KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Dem 2028 Speculation Is Entertaining Political Theater. “Yes, the 2028 presidential election is a long way off and we still have midterms to deal with more than a year from now. I also have never been a big fan of election speculation this far out, but the Democrats are struggling right now and I’m rather enjoying it. Things won’t always be this way, so I’m going to revel in their misery while I can.”

YOU DON’T SAY: Left-wing ideas have wrecked Democrats’ brand, new report warns.

Democrats have badly weakened their party with left-leaning ideas and rhetoric, growing only with self-described “white liberals” while losing ground with other voters, according to a new center-left group’s report shared first with Semafor.

The group, called Welcome, consulted hundreds of thousands of voters over six months for its broad findings, including that 70% of voters think the Democratic Party is “out of touch.” Most voters, the group found, believe the party over-prioritizes issues like “protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans,” and “fighting climate change” while not caring about “securing the border” or “lowering the rate of crime.” (Welcome began as a PAC in 2022, then founded a nonprofit with the same name for political research.)

Elected Democrats will receive copies of the report after its Monday publication, followed by events to promote it in DC and New York. The report urges party members to abandon some of the progressive language about race, abortion, and LGBTQ issues that Democrats began using after the 2012 election — and recommends the nomination of more candidates willing to vote with Republicans on conservative immigration and crime bills.

That’s probably solid advice, and nothing Bill Clinton didn’t run on in 1992. But it comes from the same people saying things like this further down in the report:

The report doesn’t urge Democrats to move fully to the right, reserving vocal praise for several progressive stars in the party with a more direct appeal to economic opportunity and lower cost of living.

“We have much to learn from the relentless focus of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani” on those fronts, the authors write.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani — the moderate faces of the New Democratic Party!

DEAL WITH THE DEVIL: UK Muslim Tells UK Progressive This Brutal Truth. “This is where things get complicated, right before they get funny, which comes a short (?) while before the inevitable bloodshed.”

GRANNY-KILLER CUOMO TO THE RESCUE? Cuomo closes gap on Mamdani as NYC mayor race tightens dramatically in new poll.

With just over a week until Election Day, Zohran Mamdani holds a double-digit lead in the raucous race for the nation’s most populous city, but former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is narrowing the gap, according to a new public opinion poll.

Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist state lawmaker from the New York City borough of Queens who shocked the political world in June with his convincing win over Cuomo and nine other candidates to capture the Democratic Party’s mayoral nomination, stands at 44% support among likely voters in the most recent survey in the race, from Suffolk University.

Cuomo, who resigned as governor in 2021 amid multiple scandals and who is running as an Independent candidate in the general election after losing the primary, had 34% support in the survey.

The survey was conducted Thursday through Sunday, entirely after incumbent Mayor Eric Adams endorsed Cuomo in a bid to defeat Mamdani.

The only thing I’m certain of is that New Yorkers will come out the losers.

RADICAL CHIC: Antifa Announces Uniform Change to Look More Like This Hamas Terrorist. “Is it possible that now that Antifa is a terrorist group that its funding is drying up, and they need new grants from the billionaire Islamofascists?”

THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST, BIDEN EDITION:

This whole interview is a mess. She starts half her answers with "no, no, no, wait a minute" because she has to clean up her previous response. And it's still not clear by the end what she thinks about anything. How this person was picked for this job is incomprehensible.

— Colin Duffy (@TheRightDuff) October 27, 2025

Exit quote: “(I know why she was picked.)”

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Dear Gavin: Oh Dear Lord PLEASE Run for President. “Here’s the thing you don’t and maybe can’t understand: Just because you’ve risen to the top of California politics doesn’t mean you’re ready for the national stage. California is a bubble. You are the boy who lived inside it for 58 years. National politics is a leaky Wuhan lab. Get the picture?”

DATING IN THE 21ST CENTURY: I Tried to Have Sex With AI Clive Owen. “I RECENTLY HEARD that a former friend was now heavily into an S/M relationship with Pedro Pascal. This was moderately surprising, as she’s a lesbian and he’s an AI chatbot, but what is fluidity for if not to explore previously untapped facets of ourselves? Let’s not get all rigid about identities. I decided I wanted in on this.”

Maybe we need red flag laws for AI and extremely neurotic, lonely people.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: The Left’s Concept of Charity Begins and Ends at YOUR Wallet.

DRONE DEFENSE: Everything Old Is New Again. “With the widespread advent of drone warfare, a whole lot of air defense doctrine needs to be rewritten. Ground-To-Air interceptor missiles that were cost-effective for multi-million fighter planes aren’t for thousands upon thousands of cheap drones, some of which cost less than $1,000 a pop. Cheap kinetic kill shells, AKA ‘ack-ack,’ the mainstay of World War II, are making a comeback in a big way.”

I’m reminded of something then-CNO Admiral Mike Boorda said 30 years ago, lamenting the retirement of the Navy’s battleships: “It is nice occasionally if the target costs more than the bullet you shoot.”

IT’S AMAZING WHAT YOU CAN DO WHEN YOU TRY:

Portland (Oct. 26) — In a final move to argue the city doesn’t need the National Guard to maintain order, @PortlandPolice and state troopers dismantle & confiscate leftover Antifa riot camp supplies. Why didn’t they do this months ago? Video by @nicksortor:pic.twitter.com/zpboCeoqi1

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 27, 2025

Trump got Portland to police itself… there really isn’t anything he can’t do.

