From threats to the safety of poll workers to voters who can’t distinguish between odds and results, prediction markets are already scrambling the political process.

It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.

The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.

Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — within hours.

Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.

“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.

“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,” Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”

Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.

He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.

It’s well known the administration has tasked HSI — a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises — with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.

But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.

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According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.

The administration plowed forward anyway.

HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.

Those searches went forward, ProPublica’s reporting shows, helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.

Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica’s request for comment. “Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work. The agency wouldn’t specify what tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced “publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica’s questions. “It’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

Teirab and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to comment.

There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countless studies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).

The administration’s critics say its hunt for noncitizen voters aligns with Trump’s attempts to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.

Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”

“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”

Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.

Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top field hierarchy — signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency would play a central role in investigations related to the president’s twin obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.

Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.

Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he once appeared at the agency’s headquarters with his face bruised and eye blackened from a recent bout. He’d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.

To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he’d overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against Salisbury, however.

Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. A White House official called him “a critical member of the Trump administration” who was “cleared” in every review of the Mexico incident and was subsequently “promoted six times under multiple administrations.”

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar. It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”

Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser

Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of carrying out the second Trump administration’s agenda for HSI, personally issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.) 

Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.

“Stephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,” said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with former colleagues.) “Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

In early July 2025, Frank Quiñones, an HSI special agent who’d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency’s technology to find noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica. Quiñones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that had been enlisted into voting investigations.

The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government’s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.

Quiñones was a true believer in Trump’s claims about election fraud: In multiple Facebook posts and reposts, ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab’s overseers, according to sources who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab’s technology to identify illegal voters — even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Quiñones did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.)

For proof of concept, Quiñones proposed using a February 2021 public voter list he’d obtained for New Jersey and running it through HSI’s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as “a little insane,” one recalled — both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don’t include voters’ unique identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI’s data would produce mismatches — what the staffer called an “ungodly” number of false positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They “didn’t want to touch this,” the staffer added. Quiñones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring: “The president wants this!”

Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all of HSI’s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment. Sandia referred ProPublica’s questions to the facilities’ parent agencies, including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)

Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they’d found large numbers of noncitizens on Quiñones’ 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they’d found “5,000 high-confidence illegal voters” in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state’s office, which oversees the state’s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)

The apparent breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better time.

The Trump administration’s other efforts to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.

The administration had hoped to persuade states to check their voters’ citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn’t. Most states also refused the Justice Department’s demands to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency’s plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ’s attempts to sue for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over elections to the states.

In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration officials, Quiñones touted the solution he’d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab: using HSI’s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Quiñones noted, could fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.

By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the “HSI Tool” as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government’s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey’s “expertise in election administration” was “invaluable to the Department’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.”)

The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a “very significant number” of “potential non-citizens.” (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: “It is of paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.”

Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy

As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged.

Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.

The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included voters’ addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16 states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ had citizens’ partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license information, too.

Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person’s information can’t be released or shared without their consent, subject to limited exceptions.

From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for example, a judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches, ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has appealed that ruling.

In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.

Instead, the DOJ’s office of legal counsel pushed forward with plans to share the public voter rolls, claiming a Privacy Act exception allowed HSI to receive such data without public notice as long as it was for law enforcement purposes. DHS just needed to submit a letter officially requesting the data for those purposes, an attorney in the legal counsel’s office explained, according to internal emails.

But this exception was meant to be used to get information on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that eventually limited SAVE’s use.

“[Anthony] Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

Eric Balliet, a former high-level HSI manager

Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency’s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.

In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he’d rewritten an initial draft memo to “make the information sharing arrangement far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.”

Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn proposed having DHS request “pertinent and relevant” information about specific people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland Security “coordinate” to fulfill the requests.

“Having slept on it,” Winn wrote, “I ended up deciding that our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.”

Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.

Winn’s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned, however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered language providing that the voter information would be “transferred” to HSI, with one exception: Voters’ party affiliation would be redacted, if possible, it said.

The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any “appropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.”

In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said “I can’t really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.”

A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government’s actions, saying “no one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien voting.” DHS echoed the DOJ’s view, calling such information sharing “essential to protecting America’s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter rolls” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”

Sus said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a “1984-style database” that could be used to surveil political participation.

CREW filed a lawsuit in April on behalf of the nonprofit advocacy group Common Cause that argues it’s illegal for the administration to use the law enforcement exception to justify mass sharing of voter information.

Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns, saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS’ systems amounted to “a mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a non-criminal setting.” On a practical level, he added, the data sharing increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to identity theft.

“As a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the protection of my private data,” he said. “If it falls into the wrong hands, it’s not the government that suffers. It’s me.”

Collapsing Claims

By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.

About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.

Still more leads came from running public voter rolls through the HSI lab’s databases, though it’s not clear how many. Agency sources told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said that included “as many as” 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.

Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.

Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.

The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Quiñones (no relation to the HSI agent), a staunch Trump ally who has led investigations of the president’s political opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office’s cases; seven others are pending.

Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states have more than 40 million registered voters.

Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.

Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register, they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who’d been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren’t citizens. Many had never voted.

“Our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens.”

Peter Winn, a Justice Department veteran, in an email urging limits on data sharing that were not adopted 

Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least six counties got subpoenas for voters’ records. The demands “presented a host of issues,” Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)

“An unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,” Teirab complained. “Instead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the investigation.”

In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica. Only six turned out to live there.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is “microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”

As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.

Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.

In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than 1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government, claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.

The agents bombarded local election officials with requests for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. “Sorry again for piecemealing these to you,” one agent wrote to an official in Butler County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks. Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to “witch hunts” that ate up staff time.

In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio’s two U.S. attorneys’ offices for an “election integrity” update, asking: “How close are we to complaints/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you’ve run into, how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.”

As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.

In the past, it was uncommon for federal prosecutors to pursue charges against noncitizen voters who didn’t understand that it was against the law for them to vote. Without evidence of a coordinated effort or plot, it didn’t make sense to put resources into such prosecutions, a former DOJ official who oversaw election cases said.

Now, however, U.S. attorneys’ offices are taking a different approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or deportation.

In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who’d registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024 presidential election. They’ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she could vote. They and their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of Florida also didn’t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled to go to trial in September.

“Far-Reaching Consequences”

Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president’s claims about noncitizen voting.

Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.

In February 2026, according to court files and emails reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who’d been leading a multistate child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn’t until May that he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving at least five 14-year-old girls.

Cases like this “don’t just stop,” said Balliet, the 23-year HSI veteran. “When you pull people off them for an extended period of time, those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.”

Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been HSI’s most urgent work. According to an annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS — often to investigate drug trafficking — plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including “changes in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.”

“It’s never been a better time to be involved in transnational organized crime,” said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official who retired in early 2025.

“The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon

In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive orders.

Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.

Its latest tactics include threatening to withhold funds from states it says are refusing to check their voter rolls for noncitizens and saying it will prosecute state election officials who “knowingly” fail to remove noncitizens. Trump has also continued to press Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, a measure advocates have criticized as a barrier to voting. Democrats are preparing for the prospect of federal troops being sent to the polls to intimidate voters.

“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.”

The post How Trump’s unprecedented effort to prosecute noncitizen voters fell apart appeared first on Salon.com.

Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico portray their U.S. Senate campaigns as a fight for the soul of America — one in which God plays an active yet vastly different role.

Talarico, believing God is on the side of the oppressed and the marginalized, focuses his message to voters on equity and protecting personal freedom.

Paxton sees God as on his side — a force safeguarding his ability to protect Texas and the nation from disaster at the hands of the “radical left.”

“I truly believe that God just delivered me, not because I am a great person, because God is sovereign and he does what he wants to do,” Paxton said on Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s podcast, referring to tribulations that included an unsuccessful 2023 impeachment on corruption charges.

“I don’t take credit for it, it’s really by the grace of God,” Paxton said.

In Texas — where two-thirds of the adult population identifies as Christian and 45% say religion is “very important” in their life — the candidates are asking voters to choose between two dramatically different views of Christianity. Paxton’s version insists conservative Christian values — such as protecting the unborn and preserving the nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage — must prevail. Talarico’s Christianity celebrates pluralism, affirms LGBTQ+ individuals and believes God transcends all partisan divisions.

“Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people,” Talarico, a seminarian, said in a sermon posted on TikTok in December 2025. “You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. You can’t love God and oppress the poor.”

“We spend so much time looking for God out there that we miss God in the person sitting right next to us, in that neighbor who bears the divine image. In the face of a neighbor, we glimpse the face of God,” he said.

Talarico has made the New Testament command to love thy neighbor a centerpiece of his campaign. That focus has also given Paxton ammunition to portray his opponent as out of touch with Texas values and Scripture.

“So, what are the differences between me and my opponent?” Paxton said in a July campaign rally in McAllen in a now viral X clip. “I’m sure you know some of them. One of them is family.”

“Actually, let me talk about faith first,” he said.

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Paxton spent the next minute critiquing Talarico’s faith, stating the Democratic nominee had said that God is nonbinary and that supporting the oil and gas industry is un-Christian.

Talarico has dismissed the criticism, saying his statements were taken out of context, but the Republican continues to assail his opponent’s faith, implying and outright stating that Talarico cannot be considered a Christian. 

Talarico’s views, Paxton said on Patrick’s podcast, are “antithetical to historical Christian views” and “adopted from liberal theology that do not reflect what Scripture says.”

The message is a frequent theme in Paxton’s stump speeches.

Talarico has gone on the offensive as well, criticizing Christian nationalism, an ideology that depicts the U.S. as a nation founded on Christian principles that must be protected by the government. Many Paxton-supported policies, according to Talarico, advance that agenda.

Talarico pointed to a state law requiring Texas public school classrooms to display donated copies of the Ten Commandments — a law that Paxton supports and has defended in court as state attorney general.

“It’s using political power to elevate one religious tradition over all the others,” Talarico told podcaster Joe Rogan in July 2025. “It’s using governmental power to dominate our neighbors instead of loving them as ourselves, which is exactly what we’re called to do as Christians.”

The Texas Tribune and Religion News Service requested interviews from both candidates. Paxton’s campaign did not respond to the interview request but had sent an earlier statement criticizing Talarico’s understanding of Christianity. Talarico’s campaign pointed to the Democrat’s extensive comments about his faith in sermons, speeches and interviews.

“Founded on the rock of Biblical Truth”

Paxton is an evangelical Christian, though his denominational affiliation is unclear, who has questioned a strict separation of church and state, arguing the phrase does not appear in the U.S. Constitution. Last year he encouraged Texas students to recite the King James version of the Lord’s Prayer in support of a law allowing school districts to dedicate class time for prayer.

