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The progressive populist Abdul El-Sayed won Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Michigan — though the vote was so close that most outlets didn’t call the race until this morning.

It’s not exactly the resounding triumph progressives expected. In the lead-up to Election Day, El-Sayed’s campaign boasted of a “massive” polling lead over centrist Rep. Haley Stevens that they said definitively proved the mainstream appeal of his style of politics.

In reality, the takeaways from one of the midterms’ bitterest and most consequential races are probably more mixed. El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former public health official who has championed policies like Medicare-for-all and an end to military aid for Israel, appeared to struggle in some of Michigan’s lower-income and less-educated districts. 

That said, his win is still a big deal, especially given the forces arrayed against him. Democratic heavyweights and big-money donors both threw their considerable weight behind Stevens. 

The left’s big swing-state test

The Democratic primary in Michigan centered on a lot of interesting issues: money in politics, a whole bunch of -isms, and the role of “the establishment,” to name just a few. But the upcoming general election will test one question above all: Can a left-wing populist win over swing-state voters the way right-wing populists have been doing for years now? 

We have some left-wing populists in office already, of course — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez D-NY), who both campaigned for El-Sayed this cycle. Progressives represent a number of cities and urban congressional districts. And over the past few months, the left wing of the Democratic Party has notched some notable primary wins.

But all of these candidates have run to represent solidly Democratic communities, where winning the primary effectively meant winning the seat. An out-and-proud, Sanders-style, left-wing populist arguably has yet to prove that this platform can win a statewide general election in a state that isn’t deep-blue already. 

That makes Michigan a high-stakes test. The state went for Trump in two of the past three presidential elections. Winning Michigan as a Democrat means cobbling together a coalition from a broad and varied range of constituencies, including Black Detroiters, swing suburbanites, college-town progressives, blue-collar union workers, and both Jewish and Muslim Americans. 

“Michigan is like a microcosm of America,” one Detroit reporter told my colleague Astead Herndon. If a left-wing populist can win there, in other words, the Democratic Party will really have to pay attention. 

One link for later

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Before you go…

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• Today’s trivia: What was the name of the Nickelodeon game show hosted by Marc Summers? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday, we asked you how many states have legalized marijuana. That would be 41, if you count medical use, and 24 if you do not.

Abdul El-Sayed has defeated Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary — albeit by a significantly smaller margin than preelection polling suggested. He’s beaten back $30 million in AIPAC spending and endorsements from top Democrats, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who backed Stevens. Now he’s moving on to face the GOP nominee, former Rep. Mike Rogers, in a contest crucial to determining Senate control.

So the next question is: Can El-Sayed beat a Republican?

That will be a cinch, some in his camp claim. “For progressives, getting out of the primary is a far more difficult battle than winning in the general,” left-wing streamer Hasan Piker told CNN last week.

But the reality is that we’ve had very few true tests of how candidates associated with the left flank of the party — and specifically with the Bernie Sanders-backed revolt against the establishment — would fare in competitive swing-state general elections. 

Which means that this would be one of the first such tests, and that its outcome will have enormous stakes for the party’s future.

El-Sayed’s views on Israel and his prospective history-making turn as the first-ever Muslim senator have gotten much coverage. But El-Sayed is also a dyed-in-the-wool member of the Sanders faction, having been closely aligned with Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez since his first political campaign in 2018. Both have campaigned for him this cycle.

If El-Sayed defeats Rogers convincingly (he’s personally predicting a 7-point victory as his baseline), he’ll become a megastar and even possibly a presidential contender. He’ll arguably be the first to prove that the Sanders formula — attacking billionaires, corporate influence, and the party establishment, while backing sweeping social welfare spending like Medicare-for-all — can win over voters who once backed President Donald Trump.

“If Abdul El-Sayed beats Stevens I actually think he’s very likely to be the next president,” Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of the socialist publication Current Affairs, posted on X last month. “If he wins the general, it’s over for centrist Dems.”

Conversely, if El-Sayed — who has trailed Rogers in recent polls — loses, skeptics may conclude that the left can’t appeal to the country’s true swing voters, and that nominating a leftist for president in 2028, or in downballot races, is too big of a risk. 

The core disagreement: Will the left’s approach succeed in the general election?

Over the past decade, it has become an article of faith across much of the left that their particular populist approach to economics and foreign policy would be potent in a general election.

They argue that typical Democrats have a more compromised platform and timid style, lacking the populist fire that can win over disaffected Americans. “Bernie would’ve won” in 2016, the saying goes, by using his outsider credibility and ambitious plans to appeal to the working-class voters and independents that went for Trump. Kamala Harris’s defeat, amid intense criticism on the left over her and Joe Biden’s support for Israel, further bolstered their sense that the party establishment just can’t get it done. 

Now, left factionalists are pointing to their several high-profile primary victories this year and arguing that energy and enthusiasm are on their side — and would translate to the general election too.

Many mainstream Democrats see this as naive. They believe that while talk of “socialism” and other far-left positions might work fine in deep blue cities and districts, it could well prove toxic in swing states that have voted for Trump. While public opinion on certain issues has moved in the left’s direction, especially Israel, candidates could have a tougher time on issues like crime, where El-Sayed has offered nuanced explanations of his “defund the police” rhetoric from 2020.

“Winning a Democratic primary means close to nothing when it comes to the general election, because these are functionally different voter pools,” Lakshya Jain of the center-left publication The Argument recently wrote.

Some analysts pointed to the primary results as a potential harbinger of general election struggles, with El-Sayed performing poorly against Stevens in the kinds of rural areas that have swung toward Republicans in the Trump era.

Are there past examples of Bernie-aligned candidates making it to tough general elections?

But even though the “Bernie vs. the establishment” battle has been raging on and off for the past decade, there have been very few clean tests about how Bernie-backed candidates would do in swing states.

Sanders never won the presidential nomination, and candidates aligned with him have generally preferred to run in strongly Democratic areas where, if they win the primary, the general election is a fait accompli. The now-expanding “squad” of left-wing House members that began with Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley all fit this model.

There have, however, been a few past examples where Sanders-aligned candidates have made it to the general election in tough territory.

One is Andrew Gillum, whose 2018 bid for governor of Florida was backed by Sanders and other progressive groups, including billionaire Tom Steyer’s network. He won the nomination over establishment favorite Gwen Graham — but then went on to lose the general election to Ron DeSantis by a mere four-tenths of a percentage point, ushering in what became the era of Deep Red Florida.

In nominating Gillum, did the left blow a winnable race amid a national Democratic wave? Maybe — but one counterargument is that longtime Sen. Bill Nelson, a thoroughly mainstream Democrat, lost his seat by a similarly tight margin in that same election. Florida may have just been trending redder generally. Gillum’s post-election personal struggles also color views of his candidacy today.

That same cycle, in Nebraska, Kara Eastman upset the establishment favorite to win the nomination for a swing House district. (Sanders hadn’t endorsed her in the primary, but she ran on a platform of Medicare-for-all and free college.) She lost in 2018 — and again in 2020, even though Joe Biden won her district — and has been viewed inside the party as a cautionary tale about blowing a winnable race ever since.

The outcome was happier for Keith Ellison, a close Sanders ally who won his race to be Minnesota’s attorney general in 2018. Yet his margin of victory — about 4 percentage points — wasn’t particularly impressive in a lean blue state in a strongly Democratic year when Tim Walz won the governor’s race by 11. Later, when Ellison ran for reelection in 2022, he eked out a win by less than 1 point while Walz won by 8.

John Fetterman was generally understood to be a “Bernie faction” candidate when he ran for an open US Senate seat in Pennsylvania in 2022. (Sanders stayed neutral in the primary that year, but had backed Fetterman’s earlier lieutenant governor campaign and championed him in the general election.) But he wasn’t exactly running on a bold left platform — he backed off his past Medicare-for-all support and was pro-fracking.

Fetterman ended up winning by 5 points even though it was a favorable cycle for Republicans — but simultaneously, the more centrist Josh Shapiro won the governor’s race by 15. However, Shapiro’s opponent was believed to be weaker and more extreme, and the stroke Fetterman suffered that year complicates efforts to read too much into his performance. 

Separate from his electoral performance, Fetterman’s association with the Sanders left ended years ago as his politics moved to the right; lately, there has been talk he might switch parties. This has also fueled arguments from moderates that populist outsider candidates are less reliable than more conventional ones even if they do manage to win.

El-Sayed is running on a bold left platform in a true swing state

Taking this grab bag of outcomes together, one can see why mainstream Democrats might be skeptical that the left has the secret sauce to win swing voters. But each race has had its own unique circumstances and complications.

Furthermore, in this cycle, the electorate could be in a different place — more disenchanted by the establishment and more willing to take a chance on further-left candidates.

Graham Platner was set to be the great hope for the Sanders faction until his Senate campaign was derailed by scandal and he was replaced on the ballot by Troy Jackson — another Sanders-aligned candidate, albeit one with his own long history in state politics. But though Jackson is facing a formidable Republican incumbent, Maine is a blue state that hasn’t backed a GOP presidential candidate since 1988.

Michigan is tougher turf, having voted for Trump in two of the past three presidential elections. The conventional wisdom for how a Democrat can win a race there is to run a cautious campaign, being careful not to alienate potentially winnable Republican and independent voters. A good example is Gary Peters, the departing two-term senator El-Sayed is running to replace, who’s a traditional pro-union Democrat known for keeping a low profile in general.

El-Sayed is not doing that. He supports Medicare-for-all, a billionaire wealth tax, abolishing ICE, and a full arms embargo on Israel. While El-Sayed is not a democratic socialist, he’s very closely tied to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez — the trio held hands and raised their arms together at a recent rally, in an image Michigan voters may well see in GOP-funded attack ads. 

And back in 2020, El-Sayed expressed sympathy with activists calling to “defund the police” and said most major cities spend far too much on police departments, though he’s tried to downplay those views this cycle.

“I’m worried that he’s more passionate about attacking other Dems than Republicans and may not be ready for what’s coming,” Adam Jentleson, president of the center-left Searchlight Institute, posted on X recently.

Now that he’s won the primary, El-Sayed will get the chance to try and show he’s ready — and to test whether his bold left platform will be his greatest asset, or a millstone.

In February, an animal rights group flew a drone over a farm in California that raises calves destined for dairies and cattle ranches. Double D Dairies, the company that owns the farm, is linked to a prominent milk brand that highlights its humane farming practices. But the drone documented a very different reality. 

In one part of the drone video, filmed by the group Direct Action Everywhere, employees can be seen kicking calves in the face. In another, they grind hot irons into calves’ skulls, apparently without anesthetics, causing some to thrash and collapse (this procedure is done to prevent horn growth). Many calves were confined in tiny crates.

The ranch fired one of the employees after the investigation was published in the Los Angeles Times. “Animal welfare and safety are incredibly important to us, and we have a zero-tolerance policy for any mistreatment,” the owner wrote to the LA Times over email. When Vox reached the owner for an interview, he declined to comment.

This sort of treatment of farmed animals, it turns out, is far from unusual. Many investigations into the milk and beef industries — along with other livestock sectors — have uncovered similar abuses.

But without drone footage, we probably wouldn’t know about many of them. Drones flown by animal advocates have also captured enormous hog manure pits overflowing during a hurricane, millions of egg-laying hens culled amidst a bird flu outbreak, and a large egg farm that falsely claimed to let its hens roam free when it didn’t.

Over the past decade, as drones have become more affordable and easier to operate, they have become an essential — and impactful — tool for exposing wrongdoing at the factory farms that collectively house billions of animals in the US. But a recently proposed rule by the Trump administration could cut off such drone-powered documentation, making the mere search for this type of animal cruelty illegal — and a huge, largely hidden industry all the more impenetrable. It could also take out eyes in the sky that add visibility into countless other massive industries and facilities across the US. 

The potential drone ban, briefly explained

There are more than 800,000 registered drones in the US, and whether people fly them for fun or for business, they have to follow some basic rules. They must keep them below 400 feet, for example, and avoid flying them near sensitive places like airports, military bases, and federal prisons.

But the types of facilities that are off-limits for unauthorized drone flight could soon balloon to also include a much broader range of places, such as data centers, banks, and wastewater facilities, along with farms and slaughterhouses. 

A decade ago, Congress directed the Federal Aviation Administration to develop a system in which businesses deemed vital to US economic and national security could request drone flight restrictions over their property. And in May, the FAA proposed a new rule to do just that. 

The rule would allow facilities in 16 vaguely defined sectors considered “critical infrastructure” to request drone restrictions, including everything from “financial services;” to “information technology;” to “food and agriculture;” and, broadly, “commercial.” 

The likelihood of the proposed rule becoming regulation as it’s currently drafted is unclear, though getting it done is a priority for the Trump administration. In June 2025, the White House issued an executive order calling for the FAA to “promulgate a final rule as soon as practicable.” 

The meat industry says the potential new rule would help to protect America’s food supply. They say that, in theory, drones could pose a biosecurity risk; they worry that drone operators could intentionally or inadvertently spread disease from farm to farm. Other objections include the possibility that these small aircraft might distress the animals or that people could spy on farms and gather proprietary information on farm technologies and production practices.

But in its comments to the FAA lies another motivation from these industries: making it harder for activists to document what happens on farms.

“Activists have been deploying drones against animal agriculture, and against hog operations specifically, for well over a decade,” the National Pork Producers Council wrote in a comment to the FAA.

“Poultry operations, in particular, have been targeted by outside groups using drones to capture aerial footage for activist campaigns,” the North Carolina Poultry Federation wrote. 

“Ag-gag” 2.0

For decades, activists have gone undercover to work at farms and slaughterhouses and covertly film and expose animal cruelty on the ground. Their footage has given millions of Americans a peek into the US meat, milk, and egg industries and has occasionally led to criminal animal cruelty charges, boycotts, and legislative action. Eventually, the industry fought back.

In the 2010s, lawmakers allied with the meat industry proposed bills in around 25 states to make such investigations illegal, and several were passed into law. Critics called them “ag-gag” laws, describing how they gag activists and journalists from exposing animal cruelty and environmental pollution in the agricultural sector. And while a few were struck down in the courts as unconstitutional, several still stand. 

In the wake of this investigative crackdown, animal advocates increasingly turned to drones over the past decade to conduct their investigations. It didn’t take long for several heavily agricultural states — including Iowa, Texas, and Kentucky  — to restrict drone operators from flying over animal farms.

Drone operator José Elias, who works for SingleStone Media — a nonprofit that reports on how factory farms affect rural communities — told Vox that the FAA’s proposed rule “allows a pathway for factory farms to continue to operate under secrecy.”

The proposed rule also worries Ram Daya, a freelance photojournalist with the group We Animals who, for years, has flown drones over factory farms to capture their enormous scale and intensive confinement of animals. Drone investigations, he said, have helped to expose the vast gulf between “how [farms] portray themselves” — often as humane and sustainable — “versus how they actually operate.” 

If enacted, Daya said, the rule would “further hinder the ability of the general public to understand what’s going on in farms and animal industrial facilities.”

He and others said this is part of a larger pattern by governments and industry to stifle farm investigations — a new iteration of “ag-gag” laws.  

Beyond factory farms, of course, this proposed regulation could hamper important insights into a huge number of other industries, businesses, and government-run facilities. An environmental journalist, for example, used a drone outfitted with a thermal camera earlier this year to reveal that Elon Musk’s xAI company was illegally using gas to power one of its data centers. 

The broad scope of the proposed rule has caught the attention of journalistic and pro-democracy groups, as well, who’ve argued in comments to the FAA that its rule could suppress newsgathering — and that the agency ought to better weigh First Amendment protections in its rulemaking.

“As drones have become an essential tool of modern journalism, restrictions on their use increasingly limit the public’s ability to receive information about newsworthy events,” the National Press Photographers Association wrote. “The FAA should therefore ensure that this rule protects against genuine security threats while preserving journalists’ ability to use drones as a principal means of documenting matters of public concern.”

The group wants the FAA to require drone restriction applicants to be able to demonstrate a specific threat and explain why existing laws are insufficient to deter it; give the public a meaningful opportunity to comment on drone restriction applications; and establish a process for journalists and others to challenge them, among other changes.  

