What’s Congress going to do in the lame duck?

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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter that is hardly shocked that a CEO worth a couple hundred billion dollars, and who struts around in a leather jacket, turned out to be basically the tech version of Tiger Woods.

This week, Chuck Schumer got a challenger for Senate majority leader and has to spend another two and a half weeks pretending that he welcomes the challenge. We look at the new red-state Senate Democrats and consider which ones will be libs and which will go Full Joe Manchin. Plus: Jim Jordan finally gets to lead the handful of remaining House Republicans. And are you all really going to act as if you’ve never missed a chance to impeach the defense secretary because you got stuck in traffic on the way back from a party?

But first! Republicans still have a month and a half left in power. What senior pranks are they cooking up?

What matters now: How Republicans will spend their last weeks in power.

Come January, Republicans in Washington will cede metric tons of political power to the Democrats. But before Democrats roll up their sleeves and get to work (on continued factional infighting), how are Republicans planning to spend the rest of their time in power?

It’s gone overlooked among postelection analysis, but Republicans have a sizable lame-duck agenda planned between now and the end of the year.

Their biggest priority is filling every vacancy on the federal judiciary that they can—about two dozen—in anticipation of Democrats stonewalling Trump’s nominees in the next Congress. Most Senate floor time will be devoted to this. This requires some fast work in the Judiciary Committee, and there have been some interesting snags this week as home-state senators and the White House jockey over who they want for these last remaining positions.

On the legislative front, Republicans are still deciding whether they want to pursue one last party-line reconciliation bill that wouldn’t be subject to a filibuster, and what would be in it. (No hurry, guys.) Donald Trump is still demanding that congressional Republicans give the Pentagon an extra $350 billion on top of its annual funding; Senate Republicans are warning that something of that magnitude could blow up a broader government funding deal with Democrats. We’ll believe there’s another reconciliation bill passing when we see it. Senate Republicans’ majority is going to slim to 52 votes when Sherrod Brown replaces Ohio Sen. Jon Husted in December (the race was a special election), passing a reconciliation bill requires long days and nights on the Senate floor among a fairly checked-out caucus loaded with people who just lost their elections, and the holidays loom. Passage of such a bill in the House, with its narrow majorities, is no sure thing either.

(Another question for the reconciliation bill: Will Republicans put a debt-limit increase in there? Otherwise, the debt limit will come up in the next Congress, Democrats will try to leverage it to force concessions from the Trump administration, and we’ll all get to live through another ticking-time-bomb scenario with the global economy. Such excitement awaits!)

The top bipartisan question is over the Dec. 11 deadline for funding the government. Democrats have to decide whether they want to fight now to defund the Iran war and prompt a shutdown fight, or wait until next year, when the reinforcements arrive.

The Senate, meanwhile, is still debating and amending a major permitting-reform deal on the House floor that has split Democrats. This is one of those issues that the Surge believes is (a) important and (b) best left for the nerds to sort out among themselves.

Beyond all that, we’re keeping our eyes peeled for a surprise of some sort. Which Cabinet official might either decide or have decided for them that they should be replaced before Democrats take over the Senate confirmation process? (We’ve flagged one possibility later in the newsletter. Hint: He and his family once dropped by Jeffrey Epstein’s island for lunch.) Which other weird demands no one has previously thought of will Trump drop in a 2 a.m. “Truth,” and from which TV show will he get the idea? Will Susan Collins, who has never missed a vote in 30 years, say “fuck it” and miss a vote? Maybe we should make a bingo card.

What we’re keeping an eye on: How will these new red-state Senate Democrats vote?

Democrats picked up their 55th Senate seat this week with a spectacular one. Scott Colom defeated Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, becoming the first Democrat to win a Mississippi Senate race since 1982 and the first Black Democrat to represent Mississippi since Reconstruction. It’s the most jaw-dropping pickup Democrats had in a year filled with red-state Senate flips in Texas, Iowa, Kansas, South Carolina, Ohio, and (probably) Alaska.

So. How are all of these red-state senators going to vote? Will we have a host of fresh new conservative Democrats in the Senate Manchin-ing their way along and regularly voting against the Democratic agenda? Or will they be content to lib out and risk getting sent packing in six years?

A useful way to think about this is to consider what each individual state could look like in six years. Take Georgia. Six years ago, it was a stunner when Democratic Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their first Senate races. Democrats hadn’t done that in Georgia in a while. But the state was and is trending bluer as the Atlanta metropolitan area has continued growing and asserting dominance over the state. It’s not a blue state in 2026, but it is one in which Warnock and Ossoff can serve as reliable, roughly middle-of-the-road Democrats without dooming themselves.

So which states might have a Democratic tailwind, looking at demographics? Some of the ones traditionally thought of as “redder” seem that way to us. Texas, if Democrats can maintain the trust with Latino swing voters. South Carolina, which has a substantial Black population and growing metropolitan areas, though tempered by regular influxes of retirees. Ohio and Iowa, meanwhile, are still exceptionally white states without huge influxes of Democratic voters. Kansas may have some more suburban growth potential for Democrats, but it’s just a more conservative place with little Democratic DNA.

