COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA — Wes Moore made an early and urgent appeal Friday to one of the nation’s most important Democratic constituencies.

The first-term governor of Maryland said Democrats must adapt and change to counter President Donald Trump and improve life for the middle class if they have any hope of returning to power.

“Gone are the days when we are the party of bureaucracy, multi-year studies, panels, and college debate club rules,” Moore said in a speech before party insiders at the South Carolina Democrats Blue Palmetto Dinner. “We must be the party of action.”

South Carolina has a track record of vaulting Democratic primary winners to the White House, and Moore’s premium speaking slot before the state's well-connected party leaders does little to tamp down speculation he’s kicking the tires on an upcoming presidential bid.

In a state where Donald Trump cruised to an 18-point victory nearly seven months ago, Moore said Democrats must also take cues from an unlikely instructor: the president himself.

“Urgency is the instrument of change. And do you know who understands that really well? Donald Trump,” Moore said. “I want to be clear: We can — and we must — condemn Donald Trump’s reckless actions. But we would also be foolish not to learn from his impatience.”

Moore talked about his roots in Charleston, where his grandfather was born, his Army service and record on crime and job creation in Maryland. He also spoke about the perilous times the country faces, and told the crowd that he is on a “mission” to help deliver adequate health care and livable wages for those who need them.

It’s a vision Moore sought to contrast with the “reckless actions” of Trump.

Moore, 46, is seen as one of the party’s most promising young stars and has caught the attention of Hollywood icon and Democratic megadonor George Clooney. While many Democrats are eager to turn the page after difficult electoral losses last cycle, the governor told the party faithful that mustering up the courage to fight can’t wait until the next presidential cycle.

“Anyone who is talking about 2028 does not understand the urgency of 2025,” Moore said.

Earlier on Friday, Moore toured the Scout Motors Production Facility in nearby Blythewood and planned to attend a campaign-style fish fry after the dinner — making his visit seem even more like a tryout for 2028.

Moore, Maryland’s first — and currently the nation’s only — Black governor has drawn the ire of a handful of Democrats back home and in South Carolina over his veto of a reparations bill passed by the state legislature. The measure called for the study of historic race-based inequality in the state.

At least one South Carolina lawmaker, state Rep. John King, called for Moore to be disinvited from the gala.

“The governor's veto doesn't just affect Maryland,” said King, who boycotted the dinner. “It echoes in every state where Black lawmakers are already working uphill. It makes our jobs harder, and that's something we can't afford to ignore.”

The issue of reparations remains politically divisive, with a 2022 Pew Research Center survey showing that 77 percent of African Americans supported them, while less than 20 percent of white respondents did.

In the governor’s veto letter he suggested that with economic headwinds facing his state, it is an inopportune time to fund “another study.”

Moore has also followed other Democrats thought to be eyeing White House runs by sitting for more podcast interviews.

This includes a recent appearance on “The Breakfast Club” co-hosted by Charlamagne tha God and Kara Swisher’s podcast to talk about DOGE cuts and impact to his state. He recently traveled to Georgia, a key swing state, to record an episode of a podcast hosted by Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and taped a hoops workout with basketball shooting coach and influencer Chris Matthews.

A person familiar with Moore's schedule said he’s limiting the number of out-of-state invites he is accepting to focus on his role in Maryland. But the person stressed he plans to hit the campaign trail in Virginia and New Jersey — both of which hold statewide elections this fall.

Two potential 2028 Democratic presidential primary candidates will descend on Cleveland in July to headline a rub elbows with the party’s top mayors — auditioning for another group of key surrogates in the unfolding shadow primary.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and California Rep. Ro Khanna will join Democratic Mayors Association President and Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb for a national gathering of Democratic mayors alongside DNC Chair Ken Martin, former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brownand current Ohio Rep. Shontel Brown. Details were shared first with POLITICO.