Most Americans will never set foot inside a factory farm or slaughterhouse. What little we know about these places has often come from investigators willing to document them. If that work becomes harder, it becomes harder to know where our food comes from. That’s good news for an industry that has long fought against public scrutiny. And bad news for the rest of us — and the billions of animals involved.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

At first, it seems innocuous. You’re burned out at work, and an influencer video promising the five steps to find the career you’ve always wanted catches your eye on Instagram. Perhaps you’re also anxious about a big birthday approaching, so while commuting home, you listen to a podcast host explain the seven essential habits you should start today to extend your lifespan by 20 years. Later on, you ask AI assistant ChatGPT to help resolve a debate with your partner. 

In all of these moments, you are temporarily relieving your stress and anxiety. You might even be getting some answers. But with each path you go down, you’re also losing something important: the opportunity to sit with, and tolerate, uncertainty. 

Being able to keep it together when an outcome is unknown is critical to enjoying your life. It’s what helps us manage friction in relationships, allows us to make considered decisions as opposed to acting on impulse, and empowers us to eventually take big leaps. But we’re collectively losing our ability to bear uncertainty.

The proliferation of the internet and smartphones kicked off the trend of reduced exposure, which a 2019 study suggested was linked to an overall decline in our ability to tolerate uncertainty. Now there’s emerging evidence from multiple studies suggesting that AI systems could be weakening our uncertainty muscles further. AI systems not only supply instant answers, but remove the need for us to make meaning of ambiguous experiences. They convert interpretation from something actively done to something that is outsourced, then passively consumed. 

When we strengthen our uncertainty tolerance, what we’re really learning is a new definition of what it means to feel safe and secure.

One study comparing the responses of mental health professionals and chatbots found that the bots were more likely to provide advice than their human counterparts. Perhaps this is because they are designed to give us what we want, rather than what we need: Other research has found that people are more satisfied when their AI therapist provides advice instead of encouraging reflection, and are more likely to continue using it when it’s solution-oriented.

“It’s a skill to manage ambiguity and uncertainty, and if you’re not exposed to it, if you don’t know how to deal with it, you never learn that capacity,” Llewellyn van Zyl, a Netherlands-based wellbeing researcher and AI systems designer, told me. As LLMs supply immediate and sycophantic companionship, validation, and answers, they slowly replace the need to, for instance, practice ambiguity tolerance in the messy context of a human relationship, or to muddle through your own interpretation of an experience. “Friction, effort and struggle are not barriers to wellbeing but are the main ingredients needed for development to take place,” Van Zyl wrote in a paper.

Indeed, tolerating uncertainty often feels like a struggle, and for some people manifests as consistent anxiety or depression over being unable to control or predict the future. It is a state characterized by fear-based decision-making, where the ultimate achievement is avoiding discomfort and surprise at all costs.

But this way of living has an unexpected cost. If you’re especially anxious about a question or decision, that could indicate that you’re wedded to a single idea of what your future could look like, which could mean you close yourself off to other meaningful opportunities. 

If you’ve increasingly found yourself looking for certainty and definitive answers, here’s how to get more comfortable sitting with unknowns. 

How to strengthen your uncertainty muscles day-to-day 

If you’re lifting weights for the first time, you wouldn’t go in and try to deadlift 200 pounds; you’d work your way up to it. Similarly, building uncertainty tolerance starts by integrating small, safe, and low-stakes moments of practice — think of these ideas as your 5-pound dumbbells.  

Identify the small opportunities.

First, look for ways in your daily life to live with short bursts of uncertainty and break out of your routine: For instance, try going to a restaurant without looking at the menu if you typically scour it first. Attend an exercise class with a new instructor if you never stray from your favorite, or grab a coffee with that new potential friend you’ve been meaning to hang out with. 

Choosing uncertainty might lead to discomfort: The cafe could serve food you don’t like, the yoga teacher might be too intense, the new pal could turn out to be dull. 

But as in weight lifting, comfort isn’t the point. It’s about enduring discomfort and getting stronger. 

Find a simple phrase to bring you back to the present.

If you are feeling anxious as you attempt to practice this, you can try a couple of strategies from psychiatrist Judson Brewer’s book Unwinding Anxiety. He recommends learning to weave curiosity into our most stressful moments, asking questions like, “How is this feeling serving me right now?” Even a simple, “Hmmm…” when you feel anxiety can bring you into the present moment, and create the space for curiosity.

In her new book, Prophecy, Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz also identifies curiosity as a salve for our obsession with answers. “If anxiety about the future is the main driver behind our craving for prediction, curiosity is one of its most powerful antidotes,” she writes. “… the more curiosity you can manage to conjure about the present, the less apprehension you’ll feel about the future, because your attention will be in the here and now.”

Learn to ask the right questions 

Curiosity is fueled by questions. But not all questions are created equal. 

A good question, the Zen Buddhist teacher Joan Sutherland told me for my recent book, “will always make the room bigger, or open a door in the room to let something else in, or blow down the walls of the room entirely.” Obsessing over finding fast, easy answers to your biggest life questions can give you tunnel vision, eliminating possible futures by keeping fear and anxiety at the wheel. 

From the stories and research I explored in my book, I’ve learned that great questions — the best curiosity fuel  — have a few key attributes:

Avoid yes or no questions in favor of something more expansive.

First, as Sutherland explained, the best questions grow your set of possible solutions and futures. Sometimes, a binary question — e.g., Am I in the right relationship? — can make you feel stuck because it’s artificially limiting the options. A better question opens up possibilities, so instead you might instead ask yourself, “How would my partner and I both need to change in order for us to stay together?

Make sure your question is your own.

A great question serves as an internal GPS leading you back to your own needs and values, not what someone else might want or expect of you. 

Take, for instance, a question like, Am I ever going to get married or Should I have a second kid? Not only are these binary questions, but they also could be questions that a family member is pressuring you to answer. 

The best questions are the ones you create. They are rooted in self-compassion, allowing you to build yourself up rather than tear yourself down. Try to ask yourself questions that take the pressure off, that give you space to breathe.  

Find a question that propels you forward.

Ah, regret. It plays an important role in our lives, but should be used sparingly, if at all, as question fuel. Think about questions like, What if I had just done it differently? or Why did we break up? If great questions open up a window or a door, these kinds of queries board them up. They keep you stuck in a stale, ruminative loop, rehashing the past rather than moving on and considering possible futures. If what you’re seeking is clarity or answers, these kinds of questions won’t provide them.   

Take the pressure off

The last way to get comfortable with uncertainty is more subtle. It’s a mindset shift rooted in a 120-year-old piece of advice that the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke offered to an aspiring poet, Franz Kappus. 

Kappus had written to Rilke asking him all kinds of questions about how to live his life. Rilke responded:

I want to ask you, dear sir, as best I can, to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language. Don’t look for the answers now: they cannot be given to you yet because you cannot yet live them, and what matters is to live everything. For now, live the questions. If you do, then maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answer.

Part of what can make uncertainty so uncomfortable is the sense of urgency it creates in us. We treat questions like problems that need immediate solutions. Rilke offers a powerful reframe: Questions are not tormentors, but teachers. And finding answers, especially to our most challenging questions, is not something that can happen instantly. Questions must be lived. 

This advice is an invitation to pause and take a breath. You do not need to have all of the answers today, tomorrow, or next week. In fact, when it comes to the big questions of our life, it’s better if you don’t seek the answers immediately. 

It is also a reminder to go out and live your life. It’s easy to let anxiety about uncertainty stop us from pursuing new experiences — even seemingly small steps into the unknown can feel very scary. When we strengthen our uncertainty tolerance, what we’re really learning is a new definition of what it means to feel safe and secure. Instead of defining security as being protected from challenge, we can define it as being ready to face whatever the future holds. 

As homeownership slips further out of reach in America, more people are spending more of their lives as renters. Millennials and Gen Zs are less likely to own homes than older generations did at the same age, and the median age of a first-time homebuyer recently reached an all-time high of 40, up from 28 in 1991. 

That need not be a bad thing. Renting offers many benefits — flexibility, far lower upfront costs, never having to figure out what a “sacrificial anode rod” is — and homeownership is overrated as a savings vehicle. 

But being a renter in America (as roughly one in three people here are) can also be a very undignified experience. In most states, your landlord can kick you out when your lease ends for no reason at all, even if you haven’t done anything wrong. Many tenants live in fear of receiving their next lease renewal, not knowing if they’ll be displaced by the next rent hike. 

Some progressive policymakers, buoyed by the growing influence of democratic socialism and a resurgent tenant movement, are reviving an old, highly controversial answer to renters’ lack of security: simply ban steep rent increases through rent control. 

In June, New York City, under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, froze rents on rent-stabilized apartments, which make up about 40 percent of the city’s rental housing stock. Rent control laws have been passed or tightened in recent years in places from Washington state to Los Angeles to Montgomery County, Maryland, and tenant advocates this year have pushed similar measures in Massachusetts, Washington, DC, Providence, Rhode Island, and Redwood City, California. 

Rent control’s advocates argue that the policy not only moderates prices, but also offers tenants stability and a firmer claim to their homes. It helps put “the landlord-tenant dynamic on different and more equal footing,” as Siraj Sindhu, executive director of Reclaim Rhode Island, which backed a Providence rent-stabilization ordinance that passed the city council before being vetoed by the mayor, told me. 

Those are really important goals. I’m a lifelong renter, having literally never lived in an owner-occupied home, and I hate that I can’t predict what my housing costs will be less than a year from now. But is rent control the best way to achieve stability? 

Housing economists have long hated rent control; the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously called it “the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing.” Decades of research have found that it can have many unintended negative consequences, including depressing housing construction by making it financially impractical to build new rentals. And as we know from today’s crippling housing shortage, nothing is worse for long-term affordability than a scarcity of homes. More recent research, however, suggests that better-designed rent control laws can protect some tenants without having catastrophic consequences for housing supply. 

That rent control keeps coming back as a centerpiece of our housing politics reflects just how impoverished our policy ideas are for providing renters what they lack most: predictable costs and secure tenure. The US has an elaborate policy infrastructure to privilege and subsidize homeownership, while treating renting as an afterthought, like a condition of poverty or at best a waystation on the path to buying a house. That makes ever less sense in a country where millions of people will rent for life, whether by choice or necessity.  

The truth about rent control is somewhere between both extremes. It can, in some cases, certainly be worthwhile. But it remains a highly limited tool, and others can furnish some of the same benefits without fueling the very affordability crisis that they’re meant to address.   

Why economists (mostly) oppose rent control

Rent control polls favorably, and it’s not hard to imagine why — voters despise high prices. Capping rents might intuitively seem fair and costless: The tenant is protected from ridiculously high prices, the landlord profits a bit less, and society as a whole is no worse off. Who could object to that? 

In fact, though, many economists vehemently oppose rent control precisely because it isn’t cost-free — it merely moves costs onto others and makes them less visible.

In uber-expensive cities like New York and Boston, rents are so high because demand to live there far outstrips the supply of homes. In a healthy housing market, high prices signal to developers to build more homes, which then brings prices down and, just as importantly, grows the city’s population and economy by providing homes to people who want to move there. We’ve recently seen this happen in Austin, Texas: The city experienced a rapid run-up in rents during Covid, and builders responded (after the city eased some of its building restrictions) with a flood of new apartments. Rents have since fallen well below pre-Covid levels in real dollars. By contrast, policies that cap rents would diminish the incentive to build rental homes at a time when the US needs many more of them. 

Meanwhile, if rent caps fail to keep pace with landlords’ rising costs, owners may neglect maintenance or even pull apartments from the rental market if they no longer pencil out. One widely cited economics paper documented this dynamic in San Francisco, where the majority of rental housing is rent-controlled and annual rent increases are capped well below inflation. The city’s 1994 expansion of its rent control law, the researchers found, shrank the supply of rental housing among newly covered properties by 15 percent, largely because landlords converted rentals into owner-occupied units. The expansion made tenants 10 to 20 percent more likely to remain in their homes, but at the cost of making San Francisco’s rental housing scarcer and raising the rents of non-rent-controlled apartments. 

Rent control programs are generally not means-tested, meaning that tenants in eligible apartments receive it regardless of their incomes. So a higher-income tenant who happened to secure a regulated apartment can remain indefinitely at a steep discount, while a lower-income newcomer is left to compete for market-rate units, which are exorbitantly priced in part because of rent control.

As a result, rent control laws bear part of the blame for why San Francisco and New York City are so unaffordable, Arpit Gupta, a housing economist at New York University, told me. Trying to suppress rents in cities like these is like trying to hold the lid down on a boiling pot — the pressure inevitably spills over somewhere else. Gupta, who sits on the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, which sets maximum increases for the city’s rent-stabilized apartments, cast the lone “no” vote on the rent-freeze measure this summer. 

The freeze creates “a severe risk of financial distress” for many buildings, he told me. It could prompt landlords to leave apartments vacant after a tenant moves out if the cost to rehabilitate it cannot be recouped through the legally permitted rent. The number of vacant rent-stabilized apartments in the city has already been rising, and Gupta has argued that New York state’s 2019 overhaul of its rent-regulation laws, which further constrained landlords’ revenues, may be partly to blame.

Many leftists don’t like arguments like these because they’re uncomfortable with the idea that housing must be kept financially worthwhile for private owners. I sympathize with that instinct — housing is a human need, and it feels wrong for its availability to depend on profitability. But it doesn’t do us much good to ignore the structure of the economy we actually live in, where housing is overwhelmingly provided by the private market. 

Housing markets can be very good at providing for people’s needs, if we allow them to work better by legalizing more housing construction and pair it with targeted rental subsidies to people with low incomes. 

How rent control got smarter 

One of the clearest ways to understand rent control comes from Shane Phillips, a housing researcher at UCLA. It should be viewed not as a long-term affordability strategy, he has argued, but as a targeted stability tactic. For affordability, there’s no substitute for building enough homes. But in already broken, unaffordable markets, like many of America’s superstar cities, rent control can be a stopgap that lets some residents remain in their homes. It’s reasonable to expect that people’s homes shouldn’t be treated as crude commodities that they can be priced out of at any moment. The question is how to balance security for existing residents against the structural harms rent control can cause to the overall market.

Not all rent control policies are created equal. Old forms of it appeared in places from ancient Rome to imperial China to the Jewish ghettoes of Early Modern Europe. When describing modern rent control, however, researchers distinguish among a few different types. “First-generation” rent controls arose largely as emergency measures across Europe during World War I, becoming very widespread in the US during World War II. These typically froze each unit’s rent at a fixed dollar amount, with few avenues for adjustment as costs rose; over time, they tended to push homes out of the rental market and discourage maintenance, reducing both the quantity and quality of rental housing.

By the 1970s-80s, a “second generation” of rent control laws, often called “rent stabilization,” was adopted in New York, Boston, Washington, DC, municipalities across New Jersey, and numerous California cities. These introduced some important innovations: They allow modest annual rent increases, set by a formula or regulatory board and often pegged to the rate of inflation. They exempt new-construction buildings from price controls, which reduces the disincentive for developers to build new apartments. 

They also often include “vacancy decontrol,” which allows landlords to reset an apartment’s rent to its current market rate after a tenant moves out (after that, the unit remains subject to the annual rent increase caps). Vacancy decontrol is especially important for preserving rental housing supply, experts told me. But it also creates an incentive for owners to try to push tenants out so they can raise the rent. To combat this, most rent-control programs include “just-cause” eviction protections, meaning that landlords cannot arbitrarily evict tenants or refuse to renew their leases; they must cite a serious lease violation (or another legally recognized reason, such as removing the unit from the rental market). 

Second-generation systems remain in place in major US cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They tend not to distort housing markets as severely as first-generation laws, but they can still, as seen in the evidence from San Francisco, meaningfully damage housing supply. And Gupta has warned that New York City’s system has been regressing back toward first-generation rent control, with the recent rent freeze and the removal of vacancy decontrol under New York state’s 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.

