Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest.

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone celebrating, from the cisgender heteronormative lovebirds to the S.B.F. polycules.

In this issue: Abby Livingston on the Long Island special election fallout; what I’m hearing about the Republican blame game; an exclusive on Lachlan Murdoch’s latest media investment; and the readout from Teddy Schleifer on the Biden donors’ post-Hur report headache.

Let’s get started. Here’s Abby’s reporting from the Hill…

What this special election really demonstrated, however, was the fact that New York and Washington Democrats wanted this seat badly, especially following a rough 2022 campaign cycle in the Empire State. Democrats at both local and national levels worked together at every turn of this race in ways that were largely organized, fast, and unified. Here’s how it all came together:

• Rowing in the same direction: After Kathy Hochul’s blessing (she knows a thing or two about winning a House special election), New York Democrats cleared the nomination field for Suozzi, her gubernatorial primary rival. The former congressman was an already-vetted dream candidate with enviable name ID. Around 70 current and former House Democratic members donated to his campaign, as did four senators. (By my count, about 55 Republicans contributed to Pilip’s.)

  New York delegation members, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, campaigned hard in the district. (Grace Meng earned high praise for her G.O.T.V. efforts in the AAPI community, specifically.) Then, the D.C.C.C. and their super PAC counterpart, House Majority PAC, booked their ads early, and outspent the Republicans two-to-one on TV.

• Democrats moved faster: The parties’ respective local machines chose their nominees, but Democrats picked Suozzi a full seven days before the G.O.P. settled on Pilip, giving him a head start. Moreover, Suozzi launched his campaign in October (presumably to challenge Santos), and so his campaign was up and running from the moment he got the nod.

  Pilip, meanwhile, had to pull together a campaign overnight. Suozzi’s head start extended into fundraising—in part due to his former House colleagues, many of whom raced to donate to his campaign in December. By Christmas, Suozzi was on the television airwaves. Republican members, for the most part, were slower to start sending their checks, waiting until late December.

• Will this matter in the fall?: Nobody knows. Of course, it’s better for Democrats to have an incumbent like Suozzi running for reelection and to have a beachhead in Long Island. But New York’s new redistricting map may change the look of the entire district, itself, in just a few months. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, Democrats have enjoyed remarkable success and outperformed polling all over the country; that happened yet again last night. But Republicans repeatedly told me ahead of this special election that they believe the region’s fall electorate will be far more favorable when Donald Trump is on the ballot. And it’s true that Trump scrambles down-ballot races, particularly at the federal level, and especially in places like Long Island. —Abby Livingston

Predictably, few Republicans are grappling publicly with the possibility that the party’s brand might have been a factor in NY-3 swinging from an 8-point Republican victory in 2022 to a 7-point Republican loss in 2024. Instead, everyone is talking about operational mistakes, of which there were plenty: “You have [Lee] Zeldin trying to run the state apparatus, Ed Cox as chair, the C.L.F., the N.R.C.C. and the R.N.C. There always are too many cooks in specials like this with a razor-thin majority,” moaned a New York G.O.P. strategist. “If they had won, we would be saying how great they worked together.” —Tina Nguyen

And now, a scoop from me and Dylan Byers on some interesting fundraising news out of the Fox Corp bunker…

I wasn’t surprised: I’ve been hearing for months that Matze has been plotting a comeback after his libertarian dream of an anything-goes, free-speech social media platform fell apart. The site, which once had about 15 million users, was essentially deplatformed by its tech partners after reports surfaced that Parler had been used to help coordinate the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Matze, who said he had actually pushed for more robust moderation, was fired by the board, led by billionaire Rebekah Mercer, shortly thereafter.

