Albertans overwhelmingly rejected moves toward independence yesterday, voting 3 to 1 in favor of staying part of Canada. With 79% of the ballots counted, 76% of voters in the western province chose to remain with 24% wanting a formal referendum.
"We are a solid country that's united from coast to coast to coast," said Alberta's former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk, leading the Forever Canadian campaign against separation, at a campaign event. — Read the rest
Remember when billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump were supposedly enemies? At the start of Trump’s second term, the world’s richest man, was busy ripping through nearly every level of the U.S. government with the Trump-approved Department of Government Efficiency. But by June 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported the pair had “torched” their relationship, which amounted to a lot of social media slapfights and accusations about who was in the Epstein files. But the truth is, the two men have a storied on-off relationship that seems to fluctuate based on who’s grabbing the check.
Lately, Musk and Trump are back to acting like close pals. It was hard not to cringe watching the president award Musk the National Medal of Science on Oct. 8, the highest honor the U.S. can bestow on a scientist or engineer. I was probably reading too much into it, but I sensed some awareness on Musk’s part that it was an empty gesture, unless inflating stock prices is a scientific achievement. But maybe the pageantry is meant to distract from how many government grants Musk has been awarded. According to multiple reports, Tesla and SpaceX basically would not exist without the government giving Musk’s companies wads of cash.
At any rate, Musk is now stepping in to try to save Trump’s allies in the midterms, dumping hundreds of millions into races, with Axios reporting he is “single-handedly keeping the Republican Party afloat in some of its most vital races.” So far, he’s spent some $366 million in pro-GOP midterm TV spots and other campaign efforts, with $276 million donated since July alone. No other known donor comes close to dishing out more funding. But for Musk that’s a relatively trivial amount, even though his fluctuating trillionaire status is currently hovering below the threshold for designation.
Some of Musk’s money went to his own super PAC, but a good chunk also to the Senate Leadership Fund and the Lone Star Liberty PAC, both of which are backing Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton’s endangered campaign for the U.S. Senate against state Rep. James Talarico. Right now polling indicates that statewide election results in the Lone Star State are going to be extremely tight, with new data from the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project released Wednesday indicating Democrats are statistically tied in key races. It’s not just Talarico, who leads Paxton 50% to 47%, but Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa holds a one-point lead over Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, which is effectively a tie. Trump is reportedly already searching for someone to blame if Democrats pick up their first Senate seat in Texas since 1988.
Across the country, other races indicate a high likelihood that Democrats will retake the House, while the Senate still looking like a tossup. With these numbers, Musk is likely to dump even more cash into the election before Nov. 3, but it increasingly smells like desperation. As Alex Gibney, director of the new documentary “Musk,” recently told Salon’s Melanie McFarland, Musk is “literally paying for political advantage.”
“He’s spending way more now than he did for the presidential campaign in 2024, and in part that’s to get more money for himself in the form of military contracts,” Gibney said. “But also, he knows that a reckoning is coming for him if the Democrats take over the House and the Senate, and there’s going to be a lot of investigations into him for corruption and abuse of power, taking our information, particularly possibly relating to DOGE, and doing God knows what with it.”
It remains to be seen if this midterm meddling will pay off for Musk. He got what he wanted out of the 2024 presidential election by propping up Trump’s campaign, but his attempts to financially sway results in other races haven’t worked. In 2025, Musk dumped more than $18 million into a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, hoping to suborn the state’s redistricting efforts and regulations of car manufacturers and dealers. His influence made it the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, but that still didn’t get him the outcome he wanted.
Last Thursday, Musk settled a class action lawsuit alleging that his PAC had engaged in fraud in the 2024 presidential election by falsely telling voters they had a chance to randomly win $1 million when the winners were actually predetermined. He also dodged bribery charges in August for trying the same stunt in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election.
In the end, the results will all come down to voter appetites, and there are increasing indicators that the majority of Americans are fed up with the ultra-rich meddling in government. A recent Fox News poll indicates that corruption is the top concern among both Democratic and Republican voters, with 60% extremely concerned, a figure that outpaces inflation (58%), gas prices (50%), government leadership (49%) and healthcare (48%). Data from a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday found roughly two in three Americans believe Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, with most of the increase over the past year coming from people who lean Republican.
These numbers may indicate that people are starting to see through Musk’s ruse. He could probably pour even more money into politics, and probably will anyway, but there’s a glimmer of hope that it won’t accomplish much.
America’s descent into chaos and depravity was foretold 10 years ago at a press conference. Donald Trump, who had just been nominated for president at the 2016 Republican National Convention, issued an invitation for one of America’s foes to hack the emails of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
The call came only days after emails from the Democratic National Committee were released following the hacking of the organization’s computer servers, which was widely assumed to have been perpetrated by Russian agents. As would become the habit over the following decade, many dismissed Trump’s remarks as mere trolling that weren’t intended to be taken seriously.
This was not the first time he had invoked Russia. Throughout the primary season, Trump had gushed in multiple interviews about Russian President Vladimir Putin and signaled his intentions to draw closer to Putin once in office. Trump even defended the dictator’s extra-judicial killings, blithely explaining, “Our country does plenty of killing.” But the press conference did mark the first time he enlisted Russia as his ally.
The overtures continued throughout Trump’s first term, most infamously when he sided with Putin during a bilateral meeting over America’s own intelligence agencies, which had found that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. The president suggested an “election integrity” sharing operation between the two countries, a proposal that made it clear Putin had Trump wrapped around his little finger.
Then came Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Throughout the 2024 election, Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or of being elected. (His rhetoric often shifted.) He apparently believed that he could get on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and order him to immediately surrender or face his mighty wrath. Needless to say, this did not happen, and since then Trump has grown increasingly frustrated that he’s been shown to be nothing more than a paper tiger, a frustration that has now reached fever pitch due to his abject failure in the Iran war. Desperate for a “win” — by which he means a Russian win — the president is now in the process of completely selling out Ukraine to his good friend Vlad.
Trump has grown increasingly frustrated that he’s been shown to be nothing more than a paper tiger, a frustration that has now reached fever pitch due to his abject failure in the Iran war. Desperate for a “win” — by which he means a Russian win — the president is now in the process of completely selling out Ukraine to his good friend Vlad.
In recent days, Trump has signed an executive order temporarily lifting the sanctions on Russian oil. While supposedly done to secure diesel fuel for the United States, which has seen prices skyrocket due to the president’s war of choice with Iran, the act is in practice a sign of goodwill toward Putin, America’s enemy, and will help him fund his war against Ukraine, our erstwhile ally. A few days later, Trump waived several additional sanctions that a bipartisan congressional majority had passed just a few weeks ago at the behest of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who foolishly believed himself to have the president under his control.
Worse yet, in what will go down as one of the most appalling betrayals by a U.S. president in history, Trump and his good friend Elon Musk apparently sabotaged Ukrainian intelligence by slowing the Starlink and Starshield communications systems the country relies on for its defensive and offensive weapons systems. Russia took swift advantage of the favor and unleashed one of the most massive bombardments of the war, killing civilians and hitting Ukraine’s energy sector. Trump also called for Zelenskyy’s ouster, and in an interview with Bloomberg published Sunday, the Ukrainian president accused Trump of pushing the country to surrender to Russia.
