In 2025, Texas Republicans, pushed by President Donald Trump, redrew the state’s congressional map before the midterms, converting five Democratic-held districts into ones Trump would have carried by at least 10 percentage points.
The move backfired: GOP candidates lost four of five seats their new congressional map was designed to flip and lost two of their own.
That means Texas Republicans will head to Washington in January with 24 U.S. House seats, one less than they had at the start of the current Congress. When the state Legislature in Austin pursued the controversial mid-decade gerrymander, Republicans had hoped for a 30-8 split in the delegation but will end up instead at 24-14.
In South Texas, moderate Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Vicente Gonzalez of McAllen both won reelection, surviving the redraw that put more Trump voters in their districts. Republicans also lost ground in the lone Rio Grande Valley district they already held, as Tejano musician Bobby Pulido ousted two-term Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Edinburg.
Democrats picked up another seat with Katy Padilla Stout’s win over YouTuber and gun-rights activist Brandon Herrera in the 23rd Congressional District, a sprawling seat covering San Antonio to the outskirts of El Paso. The district has been vacant since former GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales resigned in April over a sex scandal with a staffer. Despite the district’s 15-point lean for Trump, Padilla Stout, a San Antonio attorney and former teacher, made it onto the radar of national Democrats who saw opportunity in the district’s majority-Hispanic status and Herrera’s history of edgy, controversial comments.
Democrats held fast to districts elsewhere, despite their incumbents being displaced due to the redraw. In the San Antonio area, Bexar County sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia beat Republican Carlos De La Cruz, the brother of Monica De La Cruz, in the newly crafted 35th Congressional District, a GOP target that Trump carried by 10 points.
In Houston, the grassroots campaign of Democrat Leticia Gutierrez topped Army veteran and former investment banker Alex Mealer, despite being vastly outspent in a district that Trump won by 20 percentage points two years ago. Gutierrez raised just a fraction of Mealer’s $2.8 million haul over the midterm cycle, as of mid-October, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
Republicans had high hopes for the redraw, which Democrats fought by fleeing the state, keeping the map in limbo by temporarily denying Republicans the headcount to pass it. But the new lines could not withstand the blue wave that swept through much of the country Tuesday, driven in part by the leftward swing of Latino voters. Texas’ new map banked on the GOP holding most of Trump’s 2024 gains with Latino Texans, who made up a majority of the eligible voting population in four of the five targets.
Nor did the redraw deliver what the White House wanted from it: a buffer that would preserve Republicans’ slim U.S. House majority. Trump’s push for the Texas map kicked off a tit-for-tat redistricting war across the country, producing similarly skewed maps in a number of states.
After Texas, Republicans were most hopeful to flip four Democratic seats they redrew in Florida. Three of them stayed blue, and the other was within a one-point margin. In California, where Democrats retaliated with new congressional maps of their own, they had picked up three of the five they targeted and were leading in the remaining two.
With GOP-leaning congressional maps powerless in the face of the blue wave, Democrats won the U.S. House and are set to have a substantial majority.The party has also wrested control of the U.S. Senate, leaving Trump to reckon with a Congress under full Democratic control for his last two years in office.
New faces
Under less dramatic circumstances, a number of new faces will join the ranks of Texas’ congressional delegation to replace ten U.S. representatives who are either retiring, gave up their seats to run for other offices or lost their primaries for reelection. Most of the races were in noncompetitive general election districts.
Two sitting representatives ran for U.S. Senate but lost in their respective primaries: Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas, fell to James Talarico while GOP Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Houston, finished behind Sen. John Cornyn and Ken Paxton.
Reverend Frederick Haynes III won Crockett’s endorsement to succeed her in the heavily Democratic 30th District. A Dallas native, Haynes has been pastor of the city’s Friendship-West Baptist Church for more than 40 years. He sailed his way into Congress in the deep blue district Tuesday.
Mortgage loan officer Jon Bonck will succeed Hunt in the safely red 38th District. Bonck received endorsements from Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and other influential Republicans leading up to his victory in the general election.
The tenure of Rep. Chip Roy will also come to an end in January after the congressman ran for Texas attorney general, a contest he lost in a primary runoff to Mayes Middleton. This election left the staunchly Republican 21st District in the hands of Mark Teixeira, a former professional baseball player who started his 14-season Major League career as the fifth overall draft pick for the Texas Rangers in 2001.
And one incumbent, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, was forced into an early exit from his safe Republican seat by his primary rival, state Rep. Steve Toth of Conroe. The business owner defeated investment banker and Democratic nominee Shaun Finnie, and will be joining the U.S. House after five total terms, including the last eight years, as a state legislator.
Among the six soon-to-be retirees, two are Democrats. The seats of Reps. Lloyd Doggett and Marc Veasey will be filled, respectively, by Rep. Greg Casar, who ran for Doggett’s Austin seat after his own district was scrambled, and former Rep. Colin Allred. Both are returning to Congress — Allred after two years out of office — in new districts.
A new cast of Republicans will take over in four other safe districts.
Five-term Rep. Jodey Arrington will leave his seat to Tom Sell, who worked in the office of former Rep. Larry Combest. Sell worked at a law firm he founded with Combest before running for the U.S. House.
Rep. Michael McCaul will be succeeded by Chris Gober, who, before running for office, worked as the chief lawyer of Elon Musk’s America PAC that has channeled $216 million toward Republicans this cycle.
Rep. Morgan Luttrell also chose not to run for reelection after two terms. That opened the door for Jessica Steinmann, an attorney who previously worked in Cruz’s office as well as in the first Trump administration’s Department of Justice.
And a deceptively familiar face will replace Rep. Troy Nehls – that of his identical twin brother, Trever Nehls, who served in the U.S. Army for more than three decades and retired from the military as a Colonel. He’ll represent the Houston-area 22nd Congressional District.
Against the backdrop of an unpopular war in Iran, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced on July 15, 2026, that the Pentagon would begin testing male service members 30 and older for low testosterone. That, the department later said, would include assessing symptoms of low testosterone such as “reduced libido, loss of spontaneous morning erections, erectile dysfunction, diminished energy and physical performance, impaired concentration, reduced muscle mass, and depressed mood.”
The combination of aggressive masculinity and militarism with the implications of testing for something like “spontaneous morning erections” as necessary for war fighting is emblematic of the administration’s tendency to combine fascist ideas and symbols with outright embarrassing messaging, or what I call “cringe fascism.”
And that’s where the concept of cringe fascism fits in. In online parlance,“cringe” is a kind of embarrassment by proxy when someone posts something that should be embarrassing but which doesn’t seem to be to them.
But the purported silliness of these ideas, as with Hegseth’s testosterone policy, hides a much more serious – and to some critics, fascist – reality. That, moreover, is why the deployment of cringe can be effective: It can generate enthusiasm among conservative voters by trolling the left while reducing deadly serious policy debates to the level of online memes.
As a scholar of conspiracy theories, I have been amazed at some of the more blatant efforts to repurpose fascist imagery by members of Trump’s inner circle.
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Consider, for example, the use of ethnonationalist and fascist imagery of “blood and soil” in sloganeering by the Department of Homeland Security, or encouraging U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruits to “Defend the Homeland.”
Alongside the authoritarian and fascist tropes, the Trump administration cannot seem to avoid “cringe.”
Recent examples include the White House tweeting images of Trump as a videogame character on a select screen with sleeveless blue suit and bulging muscles, or sharing an AI parody of the new Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time game with an awkward video of a pixelated Trump running around the White House lawn. Or consider the post depicting Trump as Green Lantern, using his magic ring to raise a spectral border wall, launch a military attack and fix American industry.
Trump’s seemingly incongruous comments occur at the same time that the secretary of defense is advocating hypermasculinity in the military through testosterone testing, reflecting a heady mix of masculinity and military supremacy that has long been a hallmark of fascism. Such a policy is also at odds with how the professional military has presented itself under previous administrations.
Cringing our way to the midterms
The mixture of fascist aesthetics with cringe posting underscores the internal contradictions of the Trump administration.
It is difficult to see critics’ view of Trump’s second term as “fascist” when observers get such awkward online displays of silliness. And when official communications from the White House and federal agencies are equal parts tough talk, trolling and cringe, the underlying policies can get lost in the shuffle.
Masked ICE agents continue to operate with some legal protections from the White House in their sometimes-deadly efforts to pursue and round up people it broadly accuses of being in the country illegally.
The deployment of cringe might seems like a ridiculous, even unconscious, exercise by an administration that – as with the five-day tenure of former press secretary Katie Zacharia shows – regularly exposes itself to derision and satire. Yet that’s why the use of such a concept can be so strategically effective: It turns potentially deadly serious policy consequences and ideological choices into a game of memes and online gamesmanship.
Sen. Susan Collins, the five-term Republican from Maine, called her opponent Troy Jackson, a former logger and state senate president, to concede Tuesday night. The Associated Press called the election just after midnight, with Jackson leading by about six percentage points.
Despite nearly 30 years in the Senate, Collins has been seen as one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents, a smaller pebble in the blue avalanche that wiped out MAGA candidates in the midterm elections. She was the lone Senate Republican to represent a state that former Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris carried in the 2024 election. She lost despite her efforts to distance herself from President Donald Trump. Her campaign claims she has never voted for the president and reportedly refused his help with her run.
That hasn’t stopped her from often playing a key role in Trump’s agenda, casting a critical vote in Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh would later join the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the constitutional right to an abortion. Indeed, Collins’ position on reproductive rights seems to have played a key role in her defeat. Collins received support from Trump despite her efforts, according to reporting from ProPublica earlier this year, which revealed how an FBI anti-corruption squad was investigating Collins before Trump killed the case.
As for Jackson, he first ran for office in 2000 as a Republican for the Maine House of Representatives, but lost. He ran again as an independent two years later and won, becoming the first non-Democrat to represent the area since the late ‘70s.
Before delegates at a state convention chose Jackson in July, Collins was originally running against oyster farmer Graham Platner, who won the Democratic primary with support from progressive leaders. But controversies surrounding Platner continued to pile up, and he finally withdrew from the race on July 10 following sexual assault allegations.
Pretend I’m on the ballot, the president of the United States repeatedly told American voters over the last several weeks. Millions of voters did exactly that. Be careful what you wish for, my dude.
The astonishing results of the 2026 midterm elections do not just represent a rebuke or a political setback for Donald Trump. Those neutral-sounding terms of art are not remotely adequate. This was a historic smackdown, a massive, crushing defeat on a scale suffered by no incumbent president in living memory. It represents this nation’s collective awakening — admittedly rather late in the game — to this individual’s uniquely poisonous effects on our public life and civil society.
Many larger political questions will emerge from this epic defeat, which will see any and all surviving elected Republicans (not that there are many) scurrying for cover and trying to establish as much distance as possible from Trump. They will lose his number. They will profess that they were never convinced MAGA believers, or that they secretly disagreed with the ICE reign of terror, with the war in Iran, with the disastrous tariffs, with the ideological assault on liberal democracy.
Is JD Vance still a plausible 2028 presidential contender, having hitched his wagon to this tyrant, who has now been thoroughly pantsed in public and exposed as a pathetic loser? Will Pete Hegseth get even one more opportunity for podcaster-style flexing before the defanged Pentagon press corps? Let’s give Marco Rubio an infinitesimal amount of credit for creeping quietly through the corridors of power and staying out of the headlines. Whether his neocon mouse act is enough to survive the Trumpocalypse moment remains to be seen.
In his inimitable style, Trump is already blaming others for this defeat. He has accused Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — who lost his seat to Democrat Gina Hinojosa in one of Tuesday night’s numerous shockers — of being a RINO sellout. As impossible as it is to talk about honor with these people, that is an act of dishonorable treachery, given how eagerly Abbott has crawled and begged and prostrated himself before the Trumpian throne.
Then again, in an ass-backward way, Trump has a point. He didn’t do this all by himself; no one could have managed that. He loaded up the pipe with bigotry and xenophobia and fear and insane conspiracy theories, and adult Republican humans who used to believe in wrong-headed but somewhat sane political doctrines inhaled it all eagerly, persuading themselves that the resulting high would insulate them from the failure of their ideas. It only made the problem worse — all the problems, really — and they should have seen that coming.
The president corrupted and enslaved a historic American political party with a complicated but illustrious history, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. I’m not the biggest fan of that party either, but it has certainly had its moments, including the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress and the first Black man elected to the U.S. Senate. Trump insisted that it surrender everything to him — its principles, its history and its soul, if political parties have such a thing — and as in every fable about making a deal with the devil, now it has been destroyed.
We don’t know how this election would have turned out in the unimaginable alternate universe where Trump stayed out of it. But he didn’t. He forced Sen. John Cornyn out of the race in Texas, in favor of Ken Paxton. Look what happened. He picked Darline Graham to replace her late brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, in South Carolina. Look what happened. He picked Mike Collins to run against Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and Michael Whatley to run against former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina. Look what happened. He praised Ohio Sen. Jon Husted’s rear end and embraced gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s noxious campaign ad. Look what happened there, too.
And that’s without considering the supposedly ingenious MAGA strategy of redistricting congressional seats in one state after another, with the objective of locking in a permanent Republican majority. How will that play out over the longer term? That’s impossible to say, but in 2026 it seems to have unleashed an extraordinary backlash. Forget all the hand-wringing about purple districts and swing districts; the congressional map is a nationwide wipeout. As I write this, the New York Times is predicting a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives of 256 seats. That may or may not hold up, but however this ends, it’s likely to be the biggest midterm swing in more than 30 years.
Are there still die-hard MAGA Republicans in deep-red exurbs or rural districts who will continue to profess fealty to Trump in the wake of this catastrophe, and perhaps even maintain that it’s all some kind of grand misunderstanding? Yeah, sure. Any cult movement has its true believers and willing sacrifices. Years after his resignation, the postmistress in the rural town where I spent summers as a kid never took down the portrait of Richard Nixon. Then she retired and moved away, someone else took the job and Nixon’s picture wound up out back, in the dumpster.
That’s about where we are. Trump has always been poisonous. Republicans are finally learning that the hard way.
James Talarico, the charismatic Texas state representative who campaigned by talking extensively about his Christian faith, has defeated state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was Donald Trump’s hand-picked choice, in Tuesday’s most high-profile U.S. Senate race. Late on Tuesday evening, Talarico led by more than a million votes, and the Associated Press called the race just before 11 p.m. Eastern time.
This marks the first time a Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas since 1994, and another such result, perhaps even more surprising, followed almost immediately. Democrat Gina Hinojosa has won the Texas governor’s race, according to the AP, beating Republican incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott by more than 700,000 votes.