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton wrote in a message on the office of attorney general’s website. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society.”  

The U.S. was “founded on the rock of Biblical Truth,” he wrote, vowing to fight “far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”

Paxton has also said his faith — and the Constitution, which he said was “written by people of faith” in a 2015 interview with the Tribune — informs his opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and he has called gun ownership a God-given right protected by the Second Amendment.

Paxton’s combination of religion and politics is rooted in the alliance between the Republican Party and conservative Christianity that dates to “the late 1970s and early 1980s in the formation of the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition,” said Janine Giordano Drake, a professor of history at Indiana University.

There were “many efforts at that time to define a so-called Christian moral politics around what they call family values, personal responsibility, what they defined as appropriate expression of sexuality and patriotism,” Drake said.

Talarico, disagreeing with many of the theological and political positions commonly associated with the religious right, rejects the idea that faithful Christians must oppose abortion and says he trusts women to make decisions about their own bodies.

“That’s a belief I have not despite my faith, but because of it. Jesus never talks about abortion. The Bible is silent on abortion,” he said in an interview with Jamie Kern Lima in late May.

Talarico’s campaign emphasizes the need to get the government out of private personal decisions, and the Democrat advocates for a version of Christianity that accepts all people as made in God’s image.

Talarico attends Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and is training to become a pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA), the nation’s largest Presbyterian denomination. He is currently on leave from his degree program.

Both Senate candidates have been criticized for falling short of being an authentic or true Christian — Talarico for his progressive Christian message, and Paxton for two alleged extramarital affairs whose wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce “on biblical grounds” in July 2025.

Elesha J. Coffman, a professor of American intellectual and religious history at Baylor University, traces debates over the “correct” practice of Christianity to the Civil War, when Christians on both sides of the conflict disagreed over interpretations of the Bible.

“The pro-slavery factions were picking on specific verses like ‘slaves obey your masters’ and saying, ‘Well, we’re clearly advancing the more biblical society because look, the Bible says exactly what we’re doing,’” Coffman said.

“The Northern abolitionists had some specific verses, but it was also bigger picture — what do we understand to be true about God? What do we understand to be true about human nature and human flourishing? So even if the Bible says these specific things, like let’s nuance that, let’s contextualize that, let’s acknowledge that our world is different,” she said.

A recent Fox News poll found 78% of white evangelicals would choose Paxton over Talarico. Support for Paxton drops to 57% for “regular worship attenders.” The same poll found 51% of registered voters in Texas preferred Talarico, as did 63% of moderates.

“Forcing our religion down their throats”

Protecting religious freedom and practice has been a Paxton priority since he became attorney general in 2015, generating loyal support from grassroots conservatives.

“I was thinking about one of my very first cases when I was attorney general,” he said during a July campaign speech in McAllen. “There was a teacher in Bell County, just an innocent teacher who put up a Linus cartoon over Christmas that said ‘Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.’ And the school board voted to make her take that down.”

“We defended her,” Paxton said. “She has a right to her free expression, her religious liberty.”

Over the last 10 years, Paxton has championed religious freedom in court, often defending groups or individuals with conservative Christian views, particularly on marriage and gender.

Paxton has filed legal briefs defending Christian prayer as an acceptable way to open court proceedings, supporting an employer’s right to refuse to supply contraceptives, defending foster parents who “hold traditional beliefs about marriage,” defending a baker who refused on religious grounds to make a cake celebrating a “gender transition,” supporting a football coach who was fired for praying after games, and more.

Tisa Wenger, a professor of American religious history at Yale Divinity School, said religious liberty has long been understood as “an all-American ideal that many Americans are very proud of.”

“It’s a kind of principle that lots of people can claim, and do claim — and they claim it for their own purposes,” Wenger said in an interview.

“It is not restricted to one group or one side of the political spectrum,” she said, adding that the past two decades have seen a “more conservative approach to religious freedom.”

This shift prioritizes the expression of conservative Christianity over other religions, replacing “older American traditions” that believed the separation of church and state was the foundation of religious freedom, Wenger said.

At the nation’s founding, “the fear was religious tyranny of one particular church over others,” she said.

“In some ways, we are also returning to that moment now,” Wenger said. “Conservative Christians have a lot of public power, and there are many minorities — including Christians who are more on the left — who are protesting that on very similar grounds that people like Baptists did in the Revolutionary period against a kind of established church.”

As the Republican Party has increasingly embraced blurring the line between religion and government, Paxton has called the Ten Commandments an expression of America’s legal, moral and historical heritage, even as families have sued — and are suing — to remove them from classrooms, arguing the displays violate their right to practice religion and improperly expose students to religious doctrine.

On the floor of the Texas House, where Talarico has served since 2019, the Austin-area representative said displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools was un-American and un-Christian.

“I believe this bill is idolatrous, I believe it is exclusionary, and I believe it is arrogant,” he said in a May 2023 clip that went viral on X with over 5.7 million views. “And those three things, in my reading of the Gospel, are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus.”

Talarico expanded on the notion during a February appearance on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, saying: “We are called to love all of our neighbors, including our Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, agnostic, atheist neighbors.”

“Forcing our religion down their throats is not love. It’s why I’ve fought so hard for that sacred separation in our First Amendment,” he said.

“If God wants me here, no one can stop me”

Paxton, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, has frequently portrayed himself as a victim of political witch hunts. And like Trump, Paxton believes he is destined to usher in a greater, God-ordained future.

“Despite the fact that the left and the establishment wanted me out, there’s a greater power,” Paxton said during the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference in June.

“I’m not here because of some great thing I did, I’m here because God delivered me,” Paxton said, likening himself to other “not particularly perfect” biblical figures like Peter, Paul and David. “If God wants me here, no one can stop me. If God doesn’t want me here, no one can help me.”

Daniel Shelton attended an early August campaign rally in Houston and said he admired Paxton’s common sense.

“A lot of people say, ‘Well, he’s got baggage, he cheated on his wife.’ Well, so did King David. Get over it,” said Shelton, 66. “I’m voting for the office. I’m praying for the man that’s going to fill that office.”

Across the political spectrum, invocations of divine favor have a long history in the United States, said Heath Carter, professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and author of “Union Made,” a book about the 19th-century labor movement in Chicago.

“The workers that I write about in Union Made, they believed God was on their side,” Carter said. “They looked at the Bible and they said, look, Jesus said the labor is worthy of his hire.”

Black Christians during the civil rights movement also understood “that God was on their side, that God was the God who led the Israelites out of Egypt and out of slavery and into liberation,” he said.

Over the last four decades, members of the Christian right “felt that they have the momentum, the kind of wind in their sails, and that God is with them in their righteous fight to take back America,” Carter said.

Talarico said he does not believe Jesus would be on the side of Democrats or Republicans. ”Jesus is far more radical than any political party. … I think he would challenge both political parties to keep working toward a more radical vision for democracy,” he said in an interview with The Breakfast Club.

Paxton has described his political fights with Democrats in terms of spiritual warfare.

“The fight is vicious,” he told the Faith & Freedom Coalition crowd after encouraging them to pray for him and the future of the country. “They try to put us in jail. They try to disparage us. … They try to ruin our families.”

“This is a battle not with flesh and blood, as we know, this is a spiritual battle,” he said.

Colleen DeGuzman contributed to this report.

This story is published through a collaboration between The Texas Tribune and Religion News Service.

Disclosure: Baylor University and Fox News have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

The post Paxton, Talarico tap contrary versions of God and Christianity in appeal to Texas voters appeared first on Salon.com.

LONDON — Nigel Farage’s victory in the Clacton by-election is emphatic — but it won’t let him off the hook.

Winning back his seaside House of Commons seat by an increased margin allows the Reform UK leader to claim victory in the “people vs the establishment” contest he triggered in response to intense scrutiny of his finances.

Farage won the backing of 22,239 constituents, or 63 percent of the vote. That’s 1,014 more votes in this by-election than at the U.K. general election two years ago, and a 17-point swing in his favor.

But second-placed this time was Count Binface, a comedian with a trash can on his head who secured — by many thousands — his highest ever vote count in a palpable protest against Farage. None of Britain’s mainstream parties took part in the contest, branding it a circus.

The Reform UK leader’s refusal to turn up at the count to hear the result Friday — a move that would have seen him pictured alongside a cast of comedy characters — underlined the struggle for him to get back on the front foot he is used to contesting politics from. 

More significantly, Farage’s triumph means that parliamentary investigations into his financial affairs will now resume. That could lead to another by-election — one in which serious rivals are far less likely to stand aside to allow Farage to face-off against a long list of no-hopers.

Labour MPs switched out their own leader in part because of Farage’s storming success at local elections in May, but the focus on this contest has also made it harder for Farage to land blows on Britain’s new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

This week, Labour overtook Reform in POLITICO’s Poll of Polls after months on the back-foot for the governing party.

Snubbing the count

Clacton is Farage’s fiefdom. It was one of the most Brexit-voting constituencies in the country and was the place that first sent him to the Commons on his eighth time of trying.

But Binface, a proud proponent of the British tradition of satirical candidates contesting elections, had never won more than 308 votes in a parliamentary election before. Against Farage, he secured 9,455 votes. That means 28 percent plumped for the comedy candidate with a bin on his head.

Farage on Friday snubbed the leisure center count and the mild embarrassment of accepting victory alongside Binface that three prime ministers — Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Andy Burnham — have endured before him. 

He told his own “Farage Fest” jamboree organized in secret away from the results venue that he’d been advised by Essex Police of an “organized campaign to disrupt and degrade the result.”

“I’m not scared of these people, far from it,” he told fans. “But I’m damned if I’m going to stand on a stage, having won a resounding victory, a ringing endorsement of all that I’ve tried to fight for, and you’ve tried to fight for, and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies, and I will not sadly be attending the count.”

That meant, according to reports, Farage became the first winning candidate not to turn up for a result since jailed Irish Republican Army hunger striker Bobby Sands won Fermanagh and South Tyrone in 1981.

Instead, Farage railed against the media and the “establishment” in his own event fit with branded pint cups, a ferris wheel and yurts for overnight stays. It was yet another demonstration of his attempt to bend the norms that accompany mainstream politics to his will.

Essex Police assured a “proportionate and robust policing operation” was in place at the count — while it was made clear that Farage was not advised to avoid the event. He cancelled a scheduled speech in Clacton, too.

Farage had gambled that a strong victory would inhibit the chances of parliamentary watchdogs imposing a severe enough sentence to set up a recall, should he be found to have breached the rules. “The bigger the vote, the bigger the message. Let’s tell the establishment where to go,” Farage said as polls opened on Thursday.

