| | | |  | | By Ali Bianco | | Presented by |  | | | With help from Eli Okun, Bethany Irvine and Rachel Umansky-Castro Good Sunday morning. This is Ali Bianco. Get in touch. WILD SUNDAY READ: “Kyrsten Sinema Took a 15-Hour Psychedelic Trip. Now She’s All in on MAHA,” by POLITICO’s Erin Schumaker in Aspen, Colorado: “After infuriating progressives time and again for stonewalling their priorities, the Arizona Democrat-turned-independent decided not to seek reelection last year and instead became a senior adviser at the law and lobbying firm Hogan Lovells. She’s since taken up the cause of psychedelic medicine — pro bono, she says. “Her drug of choice? Ibogaine, a psychedelic derived from an African shrub, and which she went down to Mexico to try for herself. She and other advocates want ibogaine studied in state-funded clinical trials and eventually hope to win Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug as a mental health treatment.”
|  | DRIVING THE DAY | | | 
Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) thinks Democrats will flip South Texas blue. | Evan Vucci, File/AP | DEEP IN THE HEART — The fate of the map Texas Republicans drew in the hopes of tipping next year’s midterm elections in their favor is still up in the air after a back-and-forth week of court decisions. But Democrats in the state aren’t holding their breath to find out: Instead, they’re positively bullish about their chances — on Republicans’ terms or not. “I think you’re going to see South Texas turn completely blue next cycle,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez — the South Texas Democrat who represents one of the gerrymandered districts that rank among the GOP’s top targets — told Playbook in an exclusive interview. “We believe, like, on Latino buyer’s remorse alone, we can flip these seats,” said one national Democratic strategist granted anonymity to speak freely. Those Latino voters — many of whom broke for President Donald Trump in 2024 — are the key. “If they were that confident that Latino voters were going to stay with them in the midterms, they wouldn’t have taken 60,000 Latinos out of my congressional district,” Gonzalez said. He’s confident he can keep his seat — even if he’s running within the GOP’s lines: “This is just such a bad year for them.” When Trump launched the call heard ’round Truth Social supporting plans for Texas to redraw its maps, the GOP’s gambit quickly revealed plans to cement the significant inroads the party made with Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley. It laid bare just how pivotal the coalition was to the margins of MAGA’s victory in 2024. And it singled out three majority Latino South Texas districts — the 15th, 28th and Gonzalez’s 34th — as prime pickup targets. To Gonzalez, it’s not hard to see why the GOP is so eager to seize an opportunity in his district. “I still believe that especially Tejano Latinos are more conservative and are more likely to vote split-ticket, and more likely to vote Republican than other places in the state,” he told Playbook. His district is 77 percent Latino — it voted for Trump by over 10 points last year, but also reelected Gonzalez over his Republican challenger Mayra Flores. Now in 2025, multiple Democratic strategists and politicians say that even if the GOP’s redrawn map stands, Republicans won’t get the five seats they’re counting on because they hedged their bets on a group of swing voters who are increasingly souring on their party. “We were confident under the new maps that we could win this, that we could win those seats already,” another national Democratic strategist told Playbook. “Then Virginia and New Jersey happened.” The trends from Latino voters over the last month reveal a different electorate from 2024. Democrats Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey outpaced Latino turnout numbers from 2021 and won Latino-dominated counties by significant margins — including some that Trump carried last year. “If Texas only did half of that and swung 12 points, it’s enough to flip all those seats,” Chuck Rocha, a Democratic strategist who is also a Latino and Texas native, told Playbook.