Trump has a number of apparent rationales for these moves. He wants to be seen before the midterms to be doing something about the price of gas and diesel. But that is a crisis of his own making due to his misbegotten war in Iran, for which he has no way out that will solve the problem. His ongoing war has altered the global energy markets in ways that are not easily fixed, which was the reason no president before him was stupid enough to attack Iran. So now Trump is blaming Ukraine because it is bombing Russian oil refineries and demanding they stop so that Russia can sell its diesel — and finance its war, which led to the sanctions in the first place. Not to be overlooked is that Russia is a staunch ally of Iran and is helping them fight us, which Trump has waved off as having “nothing.” Some might argue that could constitute providing “aid and comfort” to America’s enemy.
Meanwhile, fingers are being pointed in multiple directions. Musk said the government is to blame for the Starlink/Starshield gambit. According to sources in the Pentagon, the order came from the White House. Trump claimed he doesn’t know anything about it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shrugged that “it just sort of happened.” Now, lest the Europeans get it in their heads that they should try to step up their own defenses by restricting Starlink in favor of a European-based system, the U.S. government is reportedly threatening them with “devastating” or “destructive” economic retaliation.
As a cherry on top of the administration’s full-on embrace of Russia, the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin has floated a summit with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to decide Ukraine’s fate. (On Monday, Trump told reporters he was open to a meeting but denied it would focus on Ukraine, saying he wanted to discuss denuclearization.) If Trump knew any history, he would know that such a meeting would prove to be his Yalta, the trilateral conference between President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin that carved up Europe in the wake of World War II. The summit became widely seen by the right as “the sell-out at Yalta” because the Soviets ended up with Eastern Europe, but things have changed within the GOP.
The summit is clearly intended to elevate Russia back to superpower status, which it is not in any economic or military sense, and to demonstrate a new order in which Trump, Putin and Xi run the world. In reality, Putin and Xi now have the United States dancing to their tune, handing them power and influence to dominate their respective spheres.
The president’s flagrant betrayal of Ukraine is an outrage that has seemingly awakened some of the slumbering Republicans who know they are facing a drubbing at the polls in the quickly approaching midterm elections. Whether it will arouse the consciences of enough to truly step up and stop this breach of trust is unknown. But the mere fact that Trump has gone this far to salve his ego, defy his critics by embracing Putin even more fervently and drum up a lame excuse for what may be the worst national security decision in American history leaves this country weaker, poorer and more distrusted around the world. It hardly seems possible, but we have reached yet another new low.
When I watched veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl report from the West Bank on a recent Sunday night, my first thought was to wonder how the segment had slipped past the watchful eyes of Bari Weiss. Stahl accompanied a group of Palestinians trying to reach their own land, only to be confronted by Israeli settlers clad in black. The Palestinians had approached the settlers with their hands behind their backs to make plain they posed no threat. One man was headbutted in the face and his nose fractured. An Israeli army captain finally defused the standoff, but the Palestinians never reached their property and the settlers appeared to suffer no consequences. It was a riveting piece of television, framed by the Oct. 27 Israeli elections.
The report did not slip past Weiss, of course. Within a day, Oliver Darcy of the Status newsletter reported that screenings of the segment had grown extraordinarily contentious, with the CBS News editor-in-chief taking a “very, very hands-on” role and Stahl, who has been at the broadcast since 1991, privately floating the idea of quitting. Darcy’s sources said Weiss’ objections were not confined to a single factual assertion but ranged far more broadly, and that some on the team were unsure the report would even air at all.
CBS News, for its part, called the Status account a “ludicrous, twisted narrative” and insisted the piece received far fewer edits than most. Perhaps so. But even the network’s version concedes the larger point: A correspondent of Stahl’s stature had to survive an internal fight over an eyewitness account of violence that she and her crew watched unfold.
The former Free Press editor arrived at the network promising to rescue mainstream news from ideological conformity. Yet her tenure has increasingly been defined by disputes over editorial interference, the departure of veteran journalists and a growing perception that certain political narratives receive more scrutiny than others.
That contradiction sits at the heart of the Bari Weiss experiment. The former Free Press editor arrived at the network promising to rescue mainstream news from ideological conformity. Yet her tenure has increasingly been defined by disputes over editorial interference, the departure of veteran journalists and a growing perception that certain political narratives receive more scrutiny than others. As I’ve previouslyargued, the crisis at CBS News is bigger than one controversial editor. It is about what happens when corporate power no longer values a news organization’s independence as a principle to be defended.
Under the watch of Skydance boss David Ellison and Weiss, whom he handpicked, CBS News’ rightward renovation is running into a problem. The internal revolt at the network has become a daily reality for rank-and-file employees who watched the forced departures of foundational figures like Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. The journalists who remain have not all agreed to become instruments of Weiss’ apparent worldview; many are leaking their misgivings to media reporters. Nor do the audience numbers establish that replacing an investigative institution’s identity with a slickly packaged right-wing populist brand constitutes a successful business strategy. Now the network is caught struggling to hold on to the credibility it inherited while forging the political project its leadership appears determined to impose.
If you want to hear what passes for rigor in Weiss’ newsroom, the tape is available. After Weiss fired London bureau chief Claire Day in April — her offense was apparently coverage of Israel that displeased the new regime — she installed Shayndi Raice as foreign editor. Last week Raice summoned the foreign staff to a virtual meeting and delivered a 15-minute tirade that Status obtained on audio and later released in full. “This is not your publishing platform,” she told the assembled journalists. “This is a company that we all work for, and there’s a hierarchy in place.” Failure to follow that hierarchy, she explained, “is called insubordination, and it’s legal grounds for firing.”
When Holly Williams, the veteran correspondent whose report on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks had been edited to remove the Palestinian death toll, respectfully challenged her, Raice informed Williams that she had gotten her own story “wrong.” Williams, Raice said, does not know it as well as she does. As for the figure itself — more than 74,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — Raice waved it off as a “magic number.” Including it in the report, she suggested, amounted to “posturing” rather than journalism.
The same partisan thumb has appeared on the scales in CBS’s domestic political coverage. Semafor’s Max Tani reported that Weiss has taken a personal interest in Michigan’s Senate race, and she has pushed CBS journalists to pursue story after story about Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and his supposed sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, raising the subject on editorial calls and tasking the network’s investigative unit with combing his background for a link to the organization.
The raw material for this enterprise is a 2012 tweet by El-Sayed’s half-sister describing a conversation with their mother about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early 1970s. El-Sayed has disavowed the group. He has explained that his parents divorced when he was young and that he was raised by his father and stepmother, and the leap from a mother’s politics in another country half a century ago to a candidate’s secret loyalties is the kind American journalism once required evidence to make.
To be fair, El-Sayed is a legitimate story. A Senate candidate’s family history is fair game, and there is nothing inherently scandalous in an editor telling reporters to look into it. The scandal, though, is in the selectivity. The same editor who dispatched investigators after a Democrat on the strength of his mother’s biography also tasked staff with pursuing the theory that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, had secretly checked into a mental health facility during his nine-day absence from the campaign trail, a claim right-wing influencers manufactured out of a bad case of the flu — and one that collapsed on contact with a hospital’s denial and time-stamped security footage. One CBS staffer told Semafor that Weiss’ story ideas “routinely come from social media influencers or from opposition research that’s been placed in conservative outlets,” and that the resulting reports “usually leave out important context and facts.”
It is worth highlighting what unites the targets: El-Sayed and Talarico are both progressives who have criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.
What Weiss is building with her other hand is a stage to platform MAGA. Her signature project is Things That Matter, a town-hall series she devised and launched by interviewing Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, in a December broadcast that drew 1.87 million viewers, which was notably down 11% from what CBS ordinarily draws in that hour. Of the series’ single-guest town halls since, exactly one has featured a Democrat, Maryland Governor Wes Moore. The segment’s latest installment on Saturday handed a Michigan stage to Vice President JD Vance a little over two weeks out from the midterm elections, in a state where the administration needs every vote it can find.