“The summit will showcase our cities, the work mayors are doing to hold [President Donald] Trump accountable, deliver results, and demonstrate that government can work for the people,” said a person familiar with the planning and granted anonymity to discuss an event that was still being finalized.

The theme of the summit is “Community Over Chaos: A Path Forward.”

“I am excited to welcome my fellow Democratic mayors, special guests, and Democratic partners to my hometown of Cleveland for DMA's National Summit later this summer,” Bibb told POLITICO. “This year’s summit will be a showcase of our cities and how government at the local level still works for the people. Despite chaos in Washington, mayors continue to find solutions and deliver results each day. I can’t wait for everyone to see what Democratic mayors — and Cleveland — are all about.”

The event is in line with Bibb’s vision for the association playing a more aggressive and vocal role than in years past, and this will mark the first year that DMA’s national summit will be open to the public and press.

But it also comes at a fraught time for Democratic mayors, particularly those of big cities, who have found themselves targeted by the Trump administration.

Both Beshear and Khanna have been making early moves that are aimed at a presidential run. Beshear has hired a former spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign and started a podcast this spring. Khanna has been on a nonstop tour of media hits and party events.

But Ohio, once a swing state, has drifted even further away from Democrats in recent years. Brown, a longtime Senator who clung to his seat even as it reddened due to his ties to working-class voters, got booted last cycle. President Donald Trump won the state by 11 percentage points.

MACKINAC ISLAND, Mich. — President Donald Trump's allies are fuming at Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for getting involved in Michigan’s Senate primary, a race that now threatens to divide Republicans.

Duffy is headlining a planned June 4 fundraiser for Rep. Bill Huizenga, according to an invitation obtained by POLITICO — a move that puts Duffy at odds with the National Republican Senatorial Committee and 2024 Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita. Duffy has also been advising Huizenga, according to a person familiar with the race.

Duffy, according to the two people close to Trump, never cleared his political engagement with the White House political shop, and has now drawn the ire of Trump’s top political hands. The transportation secretary’s move to fundraise for Huizenga has now prompted threats of a crackdown on Cabinet secretaries’ political activities ahead of the midterms, POLITICO has learned.

“He did not ask for it to be approved,” a person close to Trump and granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive political matter told POLITICO of Duffy’s decision. “It would not have been approved. They are old friends and it’s technically for the House so not going to embarrass him by standing it down, but the fact is administration officials are not free agents politically, even in their spare time. You never get ahead of the President.”

Huizenga has told others that a second Cabinet official could fundraise for him but they're settling on a date. One of the people familiar with Trump's thinking said they would not allow that to happen.

The White House declined to comment.

A spokesperson for Duffy did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Rogers declined to comment.

Trump hasn’t decided who to endorse yet in Michigan’s Senate race, according to two people close to the president, a contest that arguably represents Republicans’ best chance to widen their majority.

National Republicans have coalesced behind former Rep. Mike Rogers in the Republican’s second run for the office, but Huizenga has been taking steps toward a run.

Huizenga spent the week at a gathering of Michigan strategists and elected officials on Mackinac Island preparing a run against Rogers and courting prominent national donors, emphasizing in conversations that Rogers failed to beat Democrat Elissa Slotkin for an open Senate seat in the same year Trump won the state.

“I want to make sure we win,” Huizenga told POLITICO when he said he could announce a Senate bid as early as this summer. “The question is: Are we going to run the same play and expect a different result?”

Huizenga’s plans undermine the National Republican Senatorial Committee's plans to clear the field for Rogers, a former Trump critic. Rogers hired LaCivita as his senior adviser.

The Republican establishment — including the top echelons of Trump world — have started to coalesce around Rogers as the nominee.On Wednesday, NRSC political director Brendan Jaspers reposted a poll on X showing Rogers outperforming Huizenga against potential Democratic rivals and suggesting that “the numbers point to one candidate” who can flip the seat for Republicans: Rogers.