Meanwhile, the recent revival of interest in rent control has produced some laws whose design may magnify the policy’s worst impacts. Montgomery County, Maryland, which includes some of Washington, DC’s most expensive suburbs, implemented a rent-control law in 2024 that lacks vacancy decontrol, while St. Paul, Minnesota, voters approved a 2021 ballot measure that initially lacked both vacancy decontrol and an exemption for new construction. Both places subsequently saw sharp declines in apartment construction, though the timing alone does not prove rent control was the sole cause. (St. Paul has since added partial vacancy decontrol and a permanent new-construction exemption.)

In a recent working paper, a pair of UCLA economists identified a “third generation” of rent control that is less restrictive than second-generation laws. California passed a statewide rent stabilization law in 2019, for example, that set a high ceiling on allowable annual rent increases: 5 percent plus inflation, or 10 percent, whichever is lower. It exempts new buildings for their first 15 years, and includes vacancy decontrol and just-cause eviction. Oregon passed a similar law the same year, as did Washington state in 2025. Using data from San Diego, the new paper found no discernible loss in housing supply there under California’s law. The implication is pretty intuitive: “The laxer the policy, the fewer the negative consequences,” as Phillips put it. 

The flipside, of course, is that the least restrictive laws also do the least to protect tenants — a 10 percent cap mostly just amounts to an anti-gouging measure, and landlords rarely raise rents by that much anyway. Still, double-digit rent increases do happen. And even a loose cap can offer renters peace of mind and insurance against a life-upending rent hike. 

We need a broader renter stability agenda 

Some current proposals may soon play out the tradeoffs of rent control. This November, residents of Redwood City, located between San Francisco and San Jose, will vote on a ballot measure that would cap rent increases at 60 percent of inflation, with a maximum increase of 5 percent.

Clara Jaeckel, a renter in the city and an organizer with the campaign, told me that the proposed law would allow landlords to petition for higher increases if it’s necessary to cover operating costs. It’s “designed to strike a fair balance between letting landlords have a fair return on their investment and keeping things affordable for renters,” she said. Under California law, the city would still be required to include vacancy decontrol and exempt housing built after 1995. “We believe building new housing goes hand-in-hand with rent control — so we want both of those things,” Jaeckel said.

Limiting rent increases so far below inflation, which is similar to San Francisco’s rent cap, has the potential to meaningfully reduce the quantity and quality of rental housing. But it’s also possible that its negative impacts remain muted. Gupta and Phillips both told me that vacancy decontrol substantially limits the harms of rent control, regardless of the exact percentage rent increase permitted, and the proposed Redwood City rent cap would apply to a smaller share of its rental housing than San Francisco’s law does. 

Voters and policymakers might decide that this tradeoff with housing supply is worth it if it can allow longtime residents to stay in their homes. The Bay Area has become so unaffordable that such laws right now represent one of the few ways that communities in the region can maintain some measure of class diversity. 

But it’s worth considering how to deliver the same stability and affordability without rent control, which for too long has been the fallback that expensive cities and towns reach for after allowing their housing markets to become dysfunctional. It can ultimately only offer tenants a cramped kind of security, trapping them in homes that may no longer suit their needs because leaving would mean surrendering their only affordable option. 

A better stability agenda for renters would give them genuine choices in where to live, and how long to stay. In places with broken housing markets, that means, first and most importantly, repealing exclusionary zoning laws and other barriers to building enough homes. That’s the foundation of affordability for everyone, but especially for renters, whose housing costs rise unpredictably with the market rather than remaining relatively fixed by a long-term mortgage. Renters with low incomes, meanwhile, need help affording housing even in a balanced market, and that ought to be provided far more consistently (Section 8 vouchers and other federal rental-assistance programs currently only reach a fraction of people who qualify).

Other policies can offer the long-term stability that rent control provides, too. “The ultimate issue that a lot of [rent control] interventions are trying to target is the challenge of being a renter and being faced with these cost shocks year after year,” Gupta said. Most American residential leases are one year long, but policy could encourage longer terms, which are common in some peer countries like Germany and Japan, and, Gupta noted, widespread in US commercial leases. 

Another step is to give tenants a presumptive right to remain in their homes — in the vast majority of states, landlords can refuse to renew a lease without any cause because the law simply defers to their private property rights. That is a bigger deal than it might sound like: If you’re a renter in one of the 40-odd states that don’t have a right to renewal, and you have, say, loud young children who irritate one of your neighbors, you can be forced out when your lease ends without any recourse. I’ve seen this happen firsthand as a renter in Wisconsin, and it’s one of many ways that cities can be hostile to families. Protection from arbitrary eviction would benefit renters regardless of whether their units are rent-controlled.

These sorts of policies also need to be balanced with reliable processes for removing tenants who seriously damage property, endanger their neighbors, or repeatedly violate their leases. “Sometimes landlords are taken advantage of. Sometimes they are lied to,” Phillips said. It’s rare to find a jurisdiction in the US that’s both “very concerned about tenants and very concerned about landlords,” he said. Instead, US housing policy tends to oscillate between either extreme, but protecting the rights and interests of both need not be mutually exclusive. 

America will remain stuck with a housing shortage for the foreseeable future, which not only makes housing unaffordable in our highest-demand cities and suburbs, but also gives landlords a structural advantage over renters because they’re shielded from competition. Until that changes, a limited form of rent control can redistribute some of that power back to renters. That may be a bargain worth making, but, Phillips said, cities should make it knowingly: with a clear idea of which renters they intend to protect, and who will bear the cost.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: President Donald Trump’s renovation mania is reaching new heights. 

What’s happening? Not satisfied with a paved Rose Garden, lavish amounts of gold, and a granite walkway paid for with national parks money, Trump is currently adding a helipad to the White House lawn. Construction, begun in June, has been running 24/7, with the goal of finishing the project before a visit from Chinese President Xi Jinping in late September. 

But all is not well: As the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, contractors are now undoing their work as Trump demands a perfectly level helipad (on a South Lawn that is anything but).

It’s the latest evidence of something that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman recently described in a podcast with Ezra Klein: By her estimate, around 70 percent of Trump’s “mind share” is tied up not with the Iran war, affordability, or the upcoming midterms, but “on his renovations,” which she describes as a “legacy thing.”

What else does Trump have in the works? In addition to the helipad, Trump is currently working on renovating Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House; on Monday, he mused about his “big decision” on whether to change the park’s pavers from red brick to granite.

He’s also re-gilding four statues near the Lincoln Memorial in vivid 23.75-karat gold; repairing the re-drained Reflecting Pool, which was the victim of a rush job the first time around; and moving ahead with his plan for a 250-foot arch, which could be approved by early next month and which the National Park Service recently concluded would have “adverse effects” on more than three dozen historic sites in the DC area.

What’s the big picture? Trump’s construction fervor has only accelerated since he returned to office last year, especially as other agenda items have eluded him. A midterms loss will further curtail his options for the final two years of his presidency, so don’t expect it to stop here.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Here’s a stat I did not know, courtesy of my colleague Bryan Walsh: Traffic injuries are “the leading cause of death for everyone between the ages of 5 and 29 — ahead of malaria, ahead of war and homicide, ahead of every disease we spend more time worrying about.” 

That’s pretty grim, and not very Logoff-y. But there’s good news, too: As Bryan reports, between 2011 and 2025, global road deaths have fallen by 21 percent, even as more vehicles take to the roads — thanks in large part to a change in how we think about traffic accidents. You can read Bryan’s full story about what changed — and what we still have to work on — here with a gift link.

Have a great evening, and we’ll see you right back here tomorrow!

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The Spokane, Washington wildfires have destroyed at least 700 buildings and forced 65,000 people from their homes — and with high winds forecast for later this week, the crisis probably isn’t over. 

As of Tuesday afternoon, three separate blazes were still burning uncontained to the north and west of the city center, according to a data clearinghouse managed by the US Forest Service. And heavy smoke from the blazes continued to spill across Washington, Idaho, and Oregon. 

Meanwhile, investigators appear to have made progress in determining the cause of the largest fire: On Tuesday, local sheriff’s deputies arrested a 37-year-old Arizona man on charges of first-degree arson. The vast majority of US wildfires are started by humans…but typically through carelessness or by accident.

Go a little deeper

I was struck by an observation that one longtime Spokane resident made to NPR this week: “Obviously, we’ve had wildfire seasons,” she said. But she “never, ever imagined” having to evacuate, because she lived so deep inside of the city. 

Living in a city is no protection from climate change, though. And the destruction caused by wildfires in cities and suburbs is very much on the rise. Consider the devastation caused by recent fires in Colorado (2021), Hawaii (2023), and Los Angeles (2025). 

Why are wildfires causing more damage in cities and suburbs? It’s not because they’re new. One recent study found urban wildfires have remained a fairly stable share of all US fires over the past generation. 

What has changed is the scale of their damage, thanks to factors like climate-driven increases in extreme fire weather and human incursion into forests and grasslands. As a country, we are increasingly building homes and other structures in the “wildland-urban interface” — a liminal zone where neighborhoods and nature overlap. 

While housing isn’t dense in these areas, the buildings that exist can serve as tinder that helps fires spread. And putting more people, roads, and power lines into these zones creates more opportunities for ignitions.

All this means that city-dwellers and suburbanites will likely face more wildfire risk in years to come. And for those of you in the Midwest or on the East Coast, like me, don’t assume that wildfires are someone else’s problem. “Every single state” with wildland-urban interfaces also holds the potential for fire disaster, one pyrogeographer told Vox in 2023. That includes communities like Spokane, sure — but also Florida, Minnesota, and Mississippi.

One link for later

➨ Go ahead, save that tiny glass jar! It’s apparently a bona fide pop culture craze. But don’t bother doing it for the environmental benefits: One policy professor (disappointingly!) tells Vox that consumer decisions like choosing glass over plastic “do not matter in a meaningful way.”

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there’s a special branch of medical science devoted to the physiology of space travel? It’s appropriately called “space medicine.” (Alas, practitioners aren’t called Space Doctors.) 
• Today’s trivia: How many US states have legalized marijuana? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the Pennsylvania-based singer/songwriter who’s sometimes called the godmother of punk. That would be Joan Jett, who shares the contested honorific with (New Jersey-born) Patti Smith and (German-born) Nina Hagen. 

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who find it acceptable to be a little tardy and those who consider it an affront to all that is decent. As someone who frequently runs late, I’m often relieved when someone else is, too. And I don’t mind if a friend is a bit behind; the worst-case scenario is I have a few minutes of peace in which to stare at my phone. But the perpetually punctual see this as disrespect, as showing up late is a sign you don’t value others’ time, that you believe what you’re doing is more important.

The reality is often much more banal. Chronically late people may overestimate how long something will take them (like getting ready or commuting), are perhaps multitasking, or lose track of time. 

Of course, few people would be satisfied with waiting at a restaurant for an hour while their date swears they’re only ten minutes away. Is there a socially acceptable sweet spot for tardiness that satisfies both the need for punctuality while giving grace to the time-challenged? To answer that question, I enlisted the help of three people with unique viewpoints: an etiquette expert, a researcher who has studied lateness, and an extremely punctual guy who has strong feelings on the matter.

Answers have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

The etiquette expert: You get a 15ish-minute buffer to casual events, 5 minutes for everything else

“Five minutes late to a Zoom call or a scheduled phone call for work is, in my mind, really late. Five minutes late to meet your friend at a restaurant is not very late and very forgivable. Five minutes late to their house, super forgivable. Half an hour late to dinner and they won’t seat you and now you’ve lost your table, that starts to be a bit annoying. Late to a surprise party is unforgivable. I’ve seen hosts get really upset about that one because you can likely ruin a very well-planned surprise. There’s a 15-to-30-minute arrival period for most gatherings. You push past that and you’re showing up really late. If you are going to be late, let somebody know, whether it’s a phone call or a text message.

If you were only getting together for an hour and you’re starting to push the half-hour mark, you might want to check in with someone about whether you’ve really messed up and it’s not worth it for them to stay and meet with you for 20 minutes by the time you arrive. 

There are definitely friends who take advantage of other people’s time and that would be something to talk with someone about if it’s chronic and to the point where it starts ruining the experience. You could say, ‘I know that you’re often 20 to 30 minutes late when we get together for something. It would mean a lot if you could try to be on time at seven for this one.’ We can’t control how other people react. They might feel offended. They might start rattling off reasons why they’re always late and you can say, ‘I know and I understand it really does happen, but it’s been consistent enough and this one’s important. I would really love to have you get there at the start time.’ I think that can make a difference.”

—Lizzie Post, co-author of Emily Post’s Etiquette: The Centennial Edition

The lateness researcher: It depends on the cultural norms of the people involved

“Being late differs across the world. We have wide windows of time or very narrow ones depending on the culture. In our research, we were comparing Dutch, South African, and Pakistani norms. We knew that there would be differences, but we had no idea how much. Pakistanis really have a different idea about lateness. They’re much more flexible about it. The window’s much wider. For the Dutch and South Africans, the window is about 15 minutes. After that, people will start thinking they’re not coming anymore or start calling. But for Pakistanis, that moment arrives much later.

For people who grew up in cultures that are more aligned with the Protestant work ethic, we would say there’s a deal between two people about the time frame. If you don’t conform to that, then you violate that norm and then you are late. For Pakistanis, it is a time frame that aligns with the clock, but it depends on who is there, not so much as a deal between two people. The Dutch are very egalitarian. Everyone, it doesn’t matter what status you have, is allowed about 15 minutes. But we saw that for Pakistanis, if you’re meeting a very important person, then they can arrive much later.

There’s also a bit of the emotional side or the feeling that you are personally responsible and you’re rude if you don’t stick to those norms. I discussed this in class with my students because a lot of them show up late. I was saying, ‘I think it’s very rude when there’s somebody presenting and they get interrupted by doors opening.’ A lot of them said, ‘I don’t think it’s rude.’ They had different norms about that situation. Some of them agreed with me, but not everyone.

In practice, I think that it depends on how important the appointment is. In our class, we emphasized that we as teachers find being on time important. The norm violation becomes more important when it is explicit. And I have a sense that now the students are more apologetic.

In developing intercultural skills, ‘bridging’ is often trained. One of the things in bridging is to make expectations explicit. It involves explaining how violating the norms surrounding them are experienced, and then trying to find solutions that are acceptable for both sides. Often, this leads to people agreeing that it means give and take, but it can also mean changing procedures or rules.”

—Wendelien van Eerde, associate professor at Amsterdam Business School at the University of Amsterdam

The punctual guy: Actually, just be early

“For a home-hosted dinner party, no more than 30 minutes late before it’s inconsiderate. 

For dinner reservations at a restaurant, five minutes before is inconsiderate as normally your party can’t be seated until everyone is there and making everyone wait for you isn’t cool. 

For house party gatherings, show up whenever unless specifically asked by the host to be there at a specific time. 

For work-related situations, like being on set ready to shoot at your scheduled call time, be there five minutes before your call time. The crew got there on time to prepare for you. Show them the same respect. Your time is not more valuable than theirs.”

—Bobby Berk, interior designer and host of HGTV’s Junk or Jackpot?

The bottom line: Be considerate and communicate

Try as we might to get everything done, leave the house in a timely manner, and hope for no traffic, life often has other plans. Lateness happens. But as long as you make a good faith effort to be on time, openly communicate when you’re running behind, and don’t make a habit of it, consider a 10-to-15 minute window an appropriate buffer. Any later and you might start to lose goodwill.

“Blue zones” are places around the world where people have been reported to live longer, healthier lives. The idea began with researchers studying communities in places like Ikaria, Greece; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Okinawa, Japan; and Sardinia, Italy, where daily life seems to support longevity through movement, connection, purpose, and healthier eating.

But over time, blue zones have become more than a way to study longevity. They became a certification program exported to communities across the United States.

In this video, we visit California’s Beach Cities to see what happens when a community tries to recreate the conditions of a blue zone, and ask whether the lessons of longevity can really be engineered, or whether basic public health ideas have been repackaged into something much bigger.