Ironically, the format’s one unscripted moment came from the audience. Joey Amor, whose wife, Master Sgt. Nicole Amor ,was one of six American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike on an outpost in Kuwait in March, asked the vice president when this administration would hold its own officials accountable for the failures that left those troops exposed. Vance pleaded unfamiliarity, explaining that “sometimes information doesn’t filter up to me.”
The irony was abundant: A town hall designed as a coronation had accidentally produced a news story, and the news was that the vice president of the United States had nothing to say to a man widowed by President Donald Trump’s war of choice.
Now consider what the new CBS has gotten for all this friction. “60 Minutes” recently saw the smallest audience of the season and the smallest for a fourth episode in at least a quarter century. The season premiere in September managed 7.94 million, a 21% drop from 2025 and the weakest opening this century.
This is a broadcast that grew 9% last season. Nobody was asking Weiss to fix it.
With Election Day 2026 just weeks away and control of Congress hanging in the balance, the results will almost certainly hinge on voter turnout, just as they did in 2024.
As a scholar of U.S. politics, I see this as a high-risk strategy for Republican candidates and American democracy. That’s because reduced trust in election integrity can reduce motivation to vote – even if based on flawed information. But it’s not at all clear which Americans are most likely to stay home in November.
Nonetheless, rhetoric from the Trump administration about voter fraud has been pervasive. Consider the recent claim by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that Nevada had nearly 16,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls – a number reduced to 185 when state authorities pressed for details, and reduced to zero when the state investigated the names provided.
There is comparable behavior from Congress. My own research on political communication has shown that a substantial number of members of Congress, strongly skewing Republican, make frequent use of rhetoric that undermines democratic norms and delegitimizes political institutions.
How does this uncertain political environment influence voters?
There is clear data showing that voter confidence in elections has fallen across party lines: Only 65% of Republicans, 64% of Democrats and 57% of independent voters are very or somewhat confident that the 2026 vote count will be reliable. Conventional wisdom suggests such discouraging numbers would depress turnout.
Any campaign’s quest to mobilize additional voters, therefore, must find them among citizens without a strong sense of civic duty. But among these people, diminished trust in democratic processes can play out in counterintuitive ways.
Recent research on German voters is relevant to the U.S.: It shows that among more passive voters – those following cues from political elites – reduced trust in elections can depress motivation to vote. That’s because there’s no trustworthy result that voters are seeking to affirm.
Conversely, among voters with greater skepticism about elite messaging, reduced trust can motivate increased turnout as an attempted corrective for a flawed system.
What does this mean for potential voters in the U.S.? Among Republicans, it appears that the party’s strategy carries a strong risk of backlash.
Findings from MIT’s Election Lab confirm that cues from political elites are a powerful factor in voter behavior. Specifically, cues setting expectations of a disappointing or untrustworthy result will reduce motivation. Why vote if you don’t expect it to help achieve the desired result?
The same study finds Republican voters broadly inclined to believe GOP leaders’ cues about voter fraud and to frame their expectations accordingly. And once they’ve made that shift, they cling firmly to the belief, even in the face of contrary empirical evidence or messaging from within the party.
In the current election cycle, 50% of Republicans surveyed distrust mail-in voting, and 51% fear voting by noncitizens. They expect election results to be fraudulent. This likely won’t mobilize them, as there’s no positive result they can expect to affirm. The Republican Party’s messaging has painted its voters into a corner.
Democrats, meanwhile, are less inclined to believe claims of voter fraud. But they are more inclined to be concerned about attempts to undermine the midterms by political elites making such claims. Examples include the Trump administration’s efforts to sow doubt about voting by mail and about alleged noncitizen voting.
These efforts increase motivation to vote among Democrats. Unlike GOP voters, they see the capacity to correct for the system’s vulnerabilities – the potential and urgency to overwhelm attempts at voter suppression through higher turnout.
An election integrity officer, in red, trains poll watchers at the Orange County Registrar of Voters in Santa Ana, Calif., on Nov. 1, 2022. Television monitors display what each employee is looking at on their desk for observers to watch. Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
Truth and trust
Opponents of Trump and the GOP may find these diverging effects encouraging. No matter the results this November, however, we’re left with a precarious dynamic. Increasing numbers of voters lack trust in elections and make their decisions to vote – or not – based on limited or flawed information.
Fortunately, there are signs of hope.
Although voters in general are poorly informed about how elections are conducted, they can and do respond to clear information familiarizing them with election processes.
I’ve seen this myself over the years, working with nonpartisan efforts to register young adults and train them as poll watchers. And in the current election cycle, there have already been widespread efforts to broaden public awareness about the fact that state officials, not federal ones, have authority over voter rolls and election security.
Looking beyond November, what Americans can hope for is a cycle in which clear election outcomes provide an opportunity to inform voters of how and why the system works. That’s the way to motivate more political engagement and voter turnout in the future.
According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, including a substantial minority of Republicans, almost two-thirds of Americans believe President Donald Trump is using the presidency for personal profit. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
This past January, when the New York Times asked President Donald Trump about concerns he was blatantly intermingling his family’s business interests with the presidency, he had a pithy response. During his first term, Trump said, he learned that “nobody cared.”
But after a seemingly endless set of headlines about influence-peddling and profiteering involving Trump or people close to him, voters care now.
A Fox News poll asked voters how concerned they were about more than a dozen issues, and “corruption in government” ranked at the very top. In Gallup polling, the amount of respondents saying they thought government corruption was widespread reached 89 percent — a record high. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe Trump is using the presidency for personal profit, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, including a substantial minority of Republicans.
Even Trump seems a bit more worried than usual. Earlier this month, he distanced himself from two of his top political advisers’ foreign consulting work and threatened to fire them if it presents a conflict. Vice President JD Vance was questioned in a CBS town hall that aired Saturday about whether he’d witnessed any potential corruption in the White House (he said he hadn’t).
Accordingly, corruption has emerged as one of the key themes in Democrats’ closing midterm message, with candidates of all kinds hammering it in ads, debates, and interviews. And party strategists have landed on a particular argument about it: They want candidates to link it to Democrats’ message about voters’ other top concern, affordability.
That is, things aren’t just expensive because of government incompetence — it’s actually powerful interests conspiring to rip you off with the help of politicians compromised by campaign donors and personal conflicts.
Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff has been hammering this theme all year, listing eye-popping improprieties among what he calls the “Mar-a-Lago Mafia,” while also arguing that pharmaceutical companies and corporate landlords are corruptly driving up your prices. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, too, regularlyargues that “we have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.” In Kentucky’s Sixth District, House candidate Zach Dembo put out a reform plan while warning “corruption has cost our families, driven up our prices and enriched politicians more interested in their own bottom lines than us.”
Indeed, the Washington Post and Politico report that candidates across the country are being egged on by Democratic messaging firms urging them to make that link. One memo from the Democratic group Senate Majority PAC recommended arguing that corruption “drives up the price of everyday goods: gas, groceries, utilities, housing.” Republican strategists have also noticed voters making a connection between corruption and prices in battlegrounds like Ohio, according to CNN, suggesting their efforts may be breaking through.
“Voters care about corruption right now because it explains why their lives keep getting more expensive while the Republicans are creating a separate class of people who act as if the rules don’t apply to them,” Lauren French, a spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC, told me.
This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together?