In the event, the turnout — at 44 percent — was not astonishing. That it’s less than the general election may not be surprising, but it was lower than another high-profile by-election held in this seat a decade earlier.

In 2014 Douglas Carswell resigned as the Conservative MP for the area to run for Ukip, Farage’s Eurosceptic party that helped drive Brexit. 

Clacton returned Carswell in his new guise, making him the first MP elected under the Ukip banner. He won 60 percent of the vote, on a 51 percent turnout.

That day was described as a “mini-earthquake in British politics” — but Friday’s result is producing less stable ground for Reform. “Farage’s distraction by-election doesn’t clear his name – it just shows he likely has so much more to hide,” argued Labour Party Chair Bridget Phillipson Friday morning.

Probes continue

So now the uphill battle. The parliamentary standards commissioner will resume two investigations into Farage — one centering on a £5 million donation from a crypto-entrepreneur, the other into support provided by a convicted fraudster.

The MP denies wrongdoing in both instances, arguing he didn’t need to declare the donations because they were given in a personal capacity before he was elected. 

But if there’s a finding of a serious rule breach then the Commons could vote to suspend Farage and trigger a recall petition.

The signatures of just 10 percent of registered voters in Clacton would then be needed to expel Farage from parliament — and trigger another by-election in which he could stand. Farage has expressed hopes that there isn’t such an appetite in his constituency — but the support for Binface throws that into doubt.

Clacton’s electorate is 79,785 — the 9,455 votes that Binface secured represents around 12 percent of those eligible voters, a comfortable margin for recall to be successful. 

Tactical errors?

That is all potential peril for the future. Right now, the August by-election has even some supporters questioning whether this was a rare miscalculation from a veteran campaigner.

Farage has in recent years dominated the summer break when many MPs vacate the political playing field.

But broadcasting rules on election periods stymied this year’s effort. Media invites to the press conferences Farage did throw had to assure broadcasters he would not be mentioning Clacton. And every mention of Clacton meant presenters were obliged to read the full 34-candidate list — namedropping Nick the Incredible Flying Brick and Baron Von Thunderclap in the process. 

Reform has also been struggling to grapple with a squeeze on its right from Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain splinter party. Farage’s one-time Reform comrade touted the possibility of a pact to unite the right — but deeply held grievances on both sides mean the distraction has dragged on.

A row over one of Reform’s most senior officials, Zia Yusuf, calling a Conservative former defense secretary a “traitor to Britain” has also been generating unwanted headlines and exposing rifts inside Reform.

If that second by-election does emerge in the coming months then the Conservatives have already vowed to fight it. Farage, should he choose to stand again, would face a far tougher contest against the backdrop of parliament having ruled against him, and many voters in Clacton had been unimpressed by the “laughing stock” caused by the first election.

The Reform hardcore may be buoyed by Farage’s railing against the “establishment” — but what this saga does to his reputation with the wider electorate he needs to propel him into Downing Street remains the biggest unanswered question.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a problem: Nobody wants the hardest job in Washington.

The Ukrainian president is struggling to find someone of sufficient influence to represent Kyiv to the Trump administration, with prospective candidates proving reluctant to take on the grueling assignment at a critical moment in the war, according to two former senior Ukrainian officials and four lawmakers.

The need to replace the previous envoy, Olga Stefanishyna, helped trigger Zelenskyy’s still-incomplete government reshuffle. Stefanishyna was formally dismissed on Aug. 3 over impending embezzlement charges. 

Zelenskyy moved his reshuffle plans forward so he could offer the ambassadorship to Yulia Svyrydenko, the outgoing prime minister, according to a former senior Ukrainian official and a Republican foreign expert familiar with the background to the shake-up. But she declined, disrupting his plans. 

“It is no secret that I counted on and offered Yulia Svyrydenko the post of ambassador to the United States,” Zelenskyy said at a press conference in late July. He added that he was looking for a candidate with the highest possible qualifications: “a person at the level of a deputy prime minister, minister, or prime minister.”

Since then, however, other prospective candidates have proved equally reluctant, spurning what would in any case be the difficult job of handling Donald Trump’s unpredictable White House.

Ukrainians with sufficient heft and skill for the ambassadorship are looking at it askance, “worrying that they would not enjoy the conditions they would need to do the job properly,” said Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, a prominent Ukrainian opposition lawmaker and former deputy prime minister who is a regular critic of Zelenskyy.

“Certainly that would be the case without having the ear of the president or his trust,” she added. That narrows Zelenskyy’s options sharply. The person would likely have to come from his tight inner circle of trusted aides, Klympush-Tsintsadze said, but there is no one there who seriously fits the bill. 

“Framing it as if nobody wants the job would be a kind of oversimplification,” said a former Ukrainian diplomat who was granted anonymity in order to speak freely. “Of course, there are people who want the job, but there’s no one who really measures up to it. Zelenskyy is having a hard time filling the position.”

Wrong direction

The trouble filling the Washington post is part of a broader problem for Zelenskyy, whose office did not respond to a request for comment. The president’s approval ratings have deteriorated since he embarked a month ago on a government shake-up that remains incomplete and has proved turbulent. According to a Socis Center for Social Research survey, more than 55 percent of Ukrainians believe their nation is moving in the wrong direction.

Zelenskyy’s dismissal in July of popular defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov sparked street protests and a political backlash, while several key posts remain unresolved. The reshuffle has also raised questions about how Zelenskyy chooses his senior team — and how far beyond his tight circle of trusted aides he is prepared to look. 

“No one has explained to Ukrainians why exactly the government had to be changed,” Mykola Knyazhitskiy, an opposition lawmaker from Lviv and founder of Ukraine’s Espreso TV channel, said.

“There had been no clearly articulated public complaints about Svyrydenko. In her farewell address to parliament, Svyrydenko received applause. MPs gave her a standing ovation. So why was she dismissed if her performance was considered so successful and was so highly regarded?” 

Difficult timing

The ambassadorial vacancy comes at an especially fraught moment for Kyiv. Washington remains central to Ukraine’s ability to sustain the war, and whoever takes the job will have to navigate a Trump administration that has repeatedly shifted course on military support and on how — and when — the war should end.

In an interview with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns earlier this year, Stefanishyna acknowledged she had experienced “diplomatic whiplash” in the role. 

Kyiv is trying to persuade Trump to give Ukraine a license to manufacture Patriot air defense systems, something he promised in June, only to reverse himself in July. The issue is becoming more urgent as Ukraine heads toward another winter of Russian attacks on its energy and civilian infrastructure and is already struggling to intercept intensified ballistic missile strikes. Zelenskyy has said this year’s deliveries of air defense missiles from Ukraine’s allies have fallen by two-thirds compared with 2025.

At the same time, there are signs the White House may soon seek to revive stalled peace negotiations. That would put a premium on having an ambassador in Washington with the political weight to get through the door, the authority to speak for Zelenskyy and the skill to navigate an administration where policy can change quickly. And also to lobby Congress. 

Leaving the post vacant, therefore, carries risks well beyond diplomatic protocol. Ukraine could find itself without a heavyweight operator in Washington just as decisions are being made over weapons, air defense, logistics and intelligence sharing, as well as the terms of any renewed peace push.

“It is quite likely that Zelenskyy won’t appoint anyone this side of the midterm elections in the United States,” said Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, an opposition lawmaker. “It will be hard to judge who would fit the political landscape best until those elections have been held.”

Gambling on Some Light Election Denialism In Pennsylvania

Happy Thursday!

The Republican nominee in the Pennsylvania gubernatorial race is engaged in a delicate balancing act as she attempts to appeal to President Trump and his base of supporters while also trying to win over undecided voters or those who elected the state’s Democratic incumbent. For a Republican in a swing state in 2026, that means finding your election denialism equilibrium. 

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

This news analysis was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

A 2004 paper on the history of presidential election betting markets kicks off with a partial quote from the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s 19th-century essay “Civil Disobedience”: “All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.”

Not everyone agrees with that last part. And the rapid rise of online prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket are bringing that tension to the fore.

Prediction markets are websites that sell contracts that allow users to wager on event outcomes. Political examples could include which party will control the U.S. House or Senate after the midterms, for example. Typically, there are fixed payouts and the price of the contract reflects the market’s expectation of the odds of the outcome.

It isn’t yet entirely clear who regulates prediction markets and how, and markets have regularly clashed with state officials trying to rein them in. When it comes to elections, most states have laws prohibiting election betting in some form or fashion, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released in June. But many such laws predate modern prediction markets and haven’t necessarily been tested in court recently.

Kalshi recently pushed back on Wisconsin election officials after they issued an advisory about a state law dating back to the 19th century that says voters can’t cast ballots in races they’ve bet on. A Kalshi staffer said on social media the Wisconsin advisory meant election officials were engaged in “active voter suppression.”

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However the legal situation shakes out, betting on elections is happening. An NBC News analysis found nearly $200 million in trading volume on midterm election outcomes on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket, and election officials say they are concerned about how the odds on such sites could influence public trust in election outcomes — particularly when election results differ from those the markets had favored — and about creating incentives for manipulation.

“I think it is something that we are going to have to wrestle with going into the November election and forward,” said Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder and county clerk for Los Angeles County, California, the country’s single most populous election jurisdiction, during a webinar organized by the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions this month.

Logan said in the Los Angeles mayoral primary in June, “early election returns differed from market expectations, and that resulted in suspicion and questioning of normal ballot processing and canvassing procedures in California.” The bottom line, he said, is that “elections administration right now is very much affected by perception and misinformation, and in our field we have to be prepared to respond to that.”

‘This is all bad’

Prediction markets say their odds reflect the wisdom of the crowds and can be more accurate than polling. And these markets have been pretty good at predicting elections in the past. For example, the 2004 paper that quoted Thoreau, by economics professors Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf, analyzed data on election gambling between 1868 and 1940 and found that the historical markets “did a remarkable job forecasting elections in an era before scientific polling.”

But prediction markets differ from polls in important ways. Polls are representative samples of just the voters who live in the state or district in question; prediction markets are open to anyone, and the more money a person bets, the more influence they have on the odds.

And election officials, already worried about low public trust in elections, are concerned the odds on these markets could be manipulated to influence public perception of a contest or create new financial incentives to shape outcomes. Kalshi and Polymarket did not respond to requests for comment.

Jim Allen, the elections director of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, which had already banned election workers from directly betting on elections, earlier this year added a ban on using prediction markets to do so. He likened it to referees betting on the outcome of a basketball game.

