It's campaign announcement season

With Tillis out and new names jumping in, the 2026 campaign season is officially underway.

I had this week’s newsletter all queued up and ready to go before the bombshell news that U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis was bowing out of his re-election bid. To be honest, my first reaction was to think it was an AI hoax. The timing was just too on the nose.

But as it turns out, it’s real. I wrote a quick reaction for the newspaper, which you can read here: Thom Tillis is a survivor. But he couldn’t survive a breakup with Trump.

I’ll have plenty more to say about the whole thing in the coming weeks, because it’s going to be a wild ride. Tillis has already started dropping snark bombs on X and wearing epic bolo ties on the Senate floor.

We may learn more about who Tillis really is in the next 18 months than we did in the previous 18 years.

And now, of course, Republicans need a candidate for the 2026 U.S. Senate ballot. Funny enough, I didn’t have to change this newsletter’s headline at all. It’s even more timely.

Even in a normal cycle, this is one of my favorite parts of the political calendar. …