DEAL WITH THE DEVIL: UK Muslim Tells UK Progressive This Brutal Truth.

MUCH MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Trump Administration Cuts Flow of Tax Dollars Funneled to Leftist Gun Control Orgs and NGOs.

DESPERATE AND DOWNWARDLY MOBILE:

I think conservatives understand Zohran was an avatar for downwardly mobile creative affluents and that he focused on their status and income anxieties.

I don’t think he has any real prescriptions to fix their problems but he is an effective instantiation of their political and… https://t.co/yaqMTuayu7

— Coddled Affluent Professional (@feelsdesperate) October 27, 2025

It might be much simpler than even that: Mamdani isn’t just a lefty — he’s a young and trendy lefty.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Election Interference Litigation: Trump’s Case Against the Des Moines Register and Pollster Moves Forward.

MOST CORRUPT ADMINISTRATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY: Arctic Frost probe targeting Trump conservatives born at highest levels of Biden White House, DOJ.

SOME SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: College Fires Staffer Who Said ICE Agents Should Be ‘Wiped Out.’

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The More Disturbing the Dirt, the Better Democrats Like Their Dirtbags.

Am I shocked by the myriad scandals of Graham Platner, the cosplay workin’ man running for the Democrat nomination for Maine senator, a guy with more baggage than the third wife of a Middle Eastern emir? Absolutely not. Sure, he has a Nazi tattoo and a history of training Antifa terrorists – who of course don’t exist because Antifa isn’t a thing, even though he seems to think it is. Platner also has some controversial critiques regarding African American tipping habits; regardless, here’s another tip—bet that if he gets nominated, he still wins the votes of all the black people in Maine, both of them. The party poobahs are scared because he’s a nut who’ll likely lose in the general, and they’ve dropped a bunch of other revelations obtained in what had to be the world’s easiest opposition research gig, but none of that matters. What matters is that he really, really hates Donald Trump, and that’s enough for his party’s base. He’s their man, polling at 58 percent in the primary, and I am whatever the opposite of being surprised is.

The Democrats are having some serious candidate selection problems, but their solution is to march ahead with whatever psychopath they’ve anointed, regardless. They’re going to keep doing it because it’s working, at least in blue areas. In a few weeks, we’re going to have a mayor of New York City who is both a communist and a jihadist. The other day, he had a meet and greet with an unindicted co-conspirator from the first World Trade Center bombing. Oh well, who cares? Free buses and take that Trump! All the bad stuff that’s come out about him makes them like him even more.

It’s Kurt Schlichter, so read the whole thing.

AN OPEN LETTER: Dear Gavin: Oh Dear Lord PLEASE Run for President.

THANKS, OBAMA: Health insurance for a family through a job hits $27,000 a year — the cost of a new Toyota Corolla hybrid.

NOBODY LIKES A SCOLD: They Tried to Guilt Trip Us Over the East Wing. Conservatives’ Response is Delicious.

EVEN ARTIFICIAL LIFE FINDS A WAY: Are AI Models Developing Their Own ‘Survival Mode’? This New Study Is A Wake-Up Call. “Palisade is one of the companies that is evaluating the possibility of AI developing potentially dangerous capabilities. It described scenarios where the AI models were given a task and explicitly told to shut themselves down. Certain models, particularly Grok 4 and GPT-03, attempted to sabotage shutdown instructions in the updated setup without any explanation.”

Everything needs a hardware cutoff switch.

THAT’S THE WAY TO BET: The Fight to Deport Mamdani May Fizzle.

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY…:

You mean the richest man on earth saved our civilization from a woke low-IQ tyranny instigated by your friends and risked 44B to turn Twitter into the only free speech haven?

That is correct.

And personally, I am very grateful. https://t.co/unoY1voMuJ

— Jo Bhakdi (@JOBhakdi) October 26, 2025

GABRIEL ROSSMAN: The Coming AI Cataclysm.

One sometimes hears that instead of waging the impossible fight of getting kids not to use AI, we should teach them how to use it. There is a logic to this. When a technology becomes more available, wages go up for those who have human capital that complements the technology. But this raises the question of what sort of human capital is a complement to—as opposed to a substitute for—artificial intelligence and the corollary of whether such human capital is best cultivated through use of artificial intelligence or abstention from it? The usual assumption is that the most valuable skill one can acquire is prompt engineering. This is indeed an important skill to have, but I am skeptical that one learns to interact well with an AI through off-loading reading and writing tasks to it during one’s education.

My experience when I have caught university students making unauthorized use of AI is that the cheaters are too ignorant and lazy to know what good output would look like. Sometimes these errors are very obvious, as when two of my students turned in memos that did not summarize the assigned reading but one with a similar title. Knowing what good output looks like requires skills and knowledge that can only be acquired the old-fashioned way, by doing one’s own work. And I am talking about students at a selective university a few years into the AI boom. How much worse must it be at a junior high chosen at random? And how much worse will it be when students who used AI for their entire time in junior high and high school age into first college and then the labor force?

Maybe those kids would have been better off learning trades, even before AI.