The big blue wave of 2026 has featured numerous surprising results, including the upset victory by Democrat Annie Andrews over Republican Sen. Darline Graham in South Carolina’s Senate race. But these dramatic and unexpected Democratic wins in Texas stand out. The Senate campaign between Talarico and Paxton became one of the most expensive state-level races in American history, and according to CNN analyst David Axelrod, Hinojosa was outspent 10 to one by Abbott. Talarico’s campaign also became a major target for Democratic donors and an opportunity to vent their frustration and anger with Trump’s second presidential term.
A combined $573 million were spent by Talarico and Paxton, as well as their defeated primary opponents, over the course of this campaign. Much of that spending was the result of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla pumped an estimated $474 million into this race, virtually all of it to support Paxton, setting a new record for a single donor in a political campaign. Most of that money was funneled through went to Musk’s personal super PAC, but around $168 million went to the Senate Leadership Fund. Another $10 million went to the pro-Paxton Lone Star Liberty PAC, which spammed voters with AI-generated robocalls attacking Talarico. Meanwhile, Talarico’s campaign and Democratic PACs raised about $133 million.
Although Talarico, like other Democrats, focused on affordability and fighting corruption, he also sought to challenge the dominant view that only Republicans can be devout Christians. His campaign attracted various right-wing conspiracy theories, including claims that he was an emasculated “secret vegan” who suffered from mental illness. Democrats worried that this viral misinformation might overshadow numerous allegations about Paxton, including a Wall Street Journal report that he partied in Dubai with two fugitives from U.S. justice and a woman who wasn’t his wife.
Although Talarico has led in recent public polls, the size of his victory was unexpected. At this writing, it appears almost certain that Democrats will win the Senate, having already flipped seats in both South Carolina and North Carolina, where former Gov. Roy Cooper easily won the open seat held by outgoing Republican Sen. Thom Tillis. Democrats also lead the Senate races in Iowa, Maine and Ohio, although those races remain undecided.
Dr. Annie Andrews will be the first Democratic senator from South Carolina since 1998, according to AP projections. In a stunning upset, she defeated the incumbent Republican Darline Graham, who was hand-picked by Donald Trump to succeed her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, following his death in July.
A pediatrician, Andrews positioned herself as an antidote to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA agenda. Her campaign launch video hinged on measles outbreaks and the harm of anti-vax sentiments at the highest levels of public health. She described Kennedy as the “brain worm guy” and slammed Trump’s Cabinet as uniquely unsuited to their positions.
The race was never supposed to be close. South Carolina is about as red as you can imagine. The haven of cheap gas and fireworks hasn’t elected any Democrat to statewide office since 2006. Trump carried the state by 17 points in 2024.
Unlike her sibling, who shifted from staunch Trump critic to late-in-life ally, Graham was joined at the hip to the Trump administration from the outset. The president’s high disapproval ratings worked to turn the typical GOP lay-up into a closely contested race.
But Graham, a novice politician, did herself no favors. She flubbed softball questions around foreign affairs on the debate stage, a strong suit of her hawkish brother. Her dismal poll numbers pushed Trump to rally for Graham repeatedly in the state, cementing even stronger associations between the Republican nominee and Trump’s unpopular policies.
High early turnout among Black voters in the state also spelled trouble for Graham. The community, which is largely Democratic, turned out in high relative numbers and helped swing the race toward Andrews.
The Democratic candidate worked to avoid the associations with national party leaders that hamstrung Graham, refraining from appearances with prominent Democrats in the race’s final weeks. Andrews painted herself as a pragmatist, willing to work with national Republicans to score wins for South Carolinians. Late last month, Andrews received a shocking bipartisan endorsement from two former governors of South Carolina. Republican David Beasley joined Democrat Jim Hodges to support Andrews over Trump-backed Graham, saying Andrews was the only candidate focused on “making things better.”
As Americans head to the polls on Tuesday, voting experts are watching to see how the Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to assert more federal control over elections will play out.
The president has justified these steps by claiming, without evidence, that American elections are beset by fraud and that illegal voting is tipping the scales in favor of Democrats.
Courts have thwarted most of the administration’s plans to date, but Trump and his top deputies have kept up the pressure. Most recently, they’ve threatened to prosecute election officials who don’t reject ballots from people that the federal government has identified as likely noncitizens.
The administration hasn’t explicitly ruled out sending federal agents to the polls or seizing ballots or voting machines.
Election experts say the cumulative effect has been to ramp up anxiety about the midterms and to erode voters’ trust in the system.
“The administration has been creating a lot of noise, a lot of confusion, a lot of doubt,” said Ben Hovland, whom Trump fired as a commissioner for the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission earlier this year. He said he worries that this will make voters “sit it out” and “throw their hands up.”
In an emailed response to questions, a DHS spokesperson said Immigration and Customs Enforcement “is not planning operations targeting polling locations,” adding that the agency would only arrest people at the polls to address a safety threat as part of “intelligence-driven targeted enforcement.”
The DHS and the Justice Department “are laser focused on identifying, prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and dilute the votes of U.S. citizens,” the spokesperson added. “Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences — including criminal charges and deportation.”
Before and on Election Day, it’s typical for the major political parties to mount poll-watching operations, but both Democrats and Republicans say they’ve expanded these activities in this pressurized midterm.
Republicans will focus on issues such as voter eligibility and voter-roll accuracy, according to Ally Triolo, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity communications director. Democrats will concentrate on voter intimidation and other hurdles to voting, Angelo Fernández Hernández, a Democratic National Committee spokesperson, said.
Here are five issues that voting rights experts say they’re watching as this year’s election unfolds:
1. Will There Be Federal Interference?
An incident in Leon County, in the Florida Panhandle, illustrates the widespread anxiety about law enforcement at the polls.
Mark Earley, the county’s supervisor of elections, told ProPublica he was “furious” when two marked U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicles parked outside the county’s busiest early voting location last month, after he’d been repeatedly reassured by the administration that agents would not do this.
He reported the sighting to the FBI, then learned that the agents, who were headed out of state, had just stopped by to try to vote themselves. The episode generated a flurry of newscoverage.
“Given the negative media coverage regarding federal agents at the polls, it shows pretty bad judgment that they showed up in their official vehicles,” Earley said.
It’s against the law for federal law enforcement to be near polling places.
Nick Brown, Washington’s attorney general, leads a group of Democratic state officials and voting rights advocates who have been planning how to respond if, indeed, there is real federal interference. The group has “war-gamed” how to react if government agents attempt to commandeer voting equipment or ballots.
“We’ve seen the tension and chaos that’s in the air,” Brown said. He called the federal government “the biggest challenge to smooth elections right now, which is not the way it’s supposed to be.”
A DOJ spokesperson said “the best preparation for any election official is following federal law.”
It’s routine for DOJ monitors to watch over polling places, and the agency has assured states that, in the midterms, its observers will follow the law and not interfere with voting or election administration. Still, state officials remain concerned. During Wyoming’s primary election, poll workers said they felt uneasy when DOJ monitors asked about their training and to inspect voting systems. The state’s governor criticized these actions as “a bit aggressive” and “irregular.”
2. What Effect Will Noncitizen Voter Challenges Have?
The Trump administration’s multipronged effort targeting alleged noncitizen voters has already led to eligible voters being improperly removed from the rolls. Voting rights groups fear this will block some U.S. citizens from being able to vote when they show up on Tuesday.
Federal officials have made clear they plan to go after anyone they think is committing voter fraud.
On the first day of early voting in Texas, Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, posted a YouTube video announcing his intentions. “If you violate federal election law,” he warned, “I will hunt you down and prosecute you.”
This threat came days after the DOJ sued California, seeking to block the state from counting mail ballots from more than 20,000 voters it claims are “likely” noncitizens. The administration had obtained the state’s public voter rolls, which the DHS had blended with its own immigration information and third-party data.
In a court filing, California called the claim that there are 20,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls “specious.” Los Angeles County analyzed a sampling of the likely noncitizen voters that the federal government claimed were registered there. Many weren’t registered in the county or had never voted, the analysis showed. Some said on their voter registration forms that they were born in the United States.
Asked about the case, the DOJ told ProPublica, “Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and the Department has a duty to enforce it.”
A federal judge has rejected the DOJ’s motion for an emergency order that would have barred California from counting the 20,000 voters’ ballots. (A federal appeals panel later backed that decision.) On Thursday, the administration sent grand jury subpoenas to California officials demanding records about their response to allegations of noncitizens on the state’s rolls. Late Friday, a federal judge issued a restraining order blocking the DOJ’s demands, calling them an “intimidation plan” that would interfere with legal voting.
Last week, the DOJ wrote a letter threatening to sue Washington state if officials there refused to review a list of 400 voters it believes to be noncitizens within 24 hours. U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters late last month that the department was considering additional actions, saying there were “a number of states that we’re looking at.”
In a letter responding to the DOJ, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs called the government list of 400 names “not reliable,” saying it included U.S. citizens, people who aren’t registered to vote and duplicate entries. “Time and time again,” Hobbs wrote, “DHS claims about noncitizen voter registration turn out to be greatly exaggerated or false.”
Sam Trepel is Rule of Law program director at States United Democracy Center and a former attorney for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. She said the agency’s actions involving California and Washington were a “disturbing use of prosecutorial authority.”
Trepel worries that the DOJ may try to seize ballots cast by voters identified as likely noncitizens, before or after the election, which would “put their votes at risk and undermine trust more broadly.”
Voting rights advocates also worry that the government’s efforts to target noncitizen voters could frighten eligible voters to the point that they won’t show up.
“A voter could say, ‘Well, maybe I don’t want to put myself on the target list here, maybe I won’t register, or maybe I won’t vote,’” said David Janovsky, acting director of The Constitution Project at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.
3. Will There Be Problems at the Polls?
States often change laws and rules related to voting.
Since 2024, Republican-led states have taken a number of steps that experts say will make it more difficult for some of their residents to cast ballots and have them count.
A North Carolina law, for example, requires voters to provide proof of identification when sending mail-in ballots. Under new rules, ballots now come with two envelopes, both of which must be sealed. Ballot rejections have skyrocketed, Democracy Docket reported, because voters aren’t sealing the inner envelope.
Texas and other states have cut back on the number and location of polling places, especially in areas favoring Democrats. In hotly contested Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, the number of polling sites was slashed by almost a third. This could increase the risk of long lines and voter confusion on Election Day.
Voting rights groups such as the Texas Civil Rights Project are tracking two issues involving the state’s voter registration systems. A software error at the Texas Department of Public Safety stopped several hundred thousand new voter registrations from being forwarded to local election officials, preventing them from being added to the rolls. A separate state system for updating registration information wasn’t processing changes for several weeks, leading to more backlogs. Counties say they’ve been able to address these problems.
Every election features some issues with voting equipment.
So far, there have been isolated complaints involving touch-screen voting machines — including one from Dolly Parton’s sister in Tennessee — spawning fears that machines have been “rigged” to switch votes.
ES&S, the company that makes the machines garnering the complaints, told ProPublica that the company hadn’t received widespread reports. Election experts say occasional problems with touch-screen machines don’t signify tampering or manipulation. Any attempt to tamper with programming would surface during testing by election officials and be corrected, they said.
4. How Secure Will the Election Be?
Incidents in the run-up to the midterms have ratcheted up election officials’ concerns about the potential for both cyber and physical attacks.
Last month, officials in several states, including Arizona, received envelopes with an unknown white powder. Arizona eventually deemed the material nontoxic, but Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said “the fear it caused was real.”
In 2024, false bomb threats, thought to be from foreign actors, caused widespread evacuations of vote-counting sites across the country. The disruptions were brief, however, in part because a message board funded by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, alerted election officials that the FBI had deemed the threats not credible.
Trump, however, has dismantled CISA since retaking the presidency, leaving states and local election officials to grapple with both physical and cyber threats on their own. Electionnonprofits have stepped up to try to fill the gap, and states, with CISA’s help, have enhanced their own cyber defenses.
Derek Tisler, counsel and manager for the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the federal government’s absence has weakened the defenses.
“States acting on their own just do not have the same power,” he said.
5. Where Will Postelection Challenges Come From?
Election lawyers fear that actions by the Trump administration in the run-up to the midterms suggest the government will aggressively pursue postelection challenges if the results are not to the president’s liking.
Late last month, the DOJ sued Alaska, seeking to block the state from certifying the result of its Senate race if the Republican incumbent doesn’t win. A federal judge threw out that lawsuit on Sunday, but the administration is expected to appeal.
Trump has said he personally ordered the lawsuit to be filed. It claims the system is unfairly rigged against Sen. Dan Sullivan, because another Alaska man named Dan Sullivan also qualified for the general election ballot. The New York Times reported last week that campaign aides to Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola orchestrated the candidacy of the second Dan Sullivan after a monthslong, statewide search to recruit someone with the same name.
Nonetheless, the DOJ’s case is unusual, both because federal law prohibits the government from interfering with an active election and because challenges typically come after voting is complete. Postelection challenges are most often brought by losing candidates in state courts.
“This is using the federal government to interfere with our election process in a way that I think is pretty troubling on multiple levels,” said Brown, the Washington attorney general.
In response to ProPublica’s questions, the DOJ pointed to Blanche’s statement about the lawsuit on social media, which said the agency “does not seek to stop any ballot from being cast or to stop the certification of Alaska’s election.” (The lawsuit calls it “vital” that the state not certify “any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion” and asks the judge to prevent Alaska from doing this.)
Some election lawyers have suggested that if the GOP suffers significant losses, Trump could try to pressure Republicans in Congress to block new members from being seated. Several lawyers, including Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, say that the incoming Democratic majority would be able to fend off such an effort; courts, too, are likely to stymie it, though it might cause a short delay, according to Muller.
Brown said he and other attorneys general are also planning how to respond if local election officials or boards refuse to certify election results, based on their own claims of fraud or claims by the administration.
“I worry tremendously about what they might do,” Brown said.
On the last day before the 2026 midterm elections, President Donald Trump gave a speech before the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a site of considerable scandal in his second term. He joked it should be renamed after him and spent considerable time discussing Washington, D.C. construction projects and resurrecting conspiracy theories about monument vandals. When the president did turn to the elections, more than 23 minutes into an hour-long speech, he seemed to foreshadow major Republican losses in the House and Senate, describing it as “The most important midterm, I believe, in our lifetime.”
“When you vote, remember a party that hates America cannot be allowed to rule over the people who built our country,” Trump said, referring to Democrats, whom he said want to “blow all of this up by electing communist jihadists.”
“If the people that voted for me and voted in the last election where we had such a great victory, if they go out and vote, just a good portion of them, we will win in a landslide,” Trump said midway in his speech. “Now that doesn’t happen because usually whoever the sitting president is, Republican or Democrat, uh, good or bad, good president, great president, bad, for some reason the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms, but we gave this a very strong shot.”
