, whether it was Hitler, whether it was others. And part of our job as school teachers is to be the antidote to fascism, the antidote to authoritarianism. Because for teachers it is about binding people together. It is about creating a safe and welcoming environment. It’s about giving kids the skills they need so they thrive. Like critical thinking, like teaching kids not what to think, but how to think.
JW: You say in your book that the core of public education is that everyone is embraced and accepted. That’s what you say. Then there’s Trump’s former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo in 2022. He asked, who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim of North Korea? Is it President Xi of China? He said no to both of those. Who did Mike Pompeo say was the most dangerous person in the world?
RW: Me. Me. Why do they do this endless smear? Why do they demean teachers? Why is it constantly, ‘let’s undermine public education’ rather than support it or fix the things that ail it. Why defund it instead of attempting to support it? Why vouchers rather than helping all kids succeed with the support? Why all of this? And the point is, I think that they do this, to do exactly what another of these conservative activists who I quote in the book said: that to undermine our society — these are his words, not mine –They have to ‘create universal public school distrust.’ And teachers are the way back. They are the antidote. What they try to do is bring people together, trying to instill agency and empowerment for all kids.
JW: One of my favorite topics in your book is the Chicago teachers strike of 2012, which was a strike not just for higher pay for teachers, it was for something we call the community school model. And here in LA that was the basis of the LA Teachers strike of 2019, a very memorable event for those of us who live in LA. Please explain the difference between a strike for better pay and a strike for community schools.
RW: Many of us believe that we need to use whatever clout we have in collective bargaining to try to make conditions better so that more and more kids would succeed. And one of the ways of making conditions better for families, for children, is if you wrap services around a school. You can have a health center connected to the school in a way that’s geographically close, or at the school itself. You can have things like eyeglass availability. You can have a food pantry. You can have adult ed courses. You can have financial literacy courses.
And when somebody says to me, your role is teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, I’m like, ‘so how is a traumatized kid or a kid that doesn’t have enough food in her belly or a kid that needs glasses like I now need to read? Can’t read the board, the blackboard or the whiteboard. If we don’t do that, how will we helping all kids?’
And so we have to do more than teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. We have to find a way that we level the playing field so that all kids soar.
JW: Last thing before we let you go: I wonder what your thoughts are about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
RW: There is no place, no place in our society for political violence. Period. Political violence is a symptom of society crumbling, and we need to condemn it.
The next point I would make is this: what’s happening now, going after people who are commenting about what he said, and chilling their speech — is wrong. There’s very little that Governor Cox and I probably agree on, but I completely agree with him on saying about having an off ramp on what social media is doing, that makes it almost impossible, when we have disagreements about anything, to have a real discussion. And we need as a society to figure out how to talk to each other, even when we deeply disagree about issues.
JW: Randi Weingarten — her new book, out this week, has the wonderful title, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy. Randi, thank you for all your work — and thanks for talking with us today.
RW: Thank you so much, Jon. I really appreciate it.