The new language, he said during the PLEJ webinar, “kicked off a conversation at our poll worker training. There was one person out of 383 precincts, one person who stood up and they said, ‘Well, what if we just want to make a minor bet on what turnout will be? That’ll keep things interesting.’ And we said, ‘No, this is all bad.’”

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

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PARIS — Former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is trying to jump-start his presidential prospects by taking advantage of his rivals enjoying France’s cherished August break.

Attal, a former prime minister who now leads President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist political party Renaissance, is betting that by keeping a busy schedule during the holiday and meeting with people across the country — including those at vineyards, markets and ports as well as vacationers in picturesque seaside towns — he can show voters what sets him apart from the field.

“It’s a rather bourgeois assumption to think that all French people take time off or go on vacation,” said a representative for Attal’s team who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly about campaign dynamics. “There’s no way he’s going to suspend his campaign over the summer.”

But political reality is also forcing Attal to campaign in August for the vote in April of next year. If he wants a real shot at catching up in the polls, there’s little time to waste.

Surveys have consistently shown the 37-year-old trailing Edouard Philippe, his main ideological rival for centrist and center-right votes. Given the contest goes to a two-candidate runoff if nobody wins a majority in the first round, the two men have tentatively agreed that only one of them should be on the ballot so they don’t split their shared voter base — which could cost both of them a spot in the second round.

Philippe, far-right front-runner Marine Le Pen, far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon and conservative candidate Bruno Retailleau are all among the presidential hopefuls taking long summer breaks, only interrupting their time off for the occasional op-ed or statement on major events like the wildfires that ravaged southwest France.

Their reasoning for slowing down during the peak holiday season is straightforward: Voters want to rest and recharge, so candidates shouldn’t harass them with politics and should instead enjoy one last bit of respite before the race enters its decisive stretch.

“We shouldn’t bother the French people while they’re on vacation,” said a Retailleau adviser.

Attal is betting otherwise that a summer spent campaigning can help close the gap in the polls.

“A campaign is about winning over the French one by one … [Attal] wants to show that he’s more determined than the others,” added his adviser.

The right track

It’s unclear for now to what extent Attal’s summer work will reap dividends with voters, as most pollsters who would investigate that question have themselves set out-of-office messages.

But the absence of other candidates on the campaign trail has given Attal an opportunity to dominate headlines, and he’s used it to make a play for right-wing voters.

At the start of the month, Attal, a member of parliament who represents a Paris suburb, gave an interview to the right-wing weekly Le Journal du Dimanche in which he called for lower immigration, a sweeping streamlining of France’s administrative procedures and more effective enforcement of criminal sentences.

He then traveled to western France, where, in front of cameras, he confronted a group of French gens du voyage — a legal classification for traditionally itinerant communities, including Roma and Manouche, and long a target of the French right — who had occupied land without authorization.

The encounter can be seen below in a report from CNEWS, in French.

French municipalities are required to provide designated stopping sites for traveling communities, but those obligations are not always met — or the sites provided are insufficient — sometimes resulting in unauthorized occupations of public or private land.

For both Attal and Philippe, making inroads on the right will be crucial. Macron’s 2022 reelection was buoyed by older, more affluent voters who had traditionally backed conservatives.

But Philippe begins that contest with a built-in advantage.

He is a former member of the conservative party Les Républicains and has always identified as a man of the right. Attal, who started his political career in the youth wing of the center-left Socialists, has resisted the label.

One conservative minister in the current French government, who has not endorsed a candidate for 2027, readily described Philippe as belonging to his political camp. Attal, the minister said, has a “very flexible” ideological spine.

Sarah Paillou and Anthony Lattier contributed to this report.

LONDON — Nigel Farage billed it as a “people vs the establishment” by-election. But before he wins back the seat he resigned in July, there’s the small matter of convincing Clacton’s voters he can help them with their shabby beachfront stairs.

POLITICO analysis of the Reform UK leader’s digital campaign messages shows that Farage has run a twin-track strategy in the seaside seat as polls open Thursday. The two key themes of the digital air war have been painting Farage as a champion for local residents — as well as an insurgent leader harried by the “establishment” machine.

Farage and his party have spent more than £10,000 pushing those messages via ads on Meta’s platforms — which include Facebook and Instagram — in the campaign so far.

It’s a similar amount to that spent by the party in the crunch Makerfield by-election in June, where Reform unsuccessfully attempted to halt Andy Burnham’s march on Downing Street by denying the Labour candidate a Westminster seat.

But in Clacton, Farage’s chief opponent is Count Binface, a satirical candidate who sports a silver cape, wears a rubbish receptacle on his head, and claims to be from outer space.

The Reform leader triggered the special election in a bid to bolster his personal standing amid questions about his finances, including whether he broke parliamentary rules by not declaring a £5 million donation from a crypto-entrepreneur. Britain’s other mainstream parties refused to field candidates in the contest as a result, leaving Farage running against independents and comedy characters.

In his paid ad content, the Reform leader makes no mention of his Count Binface, whose policies include capping the price of ice cream and holding a referendum on returning Pluto’s planetary status.

Instead, a spate of campaign videos have been pushed out showing Farage as having his finger on the pulse of local concerns.

Tackling low-level crime, housing problems, shabby infrastructure and veterans’ issues all get mentions in the paid ads targeted specifically at users living in the area.

One Meta ad suggests he is the only candidate to have visited forgotten areas of the constituency. A further clip shows a local resident giving Farage a positive review of his work — and is presented as proof that opposition complaints he has neglected the patch since his 2024 general election victory in the seat are “cobblers.”

With over 7 million followers across the leading social media platforms — making him by far the most-followed U.K. party leader — Farage has also been churning out election content across TikTok, Instagram and X.

Even with that reach, the Reform UK leader appears to be the only candidate running in Clacton who has used paid Meta features to bolster his online campaign.

Almost £1,000 has been spent on videos of Farage urging local supporters to request the party deliver and install an “I’m with Nigel” garden sign. Meanwhile, around £500 went to ads asking voters to return their postal votes and “send a message to the establishment.”

The largest single sum — between £4,000-£4,500 — was spent on an almost five-minute campaign video in which Farage waxes lyrical about the connection he’s made with local constituents, while claiming his party’s surging success has resulted in the powers-that-be using “foul means” to hamper him.

“Rather than being judged by the political class and the mainstream media, I am going to let you, the voters in the Clacton constituency, make a decision,” he said. “I want you to be my judge, not the political elite.”

Farage also used the same piece of campaign content to try and take on questions about his funding head-on. In the clip, the Reform leader argued that the furor over a £5m donation he received from crypto-entrepreneur Christopher Harborne before the 2024 election — now the subject of a House of Commons investigation — amounts to merely a failure to fill out a parliamentary form.

The Clacton candidate also argues in the same clip that the murder of a senior Reform figure proves such funding is needed for his personal security. “Surely in the wake of the death of the elderly Ann Widdecombe, you can see that I am going to need money to protect myself for the rest of my life,” he said.

With a result due in the early hours of Friday, Farage does not have long to wait to find out whether his online spend has paid off.

Now-failed Minnesota gubernatorial candidate and prolific 2020 election denier Mike Lindell lost his bid for Minnesota governor on Tuesday night to the state’s Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth, who received 44.7% of the vote. Predictably, however, Lindell now has some questions about the results of his primary loss, and what he claims could be “anomalies” in the results. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week publicly rejected President Donald Trump’s latest Gaza peace plan.

The Trump administration can live with it — for now.

The administration says it’s less concerned with what Netanyahu says than what the Israeli Defense Forces do. A U.S. official, who, like others in the story, was granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking, said that the administration was initially “disappointed” that Israel responded to the 15-point peace proposal by ramping up attacks in Gaza — but is pleased that it has since eased its assault.

Now, the administration is willing to give the Israeli prime minister some leeway to message the peace plan in the way he needs to, the official said. There is broad understanding that he is two months from a tough reelection — and needs to please his own hard-right allies to win. Few expected the president’s roadmap to be wholesale embraced, even as Trump on Truth Social trumpeted it as a “major milestone” in the conflict.

“We recognize the complexities that come from the Israeli elections, and we’re obviously going to give Bibi a space to try and navigate that,” the official said. But in turn, “they need to give us a little bit of space in terms of no targeted killings in order to allow us to try to get to the next phase, so there’s a lot more challenges to go to get there.”

U.S. officials and Hamas negotiated the latest peace framework separately, with help from Middle East allies. The proposal, announced last month, called for Hamas to disarm and relinquish governance in Gaza and Israel to withdraw its military from the territory. The plan stalled when Hamas said it would not disarm until Israel withdrew, and Israel said it would not withdraw until Hamas disarmed.

Even as skeptics of the Trump plan criticized the president for overhyping its achievement, U.S. officials believed that they needed to go public once Hamas was on board to lock in its pledge to disarm. Despite the president’s public confidence, administration officials privately expected that the proposal would likely face pushback from Netanyahu but that talks could continue with Israel.

Still, they considered the roadmap a significant win.

“Nobody’s ever gotten to this point where they got Hamas to agree to this, so that’s a necessary step before actually disarming it,” the U.S. official said.

And there are signs that Israel is preparing for the possibility of withdrawal anyway, with Israeli media reporting Israel’s defense establishment began weighing contingencies to do so in the days after Netanyahu’s public rejection.

Another administration official said the Board of Peace, a 27-country initiative formed as part of Trump’s deal last year to end the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, has been “getting good cooperation on the ground of late.”

“That’s what’s important,” the administration official said.

And it’s not just Trump administration officials hailing the framework as a step in the right direction. Former ambassadors and administration officials, including some who served in the Biden and Obama administrations, see the recent commitment the U.S. secured from Hamas to disarm — a monthslong sticking point in the peace process — as a small, but meaningful step, even as doubts remain whether Hamas will follow through. A member of the Hamas political bureau, according to the Associated Press, said this week that Hamas remains “committed to the roadmap.”

“For Netanyahu, his primary objective, of course, is getting through his election so he’s going to at least voice rejection even while he may allow some aspects of it to move forward,” said Dan Shapiro, a U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration. “It looks like Trump is tolerating the Netanyahu two-step. These two have done a dance like this before and as long as certain elements of it are moving forward … Trump seems to be willing to tolerate Netanyahu’s stated rejection.”

Even Trump appeared in little hurry Monday to escalate the dispute with Netanyahu, insisting to reporters in the Oval Office that he had a “good relationship” with the Israeli prime minister despite the very public rejection of his peace proposal.

The White House referred requests for comment to the Board of Peace.

A Board of Peace official added that “separate discussions with Israel are continuing.”