The last day of polling indicates that Democrats have odds that are better than good to flip control of the House and Senate. The final results from the New York Times/Siena University polls report “The party is ahead in all seven states likeliest to decide control of the Senate: Michigan, Kansas, Texas, Maine, Ohio and, more narrowly, Alaska and Iowa.” The final predictions in the Cook Political Report included five additional shifts for Democrats in North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Virginia, projecting “that Democrats will win 15 to 25 seats, putting them at a 230- to 240-seat majority.” If a sweep happens in the toss up races, it’ll give Democrats their strongest majority since 2009.
Meanwhile, early voting records have been smashed around the country, in places like South Carolina and Ohio. In Texas, more than 7.7 million voters did so early, surpassing the record turnout for a midterm election set in 2018. Across the nation, about 50 million ballots have already been cast so far, with the share of registered Democrats notably increased in several key state races. But according to the New York Times, around half the expected votes will come on Election Day itself, making it difficult at this point to determine how big a role early votes will play in the outcome.
Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t win last week’s election in Israel. But he didn’t exactly lose it either. The real loser may have been Israel’s fragile democracy, already corrupted from within, perhaps past the point of no return, by Netanyahu’s decades-long death-grip on power.
On the eve of a momentous election in the United States, the parallels are both inexact and unavoidable. Israelis must now decide what kind of country they will have, or at least what kind they aspire to have. They must decide whose votes actually count, and whether some citizens are more equal than others.
Those same questions also confront Americans, both in this week’s midterm elections and, in a more general sense, on the larger political and historical stage. No doubt it is tempting for liberals and progressives to express outrage at the blatant flaws and contradictions of Israeli democracy. But to invoke the Christian tradition here, it might be better to remove the plank from your own eye before trying to remove the speck from your brother’s.
On the surface, the electoral arithmetic in Israel appears straightforward. Parties opposed to Netanyahu’s far-right government won 67 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. So a majority coalition of anti-Netanyahu forces is clearly achievable, right? You would think so, except that 19 of those 67 seats were won by Israel’s “Arab parties,” an all-time high, and that startling fact has thrown the entire political system into confusion.
Netanyahu and his allies have spent the last week airing groundless allegations that the election was fraudulent or rigged, a refrain that Americans are likely to hear a great deal in coming days. What the Zionist far right means is that too many Israeli Arabs — meaning the Palestinian population that remained in Israel after the state was created in 1948 — decided to vote this time, an outcome that no one expected, and that none of the parties representing the Jewish majority particularly wanted.
Now, in a masterstroke of historical or perhaps biblical irony, Israel’s Arab minority — which is not a monolithic group in political or cultural terms, and until now has never been electorally significant — holds the balance of power, and perhaps the nation’s future, in its hands.
In a masterstroke of historical or perhaps biblical irony, Israel’s Arab minority — which is not a monolithic group in political or cultural terms, and until now has never been electorally significant — holds the balance of power, and perhaps the nation’s future, in its hands.
Gadi Eisenkot, the former general who leads the centrist-Zionist opposition to Netanyahu, promised during the campaign not to form a government with Arab support. Over the last several nights, thousands of demonstrators in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have urged him to do precisely that, since the only realistic alternative is the grim default setting of Israeli politics: another wobbly right-wing government headed by Netanyahu, which means more brutality and destruction in Gaza, more war with Iran and more settler violence in the West Bank.
As Gideon Levy of the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz explains it,
The future of Israel now depends on its Arab citizens and on the attitude of its Jewish citizens toward its Arab ones. Eighty years after the Nakba and the establishment of the Jewish state, Israeli Palestinians may determine its fate. Is there greater historical justice than that?
The election’s unexpected results are “a cause for rejoicing,” Levy writes, in that they have presented Israelis with a clear choice “between a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and a government that includes the Arab parties.” If the “change bloc” within the Zionist majority cannot accept a coalition with Arab Israelis, he continues, “they will make it clear that they are actually the same as Netanyahu, that they prefer even the devil Netanyahu over repressing their racism. … [E]veryone will know that racism is the supreme value in this country, across the board, above any other value.”
That ferocious language certainly does not represent mainstream Israeli opinion, but it’s fair to say the strong emotion beneath Levy’s words is far more widely felt. I don’t think it’s possible for a non-Jewish observer (such as myself), however well educated or sympathetic, to understand the anguish felt by Jewish people — wherever they live, and whatever their political views — at the enormous distance between what Israel originally represented to the world, or claimed to represent, and what it represents now.
I’m old enough to remember when most American liberals and progressives viewed the state of Israel in overwhelmingly positive terms, as a locus of charismatic or heroic renewal for the people Hitler couldn’t kill, infused with the spirit of European socialism and, not far below the surface, the collective guilt of the Holocaust. I grew up in one of the most left-liberal corners of America, surrounded by educated adults who supported the civil rights movement, opposed the Vietnam War, hated Richard Nixon and loved Israel. Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan were beloved celebrities; the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, as narrated by U.S. media, were straight-up battles between the forces of light and darkness.
That says more about the moral blindness or willful innocence of American liberalism, I must admit, than it says about Israel. In any event, when I saw Joe Biden’s fateful bear hug with Netanyahu on the tarmac of Ben Gurion Airport in the aftermath of the dreadful Oct. 7 attack, I understood it. I recognized the country Biden was coming from, because I came from there too: It was the Democratic majority of the not-so-distant past, when Israel was embraced as a light to the nations and left-wing radicals who brought up the Palestinian cause were being unreasonable hotheads, if not openly antisemitic and a little bit Nazi.
What Israel has become during Netanyahu’s long and destructive reign is now clear to most of the world, and most of all to the many Jewish or Israeli critics who have been speaking difficult truths for many years, often at enormous personal cost. I am disinclined, however, to judge too harshly those who cling to the vision of Israel as an exceptional nation — one that has stumbled, perhaps, but may yet regain its true path.
Like I said earlier, we should mind the plank in our own eye first. Isn’t that the same vision that many Americans still cling to? That somehow, on the other side of this dreadful phase of our history — yes, a full decade of Donald Trump, but I’m afraid the damage goes back a lot further than that — the “indispensable nation” variously articulated by Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama is still there, still retrievable, still bending its moral arc toward justice.
Americans and Israelis are conjoined by history, for better or worse, and now see each other as distorted reflections, through a glass darkly, as the King James Bible puts it. We face versions of the same decisions this week, about whose votes count and whether the highfalutin words of our constitution apply to everyone. About whether to see terror and tyranny for what they are, and turn the page.
RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas — When Cynthia Villareal voted for President Donald Trump in 2024, she did so trusting his campaign promises of lower gas prices, border security and “assistance for the people — for the middle class.”
The 43-year-old mother of four turned out for Trump alongside a sizable majority of voters in heavily Latino Starr County, which hugs the border with Mexico and had reliably turned out for Democratic candidates for five generations.
Less than two years later, Villareal said the promise of her vote never materialized. “He said gas prices were gonna go down. They haven’t — they haven’t at all,” said Villareal, who drives around the Rio Grande Valley for her job supervising home health aides and feels every little surge. Villareal manages workers in a shortstaffed, tough profession where wages have simply not kept up with the cost of living. Many of her best workers, she said, are immigrants without permanent legal status experiencing the brunt of Trump’s immigration agenda.
“I mean, he didn’t mention that these ICE agents were just going to be picking up all of these hardworking employees, you know, that have no backgrounds,” Villareal said, referring to immigrants without a criminal record. “They’re leaving people without their family, basically, and then some of the people are even dying in there,” she said of immigration detention. “Like, who knows what they’re doing to these poor people?”
For Villareal, life is more expensive, and her job harder. “It’s just too much.”
Latina voters’ rightward shift was a crucial part of Trump’s reelection in 2024, and while more Latino men backed the president, Latinas actually made larger strides to the right in the last four presidential cycles.
Ahead of the midterms, Latinas are also registering higher levels of regret when thinking about their support for Trump, a dynamic that may decide the outcome of competitive races from Texas to Florida and beyond.
Volunteers with LUPE Votes phone bank for Democratic candidate for Texas governor Gina Hinojosa in Brownsville, Texas, on September 15, 2026.
(Brenda Bazán for The 19th)
Voters like Villareal shed light on how Trump regret among this swingy and powerful group of voters — Latinas vote at higher rates than Latino men — may be the swell that breaks into a blue wave for Democrats this November.
“I do think the narrative of this election could be that Latina women, in particular, help decide who is in control of the House of Representatives and the balance of government. And I say that because of the shifts we’ve seen over time and the shifts back that we are seeing now among Latina women in particular,” said Stephanie Valencia, who studies Latino voters at Equis Research.
Latinos’ political power this cycle is spread across the midterms map. Latinos make up at least 15 percent of the population in six of the 17 most competitive congressional districts, as well as in 29 other districts considered broadly competitive, mostly in the Southwest, California and Florida. Latino voters could be the deciders in competitive races for the U.S. Senate in Texas and Florida. Also in Texas, Latinos could swing the most competitive governor’s race the state has seen in years and, in doing so, elect the first Latina to the state’s top job.
“Trump appealed to their pocketbooks and people were suffering here. I also think people were tired. We’ve been Democratic for over 100 years — why don’t we try something different?” said Cecilia Hernández, who founded the local political group Somos STARR this year in response to the big swings to the right she’s seen in her community.
In an interview at the office of her family’s trash collection business, Hernández said voters’ views are shifting this cycle.
“I think along with everything that’s happening with immigration and with the cost of living today, what I’ve been receiving a lot is, ‘I’m in the middle,’” Hernández said. “They don’t want to be seen as far right, and they don’t want to be seen as far left, either.”
Latinas stand out in just how much they are feeling the burn of rising costs. They report higher levels of financial stress and are less optimistic about the national economy, according to multiple surveys of Latino voters conducted over the past year.
An expansive survey of Latinos conducted in the spring and sponsored by UnidosUS, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization, found that Latinas are more likely than Latino men to say that they have trouble meeting expenses — 23 percent of women vs. 17 percent of men. Men are much more likely to say they can meet their expenses and even have a little left over.
Thirty-eight percent of Latinas voted for Trump in 2024, versus half of Latino men, according to one high-quality analysis, driven by high costs and lack of confidence in the party in power on the economy. The UnidosUS survey of 3,000 Latino voters found that almost a third of Latinas who voted for Trump had regrets about their vote — seven points more than Latino men.
Regret is most striking among young Latinas: 42 percent said they would not vote for him again, a 12-point gap with young Latino men. Latina voters are more likely to register and turn out to vote, and with Latino voters skewing younger, young Latinas wield outsize political power.
Juan Lozada, a supporter of Democratic candidate for Texas Governor Gina Hinojosa, at an event in McAllen, Texas on September 14, 2026.
(Brenda Bazán for The 19th)
“Latina women have a large gender pay gap. We also have higher unemployment. We also generally have the responsibility of going to the supermarket and paying the grocery bills and understanding that eggs and and everything else is more expensive,” said Katharine Pichardo, the president and CEO of the Latino Victory Project, which backs progressive Democrats. Latinas are more likely to be closely involved in their kids’ education and doctors’ appointments, a frontline view on rising costs that Pichardo said shaped how they voted in 2024 and their views on that vote now.
Melissa Morales, the president of Somos Votantes, which does political outreach to Latinos on behalf of Democratic candidates, said Latinas started peeling away from Trump almost immediately in his second term, while Latino men started shifting in the latter part of 2025.
While Latinos, like voters overall, broadly rank the cost of living as their top issue, the disparate impact of the administration’s immigration policies on Latino communities is also registering among Latino voters.
A New York Times/Siena poll conducted in mid October found that only a third of Hispanic voters approve of the administration’s handling of immigration. UnidosUS’ survey found significant gender gaps between Latino men and women. While both groups rank the importance of the issue about the same, Latinas were more likely to oppose policies like ending birthright citizenship and more funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Latinas were also more likely to support banning ICE from sensitive locations like schools and hospitals and to support requiring warrants for enforcement at home or in a workplace.
Some of the most dramatic shifts toward Trump and Republicans in 2024 were logged in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, where Villareal lives. A string of counties in this part of Texas saw double-digit shifts in Trump’s favor compared with the 2020 election, after significant shifts to the right from 2016 to 2020.
Latina voters in the Rio Grande Valley and around Texas will have a big impact on the Texas governor’s race, where Democrat Gina Hinojosa is locked in a dead heat with three-term Gov. Greg Abbott. Hinojosa describes herself as a populist who will tackle corruption and undue influence in government, which she ties to rising costs, weakened public schools and more.
Hinojosa rarely acknowledges the history-making potential of her campaign as a Latina in a state that has never elected a Latino to the governor’s mansion. She instead nods to it by saying that she’d be the first governor from the Rio Grande Valley, which for Texans may as well mean the same thing.
Gina Hinojosa speaks at an event in McAllen, Texas, on September 14, 2026. If elected, Hinojosa would become the state’s first Latina governor and its first governor from the Rio Grande Valley.
(Brenda Bazán for The 19th)
Hinojosa, who is bilingual, flexes her Spanglish easily on the stump, telling voters that the most important lesson she ever got came from her mother was the scolding, “No te dejes.” It doesn’t have a direct translation in English.
“The best thing I can come up with is, ‘Know your worth and defend it,’” Hinojosa said in an interview. Asked if the Spanish phrase was connecting with voters, Hinojosa said, “for sure with Latinos, and 1,000 percent with Latinas.”
“I’ve learned on the campaign trail that this is a saying that is mostly passed down through the women in the family,” she added. “And I think it’s because of this knowledge that women have for their daughters, grandmothers have for their granddaughters, that the world is tough, and we have to be strong.”
At campaign events in the Rio Grande Valley in September, several voters cited Hinojosa’s identity and approach to politics as a motivating factor.
Juanita Vallejo, 40, of Edinburg, Texas, said she sees Hinojosa as an “empowered woman,” and likes her firm stances in support of public schools and curtailing data centers.
“I don’t want to say it this way, but I’m going to say it — she wouldn’t kiss ass to Trump. I think she would stand up to what is right,” said Rosie Hernandez, 56 of McAllen.
Rosie Hernandez, a supporter of Democratic candidate for Texas governor Gina Hinojosa, at an event in McAllen, Texas, on September 14, 2026. Hernandez, 56, said she believes Hinojosa would stand up to Trump and fight for public schools and curtailing data centers.
(Brenda Bazán for The 19th)
Hinojosa is one of the breakout candidates of the cycle, but she has had to plead for funding from national Democrats hesitant to spend in Texas. Earlier this month, a group of influential Latinos in Democratic political circles put pressure on Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who chairs the Democratic Governors Association (DGA), to invest $10 million in the Texas governor’s race. The DGA decided to send $1 million.
Valencia, who signed onto the letter, said Democrats’ investment in Hinojosa’s race has larger implications for the party and sends a message to Latinos. “She’s a once-in-a-generation candidate from a state that is disproportionately Latino that has been the unicorn that Democrats have chased for decades,” Valencia said.