Read more about blue zones:

• The longevity hot spots that weren’t (New Republic)
• Shades of blue: Blue zones, supposed havens of longevity, have become a global brand. But skeptics think they rest on shaky science (Science)
• Why people in “blue zones” live longer than the rest of the world (Healthline)
• Do people in “blue zones” actually live longer? (New York Times)

This video is presented by Colgate. Colgate doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos like this one possible.

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: The Uncommitted movement has already won

During the 2024 presidential election, on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we recorded an episode of my election podcast The Run-Up that I still think about all the time. The premise was simple: I wanted to know whether Democrats were making a material change at the top of the ticket or just a cosmetic one. So we asked convention-goers a plain question — how would Kamala Harris’s Democratic Party be any different from Joe Biden’s?

The tone of the piece reflected the optimism of the room. The activists, down to a person, thought Harris was showing a newfound openness to the administration’s critics. But underneath the hopium was a specific policy desire: that Harris would break from Biden’s unconditional support of Israel’s violent campaign in Gaza. That afternoon, I spent time with members of the Uncommitted movement, born in Michigan, who were trying to pressure the DNC into putting a single Palestinian speaker on the stage. They held press conferences with grieving families, and warned the party that the Democrats’ Muslim and Arab base in particular would not forget being sidelined. 

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain made clear the confidence surrounding Harris at the time was tied to the belief her posture around Gaza would be different from Biden’s: “She’s made, obviously, a couple different comments on Gaza,” he said. “We called for a ceasefire in UAW back in November. And obviously, she understands the humanity issue of this. And I mean, my conversations I’ve had with Kamala Harris have been very good, very fruitful.” 

They didn’t get one. Not the speaker, not the policy shift, not the break from Biden. Harris famously refused to distance herself from her boss, whether it was Israel or anything else — and likely lost because of it. 

And while many of the most prominent voices of the Uncommitted movement (including current Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed) ended up publicly backing Harris in the end, some of Harris’s most ardent supporters have repeatedly blamed left-wing activists for undermining her campaign. Haley Stevens, the Michigan representative who’s running for the Senate as the party’s establishment choice, has sought to make El-Sayed’s support for Uncommitted an issue in that race, suggesting that the movement planted seeds of discontent ahead of a must-win presidential election. 

I want to argue the opposite. Two years after the Uncommitted movement shook up the Democratic Party, its impact has never been more clear. Public opinion of Israel has plummeted across the American electorate, to the point where the movement’s position is now a majority opinion. Per Quinnipiac, 77 percent of Democrats say they believe Israel is committing a genocide — an unthinkable number just two years ago. The Uncommitted movement also led to the growth and maturation of the Democrats’ Muslim left, which has already molded prominent elected officials like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. 

Even more, I think Uncommitted challenged the blame-the-voters framework that allows the establishment to avoid self-reflection. The movement was never only about a DNC speaking slot, but about the idea that every vote must be earned, not owed. It was a retort to “vote blue no matter who” — an argument that conditional support for the party is not only valid, but of moral importance. 

In 2024, that posture got you branded a spoiler. Today it’s just how Democrats talk. When I sat down with Hasan Piker — the most popular voice on the Democratic left — he told me he voted for Kamala Harris but pointedly refused to endorse her, and named exactly why:

“The only reason for my refusal to openly endorse was because of…a continuation of the genocide in Gaza.”

“I understand the harm reduction arguments…but it’s not a practical approach to winning elections, and demonstrably it’s been a failure with Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.”

Piker put the mechanism plainly. October 7, 2023, and its aftermath, he told me, were “a seismic shift that gave a lot of confidence to the left, that as long as they stood by their positions…people would actually see the truth.” The movement didn’t move Biden. It moved the electorate Biden’s successors now have to answer to.

And you can trace that shifted ground straight into this year’s wins. In New York, Zohran Mamdani rode exactly this coalition into City Hall — a victory Piker described as the proof of concept he’d been waiting for: “that’s why I was so grateful for Zohran’s victory…I can just point to him.” In Congress, progressives like Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York City and Melat Kiros in Colorado add to the growing evidence that acknowledging Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide is now a litmus test for Democratic voters gauging the trust and credibility of their candidates.

Which brings us to Michigan, where the whole thing started. It’s easy to forget now, but the Uncommitted movement was born in the Michigan primary — and the general-election bill came due there, too. Kamala Harris got 36 percent of the vote in Dearborn, a city Joe Biden had carried with nearly 69 percent in 2020. She lost the state by about 80,000 votes. The voters the party told to fall in line didn’t, and Michigan is where that refusal was most legible.

Now look at who’s competitive in this week’s Senate primary. Abdul El-Sayed is running on the precise argument Uncommitted was making in the streets of Chicago — except now it’s a statewide campaign with real money behind it, against a candidate backed by tens of millions in pro-Israel spending. He turns the foreign-policy question into a pocketbook one and refuses to soften the language. As he said on America, Actually:

“There is an electoral cost to backstopping genocide and apartheid.”

“If you can’t call a genocide perpetrated by our tax dollars the moral abomination that it is, then at some point it’s hard for me to believe that you’re gonna fight for anything,” he told me.

Whether or not El-Sayed wins today, the fact that a candidate running explicitly against AIPAC and unconditional aid is fighting for a Senate seat in a swing state is the clearest possible measure of how far the ground has moved since that convention floor.

In the coming months, it may be that the Democrats’ moderate wing — think tanks like Third Way, party leadership, and those offended by the electorate’s rising leftist tide — will adopt some of the same tactics they criticized. Already, Rep. Hillary Scholten, who is supporting Stevens in Michigan, has signaled she may refuse to support El-Sayed in a general election, due to his association with Piker. 

It seems “vote blue no matter who” has its limits. For progressives. For centrists. For everyone. 

What I’m hearing

With Michigan’s primary set to conclude today, that leaves the Wisconsin governor’s race as the next big election on the Democratic calendar. This week, I reached out to Dan Shafer, a reporter in Milwaukee who has been covering the race for months. Schafer writes for the Recombobulation Area, where he’s political editor and writes a weekly opinion column. 

It looks like Francesca Hong, the DSA-aligned state assemblywoman, has a commanding lead in the Wisconsin governor’s primary. This would’ve been a shock a year ago. How did this happen?

The short answer is that Francesca Hong has simply run the best campaign. She has run circles around the consultant-brained conventional approaches of her opponents, and has found success by doing things decidedly differently.

From the very beginning, I characterized her as the “wild card” in the race. And while I certainly did not envision her having a commanding lead in the polls in the final stretch in the primary, I knew that, given her background in the restaurant and hospitality industry, she wouldn’t let anyone out-work or out-hustle her on the campaign trail. Her relentless ground game and digital organizing energy essentially issued a challenge to every other campaign to step up. The rest of the field failed that test. 

She’s also absolutely dominating this primary with younger voters. In the Marquette University Law School Poll from last week, the data showed her with the support of 66% of likely primary voters in the 18-29 age group, and 51% in the 30-44 age group. No other candidate was even in double digits. I write a breakdown of every new Marquette poll, and these are just preposterous numbers. For Gen Z and millennials, she is the candidate.

Hong has made data centers and AI backlash a centerpiece of this race. How important is this issue specifically in this race?

I think it’s been the No. 1 issue [since] she’s taken off in this primary. 

She backed a data center moratorium in January, and began running on this issue early. It’s been a very animating issue in Wisconsin, first for all the reasons the anti-data center backlash is coming to so many Great Lakes states, but also because of the failed Foxconn project in Racine County that happened during the first Trump administration under then-Gov. Scott Walker. It came with the promise of thousands and thousands of jobs, Trump called it the “eighth wonder of the world,” and it’s just been a miserable failure on so many levels. Hong just filmed her most recent ad at the Foxconn site — a project the Republican nominee Tom Tiffany voted for while in the state Senate at the time.

Politically, though, what really helped Hong on this issue is that no other candidate running backed a data center moratorium. One of the most significant moments of the primary happened in a June 3 candidate forum focused on working-class issues, where moderator JT Cestkowski asked a yes-or-no question on whether the candidates back a data center moratorium. Only Hong said yes. If any other candidate had said yes, that would have given the anti-data center voter options in the primary. Instead, they all went to Hong.

There is an assertion that Hong is a weak general election candidate. Is there evidence for this? 

This is Wisconsin. Anyone pretending a statewide election in this of all states should be considered anything other than a toss-up is kidding themselves. Many have argued that her likely Republican opponent, Tom Tiffany, is a uniquely weak general election candidate in his own right. But it can’t be denied that there would be a whole lot of risk involved with her as a general election candidate: The “socialism” of it all will undoubtedly be a challenge. But Francesca Hong continues to be a wild card, and she might have what it takes to play a winning hand.

Editor’s note, Aug. 5, 6:20 am ET: Kansas voters rejected a proposed amendment to change how state supreme court justices are selected. This piece below was originally published on August 4.

Four years after the Dobbs decision, abortion battles have largely taken a backseat in national news to other policy fights this cycle. Leaders in the anti-abortion movement say they’re disillusioned with President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to push for further restrictions. The federal battle over access to abortion medication seems to be settled — for now. Public awareness of that fight is limited, and even at the state level, a couple years have passed since the high-pitched but successful state-level efforts to protect abortion access in red states.

Yet a little-known battle has been playing out in Kansas, where a ballot measure to change the way state supreme court justices are selected serves as a reminder that these fights over abortion are still active, even if they take the form of creative procedural and administrative efforts. 

If it succeeds, opponents say, it would open the floodgates for similar efforts in other states to politicize the remaining independent state courts (13 other states use a method similar to Kansas) and provide a road map to undoing abortion protections in other states that have safeguarded them.

On Tuesday, Kansans are deciding whether to change the way judges on the state’s highest court are selected. Up until now, judges were selected through a nonpartisan merit-based system: When a spot opens on the bench, a nine-member commission submits a list to the governor, who then selects a replacement.

The referendum would replace this system with direct, partisan elections of judges, like any other politician. Proponents say it’s a democratic move, a way to better express the will of voters over “unelected” bureaucrats. Yet critics say it’s first and foremost about restricting abortion rights — which both the court and voters have rejected.

How Kansas became an abortion rights flashpoint

In 2019, the state supreme court recognized the right to abortion in the state constitution; three years later, after Dobbs, voters rejected a Republican-championed proposal to overturn that ruling, choosing to preserve abortion rights by a 59-41 margin in a deeply red state.

It was after that failed vote in 2022 that then-state attorney general Republican candidate Kris Kobach outlined a new strategy for undoing these protections: changing the way the supreme court is selected, electing anti-abortion candidates, and “slowly and quietly” overturning the 2019 decision and 2022 vote.

“If you look at the various proposals, one of the proposals that is crystal clear is allowing people to popularly elect justices to the supreme court, which is the most common system among all of the states in the country,” Kobach said in 2022.

He’s a bit more careful talking about this in 2026: “There is a real desire to bring back some accountability to the judiciary,” he told the New York Times this week. “It’s not just about abortion.”

Tuesday’s results would have huge ramifications, critics said, given that nonelected state courts have been a final bulwark against Republican supermajorities and governors in red states. Kansas has been an island for abortion access for women in the South and central US since the Dobbs decision.

The victory in 2022 also inspired abortion rights advocates to try to use ballot measures to enshrine these protections in about a dozen other states, which successfully overturned abortion bans in Missouri and Ohio. State courts in Utah and Wyoming, meanwhile, blocked bans.

The next frontier in the abortion wars

These independent checks on power have been under attack for years, Michael Milov-Cordoba, a court expert and counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s judiciary program, told me. 

“State legislators across the country are increasingly trying to undermine those courts. … That retaliation takes a few different forms, but changing how judges are selected is top of the list,” Milov-Cordoba said. “And what we’ve seen is that in many states where courts stand up for abortion rights and strike down abortion restrictions, efforts to change state judiciaries have followed.”

He noted the complete reworking of the Utah supreme court in the last year, including by expanding and packing it. Similar retooling of the state supreme court happened in Iowa in 2022. Montana is likely the next battleground, where Republican legislators are exploring various avenues to strip or limit the state supreme court’s powers. That in turn has led the ACLU to get involved to boost a constitutional amendment this year that would preserve the nonpartisan status of judicial elections.

And in recent years, state supreme court elections have been inundated with spending and attention from both in- and out-of-state backers. Last year’s Wisconsin judicial election, for example, became the most expensive race of its kind in US history, with more than $100 million spent — just two years after a contest for a different seat on the state supreme court had set its own record at more than $50 million spent.

“If these courts become partisan, then they will be just like any other election fight — subject to being bought and sold by billionaire political funders,” Deirdre Schifeling, the chief political and advocacy officer at the ACLU, told me. “They become a race to the bottom … and [Republicans] are finding backdoor ways to seize power to push their ideological agenda.”

Already, Kansas has seen heavy spending: More than $12 million have been spent from both sides, including about $5 million from the ACLU, Schifeling told me.

”Everyone’s focused on the Michigan Senate race, other kind of big-ticket, sexy elections,” Schifeling said. “Well, this is just as important and much more under the radar. Without a balanced court, we are going to lose rights and liberties across the board in a state like Kansas.”

GLP-1 drugs promised to usher in a new era of treating obesity as a disease. We could leave behind the anti-fat biases of the past, which blamed obesity on moral failing or personal weakness. Instead, these drugs would allow us to approach it as a medical condition, a complex matrix of genetics and other forces which could be changed with the right dose of these powerful new medicines. 

Or so the thinking went. 

While the clinical potential of these drugs remains immense, they have yet to change how the broader US culture perceives and engages with weight and weight loss. Even as millions of Americans shed pounds in bulk for the first time, they are also contending with fierce stigma and shaming from others — instead of being criticized for being fat, they are being criticized for using GLP-1s. 

The social media communities that have blossomed around GLP-1s are filled with tales of awkward conversations and much worse. Partners who berate a significant other who wants to go on Wegovy or Zepbound. Coworkers who blame the drugs for their rising insurance costs. Even dismissive and unsympathetic doctors and nurses. 

Some people who take GLP-1s must contend with an uneasy sense of living behind enemy lines: Many people describe being at work or out in public and overhearing people talking about GLP-1s and passing judgment on people who they think are taking a “shortcut” to lose weight.

“It’s like you’re being stigmatized without the person who’s [saying] it even realizing it, necessarily,” said Adriana, a 33-year-old GLP-1 user who lives in the Chicago area. (Vox agreed to identify the people we spoke to by their first name, to protect their privacy when discussing stigma.)

“There’s a lot of internalized stigma and judgment we have from the culture about our bodies and ourselves.”

Erin Standen, psychology professor who studies health and behavior change at Rice University

This is not just evident from anecdotes. Researchers have put the question to the test. And they have found that Americans not only feel more negative stigma toward somebody who lost weight with a GLP-1 than somebody who lost weight through diet and exercise — they also feel more negatively about the GLP-1 user than somebody who never lost weight at all.

“It seems like people are really reacting negatively to the idea that somebody who has lost weight with a GLP-1 might be, quote-unquote, ‘taking the easy way out’ or cheating the system,” said Erin Standen, a psychology professor who studies health and behavior change at Rice University and led one such study. “There’s a lot of internalized stigma and judgment we have from the culture about our bodies and ourselves.”

Americans have internalized the message that being overweight is a personal failure so thoroughly that, now that the kind of extraordinarily powerful weight-loss shots and pills long hoped for are here, many people struggle to see it as good news. They see it as cheating.

GLP-users feel damned if they do, damned if they don’t 

GLP-1 users have found themselves in a trap. They’ve felt judged for years for their bodies: Studies have found that up to 42 percent of adults with obesity have experienced some kind of weight discrimination; and between 40 and 50 percent have internalized weight bias. One survey from this year found that 81 percent of people taking GLP-1s said that they had felt social pressure to be thin, and more than half said that those attitudes influenced their decision to take one of the new weight-loss drugs.

And yet, now that they’re cutting weight, they’re being judged for how they lose it. In the same survey, 69 percent of GLP-1 users said other people saw the drugs as a cheat code, 23 percent said that it was hard to handle other people’s feelings about the meds, and 43 percent said that they didn’t like talking about their GLP-1 use for fear of judgment.

