Weekly Member Update - November 10, 2025
This weekly missive takes all week to produce. There’s usually a theme that gets settled upon early on, and the rest of the week is spent writing, researching and refining. So it’s probably not terribly surprising that, most weeks, the Weekly Member Update is pretty much finished by the Sunday night before it is published. Such was the case this week. We had something pretty much ready to go yesterday morning, in fact, and it was a fun one; It’s a celebration of everything we accomplished last Tuesday, on Election Day ‘25. It’s a story about hope and electoral success, and about the joyful and hard work ahead. It’s all printed here in full, under the Blue Wave photo below; give it a look and take special note of the reminder about our Monthly Member Meeting tonight.
But then the American people got ratfucked Sunday evening, making this atonal prologue a necessity. Sunday night, a group of eight United States Senators —Virginia’s Tim Kaine, Catherine Cortez Mastro and Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Angus King of Maine, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, Dick Durbin of Illinois and both of New Hampshire’s Senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan — all of them members of the Senate Democratic Caucus led by our own senior Senator Chuck Schumer, voted on Sunday to take the first steps to end the current government shutdown. As you well know, the unified Democratic Party position throughout the longest government shutdown in American history has been about preserving subsidies under the Affordable Care Act; should the subsidies end as scheduled under the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill, tens of millions of Americans will see their healthcare insurance premiums skyrocket. The Democratic position has consistently been that preservation of these subsidies is a line in the sand for any vote to end the government shutdown. No healthcare, no vote.
The American people have suffered under the government shutdown. Government workers have been furloughed, or required to work with no pay. Trump and his minions have played cruel games with Americans’ SNAP benefits, threatening children’s hunger as a political leverage point. Trump’s Secretary of Transportation even decreased airport capacity because of the shutdown, inflicting chaos on air travelers in the lead up to the holiday travel season. But we were told that all that pain was worth it, because Democrats would defend the healthcare subsidies. And the American people said “Hell Yes!,” voting in overwhelming numbers for Democrats all over the Country this past Tuesday and rallying in mutual aid of our neighbors whose SNAP benefits have been endangered.
Five days after this redefining electoral win, eight Democratic Senators gave it all away, agreeing to vote to end the shutdown while getting nothing more than a vague and unenforceable promise that a separate vote on ACA subsidies will be held at some future date. A pinky promise from Republicans was all that it took for these eight Senators to capitulate and fold. Its not just cowardice, its a betrayal; a betrayal to those who have endured the pain of the shutdown, and a betrayal of the tens of millions who will likely see their healthcare premiums double.
Chuck Schumer was not one of the eight who cast this shameful vote last night but, make no mistake, he shares in the shame. Either he is such a feckless leader of his caucus that he couldn’t stop these eight from driving over the cliff or, even worse, he signed off on the deal behind closed doors. The fact that none of the eight will be up for reelection in 2026 — Durbin and Shaheen are retiring from the Senate altogether — strongly suggests that this move was orchestrated, in our view.
Reaction to news of this capitulation has been swift and strident, and has been condemned by everyone from DNC Chair Ken Martin, to New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill, to Bernie Sanders, Gavin Newsom, AOC and others. We are enraged too, and we join in the calls by the national Indivisible movement for widespread primary challenges to remake the Democratic Party into a real oppositional force once and for all. Enough is enough. If the Democrats in power won’t stand up for the American people and put their constituents before their oligarch donors, we will find people to replace them. And we’re not just talking about the Cowardly Eight, but we also mean anyone who doesn’t condemn their capitulation and demand a change in Democratic leadership. We are prepared to turn the momentum of election 2025 against Democrats and Republicans alike, if that’s what it takes to have a government that is finally responsible to the American people.
While we rage over this betrayal, we also keep fighting. The vote that the Cowardly Eight took last night was merely the first step in ending the shutdown; there will be more votes in the Senate and in the House as well over the coming days, and the American people will be working around the clock to stop this capitulation. We’ve given you contact information for the Cowardly Eight and Schumer in the second paragraph above; ring their phones off the hook and flood them with emails. Channel your rage into action. Just because the Cowardly Eight have chosen to surrender, it doesn’t mean that the rest of have to as well.