“To have such a young, dynamic, charismatic Latina candidate in this environment and to not back her is a statement in and of itself, and it says a lot about how certain national Democrats feel about Texas and how they feel about certain candidates.”
Hinojosa’s ability to build enthusiasm for her campaign after starting out with a low profile as a state legislator from Austin could bode well for one the biggest challenges when it comes to Latino voters: turning them out.
Latinos had the lowest turnout rates among the major racial and ethnic groups at 51 percent, compared with 71 percent among White voters and 60 percent among Black voters. Nearly 6 million eligible Latinas did not vote in 2024.
During a town hall in Houston with a local Latino influencer this month, Hinojosa mused about the event likely being the first time a candidate for governor hosts an event in Spanish. Before Hinojosa arrived on stage, the host ushered to the microphone a woman who identified herself as a 46-year-old Houston native who had never voted before. Holding a white and orange slip, she said she had registered to vote earlier that day. “Quiero cambio,” she said to cheers. “No more Trump.”
Democratic candidate for Texas governor Gina Hinojosa meets with supporters in Weslaco, Texas, on September 15, 2026.
(Brenda Bazán for The 19th)
As both parties look ahead to the 2028 presidential election, they’ll have to contend with the fact that the Latino vote is a swing vote. Whatever gains Democrats make this cycle, they have a lot of ground to make up — especially with Latinas.
Nine days out from Election Day, Villareal said she is planning to vote for Democrats up and down the ballot. She described her vote this time as against Republicans — a register of regret — rather than about enthusiasm for the Democrats on the ticket.
“We have to trust somebody. We have to vote for somebody no matter what,” Villareal said.
“And obviously, the way things went in 2024 with Republicans, there wasn’t a change at all. It’s just been worse. So we’re gonna try and see.”
To check your voter registration status or to get more information about how to vote and what’s on your ballot, visit vote.org.
PEEKSKILL, New York — Betsy Abrams, a 67-year-old executive assistant, showed up at a political rally held in a park on the banks of the Hudson River wearing a shirt that read, “Sit over there, I don’t need your mansplaining.” She was also holding a stack of yard signs for Cait Conley, the Democratic challenger in New York’s 17th Congressional District.
Abrams didn’t support Conley in the primary, but she’s been impressed with her on the campaign trail. Conley, who’s challenging Rep. Mike Lawler in one of the country’s most competitive races, also won Abrams over in an October 15 debate in a heated back-and-forth over a question about whether there should be a federal standard for consent.
Conley told Lawler: “I do not need you to mansplain to me what sexual assault and domestic violence against women is and the appropriate response. Don’t start. Sit over there.”
As a survivor of abuse herself, Abrams said, “It hit a chord with me.”
Cait Conley, the Democratic challenger in New York’s 17th Congressional District, speaks at a get-out-the-vote rally in Peekskill, New York, on October 25, 2026. Conley, who’s challenging Rep. Mike Lawler in one of the country’s most competitive races, won over some supporters after a heated debate exchange about sexual assault and domestic violence.
(Adrianna Newell for The 19th)
The question was sparked by a bombshell lawsuit filed by a former student at Cornell University, some 200 miles north of the district. The plaintiff, identified in court documents as Jane Doe, is suing the university and seven men she accuses of raping her at a fraternity house in 2024. Lawyers for all seven defendants have denied the allegations. Both the university and the local district attorney, who initially declined to prosecute the men, have come under fire for how they handled the case.
Along with Abrams, Dawn Greenberg, a 63-year-old Conley supporter, and several other women showed up at Saturday’s rally with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in Peekskill with T-shirts and buttons referencing Conley’s line.
“One of the things I love about her is her fire in her belly,” Greenberg said of Conley. “That spoke to me.”
Mellicent Dyane, a filmmaker and Democratic district leader in Pleasantville, attends a get-out-the-vote rally for Cait Conley in Peekskill, New York, on October 25, 2026. (Adrianna Newell for The 19th)
The cost of living, healthcare and the impact of the second Trump administration’s policies have been the biggest issues in the race for New York’s 17th District and around the country. But in a year where multiple men have resigned from Congress amid allegations of misconduct; the Cornell case brought campus sexual assault back to the forefront of the national conversation; and revelations from millions of files connected to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have led the headlines, the exchange struck a chord with many women supporters.
Mellicent Dyane, a 60-year-old filmmaker and Democratic district leader in Pleasantville also wearing the shirt, is one of many women who were disturbed by those blaming the victim of the alleged assault and what she saw as a lack of accountability for perpetrators.
“Universities need to stop this bullshit,” she said.
Conley, who has served multiple tours of duty overseas as a military police officer, said rates of sexual assault and domestic violence are “unacceptable.”
“I think we do need to relook at how the law enforcement structure around violent crimes on campuses is, and make sure that every victim gets access to quality law enforcement and justice, regardless of ZIP code,” she told The 19th. “America is about freedom, equality, and justice for all, but that’s not what’s happening right now.”
When asked about their exchange in the debate, Lawler said Conley’s charge of mansplaining was “manufactured” political theater.
In the debate, Conley and Lawler sparred over their associations with men accused of misconduct. Conley said she was “disappointed” with Lawler’s support of his colleague Rep. Max Miller of Ohio, who has been accused of domestic abuse by his ex-wife and mother of his daughter; Miller has denied the allegations. Lawler, in turn, criticized Conley for taking campaign donations from former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in 2008 after a federal investigation revealed he had hired sex workers; he was not accused of abuse or charged with a crime.
An attendee reacts as Rep. Mike Lawlerspeaks during a town hall on April 12, 2026 in Mahopac, New York.
(Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)
“Fact is, she attacked me, and I pointed out her hypocrisy on the issue of taking support from a sexual predator, Eliot Spitzer, and her response is not to denounce Eliot Spitzer, but to say that I’m mansplaining,” Lawler told The 19th. “That didn’t land as well as you or others may think it did, with her made-up T-shirts that magically were produced right away.”
Lawler, first elected in 2022, is running on his record of achieving results and working across the aisle. He’s one of just three House Republicans representing a district that voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 and has been endorsed by Democratic colleague Rep. Jared Golden of Maine.
“At the end of the day, people know who I am, they know what I stand for. I’ve consistently been rated among the most bipartisan and effective members of Congress, and ultimately, I think people will judge me based on my record and who I am,” Lawler said in a brief interview in Nanuet on Sunday, adding that people in the district “don’t actually know” or care who Jeffries is.
But defeating Lawler is a top priority for other Democrats, including Assemblymember Didi Barrett, who said she’d seen him be “a real jerk,” in the state assembly. That’s also a goal for Jeffries, who is poised to be House speaker if Democrats retake the chamber and called Lawler a “MAGA extremist phony” in Peekskill.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Cait Conley greet supporters at a get-out-the-vote rally in Peekskill, New York, on October 25, 2026.
(Adrianna Newell for The 19th)
The firestorm around the Cornell case has also spurred some Democrats to call for changes to New York’s laws around intoxication and consent — and to elect more women lawmakers.
“From Congress to Cornell, it’s clear we need more women,” Barrett said at a rally and canvass launch for Conley and other down-ballot women candidates later Saturday in East Fishkill, about an hour’s drive north of Peekskill.
“I think that everybody needs to understand that if women aren’t at the table, things are going to keep happening like that,” she told The 19th.
To check your voter registration status or to get more information about how to vote and what’s on your ballot, visit vote.org.
ALAMO, Tex. – Eustorgia Santos de Torres has lived here for four decades. Last year, she turned to a trusted Rio Grande Valley nonprofit for help navigating the citizenship application process. The same nonprofit — La Unión del Pueblo Entero, or LUPE — then helped her register to vote, and she cast her first ballot as a citizen in the primary election last March.
Santos de Torres, 67, is retired after years cleaning houses and working as a healthcare aide. She speaks mainly Spanish and is the primary caretaker for her husband, Nemorio, who is blind. “Yo soy sus ojos,” Santos de Torres said — I am his eyes.
But last month, Santos de Torres, a new voter, struggled to help Nemorio, an American-born citizen, understand and cast his mail ballot for the November election. All the information on the ballot is in English, she said, and the letters are small.
So Santos de Torres helped Nemorio to the car and made the familiar 7-minute drive to LUPE’s headquarters in the neighboring town of San Juan to ask for help with her husband’s ballot.
This time, though, LUPE workers reluctantly turned the couple away.
In 2021, Texas’ GOP-dominated state Legislature passed a sweeping and controversial overhaul of election laws known as SB1. Among other changes, SB1 made it illegal for anyone to receive compensation for helping voters fill in their ballots.
That not only makes it illegal for paid nonprofit staff to help voters, but also criminalized common past practices, such as organizations giving volunteers gas money or stipends. Violations are a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.
In the wake of the law, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican currently running in the state’s nationally watched U.S. Senate race, investigated and prosecuted voting rights advocacy groups and organizers in heavily Latino communities across the state.
Groups such as LUPE say they have been forced to alter or stop some voter outreach as they worry about running afoul of the law. LUPE used to send workers out walking blocks to help voters. Now it has to instead ask volunteers to do more limited versions of that work.
LUPE is known for providing one-on-one assistance to people in the Latino community, so the restrictions on helping with voting are a real pain point for the organization, Executive Director Tania Chavez Camacho said. Texas has strict rules limiting who is eligible to use mail ballots, but people over 65 may do so. LUPE helps around 30,000 people a year, she said, including people with disabilities and many older people who, each year, “want to vote by mail and they come in wanting help.”
Now, Chavez Camacho said, when the group holds public town halls for residents to instruct them on how to vote, if a voter pulls out their mail ballot to ask for help, organizers must ask the voter to leave so paid employees aren’t near the ballot.
And if workers for LUPE’s advocacy arm are canvassing for candidates and a voter shows them a mail ballot and asks for help filling it out, workers have been trained to say they can’t and walk away, Chavez Camacho said.
“We literally have to turn them away,” Chavez Camacho said. “We’ve had to do a lot of training with our staff for the past three years because they were so accustomed to helping folks one-on-one and now they can’t.”
Santos de Torres did what she could to help her husband, who mailed back his ballot about a month ago.
“But I don’t think it’s right that LUPE can’t help us,” she told a reporter in Spanish. “That law is not right. It’s excluding people who need help.”
“What if,” she added, “my husband didn’t have me?”
‘A person who doesn’t know how to read has to do it on their own’
The Rio Grande Valley, where LUPE is based, covers roughly 4,300-square-miles across Hidalgo, Cameron, Starr, and Willacy counties along the Mexico border at Texas’ southern tip. It’s a diverse community with some residents who primarily speak Spanish. Younger generations of residents easily switch between English and Spanish in conversation.
Many households are made up of families whose members have mixed legal statuses, including some who have lived in the area for generations. The Valley also has a history of activism as the birthplace of the Texas farmworker movement of the 1960’s. Farmworkers – who harvested cotton, vegetables and fruits — organized and marched for roughly 400 miles from the Valley to Austin to demand fair wages and better working conditions. Mexican-American farmworker labor today remains key to the area’s growth and agricultural economy.
But due to the lack of affordable housing, Mexican Americans for years purchased land they could afford in rural areas outside of city limits, often lacking basic infrastructure and public services. Those communities are known now as the colonias.
Alamo, where Santos de Torres lives, and San Juan, where LUPE is based, are neighboring cities. The landscape varies depending on the side of town. In the southern parts of the cities, closer to the border with Mexico, modest residential homes with green front lawns adorn along palm tree-lined streets. Shopping centers, chain restaurants, stadiums, and commercial developments lie to the north of the cities, along Interstate Highway 2, reflecting the transition from the once primarily agricultural community to a growing metropolitan hub. The Valley has for years relied on its trade of goods and services with Mexico. It has a population of more than 1.4 million people and 90% of them are Hispanic or Latino, according to Census data.
About 24% of people in the Valley live below the poverty line, which is more than double the national rate. And about 30% of Valley residents don’t have health insurance – one of the highest uninsured rates in the country. The area also has one of the highest rates of diabetes in the country; Nemorio Torres’ blindness is a complication of the disease.
LUPE and other advocacy groups have long worked with residents in the colonias and all over the Valley, providing resources to find affordable housing and medical treatment, or helping with complex procedures such as filing taxes. Voter education and outreach was part of the mission.
Now, instead of providing one-on-one assistance, LUPE hosts group sessions with a screen projector showing what mail ballot applications and mail ballots look like. Facilitators point at the screen indicating what the instructions say and explaining how the forms should be filled out.
The limitations are frustrating, Chavez Camacho said, especially “si una persona no sabe leer” — if a person can’t read. “It doesn’t matter that we’re doing those sessions because a person who doesn’t know how to read has to do it on their own and we can’t help them to know where to mark,” she said.
Instead, LUPE’s workers and volunteers now focus on letting people know key deadlines are coming up. They also have fewer volunteers willing to guide and interpret for voters at the polls, she said, because the law now requires such people to sign an oath affirming the voter is qualified to receive help because they are disabled or need an interpreter, and detail their relationship with the voter. They must also affirm they are not being paid by a candidate or political committee, which would be illegal. Volunteers fear any misstep while assisting voters could get them in trouble, Chavez-Camacho said.
“We really feel that the people are not getting the support they need,” Chavez Camacho said.
Election and voting law experts say the courts have interpreted “compensation” prohibited from going to volunteers by SB1 as any type of benefit. That interpretation is so broad that it makes it difficult for voter outreach organizations to know whether they are violating the law, said Zachary Dolling, litigation director at Texas Civil Rights Project, which works with groups to design trainings in voter outreach that comply with the law.
Dolling said some organizations historically provided unpaid volunteers dinner, T-shirts, or pens, and others have given volunteers college credit for their work.
“All of those things are items of value” and could be considered compensation, he said.
Advocates warned state leaders of added burdens for people with disabilities
Texas Republicans passed SB1, the sweeping overhaul of election law, in part responding to false claims and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
Republicans claimed the law would increase public trust and confidence in the elections. Democrats argued the legislation would disproportionately burden voters of color and people with disabilities, and staged two walkouts and a 15-hour Senate filibuster in their failed attempt to defeat the bill.
Despite lawsuits from voting rights organizations including LUPE, the League of United Latin American Citizens and organizations representing Texans with disabilities, a federal appeals court ultimately upheld key provisions of SB1, including the restrictions on voter assistance.
Other attempts to expand voting help for people with disabilities were meanwhile unsuccessful.
In 2023, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have expanded vote-by-mail access for people with disabilities — specifically people who are blind or paralyzed and need assistance marking their ballot — by allowing such voters to request an electronic ballot and use a computer to mark their choices. Similar options in Texas are already available for military overseas voters and astronauts, but not for voterswith disabilities.
The challenges Santos de Torres and her husband have faced are an example of what advocates worried about under SB1, said Lydia Nunez Landry, statewide coordinator for REV UP Texas, which works to get out the vote among people with disabilities.