A pro-Trump executive at The Kennedy Center for Performing Arts said he was dismissed after CNN questioned his history of anti-LGBTQ+ remarks.

Floyd Brown posted on social media Thursday that he had been removed from his post at Washington’s premier theater and cultural center just months after joining.

The Kennedy Center has faced an overhaul under President Donald Trump. During his first month, Trump fired the Center’s leadership — including former president Deborah Rutter — and filled the board of trustees with his own supporters. He also announced he had been unanimously elected the board’s chair. Several artists have canceled appearances at the Center as a result.

Brown has previously called homosexuality a “punishment” upon America and said same-sex marriage is “godless” and a “hoax,” CNN reported. He also promoted conspiracies about former President Barack Obama’s birth and religion.

He said on X that he was asked to “recant your belief in traditional marriage” and refused to do so, and that he was let go before the article was published. He accused Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell — a close ally of Trump — of being “intimidated” by CNN and alleged that Grenell, who is gay and a practicing Christian, “preemptively fired me for my Christian beliefs on marriage.”

Brown said he has asked for an explanation regarding his dismissal, along with the chance to speak with Grenell. He claims both requests have gone unanswered.

The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brown said he never meant to offend anyone with his previous comments.

“Comments rooted in my personal Christian views, which I have made in the past, have no impact upon my work here at the Kennedy Center nor do they impinge on my interactions with colleagues who do incredible work for the patrons of the Center. As a Christian I am called to work with others of different beliefs and worldviews,” he said.

Brown added that he was “honored” to work at the Kennedy Center and said he was united with the Center’s and Trump’s mission “to bring wholesome entertainment showcasing the best of performing arts and music to America.”

Brown has a long history of conservative activism. He helped found the conservative nonprofit Citizens United. He also served as an executive for Young America’s Foundation, which offers support to conservative college students, and founded The Western Journal.

MACKINAC ISLAND, Michigan — Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga has been preparing a run for Michigan’s open Senate seat and plans to make a final decision this summer.

If he does enter the primary, he would defy national Republicans, who have been aiming to clear the field for former Rep. Mike Rogers’ second attempt at the office.

“I want to make sure we win. I want to make sure we’ve got the right candidate to do that,” Huizenga said Thursday. “I personally think it should have been won last election. It didn’t. And the question is: Are we going to run the same play and expect a different result?”

Huizenga has been assembling a team, including fundraisers, for a potential bid. He recently traveled to West Point to discuss his candidacy with Donald Trump during the president’s visit last weekend. Last cycle, Trump endorsed Rogers, a former critic, in a crowded Senate primary; he has not endorsed in this race.

Republicans’ Senate campaign arm has been pressuring Huizenga to stay out of the contest, aiming to avert a potentially messy primary as they try to flip retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters’ seat.

National Republican Senatorial Committee political director Brendan Jaspers on Wednesday reposted a poll on X showing Rogers outperforming Huizenga against potential Democratic rivals with the message, “If Republicans want to flip Michigan’s Senate seat red in 2026, the numbers point to one candidate” — Rogers.

Democrat Elissa Slotkin defeated Rogers in Michigan’s open Senate race last year even as Trump won the state.

With Republicans holding competitive, eat-their-own primaries in the midterms next year, Democrats in the South see an opening to court moderates who are souring on the GOP.

In Texas, state Attorney General Ken Paxton is challenging the establishment-aligned Sen. John Cornyn, and the Georgia GOP primary field is quickly becoming crowded as Republicans attempt to oust Sen. Jon Ossoff. While holding Georgia will be tough and flipping Texas even harder, there’s still an opportunity for the left.

A new class of Democratic leaders in the South are pitching voters on their party’s proposals to lower costs and increase wages, while casting blame on Republicans for an unsettled economy under President Donald Trump. They say that strategy is key not just for the midterms, but part of solving an existential threat for Democrats if they want to stand a chance in coming years at regaining national power.

