House Minority Leaker Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) was asked on CNN on Sunday what the party’s plan is to fight the president sending troops into Chicago. He only offered that Trump has no authority to do this, and that he supports the men and women working in law enforcement. He also, as the Blue Rose memo suggested is effective, cast the federal takeover as a “distraction” from Trump’s unpopular policies. Jeffries didn’t seem too worked up about any of this, delivering his talking points with a complacency that certainly did not bely that the United States is currently experiencing a militarized dismantling of representative democracy.

from the CNN transcript because I hate watching these videos:

There’s been no request from the state of Illinois, no request at all for federal assistance. I support the Chicago Police Department. I support the New York Police Department. These are men and women who have taken an oath to protect and serve these communities, and they do a great job of that.

leader of the House Democrats says that Trump shouldn’t send the National Guard to Chicago, because *checks notes* the Chicago Police Department is so amazing and wonderful?

As the Times explained elsewhere, Blue Rose handled much of the ad testing for the Super PAC Future Forward as it worked to support Harris’ campaign. Blue Rose’s team was effectively embedded within Future Forward, which served as Harris’ primary outside spender and spent $560 million to boost the Democratic ticket in 2024. It’s worth noting that many of the ads run by Future Forward were completely unwatchable — overstuffed with tidbits about various policies, provided too quickly for a casual viewer to process and often presented by random narrators.

…

The firm is prone to bold proclamations. Among its contributions to the 2024 campaign was the idea that running negative ads against Trump was ineffective, and contrast was more important, according to people familiar with the Blue Rose operation.

remember kids, Harris lost the election because of leftists with blue hair and pronouns who refused to vote for her.

we should blame them, not the consultants who spent half a goddamn billion dollars to come up with galaxy-brain political strategies like “don’t run negative ads about your opponent”.

blaming those consultants would be a distraction from kitchen-table issues, like “how many hundreds of millions of dollars should Democrats give Blue Rose for the 2026 midterms?”