And now back to our originally scheduled programming…
A Big Beautiful Blue Wave. The Great Repudiation. The Rise of the New Left Coalition. A Complete GOP Beatdown. Call it what you like, Election Day 2025 was an exhilarating ride. We saw Democratic blowouts in all the high-profile national races, and long-coming resurgencies in places like Mississippi and Georgia. We witnessed the historic ascension of a young, charismatic Mayor of New York City with a bold progressive vision and the potential to help reorient the way politics is done in our entire state. Meanwhile, here Upstate, Democrats — and progressives in particular — were on the rise, and the 518 was no exception. Columbia County elected the State’s first-ever Black woman County Sheriff and Dorcey Applyrs coasted to victory as the first nonwhite Mayor in the three-century history of the City of Albany. Democrat Will Little romped to a seat on State Supreme Court and we saw clean sweeps for Troy City Council, and in Clifton Park, Bethlehem, Colonie and Malta. All in all, in 99.8% of all the Counties across the Country that held partisan elections, voters moved decidedly to the left from 2024, thoroughly erasing any gains that MAGA made with young and Latino voters in 2024 and buoying hopes that Democrats have found a resonant anti-Trump affordability message that can carry them forward among every cohort of the diverse Democratic coalition. So, yeah, Tuesday was a great night.
We therefore have reason to revel and an excuse to exult, especially coming as the election did only a couple of weeks after the jubilation and solidarity of No Kings 2. It’s as if the long unstoppable fog of DOGE and Elon and Vance and Miller and ICE and Noem and Kash and Vought and Bondi and Homan has finally lifted just a little. That’s an itch called hope getting scratched just a little bit. But, as the writer and independent journalist Marisa Kabas recently reminded us, it is difficult for that hope to turn into unbridled joy given the unmitigated horrors which we have been subjected to over the past 10+ months. As Kabas put it:
“This year and this election have redefined for me the meaning of hope. Hope is not blind optimism or uncritical belief in a political savior. Hope, to me, means the ability to imagine a better world is possible and then work to build it brick by brick. It is, as the activist and organizer Mariame Kaba says, not an emotion but a discipline–one we must practice every single day. I am imbued today with that concept of hope. There is no MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner to be hung, no real material change in the world of today versus yesterday. Just the quiet relief of good news that helps us live to fight another day.”
Hope is a discipline. Hope is a practice. And practice is hard work, every single day. Thus, while we celebrate little victories everywhere, we also need to lock the memory of this feeling inside us as fuel to work even harder. If you like how you felt at No Kings, if you like how you felt Tuesday night, it’s time to lace ‘em up because midterms and the race for control of NYS government are less than a year away.
Check that. It’s already started. Elise Stefanik announced her long-awaited run for Governor this week — her first foray into electoral politics outside of the friendly confines of NY-21 — and we’re frankly delighted. Finally, we Albanians may get a chance — along with voters in every other corner of the state —to join with our North Country friends and put an end to #ElusiveElise’s career. Of course, it’s not even a foregone conclusion that Stefanik will be the GOP nominee for Governor in 2026, but that’s her problem to deal with. Meanwhile, with Stefanik’s formal announcement that she is leaving NY-21 once and for all, Republicans will look to avert an internecine civil war to find Elise’s successor, while Democrats get to choose between centrist Blake Gendebien and progressive Dylan Hewitt.
Even if our dear friend Elise hadn’t spilled the worst-kept secret in NY politics, we’d still be ready to get back to work. Designating petitions will start circulating come late February, and the June 2026 primaries are a little more than six months away. Local primary season has already begun, with New York State Historian Devin Lander already announcing a challenge to MAGA State Senator Jake Ashby in the 43rd District encompassing Rensselaer County and the northeastern corner of Albany County; Lander will have a campaign kickoff event on December 4 in Troy, in case you are interested.
The work continues tonight, at our Monthly Member Meeting at the Guilderland Public Library. Among other topics, we will be discussing the ongoing campaign against Avelo, our collaboration with the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York and preparations for increased ICE activity in our communities. We hope to see you there!