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Explore Phil's story. | | | | The positive momentum for Democrats on Election Day wasn’t isolated to the East and West Coasts. In Texas, a special-election state Senate race in the north saw Democrat Taylor Rehmet come within 3 percentage points of winning outright in a district that backed Trump by more than 17 points last year. Though the race is now headed to a runoff — in which Rehmet is still viewed as the underdog — it was a significant sign of life, Gina Hinojosa, a state senator in Texas who is running in the Democratic primary for governor, told Playbook. “It was just assumed a Republican would win,” she said. But but but: A red drift among Latinos in Texas isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, and GOP operatives aren’t sweating an erosion. “They don’t necessarily follow national headwinds,” a Republican strategist said of Latino voters. “They are people whose votes you have to earn with a strong economy, border security … That’s not ground we plan to lose.” Another GOP strategist said the results from this year’s election can be a good “wake-up call” for Republicans not to rest on their 2024 laurels. But “there is a real knee-jerk reaction from both sides to say, ‘Oh, we’re winning them back,’” they said, “because a lot of them don’t see themselves as Republican or Democrats. They vote on issues.” And voters remember, one Republican argued, “who it was who caused open borders and all this inflation.” Three’s a trend: In the last two weeks, a trio of polls from Latino-run firms have shown an erosion of approval for Trump and Republicans with this critical bloc. Equis Research found 68 percent of Latinos disapprove of the GOP’s handling of the cost of living. Liberal-leaning Somos Votantes’ latest sponsored poll, reported by POLITICO last week, showed Trump’s approval underwater by 26 points — and down 30 points on the economy. And in the most pointed numbers, advocacy group UndiosUS surveyed Texas specifically and found 66 percent disapproval of Trump among Latino voters. There’s one other big factor Democrats say will work in their favor: no Trump on the ballot. The big swings back to Democrats in this year’s elections in New Jersey and Virginia also came from some Trump voters sitting the election out, Rocha said. It all adds up to a “perfect storm of opportunity for Democrats in Texas,” Hinojosa told Playbook. In UnidosUS’ Texas poll, nearly 3 in 4 Latinos in the state said they are likely or certain to vote next year, and 53 percent would support a Democratic candidate. “I think, without a doubt, President Trump brings a certain excitement when he’s on the top of the ticket to untraditional voters, and very low-propensity voters come out for him. And that’s a reality,” Gonzalez said. “It happened in ’20, and it happened in ’24.” So what does he think that trendline looks like for Republicans in ’26? “They lose,” Gonzalez said.
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| | | | SUNDAY BEST … — NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani on what was going through his head as he stood beside a friendly Trump in the Oval Office, on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “I thought again and again about what it would mean for New Yorkers if we could establish a productive relationship that would focus on the issues that those New Yorkers stay up late at night thinking about. Because so often in our politics we try and tell people what they should be worried about, what they should be concerned about. When you actually ask New Yorkers and you listen to them, you hear it come back to the issues that animated not just the conversation the president and I had with the press after our meeting, but frankly in the meeting itself.” — Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) on Trump’s assertion that she’d committed “seditious behavior, punishable by death,” on ABC’s “This Week”: “Almost immediately, you know, the security situation changed for all of us. Leadership climate is set at the top. So, if the president [is] saying things like that, you can imagine people on the ground, what they’re doing, the calls into our office … The president took issue with one sentence in a video and was calling for our death. … This is a tool of fear. He’s trying to get us to shut up because he doesn’t want to be talking about this.” — Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) on the U.S. peace plan for the Ukraine war, on “This Week”: “About 80 percent of this deal, I think, they’re going to find agreement with as they go to Geneva. The problem is going to be the 20 percent of really tough items to negotiate. You know, what happens with that? And I would take a page out of Donald Trump’s book ‘The Art of the Deal’ to all parties involved in this. If you have a bad deal, then you gotta be prepared to walk away.” — Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) on her internal polling about whether to run for Senate, on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “Head to head, we are doing really well against [AG Ken] Paxton. … We are actually within the margin of error as it relates to [Sen.] John Cornyn. So, to be perfectly honest, the only reason that I’m continuing to consider whether or not I do this is because my polling says I can win. … We feel confident that we can get this done. The thing is, we obviously would prefer to have Paxton.” TOP-EDS: A roundup of the week’s must-read opinion pieces.
- “It’s time to end the filibuster,” by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in WaPo
- “The COVID political backlash disappeared,” by The Argument’s Lakshya Jain
- “Why ‘No’ Lost on Election Day,” by Matthew Brouillette in RealClearPennsylvania
- “Republicans Will Never Find a Health Care Replacement,” by The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper
- “Is Trump Giving Illegal Orders? Dems Just Blew the Question Wide Open,” by The New Republic’s Greg Sargent
- “‘Things happen,’” by the WaPo editorial board
- “Newsom Dropped the Ball on Menopause, But Other States Are Ready to Lead,” by Halle Berry, Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton and Pauline Maki in Time
- “The U.S. Economy Is Ready To Grow Again — If Washington Lets It,” by Forbes’ Steve Forbes
- “To voters, Democrats aren’t calm — they’re comatose,” by Michael Starr Hopkins in The Hill
| | | | With the shutdown behind them, the White House and federal agencies are pivoting to the next challenges. West Wing Playbook reveals how the administration is managing the fallout — and the people behind every move.
