The New York Times editorial page’s response to the Supreme Court’s redistricting decision and the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling striking down the referendum, framing both as expressions of white supremacy and devastating blows to black political power, drew sharp pushback on Chicago’s Morning Answer from Alex Marlow, editor-in-chief of Breitbart News and host of the Alex Marlow Show. Marlow said the clips from commentators like Times opinion writer Mara Gay are worth highlighting not because they are persuasive but because they reveal a Democratic Party that stands for nothing beyond opposing Trump and reflexively exploiting racial grievance in ways that a growing number of Black voters are finding patronizing and hollow.
Proft noted the immediate irony in the black political power framing: the Memphis seat vacated by the redistricting decision is likely to be filled by Charlotte Bergman, a Black Republican woman, and Byron Donalds, a Black Republican congressman, is positioned as the leading candidate to succeed Ron DeSantis as governor of Florida. He said AOC’s recent assertion at the University of Chicago that Black Americans invented democracy, rather than ancient Greeks or the European Enlightenment traditions that shaped the American founding, illustrates how far the rhetorical overreach has gone. Marlow said he does not think most Black voters actually believe that, and that many are rolling their eyes at the degree to which Democratic messaging has become unmoored from any genuine engagement with the issues people care about in their daily lives.
He said Trump’s Black support roughly doubled from 2020 to 2024 and will continue to grow, and that the mechanism is straightforward. When white progressive socialists tell Black voters they are supposed to vote a certain way or face accusations of racial betrayal, the backlash effect over time is to push more independent-minded Black voters toward the Republican Party. He said the entire exercise of race-based gerrymandering was always a cynical shell game about moving voter blocks rather than genuine representation, and that ending it opens the field for the kind of competition that actually produces responsiveness to voters’ material concerns.
On the Save America Act and the filibuster question, Marlow said he does not think Thune will find the will to force a talking filibuster even though he believes the base of Republican voters see the failure to pass voter ID legislation as completely insane and politically self-defeating. He said Thune is indulging a small number of moderate holdouts at the expense of the energy and turnout that Republican base voters could generate in the midterms, and that it is a significant miscalculation. He said when pressed on whether calling out individual Republican senators like Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Thom Tillis would move the needle, he was honest: devastating opinion pieces at Breitbart making the case are not going to convince those particular senators to change their votes because they are specifically insulated from the base pressure that would work on most members.
On the midterm prospects more broadly, Marlow said his analytical brain tells him the concern about MAGA voters sitting on their hands without Trump on the ballot is legitimate, but his gut feeling is more optimistic because the Democratic Party is in such visible disarray. He said Democrats cannot put their own leaders out in public because their favorability drops every time they appear, their platform is incoherent, Gavin Newsom’s poll numbers go down whenever he campaigns, and the candidates in races like the Los Angeles mayoral contest are being exposed as intellectually unprepared for any real challenge. He said if Trump can achieve a definitive resolution to the Iran campaign and the MAGA policy agenda can be the central conversation of the election cycle, he does not see how Democrats defend against it, and that one side is likely to win by a narrow margin with Republicans having a real shot.
On Spencer Pratt and the Los Angeles mayor’s race, Marlow said he was born in Los Angeles and has lived there for thirty-two of his forty years, and that the city is completely broken in ways that are visible every day. His honest assessment of Pratt’s chances of winning is not optimistic because the unions control the city’s electoral mechanics and they are fully behind Karen Bass. Union organization moves blocks of voters in ways that grassroots energy alone does not overcome without an equivalent institutional infrastructure. But he said Breitbart is covering the race as though Pratt has a genuine shot because what Pratt is doing is politically valuable regardless of the ultimate outcome, demonstrating that a straightforward campaign built around common sense and accountability for obvious failures can generate real resonance in a deep blue city and lay the groundwork for the kind of political realignment that will eventually have to come to places like Los Angeles.