“That was our worst fear and now it’s happening,” she said. Nunez Landry has muscular dystrophy, uses a power wheelchair, and needs help doing basic tasks such as opening the refrigerator.
The state has made voting “just so impossible and so arduous for people — and now people are also terrified of helping us,” she said.
An increased ‘sense of anxiety’
Groups across the state have been changing their voter outreach work to comply with SB1.
Asian Texans for Justice conducts voter outreach in Asian communities, focusing on San Antonio, Houston, Austin, and North Texas.
The stricter rules associated with voting by mail under SB1 have created “a sense of anxiety” in those communities, Executive Director Nabila Mansoor said. She said that the process is now much more complicated for elderly voters, who must provide one of two forms of ID on their application and pay close attention to pages of instructions that are written in font that is small and hard for them to read. In addition, an error could force them to restart the whole process of applying for a ballot.
“That anxiety comes from this kind of fear that they’re going to do something wrong,” Mansoor said. “Whenever you have that kind of fear, it is one more barrier for that person to actually go out and vote.”
Now that Asian Texans for Justice can no longer provide one-on-one help, they’ve turned to providing checklists for voters, she said, which she believes is less effective when some voters may need help reading and understanding the ballot and instructions
Mansoor said she believes that SB1’s goal was to make it harder for people to vote.
“It means that we have to be more careful. It means that we have to dot our i’s and cross our t’s. It means that we have to take good records. It means that we have to be very thorough in terms of our training of our volunteers,” she said, adding that the organization assembled a legal team to defend against challenges to their work as well.
In the meantime, volunteers for LUPE and other groups say they are doing their best to fill the gap.
Maria Gomez, better known as Doña Mary, of Pharr, worked as a farmworker for years in Hidalgo County and has been a member of LUPE since the organization was founded. Gomez, 78, was involved in the farmworker movement years ago. She now ensures her elderly friends and neighbors are aware of election deadlines, know where to vote, and have a ride to the polls if they need one.
After she drops off her grandkids and great-grandkids at school, she makes her rounds around the Colonias in San Juan in her small red SUV. She chats up her neighbors, and asks them what they need help with or if they need resources or a ride. She’s always fielding calls.
“People don’t vote because sometimes they can’t leave their home and because they might not have access to that piece of paper that they need to sign to receive their ballot,” Gomez said in Spanish, referring to voter registration forms and ballot-by-mail applications.
One of her friends, 80-year-old Teresa Corona Garza of San Juan, has relied on Gomez for rides to the polls for some time now. Corona Garza struggles to stand for long periods of time and can’t see very well out of her left eye. Even though she qualifies to vote by mail, she prefers to go to the polls in person.
“There’s so much on there you have to fill out, and those letters are small,” Corona Garza said in Spanish. “No, I prefer to go, quiero ver que mi voto cuenta,” she said – I want to see that my vote is counted.
The laws have gotten so complicated and strict that Gomez worries state leaders may even try to prevent volunteers like her from providing rides to the polls.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen, if they’re going to keep making this harder for people,” she said, “but I would like to see people who want to vote to be able to do it.”
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
Republicans are shaking in their boots about the upcoming midterm elections, according to numerous reports. In a Wednesday episode of his podcast, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said his home state “is excruciatingly close,” adding that “we could lose Texas. Let me repeat that: We could lose Texas. And by the way, not just the Senate race. We could lose every single statewide race in Texas. That’s how close these numbers are.”
According to Politico, House Republicans aren’t quietly discussing whether or not they’ll lose their majority, but are counting how many seats. “It could be quite a brutal evening,” a senior Republican told the outlet. The mood at the White House is “grim,” the New York Times reported as advisers close to the White House anticipate at least losing the House, if not the Senate.
That’s seemingly why the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has dumped nearly half $1 billion into the race, mostly into his own America PAC. The PAC’s spending has focused overwhelmingly in Texas with approximately $48 million, followed by Michigan and Ohio around $9 million and Iowa at $4 million. According to CNN, Musk’s spending streak “makes him the single, largest disclosed donor in modern American politics and one of the Republican Party’s largest-ever benefactors.”
But some people are already looking beyond next Tuesday to see how President Donald Trump may react, and not just by challenging the results, which is more than expected and arguably already being attempted. But the president’s legal options are limited, so even if he does try to seize voting machines, declares a national emergency, or otherwise wedges the federal government into the electoral process, there’s a chance it could fail. Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center, told Forbes that the president can “certainly try” to intervene, but there “just isn’t a lot that he can actually do.”
Still, most analysts anticipate that the president will turn the dial up on his dual wars, the trade wars with America’s partners and the Iran war Trump started alongside Israel in late February 2026. The Pentagon is slowly building up its military presence in the Middle East, including drawing up plans to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, energy infrastructure and missile and drone stockpile.
“It might be difficult for Democrats in Congress to restrain Trump from a course of action which he is strongly committed to, but they can still raise the political costs associated with plowing ahead,” Andrew Gawthorpe, a senior research fellow in the Foreign Police Centre, told The Independent. “Facing a hostile Congress, Trump might become even more willing to simply ignore domestic opposition and plow ahead with controversial and unpopular policies, as he did by attacking Iran or threatening to annex Greenland.”
Laugh or cry, we’ll be here all week. Try the veal.
I wonder what a Todd Blanche outfit looks like? The image of Frankenstein’s monster, for some reason, sticks in my mind.
It’s time to sit back, relax and enjoy the elections — a midterm extravaganza featuring two flailing political parties jockeying for supremacy in a nation full of educated young adults working as cabbies and delivery drivers who aspire to be “influencers” while their parents wonder how in the name of God they’ll be able to afford retirement.
To be able to handle that good news, maybe you can channel your inner Hunter S. Thompson, without resorting to dropping a couple of hits of acid or snorting lines of cocaine in Studio 54 while Donald Trump ogles the dancers in tight pants, female and male alike.
Then again, you might need a tall glass of Wild Turkey 101 on ice (Thompson’s favorite) when you hear Trump say that Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola should be prosecuted because there are two Dan Sullivans running for office in Alaska, or declares that the country “would be gone” if he hadn’t won the presidency two years ago.
Everything old is new again. At any rate, we’ve seen this carnival roadshow before, though it seems a bit different this time. Trump has less energy as he flails about dancing to the Village People. He plays before smaller crowds every week. He seems to be on stage only to get laughs. “Am I right?” he whispered hoarsely with a big grin last Saturday night in Georgia, after mocking Democrats one more time. He apologized for his raspy voice and kept going with the low-energy insult comedy. His small crowd chortled and ate it up.
In the last week on the campaign trail, Trump has appeared at a livestock arena, a school gymnasium, a hockey rink and, on Thursday in Rock Hill, South Carolina, at a venue that holds just 1,200 people. He doesn’t seem to care. He’s on autopilot. The war in Iran? He’s got nothing. The war in Ukraine? Nothing. Corruption, immigration, AI (sorry, never “SI”), the economy and any other real-world issue? He’s either got nothing, or it’s all nonsense we’ve heard before: The Democrats, Joe and Kamala, and marauding bands of violent dark-skinned immigrants and communists are to blame. As for the economy, he tells us he’s doing great and making billions. We should all be happy.
In the last week on the campaign trail, Trump has appeared at a livestock arena, a school gymnasium, a hockey rink and, on Thursday in Rock Hill, South Carolina, at a venue that holds just 1,200 people. He doesn’t seem to care. He’s on autopilot.
Forget it. He’s done with campaigning, quite literally. The White House confirmed Thursday that two campaign stops planned for Kansas and Iowa this weekend have been canceled. What happens next is what we need to watch. It must be the season of the witch. Or as Thompson himself told us, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Thompson was covering Richard Nixon when he penned that epigram, but it is equally applicable to covering the surreal spectacle of vampires, zombies, ghouls and degenerates awkwardly shuffling across the MAGA landscape. It certainly should be a factor in understanding what Trump does on Nov. 4 and afterward. Ask anyone, Republican or Democrat, and they’ll all say the same thing: Whatever happens is likely to be simultaneously annoying and frightening.
Trump has already filed suit against Alaska’s election results, even though the election has yet to occur. In Missouri, the GOP lost three times trying to gerrymander districts in a case that went to the Supreme Court, all in hopes of gaining one seat in the House. That move may have backfired big time. Not only did Republicans fail to gain a guaranteed seat, but in Missouri’s Second District Democrat Fred Wellman is poised to pull off a miracle against Republican incumbent Rep. Ann Wagner (albeit with little support from party leaders in D.C.). Trump appears ready to file suit there as well. Some insiders say he might try to sue in every state where an incumbent Republican loses. Check your favorite gambling app for the over/under on that.
At the same time, there’s a constant susurrus from Trump about “voter fraud” that surfaces wherever his candidates look to be failing. There are rumors of National Guard and ICE officers roaming the countryside on Election Day hunting and bagging anyone with a good tan who speaks something other than English. Long voting lines and randomly closed precincts are a given. A general feeling of chaos among the electorate, whipped into a frenzy by the president himself, is expected. There’s still stray talk about invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law. What’s the over/under on that move?
I’m actually tired of the talk. We all know Trump will not go gentle into that good night. If the GOP loses control of Congress, his administration will likely see more people convicted and jailed than Nixon’s during the Watergate weirdness that made Thompson “turn pro.”
On the other side of the aisle, the aging Democratic leadership looks as lost and confused as Trump. Some in the party want to remain silent, cross their fingers and hope for the best, fearful of Democratic infighting and hopeful that Trump is really on his last legs. Others want to defeat Trump then turn on the “establishment” Democrats.
I don’t want to listen to this from either side. After covering Trump for 10 years, he reminds me of my children during their pre-pubescence, always cocksure, arrogant and wrong. My children grew up to be adults. Trump never has. The same can be said for some of the more argumentative Democrats.
The Democrats, as is often the case, lack focus and leadership at the national level. The headless horsemen run amok, trying to scream “The Trumps are coming!” while fighting with each other, even before they hold any power. It does not exactly inspire confidence. Younger voters find each party equally repellent, and for good reason. If Democrats win a majority in the House, as nearly everyone expects, and the Senate, as a growing number of Democrats have the audacity to hope, how long will it be before they slice each other’s throats over their marginal political differences while what remains of the GOP looks on with glee?
Still, the Republican Party at this point looks like a horde of zombies led by Art the Clown. To extend the horror-movie metaphors even further, Trump is such a crude cartoon character that if he isn’t the Terrifier then maybe he’s Pinhead from “Hellraiser.”
For lazy reporters, or those who’ve never covered another president, Trump makes the job easy. He doesn’t hold news conferences. He has no policies. There are no long meetings with press secretaries. Come to think of it, there’s no press secretary.
But our president can still generate media attention, even as his crowds continue to diminish. He may soon be reduced to appearing before middle school PTA meetings across the South, but he’ll still be on TV. As one of the younger members of the White House Correspondents’ Association recently said, in all earnestness, “We’ll miss him when he’s gone.” Some reporters even find his insults of the press amusing. I don’t agree, but I admit that my experience is limited to the Ronald Reagan presidency — and every one since then.
Some of us were here before Trump, and will still be here when he’s gone. For lazy reporters, or those who’ve never covered another president, Trump makes the job easy. He doesn’t hold real news conferences. He has no policies. We don’t have directives to read or position papers to study. There are no long meetings with press secretaries. Come to think of it, there’s no press secretary. Covering Trump is easier than covering a traffic accident, and twice as gory. That’s how he governs.
It’s obvious to even the most casual political observer that Trump’s campaign tactics are the signs of a desperate man with dwindling influence. After he lost control of Congress in the 2018 midterms, he purged his staff and yanked press passes from reporters. Some senior officials quit. Expect a repeat of all that, beginning next week. Only now most of my colleagues in the press pool will wag their tails and bark a bit before waiting for a presidential treat.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, unless he gets appointed as a senator from Tennessee, is most assuredly a goner. Even the Republicans in Congress dislike him, and Trump, who never accepts responsibility for anything, still needs a scapegoat for the war in Iran — the one he has claimed is over on more than a dozen occasions.
While Speaker of the House Mike Johnson says he’ll do his job and seat every Democrat who wins in the midterms, Trump is eagerly searching for ways to stop that from happening. Some believe he’ll try to stage another insurrection, while others believe he’ll let government funding run out and spend the rest of his presidency presiding over a government shutdown, in effect dissolving Congress.
Whatever he does won’t work. His recent public appearances add up to a tell on how badly he will fail. High school basketball teams in Kentucky are filling gymnasiums better than this president.
White House pool reports from Trump’s campaign stops no longer mention the venue capacity or attendance, but the empty seats in those modest arenas and his listless rhetoric, combined with ever-louder outbursts from protesters, are evidence enough that this guy isn’t what he once was.
While Speaker of the House Mike Johnson says he’ll do his job and seat every Democrat who wins in the midterms, Trump is eagerly searching for ways to stop that from happening.
Whether he’s complimenting another man’s (or woman’s) behind, berating reporters or making deals with Russia while screwing over former allies, his raging incompetence is still center stage at these increasingly feeble campaign events. We still can’t look away.
I recently watched a documentary about the fall of the Bronze Age civilizations. It was an era of climate change, supply chain collapse, earthquakes, famine, disease, migration, drought and armed incursions and invasions. Stop me if you’ve heard any of that before.
What worries one of the archaeologists in the documentary and causes him to lose sleep is how similar our world is to that one.
We are ripe for catastrophe, and poor leadership exacerbates the problems we currently face. “How resilient will we be? How will we get back up?” the documentary asks. Those are excellent questions to ask now.
After the midterm elections are settled, we may learn some answers. If Hunter S. Thompson was right, maybe there’s some hope. After all, I’ve never seen politics any weirder than this.
Trump looks done, in ways I’ve never seen him look done before. I’ve seen him stumble, fall and constantly deflect reality. He’s always managed to survive those stumbles. Not now. The cancellations, his delusional ramblings, his anger and increasing desperation, the smaller crowds, the raspy voice combined with the collective shoulder-shrug I see from even his closest allies — countered by the quiet optimism of the Democrats and their muted sniping at each other — have created a stew of weirdness that Thompson might find eclipses the waning days of the Nixon administration.
All this leaves us pondering two questions: How far will Trump go to challenge the outcome of the midterms, and what will the Democrats do with power if they get it?
Trump’s waning influence may ultimately be the deciding factor in both questions.
If I’m wrong, I’ll admit it. But if the Democrats win both houses of Congress, I don’t think Trump will do much of anything after the midterms. He will make lots of threats. But he has to deal with the zombies in his administration and all the fires they have started: wars, battles with immigrants, court cases, affordability issues, the economy, personal corruption, racism, misogyny, the destruction of healthcare and education and the existential problems brought about by ignoring climate change. That’s too much for almost any leader, and way above his level. For the next two years, we’re likely to see Trump in the White House on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and in Bedminster or Mar-a-Lago the rest of the week, somewhere on the back nine.