➡️ Subscribe to West Wing Playbook | | | | | 9 THINGS FOR YOUR RADAR 1. READ BETWEEN THE LINES: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and special envoy Steve Witkoff are meeting today with Ukrainian and European officials in Switzerland, following a day of confusing back-and-forth over a peace plan — with existential stakes for Ukraine. A U.S. meeting with the Russians is expected sometime after today’s discussion, POLITICO’s Paul McLeary and colleagues report. The breakdown: At the Halifax International Security Forum, pro-Ukraine senators from both parties said Rubio had called and reassured them that the leaked 28-point U.S. proposal — which would end the war on terms very favorable to Russia — was actually a Russian proposal, not an American one. And they said Rubio wasn’t aware of any U.S. threats to cut off Ukraine if it says no, per POLITICO’s Joe Gould. Which would all be a significant about-face. Not so fast: “Blatantly false,” said the State Department. Rubio himself then denied the senators’ claims, posting on X, “The peace proposal was authored by the U.S.,” with input from both Russia and Ukraine. “It is offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations.” Axios’ Barak Ravid, who’d scooped the details of the plan, stood by his reporting that it came from the U.S. Got it? No? Trump, after earlier saying that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had until Thanksgiving to accept the plan, told reporters yesterday that it is “not my final offer.” If Zelenskyy rejects it, Trump added, “then he can continue to fight his little heart out.” Not happy: “Some people better get fired on Monday for the gross buffoonery we just witnessed over the last four days,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) fumed. The opposition: The muddle will continue this week, as Ukraine’s allies in Europe and the U.S. strenuously push back against the plan — which many consider a non-starter — to grant huge concessions to Russian President Vladimir Putin in exchange for the end of his war. Panicked G20 allies said the draft “will require additional work,” per Bloomberg. The defense: The White House feels that it’s time to pressure Ukraine into a deal to end the bloodshed. Driscoll told Europeans that Ukraine, doing poorly on the battlefield, won’t be able to win back territory Russia has seized since Europe’s defense industrial capacity lags Russia’s, our colleagues scooped. Putin sounded positive about the plan yesterday, which would be a big victory for him: It delivers on some of the core demands from which he hasn’t budged for four years, WSJ’s Thomas Grove and Matthew Luxmoore note. Top talker: Questions are mounting about Witkoff and Jared Kushner’s Miami meeting last month with sanctioned Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, Reuters’ Erin Banco and Gram Slattery report. That seems to be the origin of the 28-point plan, which surprised some top State Department and NSC officials. The vibe shifts: Trump is back to placing blame everywhere but on Russia. “UKRAINE ‘LEADERSHIP’ HAS EXPRESSED ZERO GRATITUDE FOR OUR EFFORTS, AND EUROPE CONTINUES TO BUY OIL FROM RUSSIA,” he said on Truth Social. Zelenskyy tried to move toward a conciliatory stance: “It is good that diplomacy has been reinvigorated and that the conversation can be constructive,” he posted on X.
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| | | | 2. THE DRUMBEAT OF WAR: The U.S. pressure campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is due to ramp up into a new phase, likely covert operations, in the coming days, Reuters’ Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali scooped. Most of the details remain unclear, including whether Trump has made the final call, but an outright effort to overthrow Maduro hasn’t been ruled out. More activity: One possible idea is dropping leaflets on Caracas today, timed to Maduro’s birthday, as a psychological operation to try to push him out, WaPo’s Alex Horton reports. An FAA advisory yesterday warning of a “worsening security situation and heightened military activity” led multiple airlines to cancel flights to and from the country, per Bloomberg. And the U.S. designation of the Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist group takes effect tomorrow. How it’s playing: A new CBS poll finds that Americans oppose U.S. military action in Venezuela by a huge margin of 70 percent to 30 percent. Only 13 percent see Venezuela as a major threat, and three-quarters of the country say the Trump administration hasn’t clearly explained its position. (Meanwhile, 65 percent of Americans think Trump’s policies are making their grocery prices rise.) The boat strikes: These fare better in the CBS survey, with Americans supporting military strikes on suspected drug-trafficking boats, 53 percent to 47 percent. But WaPo’s Ellen Nakashima and colleagues report that almost as soon as they took office, top White House officials “have repeatedly steamrolled or sidestepped government lawyers who questioned whether the provocative policy was legal.” 3. HEADS UP: “Pentagon urges inquiry of Trump foe Vindman over Ukraine work,” by WaPo’s Noah Robertson: “The Pentagon is urging the House to investigate whether Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-Virginia) improperly consulted on behalf of the Ukrainian government before being elected to Congress — a claim the congressman denies and argues is an attempt by the Trump administration to ‘intimidate’ him.” 4. THE POLITICIZATION OF DISASTER AID: After huge storms in Chicago, Trump refused disaster aid for thousands of city residents — the first such denial in at least 18 years, POLITICO’s E&E News’ Thomas Frank scooped. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker made the requests for aid last month. The White House’s Abigail Jackson told Thomas that Pritzker “should know how to balance his budget … but instead prioritizes the state’s budget for illegals over Americans.” Former FEMA officials say the extensive damage would have made the aid request a no-brainer to approve in the past. And residents are struggling with mold and flood damage. Meanwhile, Trump doubled down on his calls yesterday for the federal government to go into Chicago after shootings downtown Friday killed a teenager and injured several more: “The people are chanting, BRING IN TRUMP!!!” he posted on Truth Social.
