It's Tuesday, so yet again it is primary day, but this week doesn't have any really exciting races on the Democratic side so I thought it was time to take an overview of how the Senate races are going in all the other states.

At this point, regaining control of the Senate is well within reach for Democrats, but will still require a massive shift towards the party from the electorate. This isn't out of the question, as Donald Trump's polling is still at record lows and he keeps actually going out of his way to remind people why they are so dissatisfied with his economic record. Starting up a new trade war with Canada isn't going to do the Republican Party any good in states like Maine and Michigan, to state the obvious. The war with Iran continues to stagnate, with gasoline prices showing no signs of coming back down to pre-war levels any time soon (indeed, they are still up over a dollar a gallon from when the war started). And Trump doesn't care one whit -- he still says affordability is some sort of Democratic hoax. Voters aren't in the mood for such gaslighting, which is why the wind is at the Democrats' backs.

Democrats need to flip four Senate seats, which is a tall order, but they now have multiple paths to victory as more and more states have become competitive (to various degrees). Perhaps this is unjustified optimism, and perhaps the polling will prove to be disastrously off (always an option, these days), but as things stand Democrats are looking pretty good.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made an announcement today, unveiling increased sanctions on Iran and also (possibly -- there were few actual details given) on countries which still do business with Iran. It was billed as being a tough declaration of economic warfare (he called it "D-Day"), but what is pretty obvious is that in reality it was an admission of military defeat.

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We're going to pre-empt our normal weekly wrap-up this week, because instead we feel the need to rant. We're getting increasingly sick of the way the progressive candidates are being talked about by mainstream political pundits, so we felt the urge to vent.

Plenty of things did happen in the political world this week, with Trump again trying to outdo himself in the idiocy category. He threatened to "bomb the shit" out of a U.S. ally in the war against Iran, delusionally said the Strait of Hormuz was now a "U.S. territory," took the time to introduce two major multi-billion-dollar changes to American aircraft carrier design (neither of which makes the slightest military sense), tried to pull out of joint military exercises with South Korea while sucking up to North Korea's leader once again, and for good measure ridiculed American voters complaining about having "to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline" at a political rally.

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My apologies, but today was yet another day where I had so many things to get done in real life that I didn't have time to write a new column. What I wanted to write about was a spectacular upset in a Pennsylvania state house district where the Democrat, Brandon Dukes, narrowly defeated his Republican opponent. The district hasn't elected a Democrat in decades, and Donald Trump won it by a whopping 18 points.

This was a low-turnout special election and the same two candidates will face each other in November running for the next full term, when a lot more voters will assumably show up at the polls. Even so, it does show (once again) how Democrats have widened an "enthusiasm gap" with the Republicans. Polls show far more Democrats are motivated and eager to vote this year, while Republicans are a lot more disenchanted and demoralized. This disparity could wind up turning into a "blue wave" in November, although there are no guarantees (as always).

That would have been the theme of my article today, at any rate. The wind is still at the Democrats' backs, but they can't afford to get overconfident with over two months to go before November.

Again, my apologies for not having the time to flesh that argument out and write a full column. And never fear -- tomorrow's Friday Talking Points column will appear on schedule.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Progressives just scored a truly shocking victory in last night's Florida primary election, as state lawmaker Angie Nixon defeated Alex Vindman in the Democratic nomination race for a Senate seat, by a whopping 12 points. The biggest takeaway from this race was that Vindman had raised 16 times the amount of money that Nixon did, but in the end it just didn't matter. The other big takeaway from the race is that Nixon's victory was an impressive one for a progressive because she won demographic groups that don't normally go for progressive candidates -- they are usually a stronghold of votes for establishment candidates instead.

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Yesterday was supposed to be a big deadline. Yesterday was 60 days from when Donald Trump signed the "Memorandum Of Understanding" with Iran, and was theoretically going to be when the final peace agreement between the two nations would be finalized. Needless to say, the deadline passed without this actually happening. The M.O.U. completely collapsed soon after it was agreed to, which made the deadline itself completely meaningless.

It was always a pie-in-the-sky deadline, it is worth noting. Even if the two countries had stuck to the agreement, it is highly doubtful that they would have been able to hammer out an agreement by now that covered all the topics it was supposed to -- not least of which was some sort of agreement on Iran's nuclear capabilities and the half-ton of highly enriched uranium it still possesses. It took Barack Obama over a year to get the Iranians to agree to a nuclear deal, after all (a deal that Trump famously ripped up in his first term, replacing it with absolutely nothing). So expecting a fully-fledged nuclear deal to appear inside of two months was always unrealistically optimistic.

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Many curmudgeonly older people long for the past. They want the world to be simpler -- as it was when they were growing up. Most of them, however, don't have the power to impose their living-in-the-past will upon the world. So they have to be content with grumbling about modern life and being an embarrassment to their children and grandchildren.

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So doubtlessly you've heard the story -- which has gotten heavy coverage in the political press all week long, of course -- of the very progressive Democrat who not only won the primary for an open Senate seat but also impressively outperformed polling expectations, right? It was a huge story -- because it will mean there will now be three progressives on November Senate ballots in three swing states. Progressives scored a big win, which has given rise to much discussion among the pundits over whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for the Democratic Party, because it is such a risky strategy right now (with control of the Senate hanging in the balance).

What's that? You didn't hear about all of this?

Well, that's because the mainstream media decided a different primary race was worth all their ink and airwave time instead. They obsessed over a progressive who very narrowly lost a primary in a governor's race (which is just not as important, to national politics, as the Senate races), because they could barely contain their relief and glee over seeing a progressive lose (even though the polls said she would win).

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I have to begin by pointing out that, technically, that headline should be in quote marks, since it is a direct quotation (from the guy who inadvertently started the whole thing). I was thinking of calling this article "Whistling Past The Graveyard" before I came across that quote, but I had to admit it was indeed a catchier title.

So what is the "great burrito debate," if you haven't already heard about it all? Here's how Forbes explained it (complete with the quote's source):

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Another bundle of primary elections happened last night, and this morning all the political news was focused on what turned out to be the closest race of the evening: an upset victory in the governor's race among Democrats in Wisconsin. Which is understandable enough, I suppose, since it truly was a close contest (decided by less than a half a percentage point, only a few thousand votes), but this focus managed to crowd out another interesting primary next door, in Minnesota.

The stories today about the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary mostly followed one of two storylines. The first was: "How was the polling so wrong?" or (with a slightly different emphasis): "Progressives are failing to live up to their polling in Democratic primaries." The second storyline came from those pundits who could barely contain their relief that a centrist candidate had somehow managed to defeat a progressive in a contest where few people expected he'd even have a chance. Both of these storylines are probably going to prove to be far too sweeping and generic in the end, because while the political reporters all love to write about the "progressive versus establishment" fights within the party, to do so in this case means ignoring several rather large caveats.

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