Longer-term population shifts in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas that went to Trump in November, mean those states are poised to gain congressional and Electoral College seats. Florida — which many Democrats concede is a solidly GOP state — could also expand its influence. Democrats in these states are now warning that failing to mount a comeback could mean that winning the White House after the 2030 Census would be far more difficult.

The fix, according to a dozen Democratic leaders in the South, is to refocus the Democratic Party on the economy and border security — two areas of strength historically for the GOP. Kendall Scudder, a 35-year-old progressive who took over the Texas Democratic Party in March, said Democrats must “do everything we can to show that when we get out of bed in the morning, we eat glass to fight back and protect the working people of this state.”

In Georgia, Charlie Bailey, who was named Democratic Party chair this month, is also stressing that Democrats’ political survival depends on figuring out how to talk to working-class voters — and hammering Republicans on the economy.

“It is that kind of record of the Republicans that has voters with full cause to be angry,” Bailey said. “They know they're being screwed. My job as the chair is to make sure they know who to blame.”

Other Democrats say the national political climate could help turn the tide.

“What's happening on the federal level is unpredictable, but it may be a unique opportunity for a progressive agenda,” said Georgia Democratic strategist Amy Morton. “Republicans are claiming the far right, Democrats have an opportunity to claim everything else. Voters may be hungry for change by the time we get to the elections next year.”

The uphill climb for Democrats in the South is steep. Republicans raise far more money and hold far more seats in state legislatures than Democrats, meaning they control the redistricting process. And following a brutal November that saw many red regions grow redder, Democrats' national brand problem is even more pronounced in the South.

Texas Democrats are taking the fact that they lost ground in South Texas as a warning sign for a party that has counted on the surge of Latino residents in recent decades to help bring the party to dominance. Taking Latinos for granted is “a mistake we'll never make again,” said Texas State Rep. Erin Gamez, who represents a district in South Texas. “It's a mistake we can't afford to ever make again.”

Scudder’s plan to better position Texas Democrats involves creating a Spanish-language communications department and recruiting more local party leaders, citing the fact that half of precinct positions sit unfilled.

Scudder and other new chairs have not shied away from calling out the national party for failing to read the electorate correctly, and say the party needs to stay hyper focused on middle-class concerns like higher wages and more investment in public education. They echo longtime complaints from local Democrats that national party leaders have neglected to help build out a political operation in all corners of Texas that remains strong even in non-election years.

“We need help now,” Scudder said. “We're just simply out-resourced here. When real money starts coming to the state in a long term infrastructure way, that's when I think the state is going to start to really move in the right direction.”

But newcomers are encouraged by the recent election of Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin, who ran Minnesota's state party for years. Last month the DNC announced it is steering more investment to state parties, with an extra focus on red states intended to help organizers build long-term infrastructure. Under the new formula, red states would get $22,500 per month, a 50 percent bump, whereas their blue state counterparts will get $17,500, a 30 percent increase over current funding levels. That cash can help state parties hire more staff, open new field offices and conduct research that helps state parties hone the right message.

Martin, in an interview, recounted a conversation he had with Brandon Presley, the Mississippi Democrat who came within 3 percentage points of defeating incumbent Gov. Tate Reeves,. Presley said one reason he came up short was there was no infrastructure on the ground to help him.

“That, to me, was a real, real damning indictment, and one that I'll never forget,” Martin said. “The party's responsibility is to build infrastructure so that we meet the moment.”

After a blitzkrieg of a book rollout that saw Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” dominate the news cycle this week with its clinical autopsy of Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection, some in Biden world are hitting back, offering fresh complaints about the reporting process and their own fact checks.

When Biden’s reelection campaign needed video of him taking off-the-cuff questions from voters, they turned to a staged town hall in Delaware in April 2024 that they planned to use for a campaign commercial — an episode that went so poorly, people in the campaign determined the town hall yielded unusable material, according to Tapper and Thompson.