Meanwhile, we teeter on the brink, and any one of those issues I just mentioned could push us over the edge. During the Bronze Age, a natural climate disaster led to the decline of the culture. Today we can do that ourselves.
The week ahead will be challenging week, no matter what happens. I need to channel my inner Morgan Freeman, from the film “Se7en”: “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”
Jon Husted has a problem: People can’t seem to remember who he is. The former lieutenant governor of Ohio was appointed to be the state’s junior U.S. senator in 2025, after JD Vance became vice president. But Husted hasn’t much of an impression on the Buckeye State’s residents. In an August poll conducted by Emerson College, nearly four in 10 Ohio voters answered “unsure/never heard of” when asked their opinion of the Republican incumbent. Only 14% answered the same regarding his Democratic opponent, former Sen. Sherrod Brown. In fact, one in four voters in a Bowling Green State University poll even mistakenly identified Brown, a popular veteran of Ohio politics, as the incumbent. (In fact, Brown lost his seat to Ohio’s other Republican senator, Bernie Moreno, in 2024.)
The Husted campaign has tried to spin his forgettability as an asset, hoping to trick voters into thinking of Brown as a failed incumbent, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Brown is pulling ahead in the most recent polls, riding a larger national turn away from the GOP. So Republicans turned to the one person who knows how to get a headline: Donald Trump.
Bringing the president to campaign in Ohio has certainly helped to boost Husted’s name recognition, but at a painful cost. Now Husted has become the single most famous male victim of Trump’s relentless appetite for sexual harassment.
The president’s public ogling of Husted started at a Youngstown rally on Oct. 12, when Trump delivered a monologue about how he’d “started examining [Husted’s] body” and had seen big hands and shoulders. Then he said the word “ass.” This caused a reaction of shock and laughter reaction in the crowd and also generated a lot of media attention. So Trump, like a narcissistic rat pushing the “applause” button, turned it into a running joke. At nearly every rally now, whether in Ohio or somewhere else, Trump raves about the 59-year-old Husted’s reputedly spectacular and muscular backside.
Trump is famously a lifelong heterosexual, so many in the media and on the left are confused. They assume that latent homoerotic yearnings are burbling up, perhaps from the disinhibition that can occur among people who take regular tests for dementia, as does our president. But that’s unlikely, and not just because Husted actually possesses the softer derrière typical of a man his age. If genuine same-sex desire was behind Trump’s leering, the overtly homophobic crowds who populate MAGA rallies would be highly uncomfortable.
Bringing Trump to campaign in Ohio has certainly boost Husted’s name recognition, but at a painful cost. Now he’s the single most famous male victim of Trump’s relentless appetite for sexual harassment.
Instead, as videos show, they scream with the same laughter they produce when Trump goes on a racist tirade, encourages audience members to commit acts of violence or otherwise showcases his affinity for childish bullying, which remains his main and often sole selling point to his base. It’s a large-scale version of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, where Trump tried to impress the show’s host, Billy Bush, with braggadocious claims that he can grab women’s genitals and they have to put up with it.
The MAGA crowd may not favor the term “sexual harassment,” but they get that’s what Trump is doing to Husted. He did the same bit with Nicki Minaj, making the rapper-turned-MAGA shill stand up and show off her backside to the crowd at a Michigan rally. As feminists like to remind folks, sexual harassment is about demonstrating power, not lust. Husted is far from the only man Trump ever catcalls. As the New York Times notes, Trump loves making a spectacle out of men’s looks, for the approval of hooting MAGA audiences who get a vicarious thrill from watching Trump say inappropriate things to fellow Republicans, who have no choice but to grin and pretend they enjoy it. It’s a continuation of the other ways Trump displays his dominance over Republicans with fancy job titles, such as senators and Cabinet officials, by expecting them to flatter him grotesquely on camera or to wear ill-fitting shoes he has “gifted” them.
None of this should make us feel any sympathy for Husted or other Republicans, who could at any point grow an actual spine and reject Trump’s abuse. These people grovel for their failing leader in the vain hope that some of his celebrity stardust will rub off on them and boost their political ambitions. Husted is a classic example of the problem now facing Republicans. Like most in his party, he has nothing to offer voters, unless they’re hyper-rich capitalists seeking deregulation or massive tax cuts. He has no discernible charisma of his own, either. So all that’s left is leeching onto Trump and hoping his ability to speak to the lizard-brain impulses of bigots will rally enough voters to drag Husted’s empty pair of pants (and his mediocre ass) across the finish line.
Like most in his party, Husted has nothing to offer voters, unless they’re hyper-rich capitalists seeking deregulation or tax cuts, and no discernible charisma. All that’s left is leeching onto Trump and hoping his ability to speak to the lizard-brain impulses of bigots can drag Husted’s empty pants across the line.
What’s funny about all this is that Husted’s blandness is likely what landed him in the unfortunate spot of getting rhetorically goosed by Trump almost every night. By his own account, Trump knew very little about the Ohio Republican he was there to support at the Youngstown rally, but learned shortly beforehand that Husted played football in college. Trump, whose background is in reality TV, resorted to his tendency to reduce a person to a single defining trait that could fit on a chyron. So even though Husted’s gridiron career ended decades ago, Trump indulged in lame fantasies about how he thinks a football player should look like, complete with broad shoulders and well-defined glutes.
Likely, it would have ended with one iteration if he hadn’t praised Husted’s ass, which elevated a pedestrian effort to define a candidate into the realm of attention-getting weirdness. But of course that remark got everyone’s attention, and Trump will reliably return to any bit, no matter how bizarre, as long as it draws eyeballs. So it was that Husted, who was on the verge of being relegated to “Former College Football Player” in the sprawling reality show cast of Trump’s political orbit, instead became the butt of Trump’s favorite new joke.
It could be worse, of course. Trump has a similar bit he likes to trot out about Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for that state’s Senate seat. Except instead of being an imaginary muscleman like Husted, Trump has cast Paxton in the role of ugly loser. In nearly every speech where he mentions Paxton, Trump has to talk about how hideous the guy is and how poorly he supposedly dresses.
With both of these GOP candidates, Trump’s oversimplified, theatrical descriptors don’t have much to do with reality. Whatever he once looked like, Husted doesn’t really have the athletic build Trump fantasizes about. Paxton is nobody’s idea of a handsome man, but it’s simply not true that he dresses poorly. There are many terrible things we could say about Paxton, but his wardrobe appears perfectly fine — especially compared to Trump, who seems to believe that wearing enormously oversized suits will hide his ever-expanding bulk. But these two guys are now characters in Trump’s world, where, as in reality TV shows, individual humans are stripped of all their complexities to be turned into broad, easily consumed caricatures.
Whether he’s inviting the world to stare at these men’s allegedly spectacular rear end or daring them to smile while he calls them ugly, Trump is sending a message: He owns these people. He can define them in reductive, humiliating language, and they have been so hollowed out as human beings that they won’t even defend themselves. Normally, when a leader is both a lame duck and cratering in his approval polls, the way Donald Trump is now, that person’s party will start looking for ways to move on and forge a new identity. It’s a sign of how empty the Republican Party is that they seem incapable of doing that. They don’t just submit to Trump’s continued abuse, but even keep seeking it out. That must be a miserable experience, but clearly they feel that without him, they’re nothing at all. It’s tough to disagree.
This story was reported in partnership withUncloseted Media, an LGBTQ-focused investigative news outlet.
Max Sorgenfrey was sipping a coffee at a cafe in Charleston, South Carolina, in early October when her phone began lighting up with messages. People were sending her a new ad from Annie Andrews, the state’s Democratic Senate nominee, that referred to transgender women like Sorgenfrey as “biological men,” a marked shift in language that confounded many of her supporters.
Appearing in the direct-to-camera ad wearing a white lab coat and a stethoscope slung over her shoulders, Andrews, a pediatrician, said she would oppose “gender surgery for minors” and “men in women’s sports” as South Carolina’s first Democratic senator in more than 20 years. “I want you to hear me loud and clear,” Andrews said in the ad, released October 8, days after President Donald Trump had called her an anti-trans slur on social media.
The backlash to Andrews’ ad was swift. Twenty local LGBTQ+ rights groups signed an open letter denouncing “transphobic attacks, slurs, and fear-based political messages” in midterm races across South Carolina. “We deserve leaders who support transgender people as whole people worthy of safety, dignity, and care,” the groups wrote.
Sorgenfrey, a co-chair of the Charleston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, helped the organization draft its own statement. “What message does it send by showing Trump’s bullying works?” the Charleston DSA wrote on its Instagram page. “Why are so many of Democratic politicians willing to sacrifice everything but their personal comfort when fights come to their doorstep?”
Sorgenfrey struggled with what to do with her vote. She was frustrated and angry that Andrews, who had once called statewide restrictions on trans athletes “shameful” and criticized a South Carolina hospital system for suspending gender-affirming care for youth under pressure from Republicans, had appeared to have been moved by the same forces.
She’s still voting for Andrews on November 3.
“At the end of the day, her winning proves a lot about what’s possible in South Carolina,” Sorgenfrey said. “Her winning still pushes the momentum in a direction that is positive for the state, and hopefully, in the wake of that momentum, there can be stronger forms of accountability in terms of not backing down on LGBTQ values.”
Lorien Lucero is probably voting for her, too. Lucero is a consultant who met Andrews at a Pride event over the summer, where Andrews had asked her for her support in November and pledged to fight for trans people in Washington.
David Bell
(Rebecca Bell)
David Bell already did. He’s a longtime South Carolina resident whose adult daughter is trans. He found Andrews’ choice of words in the ad “deeply, deeply hurtful.”
“Answering the way she did only solidifies that we’re leaving trans people behind, because she’s using the same rhetoric. It makes it feel like trans people are being thrown away,” he said.
In the United States, a years-long offensive on trans rights has been led largely by Republicans. Conservative lawmakers have introduced — and passed — hundreds of bills meant to restrict trans rights and gender expression in state legislatures nationwide. The Trump administration has also proposed and implemented multiple policies restricting the rights and recognition of trans people.
This year, some Republican-aligned groups have questioned whether focusing solely on “culture-war issues” may be enough to win in November, especially as polling shows trans issues are not a top concern for voters. But with public support for the president slipping and the cost of living rising, conservative candidates are leaning into those attacks, hoping they can tip the scales in their favor. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars, including on ads with anti-trans messaging, to help Republicans win this fall. In a recent 19th/YouGov poll, nearly half of adults said they were more likely to vote for a candidate who supports banning trans athletes from girls’ and women’s sports, for instance, over one who does not.
And red state Democrats in competitive races are responding to the attacks and the polls, often by walking back their own previous support for trans people with language that purposefully misgenders them. Trans voters and their loved ones said they have grappled with difficult choices this election season as the party they have aligned with continues to disappoint them. Even so, most said they either have voted for Democrats or will.
The same dynamic is playing out in South Carolina, a state Trump won by 18 points in 2024. It’s also happening in Ohio, where Trump won by 11 points, Iowa (13 points) and Texas (14 points).
In June, Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio, drew outrage from LGBTQ+ leaders and progressive groups when she told a local newspaper that she does not support “boys” in girls’ sports. Equality Ohio, one of the state’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations, updated Acton’s status on its 2026 Candidate Scorecard from an “A” grade to “pending” in response.
“It was just really hurtful and betraying,” Kathleen Burns, a Democratic voter in Columbus, Ohio, said of Acton’s choice of words. Burns is not trans, but her spouse, whom she married last year, is trans and nonbinary. The couple would like to see a Democrat in the governor’s mansion next year, Burns said, but neither is planning to vote for Acton.
“I’ve just been asked too many times in my entire adult life to vote for a lesser evil,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore. I’m so tired.”
Burns said she plans to support other Ohio Democrats, including Sherrod Brown, a former senator running to unseat Sen. Jon Husted, a Republican endorsed by Trump.
“I wouldn’t say he’s like a staunch advocate for trans people, but it seems like the bar is low,” Burns said of Brown, whose campaign has faced a barrage of anti-trans attack ads from powerful Republican super PACs including the Senate Leadership Fund and Musk’s America PAC.
“Congress is kind of a political chess game that is at risk if I wouldn’t vote for him, so I probably will vote for him,” Burns said. “But I think I will leave the governor’s race blank.”
Kaden, a trans man in Geauga County, Ohio, who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used out of concern for his privacy, said he was unhappy with Acton but had still voted early for her. Acton seems more likely than her opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy — who has described being trans as a mental illness — to engage with trans people as governor, he said.
“Maybe we can sit down and talk and say, ‘Listen, you really need to think about this. You really need to understand that what you said hurt,’” he said. Kaden’s home in northeastern Ohio is largely rural and has voted for Republican presidential candidates since the mid-1960s.
But his community — including his three adult children and his parents, both in their late 80s — has accepted him all the same. He believes Acton will, too.
Democratic candidates in Iowa have faced similar backlash from some voters and LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations for how they’ve spoken about trans people. In an August campaign ad, Sarah Trone Garriott, a Democratic state lawmaker and congressional candidate, said she opposes “letting men in women’s locker rooms,” despite voting against a bathroom bill in the legislature. Josh Turek, who is running for Senate, said that he does not believe that “biological males” should be allowed to compete in women’s sports and that he opposes “taxpayers paying for sex changes.”
In August, Rob Sand, Iowa’s state auditor and the Democratic nominee for governor, said, pointedly: “Girls’ sports are for girls, and boys’ sports are for boys.” Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature banned trans student-athletes from competing in line with their gender identity in 2022.
Aria Shipston
(Aria Shipston)
Aria Shipston, a 29-year-old drag performer and LGBTQ+ rights advocate in Iowa, said Democrats adopting anti-trans rhetoric are falling into “a trap” laid by Republicans.
“They’re still harming trans people because they’re still perpetuating this idea of trans women being men,” she said. “Even if they’re thinking they’re being helpful, they’re still harming the public perception of trans people — and it hurts the trans people watching. When I hear the Democratic candidates that I’m supposed to be supporting saying that I’m a man in a women’s bathroom, it’s extremely disheartening.”
Shipston said she still plans to vote for Sand and other Democrats next month, but doesn’t see her vote as much of a choice. “Rob Sand doesn’t know how to talk about me and borrows a Republican framework that he just shouldn’t borrow, but Zach Lahn actively wants me to not be allowed to exist in public,” she said.
Lahn, a private school founder, has described being trans as a false identity and has repeatedly criticized Sand’s support for LGBTQ+ people, including his opposition to a 2025 law removing gender identity protections from Iowa’s civil rights code. In a recent Facebook post, Lahn questioned Sand’s attendance at a progressive Christian church that has hosted drag shows and featured a trans guest pastor.
During a September town hall in Iowa City, Sand acknowledged that some of his supporters may be “disappointed” by his support for restrictions on trans student-athletes but pledged to veto other “culture war bills” as governor.