“The objective remains the full decommissioning of weapons and ensuring Gaza can never again pose the kind of threat Israel faced on October 7,” the official said. “Plans are moving forward in this regard. We have seen important elements of cooperation in recent days and we are intensifying our efforts to accelerate progress.”

The U.S. official added that Israel remains skeptical that Hamas will follow through on their commitments, while noting the country was similarly skeptical that Hamas would release the Israeli hostages.

“We basically have built a lot of credit with them. And I think that they’re willing to give us more of a shot to see if we can get to the next phase,” the official said. “We’re in an uncomfortable position for everyone, but I think that there’s a pathway to get through it.”

The idea that Israeli troops are at least planning to withdraw — especially if that withdrawal goes to the yellow line in Gaza, a key point of the plan the Board of Peace proposed — is giving Trump allies hope that Netanyahu’s words are meant for a domestic audience, while his actions are meant to demonstrate he might consider a deal in the future.

“Netanyahu’s playing a fairly tricky tightrope, where on the one hand he flexes his muscle for domestic audiences, given his situation at election eve, and on the other hand, he’s doing some baby steps in the direction of the 15-point plan — testing the tolerance of the American or Board of Peace team,” said Nimrod Novik, who served as senior diplomatic adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

James Jeffrey, a former ambassador who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term, said that “of course it’s a win” to get Hamas to agree to disarm. And, behind the scenes, he said there continues to be movement between the U.S and Israel.

“Slowly we and Israel are moving forward on both Lebanon and Gaza even in the face of Israeli elections,” Jeffrey said.

Still, the incremental movement leaves fundamental questions, which have repeatedly stymied efforts to create a lasting peace between Israel and Gaza. U.S. allies are also concerned that Netanyahu’s public rejection of the latest peace plan is undermining confidence in the Board of Peace and the broader Middle East peace efforts.

Hamas’ willingness to disarm is conditioned on Israel withdrawing from Gaza, leaving unresolved how — and in what order — either side would carry out its commitments.

Hamas is supposed to turn over its weapons to a United Nations-created body responsible for governing the day-to-day operation in Gaza, and that governing authority is supposed to eventually run the territory, supervised by the Board of Peace, though the timeline for leadership handover remains uncertain. And Israel, meanwhile, has not agreed to the withdrawal in the plan, even as its military is preparing for the possibility.

But administration allies don’t really expect some big peace ceremony at Camp David or in Geneva. They’ll settle for dialogue, however tenuous.

“You have to judge these things incrementally in the Middle East,” a person familiar with the White House’s discussions around the peace process said.

Jerry Wu and Daniella Cheslow contributed to this report.

Clacton's parliamentary race has it all: Nigel Farage, a man dressed as a trash can, a Union Jack bikini, white nationalist conspiracy theories, and 34 candidates on the ballot.

CLACTON-ON-SEA — Voters seeking to re-elect Nigel Farage Thursday will have to scan past an array of comedy characters and oddballs on the longest ballot paper in British history.

The man who hopes to be the U.K.’s next prime minister is all but certain to retain his seaside fiefdom of Clacton — but his self-styled “people versus the establishment” electoral gambit is sowing some seeds of discontent even among loyal supporters.

Fear of Clacton becoming a “laughing stock” is a common refrain during a pair of focus groups POLITICO attended in the run-up to this week’s election.

The feeling that the town has been made to look daft was apparent even among those preparing to vote once again to return the Reform UK leader to parliament. And it’s not the rival candidate wearing a trash can on his head that they’re holding responsible for the “farce.”

Thursday may not be the end of the matter, either. A parliamentary investigation into Farage’s alleged failure to declare millions of pounds of donations in the run-up to his 2024 election could mean yet another by-election — and a tougher battle for the right-wing populist next time around.

Bid for absolution

This self-inflicted campaign is taking place because of Farage’s decision to resign his parliamentary seat and put his fate in the hands of Clacton’s residents.

Ordinary punters, he argued, should be the ones to have their say as he faced mounting questions over undeclared donations. The gamble was that such a vote would absolve him of wrongdoing in the eyes of the public, regardless of the findings in two parliamentary probes — one over a £5 million donation from a crypto-entrepreneur, and the other into support from a convicted fraudster. Farage has denied wrongdoing in both instances, arguing that help was given in a personal capacity.

But Britain’s main political parties took one look at this ploy and opted out. That’s how Count Binface, one of the most enthusiastic inheritors of a rich British tradition of standing as a satirical candidate in elections, ended up as Farage’s most high-profile rival. 

Others risking their £500 deposit to get their names on the 90-cm-long ballot paper include rival jokesters with names ranging from Howling Laud Hope, Nick the Incredible Flying Brick and Baron Von Thunderclap. Broadcast rules mean the 34-strong candidate list needs to be read in full at every mention of Farage’s by-election on TV.

A seaside town back on the map — in ways unwanted

The first focus group arranged by the More in Common think tank that POLITICO observed was made up of nine constituents who all voted for Farage in the 2024 general election, and are minded to do so again in the by-election. (Their names were withheld so they could speak candidly).

It was a retiree who was first to volunteer regret at Farage’s decision, blaming him for provoking an “influx of idiots” into the constituency. “Unfortunately, the action of causing a by-election has,” the former shopkeeper offered, “really made Clacton, in my opinion, a bit of a laughing stock.”

Two others repeated that same phrase, with one dog groomer-by-trade adding: “I think it was all a bit of a farce. I think he should have admitted that he was given this £5 million.”

“I guess it makes it very hard to trust him,” a delivery driver chimed in. “Most of my friends have gone towards Count Binface as opposed to Farage.”

Farage has since given varying explanations for some of the money he’s received, including as a “reward” for Brexit, or to cover lifelong security in the perilous world of modern politics. The veteran campaigner has been tetchy about the “unconditional gift” during media appearances, telling a radio interviewer he could spend it on Ferraris or bet on the horses, adding: “What’s it got to do with you?”

The dog groomer was among those lamenting the cost of running the by-election too. Reform had offered to pay for it, but in reality there is no mechanism to do this. The sheer number of candidates running has some extraordinary consequences.

Tendring Council, which is presiding over the vote, said even the cost of printing the ballot papers is four times that of a typical election because of their sheer length. Additional planning has had to go into every stage, from how the ballot is printed, folded and actually cast at polling stations — and counting will go on through the night and possibly past breakfast.

Then there are the Reform voters who have now been forced to choose whether to cast a vote for a comedy candidate or for Farage.

“From what I can tell about Binface, he seems like an okay guy from the research I’ve done,” said one local businessman. “And I do think there would be some tourism involved because of the absurdity of having that candidate as the MP of Clacton.”

That influx could already be observed, to some extent, on Tuesday this week. Even though it’s a school holiday, the pier and the amusement arcades in town weren’t exactly heaving with holiday-makers. 

But there was a steady stream of journalists — so many that they even tried to vox pop each other at times. Then there was an obscure mobile phone network that set up an ice cream van selling “99s for 99p” — in a publicity stunt echoing one of Binface’s manifesto pledges. A vintage Jaguar painted all over with the Union Jack (and used in the Austin Powers franchise) is touring the streets all day in support of Binface.

Farage’s social media has done a good job of showing how much support he still commands from the diehards — at times at messiah-like levels. And it’s not hard to find his “I’m with Nigel” placards outside homes, a picture of the candidate ringed with a halo-like ferris wheel.

But supporters in the first focus group suggested that the sheen could be coming off a man who has, just this year, been enough of a campaigning force to send the governing Labour Party searching for a new leader.

Old-school Tories’ views harden

The second focus group, held in a community garden overlooking the town, featured right-wing voters, and comprised largely of former Conservative supporters who, though discontented with their old party, aren’t eager to back Farage any time soon.

They roundly agreed with the “farce” analysis of the by-election. “People see this by-election as a total joke. If you talk to anyone, then that is their view,” said a retired printer.

They all lamented having no proper choice, though they generally backed the decision by Farage’s mainstream rivals not to contest the vote.

One bridge player with a firm grasp on politics described playing “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” with her postal vote to randomly pick a candidate who wasn’t Farage. Another spoke of spoiling her postal ballot and writing that the whole affair is a waste of time and money.

These were all the kind of right-wingers who Farage would want to win over to elevate himself from an insurgent outsider to true contender for high office — but their stances only seemed to have hardened in response to the by-election.

Anything but a crushing Farage victory would be a major upset. Constituency polling has him on course to win 73 percent of the vote to Binface’s 20 percent. Turnout in this bizarre by-election will also be closely looked at, as will spoiled ballots.

Reform aides have already been planning a victory speech to take place after the votes have finally been counted on Friday. But first their candidate will have to undergo that British ritual of standing next to an array of comedy characters on a stage in a leisure center to hear the results.

Should Farage make it back to parliament as expected, then the standards commissioner’s investigation into the donations resumes. That means yet more scrutiny at a time when Labour is riding a polling bounce after Andy Burnham took over as prime minister.

For the first time since March last year, Labour has topped POLITICO’s poll of polls ahead of Reform. The government’s apparent rehabilitation — combined with Reform being squeezed on the right by the splinter Restore Britain party — is adding to a worsening picture for Farage.

If the Reform UK leader is found to have committed wrongdoing and ends up being suspended from parliament, the next by-election — should he choose to fight it — could pose a far greater challenge. Not only would he come up against real opposition, but voters will have read yet more headlines about mega-bucks donations as they’re forced to the polls once again.

“It’ll be bad for us and it’ll make us look even more stupid,” said a Reform-minded instrument salesman when asked about the prospect of another by-election. “But then he [Farage] was the one that called it.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated to amend the number of constituents taking part in the first focus group.

SACRAMENTO, California — Nancy Pelosi said those close to Joe Biden during his reelection campaign should have shared what they knew about his mental acuity — and confirmed she had private conversations with him about her polling concerns.

“I do think that those who did know should have acted upon that information. Whoever knew,” Pelosi, the former House speaker said at POLITICO’s The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit on Tuesday. “There was staff saying the family knew. The family said the staff.”

Pelosi’s remarks, in an interview with POLITICO’s Jonathan Martin, reflect some of the most detailed reflections she’s shared publicly about the role she played in convincing Biden to not to run for another term. She has long insisted that she didn’t demand Biden drop out of the race, instead urging him to reconsider polling that showed his path against Donald Trump was fraught.

“I only said to President Biden, ‘I’ve come to question the polling that you have and how your campaign is being conducted,” Pelosi said. “Because, at that point, 72 percent of the American people didn’t think he should run.”

The former speaker said she also urged Biden, during their private meeting at the White House, to release a diagnostic test from a doctor to prove to the public that he could “serve the next term.”