But the most interesting person involved in Matze’s new company wasn’t named on the S.E.C. filing at all: Lachlan Murdoch, now overseeing his father’s News Corp and Fox Corp empires. According to multiple sources close to the deal, Fox Corp is the lead investor in Hedgehog, with $4 million committed in its Series A, plus another $1 million if Matze hits certain performance goals. (A company spokesperson confirmed Fox Corporation’s investment and status as a minority stakeholder, and said talks with Matze first began 18 months ago.)

According to a forthcoming press release, Hedgehog is a news aggregation product with a social component, with a layout designed to “promote conversation and civil debate” among users while directing them toward a broad array of ideologically diverse (but not fringe) news outlets. I’ve had a chance to see the site, and I’d describe it as a sort of mashup of the Apple News front page, with links to news stories populated with Drudge Report-esque headlines, and a LinkedIn-style comments section. When I last interviewed Matze for Puck, I was struck by his belief that one can UX their way into a more civil online discourse.

Apparently, Fox and Lachlan see some potential too, even if digital news aggregators haven’t historically been particularly good businesses. Flipboard, Feedly, and Pocket all struggled to meet their once unicorn-sized ambitions. Artifact, the A.I.-powered news aggregator from the founders of Instagram, shut down just last month. Still, $5 million is a small bet on a product that could presumably be integrated into other Fox properties as it inevitably builds its digital presence. —Tina Nguyen

Now, here’s Teddy Schleifer with the latest from inside the Biden donor bunker…

Gee, I wonder what the 20 or so couples who paid $100,000 to get a seat at the table next to Biden, Pelosi, power-bundler Ron Conway, or real-estate honcho and event host George Marcus are thinking about these days? Talk about dignity, power, and senescence: The Democratic donor class has thought about almost nothing else since Biden was strafed last week by special counsel Robert Hur as old and mentally unfit.

These Democratic elites are often what some people have in mind when they babble about who’s really pulling the strings in Washington—you know, the puppet masters who could tell Biden to step aside for Gavin Newsom or Michelle Obama. The shadowy “they” who should “do something.” Obviously, that’s not how it works. First of all, Biden isn’t stepping aside. And if you actually talk to people who raise money for the president, they’ll tell you there’s nothing they can do, anyway. They’re stuck with Biden, and they’re terrified of Trump. And so all that’s left is to complain, really, and white-knuckle their way to November.

They can’t make Biden any younger, everyone dutifully notes, and few of them are suggesting anything significant that the White House or political team can do. There are minor tactical moves—more surrogate work by cabinet officials, more Jill, more TikTok, more talking about the Inflation Reduction Act or record low unemployment or how the S&P 500 just hit an all-time high—but these are donors and fundraisers, not experts on marketing a product that seemingly every user is telling the manufacturer is out-of-date. “We’re not going to defend the age of the president because there’s no miracle in the world where we can lower his age to 60,” one bundler told me. Another noted the challenges of Biden’s perceived physicality. “He has definitely gotten noticeably weaker over the last few years. He’s still fit. But he’s frail. He’s got that elder gait, where he walks gingerly,” the fundraiser told me. “Trump doesn’t have that.”

Biden donors are repeating the party line in part because they believe it, yes, and because they have seen Biden beat Trump in 2020 and have faith that he can do it again. But they’re also saying this because there are no other options. The chance for major Democratic donors to have found themselves a fitter nominee was in 2022, not mere months before the convention. And this isn’t the sort of self-reflective crowd that admits mistakes.

In the end, their only move is to help, where they can, by raising money for their man. Biden is headed to the 40-person event with the Gettys and Marcus families, and then to the Los Altos Hills home of Bob Klein and Danielle Guttman Klein next week, according to an invite I’ve seen. He’ll also drop by Southern California, the backyard of Biden campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg. Bundlers are raising good money, the pro-Biden super PACs are humming along. “I’m still getting the donation,” said one bundler. “Am I getting enthusiasm for them? Fuck no. I am getting donations to protect democracy. I am getting donations from people who historically like the president, and who think he’s old. He might be old as fuck but he’s doing a great job.”