Since the moment Joe Biden ended his presidential reelection campaign, things have been looking up for Democrats basically everywhere. Polling on Senate races in swing states looks favorable across the board, and once-out-of-reach House races are getting increasingly competitive. Kamala Harris continues to poll competitively even in places like North Carolina, where Democrats haven’t won in a presidential race since Barack Obama ran in 2008.

But there is one place that remains a glaring, humiliating mess—one state that threatens to spoil it all for Democrats: New York.

This is not a new problem. New York has been a basically uninterrupted mess for years. But the state Democratic Party really screwed things up in 2022 when it cost Democrats control of the House during an otherwise victorious midterm election. Since then, the party has botched its state’s redistricting process (again) and has screwed up the state’s abortion referendum so badly that it looks like there could be more gains for Republicans in the upcoming election. Meanwhile, that state’s highest-ranking Democrats can’t stop getting raided by the feds.

I see only one solution to this big, intractable, and steadfast problem: a ruthless takeover by Nancy Pelosi. Fresh off of cleaning up the Democrats’ previous biggest mess, the Joe Biden reelection campaign, she’s clearly up to the task. Pelosi is running once more for reelection in her California district, so she clearly has at least one more big job in her. And her concern for the Democrats’ legacy, for the long-term viability of the national party once she finally retires, has never been clearer. Which means it’s time for her to go Godfather mode on New York.

She certainly seems aware that something must be done. Speaking at the Democratic National Convention last month, Pelosi pointed the finger squarely at the state when asked how Democrats managed to lose the House in 2022. “Five seats in New York,” she said. And then she took the rare step of heaping additional blame........

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