And Hakeem Jeffries, the potential next speaker of the House, said this week that corruption would be at the top of the party’s 2027 agenda alongside affordability and healthcare: “We’re going to hold the crooks accountable who’ve visited unprecedented corruption on the American people — beginning on day one.”
This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together? If you’re already going to attack the other side for cutting taxes for big business while slashing healthcare, it’s not a huge leap to name donors or candidates who might benefit and suggest a connection.
“Voters are asking: ‘Why is life getting harder when I’m doing everything right?’” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me. “The answer is: Because somebody paid to make sure it would.”
The message is clear enough. But what would these candidates actually do about it?
In practice, the strategy is a consequential victory for the rising progressive wing of the party, which has long argued that Americans’ economic problems are the result of corporations’ and billionaires’ greed and corruption. And it’s leading candidates to embrace many ideas that have long been pushed by progressive advocates — some of which involve “good government” reforms to block conflicts of interest, and others of which involve taking on big business and the ultra-wealthy.
While enacting some of these ideas may be difficult, there’s little doubt they’ll be a priority in the near future — and some might even draw bipartisan support. Here’s what they’re proposing.
Democrats’ 3-part anti-corruption agenda
Under the broad umbrella of “corruption,” we can think of three basic categories of ideas that Democrats are embracing.
The first category is: investigating Trump and other people in and around his administration for potential malfeasance.
In such a target rich environment, one question will be what to prioritize. Another will be: How can these investigations best be designed to achieve actual results? But Democrats are vowing that they will use the powers of congressional majorities to investigate corruption vigorously on many fronts.
The second category: proposing broader ethics or government reforms to the system as a whole.
Progressive advocates have long had a set of favored reforms around this front, such as restricting dark money, super PAC, and corporate spending on elections, as well as requiring greater transparency around donors. Populists on both the left and right have supported banning stock trading by members of Congress.
It would be challenging for a new Democratic Congress to pass any of these reforms into law (for one, they’d need Trump’s signature or a veto-proof two-thirds majority of both chambers). Furthermore, several of these ideas — particularly on campaign finance and term limits — would almost surely be deemed unconstitutional by the current Supreme Court majority. So the path to success on this front is more challenging; unless a particular idea can strike a chord and win broad bipartisan approval.
The third category, then, would be on policies that would actually seek to deliver on that promised link between affordability and corruption — policies that seek to drive down voters’ healthcare costs, utility bills, and grocery prices by challenging malfeasance from corporations or special interests.
The people in the Democratic coalition that have ideas for this are predominantly associated with the progressive wing of the party and specifically the “anti-monopoly” movement. These progressives tend to argue that behind almost every high price is a corporation trying to get one over on consumers, via price fixing or some other monopolistic behavior.
The new messaging linkage of corruption and affordability boosts these progressives’ credibility inside the party — because it’s exactly what they’ve been saying for years. So expect new Democratic majorities to pursue investigations into and propose legislation about pharmaceutical companies, utilities, tech giants, food conglomerates, and more.
To this end, Talarico has proposed breaking up “healthcare monopolies,” Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has proposed to “break up corporate concentration in agriculture” by challenging “consolidated seed, fertilizer, and chemical market monopolies,” and Peltola wants to block “anti-competitive” mergers of grocery chains that drive up prices.
Still, there’s a debate among Democratic wonks and commentators over whether taking on corporate villains and unwinding mergers is actually likely to succeed in delivering lower prices for consumers.
Skeptics on the party’s center left argue that broader economy-wide forces are more important than individual cases of corporate wrongdoing. They argue that President Joe Biden already pursued a strategy of “turning to the federal government’s antitrust authorities to try to tame red-hot price increases,” as the New York Times put it in December 2021, and it failed to rein in inflation.
Other policies candidates have sometimes mentioned in their corruption and affordability combo platter could more directly address costs — scrapping tariffs, undoing health care cuts — but also might add to deficits, putting more pressure on inflation, which could in turn keep interest rates higher on mortgages and auto loans. So there may not be any easy choices for Democrats if they gain control of government after 2028, and the most effective message might not necessarily be the most effective policy.
But the momentum for change is there inside the party. Just as the first post-Watergate midterms ushered in a generation of politicians determined to enact new good-government reforms, it’s likely there will be significant energy from Democrats behind both corruption and affordability issues for the foreseeable future. If they win congressional majorities, and especially the presidency in 2028, they’ll get to put their theory to the test.
The leader of Spain’s conservative People’s Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, confirmed Tuesday that he is negotiating with the far right ahead of the Nov. 29 snap election to secure a majority in the Senate.
“Vox knows how far we can go; they know we have a sense of state,” Feijóo said Tuesday morning in an interview on Spanish radio station COPE, alluding to an alliance with the far-right party. “It would be a mistake to hand control over to Sanchismo,” he added, in reference to Pedro Sánchez’s Socialist government.
Feijóo, who is eyeing the premiership, said he was negotiating with Vox to coordinate Senate lists and counter a potential coalition between the governing socialists and other left-wing parties.
“We are going to continue talking to Vox with discretion and respect. If Vox is up to the task, the PP will also be up to the task,” he said, adding that the two parties were working on a deal to not compete with each other in key areas to ensure a conservative majority in the upper house of the Spanish parliament.
Feijóo’s comments echo those of Vox leader Santiago Abascal the day before: He said in a statement Monday he would negotiate with the People’s Party to prevent Sánchez from “stealing the elections,” accusing him of sowing “coercion and violence” to influence the vote.
“Sánchez’s alliance with the far left demands sacrifices from the opposition parties, and we remain willing to reach some kind of agreement that protects the Senate from the deals Sánchez has struck with the far left,” he said.
In a blow to the Socialist prime minister, the left wing has failed to unite ahead of November’s election, with prominent party Podemos opting out of a broad, joint ticket except in the Canary Islands and the Valencia region.
STRASBOURG — The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) wants to scrap the directly elected European Parliament, shrink the European Commission and let Berlin opt out of common EU policies. That’s according to the party’s policy program, which party leader Alice Weidel will present at the European Parliament on Wednesday.
The AfD’s push comes as far-right parties look to gain ground across Europe. The party’s recent victories in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania have given it fresh momentum.
Last week, Marine Le Pen was in Brussels to outline her plan for the EU if she becomes French president. She vowed to halve Paris’ contributions to the budget if she gets to power, and to turn the European Commission into a “secretariat” in the service of its member countries.
“I’m not fooled by what the European Commission wants to do. The European Commission wants to turn itself into a state; we do not. And so we will stand in its way,” Le Pen said.
The AfD policy paper, obtained by Brussels Playbook, says the AfD would not seek to leave the EU or eurozone at first. Instead, it wants to renegotiate the EU treaties and cut the bloc’s powers, institutions and budget. Weidel will present her strategy at an event on Wednesday afternoon entitled “Our new deal for Europe.”
The party wants to replace direct European Parliament elections with delegates appointed by national parliaments, reduce the Commission’s role to purely administrative and transfer decision-making to national capitals. It also wants to replace the EU’s top court with an arbitration tribunal.
The plan calls for slashing and capping the EU budget, freezing staffing numbers and abolishing agencies. The AfD would use its veto power to scrap revenue from VAT and plastics taxes, and threaten to halt Berlin’s contributions to the common budget to force through the reforms it demands.
“If Brussels refuses the path of reform, this veto will be used to block future EU financing legislation and drastically reduce Germany’s contributions,” the AfD plan says.
The AfD also wants to give larger eurozone economies more voting power at the European Central Bank — giving Germany a say in monetary policy — and reject the digital euro.