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Explore Phil's story. | | | | 5. THE VIEW FROM NORTH CAROLINA: The high-profile Border Patrol crackdown last week in the state, especially the Charlotte area, has some Republicans spooked that the aggressive enforcement could turn off swing voters in the midterms, POLITICO’s Myah Ward and Elena Schneider report. Publicly, the GOP is touting the immigration arrests of criminals, but many other high-profile incidents targeting non-criminal immigrants have gone viral. It’s the first swing state to face such intense immigration operations, and they’ve “prompted reflection from residents across the political spectrum, who wonder whether the aggressive tactics, which have led to a few hundred arrests, were worth it,” NYT’s Eduardo Medina and Meredith Honig report. More immigration news: A federal appellate court panel for now allowed a lower-court order to stand that had blocked the administration’s expansion of fast-track deportations, per Reuters’ Nate Raymond. They’ll hear arguments on the merits Dec. 9. 6. FROM 30,000 FEET: “In One Week, Trump Moves to Reshape U.S. Environmental Policy,” by NYT’s Maxine Joselow: “The environmental rollbacks came one after the next this week, potentially affecting everything from the survival of rare whales to the health of the Hudson River. … If the Trump administration’s proposals [to narrow the Clean Water Act, change the Endangered Species Act and expand offshore oil and gas drilling] are finalized and upheld in court, they could reshape U.S. environmental policy for years to come, environmental lawyers and activists said.” 7. DEMOCRACY WATCH: “Big changes to the agency charged with securing elections lead to midterm worries,” by AP’s Steve Karnowski and Julie Carr Smyth in Minneapolis: “Shifting priorities of the Trump administration, staffing reductions and budget cuts have many election officials concerned about how engaged the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will be next year … Some officials say they have begun scrambling to fill the anticipated gaps.” 8. PRIMARY COLORS: Top Cornyn allies in Washington are increasingly seeking to push Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas) out of the Senate race, warning that he could act as a spoiler and allow Paxton to beat Cornyn’s reelection bid. Good luck with that: Hunt tells CNN’s Manu Raju and Sarah Ferris that he’s “absolutely” holding on and filing to run this week. “Senate leadership does not pick the leadership in Texas,” he says. “The United States Senate is not a retirement community.” Hunt is training his ire more on Cornyn than Paxton for now. The question of Trump’s endorsement still looms over the race. 9. FOR YOUR RADAR: “Minnesota congressman’s chief of staff tallies travel expenses among highest in Congress,” by The Minnesota Star Tribune’s Nathaniel Minor and Tom Nehil: “The chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Brad Finstad has been reimbursed for more than $125,000 in travel expenses from a taxpayer-funded account since 2023 … Finstad spokeswoman Jenny Luepke said [David] FitzSimmons ‘regularly travels for official purposes’ … FitzSimmons’ expenses stand in stark contrast to other chiefs of staff among the Minnesota delegation.”
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➡️ Explore POLITICO Pro Briefings | | | | | | | TALK OF THE TOWN | | Kristi Noem and Kash Patel were at the Formula One Las Vegas Grand Prix yesterday, with Patel rooting for McLaren. Donald Trump said Jack Nicklaus will help improve Joint Base Andrews’ golf courses. HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer … Reps. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) and Sean Casten (D-Ill.) … NYT’s Carolyn Ryan … Kyle Nevins … former Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) … Geoff Morrell … former Reps. Wiley Nickel (D-N.C.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) … Geoff Mackler … Amy Schatz of Glen Echo Group … Matt Dennis … Katie Wall of the Artemis Group … Suzanne Kianpour … Americans For Prosperity’s Bill Riggs … Sheara Braun … Jeremy Slevin of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) office … Colby Nelson … Pam Welsh of Thorn Run Partners … Richard Hunt … POLITICO’s Phelim Kine, Mike Blanchfield and Tim Lafayette … Danny Cevallos … former Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle … C.W. Goodyear … Zack Laven of Fulcrum Public Affairs … Robin Roberts … GEG Strategies’ Rick Gorka Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. Send Playbookers tips to playbook@politico.com or text us on Signal here. Playbook couldn’t happen without our deputy editor Garrett Ross and Playbook Podcast producer Callan Tansill-Suddath. Correction: Friday’s Playbook misstated Shelley Greenspan’s previous employer. She previously worked at the White House under former President Joe Biden.
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