“Culturally we have a widespread belief that weight isn’t complex — it’s simply energy in versus energy out,” Susan Persky, a behavioral scientist at the National Institutes of Health who has studied GLP-1 stigma, told me in an email. “If everyone ‘should’ be able to manage their weight through diet and exercise, engaging willpower and hard work, using GLP-1s is seen as a cheat or a hack. So someone with higher weight who uses a GLP-1 is not only seen as lazy or weak, they’re also seen as cheating to achieve weight loss that other people have ‘earned’.”

Perhaps the most extensive study on GLP-1 stigma so far is from scholars at Rice University, UCLA, and the Mayo Clinic, published in the International Journal of Obesity in April. It followed an earlier paper, published in April 2024 in the same journal, that suggested people had more negative views of a woman who lost weight with a GLP-1 versus somebody who lost weight with diet and exercise.

The new experiment sought to replicate those findings and extend them. How did people feel about somebody who took a GLP-1 versus somebody who never lost weight at all? How would people feel about somebody who regained weight? They gave more than 600 participants short profiles of hypothetical patients who were all alike except for one thing: One had lost weight with diet and exercise, one had lost weight using a GLP-1, one didn’t lose weight. They were asked to rate the person on various positive and negative metrics, to measure how they perceived the person and whether they’d want to associate with them socially.

What they found revealed how deep the bias against GLP-1 users seems to run.

When comparing the two hypothetical people who lost weight, study participants offered far more negative traits and far fewer positive ones to the people who had used a GLP-1, Standen told me. “That really stuck out,” she said. They also ranked the GLP-1 user as more unhealthy. 

But even beyond that, people actually rated the person who didn’t lose weight at all more positively than the GLP-1 user. “People were more likely to say they were willing to connect socially with the person who hadn’t lost weight as compared to the person who was a GLP-1 user,” Standen said.

The study didn’t ask the participants to explain in detail why they felt the way they did about GLP-1 users. But Standen and other experts attributed the attitude to those cultural norms around body weight that have turned obesity in the minds of many into a matter of personal morality rather than the medical and socioeconomic issue that most clinicians view it as.

“Stigma toward GLP-1 use reflects deeply rooted cultural beliefs about effort, discipline, and personal responsibility for weight and health,” Stacy Post, a postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University who authored the 2024 study on GLP-1 stigma with Persky, told me over email. “In this context, it is not surprising that GLP-1s are often viewed as a ‘quick fix’ for a problem that many believe should be solved through willpower and lifestyle changes alone.” 

And the consequences of stigma go beyond straining someone’s personal relationships. People can feel shame and stress when they think they’re being judged, and that in turn can have direct physical effects that are bad for their health. 

“These small little moments where people feel discriminated against do accumulate in the body,” Standen said. “Experiencing stigma or feeling judged for having used or not used a GLP-1 is directly harmful to your overall physical and mental health.”

Feeling judgment “also might lead you to either avoid health care or be less open when seeking healthcare in ways that could long-term harm your health as well,” Standen said. We know how much GLP-1s can improve the health prospects of somebody who is obese, so if somebody decides not to take a weight-loss med for fear of being judged, that is a net loss to their health. 

What it’s like to be a GLP-1 user when society shames GLP-1 users

The Rice study affirms something GLP-1 users have been saying in online communities since these drugs hit the market a few years ago. I have spent the past few months reading these stories on the various Reddit communities dedicated to GLP-1 drugs and weight loss, and the frustration that users experience in being judged for medications they feel are approaching a miracle drug is palpable.

One poster described her boyfriend becoming “extremely upset” when she said she was considering going on a weight-loss medication; another person also detailed their fight with an unsupportive partner. Others have contended with rude comments from coworkers. People have faced judgmental questions when they were visiting a hospital’s emergency room for something unrelated. One person even encountered the stigma at their cross-stitch club.

I spoke with two people, Adriana and Mike, who had shared their experiences of GLP-1 stigma on Reddit.

Mike, 50, and living near Boston, says he had been big his entire life, but after seeing an unflattering vacation photo a couple years ago, he decided he wanted to get serious about losing weight and thought a GLP-1 could help him. After losing some weight through Weight Watchers, he went on Zepbound; all told, he’s shed about 170 pounds.

He and others have encountered judgment for his weight loss in surprising places. Mike told me the story of going to visit an old friend from college, after he had started taking Zepbound. 

His friend’s mother was there and she inquired about his evident weight loss. He told her he was taking a GLP-1 medication. And for the rest of the weekend, she badgered him about whether whatever he was eating fit with his “diet.”

“It was eye-opening because when I first went on it, I’m like, ‘I don’t understand why people don’t want to tell anybody. This is a good thing. The world should know,’” he told me. “And then you realize, ‘Oh, God, this is affecting my ability to enjoy myself this weekend because I have to answer for it every two seconds.’ That’s when you’re like, ‘Okay, I understand why people don’t want to tell.’” (He added that the incident has, fortunately, become a running joke between him and his friend.)

Adriana from Chicago had been naturally thin for most of her life, never developing particularly good diet or exercise habits. But a couple of years ago, she had a bad mental health episode and started to cope by overeating, she says; she gained 50 pounds in a year. She had a family history of diabetes, and her doctor told her she was prediabetic. She felt an urgency to do something, she told me: “I just need to go on this medication before I do irreversible damage to my health.”

The medicine has revitalized her she said. She hasn’t experienced serious side effects and the food temptations that led her to binge-eat have been quieted. She says she’s seeing a therapist and a dietitian and feels as good as she has in years.

But she’s experienced stigma at every stage of her journey too. Adriana said that growing up, she was often praised by her family for being thin. Then when she gained weight, her family nagged her about it and friends started cutting her out of more physical activities.

Since she started taking Zepbound, she hasn’t told a lot of people — but she has still felt the prejudice toward GLP-1 users in unexpected ways. Many people in her life just assume that she is reverting back to her previous body type and compliment her for looking slim, then turn around and judge somebody else who’s on a weight-loss drug.

“My coworkers will say, ‘Oh, you look so good,’ and then they’ll mention some other person who was maybe always bigger, and they’ll say, ‘But she’s on the shot,’” Adriana said.

And online spaces, where so many of our health and wellness conversations take place these days, are filled with people expressing hurtful opinions about GLP-1 users, often fixating on reports — both credible and not so credible — of dangerous side effects. That was what prompted Adriana to post her frustrations on Reddit.

“What really bothers me is the fake concern for our health, which is the thing that always comes along when people are policing other people’s bodies,” she said. “When people are overweight, people say, ‘Well, I’m just concerned for their health.’” she said. But “now that there is this medication that’s helping, the stigma is: ‘Well, what about the side effects?’”

Will the GLP-1 stigma ever go away?

As GLP-1 use continues to rapidly expand across the country, there are signs that this stigma could eventually be broken down.

It starts with sheer numbers: The more people who take a GLP-1 or know somebody who has, the more likely they might have a more charitable view of GLP-1 users. About 12 percent of Americans said in an August 2025 survey that they had taken a GLP-1 drug. As of May 2026, one in five US households had at least one GLP-1 user, according to data from PricewaterhouseCoopers. This growth may be the best hope for breaking the stigma that is a nasty asterisk on what is otherwise a remarkable moment in medicine. 

“As these medications become more prevalent and more people have either used them themselves or have a close loved one who has used them, it is possible that that will help to reduce the stigma and increase acceptance,” Standen said. “We know that in general, one of the more robust findings in social psychology is that as people have more contact with folks who have identities or situations that might be unfamiliar to them, bias tends to go down over time.”

It is expected to be one of the largest prescription drug rollouts ever.

Mike said he has confronted acquaintances who spoke badly of GLP-1s, explaining how they have worked for him and the hard work he has put into the process. “Your perspective always changes when you suddenly know someone,” he said. 

The number of GLP-1 users is probably as low as it will ever be. Medicare launched its $50 GLP-1 prescription program in July, and millions of Americans will be eligible to receive these medications cheaper. It is expected to be one of the largest prescription drug rollouts ever.

And access should continue to expand. Pharmaceutical executives say they are making inroads with the private employer-based insurance plans that cover about half of the US population; at a health conference — Aspen Ideas: Health — in late June, Laura Steele, group vice president of US cardiometabolic health at Eli Lilly, said the company has seen large employer coverage increase significantly, from about 20 percent covering the medications in 2025 to 67 percent. 

In a decade, 50 percent or more adults in the US may be taking one of these drugs, Alison Furman, partner and US consumer markets industry leader at PwC, said at the Aspen panel. 

As bad as things might still feel to people taking GLP-1s right now, social attitudes do seem to be evolving. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers data shared with Vox, 23 percent of current GLP-1 users openly share that they are on the drugs, compared to the 2 percent who say they haven’t told anyone. People who are considering going on a GLP-1 are even more open-minded. More than half of those considering the drugs (53 percent) say they would share their use with their immediate family members, versus 42 percent of current users.

“The stigma is subsiding,” Furman said. “You see an increase in just openness around this drug. All those signs we believe point to increased adoption over time.”

Adriana has even seen hints of it herself. She has opened up to a few friends who had asked about her weight loss. “Once you start that conversation,” she said, “it’s kind of shocking how many people are like, ‘You know what? I’ve been thinking about going on.’”

Let me start with the most local of local stories: the intersection down the street from my apartment in Brooklyn, New York, where Columbia Street meets Summit Street.

Since my family moved into the neighborhood in 2023, I’ve hated this intersection. It has no stop signs, no crosswalks, no signal. Crossing on foot with my son has meant grabbing his hand and hoping any oncoming cars would slow down, which, given that this is New York City, is maybe a 50/50 proposition at best. Everyone knew a stop sign or signal was needed, but the city did nothing.

That finally began to change late last year, after a 10-year-old girl was struck and injured by a car just two blocks north of the intersection. The neighborhood organized, packed a public meeting, and eventually walked a city official down the block so he could stand in the intersection and see what they saw every day. Which is how I woke up on July 17 to see four stop signs and freshly painted crosswalks at the intersection I hated so much.

My very local story is part of a much bigger one. Cars kill about 1.16 million people a year worldwide — more than the population of San Jose, California erased every year. Road injuries remain the leading cause of death for everyone between the ages of 5 and 29 — ahead of malaria, ahead of war and homicide, ahead of every disease we spend more time worrying about.

For most of the 20th century, that was simply the price of moving around faster. Being in a car was the most dangerous thing most of us did on any given day, and we seemed to have no choice but to accept the consequences.

But, it turns out, we don’t. According to new data released last month, between 2011 and 2025, the rate at which the world’s roads killed people, measured against population, fell 21 percent, even as more than a billion motor vehicles were added to the world’s roads. It’s still far too high, and the death rate actually increased in Africa, as more vehicles are added to often substandard roads. But in epidemiological terms: Globally, exposure went up while deaths went down. What ultimately changed was an argument about whose fault it really is when a car crashes.

The doctor who decided crashes were not accidents

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that American cars were once all but literal death traps. In 1966, they killed 50,894 Americans and injured 1.9 million more, in vehicles with rigid steering columns aimed at the driver’s chest and metal dashboards studded with knobs that lacerated and impaled human bodies. The toll was horrific; as President Lyndon B. Johnson put it in 1966, the million and a half Americans who had died on the roads so far that century were “nearly three times as many Americans as we have lost in all our wars.”

Detroit’s answer to all this was that Americans were bad drivers. A doctor named William Haddon Jr. thought the industry was looking at the wrong thing. Haddon trained as a physician and came to car crashes as an epidemiologist. He saw them as systems failures and understood that cars had to be designed to protect drivers against themselves.

Haddon wasn’t working alone. In April 1959, a Labor Department official named Daniel Patrick Moynihan published “Epidemic on the Highways,” making a version of the same argument: The problem was how cars were built, not who was driving them. In 1965, the consumer advocate Ralph Nader — whom Moynihan had hired the year before to help write the government’s highway safety report — published Unsafe at Any Speed, a catalog of everything automakers already knew they should fix and had decided not to.

Nader’s book became a national bestseller, and, in September 1966, Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which finally gave the federal government power to mandate how cars could be built. Johnson appointed Haddon to lead the new federal traffic- and highway-safety agencies that later became National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

A safer system

NHTSA estimated that federal vehicle-safety standards prevented more than 860,000 deaths and 49 million nonfatal injuries from 1968 through 2019. Preliminary data released this week showed that the US motor vehicle death rate for the first quarter of 2026 was 0.99 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled: the second lowest first quarter figure on record and down 82 percent from the 1966 death rate, when Congress passed the vehicle safety act.

But while America has largely aimed to make crashes survivable, other countries decided that wasn’t ambitious enough. In October 1997, the Swedish parliament adopted a national policy called Vision Zero, built on the premise that nobody should be killed or seriously injured on the roads — and that, when someone is, ultimate responsibility belongs to the people who designed the system, rather than solely to the person who made the mistake. Sweden began adding median barriers to rural highways in 1998, and a national revision of speed limits rolled out in 2008-’09. Since Vision Zero’s adoption, Swedish road deaths have fallen about 61 percent, from 541 in 1997 to 213 in 2024 — about two deaths per 100,000 people, the lowest rate in the EU.

New York adopted the same framework in February 2014, explicitly modeled on the Swedish work, and cut its default speed limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour that November. By the end of 2025, the city’s traffic deaths were down 31 percent from 2014. The year closed with 205 road deaths, the fewest since New York began keeping records in 1910. In the first half of 2026, pedestrian deaths were more than 42 percent below the comparable period in 2014.

Four stop signs on a Brooklyn corner are what that idea looks like at its smallest possible scale.

The people we left outside the car

But, in our effort to make our cars safer, we neglected to do the same for everyone else on the street. Between 2009 and 2023, US pedestrian deaths rose 80 percent, even as other categories of traffic deaths increased just 13 percent. By 2022, pedestrian deaths had climbed to a 40-year high — back to 1981 levels.

One major contributor is as simple as geometry. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that vehicles with hoods above 40 inches are about 45 percent more likely to kill the pedestrian they hit than vehicles with hoods of 30 inches or less and a sloped profile. A low, sloped hood catches an adult at the legs and rolls the body up onto it. A tall flat one catches the torso and drives the body down and under. Light trucks — which have gone from under a fifth of new vehicle sales in 1975 to more than four-fifths today — accounted for 54 percent of US pedestrian deaths with a known vehicle type in 2023.

It’s only recently that this second curve has begun to bend. Preliminary state data indicated that US pedestrian deaths fell about 7 percent in 2025 to an estimated 6,732, a third consecutive annual decline. Part of it is that a pandemic-era spike in reckless driving is receding. Part is states spending on infrastructure and enforcement. And part is that cars now come with automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection spreading, which IIHS found cuts pedestrian crash risk by about a quarter.

Pedestrian-detecting automatic emergency braking is spreading, as well. IIHS found that it was associated with a 27 percent reduction in pedestrian crashes, though detection spreading, which IIHS found cuts pedestrian crash risk by about a quarter. (But there is work to do, as those systems don’t reduce risk on unlit roads at night, and more than three-quarters of pedestrian deaths happen after dark.)

Driver Zero

I’m glad there are stop signs at Summit and Columbia now, but it was a good outcome produced by a bad process — one that required a child being hit by a car to get started. There are more dangerous intersections in this country than there are communities with the voice and the stamina to demand fixes. A real Vision Zero wouldn’t wait for the crash; it would identify which intersections could kill someone and fix those first.

For now, though, I’m simply happy that, in my local corner of the world, the streets got just a little bit safer.

New York is also an outlier. As my colleague Marina Bolotnikova wrote earlier this year, Vision Zero hasn’t worked nearly as well elsewhere in the country, largely because the American public is less accepting of road designs that inconvenience drivers.

That’s why the US, for all its long-term improvement, lags behind its peers. Over the decade to 2021, road deaths fell 36 percent in WHO’s European region and did not move at all in the Americas. The US sees about 12 road deaths per 100,000 people, more than twice the rate in Australia, Israel, or South Korea — a gap so large that the International Transport Forum publishes OECD road safety averages both with the US included and without it, presumably to keep us from skewing the results.