Shipston said it can be painful to support a party that doesn’t appear to fully support her. It was refreshing, she said, when a recent campaign ad for Iowa state Rep. Christina Bohannan, a Democrat running to unseat Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, declined to directly engage with a claim that Bohannan had failed “to protect girls’ sports” by voting against restrictions on trans athletes in the legislature.
“As the only one in this race who ran track in high school, it matters to me that girls’ sports are fair. That’s why Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ false smear campaign is downright pathetic,” Bohannan said in the ad, taped on an outdoor track lined with hurdles. “What Miller-Meeks is doing in Washington, siding with the drug companies, taking their money and sticking it to Iowans, that’s what’s really unfair.”
“She intentionally didn’t use the framing ‘men in women’s sports’ and rerouted the argument into, ‘Here’s something actually harmful and unfair that my opponent is doing,’” Shipston said of Bohannan’s ad. “I thought that was a really good way to handle it. I would like to vote for her now, and I will.”
Annie Sarcone, a 34-year-old delivery driver in Des Moines, said they felt similarly about Bohannan — but had expected better from Trone Garriott, Turek and Sand, all of whom have been entrenched in Iowa politics for years.
Annie Sarcone
(Jasper Chung)
“From my perspective, I’m thinking, ‘How have you not prepared to answer some of these political attacks in a more thoughtful manner that doesn’t throw trans people under the bus?’” they said. “Like, you’ve been seeing this happen for years now.” In the last year alone, 30 bills targeting LGBTQ+ people were introduced in Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature, according to the ACLU.
Sarcone, who volunteers at a local LGBTQ+ youth resource center they also founded, still plans to vote for all three. “I have decided that, and it’s hard. I’m not going to lie, it’s really hard,” they said. “But if we get them in office, we can’t stop — we have to keep their feet to the fire, and we have to keep voicing our concerns to them.”
Trans voters in Texas said they were similarly disappointed when state Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate, said he opposed trans student-athletes in girls’ sports “if it risks safety or fairness” during an interview with Fox News. Talarico had opposed restrictions on trans athletes in the state House.
State and national Republicans have targeted the Democratic lawmaker over his previous support for trans people and past comments where he said “God is nonbinary” and that there are six sexes. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has called Talarico trans on social media. During a rally in October, Vice President JD Vance implied that Talarico is gay.
“I’ll be the first to admit that I missed the mark on some of those old statements,” Talarico told NBC News in May.
In September, Gina Hinojosa, Texas’ Democratic nominee for governor, responded to an assertion from her Republican opponent that she is “too woke” for Texas with a campaign ad that said her “pronouns are mom, Texan and soon-to-be-governor.” Some saw the ad as minimizing threats to trans rights in Texas.
“I’ve had to abandon the desire and hope that they’ll say that they’re pro-trans, or actually just say something rather than just being silent or wishy-washy,” Bryanna Jenkins, an attorney in Houston, said of Talarico, Hinojosa and other Texas Democrats. She said she still plans to vote for them but that it is “more a decision of strategy” than a vote of confidence.
Hinojosa and Talarico’s Republican opponents — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general — have openly rejected trans identities and played leading roles in enacting some of the nation’s most stringent and restrictive laws for trans people.
In a 2022 legal opinion, Paxton mused about whether allowing a minor to receive gender-affirming care may “legally constitute child abuse,” driving Abbott to call for statewide investigations into families with trans kids. In March, Paxton declared it illegal for mental healthcare providers in Texas to “transition” minors and threatened to revoke the licenses of practitioners who affirm a child’s gender identity over their sex assigned at birth. The state’s Republican-controlled legislature banned gender-affirming care for minors in 2023.
Texas Democrats, Jenkins said, hadn’t done enough to make her or others’ lives any easier. She’s considered channeling her disappointment into a run for office, but has decided against it for now, citing concerns about her safety as a Black trans woman. She continues to work closely with state and national civil rights groups, and is holding out hope that grassroots organizing will usher in a “watershed” moment.
Avery Belyeu, CEO of the Montrose Center, an LGBTQ+ community center in Houston, said she planned to support Talarico and Hinojosa over Paxton and Abbott — and was excited to do so. Talarico, whom she had met personally at a fundraising event, had proven himself a particularly strong ally, she said.
Bryanna Jenkins
(Sway Ambrose)
“He’s been very vocal in support of trans people, and he can’t escape that record because he’s been in the state legislature,” she said. “He’s spoken out and been very clear on his stance.”
Belyeu said national media attention on Talarico’s comments on trans athletes did not necessarily align with how she and other trans Texans felt about his candidacy or whether he would fight for them in Washington.
“The issue of transgender youth in sport is not a central issue of concern in this moment for transgender people,” she said. “We’re currently living in a state where there is a ban on trans youth receiving medical care, where a transgender adult cannot change their gender marker on their driver’s license. So when you’re living in that context, it’s kind of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.”
Belyeu stressed the importance of turning out to vote in November. “I think the greatest danger we have in this moment is being demoralized and being discouraged and not claiming our power — our vote is our power.”
In South Carolina, Andrews’ opponent, Sen. Darline Graham, has opposed gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth and allowing trans students to compete on school sports teams matching their gender identity. South Carolina has banned both for over two years.
“I’m a conservative Republican,” Graham said in her very first campaign ad. “Every life is precious, men don’t belong in women’s sports and only American citizens should vote in our elections.”
Bell, a Navy veteran who previously ran as a Democrat for the South Carolina House, tied his early vote for Andrews to the potential impact in the Senate. “I voted for her, but I didn’t vote for her,” he said. “I voted for two Supreme Court picks in the next six years. In the long term, I think Annie being senator is the right move.”
Lucero, who moved to South Carolina more than two decades ago, said she disagreed with calls to vote for a third-party candidate instead.
“I’m an idealist, but I’m also a pragmatist,” she said. Even if Democrats were to learn that turning against trans people will not win them elections, that lesson “would be far outweighed by the actual harm that would be done if the conservative candidate wins.”
She’s largely lost trust that politicians will act in her best interest.
“It’s extremely frustrating to be constantly reduced every single day of my life to a controversy, rather than being seen as a human being, even by the people who are supposed to have our backs,” Lucero said. “It’s exhausting.”
Every president leaves a signature accomplishment. Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union. Franklin Roosevelt rescued capitalism from itself. Donald Trump’s will be something no predecessor ever attempted: He has done more than any American in history to convince his fellow citizens that their votes are not counted honestly. That dubious achievement belongs in the first line of his obituary.
On Oct. 18, “60 Minutes” reported that in the 21 months of his second term, Trump has said, “in so many words, the vote can’t be trusted — more than 150 times.” This is not the grievance of a defeated candidate. It is the drumbeat of a sitting president who won an historic election in 2024, controls the executive branch and still insists that the system that elected him is rotten.
The record is not hard to find. The day before his second inauguration, Trump told a crowd at a rally in Washington, D.C., that he would be president for the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics — which he would have missed had he won in 2020 — only “because they rigged the election.” In February and again in April 2026, he posted that “America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World,” adding, “We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer.” In September, at the Republican National Committee’s Midterm Convention, he told supporters, “I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do.” He doubled down on those claims earlier this month when he posted that vote counts “take weeks to rig, I mean, calculate. Voting in America is CORRUPT!!!” And on Oct. 16 in Georgia he declared that Sen. Jon Ossoff “lost that election [in 2020], but they gave it to him because it was a rigged election.”
But the centerpiece of Trump’s election lies came on July 16, when he used a primetime address to the nation from the White House to warn that our elections “were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen” and that the system “falls catastrophically short.” He promised proof. He delivered heavily redacted documents that, according to election officials and security experts, showed vulnerabilities long known and studied, but included no evidence that any American election had been stolen. He cited only some fraudulent registrations in Michigan, which authorities flagged, and no fraudulent voter registrations were processed.
What it all adds up to is this: Six years after Trump claimed that millions of illegal votes were cast against him in 2020, he failed to document a single illegal vote.
I have studied American elections for more than four decades, and during that time I have testified as an expert witness in more than 100 voting rights cases. Let me be precise about where legitimate concern lies. There are serious reasons to question how congressional districts are drawn. Partisan gerrymandering, now escalating into mid-decade redistricting wars between red and blue states, lets politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around. These are real problems.
But the accuracy of the count is not among them. Nearly every American jurisdiction leaves a paper trail for ballots. Bipartisan local officials tally them, audit them and, when margins are close, recount them. After the 2020 election, Trump’s own cybersecurity chief called it “the most secure in American history.” William Barr, his own attorney general, found no fraud on a scale that could have changed the result. Georgia, under a Republican secretary of state, counted its presidential ballots three times. More than 60 lawsuits failed, some before judges Trump appointed. Studies of non-citizen voting find it vanishingly rare.
Compare Trump with the presidents who came before him. In 1800, John Adams handed power to his bitter rival Thomas Jefferson, establishing the peaceful transfer between parties that defines our republic. In 1864, with the nation at war, Lincoln held an election he expected to lose and privately pledged to cooperate with his successor. Herbert Hoover in 1932, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992 all lost as incumbents and accepted the verdict without a word against the count.
Richard Nixon, a Republican, and Al Gore, a Democrat, swallowed razor-thin defeats in 1960 and 2000 rather than tear at the nation’s faith in its elections. Both graciously conceded despite having some basis for challenging results. Presidents have complained about the press, the courts and Congress. None of them made the American voter’s ballot the enemy — until Trump.
That is the damage he has caused. Democracy rests on a simple bargain: The loser accepts the result because both sides trust the count. Each time a president claims, contrary to the evidence, that the count cannot be trusted, he weakens that bargain. He also hands his supporters a ready excuse to reject any outcome they dislike, including the coming midterms. Americans should hold elections to the highest standard and fix what is genuinely broken, starting with how congressional districts are drawn. But they should not mistake a president’s endless repetition of baseless claims for proof of fraud. The evidence shows that America’s votes are counted honestly. The untrustworthy voice comes from the one who keeps telling them otherwise.
Trump has said he would accept the midterm results if they are “honest” — code for Republicans winning. He has already interfered with elections by suing Alaska to overturn results if having another Daniel Sullivan on the ballot allegedly defeats the Republican Senatorial incumbent with the same name. He has also sought to compel California to set aside the votes of 20,000 alleged non-citizens based on an error-ridden database and a dubious matching with registration rolls.
As happened after Trump’s 2020 defeat, we can expect more lawsuits and pressure on Republican legislators and election officials to alter results.
Not two weeks after the Tennessee legislature carved Memphis into three congressional districts this spring, in a move designed to eliminate Democratic representation, Republican state Sen. Brent Taylor made his electoral expectations clear in a photo posted on social media.
Taylor and U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, a fellow Republican, sat side by side on the U.S. Capitol steps. “My friend Tim Burchett showing me the dadgum ropes,” Taylor wrote in a Facebook post.
On May 7, the same day that the new districts were approved, Taylor had announced his bid to represent the redrawn Congressional District 9, which for more than four decades had stood as the state’s sole majority Black district. During that time, it covered mostly the Memphis area; it now stretches across half the state and is majority white.
Taylor, 58, already has a track record with many of the voters he is now seeking to represent in Washington, D. C.: In his nearly four years as a state senator, he has taken steps to strip authority from local officials elected by many of those same voters. With the backing of a Republican supermajority, Taylor, who is white, pushed through half a dozen laws that superseded the power and priorities of local politicians.
Around the country, state legislatures from both parties have used preemption laws to control local governments. That tactic has been embraced by Republican-dominated statehouses in recent years as a way to restrict the ability of Democratic-led cities to enact policies state leaders disagree with, including protections for civil rights, public health and workers.
Memphis has long struggled with high rates of violent crime that have begun to fall only in the last couple of years. This is where Taylor focused his legislative efforts. He led the charge to prohibit judges from considering a defendant’s ability to pay when making bail decisions. He has tried to oust Steve Mulroy, the first Democrat elected as Shelby County district attorney in 25 years, and pushed through legislation authorizing the state to review every decision made by his office. And he co-sponsored a law that voided the Memphis City Council’s ban on police stops for minor traffic infractions, which had been passed after the 2023 beating death of Black motorist Tyré Nichols.
The question of how to keep communities safe has drawn divergent political approaches in Memphis — from Mulroy’s focus on rehabilitation as part of his effort to lower violent crime, to Taylor’s emphasis on aggressive prosecution and incarceration. Those approaches can mean very different experiences for the people of Memphis, which makes up most of Shelby County. Some elected officials and criminal justice experts warn that the laws Taylor has championed will embolden police to detain drivers without justification and the criminal justice system to lock up more people for longer periods in the already overcrowded county jail, where more than 65 people have died since 2018.
“I think he’s very dangerous for Shelby County, and he’s going to be very dangerous for the Ninth District if he gets elected,” said former Shelby County General Sessions Court Judge Bill Anderson, referring to how Taylor’s policies could especially harm Black men. Anderson retired in May 2025 after clashing publicly with Taylor over bail reform measures. (Anderson supported them; Taylor opposed them.)
Taylor is favored to win because of redistricting by Tennessee Republicans after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in April made it harder to challenge gerrymandering that dilutes the Black vote. The Mississippi native, who lives in an antebellum-style mansion in a tiny and heavily white community east of Memphis, has loaned his congressional campaign $1.5 million. The candidate made millions after selling his funeral home businesses to a private equity firm.
Taylor’s opponent is state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a 31-year-old Black Democrat who has taken a very different approach to what the district needs. Pearson has called for addressing the root causes of crime by improving schools and economic opportunities instead of a singular focus on incarceration. He first made national headlines for his role in stopping the construction of an oil pipeline in a Black Memphis neighborhood. He is also one of two Democratic legislators expelled by the Republican supermajority after leading a protest calling for gun control following a 2023 school shooting. With deep family roots in southwest Memphis, Pearson has positioned himself as the better fit for the historically Democratic Ninth Congressional District. He has also received support from national Democrats and has outraised Taylor in campaign donations.
Taylor, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has said that the laws he has championed prioritize public safety. He did not respond to detailed questions.
But John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham School of Law who has studied how state preemption laws impact prosecutors, said tough-on-crime laws like the ones Taylor helped pass have historically been “a form of social control against disliked minority groups” under the guise of public safety. Non-urban voters, Pfaff said, “do feel, however incorrectly, sort of victimized by expanding civil rights” that urban voters choose. While these voters cannot cast ballots in city elections, he said, they have another path by which to exert power: “If the suburbs and rural areas control the governor’s mansion and the state legislature, they then can use their power there through preemption laws that finally tell Memphis what they want Memphis to do.”
Prohibiting Limits on Police Traffic Stops
In January 2023, the month Taylor took office, the nation was shaken by video of violent policing in Memphis.