Berlin should seek exemptions from EU rules on migration, taxation, social policy, defense and common borrowing, the party argues. If the EU’s green policies are not scrapped, and no substantial changes take place to industrial, agriculture, and financial policies, an opt out in these areas would be sought too.
The paper identifies 2029 — when the next European Parliament and German federal elections will take place — as the moment to start implementing the reforms.
“In 2029, something we have scarcely dared to hope for may become reality: a patriotic, right-wing majority in the European Parliament is coming within reach.”
If its reforms fail, the AfD says it would put Germany’s EU membership to a referendum.
John Healey’s first budget is shrouded in secrecy so how come we know he won’t be touching capital gains tax?
Sam Coates and Anne McElvoy ponder whether the Treasury is worried about growth and discuss how Kemi Badenoch is trying to get the Conservatives on an economic front foot.
Plus, they pull apart the weekly polling numbers, and Sam’s got a story about the wait times for parents of special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) children.
The Arctic is becoming a geopolitical battleground — and the EU wants a bigger role.
The European Commission is unveiling a new strategy focused on security, as Russia builds up its military presence, China explores new shipping routes, and Donald Trump’s Greenland ambitions raise tensions.
Also on the show, hosts Zoya Sheftalovich and Nick Vinocur discuss signs of progress in the EU’s long-term budget negotiations: Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz appear to be finding common ground, while Kaja Kallas warns that proposed cuts could undermine Europe’s global influence.
Im einstigen Büro von Erich Honecker buhlt die deutsche Politik beim ersten „Invest in Germany“-Gipfel um ausländisches Kapital. Während das Kanzleramt die Konferenz initiiert hat, verspricht Friedrich Merz weitreichende Reformen. Es sollen Milliardenzusagen fließen. Eine ist bereits da: Von Nvidia-Chef Jensen Huang. Rasmus Buchsteiner analysiert zusammen mit Maximilian Stascheit, wie glaubwürdig dieser neue deutsche Pitch ist und welche Hürden ausländische Investoren weiterhin abschrecken könnten.
Im 200-Sekunden-Interview warnt die finanzpolitische Sprecherin der Grünen, Katharina Beck, vor einem Ausverkauf heimischer Interessen. Angesichts gescheiterter Großprojekte wie bei Intel fordert sie bessere Rahmenbedingungen, um privates Kapital zu hebeln. Dabei steht die drängende Frage im Raum, wie Europa seine technologische Souveränität wahren kann, ohne sich blind von US-amerikanischen Geldgebern abhängig zu machen.
Jenseits des Rheins eskaliert derweil die Lage: Gewalttätige Schülerproteste und die Rückkehr der Gelbwesten setzen die französische Regierung massiv unter Druck. Marion Solletty von POLITICO Paris berichtet, wie die Demonstrationen weitaus größer ausfallen als erwartet und dem Staat das Geld für Zugeständnisse fehlt. Ein politisches Vakuum, das nun vor allem Marine Le Pen und der Rechten in die Karten spielt.
Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Rixa Fürsen, Maximilian Stascheit und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig.
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PARIS — Looting and rioting across France over the weekend are threatening to reshape the contours of the French presidential race.
Far-right front-runner Marine Le Pen is seizing on the crisis to cast herself as the candidate of law and order, but there are risks for her too. Many voters see her as a highly divisive leader whose 2027 victory would only deepen the societal fault lines exposed by the riots.
Far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, widely tipped to challenge Le Pen in the second round next year, is also treading carefully as rivals accuse him of encouraging the rage on the streets that has morphed into pillaging and arson.
For the flailing centrists, there is now an opportunity to finally make an impression in the contest — but only if they can distance themselves from President Emmanuel Macron, who is seen as fluffing his response to the nationwide wave of vandalism.
Overall, it’s pushing the election into uncharted waters.
“If there’s a real crisis, you don’t know where it could lead,” said one conservative who holds regular talks with officials from the far-right National Rally and was granted anonymity to discuss the subject.
Where does that leave the candidates? POLITICO takes a look at the strategic calculus for the leading runners across the political spectrum.
Marine Le Pen, on the up
Le Pen is receiving an immediate boost. Even her rivals admit it.
This Saturday’s unrest “benefits the far right,” said center-right European Member of Parliament Nathalie Loiseau. “They are circling around the violence like vultures,” she said in an interview.
Le Pen has already cast herself as the alternative president, delivering a sober address to the nation Sunday and pitching herself as the candidate of a “pacified France.”
Jordan Bardella, president of her National Rally party, upped the ante on the protests and pitched his party as the only one able to restore order, dialing up fears about the pillaging. The rioters “will soon be breaking into people’s homes,” he said at a press conference in Paris. “The authorities are collapsing.”
But excessive, prolonged chaos could backfire on a party long seen as instigating civil unrest. And the topic is already becoming a talking point inside the National Rally.
Marine Le Pen holds a press conference on the sidelines of a meeting of the Patriots for Europe in Brussels on Oct. 14, 2026. | Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images
“Some say that this shows that there will be riots if the National Rally comes to power,” said Charles-Henri Gallois, one of Bardella’s advisers. “But I don’t believe it.”
According to the conservative quoted above, periods of instability can lead the French to turn their backs on anti-establishment figures and prefer traditional veterans.
“You could end up with [Charles] De Gaulle on the Champs-Elysées,” the official said, referring to how the first president of the Fifth Republic emerged with extra powers after the 1958 crisis that roiled the nation.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on the defensive
Far-left leader Mélenchon is in a bind as he walks a tightrope between supporting protesters and distancing himself from violence.
The France Unbowed party supported the school protests in the run-up to last weekend’s riots, and far-left elected officials have played a prominent role in the blockades, either in decrying alleged police violence or in support of the protesters.
In the battle for leadership between Mélenchon and center-left MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, the former grabbed the limelight.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon is pictured during a demonstration in Paris on Oct. 17, 2026. | Augustin Pasquini/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
But the violence this weekend could end up marginalizing the far left, especially with the government and political rivals accusing them of fueling the unrest. “They tried to aggravate the situation,” Loiseau said.
On Monday, Mélenchon tried to turn the tables, firing back at the government, saying the prime minister was fomenting “disorder” with his accusations that ultra-left groups were trying to disrupt the election.
Edouard Philippe, looking for a reset
For the center-right presidential hopeful Philippe, the riots aren’t good news either. He has to work hard to distance himself from his old boss, President Emmanuel Macron, who is seen as failing to respond sufficiently to the crisis. (Philippe was Macron’s first prime minister.)
But the protests could also be his opportunity to show some character, and rebut critics who think his campaign lacks energy and panache. Philippe, the best-placed centrist candidate to beat the far-right, has seen his poll ratings stall in recent months and has struggled to cut through the campaign noise.
Edouard Philippe gives a speech in Paris on Oct. 14, 2026. | Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
A break with Macron might just be what he needs.
Philippe came out hard against the president after he failed to announce any measures during his primetime television address Sunday. “I would have preferred… decisions and initiatives to restore order,” he wrote online. “This country needs someone in command.”
But the former PM will need to stick his neck out more if he’s going to make an impact.
“He’s very presidential, and it’s a posture that suits him,” said one of Macron’s ministers, who, like others cited here, was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
“But he’s not saying anything. What’s his measure? Why doesn’t he say we need to call a state of emergency? “
Raphaël Glucksmann, on the offensive
For the MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, the protests are a trial by fire after he won the Socialist Party primary contest earlier this month and became the center-left’s presidential candidate.
On Monday, Glucksmann tried to strike a very different note from Mélenchon, telling reporters that “it’s unbearable … that hordes of looters should attack symbols of the state.”