“We’re Catholic, we’re prayerful, we had our rosaries and all of that,” Pelosi said. “We had a lovely meeting. It was only the two of us.”

Pelosi recalled her reaction to his disastrous performance during a televised debate with Trump in June 2024. “When you think of the debate and how sad that was, that’s really when we learned,” she said. “I didn’t know, and I think he had his sort of ups and downs.”

Pelosi, who by then was no longer speaker, said she had only seen Biden in person a few times the prior year and hadn’t witnessed his decline.

The former speaker, one of the Democratic Party’s foremost tacticians, also spoke about the upcoming midterm elections, saying she was optimistic that Democrats — who need to pick up three seats to win the House — will have a wave year.

“I’d rather see 10 times that, like 30,” Pelosi quipped. “Thirty is my goal.”

But Pelosi was reluctant to speak about the succession fight for her seat in San Francisco. Pelosi, who’s represented the city in Congress for nearly 40 years, has endorsed city Supervisor Connie Chan and is using her formidable political operation to try to sink Scott Wiener, a prominent state senator.

“I don’t want to talk against anyone,” Pelosi said. “I’m for Connie Chan because I think she will be the best. I know the Congress better than anybody, says she immodestly.”

Pelosi declined to say who she might support for president in 2028, though she said Democrats will have a strong bench. She did, however, speak glowingly about California Gov. Gavin Newsom, her longtime political ally and a likely contender.

“He’s just been remarkable,” Pelosi said. “His intellectual resources he brings to it, his strategic thinking, again his knowledge of issues is so remarkable.”

Pelosi also heaped praise on New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another potential presidential contender. Pelosi dismissed reports about early tension between the two lawmakers after Ocasio-Cortez was first elected in 2018. Pelosi suggested that tensions were due to staff around the lawmaker — an apparent illusion to Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff who unsuccessfully ran to succeed Pelosi in San Francisco’s primary election.

“I think that she has been so operational, and it’s just wonderful. Wonderful,” Pelosi said of Ocasio-Cortez. “I know it’s a joy to work with her.”

Marisa Guerra Echeverria contributed to this report.

U.S. allies see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rejection of Washington’s 15-point plan for Gaza as undermining confidence in the Board of Peace — and in the Trump administration’s ability to influence the Middle East more broadly.

It increasingly appears that the U.S. either doesn’t have — or isn’t willing to exercise — the leverage needed to deliver on Gaza, a number of diplomats and others familiar with U.S. strategy in the region told POLITICO. And that has them concerned about U.S. efforts at negotiations across the region.

“Netanyahu’s rejection of the peace plan carries significant implications for long-term regional stability and Israeli security,” said an Arab diplomat familiar with U.S. policy in the Middle East. “President Trump is the only one to have the potential to influence this situation, as he could seek to reassert his political relevance by pressuring Netanyahu to reconsider his position.”

Netanyahu’s defiance adds to the growing list of woes Washington faces as it struggles to reshape the Middle East, from ending the Iran war to winding down the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Arab diplomat warned: “Arab and regional leaders may find themselves in a complex position, needing to balance their interests amid these evolving dynamics.”

Netanyahu disavowed the White House-backed peace plan for Gaza on Sunday, declaring that Israel requires Hamas to have “genuinely disarmed” before it withdraws its troops from the territory. That hard line could further threaten the viability of Trump’s Board of Peace, a 27-country initiative formed as part of Trump’s deal last year to end the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

“The Board of Peace has a distinct limp to its gait at the moment,” said Robert Jordan, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the George W. Bush administration.

“It never appeared to be a broadly based, highly viable substitute for the United Nations,” he added, referring to Trump’s assertions in January that the board could be used as an alternative to the world body. “That’s compounded by the political situation in Israel at the moment.”

The Board of Peace declined to comment, but an official with the organization insisted that work is continuing apace, with Israel’s buy-in. The official pointed to a logistical support area under construction that is meant to serve hundreds of troops expected to deploy to Gaza as part of the international stabilization force envisioned by the board.

“The roadmap is between the Board of Peace and Hamas,” said the board official. “Separate discussions with Israel are continuing. Israel is not being asked to rely on trust or to make irreversible moves before verified steps are taken on the ground.”

The official, like others, was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiation process.

A Western diplomat familiar with Middle East policy argued Netanyahu’s action is a sign that U.S. strategy toward Israel is misguided.

“This latest rejection once again shows that appeasing Israel only leads to more maximalist demands,” the diplomat said. “I don’t think it kills the [Board of Peace] but what it does do is once again show that Israel remains one of the obstacles to a viable two-state solution.”

Trump has avoided clashing publicly with Netanyahu over the roadmap, telling reporters Monday that he had a “good relationship” with the Israeli prime minister even though Netanyahu rejected the U.S. proposal. The White House declined to comment further on Israel’s rejection of the deal.

A Trump administration official, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, said the White House doesn’t see Netanyahu’s action as derailing the peace process at all.

“Broadly speaking, we see this as election-posturing by Bibi for a domestic audience,” the official said. “The [Board of Peace] has actually been getting good cooperation on the ground as of late. So that’s what’s important.”

Netanyahu’s rejection of the road map comes as his popularity has been eroding in Israel ahead of an October parliamentary vote that could lead to his unseating.

In Europe, some governments are still holding out hope that the Board of Peace can rescue the Gaza peace process.

“I extremely appreciate the work of chief negotiator [Nickolay] Mladenov on behalf of the Board of Peace, his achievements in the 15-point plan are absolutely substantial,” said Hildegard Bentele, a center-right German lawmaker in the European Parliament. He said he was confident the U.S.-led effort would make progress “if re-submitted after Israeli elections and targeting the core point of full weapons’ decommissioning.”

Others with experience in the region said that Netanyahu appeared to be successfully pushing the Board of Peace in a direction more favorable to Israel.

Netanyahu’s actions are “testing the tolerance of the American or Board of Peace team,” said Nimrod Novik, who served as senior diplomatic adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and is now a fellow at the New York-based Israel Policy Forum.

“It’s really a Trump personal enterprise,” said Zaha Hassan, who advised the Palestinian negotiating team during its bid for U.N. membership from 2010 to 2012 and is now a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “So if it can’t get Israel to stand down in Gaza, to withdraw, to allow the Board of Peace to do its work, how can any other regional actor believe that the U.S. can restrain Israel in their neighborhood?”

A European diplomat said the disillusionment with Trump’s sway in the Middle East was already evident in his failure to wrap up the war in Iran quickly.

“The solution is not as close as anticipated or as Trump told us at some point. I think Trump is losing credibility,” said the diplomat, granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. “Everything seems to be in limbo and in a high degree of uncertainty that affects us all.”

Jerry Wu, Megan Messerly, Myah Ward and Nicholas Vinocur contributed to this report.

Facing little opposition, Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI), an established election denier who voted against certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in two key states, is expected to easily secure the Republican nomination for governor in Wisconsin during Tuesday’s primary election.

The road to Democratic control of the Senate remains steep, but Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity, the misbegotten war in Iran and a wobbly economy have opened a slender path.

The thinking goes that if Democrats can hold every blue seat, prevail in North Carolina and defeat Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, then they must take any two from a list of red states that could well be in some semblance of play: Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa or Nebraska.

Imagine that almost everything goes right. Democrats hold Georgia and New Hampshire. They claim North Carolina, vanquish Collins, and spring upsets in Texas and Alaska. But the chamber remains in GOP hands because Michigan Democrats could not reunify after a bruising primary. Kick away a winnable race in Michigan and, in this scenario, Ohio, Iowa or Nebraska also becomes a must. 

So don’t lose Michigan. 

On Tuesday, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens to claim the Democratic nomination. All the instant analysis is true: This was a political earthquake and one of the biggest wins progressives have scored. Stevens was better funded and the candidate of the Democratic establishment. El-Sayed’s win is a sign of the importance of Gaza inside the Democratic coalition, and of shrinking support for Israel. Now, his ability to close the deal this fall will be a crucial test of progressive electability ahead of the 2028 presidential election. 

The race was also closer than expected. With a small number of votes outstanding, El-Sayed’s lead is just under 16,000. He fell short of a clear majority, winning with 48.5%. And while both candidates continue to say all the right things about coming together for what will be a very close battle against an old-school conservative in former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers this fall, the tight margin, El-Sayed’s failure to secure a true majority and the nastiness of the race could make that difficult.

After all, El-Sayed recently had to plead with his backers not to take personal shots at Stevens and her accent online. The airwaves were filled with millions of dollars in negative ads, many of them determined to paint El-Sayed as unelectable in the general. He called Stevens “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.” She retorted that “Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.” A unity breakfast might not be enough to paper all that over in a matter of weeks, especially if the super PACs that backed Stevens continue to spend millions to fan the flames against El-Sayed in the general election. 

This race could have been run in a far different and more positive manner. If it had, both progressives and Democrats as a party would be in a much stronger position heading into what will likely be a very competitive general election that decides control of the chamber. The stakes are high and will determine, among other things, whether Trump can confirm Supreme Court justices over the next two years.

Imagine the difference that ranked choice voting would have had in the primary. A third Democrat, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, won over 4% of the vote despite dropping out of the race several weeks ago. She won 61,000-plus votes, almost four times the difference between El-Sayed and Stevens. If Michigan used RCV in its primaries — like Maine, New York City and dozens of cities nationwide — the winner would have been able to claim a majority, and an easier path to unifying the party.

Some $60 million of negative ads flooded Michigan’s airwaves over this primary. Ranked choice voting wouldn’t have stopped that entirely; important, contentious issues were at stake. Outside dollars were a given. Yet RCV has been proven to lower the temperature in races like this and encourage conversation, coalition-building and respect. 

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It’s entirely likely that an RCV race would have looked quite different. McMorrow and other challengers — forced out to provide voters with a binary, two candidate contest without spoilers — would have been able to stay in the race. Then, El-Sayed, Stevens and the others would have had every incentive to build a coalition through second choices to reach 50%. That comes from finding common ground, not from scare ads and nasty attacks. The winner of a race like that would be in far stronger shape, and ready to focus on the Republicans. Instead, El-Sayed is stuck trying to rebuild an intra-party coalition after the primary.

Instead, as McMorrow faded, party leaders and donors leaned on the state senator, a promising, charismatic politician, to exit and reduce the field to two. But this strategy didn’t produce a majority winner. It just limited choices before voters, and the winner still fell short of a majority. Democrats look less unified in a must-win race as a result.

Ranked-choice voting doesn’t fix everything that’s wrong with our politics. It’s not a silver bullet that cures polarization, settles complicated policy debates or ensures that everyone gets along. But it’s such an obviously useful tool in races like this that it makes zero sense not to use it. 