The pair write that at the closed-press event, even amid supporters and campaign staff that had the full list of questions, “Biden had trouble. The campaign ultimately decided that the footage wasn’t usable.”

But Biden team’s is pushing back. Three versions of test ads obtained exclusively by POLITICO tell a slightly more complicated story.

While all three are highly edited and feature jump cuts of Biden’s remarks, the footage also shows the candidate engaging with members of the audience. POLITICO viewed dated documents related to the town hall’s planning and a painting in the gym to confirm the date and location.

One is called “Greatest Nation” focusing on democracy; another is titled “They’ve Tried” on the Affordable Care Act; a third, directed at veterans, is called “Defend Us All.”

None ever aired.

Why was that? Though Tapper and Thompson report that it was because the footage “wasn’t usable,” Biden advisers argue that the footage didn’t make it on air simply because of timing.

A Biden spokesperson tells POLITICO that the campaign tested the ads with focus groups but did not deploy them before the president dropped out of the race following his disastrous June 2024 debate.

Asked about the Biden advisers’ claims, Tapper disputed the contention. In a quotation supplied to POLITICO by Tapper, an unnamed Biden adviser said: “While the campaign was able to selectively utilize portions of the footage to craft ads that were eventually tested on focus groups, the consensus from senior and mid level campaign staff present for the event and those privy to the editing process was that the footage was not up to par and would require crafty editorial support. The campaign’s leadership would not have needed to wait nearly four months to (not) release the ads created with the footage if it reflected the picture of confidence they suggest.”

POLITICO has been unable to independently verify the identity of the unnamed Biden adviser supplied by Tapper.

The dispute over the book’s reporting is the latest pushback from Biden aides and allies against what they are keen to depict as a slapdash fact-checking process by Tapper and Thompson.

Tapper and Thompson have made a point of publicly noting that they paid for their book to be fact-checked — a step that many nonfiction books skip — and that Fergus McIntosh, the head research editor at The New Yorker, led that process.

The New Yorker has a stringent and storied process for vetting materials before publication, and, indeed, McIntosh fact-checked both the book and the excerpt from the book that the magazine published last week. POLITICO has learned that McIntosh told at least one person that he was more limited in the facts he could check in the book versus the excerpt, which is common. McIntosh declined to speak on the record.

McIntosh’s role in fact-checking was raised as an issue in a statement Biden’s spokesperson gave The New Yorker, but which the magazine didn’t publish in its entirety. “[T]he New Yorker employee who reached out to fact-check this excerpt also apparently reviewed the book and offered suggestions to the authors as they wrote it,” the statement read. “It's remarkable that neither this fact checker, nor the authors, reached out to fact check the actual book with us, and only the New Yorker is holding them to the high editorial standards that readers of the book should get in the first place.”

In other words, the unnamed Biden spokesperson claims that the first time a Biden aide heard from the independently hired fact-checker was for the magazine excerpt, not for the book. The New Yorker did not respond to a request for comment.

Rufus Gifford, a Biden campaign official, shared video of Biden talking with George Clooney at a moment that the president allegedly did not recognize him — though the video doesn’t seem to definitively prove Gifford’s argument.

Like some of the book’s buzziest anecdotes — including that Biden didn’t recognize Clooney — the town hall anecdote is a matter of perception.

Thompson reports that some people say ads from the town hall weren’t used because the lighting was bad; the lighting looks serviceable in the ads. Others told Thompson that Biden’s performance at the event was poor; Biden, indeed, sounds raspy and old.

In a statement to POLITICO, a spokesperson for Tapper and Thompson said: “Jake and Alex stand by their reporting in ‘Original Sin.’ The Biden team is repeating the same obfuscatory tactics used during their time in the White House, and news outlets continuing to rely on the very same unattributed and unverified voices raises serious credibility questions.”

The spokesperson didn’t want to be named. Tapper declined to identify his source who appraised the Biden town hall.

This story first appeared in POLITICO Playbook.