Since the US probably won’t adopt Sweden’s approach, a more realistic hope might be autonomous vehicles. This month, the Insurance Institute compared about 50 million driverless Waymo miles across four cities with human driving in the same places and found that, per mile, the robotaxis were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes of the kind a human driver would typically report to police. Waymo’s own tally across more than 220 million driverless miles claimed 93 percent fewer injury-causing crashes involving pedestrians — which is to say the technology is best at precisely the thing American road design has been worst at.

If Haddon fundamental insight was that systems have to be built to counter the inevitable errors when a human drives a two-ton hunk of metal and glass at 60 mph, then maybe it makes sense that the ultimate system response is to remove the human altogether. For now, though, I’m simply happy that, in my local corner of the world, the streets got just a little bit safer.

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Welcome to The Logoff: It’s clearer than ever that President Donald Trump has no way out on Iran. 

What’s happening? Over the weekend, Trump posted to social media that he had agreed to “hold off any attack” on Iran because “the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to.” The deal, he said, would include the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a nebulous “end to Iran’s nuclear threat.” 

That should all sound fairly familiar, since it’s essentially what the US and Iran agreed to — and subsequently abandoned — in June. As of Monday morning, though, Trump had already pivoted, accusing Iran of being “unbelievably duplicitous” in negotiating.

“This is a last chance for them to sign a good document,” he told reporters in the Oval Office Monday afternoon, threatening “decapitation” — essentially the same warning he issued in April. 

What’s the context? Since the collapse of the June “memorandum of understanding” between the US and Iran, which ended the immediate conflict and set out a path for negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, the two countries have resumed hostilities, if not full-scale war. In July, three more US servicemembers were killed in Iranian attacks.

The strait also remains largely closed, with only a handful of vessels per day passing through.

Why does this matter? The Logoff has tried to steer clear of blow-by-blow coverage of the Iran war, because this kind of reversal happens a lot: Trump is constantly blustering, promising a deal, threatening massive retaliation, backing down, and doing it all over again. 

This latest episode, more than five months into the war and tidily compressed into just a few days, is little different. We’re writing about it anyway because it’s a good reminder of what has emerged as the essential fact of the war: Trump may have started the conflict, but he doesn’t seem to have any real plan in place to end it — and the longer things drag on, the greater the risk to the US troops fighting it.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Vox’s Unexplainable podcast is tackling the “holy grail of sensory biology” — magnetoreception, which lets birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field — this week with some help from author and journalist Ed Yong. You can listen here, and I also recommend Yong’s newsletter, which regularly features some spectacular bird photos.

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow! 

For a brief moment late last week, it looked like acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s bid to get the word “acting” removed from his job title was in serious trouble. But that moment appears to have passed, as two key Republican senators just signaled that they will vote to move his nomination forward.

Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) halted Blanche’s nomination because of concerns about a $1.8 billion slush fund that Blanche helped create as the Justice Department’s acting leader, as well as some objections to a collusive deal between President Donald Trump and the IRS that could have shut down tax investigations into Trump, his family, and his businesses. Both senators announced on Monday that they will no longer block the nomination.

Though these two senators, both of whom are retiring in January, did extract some minor concessions from the Department of Justice in return for their votes, they objected to only a small fraction of Blanche’s efforts to transform the DOJ’s lawyers into Trump’s personal advocates and enforcers. The fact that Blanche is likely to be confirmed, despite his sycophancy toward Trump, suggests that any meaningful guardrails on a weaponized Justice Department have ceased to exist.

Cornyn and Tillis both currently serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee. That committee, where Republicans currently have a two-vote majority, was originally scheduled to vote on Blanche’s nomination Thursday — but that vote would have failed if Cornyn and Tillis rejected the nominee. And, now, it’s likely to go ahead.

Cornyn and Tillis’s objections to Blanche were quite narrow in scope. They demanded a written order from Blanche “terminating the anti-weaponization fund,” a reference to the $1.8 billion slush fund that could be paid out to Trump’s allies, including participants in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Blanche originally established this fund in a May 18 order. On Sunday night, he tweeted out a new document terminating his May 18 order. 

Cornyn also objected to the breadth of settlement between Trump and the IRS — which could be read to permanently cut off that agency’s power to audit Trump, his companies, or many members of his family — but only sought to narrow this settlement’s scope.

For the most part, however, the two senators did not object to Blanche’s broader efforts to weaponize the Justice Department against people who’ve displeased Trump, including the use of law enforcement to cow Trump’s critics. As both deputy attorney general and as acting attorney general, Blanche oversaw several highly dubious prosecutions brought against Trump’s perceived enemies and prominent Democrats.  

A video introduced in federal court, for example, indicated that Blanche personally instructed law enforcement officers to arrest Newark’s Democratic Mayor Ras Baraka — an arrest that led a federal magistrate judge to scold the DOJ for “using the immense power of the government to pursue weak cases or to make examples without sufficient cause.” Under Blanche’s oversight, the DOJ’s also brought flimsy charges against individuals like former FBI Director James Comey and New York state Attorney General Letitia James, who investigated Trump for potential wrongdoing. (One minor exception: Tillis did previously pressure Blanche to drop an investigation into former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.)

So, while Cornyn and Tillis successfully pushed Blanche to make some small concessions in order to secure their votes in the Judiciary Committee, neither senator appeared interested in a confrontation over Trump and Blanche’s broader efforts to transform the DOJ into a revenge-seeking agency. And now, it appears likely that Blanche will be confirmed — and that those efforts will continue. 

What did Blanche actually agree to do in order to get Cornyn and Tillis’s votes?

Earlier this year, Trump, the Trump Organization, and Trump’s two oldest sons sued the IRS, claiming that it failed to prevent a contractor from leaking some of Trump’s tax documents. The president originally demanded a $10 billion payout from the federal government, and the lawsuit triggered widespread concerns about a conflict of interest, because Trump was both the plaintiff and the chief executive of the government he sued.

On May 18, a little over a month after Blanche became the federal government’s top lawyer, Trump (and the other plaintiffs) entered into a “settlement agreement” that did not include a $10 billion payday for Trump but that did include several provisions favorable to Trump, his family, and his companies. 

Among other things, the settlement announced the creation of the “anti-weaponization fund,” which would distribute money to an unknown group of people who claim they were unfairly targeted by previous administrations based on decisions by five individuals appointed by Blanche. It also included a provision claiming that the IRS (and potentially other federal agencies) is “FOREVER BARRED” from pursuing any claims that “have been or could have been asserted by Plaintiffs” — open-ended language which sparked fears that a wide range of potential investigations into Trump, his family, or his companies could be shut down forever.

In response to Cornyn and Tillis’s objections to this settlement, Blanche tweeted out a brief order on Monday, stating that his own May 18 order establishing the anti-weaponization fund “is rescinded and shall have no force or effect.” According to Tillis, the DOJ also “acknowledged in a binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit.”

So, Blanche walked back the specific order that he signed to establish the $1.8 billion slush fund, but he did not repudiate the part of the settlement that immunizes Trump, his two oldest sons, and the Trump Organization from many tax investigations. According to Tillis, the DOJ merely said that this part of the settlement does not apply to parties (including federal agencies) that were not parties to Trump’s original lawsuit.

Though this deal appeared to have been enough to secure Cornyn and Tillis’s votes, and most likely to ensure Blanche’s confirmation in a Republican Senate, it is unlikely to placate Democrats. As Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) tweeted Tuesday morning, Blanche’s new order “doesn’t prevent payouts to violent insurrectionists in the future,” and it “leaves in place a tax-immunity deal that could help Trump skip taxes on the $2.3 billion he made last year.”

And the question of whether the DOJ may bring politically motivated charges against figures like Baraka, Comey, or James appeared to not even be part of the deal struck between Blanche, Cornyn, and Tillis.

One reason why the two senators exacted such meager concessions may be because they didn’t have a very strong hand to play against Trump. Because Blanche is currently the Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general, he can remain head of the Justice Department, in an acting role, for as long as Trump is president. Indeed, when negotiations between Blanche and the two senators appeared to hit an impasse late last week, Trump threatened to “keep Todd as Acting A.G., and push hard to get the Anti-Weaponization Bill” if Cornyn and Tillis wouldn’t support Blanche.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Blanche’s concessions are thin gruel. His statement on the slush fund merely confirms that “there is no Fund” right now. And, under the terms of the apparent deal reached with Cornyn and Tillis, Trump, his sons, and his primary business still gain broad immunity from a wide range of tax investigations. 

So, while Cornyn and Tillis may have given Trump and Blanche a brief scare, they never put up much real resistance to Trump’s nominee.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

We always like a bit of good democracy news — such news being in overall short supply — and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared to deliver some last night. 

Blanche is currently jockeying for the permanent AG gig, which would put him in charge of the Justice Department. But his confirmation process stalled over bipartisan objections to President Donald Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund,” a $1.8 billion reparation program for people who claimed the government had wronged them. 

On Sunday, in acknowledgement of those objections, Blanche confirmed in writing that the Justice Department had rescinded the fund and had no plans to revive it. It’s a rare reminder that the Senate’s confirmation power can still constrain the White House, even if many Republican lawmakers would rather not rock the boat. And the presidential boat was very much rocked by the dustup over Blanche’s confirmation. 

In a post on Saturday, Trump insisted that he’d get some version of the fund even over senators’ objections. And on Monday, he told reporters that he didn’t sign off on the rescission. Notably, the two Republicans who forced that surrender — North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Texas’s John Cornyn — will both depart the Senate in early 2027.

All the president’s slush funds

The anti-weaponization fund is just the latest of Trump’s attempts to siphon federal money into an account that he or his allies control. In fact, the quest to secure such a slush fund is a defining feature of his presidency — and several of his previous, less egregious attempts have been more successful. Those include: 

1. Venezuelan oil accounts: Since the US toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil have gotten routed into special US Treasury accounts, which are labeled as Venezuela’s sovereign property — but only released at the direction of the secretary of state.   
2. The Board of Peace: Trump’s controversial coalition for rebuilding Gaza was conceived as a pay-to-play operation: Member countries get seats for a mere three years unless they pony up $1 billion to the Trump-controlled organization. While more than 20 countries have signed on, Reuters reported in April that only two had actually made contributions.  
3. US sovereign wealth fund: Trump first floated this idea of a government-owned wealth fund, which would allow him to direct federal investment in private companies, during his first term. While it never got off the ground as such, the administration has since acquired equity stakes in at least a dozen firms.

“The long-term risk is not just that Trump might be doing something illegal,” Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, wrote for Vox earlier this year. “The long-term risk is that his presidency is normalizing treating the receipt and disbursement of money as instruments of personal power.”

One link for later

➨ Happiness is overrated. In a new book, the author Ian Bogost argues we should instead pursue sensory gratification: the simple and immediate pleasure found in physical experiences, whether changing gears in a stick-shift car or holding a warm mug in your hands. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that dolphins have been known to beat and kill other animals for fun? I spent much of my weekend watching a baby animal documentary with my sick child, and am actually devastated to learn that many adorable animals “are also murderous monsters.” 
• Today’s trivia: What Pennsylvania-born singer/songwriter is sometimes called “the godmother of punk”? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last Friday we asked you for the Vietnamese word for festival. That would be “tết,” as in the 1968 Tet Offensive — a brutal military campaign that began during Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebrations. 

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro have been wildly successful. But as popular as they are, Americans still have very negative feelings about the people using them. In this month’s Highlight cover story, Dylan Scott explains why ‘Ozempic stigma’ hasn’t gone away, how it’s impacting GLP-1 users, and whether it could begin to fade as more and more people take the drugs. Also in this issue: How to tolerate uncertainty. What rent freezes could mean for renters. Good news about declining road deaths. And the coming AI wealth boom.

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Can knowing less make you happier?

By Shayla Love

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The simple idea that helped prevent millions of traffic deaths

By Bryan Walsh

Coming August 4

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The one thing Ozempic still can’t fix

By Dylan Scott

Coming August 4

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How to tolerate uncertainty in a world that’s full of it

By Elizabeth Weingarten

Coming August 5

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The truth about rent control

By Marina Bolotnikova

Coming August 5

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Rise of the AI-ristocracy

By Sara Herschander

Coming August 6

New Yorkers will soon enjoy a 30 percent discount on their meat, seafood, milk, and bread — so long as they shop at a city-owned store.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani touted such bargains this week at a press conference detailing his plans to launch five public grocery stores, in a bid to lower New Yorkers’ food costs. Under the proposal, the city would own each supermarket and dictate its pricing and labor practices, while private grocery companies would handle the day-to-day operations.

Mamdani’s proposal has been getting people worked up from the moment he unveiled it on the campaign trail for his 2025 mayoral run. For many progressives, state-owned supermarkets embody one of their movement’s highest ideals — the prioritization of public needs over private profits. For conservatives, meanwhile, “Mamdani Marts” represent an attack on free enterprise (if not, the first step on the road to Soviet breadlines).

While stimulating, these grand philosophical arguments have often overshadowed more banal but pressing questions: Would public grocery stores do more to advance Mamdani’s stated goals than other things the city could do with the same money? Has New York’s mayor discovered a way to sell groceries more efficiently than Costco does — or an approach to nutritional relief more effective than simply giving poor people more cash and food?

The answer to both of these questions appears to be “no.” And that should concern more than just New Yorkers. Mamdani’s vision is already inspiring imitators, with San Francisco and Boston both exploring their own public grocery store proposals. And in national discourse, the mayor’s policy is widely understood as an experiment — one testing a bold new theory of how governments can make food more affordable.

Unfortunately, although public grocers have merit in some circumstances, the theory underlying Mamdani’s specific plan is not merely unproven but incoherent.

Grocery socialism makes more sense for small-town Republicans

Public grocery stores have historically aimed to solve a problem that New York City does not have — a total absence of private supermarkets.

In 2018, the small town of Baldwin, Florida lost its only grocer. With only 1,600 residents — and a median income of $44,271 — the community no longer generated enough business to be worth the local IGA’s while. And no other national chain rushed in to fill the gap. 

So, the municipality opened its own grocery store, the Baldwin Market.

This attracted national media attention. And not without reason. A deeply conservative small-town trying its hand at socialism was a fun story. And it turned out that Baldwin wasn’t an aberration: Other aging rural communities in red America had turned to government grocers once private supermarkets had left them in the lurch.

Progressive policy thinkers took inspiration from these examples. In the ensuing years, proposals for using public grocery stores to combat urban food deserts — impoverished neighborhoods without convenient and affordable supermarkets — began to circulate. The merits of such plans can be debated. But their logic was straightforward: Where the market fails to provide residents with healthy food options, the government should step in. 

When post-COVID inflation sowed outrage over food prices, however, some on the left reconceived the purpose of public supermarkets: In their telling, such stores weren’t merely a means of eliminating food deserts, but also a way to make groceries more affordable.

Mamdani’s plan is principally animated by the latter goal. With more than 1,100 grocery stores and 10,000 bodegas, most of New York City is well-provisioned by private food vendors. And although parts of the municipality are under-served, the mayor is not actually concentrating his stores in such areas; his planned East Harlem location lies just blocks from an Aldi, Costco, and many other grocers. 

In a report detailing its policy, the mayor’s office makes clear that its primary aim is to drive down New Yorkers’ food bills. Yet there’s little reason to think that public grocery stores are a cost-effective way to do that.

New York City probably won’t provide groceries more efficiently than Costco

Without question, a government store can make groceries more affordable for its own customers: All it has to do is charge below-market prices.

And yet, if that store manages this feat by operating at a loss, then its shoppers’ savings will come at the broader city’s expense.

That might not be too troubling, if one pictures rich taxpayers footing the bill. But for a city like New York — which faces a structural budget deficit — revenue is a scarce resource. A tax dollar spent on public grocery stores is one that can’t be spent on nutritional assistance for low-income people. And all else equal, the latter will do more to enhance affordability: If you have a limited pool of food subsidies — and want to minimize the number of New Yorkers who can’t afford groceries — then you should spend your funds on the poor, not on whoever happens to show up at your city-owned store. 

Thus, for Mamdani’s supermarkets to be cost-effective, they can’t just subsidize low prices with taxpayer money. Rather, they need to deliver groceries more efficiently than private retailers do.