Raphaël Glucksmann speaks in Paris on Oct. 11, 2026. | Benjamin Vodant/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
Sensing a chink in the far-left leader’s armor, he accused the leader of France Unbowed of being “a springboard” for Le Pen, who would be “the beneficiary of the chaos.”
Glucksmann has seen his poll ratings go up since he won the Socialist Party primary outright, reaching 15% to 16.5% according to a recent Elabe poll — in a similar territory to Mélenchon and Philippe.
But the minister quoted above expected Glucksmann to peak soon.
“He can only take voters away from Mélenchon,” the minister said. “A left-wing voter may vote for the right, but a right-wing voter won’t vote for the left anytime soon,” the person said.
Emmanuel Macron, on the skids
Macron is being roasted for going on television to address the nation and announce … absolutely nothing.
On Sunday, Macron promised that rioters who “destroyed” things would have to pay the price and called for “clear answers” on why the protests turned violent.
“Fucking hell, it’s rubbish,” said one former senior government official.
Macron has cultivated an image of being above the fray and went on a trip to the Middle East on Monday. But his failure to respond to the violence risks damaging his final months in power. “It’s out of touch,” a regional official said.
According to the minister quoted above, Macron should have let his prime minister do the talking but instead was encouraged to make “a speech to calm” the situation.
On Monday, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu tried to get a grip on the situation, announcing localized curfews, movement restrictions, and bans on public demonstrations.
But another day of demonstrations has already been announced for next Saturday, sparking fears the protests will snowball into sustained protests similar to the Yellow Vests movement in 2018 and 2019.
If so, this chaos will be a defining element of the 2027 campaign.
MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s chances of staging a poll-defying election comeback have suffered a serious dent.
Spain’s notoriously fragmented far left has failed to unite on a single ticket ahead of November’s election, which many Sánchez supporters had hoped would mobilize voters, capitalize on the country’s electoral system and increase the prime minister’s hopes of forming a new government.
The left-wing disarray leaves Spain’s conservative People’s Party, led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, on track to claim power after eight years of socialist rule in Madrid, as a broader tilt to the right reshapes European politics.
With negotiations stuttering, an exasperated Mónica García, health minister and candidate for the left-wing Broad Front, warned on social media that the left risked getting “trapped in egos, worries, internal disputes and electoral and/or personal calculations that are good for nobody except the right.”
The Broad Front took shape shortly after the election was called in order to bring together several parties to the left of Sánchez. But after several days of frantic discussions, prominent left-wing party Podemos did not join the united ticket — except in the Canary Islands and the Valencia region — hampering the far left’s overall electoral prospects.
“The only way for [Sánchez] to be able to govern again is for there to be a strong presence to the left of the Socialists,” said Kiko Llaneras, polling analyst for media outlet El País, who pointed out that “the Broad Front isn’t actually that broad.”
He added, “The big question is whether this new movement will be strong enough to allow the left to form a majority — and that’s going to be very difficult.”
Defying the odds
The Broad Front is made up of Sumar, the junior partner in the current Socialist-led government; the Catalan Comuns; the communist-led United Left (IU); Más Madrid; and an array of regional left-wing parties. The lead candidate of the ticket will be Ada Colau, the former mayor of Barcelona.
Spain’s electoral system rewards united platforms, and the Broad Front is not as inclusive as a similar alliance — created in 2023 and including Podemos — which helped Sánchez defy the odds and form a new administration after the last election.
Sumar, the dominant force in the 2026 alliance, has seen its vote share more than halved since 2023 to 5%, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls.
“Junior partners in any coalition tend to suffer because it’s difficult for them to implement their agenda and they tend to be less visible,” said Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University.
Sumar has been lacking a high-profile figurehead. Yolanda Díaz, the labor minister and deputy prime minister who was once touted as a potential prime minister-in-waiting, is not running in the election.
Ada Colau prepares to cast her ballot during local and regional elections in Barcelona, Spain on May 28, 2023. | Pau Barrena/AFP via Getty Images
The Broad Front ticket, Simón said, “is better than if there had been no agreement at all, but it’s still looking tough for them.”
Amid a last-minute scramble leading up to Friday’s midnight deadline for the registration of electoral alliances, hopes that Podemos, polling at around 3%, might join the ticket were dashed as talks ran aground over candidacies and the left-wing party’s concerns about being subsumed by the alliance.
Speaking the next day, Colau apologized to voters on the left for the lack of a deal with Podemos and, referring to the fraught negotiations, said that “if someone doesn’t want to sit down at a table, you can’t force them.”
‘We have failed’
Sánchez is banking on a solid performance by his socialists and a resurgence by Sumar and its fellow parties to prevent what most polls suggest is a virtual inevitability: The People’s Party forming a coalition government with the far-right Vox, which has enjoyed a surge thanks to its aggressive stance on immigration.
But there was further disappointment on the left last week — beyond Podemos not appearing in the Broad Front — when hopes of an even wider ticket were dashed.
Gabriel Rufián, the charismatic parliamentary spokesperson for the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), had led a debate in recent months on the need for unprecedented unity on the left going into the next election in order to prevent the far right from entering government. The prospect of Rufián, who has a strong appeal outside Catalonia, leading a joint ticket had stirred excitement among voters.
However, restricted by his own pro-independence ERC, Rufián said he would be running only for that party, ruling him out of involvement in the kind of ambitious, nationwide ticket he had raised hopes of leading.
“We have failed and, specifically, I have failed,” he said.
Juan Carlos Monedero, a co-founder of Podemos and former senior figure in the party, told POLITICO that “there is no one who has the authority to make a success of [a united left]. Rufián flirted with it, but in the end his loyalty to ERC was more important.”
Polling analyst Llaneras said that, as well as potentially mobilizing voters, greater unity would have provided a boost to the parties to the left of the socialists because of the country’s electoral framework.
“When it comes to converting votes into seats in Spain it’s very hard to do that with less than 10% of the vote,” he said. “Because the electoral districts in Spain are small, dividing the vote means losing a lot of representation. In districts where there are six or seven seats, you can miss out on all of them.”
Aitor Hernández-Morales contributed to this article.
In 2013, Politizane explained America's untenable and growing wealth gap in what would become an all-time classic of data visualization. Thirteen years on, they're back with a four-part update. It makes for grim viewing: the wealth gap has become runaway income inequality, with the world's first trillionaire in the mix, a fast-sinking middle class, and a tax system that offers elites a myriad of legal dodges. — Read the rest
A golfer plays on the course at East Potomac Golf Links in Washington, DC, on October 19, 2026. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is trying to take over a public park.
What’s happening? On Sunday, Trump announced in a social media post that East Potomac Golf Links, a municipal golf course on the Potomac River in Washington, DC, would close next month for what he described as “restoration work” to transform it from a three-course complex into a single professional-caliber course.
According to a rendering of the “restoration” shared by Trump, the new course would also eliminate a popular public park and multiuse road around the course, which is currently home to some of DC’s historic cherry trees.
Why does this matter? Relative to many other Trump decisions (like, say, the Iran war or interfering with Ukraine’s ability to defend itself), the fate of a golf course is not so high-stakes.
But it’s shaping up to be a major legal fight over the administration’s blitzkrieg approach to Washington that saw the East Wing of the White House demolished last year and Trump’s name attached to (and subsequently removed from) the Kennedy Center.
A DC preservation group previously sued over Trump’s plan to transform the course, which has been in the works for months prior to Sunday’s announcement. And the administration was already in hot water with a DC District Court judge over the recent removal of more than 500 trees from the course, which it described at the time as maintenance rather than part of Trump’s renovation scheme.