Win or lose, progressives and centrists will debate the meaning of this race for some time to come. That’s fine. In some form, the party is endlessly re-fighting 2016 over and over again. The more immediate issue is that primaries like this are going to continue to be contentious. Democrats would be in a better position to win races they absolutely must win if they adopted ranked choice voting in primaries like Michigan’s this. (Republican primaries would benefit from this nonpartisan tool too). 

This is a lesson that Democrats absolutely must learn ahead of the 2028 presidential primaries. Then, it won’t simply be a schism between centrists and the left, but between multiple candidates within each lane and others representing different perspectives, backgrounds and parts of the country.

It will be painful for Democrats if they fail to take the Senate because they lost Michigan. But if that happens, it might not be because El-Sayed was too progressive for a swing state — but because Democrats chose their nominee through a process that bloodied and embittered everyone with no hope of consensus, and no easy path to reconciliation. In Michigan, and in other bitter primaries to come, they are going to need one.

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MIRROR, ALBERTA — Nestled within a sleepy community campground and roadside cafe, hundreds of Canadians are gathered to imagine a new country of their own.

It’s July 1, and they’re hosting a family-friendly event that looks like a typical Canada Day celebration. Live music, a farmers’ market, hamburgers on the grill. Except there isn’t a Maple Leaf in sight.

Instead, people have wrapped themselves in Alberta’s flag, wave “we’re done” banners and wear “Trump 2024” and MAGA — Make Alberta Great Again — ball caps. This is an “Albertans’ Day” gathering at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which gained notoriety for bucking pandemic-era rules and which former Alberta premier Jason Kenney calls “ground zero” for the province’s fast-growing separatist movement.

Instead, people have wrapped themselves in Alberta’s flag, wave “we’re done” banners and wear “Trump 2024” and MAGA — Make Alberta Great Again — ball caps. This is an “Albertans’ Day” gathering at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which gained notoriety for bucking pandemic-era rules and which former Alberta premier Jason Kenney calls “ground zero” for the province’s fast-growing separatist movement.

And until Alberta separates, Moore places her faith not in Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney — whom she views as part of a Davos “cabal” — but in U.S. President Donald Trump.

“I kept thinking this: Trump is the only one that can save us.”

Moore’s affinity for conspiracy theories is shared by many, though certainly not all, of the separatists. Resentment toward the federal government in Ottawa is longstanding in Alberta. But a surprising new ingredient has turbocharged the separatist push: Trump and the increasingly toxic U.S.-Canada relationship. The separatists are furious about Carney’s friction with Trump and the fraying ties to their southern neighbor. Some even hope the Trump administration might help their cause.

Many separatists believe Trump’s presidency makes Alberta’s independence possible, with the United States a ready customer for its oil and gas should they split from Canada. One group, the Alberta Prosperity Project, is trying to seek a C$500-billion U.S. government loan to fund the province’s “seamless departure” from Canada.

“This isn’t your grandfather’s independence movement,” says Jeffrey Rath, a co-founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project and a longtime separatist activist who has sought to court the Trump administration.

Many separatists see a cultural kinship with the United States. They proudly share fake newspaper clippings that highlight the province’s history of early American settlers allegedly helping to shape a self-reliant, frontier culture that remains in Alberta today. They argue the Eastern provinces are more associated with European traditions than American ones.

While some object to Trump’s idea of making Canada the 51st American state, others embrace the idea.

“I like freedom and less taxes,” says Casey Phillips from Edmonton, Alberta.

Carney and his government are now working hard to convince skeptical Albertans their best prospects lie with a united Canada. He and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who called the Oct. 19 vote, are touting a new pipeline agreement to send western oil abroad. The effort may work with some swing voters, but the hard-core separatists aren’t likely to buy it.

“It will never happen because Canada’s a communist country and there will be 24 years of paperwork,” Phillips says of the pipeline project. “It’s all lies.”

The separatists have good reason to think the Trump administration could be an ally. In January, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called Alberta a “natural partner for the U.S.” while referencing the province’s “great resources.”

“People are talking,” Bessent told conservative podcaster Jack Posobiec, nodding to the separatist movement. “People want sovereignty. They want what the U.S. has got.”

Rath says he has requested introductions to the U.S. Treasury Department and major financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs to build a day one feasibility plan for Albertan independence, though it’s unclear if he has had any such conversations.

The Alberta Prosperity Project, however, has taken three trips to Washington, D.C., and Rath insists the group has met with “very senior level” officials, who he says have taken their information directly to the White House.

A State Department spokesperson said the department “regularly meets with a wide range of representatives. We do not anticipate any future meetings, and all department engagements are at our sole discretion.”

“As Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra has said, the vote is a decision for the people of Alberta,” the spokesperson added.

Bessent made his comments amid heightened U.S.-Canada tensions; days earlier Carney had argued at Davos that middle powers needed to form new coalitions after the Trump-fueled “rupture” in the global order.

That episode inflamed the pro-America separatists, as did Carney’s subsequent use of the phrase “new world order” during a January trip to China to sign new energy and trade agreements. That phrase is catnip to those who fear the creation of a global government, and more conspiracy theories quickly seeped into Alberta’s separatist movement through Facebook groups and YouTube videos claiming Carney is steering the country toward communism and against the U.S.

But it’s also true that Alberta’s grievances with Ottawa began long before Carney jostled with Trump. They have been passed down for generations, rooted in a belief that the federal government has ignored, exploited or misunderstood the province since its founding.

Today, that resentment has become deeply personal. Separatists point to what they see as federal overreach and clean energy policies that have made life more expensive and undermined their economy.

Federalists, meanwhile, are alarmed that neighbors, friends, family, and sometimes even spouses, are “willing to betray their country,” in Kenney’s words.

Former Conservative MP Damien Kurek cautions against dismissing separatists as traitors. Instead, he argues, politicians should ask why so many Albertans feel abandoned by the federation.

For Kurek, one of the defining moments of Albertan anger came in 2021, when U.S. President Joe Biden cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office by revoking its cross-border permit.

The ripple effects spread throughout Kurek’s riding. He says mechanics had fewer oilfield trucks to repair and restaurants served fewer meals, while roadside motels sat empty and young families put off buying homes.

But what many Albertans remember most isn’t Biden’s decision. It’s the belief that Ottawa, under then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, failed to fight it.

“I was very frustrated with the Liberals, including many Liberals that told me that I just needed to accept it, that are still on the Liberal Cabinet benches today,” says Kurek, whose riding included Hardisty, Canada’s largest oil pipeline hub.

That moment reinforced a deeper belief among many of his constituents, he says: If our national leader won’t stand up for us when we need him most, the very “promise of Canada” was in question.

Many in rural Alberta feel like their communities live or die by decisions made thousands of miles away in Ottawa. But this was just another chapter in a much longer story.

Kenney, the former Alberta premier, traces Western alienation back to the province’s creation in 1905. He says Ottawa initially treated Alberta more like a colony than an equal partner, including delaying provincial control over its natural resources.

The modern separatist movement then took shape in the 1980s after former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced the National Energy Program, which raised taxes on oil companies and oil exports and shifted more of the industry’s profits from Alberta to Ottawa. The unpopular program was dismantled five years later, but Albertans didn’t forget.

When Trudeau’s son, Justin, became prime minister in 2015, his government introduced environmental policies that Alberta’s oil industry argued made it more difficult and expensive to build pipelines, expand production and attract investment.

Albertans’ sense of alienation also extends beyond energy policy. Many feel their votes carry less weight than those cast in vote-rich Ontario and Quebec, since that’s where federal elections are often decided. After repeatedly electing Conservative MPs only to see Liberal governments take power in Ottawa, some have concluded federal elections have little effect on Alberta’s fortunes.

That frustration is compounded by Canada’s equalization program, enshrined in the Constitution, which redistributes federal tax revenue to help less wealthy provinces fund public services. Because Alberta’s oil-rich economy is one of the country’s wealthiest, it has never qualified for those payments. At the same time, Ottawa collects more in federal taxes from Albertans than it spends in the province, which reinforces a decades-old belief that Alberta bankrolls the rest of the country while getting too little in return.

“It’s very scary to see what they’re trying to take from us, what they’re trying to control,” says Trina, a Red Deer resident who volunteers with a separatist group and who did not give her last name. “It leaves us with a lot of uncertainty. Nothing feels secure.”

Carney is aware of the challenge ahead. Even as he has warned Alberta against stumbling into its own Brexit disaster, he has sought to address the province’s most tangible concerns.

Last November, Carney signed an agreement with Alberta to work toward a new oil pipeline and soon after, delivered a sobering wake-up call to his Liberal caucus behind closed doors.

To the surprise of MPs in the room, Carney opened his remarks by addressing the specter of Alberta separatism, framing the pipeline deal not just as an economic win, but as a strategic necessity to keep the country together.

“He was emotional,” a Liberal MP, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal party matters, told POLITICO at the time. “You could hear a pin drop.”

It was a clear sign from the prime minister that the separatist movement was shaping his thinking — and federal policy.

“This was a no-BS kind of thing,” the Liberal lawmaker said. “This was coming from someone who grew up in that province, who understands that province, and who was very worried about the feelings of alienation.”

The speech also marked Carney’s first step in persuading Liberal supporters — many of whom had embraced Justin Trudeau’s aggressive climate agenda — that pipelines, increased oil production and energy exports were essential to Canada’s economic and geopolitical future.

Carney has made a similar pitch to the broader public.

“In Canada, we are strongest when we are united — when we look out for each other and ensure that no child, no family, no one is left behind,” Carney said in a speech to Canadians and his Cabinet in January. “This spirit of solidarity and generosity helps define us as a nation.”

Nine months later, Carney has backed up that message with action. Since taking office, he has rolled back several Trudeau-era environmental policies despite pushback from some Liberal MPs, including former environment minister Steven Guilbeault, who is leaving politics after accusing his party of “backsliding” on climate action. Last month, the West Coast oil pipeline got closer to fruition, after Carney’s government announced its partnership with Alberta would amount to a C$35 billion project in a bid to boost the province’s energy sector.

The policy shift is part of Ottawa’s effort to encourage federalists to send a strong message on Oct. 19, that they want to remain in Canada. In July, Carney made three trips to Alberta, two of which included photo-ops with Smith, Alberta’s premier. Both have been framing their pipeline pact as proof that Canada still works, for all its people, even as many separatists argue it comes a decade too late.

