A record number of Democrats are running on Medicare for All

More Democratic congressional candidates than ever before have voiced support for Medicare for All, according to new data I've compiled for this newsletter.

Over the past few weeks, I used a handful of AI tools to scrape and cross-check candidate websites, local news coverage, and election position trackers in order to pin down where each of the more than 400 Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives who have made the general election ballot this November stands on the issue.

Here's what I found: 163 of them, or roughly 38 percent of the candidates I tracked, explicitly support Medicare for All or a single-payer healthcare system. The other 272 stop short of endorsing single payer, instead staking out a spectrum of positions on expanding Medicare eligibility or strengthening the Affordable Care Act.

(One caveat before we go further: voters in a handful of states have yet to choose their nominees. Massachusetts holds its primary today, while New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware vote over the next few weeks, so another three or four Democratic House candidates will likely join the list of supporters on the ballot this fall.)

Unsurprisingly, most of the Medicare for All supporters, 107 in total, are running in districts the Cook Political Report rates as "Solid D." Another two are competing in "Likely D" or "Lean D" seats, and just four Democrats running in genuine "Tossup" districts have embraced single payer. Those swing-district candidates are Randy Villegas (CA-22), Bob Brooks (PA-07), William Lawrence (MI-07), and Jared Moskowitz (FL-25). Manny Rutinel, who is running in Colorado's swingy 8th district, previously backed the policy but now says he no longer does.

On both sides of the debate, a few of the candidates’ positions aren’t black and white. For example, Adrian Boafo, running in Maryland’s 5th district, has an issues page that says “Pass Medicare for All with a public option, so that if you like your private health insurance you can keep it.” I’m not sure that’s how a single-payer system works, lol. Still, I categorized him as supporting Medicare for All. Tom Perriello, a former Congressman running in conservative-leaning VA-05, was recently touted by Rep. Pramila Jayapal as “a fearless, progressive partner in our fight for Medicare for All,” but it’s been difficult to track down any stated support of Medicare for All this cycle, beyond allowing people to “buy-in” to Medicare. As a result, I’ve categorized him as against single-payer. 

As for the current Congress, 114 House Democrats have signed on as co-sponsors of Jayapal's Medicare for All bill, a slim majority of the 212-member Democratic conference. If my candidate-level estimates hold up, House Democrats should return next year with roughly the same number of single-payer supporters in their ranks, as several prominent backers retire or get redistricted out of their seats while incoming battleground-district members keep their distance from the policy.

All of which leaves Minority Leader (and would-be Speaker) Hakeem Jeffries with a bit of a dilemma. If Democrats retake the chamber and he gets to set the agenda, progressive activists and the online Left will demand a ceremonial vote on Medicare for All to show their base they’re fighting for it. Jeffries’ team knows how unforgiving the math is, and that's probably why he stumbled through a non-committal answer in this recent clip:

Stepping back from the district-by-district calculations, you can kind of see a macro-level trend of what’s happened in the decade since Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign injected the concept of single-payer healthcare back into the party's bloodstream: candidates in deep-blue seats now back Medicare for All almost by default, while nearly everyone competing for the seats that will actually decide the majority keeps the policy at arm's length. 

Note: This level of data collection and manual cross-checking was a beast! All-Access subscribers can request access to my full data-set here, which includes categorizations of single-payer support for every Democratic candidate for Congress on the ballot this November. If you see an error or misclassification, shoot me an email and let me know. 

Rep. Maxwell Frost, the Gen-Z Democrat representing the Orlando area in Congress, went on Jubilee Media’s Surrounded this week to debate 20 angry baby boomers over student debt relief, the social safety net, and January 6th. Watch below:

With over 14 million followers, Carlos Eduardo Espina runs one of the largest TikTok accounts posting about U.S. news and politics on the entire platform. He has a bigger following than Fox News and Kamala Harris, and among Spanish-speaking audiences in the U.S., he is probably the single most influential news creator on the app.

So, he was more than a little surprised when he woke up on Sunday morning, logged onto TikTok, and discovered that the company had “permanently” banned his account, citing too many recent policy violations. The ordeal became a whole thing among his audience, with his fans making content urging the company to reinstate his account. Espina himself created a backup account that quickly accumulated nearly 500,000 followers in 24 hours. 

But, more than 24 hours later on Monday evening, TikTok reversed course and reinstated the primary account, without much explanation as to what happened.

For those unfamiliar, TikTok uses automated systems to police users' content, often flagging posts for violating vague "community guidelines." Oftentimes, users have no idea which guideline their content supposedly violated, and platform moderators quickly reverse many of these violations once a user clicks a button and submits an appeal. If those appeals fail, a user sometimes receives an "account strike," and after multiple strikes, TikTok can ban their account. But because he usually won on appeal, Espina didn't pay much attention to the violations he'd been racking up over the summer. After all, he'd been doing this for six years, and TikTok had never taken serious action against his account.

"It got to a point where all my videos would get taken down, but I would always appeal them, and 95% of the time they'd get brought back up," he told me. "The account strike wouldn't really stick until after you appeal and it doesn't get restored. So a few didn't get restored, and I guess they just accumulated." He says he received an automated "Account warning" at the end of July, but he didn't think a ban would actually happen without someone from TikTok reaching out and explaining the situation to him.

Even with his account restored, Espina is still owed an explanation as to what specifically happened so he can avoid a repeat in the future. "I don't understand what the guidelines are," says Espina. "All they say is 'community guidelines violation.' It's just very broad…which community guideline is it, out of the million that they have?" I reached out to TikTok US for comment and have yet to receive a response.

There's also a very political layer to this story. Espina has been politically active this midterm cycle, serving as a major advocate for Democrat James Talarico in his home state of Texas and working on behalf of Tom Steyer in the California gubernatorial primary. Plus, progressive creators have long been suspicious of censorship on TikTok, and that distrust has only deepened since the platform's new ownership structure went into effect earlier this year. Despite the change in owners, data shows that there has not been any macro-level change to the distribution of political content on the platform in recent months.

In the end, Espina barely lost a day of posting. But the episode is a reminder of the influence the major social platforms wield as a gatekeeper in the information ecosystem, and how little control creators have over their own audiences. "What if I got banned the day before the election and it takes three, four days to come back online?...Even if you're a big creator, you're not really in control as long as the platform's in control."

Sen. Ed Markey is on the ballot in Massachusetts today, fending off a primary challenge from Rep. Seth Moulton after making the embarrassing decision to seek another six-year term at age 80. He's expected to win easily, though I suppose anything could happen.

The last time Markey faced a primary challenger was in 2020, when he beat Joe Kennedy III, a member of the famous Massachusetts political dynasty. His campaign that cycle was buoyed by what I still consider to be one of my favorite political ads of all time. Watch it below.