Public ownership can unlock efficiencies in certain contexts. For example, America’s private health insurance system generates massive administrative redundancies. By one estimate, if the US replaced its sprawling insurance industry with a single government payer, it could cut our health system’s annual administrative costs by $500 billion. In other words, a Medicare For All program could theoretically provide more healthcare-per-dollar than the current system does, by eliminating excess bureaucracy.

But there are no comparable inefficiencies in the grocery sector. True, a government retailer could generate some savings by declining to take a profit. But margins in the industry are slim; the average profit rate among food retailers was just 2.1 percent in 2025. Therefore, Mamdani’s stores can’t finance 30 percent discounts merely by dispensing with shareholder returns. 

Meanwhile, the city actually wants its stores to be less cost-efficient than private grocers in some respects. According to its policy brief, the government grocers will pay their workers higher wages than most retailers and may also favor “local and regional suppliers,” rather than automatically contracting with whichever food producers offer the best rate. 

The city suggests that its stores will have some cost advantages: Unlike private competitors, they will pay no rent or property taxes on their facilities. But these are merely additional subsidies, not actual efficiencies: By providing free real estate to its grocers, the city is forgoing revenue that it could otherwise collect and spend on nutritional assistance or other public goods. 

It is not yet clear how much money the city is prepared to lose each year on these stores. If Mamdani’s celebrity — and heavily advertised bargains — lure large masses of people to his markets, their steeply discounted goods will quickly sell out. In that circumstance, to avoid long stretches with empty shelves, or some complex rationing system, the city would need to rapidly restock money-losing items, compounding the stores’ operating losses.  

In theory, there is one way that government stores could benefit consumers throughout a city without being especially efficient enterprises in themselves: They could force other retailers to cut prices by accepting lower profits or discovering new efficiencies. But with grocery margins already thin, squeezing private markets further could lead to closures, thereby reducing shoppers’ options. Further, Mamdani himself insists that his stores will go out of their way to avoid harming private competitors (which, in New York, consist primarily of the sorts of small businesses that Mamdani has promised to help). 

In any case, five stores won’t substantially impact pricing citywide. And so long as each government grocer operates at a loss, scaling up the program will only deepen its costs — and thus, the tradeoff between funding public supermarkets and anti-hunger programs.

Aldi for all

At present, Mamdani’s grocery store experiment looks fairly cheap. The city estimates the stores will require $70 million in capital costs. As already noted, it’s unclear precisely how large each store’s annual operating budget will be. But even if each supermarket loses many millions each year, it still won’t make that big a difference, in the context of the city’s $125 billion budget.

Still, the opportunity costs of Mamdani’s policy are real. New York City currently plans to spend $3.1 million next year on a program called Get The Good Stuff (GTGS), which essentially gives SNAP recipients up to $10 off each time they purchase fruits and vegetables from 25 participating grocery stores. With the money slated for its public supermarkets, New York could dramatically expand the program, while also investing more money into its food banks. Alternatively, the city could modestly increase cash transfers to its lowest-income residents. 

To be sure, none of that would offer much benefit to middle-class shoppers. And the mayor is quite reasonably concerned with increasing grocery affordability for the typical New Yorker. But the city can advance that aim — while actually increasing its revenue — by easing zoning and permitting rules that currently make it difficult for large, low-cost retailers like Costco and Walmart to operate in many parts of the city. Happily, to Mamdani’s great credit, his administration’s paper on public grocery stores does briefly mention the need for permitting reforms.

Maybe public grocery stores are an end in themselves

All this said, there may still be a reasonable case for Mamdani’s stores or others like them. For example, a city’s residents might come to see such retailers as a kind of attraction, public amenity, or community space, akin to a park or library.

Further, public grocers could theoretically increase the public’s faith in the government. While the grocers are unlikely to be efficient in reality, they may appear to be. After all, their low prices will be far more visible to consumers than their operating costs. If Americans come to associate the public sector with cheap, ostensibly well-run supermarkets — rather than dreary DMV lines — that could aid the left’s broader efforts to expand the government’s remit. (Although, if the public grocers end up being characterized by overcrowding and empty shelves, the policy could further erode Americans’ confidence in the public sector.)

As a means of maximizing affordability, however, Mamdani’s program makes little sense. It will mostly just transfer income from the city’s broad population to the small subset of New Yorkers who happen to live near — or work at — one of its five stores.

Where private markets fail to provide any grocery options, public stores may be the best way for municipalities to meet their residents’ nutritional needs. But in other contexts, governments can make a bigger difference by simply putting more money in poor people’s pockets.

Both Washington and Silicon Valley are in the midst of a collective freak-out over China’s recent advancements in artificial intelligence.

The latest round of consternation was triggered this month when a little-known Chinese AI startup called Moonshot released a new large language model called Kimi K3. The conventional wisdom had been that the leading AI models developed by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic were between six to 12 months ahead of their Chinese competitors. Kimi dashed those assumptions: now, analysts say American companies may be as little as two to three months behind. 

Dean Ball, a former Trump administration official now with OpenAI, warned in a bleak post on X that models like Kimi K3 could lead to a world of “full AI communism” and a “dystopian hellscape” of AI under full government control. 

Policymakers have worried for years now about China gaining an edge over the US in the AI race. Both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations took steps to slow China’s AI progress, including blocking the export of the most advanced US semiconductors.  

The White House is already reportedly considering taking steps to ban “open-weight” models — models that are easier to adapt for a user’s own purposes — like Kimi K3 in the United States. The Trump administration has also accused Moonshot of using the unauthorized “distillation” of one of Anthropic’s models — basically using another model’s outputs to train itself rather than raw data — as well as gaining access to blacklisted Nvidia chips in Thailand.

But often lost in the debates about what to do about China’s accelerating AI capabilities is the question of why the US cares about this at all. Obviously, the American companies developing the latest frontier models care about maintaining their edge, but why should it matter to Americans if the chatbot in their pocket was developed in Silicon Valley or Shanghai? And perhaps even more so, why should it matter what chatbots people in Nairobi or Brussels are using? 

The concerns in the US about Chinese AI generally fall into three broad buckets: cybersecurity concerns; military and national security concerns; and human rights or democracy concerns.

For the moment, concerns about who is winning the AI race can feel a bit abstract, but as AI becomes more embedded into governments, militaries, and ordinary people’s lives, the difference will start to be felt in a much more material way at both a national and personal level. In general, there is a growing sense that it matters which of the world’s vastly different superpowers builds the technology that could transform everything. 

“People’s relationship with AI is becoming foundational to how they live their lives, so the choices people make about whose model they use and where they are physically hosted, as they share some of their most intimate secrets and ask for life advice and business guidance, and run an increasing share of their life — those are incredibly important,” said Ryan Fedasiuk, a former State Department technology adviser now at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s a contest between the United States and China to define the operating systems through which people live and work.”

Here’s what else America loses if it loses that contest.

Chinese AI could be more vulnerable to cyberattacks 

The concerns about using Chinese AI are in some ways a repeat of the concerns over Huawei, the Chinese telecoms firm that built much of the world’s 5G internet infrastructure, but which the US government banned from operating in the United States during the first Trump administration over concerns that the Chinese government could intercept information transmitted over these networks. 

Today, the concern is that many firms are increasingly integrating Chinese AI models into their systems, both because they are often cheaper and because they are “open-weight.” (“Weights” refer to the setting an AI model uses to process a user’s inputs. “Open-weight” models make these publicly available for users to tinker with, rather than charging for access.) 

There are some indications that Americans using Chinese AI models are already vulnerable. A Booz Allen study from earlier this year tested four Chinese models commonly used by US developers and found that three of them generated software with far more “hidden vulnerabilities” that could be exploited by hackers than their US counterparts. There’s no proof that the models were doing this intentionally, but the study did find that the models were “changing their behavior depending on who the user seemed to be or what country the request referenced.”

AI can also be used to carry out cyberattacks. Although nearly all the leading models have safety protocols meant to prevent this, they’re not bulletproof. Even Anthropic’s Claude, generally considered one of the most secure models, was adapted by Chinese hackers last year to engage in cyber espionage. The open weights of the leading Chinese models could make it even easier to strip out the safety protocols. 

AI could give China a military edge

The simplest and most obvious argument for why AI matters for American national security is that it’s all too conceivable that the US and China could be at war in the years to come, and AI could be a major factor in determining who wins. 

The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran have shown that modern militaries are already extensively using AI for intelligence collection and targeting. Semi- or fully-autonomous drone swarms are a major component of US plans for repelling a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Then there’s the risk of AI being used to generate new bioweapons or other dangerous threats. 

US experts believe China has pursued a “military-civil fusion” strategy, encouraging the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese defense contractors to collaborate closely with civilian technology companies and research institutions in order to gain an edge in military AI applications like intelligence analysis and drone swarms. It’s difficult to know exactly which of these capabilities China is focusing on, but procurement data suggests leading Chinese technology firms like Deepseek and Alibaba are involved in work with potential military applications. Analysts also accuse China of using outputs from US models like ChatGPT and Claude to train AI systems that could help develop China’s defense capabilities. 

And that’s just conventional weapons. The US government has alleged that Chinese labs have “continued to engage in biological activities with potential [bioweapon] applications” amid concerns that artificial intelligence could help make such weapons more sophisticated and deadly. 

China could export digital authoritarianism

Last year, it was reported that Miiloo, a fuzzy children’s plush toy with a built-in AI chatbot, would, if prompted, happily tell users Chinese Communist Party talking points like “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.” The hubbub over Miiloo reached the US Senate floor. While it’s hard to imagine that many users were really asking Miiloo to help clear up East Asian territorial disputes, the affair illustrated much larger concerns about the dangers of letting AI models built by an authoritarian government with one of the world’s strictest censorship regimes become the global standard. 

Chinese generative AI tools are legally required to uphold the country’s “core socialist values,” according to a document published by its national cybersecurity standards committee. So it’s little surprise that DeepSeek, the Chinese chatbot that sent shockwaves through the US tech industry in 2025, politely declines to answer when you ask it what happened on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square. 

It’s not just that Chinese AI could help shape the political narratives absorbed by billions around the world, at a time when US soft power is ebbing and surveys show people in many countries already now have a more positive view of China than the United States.

 The Chinese government is also increasingly integrating AI into its own censorship and surveillance apparatus, and is exporting tools like facial recognition technology to other authoritarian countries. 

The fact that under Xi Jinping, China’s government was centralizing power and becoming more, not less, authoritarian in the years leading up to the recent advances in AI are a major factor driving the mistrust in its technology. 

“I think many of the sincere arguments about the risks of these models and what China would do with them stems from the coercive authoritarian approach of China’s current leader,” said Mieke Eoyang, former US  deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy. “I don’t think we would be having this conversation in the same way with someone like [China’s previous leaders] Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao.”

It is a serious concern if models built to conform to the values and political priorities of China’s current government become the global standard. But some are skeptical of the idea that human rights and democracy should be the goal of AI competition, worrying that the damage has already been done. The premise of that idea has gotten “shakier in recent years,” says Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and author of the book The Rise of Digital Repression. Under this administration, the US has cut support for democracy and human rights programs overseas, and often allied itself with authoritarian governments. Then there’s the fact that at least one leading chatbot often seems to mimic the racist and antisemitic views of the world’s richest man who is also an ally of the current president. 

While it’s still true that Chinese AI reflects the authoritarian values and priorities of China’s leaders, Feldstein notes, “this idea that the US is standing at the forefront of protecting and advancing democracy, human rights, that we’re not sort of there to manipulate information or to push a narrative agenda that reflects the ideological preferences of its leaders, has started to fray.” 

The race to AGI 

There’s also a set of concerns around the topic of “artificial general intelligence,” the hypothetical point at which AI exceeds human capabilities and is able to improve itself. The concern, expressed by both US government commissions and senior officials in both administrations, is that China is “racing” toward AGI and that whichever country achieves it first will have a massive geopolitical advantage. This is the type of thinking behind invocations of the nuclear-era Manhattan Project to justify massive government investments in AI development. 

Chinese leaders do not appear to view AI competition this way. “The US conversation around this is much more ‘AGI-pilled’,” says Jeffrey Ding, a professor at George Washington University and expert on US-China technology competition. “The concern here is that we are very much on the brink of this explosion of more and more powerful AI that leads to it dominating everything.” Chinese leaders, on the other hand, “generally see AI as a productivity tool.”

If Chinese AI is a problem, what should we be doing about it? 

This is not just a Beltway or Silicon Valley concern. A recent Pew survey found that 43 percent Americans believe it is very important for the US to remain the leader in AI development, versus 22 percent who said it was not that important. Interestingly, the survey also found that most Americans believe China is already ahead on AI, though the expert consensus is that it’s still slightly behind. 

“We’ve gotten so used to the fact that the US has been the leading player in technological revolutions from like mobile internet to the internet era, so it’s worrying to feel we may no longer have that dominant strength,” said Selina Xu, China and AI policy lead in the office of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. 

Even if there’s some consensus that AI competition is a priority, there’s less agreement on how to go about it. The challenge, Xu says, is “How do you manage the very concrete national security risks that come from competing with China on AI, but not turn technological competition into blanket protectionism?”

Often, the policy responses to this challenge have been contradictory. 

The Trump administration, in its first term, pioneered the policy of restricting the export of the most advanced semiconductor chips to China, but Trump undermined that policy last year by permitting Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips there. The move flummoxed China hawks in Washington and went against the preferences of AI developers like Anthropic, but probably had a lot to do with lobbying by chip maker Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, CEO of the world’s most valuable company. 

In some cases, the US may be inadvertently making China’s models more appealing. In June, the Trump administration placed export controls on Anthropic’s advanced Fable model. This move prompted the company to take the model down for all users and led to the first time that AI capabilities meant for the global public took a step backward.In response, French President Emmanuel Macron warned, “We will not buy any model made by [US AI] companies if from one day to the next you can just turn off the switch.” Chinese models are hardly immune from concerns about kill switches or back doors, but if both governments involved in the AI race are seen as meddling, customers may just opt for whichever one is cheaper. 

The latest flashpoint in the debate concerns the reports that the administration is considering banning open-weight models.  This prompted an open letter from dozens of leading tech companies including Nvidia and OpenAI defending access to these models as necessary for helping the US maintain AI leadership. Advocates note that open-weight models can help respond to vulnerabilities as well as create them: When a rogue OpenAI model recently hacked into the startup Hugging Face’s systems, Hugging Face’s engineers used an open-weight model developed by China’s Z.ai to analyze the attack. 

Despite the frequent comparisons, AI is not a national security competition like the early days of nuclear weapons or the space race. It’s a technology with potentially grave national security implications, that’s also used by millions of people around the world to plan their Tuesday night dinner or help with their homework. The log-in for Claude is not carried by a military officer at the president’s side. And much of the important work on developing these new technologies is being done by private tech companies, not government labs or defense contractors. 

It may be that AI capability will help determine which country has the edge in the 21st century. It may also be that the benefits of these capabilities will be shared: Chinese companies might be no less capable than their American counterparts when it comes to developing new medications or clean energy technology. 

The challenge of crafting technology to prevent a “dystopian hellscape” is to not accidentally make the existing world worse. 

Last June, in a case that effectively guaranteed one of Alabama’s Black Democratic members of Congress would be replaced by a white Republican, the Supreme Court used a single word that delighted movement conservatives and made many longtime civil rights advocates want to weep. 

In the first sentence of its decision in Allen v. Milligan (2026), most of the justices concluded that there is a tension between the federal Voting Rights Act (VRA), the landmark law that ended Jim Crow-era race discrimination in elections, and “our colorblind Constitution.” All three of the Court’s Democratic members dissented in Allen.

The word “colorblind” might not suggest, to many casual observers, the gravity of what the phrase means, how much power it has to roll back civil-rights reforms enacted in the 1960s — and the major ideological change ushered in by this Supreme Court. Proponents of colorblindness argue that any law that draws distinctions on the basis of race, for any reason whatsoever, is equally repugnant under the Constitution. Under this theory, laws like the Voting Rights Act and similar efforts to lift up historically disadvantaged racial groups are legally indistinguishable from the very kind of Jim Crow discrimination that the VRA sought to abolish. 