Trump, for his part, has said that his administration has “an absolute right” to renovate the course and does not need approval, setting him on a course for a bigger clash with federal courts.
What’s the big picture? Setting aside everything else about Trump’s golf course push, it’s unlikely — with just 15 days until the midterms — that this is a fight that will endear him or his party to voters, who are broadly fed up with corruption, inflation, and the overall cost of living.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
Hi readers, happy Monday! Early voting is getting underway in some states and while The Logoff officially encourages you not to read too much — or anything, really — into early voting numbers, I do recommend this post from the Substack newsletter Can We Still Govern? by Don Moynihan. He rounded up some of the best “I voted” stickers with art submitted by (mostly) children, ranging from charming to deeply strange. You can find them all here.
As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!
STRASBOURG — The European Parliament is launching an internal investigation into a bogus email ostensibly written by a senior European People’s Party lawmaker, apparently attempting to derail a colleague’s bid for a top group post.
Andrzej Halicki said the email, received by POLITICO on Thursday, was not written by him and requested that the Parliament ask Belgian authorities to investigate, arguing he is a victim of “shameful allegations based on fake e-mails.”
A spokesperson for the Parliament said, “Our services have confirmed that it is not an authentic email. We are in contact with the member concerned to see how this can be best investigated and prevent any further cases like this.”
The email disparaged the work of Portuguese EPP lawmaker Sebastião Bugalho ahead of the EPP’s vice-chair elections. When asked, Bugalho’s office said he “will obviously not comment on forged emails.”
Pedro López de Pablo, the EPP’s press director, said: “The group has been informed that there will be an investigation.”
The Parliament’s probe was announced by EPP group chair Manfred Weber to all the group’s lawmakers at a closed-door meeting on Monday afternoon, according to four people in the room. They were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal matter.
Halicki sent his request for an investigation by Belgian authorities to Parliament President Roberta Metsola on Friday. “As I know, the Parliament immediately reacted, and the investigation has been launched,” he said, referring to the internal probe.
The email comes amid a fierce campaign for the EPP’s vice-chair positions, which are to be voted on on Tuesday. Twelve lawmakers, including Bugalho and Halicki, are battling it out for 10 spots.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misstated Pedro López de Pablo’s role. This article was updated Oct. 19 to correct his title to press director.
The Trump administration is ramping up its efforts to flush out noncitizen voters with next month’s midterm elections approximately two weeks away. On Monday, the Department of Justice filed criminal charges against more than two dozen green card holders in California, accusing them of illegally registering to vote or casting fraudulent ballots. The 28 defendants are lawful permanent residents with legal status in the country but are not citizens permitted to vote.
Noncitizen voting is incredibly uncommon, according to data on the issue, and has not been shown to influence the results of races. Not only does the practice create a paper trail, it carries steep penalties. “Federal law prohibits non-U.S. citizens from registering and voting in Federal elections; violators are removable and face up to five years in prison,” Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledged in an October 2024 letter. “The evidence is clear that these laws are working as intended — it is extremely uncommon for noncitizens to vote in Federal elections.”
That hasn’t stopped members of the Trump administration from upholding the recent DOJ arrests, dubbed Operation Protect the Vote, as evidence of cheating in the midterms. “This causes real damage to real elections and real damage to American citizens,” Trent McCotter, the acting deputy attorney general at the DOJ, said during a Los Angeles news conference.
The arrests come less than a week after the DOJ sued California and sent officials a list on an USB drive and a handwritten password, demanding to know who on the list was a citizen or not with only a 48-hour window to respond. Dean Logan, the Los Angeles county clerk and recorder, told The Guardian his office refused to review the list, in part because they didn’t consider the USB drive to be secure. “The Department of Justice has not provided the underlying evidence, source, or methodology supporting its assertions that individuals identified in its records are ineligible to vote,” Logan said in a statement.
“If the regime truly believed California had an illegal voting problem — no such problem exists — they would have taken this action a long time ago, not as Californians are literally casting votes,” State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat, posted on X. “This is all a political stunt to trick people into voting for Prop 39 (which will make it harder for citizens to vote) and to lay groundwork for a coup on January 3 by refusing to seat House Democrats based on bogus “voter fraud” claims.”
Prop 39, also known as the “Voter Identification, Citizenship Verification, and Registered Voter List Administration Initiative,” is basically a voter ID law. If passed, it would, among other things, require voters to present a government-issued ID for in-person voting or provide the last four digits of a government-issued ID designated during voter registration for mail-in voting.
Claims of voter fraud and noncitizen voting are not new to the Trump administration. It was a strategy that Donald Trump explored in his 2024 presidential campaign, but it was largely dropped once he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris and it became unnecessary to use. David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “You can absolutely bet if Trump loses, he will claim there was widespread noncitizen voting without any evidence whatsoever,” Becker told NPR in September 2024. “And that is going to incite anger and potentially violence.”
A protester holds a smoke flare and French flag during a demonstration at Paris’s Place de la Republique on October 17, 2026. | Kiran Ridley/AFP via Getty Images
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
French protests have long been the stuff of legend, literature, and Broadway musicals. But even by those storied standards, last weekend’s demonstrations were pretty remarkable.
More than half a million people took to the streets in occasionally violent protests that are posing a mounting political challenge for the French government. The movement began roughly a month ago over concerns about the sorry state of public high schools, which are frequently underfunded and understaffed.
But in the weeks since, the student protests have rapidly expanded to encompass a wider range of grievances around inequality, high living costs and public services. The ranks of the protesters have also swelled to include some more opportunistic looters and agitators.
In Paris, masked rioters trashed businesses and set fires, while students blocked the Louvre Museum on Monday, forcing it to close. In Limoges, a city of roughly 130,000 people, the spire of a 19th-century town hall dramatically collapsed in flames.
The national government has responded with curfews for parts of cities including Paris, Nice, and Lille, as well as emphatic condemnations of the violence. In a televised address on Sunday night, French President Emmanuel Macron also promised to partner with students, teachers, trade unions and other groups to identify “joint solutions.”
But it’s unclear what solutions could possibly speak to the whole of this newly expanded movement. The initial student protesters were after concrete educational reforms, like smaller class sizes and less chaotic schedules. The demands now are more diffuse and disjointed, reflecting the sense that — as Macron himself put it — “there is no desirable future” for young people in France. It’s a situation that the French far right is already exploiting, just six months before the country’s next presidential election.
If you’re getting a bit of déjà vu here — that’s French for “already seen,” FYI — please know you have good reason. The French also turned out for gigantic mass protests against a proposed retirement age increase three years ago. And a gas-tax hike five years before that. Some historians trace French protest culture all the way back to the 1300s.
While it’s not necessarily true that the French demonstrate more than people in other Western countries, their protests do tend to attract outsize global attention. Youth protests over education, living costs, and government corruption have also recently taken place in Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Albania, for instance. I’d hazard that you’ve heard less about them.
But there’s a twofold explanation for why France’s protests loom so large. First, protest occupies a special place in French history and culture — and the world knows it. As one political scientist explained in a 1994 paper on the history of French protests, the French have an unusual, centuries-long track record of turning demonstrations into actual political change, arguably starting with the French Revolution.
But that’s not the only reason that French people always seem to be protesting. Conditions in France are also, well … pretty protestable. Consider just the narrow issue of public education, which sparked the current hullabaloo.