Mississippi is an interesting one. It’s roughly 40 percent Black and 60 percent white, but partisanship has long been rigidly polarized along racial lines. Elections have rarely strayed too far, then, from 60–to–40 percent Republican wins. But if Colom can find a way to keep just enough white voters in his coalition, particularly newer white entrants to the state who come to work in defense hubs? Well, maybe even the first Democratic senator from Mississippi in four decades will be able to let himself lib out from time to time, as a treat.

What’s becoming a bigger distraction by the hour: The long road to Senate Democratic leadership elections.

There is one major reason why so much focus has been applied this week to whether Chuck Schumer will be elected Senate majority leader: Rule VI, Clause 3 of the Senate Democrats’ conference rules. It states: “Officers of the Conference are subject to election by the Conference beginning no earlier than in December prior to the start of the next Congress or whenever a vacancy occurs.” House and Senate Republicans have already worked through their battles and elected leaders for the next Congress, and House Democrats will vote internally on their speaker nominee next week. But Senate Democrats have to sit tight until Dec. 1 before they can resolve the drama and move ahead with their work.

There is now officially a race, as Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen announced a challenge to Schumer on Thursday night. After decades serving as a perfectly adequate workhorse, especially on budget and appropriations matters, he got a taste of national fame early in Trump’s second term and has been looking for a new adventure ever since. While he had previously said he was “kicking the tires” on a presidential run, he told reporters Friday that with this majority leader bid, he will no longer be “pursuing” the White House.

Most likely, Van Hollen will serve as a repository for the protest votes of progressives in the Democratic caucus and extract a concession or two from Schumer, while making Schumer think twice about running for reelection in 2028. But here’s a simple way to read Democratic senators’ answers when they’re asked whom they’ll support, and whether Van Hollen’s bid is building into anything: Unless they’re saying directly that they will support Van Hollen, count them as a vote for Schumer. Right now there are a lot more of the latter. Many just don’t want to say anything and get dragged online.

The Democratic presidential primary will be a hot mess for many reasons. But it will at least redirect Democratic energy to the proper arena. There’s an understandable thirst among Democrats for the party to set a bold vision for the future. But in the absence of a president or presidential candidates, that energy has been directed at congressional leaders, whose jobs primarily involve ego management, protecting their members, keeping their disparate caucuses united while fracturing the opposition, raising money, and recruiting candidates to win more seats. The electorate for Senate party leader is fellow senators, not the public, and the principal thing senators want is a morally flexible sicko they trust with their political lives, not someone looking to be popular. And no one will think about who the Senate majority leader is once 25 presidential candidates start debating every month.

More trash from the garbage hose …

• House Republicans’ selection of Rep. Jim Jordan, the combative, far-right jabbermouth, as their incoming party leader is a perfect summation of how small and insular the GOP conference will be in the next Congress. All House Republican candidates who had to spend even one joule of energy trying to appeal to swing voters lost their elections in the tsunami; the ~175 or so who survived basically all believe in Pizzagate. Jordan’s promotion isn’t a story of how a one-time factional bomb thrower remade himself into a leader with broad appeal. It’s that his faction is now the only one left.

• The House Democratic leadership-in-waiting did itself no favors this week when 11 of its members failed to show up on time for a procedural vote on the impeachment of Pete Hegseth. Those 11 members have spent the remainder of their week apologizing profusely. The morning after the vote, Democratic Whip Katherine Clark reportedly “scolded” those members in a closed-door caucus meeting. But one reason several missing members didn’t make it was that they got stuck in traffic returning from an off-campus event held by Elect Democratic Women, a PAC co-founded by Clark. Perhaps EDW should devote some of its largesse to helicopter leasing going forward.

• It’s looking as if the Jensen Huang scandal at Nvidia and concerns over A.I. chip exports are prompting a Republican-wide effort to do something many have long wanted to do: get Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick out of the administration. Lutnick is being summoned by Republicans for oversight hearings. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has fought regularly with Lutnick throughout the administration, threw Lutnick directly under the bus on Friday. If Lutnick were to resign soon, that would give Senate Republicans plenty of time before the new year to confirm whichever Fox News contributor Trump would replace him with.

• During the run-up to the election, Speaker Mike Johnson declared over and over that the polls were historically wrong because they were undercounting Republicans due to partisan nonresponse bias. He clearly meant he believed that the polls were underestimating Republicans. When asked to reflect on those comments this week, Johnson told reporters: “That wasn’t my opinion. Everybody saw the polls were off. They were off all over the place. No one, none of you, projected the final outcome. The polls were wildly inaccurate.” The polls were indeed inaccurate, underestimating Democrats significantly. But that is not the prediction Mike Johnson was making. It would have been very weird for the Republican House speaker to say at Republican campaign events that Democrats were going to do a lot better than the polling suggested!

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