A street surveillance camera and police body cameras captured what happened after undercover Memphis police officers pulled over 29-year-old Nichols just a few blocks from his mother’s home. For three minutes, officers repeatedly punched the unarmed man in the face, hit him with a baton and kicked him as he screamed for his mom. Nichols would die from his injuries in the hospital three days later.
After pressure from Nichols’ family and community organizers, the Memphis City Council unanimously passed an ordinance in April of that year barring police from pulling motorists over for minor traffic violations, such as a broken tail light, as a pretext for investigating an unrelated, more serious crime. Research shows that these stops are disproportionately used to detain Black drivers, undermine the public’s trust in police and create unnecessary police encounters that can turn deadly.
Taylor, who had been in the state Senate for a few months when the city ordinance passed, said it made the public less safe by limiting the potential for police to investigate more serious crimes. The next year, he and state Rep. John Gillespie, a Shelby County Republican, sponsored legislation that prohibited local government from curbing law enforcement’s ability to conduct traffic stops, effectively undoing Memphis’ ordinance.
Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, pleaded with lawmakers to drop the bill. Speaking on the Senate floor, Taylor responded, saying that as a funeral home director, he empathized with the Nichols’ family, but “we can’t let that empathy, Mr. Speaker, cloud our judgment in protecting 7 million Tennesseans.”
Taylor’s intervention suggests “that Memphis voters don’t know what their best interests are,” said Martavius Jones, who was chair of the Memphis City Council when the city ordinance passed. “What we were trying to do would not jeopardize the safety of anyone — not even in Memphis, but much less the rest of the population of Tennessee.”
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, told reporters before signing the law that no one should limit police in their enforcement methods and officers should be held accountable for their actions.
“I think what’s most important for us to remember is that we can give law enforcement tools,” Lee said, “but we’ve got to hold law enforcement to a standard of using those tools appropriately, where there’s an appropriate interaction with the public.”
Eight months after Tennessee lawmakers passed Taylor’s preemption bill, the U.S. Department of Justice released its investigation of the Memphis Police Department, finding that its aggressive traffic enforcement had harmed Memphians. The Justice Department recommended that the city limit the use of pretextual stops. Such police activity enabled the “regular use of excessive force with impunity” and unlawfully discriminated against Black residents, the Biden administration’s report said. When President Donald Trump took office in 2025, his Justice Department retracted those findings.
Over the last year, law enforcement has ramped up the use of such stops, especially in immigration enforcement, as Trump’s Memphis Safe Task Force — a collection of more than two dozen state and federal law enforcement agencies, including the National Guard — descended upon the city. Taylor supported the effort, testifying before the U.S. Senate days before it began that the task force would “succeed in doing the hard work to infiltrate gangs and arrest more routine criminals.”
Unprecedented Scrutiny of a District Attorney
Since his first year in the state Senate, Taylor had also been working to displace the decision-making authority of another locally elected office: district attorneys, especially Mulroy, one of Tennessee’s two Democratic county prosecutors. Taylor called him a “far-left zealot” who “has the potential to make the scourge of violent crime even worse.”
In 2023, Taylor sponsored a law that transferred the power to review certain death penalty cases from county prosecutors, who are elected, to the state attorney general, who is appointed by the state Supreme Court. While the law applied statewide, it disproportionately impacted Shelby County, where half of the state’s 40 death row prisoners were prosecuted. The law, Mulroy said at the time, “effectively disenfranchises the voters” who chose their district attorney.
Taylor would go on to further weaken Mulroy’s office following Trump’s 2025 deployment of his crime task force to Memphis. As arrests soared, Taylor worked to place the district attorney’s decisions under unprecedented scrutiny, saying he wanted to ensure that the prosecution of task force cases was as aggressive as the task force itself.
One new law, co-sponsored by Taylor, authorized the state attorney general to review every case that comes through Mulroy’s office, including those that stem from arrests made by Trump’s task force, “to ensure the proper administration of justice necessary to protect the safety of the community.” The dispositions of each case, along with bail recommendations, would be reported to legislative leaders.
Republican state Rep. Andrew Farmer, who introduced the bill in the House, noted that it is designed to ensure that “all crimes that deserve to be prosecuted are prosecuted.”
Mulroy is “just going to have to work harder and ensure that people are continuing to stay safe,” Farmer said on the House floor. “We want Memphis to continue on the path that it’s going — up.”
The state’s district attorneys general conference, led by Republican former District Attorney Stephen Crump, opposed an early version of the bill, which would have applied to district attorneys across the state, because it could lead prosecutors to second-guess their decisions. He dropped his objections after the bill was narrowed to apply to only Mulroy.
That law has another provision aimed at Mulroy as well: If he declines to prosecute specific categories of crime, the state attorney general can ask the state Supreme Court to intervene by installing a temporary district attorney who would then decide whether to prosecute. Taylor has long sought to limit Mulroy’s authority, and the provision would be a way to do so. Mulroy said the effect would be “an unelected shadow DA operating in parallel to the duly elected DA.”
“Prosecutorial discretion and prosecutorial independence is a key fundamental part of our criminal justice system,” Mulroy said. “It’s clear under both the text of the Tennessee constitution and Tennessee Supreme Court case law, and this bill does great violence to those principles.”
Taylor co-sponsored a second law, passed in May, that requires Mulroy’s office to report to the state and the U.S. Department of Justice within 10 business days every time it has entered into a plea deal, or dismissed or lowered the charges on a felony offense that resulted from a task force arrest.
“Memphis residents deserve confidence that the significant investments being made to combat violent crime are matched with accountability at every level of the justice system,” Gillespie, who co-sponsored the bill in the House, said at the time.
Mulroy has sued to stop both laws, claiming they are unconstitutional because they unfairly single out Shelby County and create an administrative burden. The lawsuit is pending in state court. Meanwhile, Mulroy has objected to his staff spending time on the reporting requirements, which he called “pointless busywork.”
Mulroy’s election in 2022 as the county’s first Democratic district attorney in more than two decades came on the heels of a year with a record number of homicides. But Republicans’ tough-on-crime approach had grown unpopular with voters, and Mulroy vowed to be an alternative. He promised to deprioritize the prosecution of low-level offenses such as marijuana possession and shoplifting; emphasize rehabilitation such as drug treatment, mental health counseling and job training; and establish a unit to examine the validity of convictions.
One of the people who campaigned for him was William Arnold, who had spent nearly seven years in state prison before his conviction was dismissed following examination by a Davidson County conviction review unit. The community organizer said he saw Mulroy’s candidacy as a way to “support someone who could help Memphians in a different way.”
To see Mulroy’s power being muted by Taylor is disheartening, Arnold said. But that is not surprising to him, given how the state legislature has long treated the predominantly Black city, including replacing the Memphis Shelby County Schools’ elected board with a state-appointed one.
Bail Calculator Scrapped
Among the preemptive legislation Taylor has sponsored, a 2023 effort stood out: the dismantling of a bipartisan effort to ensure Shelby County’s bail practices did not discriminate against poor people, who are disproportionately Black.
Under state law, magistrates are to “impose the least onerous conditions” when deciding bail and should set bail “as low as the court determines is necessary” to assure the defendant returns to court.
But in practice, hundreds of people were being detained at the Shelby County Jail simply because they couldn’t afford bail, according to Just City, a Memphis criminal justice reform organization, which along with the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue the county in 2021 for violating existing state law. Being jailed while awaiting trial can cause arrestees to lose jobs and child custody, the organizations argued.
In August 2022, the organizations and county officials — including Mulroy’s predecessor, Republican District Attorney Amy Weirich — agreed on a new bail order that included an “ability to pay” calculator.
That tool quickly drew Taylor’s ire, and by the following January he had co-sponsored a bill to kill it, characterizing the calculator in a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting as a way of “essentially asking defendants how much money they happen to have in their pocket so that they can make bail.”
The bill’s supporters said judges should prioritize public safety when deciding whether to release defendants. “There is blood running in the streets of Memphis today because they’re letting people out,” state Rep. William Lamberth, a Republican, said on the House floor.
State law requires judges, when setting bail, to consider several factors, including a defendant’s financial condition. And Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, said that’s exactly what the tool helped judges do.
Under Taylor’s law, however, “the defendant’s ability to pay shall not be considered.”
“That tied our hands as judges,” Anderson, the former Shelby County judge, said in an interview.
A 2025 University of Memphis study found that the median bail amount increased after Taylor’s law took effect. And the law’s impact falls hardest on Black residents, Anderson said, because they are more likely to be low-income and make up a disproportionate share of Shelby County jail occupants.
“To those of us in the system, it’s obvious what he’s doing,” said Anderson, who resigned in 2025 with six years left of his eight-year term. “He called them reform acts, but they’re not reform.”
With the midterm elections a week away, President Donald Trump is pre-emptively casting doubt on the results if they are unfavorable to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, reporters asked the president if he would unconditionally accept the results in November. “I will if they’re honest elections,” Trump responded.
It’s a familiar line for Trump. As the Washington Post summarized, “In 2016, Trump said he would accept the election results ‘if I win.’ In 2020, he repeatedly declined to commit to accept the results, saying ‘We’re going to have to see what happens.’ In 2024, Trump said he would accept the results if the election was ‘fair and legal and good.’”
But some analysts are growing increasingly worried Trump might do more to annul voting results this time around, especially as the Department of Justice is getting increasingly involved in the elections. Earlier this month, the DOJ filed criminal charges against more than two dozen green card holders in California, accusing them of illegally registering to vote or casting fraudulent ballots. Last week, Trump personally requested a DOJ lawsuit against Alaska to block certification of the state’s Senate election if the Republican incumbent loses. The New York Times reported it was “a highly unusual move that signaled an effort to potentially intervene in the outcome.”
On Monday, the Trump administration threatened Washington state with legal action if it did not purge around 400 people from its voter rolls that they claim are not U.S. citizens.
“The timing of this request — one week before the General Election — is no doubt intended to cast unfounded suspicion on the results,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a statement on Monday. “We take our responsibility to protect voter information seriously and will only respond to requests that follow due process. We saw what happened in California and don’t want Washingtonians to be harassed.”
Even if these attempts don’t work, the overall goal may be to rattle voter confidence in the security of the U.S. elections. “This is part of the election takeover playbook that I’ve seen around the world and unfortunately in some other autocratic environments,” Michael McNulty, a former senior elections adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development, told the New York Times. McNulty has studied elections in countries like El Salvador, Hungary and Venezuela. “Trump has essentially undermined the independence of the DOJ and it’s been weaponized,” he said.
“Time and again, the evidence shows U.S. elections are secure. State and local election officials, in communities across the country, painstakingly implement layered security to protect the integrity of elections,” Ben Hovland and Emma Hulbert write in a recent article for Center for American Progress. “Despite all this evidence, the Trump administration continues to call the security of elections into question. As the Center for American Progress has detailed, alleging voter fraud or invoking national security emergencies provide powerful pretexts for challenging election results, despite the fact that these claims are contrived to justify just such election subversion. Widespread voter fraud is a myth, and presidents have no constitutional or legal authority to take control of elections.”
In what’s being described as an unlikely comeback, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won reelection on Oct. 25, defeating Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro in the second round of an election that promises to hold profound implications for Latin American politics. That breaks a streak of seven straight victories for right-wing parties and candidates in Central and South America over the last year and a half, and denies President Donald Trump a key ally in Brazil.
From France to Russia, world leaders were quick to congratulate Lula, including some of those recently-elected right-wing presidents, such as Peruvian President Keiko Fujimori and Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella. But neither Trump nor Argentina’s right-wing president, Javier Milei, have joined in. Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the Brazilian result “looked like another rigged election, frankly,” telling reporters before flying to a Mississippi rally, “Elections have to be indisputable and it looked very bad to me.”
Bolsonaro, eldest son of imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro, initially said he intends to challenge the results, although there’s no precedent for overturning an election in Brazil. As of Monday, Lula had 51.79% of the vote while Flávio Bolsonaro had 48.21%, with nearly 97% of ballots counted. That marked a dramatic flip from the first round of voting on Oct. 4, when Bolsonaro led by nearly two full percentage points, 47% to 45%. This is the first time since Brazil returned to democratic elections in 1989 that a candidate who placed second in the first round went on to win the runoff. Most observers are saying that Lula’s campaign successfully doubled down on voter turnout, convincing many of the 33 million people who did not vote in the first round to show up for the runoff.
Brazil’s back-and-forth presidential corruption
Lula is a longtime labor activist and co-founder of the left-wing Workers’ Party, who ran losing campaigns for president three times before being elected in 2002 and reelected in 2006. After leaving office he was swept up in a 2014 anti-corruption probe, convicted of corruption and money laundering and in 2018 was sentenced to 12 years in prison. A year later, The Intercept published reports that the judge and the lead prosecutor in Lula’s case had allegedly conspired in an effort to prevent him from running again in 2018. (In Brazil, presidents may only serve two consecutive terms, but are free to run again after that.)
After winning his release from prison in 2019, Lula completed his first remarkable comeback by narrowly defeating conservative incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in 2022 presidential election. Claiming election fraud, Bolsonaro incited a mob assault against government buildings in Brasilia on Jan. 8, 2023, almost exactly two years after the Trump-inspired riots at the U.S. Capitol. In late 2025, it was Bolsonaro’s turn to be convicted of crimes relating to the attempted coup. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison, but for health reasons has been serving his sentence under house arrest. Trump said at the time, “That’s very much like they tried to do with me. But they didn’t get away with it at all.”
A long fight ahead
Like his imprisoned father, Flávio Bolsonaro refused to accept Lula’s win, telling reporters “It is impossible to recognize the election results, given the circumstances under which things unfolded.” He’s citing a decision late on Sunday by a Lula-appointed Supreme Court justice to extend voting by two hours over alleged public transport irregularities, which does not seem likely to have affected the result.
Nonetheless, Bolsonaro initially sought for the result to be annulled. Since he trails Lula by about 4 million votes in the official count, most observers said he was unlikely to succeed. Although losing sides have often complained about Brazil’s elections, the country’s electoral system is widely considered fair and transparent. Late Monday, after it appeared that Trump wasn’t going to help him, Bolsonaro effectively conceded. He is also now under investigation for an alleged money laundering scheme and authorities have seized his passport.
Lula’s win isn’t just encouraging for the Latin American left. It’s arguably also a victory for democracy and environmental causes, as the rate of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has fallen by 71% during his presidency. Greenpeace Brazil said the election “is a win for democracy and maintains the commitment to protecting the Amazon and fighting climate change.”
Still, Lula now faces a difficult political landscape, as conservative voters in the general election’s first round have packed Brazil’s Congress with allies of the Bolsonaro family, pushing the Brazilian legislature further right. “Bolsonarism remains a major political force among conservative voters,” Bruno Ronchi, a political science researcher at the University of Rennes, told France 24. “Flávio Bolsonaro’s result was not exactly a humiliating defeat.”
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