Federalists say the biggest risk in the vote isn’t necessarily that Alberta endorses moving toward separation; polls show about 30 percent of Albertans want independence. It’s that federalists don’t show up to vote since they assume victory. If turnout is low, a highly motivated separatist base could post an unexpectedly strong result, giving the movement new legitimacy and driving away private investment in the province.

“We can all think that the worst isn’t going to happen. We could put signs on our lawn and write poetry about Canadian unity. But honestly, unless people show up at the polls on Oct. 19, we could lose this referendum question,” says Eleanor Olszewski, a federal Liberal cabinet minister from Alberta.

Back outside the Whistle Stop Cafe, the conversations at Albertans’ Day drift from claims Carney wasn’t democratically elected, to beliefs the pandemic was orchestrated by global elites, to how a federal ban on assault-style firearms is meant to stop Canadians from rising up against the federal government.

One vendor sells knives, stun batons, tactical shovels, night-vision glasses and body shields, encouraging Albertans to protect themselves. Pickup trucks and SUVs are modified to look like sheriff’s vehicles with “Republic of Alberta” decals. Some separatists show off homemade T-shirts that read “skid mark Carney” or “pure-blood warriors” showcasing a white baby in the paws of a lion.

The antipathy toward Carney and enthusiasm for Trump even has some separatists ready to defend Trump’s wave of tariffs against Canadian goods.

Keith Walker, who is from a small farming community in southern Alberta, believes the only thing preventing Canada from becoming a communist country under Carney is Trump’s trade war.

Canada, in his view, is part of a group of governments that Trump is trying to dismantle alongside Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. “That’s why that’s happening,” Walker says of Trump’s tariffs; he and a friend are both wearing Trump 2024 hats.

The separatists’ longstanding grievances with Ottawa aren’t occurring in a vacuum. Populist forces have reshaped the globe over the last decade, amid Brexit and Trump and the pandemic, and they are now converging in Alberta.

Separatism has become a right-wing uni-cause.

“It is a perfect umbrella,” Kenney says, “for every obsession, paranoia and anxiety on the right.”

WARSAW — A bad-tempered split in Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party is being greeted with joy by the centrist, pro-EU government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, but it’s unclear whether it will improve his odds of retaining power in next year’s election.

Tusk’s Civic Coalition is far ahead in POLITICO’s Poll of Polls — with 32 percent support, compared with PiS’s 21 percent — but that does not offer a full picture of the electoral dynamics. All of the parties on the right together could still command a majority — but only if they’re able to cobble together a coalition after next year’s vote. Three of Tusk’s four junior coalition partners may fail to clear the 5 percent threshold needed to enter parliament.

Renata Mieńkowska-Norkiene, a political scientist at the University of Warsaw, called Tusk’s chances in the 2027 race “far from certain.”

However, the departure of former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki from PiS complicates the balance of balance of power on the right.

PiS, which ruled from 2015 to 2023, formally ruptured last month, when Morawiecki stormed out, taking 40 MPs with him to form the new Development Plus party, leaving PiS with 147 deputies.

The split between him and party founder and leader Jarosław Kaczyński quickly became acrimonious.

Morawiecki criticized his own government’s decisions on Covid-19 restrictions and its push to tighten Poland’s abortion law, which outraged many women and saw PiS take a long-term hit in public support.

“Although I oppose abortion, I believed the change would lead to catastrophe — a polling collapse. Unfortunately, I was right,” Morawiecki said on the popular YouTube show Rymanowski Live this week.

He is now trying to set up a more moderate center-right party focused on economic growth which is less partisan than PiS. “Today, Poland does not need to get bogged down in ideological disputes,” he said in Monday’s interview. However, he has ruled out ever working with Tusk in the future.

Kaczyński responded by appearing to question both Morawiecki’s loyalty and his state of mind.

“Mateusz Morawiecki’s latest statements show clearly that his enemy is not Tusk, but me and Law and Justice. I have the impression that the prime minister is in some peculiar state. God willing, I am wrong,” Kaczyński said in a post on X.

He twisted the knife in another post on Friday, denouncing “attacks based on lies, manipulation, and insinuations,” made by “people who, until recently, pretended they wanted to be part of PiS but decided to break away.”

Tusk is watching the fallout with joy.

“I watch what is happening with a smile,” Tusk said at a press conference last week when asked about the turmoil within the largest opposition party.

Unclear political picture

Although PiS and Civic Coalition have been alternating in power for more than two decades, Poland’s current political makeup is a lot more complicated.

Two new parties are battling for votes on the far-right — the libertarian Confederation, with 14 percent support, and the antisemitic extremist Confederation of the Polish Crown, at 11 percent.

The two far-right parties are fighting each other, and also taking aim at PiS.

“I feel the next prime minister should not be from PiS,” Krzysztof Bosak, one of the leaders of Confederation, said in a radio interview this week.

Wojciech Machulski, a party spokesperson, denounced Morawiecki as a “puppet” with a terrible governing record but also noted: “Kaczyński is no longer the leader of the right; he no longer dominates the right.”

Political analysts warned that Tusk should not assume the split will benefit his coalition.

The Kaczyński and Morawiecki parties could appeal to a broader range of voters by campaigning separately, while Tusk’s prospects depend heavily on the survival of the weakest members of his coalition, said Mieńkowska-Norkiene.

“What is more, Morawiecki could attract more conservative voters from those parties,” she added.

Morawiecki is already campaigning in an effort to reach beyond PiS’s traditional right-wing electorate — this week laying out a new strategy to combat Poland’s low birth rate.

“A right-wing party without a clear identity-based agenda will not be a right-wing party. But a right-wing party without a development agenda and without the ability to implement change will never come to power,” he said in his party manifesto.

Anna Siewierska-Chmaj, a political scientist at the University of Rzeszów, said Tusk’s governing coalition should not rely on its enemies devouring themselves and should instead use the summer break to overhaul its political messaging. Many voters are fed up with the government’s lackluster results — although part of that stems from PiS-aligned President Karol Nawrocki blocking a lot of legislation.

“The old polarization strategy of ‘us versus PiS’ will no longer suffice,” she said.

PISA, Italy — Giorgia Meloni doesn’t want to be beaten at her own game.

With an election approaching next year and a new far-right rival emerging, the Italian prime minister — whose political origins lie in Italy’s post-fascist right — is putting aside the moderate image she has built over her four years in office and hardening her tone on migration and security.

Meloni’s government was the first in the EU to attack the Spanish government over a sudden influx of migrants from Morocco into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta last week. 

While France and other countries tightened border checks, Italy went further and announced it had suspended the EU’s free-movement Schengen agreement with Madrid. Now, in Italian airports, passengers from Spain are asked to join a different line. 

Meloni’s office has made clear it has no intention of lifting the controls until at least Aug. 15, escalating the clash with Spain, which retaliated by imposing checks on travelers from Italy.

“We will not back down one millimeter on illegal immigration,” Meloni posted on X while her allies attacked the socialist Spanish government, accusing it of failing to manage migration flows. “Defending our borders, stopping human traffickers, and ensuring effective repatriation will continue to be this government’s policy,” she added.

The clash with Spain is just the latest sign that the Italian leader is doing all she can to secure her core, hard-right electorate in the face of a challenge from the right by Roberto Vannacci, a former general and member of the European Parliament.

With an election expected as early as next spring, Vannacci’s far-right National Future party has been advancing in the polls, overtaking one of Meloni’s coalition partners, the far-right League party, and gaining on another, Forza Italia, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. 

For Meloni, who began her political career in the youth wing of Italy’s post-fascist movement, the challenge strikes particularly close to home.

“There is no doubt that there is concern about containing the competition from National Future,” said Marco Tarchi, a leading right-wing political scientist. “It all boils down to a sharpening of tone. The issues — security, immigration, identity — remain the same as before.” 

During the electoral campaign that brought her to power in 2022, Meloni promised to crack down on illegal migration by putting in place a naval blockade off Italy’s coast. Though that project never ultimately happened, Meloni’s government did open detention hubs in Albania to house migrants while their asylum applications are processed. 

Vannacci, who is campaigning on security and a hard line on immigration, is calling for a more radical solution: “remigration” — a yet-to-be-detailed plan to encourage migrants to return to their countries of origin.

The crisis in Ceuta, during which tens of thousands of migrants crossed from Morocco into the Spanish exclave and nearly 100 died, provided Meloni with an opportunity to show that fighting irregular migration remains an absolute priority for her government.

Meloni’s reaction was “purely the result of domestic political calculations,” said Giorgio Gori, a member of the European Parliament from the left-wing Democratic Party. The Italian prime minister is trying to secure her electorate “by showing that she is loyal to the right-wing slogan and propaganda on migration and beyond.”

For Giovanni Orsina, director of the political science department at Rome’s Luiss Guido Carli University, Meloni’s priority at this stage is “that the Brothers of Italy [Meloni’s party] doesn’t start losing votes too” — in preparation for a potential alliance with Vannacci before or after next year’s election.

“Vannacci has been growing a lot in polls, especially over the past two months,” said Lorenzo Pregliasco from the YouTrend polling firm, noting that National Future is polling at over 7 percent. 

“Without Vannacci, the center-right could lose the upcoming election,” he said. “These seven points matter a lot.”

The Vannacci effect

Nicola Procaccini, Meloni’s lieutenant and co-chair of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, denies that Meloni is shifting on policy to protect herself from Vannacci.

“She stands where she has always stood,” he told POLITICO. “She simply isn’t the racist, xenophobic fascist she was made out to be when she first took office. And she isn’t one now, either.” 

Meloni is also facing a challenge to her support for Ukraine, with both the League and Vannacci advocating a softer line on Moscow, opposing military aid to Kyiv and arguing against an increase in defense spending. 

Though Meloni has portrayed herself as a strong backer of Ukraine, her reliance on the League for support has meant Italy has contributed just €3 billion in four years, roughly the equivalent of €1 a month for every Italian citizen, less than the cost of an espresso.

Italy has also declined to join NATO’s PURL (Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List), an arms-buying scheme set up last summer after U.S. President Donald Trump ended new military aid commitments to Kyiv.

Ukraine is where Meloni’s real difference with Vannacci lies, argued Tarchi, who teaches at the University of Florence and is considered the key figure of a movement called the New Right.

“Otherwise, the gap is artificially exaggerated in rhetoric and posturing for tactical reasons,” he said.

Meloni’s allies haven’t ruled out an alliance with Vannacci but they stress that the possibility will depend on where he stands on key values such as foreign policy.

If he seeks “to position Italy, alongside Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, clearly, it is not possible to stand together,” said Procaccini. “If, instead, he chooses the West — the democracies, Western nations, Western liberal democracies — then we can certainly stand together.”