It’s Thursday, November 20. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: A fresh take on George Orwell, Jed Rubenfeld on the perils of gerrymandering, Freya India on why “stay single” is terrible advice, and much more.
But first: Can Democrats keep their momentum?
And just like that, it’s good to be a Democrat again. Sure, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision to shut down the government backfired on him. But looking forward to next year’s midterms, the Democrats appear to have the wind at their backs: According to one new poll, if they had to choose today between a Republican or a Democrat to represent them in Congress, 55 percent of Americans say they would go for the Democrat, while just 41 percent say they will support the Republican.
The last time Democrats saw numbers this good was in 2017, just before they walloped Republicans in the 2018 midterms and picked up 41 seats in the House. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is increasingly unpopular, with an approval rating dipping into the 30s, and the right is engaged in a low-grade civil war over what the GOP should look like once Trump is gone.
Take a closer look, though, and the picture gets a little more complicated—with the Democrats still in search of answers to the big questions about the future of their party.
You can see that dynamic in New York where, as Olivia Reingold reports, mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani could be on a collision course with the Democratic Socialists of America, who helped get him elected.
Mamdani has tacked ever so slightly to the center since his election earlier this month—for example, he’s keeping his predecessor’s tough-on-crime NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch. And already the DSA is strategizing over how to hold his feet to the fire. Olivia has the details of those plans in her report today.
Another sign of the Democratic Party’s fault lines is in the gap between the rhetoric and actions of some of their most prominent midterm candidates. Candidates like Georgia senator Jon Ossoff. In recent months, Ossoff has taken a populist stance against billionaire and corporate interests who he says “manipulate elections” through donations. There’s just one problem: As Gabe Kaminsky reports, Ossoff himself is funding his campaign with money from exactly those sources.
“The contradiction between Ossoff’s rhetoric and the sources of his cash are a reflection of the Democrats’ post-2024 identity crisis,” writes Gabe. “The party is caught between the elites who helped fund Kamala Harris’s $1.5 billion campaign, and progressive populists like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani who want to steer the party further to the left.”
Read his report on the Democrats who attack billionaires—but take their money.
As for where the party goes from here, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Ruy Teixeira say Democrats should look to the past, specifically Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential run. Kennedy was born 100 years ago today and, although an assassin’s bullet ended his White House bid, RFK was able to create a remarkable coalition by leaning heavily into patriotism. If Democrats study and absorb the lessons from his political playbook, Kahlenberg and Teixeira write, they have a better chance of winning over the minority and working-class voters who voted for Trump. Read their piece here.
—Will Rahn
A Texas court has struck down a GOP redistricting map designed to add five additional safe Republican congressional seats in the state. However, Jed Rubenfeld notes, the court’s logic has some problems. And with both parties rushing to gerrymander as many states as possible, the Texas case heads to the Supreme Court—and just might decide who controls the House after next year’s midterms.
We keep hearing there’s “too much pressure” to get married—that women are rushed, shamed, even “victimized” into settling down. But what if the real cultural push is the opposite? In a new essay, Freya India argues that today’s expectation is not to commit, but to stay unattached: “The dominant pressure in liberal culture is to delay, to detach, to stay permanently available.” She asks what we lose when a generation is told to be alone in this must-read piece.
A former anti-Israel student activist tells Maya Sulkin how campus groupthink turned Hamas’s October 7 terror attack into a litmus test for moral virtue, and what changed her mind when she finally stepped outside the movement. Watch it here.
Instagram Teen Accounts default teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see.
On Old School: George Orwell’s Lessons on the Class Divide
Most of us have read 1984 or Animal Farm. But in the latest episode of Old School, Shilo Brooks sits down with Rob Henderson to discuss an earlier George Orwell classic: Down and Out in Paris and London, the fictionalized story of his plunge into the slums of those two great European cities. Henderson, who grew up in foster care and poverty before ascending to Yale and Cambridge, talks with Shilo about why people with privilege so often misunderstand the realities of the poor, how poverty shapes the mind and spirit, and what Orwell ultimately discovered about the divisions—and the common ground—between classes.
You can watch Shilo’s conversation with Henderson here, and listen to it here:
On Tuesday, the Senate unanimously passed a bill demanding the Justice Department release the Epstein files. President Donald Trump then signed the bill, known as the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and Attorney General Pam Bondi now has 30 days to make the documents “publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format.”
Former Harvard president Larry Summers stepped down from his position on the OpenAI board following the release of his correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein. Harvard has also launched an internal review into his conduct, although Summers said that he plans to “fulfill his teaching obligations” at the university.
Russia launched another round of drone and missile strikes into Ukraine, killing at least 25 people, Ukrainian authorities said Wednesday. In response, Poland rushed to assemble a group of fighter jets, anticipating a wider European conflict.
As the war in Ukraine continues to heat up, the U.S. is reportedly working with Russia to draft a new peace plan that would have Ukraine give up large chunks of territory to Russia. According to a Russian official, a recent round of talks was led by Steve Witkoff in Miami.
The Justice Department’s case against former FBI director James Comey seems to be in jeopardy after a tense hearing on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff heavily pressed prosecutors, questioning the validity of Comey’s indictment.
Republicans in Congress are pushing back against President Trump’s plan to send $2,000 checks to working-class families ahead of the midterm elections. While the president claims the checks would be fully funded by his tariffs, some GOP lawmakers worry about the fiscal consequences. “I think it would be crazy to send money to people while we have a deficit,” Senator Rand Paul said Tuesday.
Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum rejected President Trump’s offer to send the U.S. military after Mexican cartels. “It’s not going to happen,” Sheinbaum said on Tuesday.
The AI music platform Suno announced that they raised $250 million, and reached a valuation of $2.45 billion. The news comes alongside a new study that found 97 percent of listeners can’t tell the difference between human and AI-generated songs. (For more on AI music, read River Page’s excellent take in Second Thought.)
Everyone remembers their first kiss—and now, a new scientific study has just discovered that the first kiss in history took place over 16.9 million years ago, and even had a distinct role in our evolution.
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Let's be clear; does Intifada translate to "Kill the Jews"
Israeli terrorist settler? Haven't been keeping up with the West Bank, etc.?
Oh my goodness, it would be really unfortunate if there were an exceptionally large library of videos of Israeli settlers killing livestock, burning homes, attacking schools, poisoning water supply, assaulting/killing Palestinians outside the homes or while farming, etc., wouldn't it?
Right...