The government has pointed to France’s strained finances as a constraint on addressing these issues. (And, in fairness, France’s finances are indeed very strained.) There’s a sense, however, that young people are bearing the cost of that crisis more than other populations. Cost-cutting measures that would affect older people — such as raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 — have been delayed in the face of fierce opposition. And by “opposition,” of course, I mean protests.
One link for later
➨ Make your AI fallback plan. Artificial intelligence will cost many people their jobs; in some places, it already has. But instead of panic-learning the first available trade, first consider where you find meaning in your current occupation. That should help guide you to a fallback career that will still feel valuable, even if it’s…you know. Not your first pick. My colleague Sigal says she’d become a rabbi; I think I’d like to teach again.
Before you go…
Did you know…that a single episode of Sex and the City is credited with launching the early aughts cupcake craze? Today’s food trends are much shorter-lived, by comparison. And they typically start on TikTok or Instagram.
Today’s trivia: What mass-market, imported beer is named for a river in the Netherlands? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the author of the 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking. That would be Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister who also preached at President Donald Trump’s childhood church and officiated his first wedding.
Flames burn at a facility belonging to Saudi oil giant Aramco south of Riyadh on October 3, 2026. | AFP via Getty Images
As the US-Iran war drags on, the damage is being felt regionally: Saudi Arabia experienced the worst attack in over a decade earlier this month, when Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia struck an airport in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. The strike killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 300 others.
The dueling strikes are the latest development in a decade-plus of conflict between Saudi and the Houthis, a political and military group that controls part of northern Yemen, which had been on pause until earlier this year after a 2022 ceasefire. But the Iran war, and Houthi affiliation with Iran’s network of proxy groups, mean the current violence has far-reaching implications for the US, Israel, and the global energy economy.
It also threatens more than just Saudi Arabia’s airports and oil industry: As Gregg Carlstrom, a Middle East correspondent for The Economist, explains, the attacks cut at the heart of the country’s project to evolve into a destination for foreign investment, travel, tourism, and more. On Monday, the country’s upcoming Future Investment Initiative was postponed until 2027.
Carlstrom, who is based in Riyadh, spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram how the attack has been received inside Saudi Arabia, why it comes at an especially bad time for the country, and how President Donald Trump might — or might not — get more involved.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Can you help us understand how the Houthis have such a presence in the country right now? Are they infiltrating the country? Are they already there?
They’re shooting from outside the country. They’re shooting from Yemen. The Houthis are a group that’s been around for a few decades. They were originally a local insurgency in Yemen that was fighting against the Yemeni government. They originate from the northern part of Yemen, but they were able to gain control of large parts of that country from 2014 onwards. Ali Abdullah Saleh, the longtime dictator of Yemen, was overthrown during the Arab Spring and the Houthis were able to seize a large chunk of territory.
They are effectively in control of most of the population centers in Yemen. They have received increasing support from Iran, which has provided them with weapons, with money, with know-how, and technical expertise. And they have used that to build an arsenal of drones and missiles, which they are using now to carry out attacks on Saudi Arabia.
And was there a particular reason they targeted the airport in Riyadh? Were they trying to send a message here?
If you listen to the messaging from the Houthis, they are trying to describe this as almost a like-for-like campaign, where you’ve had years in which the Saudi-led coalition, which invaded Yemen in 2015, has been imposing a blockade of Yemeni airspace, has been restricting flights in and out of that country.
And so the Houthis describe this publicly as being a retaliation in kind, but I think they’ve also just figured out that attacks on airports are a very effective way to cause economic disruption in Saudi Arabia. You prevent not just people from flying in and out but also, as we’ve seen disruptions to shipping via the Strait of Hormuz, a lot of cargo that these countries depend on for daily needs are coming in by air instead.
Carrying out these sorts of attacks, shutting down the airport in a capital city, is a very effective way for the Houthis to impose economic pain on the Saudis.
And I guess on some level it makes the country feel insecure. How is that making Saudi Arabia’s leader feel right now? What’s his response been?
It comes at a very difficult time for the Saudi leadership because they are supposed to be hosting a number of events this month where Saudi will be playing a role on the world stage.
There’s something called the World Petroleum Congress that is taking place this week [October 11–15], which is normally a big event that draws executives from top oil and gas companies. Many of them canceled their participation because of the attacks on the airport.
Then they are supposed to be hosting the [now-postponed] Future Investment Initiative, which is something often known outside Saudi Arabia as “Davos in the Desert.” It’s the sort of flagship investment conference that takes place here every year. It draws a who’s who of global finance.
For a country that is trying to diversify its economy, a country that is trying to attract foreign investment and make itself into a hub for finance and travel and tourism, these sorts of attacks are very detrimental to those goals.
And this is coming as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the rest of the leadership in the country is really trying to establish Saudi Arabia as the premier economic hub in the region. The stakes are really high for him right now?
They are. And just about everything that they are trying to do is being disrupted by what’s happened over the past few weeks.
If you look at travel, for example, the Public Investment Fund, which is the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, last year launched a new airline, Riyadh Air, which they are hoping will eventually compete with Emirates or Qatar Airways, the really big carriers in the Gulf.
That airline was just getting into regular operations this summer where they were growing their fleet, they were growing their network of destinations. And then suddenly this happens and their home base in Riyadh is shut down. They have moved some of their planes out of Riyadh to other airports to keep them safe from Houthi attacks. Obviously, it’s very disruptive for trying to build an air carrier.
In Riyadh itself, the financial district — this sort of long-planned attempt to set up a banking hub that might rival the one in Dubai — had just started to get going over the past couple of years, when you had banks and other financial services firms moving in there. Everybody who works there has now been told to work remotely for the foreseeable future because there is a concern about possible Houthi attacks against skyscrapers and the financial district.
Everything they are trying to do, from finance to travel to trade, all of it is being disrupted and threatened by what’s happening in Yemen.
What options does he have to reassure investors and the world really that he can protect the country and maybe especially his airport, where a bunch of the investment is focused?
The airport, I think, is going to be difficult to reassure people about. You can install additional air defenses there. You can move more batteries and more interceptors there, but at the end of the day, no air defense system is hermetic. There’s no 100 percent guarantee that you’re going to shoot down every incoming projectile.
As long as there is this ongoing war between the Houthis and Yemen and the Saudis, I think people might have ongoing concerns about the airport. You have to resolve that underlying issue to give people confidence.
Now, how do you try to resolve that? If you’re Saudi Arabia right now, you have two bad options. One is you keep fighting. You try to militarily defeat the Houthis or at least force them to accept a renewed ceasefire.
The other option is you cut a deal. You try to offer the Houthis some concessions that might encourage them to go back to the ceasefire. That’s going to be very costly for Saudi Arabia. I’ve heard that the Houthis are demanding probably billions of dollars of financial concessions where they would want the Saudis to offer some money for reconstruction and to pay the salaries of Yemeni civil servants working in Houthi-controlled areas.
If you are the Saudi leadership right now, neither one is really a good option.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has a pretty strong relationship with the president of the United States, who’s very sympathetic to Saudi Arabia and Saudi investment. Has he appealed to President Trump for help here yet?
He has. He’s done so repeatedly over the past month or so, asking not just for support with the Saudi campaign in Yemen, but for America to carry out its own airstrikes in Yemen. And the response so far from Donald Trump has been to refuse that.
For the US to get involved in a bigger way, there are some practical constraints at the moment where a lot of American military assets are tied up in the Strait of Hormuz trying to keep that open, keep oil flowing through the Strait. And so the response from Trump has been disappointing for the Saudi Crown prince. The US is providing intelligence support. It’s helping on that front, but it is not directly getting involved in the war in Yemen.
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