It’s an idea that cuts across the Roberts Court’s race decisions, including its decisions abolishing affirmative action in nearly all universities, its decisions undercutting public school integration, and its decisions dismantling the VRA. Under the colorblind thesis, the Constitution sees a modern law intended to guarantee some Black representation in Congress as precisely as intolerable as a 19th-century law forbidding Black people from voting at all. 

As Chief Justice John Roberts summarized colorblindness in a 2007 opinion, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

And lest there be any doubt, the Court’s commitment to this project extends far beyond a few pithy quotes. Just over one month before Allen, in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), the Court’s Republican majority imposed colorblindness on the laws governing US elections, effectively killing a 1982 amendment to the VRA — which was signed by President Ronald Reagan — in the process. Three years earlier, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the same justices implemented colorblindness in college and university admissions, ending affirmative action in nearly every institution of higher education in the country.

Allen’s reference to “our colorblind Constitution” confirms the breadth of this project, because if the colorblind thesis is imposed by the Constitution itself, that means that judges must strike down any law or government program that takes account of race, whether in hiring, federal contracting, university admissions, elections, or the military. (Though it is notable that the Harvard decision did dodge the question of whether service academies such as West Point may take account of race in admissions, after military leaders raised concerns that a racially diverse enlisted corps would resent being commanded by a corps of officers who do not resemble them.)

This shift in the Court’s approach to race cases is likely to lead to a purge of programs intended to benefit historically disadvantaged groups. Armed with precedents like Callais and Harvard, pro-colorblindness advocacy groups have filed a wide range of lawsuits challenging scholarships for minority youth, targeting groups that promote minority-owned businesses, and even trying to prevent universities from conducting surveys of Black students.

The GOP’s hard-right turn against laws like the Voting Rights Act is a recent development. Callais, after all, neutralized a law signed by Reagan, a Republican. An earlier Supreme Court case invalidating much of the VRA, Shelby County v. Holder (2013), struck down an extension of the VRA that was signed by Republican President George W. Bush. A significant faction within the GOP has fought against the VRA since the Nixon administration, but they repeatedly lost in the two elected branches of government and only prevailed after they captured an unelected judiciary.

But the victory of the “colorblind” theory in the conservative legal movement is also the result of decades of work. It is largely a story of how a once-fringe faction within the Republican Party took over both that party and then the Supreme Court. And, now that it controls the Court, that faction seeks to lock its approach to racial questions in place forever.

The pre-Roberts Court’s approach to race

Proponents of the colorblindness thesis often trace its origins to Justice John Marshall Harlan, the only dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court’s infamous decision permitting racial segregation. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” Harlan wrote in that dissent, “and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”

Yet, while Harlan was a racial progressive by the standards of late 19th-century legal elites, his views would offend nearly all modern-day Americans. The full context of Harlan’s famous “color-blind” line suggests that he rejected segregation, at least in part, because he viewed it as unnecessary to maintain white supremacy. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power,” Harlan began the very same paragraph that includes the line about colorblindness. “So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty.”

The truth is that modern legal arguments regarding the Constitution’s racial equality provisions did not fully take shape until late in the 20th century. The Court’s landmark school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) spoke only of a right to racially integrated public schools: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” After Brown, the Court handed down a series of unexplained orders affirming lower court decisions that struck down segregation at public beaches, municipal golf courses, parks and elsewhere. But many of these orders were just one sentence long, and they hardly answered the question of why segregation is unconstitutional outside of the public school context.

By the 1970s, legal scholars began to split between two competing theories of how the Constitution approaches race. The first theory, which Yale law professor Reva Siegel labels the “antisubordination” principle, contends that “it is wrong for the state to engage in practices that enforce the inferior social status of historically oppressed groups.” On this theory, Brown was correctly decided because the purpose of school segregation was to subordinate Black people, and the Constitution does not tolerate a racial underclass.

The other theory, which Siegel labels the “anticlassification” principle, simply declares that “government may not classify on the basis of race.” And thus any law that draws any distinction on the basis of race is constitutionally suspect, even if that law was enacted to undo the legacy of racism.

The Supreme Court of the 1970s and ’80s, however, did not divide into two neat camps. Every late 20th-century justice was at least a moderate proponent of Siegel’s anticlassification principle. While Justice Thurgood Marshall, for example, argued that the Constitution views laws which seek to “remed[y] the present effects of past racial discrimination” with less skepticism than it does laws that enforce white supremacy, he still would have subjected affirmative action and similar programs to “intermediate scrutiny,” which is the same test that courts apply to laws that discriminate against women.

Such laws are unconstitutional unless the government can provide an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for them.

Meanwhile, while a majority of the Court ultimately concluded that both Jim Crow-like laws and programs like affirmative action must survive the same exacting legal test — known as “strict scrutiny” — the Court also permitted at least some affirmative action programs to exist. The seminal case was Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which recognized that students from underrepresented racial groups bring “experiences, outlooks, and ideas” to the classroom “that enrich the training of its student body and better equip its graduates.”

And thus, if universities could not take some steps to racially diversify their student bodies, all of those students, including the white ones, would receive an inferior education.

The pre-Roberts Court, in other words, took a pragmatic approach to race cases that avoided drawing rigid lines or categorically declaring well-meaning programs intended to achieve racial equality off-limits. The justices of this era also understood that institutions outside of the Court often had far more expertise on how to foster a pluralistic society than nine lawyers in black robes.

Take Justice Lewis Powell’s opinion in Bakke, which said that “it is the business of a university to provide that atmosphere which is most conducive to speculation, experiment and creation,” and which ultimately concluded that universities “must be accorded the right to select those students who will contribute the most to the ‘robust exchange of ideas.’” 

Powell was a white Southerner who, as chair of the Richmond, Virginia, school board, left office six years after Brown with only two of Richmond’s 23,000 Black children attending school alongside white students. But he was also humble enough to recognize that universities knew something about how to educate university students to succeed in a diverse nation that he and his fellow justices did not. And so he gave these universities some leeway to exercise that expertise.

Indeed, if anything, the current Court’s most defining feature is the complete absence of the very kind of humility that Powell showed in Bakke — especially on questions of race.

Writing colorblindness into the Constitution was one of Roberts’s top priorities as chief justice

John Roberts became chief justice of the United States in 2005. Less than two years later, he made his first big push to write colorblindness into the Constitution.

In a sharp break with earlier school segregation decisions, which concluded that public schools may require each school to have “a prescribed ratio of Negro to white students reflecting the proportion for the district as a whole,” Roberts wrote that public schools are forbidden from voluntarily integrating themselves.

Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) involved two school districts, one in Seattle and another in Louisville, that allowed families to select which schools they wanted their children to attend. If more students chose a particular school than that school could accommodate, however, the districts gave a preference to children who would make their chosen school more diverse. The idea was that, since the districts had to come up with some way to determine who got to attend oversubscribed schools, it should do so in a way that fostered racial integration.

This was the case where Roberts declared that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Indeed, Roberts even wrote that these two districts’ attempt to integrate public schools was no less odious than Jim Crow segregation. “Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.” The school districts in Parents Involved, he claimed, asked his Court to “allow this once again — even for very different reasons.”

This is the essence of the colorblind theory of the Constitution. According to Roberts, the Constitution draws no distinction between white supremacist laws that segregate children by race, and an administrative scheme that tries to slightly increase the racial diversity of public schools.

It’s worth noting that Roberts’s views did not fully carry the day in Parents Involved, although a total of five justices agreed that the two school districts’ assignment schemes must be struck down. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018, wrote a separate opinion criticizing Roberts for going too far. “In the administration of public schools by the state and local authorities,” Kennedy concluded, “it is permissible to consider the racial makeup of schools and to adopt general policies to encourage a diverse student body, one aspect of which is its racial composition.”

But the Court’s overarching conclusion that racial integration can violate the Constitution still shocked the seniormost member of the Court. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “it is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.”

A justice ready to take colorblindness from a fringe idea into the law of the land

Stevens, however, should not have been surprised that the new chief justice would reach such a conclusion, because Roberts had spent nearly his entire career fighting for the most absolutist version of the colorblindness thesis.

In 1982, President Reagan signed an amendment to the Voting Rights Act which clarified that state election laws that have a disproportionate negative impact on racial minorities violate the VRA, even if the plaintiffs cannot prove those laws were enacted with racist intent — this was the amendment that Roberts’s Court effectively repealed in its Callais decision. Reagan did so over the objections of a conservative faction within his administration, and one of the most vocal members of this faction was a young lawyer named John Roberts.

As a Reagan White House attorney, according to journalist Ari Berman, Roberts “wrote upwards of 25 memos opposing” the 1982 law. He “prepared administration officials for their testimony before the Senate; attended weekly strategy sessions; and worked closely with like-minded senators on Capitol Hill.”

Meanwhile, in an unrelated 1982 memo to Attorney General William French Smith regarding Smith’s upcoming meeting with the chair of the US Civil Rights Commission, Roberts urged Smith to “reiterate our commitment to the color-blind principle” in that meeting.

Though Roberts, and the conservative faction that he belonged to, lost the fight to get Reagan to veto the 1982 law, this movement was hardly a flash in the pan. The original Voting Rights Act of 1965 included a provision requiring states with a history of racist election practices to “preclear” any new election laws with federal officials to ensure that those laws would not prevent people of color from voting. This provision was initially set to expire in 1970, which meant that there was an internal fight within the Nixon administration over whether President Richard Nixon should sign an extension.

The conservative faction lost that fight too. They also lost similar fights over Voting Rights Act extensions in 1975, 1982, and 2006, all under Republican presidents. The 2006 extension, signed by President Bush, passed the House by a 390-33 margin, and it passed the Senate 98-0.

Ultimately, however, a conservative faction that was too weak to convince a single senator to oppose the 2006 extension had the last laugh. While this faction was only a minor player in Bush-era electoral politics, it dominated conservative legal groups like the Federalist Society and successfully pushed its own candidates for the Supreme Court. And so, in 2013, that Court struck down preclearance in Shelby County. Roberts wrote the opinion, which was joined by all of the Court’s Republicans.

The piecemeal death of the Voting Rights Act, in other words, wasn’t just the triumph of a once-impotent faction within the GOP over a voting rights law, it was a triumph over the democratic process itself. Time and time again, this faction lost its fight against the VRA in the two democratically elected branches of government. But none of that matters to a faction that controls the Supreme Court.

The colorblindness thesis is ahistorical

One irony of this fight over how the Constitution approaches race is that, while the most recent version of the Republican Party embraces colorblindness, it does so despite a lack of evidence that the Constitution’s racial equality provisions were originally understood to support this thesis. In Republican legal circles, it’s currently fashionable to tout originalism, the idea that the Constitution’s meaning was fixed at the time it was drafted or ratified, and that judges must interpret constitutional provisions in line with this original meaning. Several of the current justices, including Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, are outspoken originalists.

But within the Supreme Court it was Justice Thurgood Marshall, the great civil rights lawyer turned liberal justice, who first examined how the 14th Amendment, with its guarantee that no one will be denied the “equal protection of the laws,” was understood by the post-Civil War Americans who drafted and ratified it. And that evidence does not support colorblindness.

“The Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment is the same Congress that passed the 1866 Freedmen’s Bureau Act, an Act that provided many of its benefits only to Negroes,” Marshall wrote in a separate opinion accompanying the Bakke decision. He also quoted members of Congress who complained during debates over this act that it gave Black people “favors that the poor white boy in the North cannot get,” as well as lawmakers who defended the “very discrimination” the Freedmen’s Bureau “makes between ‘destitute and suffering’ negroes and destitute and suffering white paupers.”

Seven years later, in 1985, legal scholar Eric Schnapper wrote a seminal paper fleshing out Marshall’s argument. Schnapper identified “eight Reconstruction measures establishing programs limited, in varying degrees, to blacks.” These laws included the Freedmen’s Bureau named by Marshall, as well as less significant laws offering targeted benefits to Black Americans. One law appropriated $15,000 “for the relief of freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia.” Another provided safeguards for Black veterans of the Union army.

For more than four decades, no justice even attempted to rebut Marshall and Schnapper’s originalist case for affirmative action. Indeed, the Court’s originalists were so silent that, in a 2013 article, conservative legal scholar Michael Rappaport complained that they have “not made any real effort to justify their affirmative action opinions based on the Constitution’s original meaning.”

Justice Thomas did finally attempt to rebut at least some of Marshall and Schnapper’s evidence in a concurring opinion in the Harvard case, but his response to the originalist case against colorblindness was quite feeble. Thomas’s opinion did “not contend that all of the individuals who put forth and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment universally believed” in colorblindness, and he claimed that the historical record is “sparse.” 

Regarding the Freedman’s Bureau, Thomas argued that the laws authorizing it “applied to freedmen (and refugees), a formally race-neutral category, not blacks writ large,” even though “freedmen” is a category that consisted entirely of Black people. Regarding the other Reconstruction-era laws identified by Schnapper, Thomas discussed two of them.

Thomas acknowledged that “an 1866 law adopted special rules and procedures for the payment of ‘colored’ servicemen in the Union Army,” but anachronistically claimed that this law does not show that its 19th-century drafters rejected colorblindness because it may survive the strict scrutiny test that the Supreme Court devised during the 20th century. Thomas also conceded that “another law, passed in 1867, provided funds for ‘freedmen or destitute colored people’ in the District of Columbia,” but speculated that Congress “may have enacted the measure” — which again, used the words “colored people” — “not because of race, but rather to address a special problem in shantytowns in the District where blacks lived.”

All of which is a long way of saying that the colorblindness thesis is a far more recent invention than its most prominent proponents acknowledge. It was primarily devised, not by post-Civil War lawmakers seeking to undo the legacy of slavery, but by late 20th-century conservatives who opposed programs like affirmative action. 

If there was a serious originalist case for colorblindness, one of the justices would have made it in the 45-year period between Marshall’s opinion in Bakke and Thomas’s opinion in Harvard. And when Thomas finally did attempt to rebut the evidence gathered by Marshall and Schnapper, key prongs of his argument rested on anachronism and conjecture.

The fate of affirmative action and similar programs should be decided by elected officials, not by judges

In 2006, the people of Michigan voted to end affirmative action in that state’s university system. This ban sparked a far-fetched lawsuit claiming that it was somehow unconstitutional for the state to enact such a policy. As Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote about this suit, the plaintiffs’ argument “transforms a potential virtue of affirmative action into a vice,” because “if there is one feature of affirmative-action programs that favors their constitutionality, it is that they grow out of the democratic process.” 

The question of what, if anything, should be done to racially diversify campuses — or to otherwise lift up communities that faced hundreds of years of enslavement, segregation, or other forms of government-sanctioned racism — is fraught. It is entirely reasonable to believe, as Chief Justice Roberts argued in Shelby County, that the same aggressive civil rights policies that were necessary to tear down Jim Crow in the 1960s are no longer needed two generations later. It is also reasonable to believe that, in a nation where the median white household earns over $36,000 more per year than the median Black household, that not enough is being done to close this gap.

Judge Sutton’s insight, in other words, should cut both ways. In a democracy, we are supposed to resolve these sorts of fraught questions through elections, not litigation. As the original history of the 14th Amendment shows, the United States did not ratify the post-Civil War constitutional amendments to prevent Harvard from diversifying its campus, and we certainly did not do so to prevent Congress from requiring former Confederate states to give some legislative representation to Black people. 

Similarly, proponents of colorblindness are more than capable of enacting their preferred policies without having to bypass democracy. Unlike the disenfranchised families who brought the Brown case, advocates of colorblindness do not need a judicial decree to advance their political goals — they can enact their preferred policies the same way that they did in Michigan’s 2006 election, by persuading voters that they are correct.

Nevertheless, by constitutionalizing colorblindness, the Republican justices have attempted to lock in place what could be, at most, a very transient electoral consensus around their preferred racial policy. If the American people decide, in the 2028 election or beyond, that the recent turn against laws like the Voting Rights Act was a terrible idea, they will have to replace the Supreme Court before they can reinstate those laws.