Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, still a little amazed at our success this week. Before we get to the news, hit that ❤️ and restack this newsletter. Every restack puts this reporting in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine wants kept in the dark.
To our paid subscribers: Thank you. Your support makes this work possible, and we don’t take it lightly. You fund independent journalism that holds power accountable when corporate media won’t.
But first, we need just 16 more paid subscribers to meet our goal this week. Substack recommends newsletters based on their growth. Can you be one of them? If we remain a Substack bestseller, we can reach Americans in new formats to recruit more to the progressive cause. Join our community today.
Here’s Why Your Investment Matters
Let’s start with impact. On Thursday night, Jesse Watters, a Fox News host in primetime on the most-watched network in the country, devoted a segment of his show to attacking us.
Specifically, he referenced Carl Gibson’s interview with Angie Nixon, Florida’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. Nixon explained how she plans to flip a Republican-held seat in Trump’s adopted home state by running on Medicare for All and getting corporate money out of politics.
Fox News focused on Raw America? Wow. You made it happen. And we’re just eight months old.
Here’s what got under Fox’s skin. An interview from an independent outlet that you started. A channel with no billionaire backer or corporate parent, or swanky office in NYC.
Nixon may be a longshot for Senate, but if Fox is on the attack, it means you’ve got something going. When a network with Fox’s reach spends precious primetime minutes swatting at an independent startup, it means the ground is shifting under their feet.
The New Media Moment Is Real, and We’re In It
Americans are walking away from legacy media, and they aren’t coming back. Across the political spectrum, people now say they trust independent and digital news over the outlets their parents grew up with. The trust in institutions is gone, and readers are picking the voices they believe are telling them the truth without a boss upstairs deciding what’s allowed.
Substack recently passed five million paid subscriptions. Independent outlets that didn’t exist a few years ago now count their subscribers in the hundreds of thousands. The Washington Post and CNN are now scrambling to build their own creator networks, trying to emulate the thing they spent years sneering at.
The billionaire-owned press has looked at independent media and concluded: we’d better become that before it eats us.
But this moment doesn’t fund itself. The reason we could put Angie Nixon on camera without a single call from upstairs telling us to spike it is that we don’t have an upstairs.
That independence is our strength, but it means we live or die by whether you decide this work is worth paying for. Breaking through to primetime takes resources. The reporting takes resources. None of it happens without readers who chip in.
Trump May Have Just Kneecapped His Own Voters
Here’s something else I caught this week that breaks the conventional narrative.
Trump is livid with mail-in voting. Conventional wisdom holds that Trump gutted vote-by-mail to suppress Democrats. But it turns out that the people who run Republican campaigns are panicking, because the voters most likely to get tripped up are actually his own.
Don’t take my word for it. Take Ben Ginsberg’s. Ginsberg spent decades as one of the most powerful election lawyers in the GOP. He was counsel to the RNC, the Senate and House campaign committees, and the Republican Governors Association.
This week he went on CNN and said the order will largely hit Republican voters.
“Republicans are the older party and older folks like to vote by mail,” he said. “They’re the rural party. And certainly vote by mail is important to people in rural areas. And thanks to Donald Trump, there are many more low propensity voters in the Republican Party.”
The reason is straightforward. Democratic voters tend to live in more urban areas, where voting is more accessible. In rural states, the ballot box may be dozens of miles away.
None of this is something to cheer, exactly. An order that disenfranchises voters is bad no matter whose voters they are. But there’s a special irony here. Trump cast his own ballot by mail, then turned around and tried to make it harder for millions of Americans to do the same. And the ones who may pay the price are the very people who put him back in office.
The Number That Should Have the GOP Running Scared
Here’s why this is landing at exactly the right moment. CNN’s Harry Enten recently went on air and tallied up the Democratic primary turnout across the country this cycle. His word for it was “bonkers.”
More than 25 million people have voted in Democratic primaries this cycle. This is already ahead of where the party was during the entire 2018 primary season, the year it flipped 40 House seats and took back the chamber.
Since 2006, the party with the higher primary turnout has gone on to win the House every single time. Republicans should be running scared. Enten’s read on why the number is so high? A president who is deeply underwater with the public.
Enthusiasm like that doesn’t come from cable panels telling people to calm down. It comes from people who are paying attention, the same people walking away from legacy media and toward outlets like this one.
A Few Small Wins Worth Savoring
It wasn’t all big-picture this week. A few things went right, and they’re worth naming.
A federal judge in Massachusetts, Indira Talwani, hit pause — again — on Trump’s last-minute scheme to gut mail-in voting weeks before the election. She put the rule on hold and said flatly that the government never produced any evidence of the fraud it claims to be fighting. Trump will appeal, so this fight isn’t over. But for now, ballots keep moving.
The generation that helped put Trump back in office is having second thoughts. New Navigator Research polling found that 31 percent of Gen Z voters who backed Trump in 2024 now regret it. His approval with Gen Z now sits at just 33 percent.
This is the lowest of any age group, and he’s now underwater with every single one. Young voters who supported Trump are slipping away.
None of these are the whole war. They’re a temporary restraining order, a poll, a network losing its composure on live TV. But strung together, they tell you which way the wind is blowing. And it isn’t blowing toward Trump.
A Note from Our Team
This week, our White House reporter exposed Trump’s Canadian tariff scam and got a member of Trump’s own party on the record calling his trade war “just nuts.”
A top GOP Senate aide told Raw America that Trump is “an idiot who doesn’t understand economics and doesn’t understand math,” and an aide to House GOP leadership said Trump is “Democrats’ secret weapon for success.”
None of these truths surface without you. You’re the reason we’re independent, and your support is at the center of our success.
If you’ve been meaning to become a paying subscriber, let today be the day. For less than a quarter a day, you can keep this reporting going. Your subscription means we keep breaking through to the mainstream against Fox News, whose primetime hosts are rattled by our success.
I believe we’ll win this cycle. In fact, I’m certain of it.
Tap the ❤️ like button and restack this newsletter before you head out. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think, and it helps these stories reach more people. Thank you for everything you do.
I’m John Byrne. See you next Sunday.
Donald Trump is trying to give away part of Yosemite National Park to a private developer to develop a road near an ancient sequoia stand.
Oh hell no! You better believe we will fight this with everything we’ve got!
I wish he would just leave already!!!’