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

One big idea: Democrats’ Laken Riley vote is aging badly

Two things happened this week that reveal how quickly the politics of immigration enforcement are shifting.

First, Republican Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, urged the administration to dial back its enforcement push. “Before you know it, you get people that get carried away in their job and whatever it may be, and all of a sudden, then you’re dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years,” Justice told Politico this week. “I don’t know that we need to be doing that stuff.” And he’s not the only red-state Republican who’s been pushing back on ICE lately, including some facing voters in tough races next month.

The second thing flew under the radar: Sen. Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat running for reelection who has also been floated as a 2028 presidential candidate, struggled to explain himself when a reporter confronted him on camera about his vote for the Laken Riley Act in January 2025. Passed within days of Trump’s inauguration and signed nine days into his second term, the law requires ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who are merely arrested for or charged with theft-related crimes, before any conviction.

In the exchange with a reporter from Drop Site News, Ossoff talked about his Senate work investigating alleged ICE abuses, but didn’t directly address his vote after being asked if he regretted it. “Laken Riley was my constituent and what happened to her should happen to no American, to no person in this world,” Ossoff said. “I think that immigration enforcement should be focused on those who are convicted or charged with serious crimes.” He excused himself to walk into a meeting as the reporter pressed him on whether the law undermined due process. 

In both cases, you see changing winds of electoral politics. Back in 2025, when Ossoff and 11 other Senate Democrats joined Republicans in supporting Trump’s immigration bill, they implicitly validated Trump’s premise on immigration enforcement: that not only was the border out of control, but that there also needed to be new efforts to step up interior enforcement through expanding agencies like ICE. In the year-plus since that vote, Trump has hired more ICE officers, launched sweeping raids in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and fueled a cauldron of chaos that’s led to shootings across the country. Politically, it has now put Democrats like Ossoff in a pickle, one that will matter more the closer we get to 2028.

How do you explain giving more immigration powers to a Stephen Miller-led White House? How can one argue you couldn’t have seen this coming?

In some ways, you can understand the political logic of the time. Ossoff, who is running in a state Trump carried, and many of the congressional Democrats who supported the Laken Riley law were in competitive races, and Democrats left the 2024 election thinking they had misread the electorate on the issue, particularly after Latino voters swung hard toward the right. But given what’s happened since, it’s clear many congressional Democrats made a familiar mistake: prioritizing political triangulation over standing on their values of protecting marginalized communities.

Take a look at some of the Democrats who have already had to walk back their votes. In the Democratic primary for Minnesota’s open Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan made US Rep. Angie Craig’s vote for the law a key focus of her campaign, calling it “disqualifying.” The attacks were so effective that Craig eventually expressed remorse, saying, “I wanted to be honest with the people of Minnesota. I will tell you when I get it wrong, and I got that one wrong.” Craig lost the August 11 primary to Flanagan.

Maryland’s April McClain Delaney, another congressional Democrat, also said she regretted her vote: “I will say that this was in the beginning of my term. And I never thought that ICE immigration and the horror of what has happened would happen.” (She survived her primary, defeating David Trone by 6 points.)

It’s easy to see where the buyer’s remorse is emanating from. Trump’s ICE is broadly unpopular. And as we’ve talked about on this Substack and in our reporting on America, Actually, Trump is doing worse and worse with Latino voters, with both prices and immigration enforcement driving the slide. A Hart Research poll for TelevisaUnivision of 1,500 Latino registered voters in battleground House districts (August 6–17) found 63 percent disapprove of Trump’s job performance and 62 percent disapprove of his handling of immigration enforcement and deportations. Sixty-four percent view ICE unfavorably. 

When I recently talked to Stephanie Valencia of Equis Research, she said this: 

The people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there. Like, they were told he was gonna focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was gonna focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that.

But while the shift in public opinion helps explain the elected officials’ political logic, it doesn’t change the material harm of their votes. Just this week, ICE announced plans to hire 5,000 more employees, most of them deportation officers, by the end of the year as enforcement continues to ramp up.

And these raids have a lasting effect on targeted communities, like in Maine, the Chicago area, and Texas. It’s the No. 1 issue that has come up in my conversations with local reporters. The chief architect of this chaos is the president, but make no mistake: Trump had help from shortsighted Democrats.

One thing I’m hearing 

Maya Miller is a Report for America corps member covering democracy and government for the Gulf States Newsroom, a public radio collaboration that includes Louisiana’s WWNO and WRKF. She’s been reporting on Mississippi’s redistricting fight and what residents are saying about their representation and the upcoming midterms.

You’ve been reporting from redistricting hearings in Mississippi. What are residents most concerned about, and is there a conversation or moment that captures the mood?

Residents are most concerned about their representation. In Mississippi in particular, race and party are strongly intertwined, and Black residents worry that by being drawn into new districts, voters may elect a Republican candidate. There was a bit of secrecy around redistricting earlier this summer, with Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, canceling a special session to redraw judicial lines. So advocates created the People’s Hearings, a series of meetings held across the state to voice concerns and create a public record of testimonies from Mississippians. Quickly after, lawmakers decided to host their own public hearings, and at these hearings, hundreds of residents showed up, mostly to urge them not to redistrict.

“It seems to me that the threat of losing representation has made people more aware of the moving parts.”

At one hearing, I spoke to Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis, president of the Natchez NAACP. She’s frustrated that the state is going to spend millions on new maps when people are struggling with day to day expenses. And Ramona Sanders of Meridian, Mississippi, has a lot of concerns on whether mid-decade redistricting is illegal. While it’s not, she says that lawmakers are opening themselves up to legal action. I haven’t heard anything from voter advocacy groups that points to future lawsuits, but only time will tell, if and when lawmakers redraw the maps, if these maps are constitutional or not.

Redistricting is often covered as a fight over which party wins more seats. What would these changes mean for the communities you cover and their ability to have a voice in Congress?

One change that could happen is that residents who are Democrats might lose the state’s only Democrat leader. Out of four congressmen, there’s only one Democrat, Bennie Thompson, who represents District 2. His district spans much of the west, from the capital city of Jackson to most of the Mississippi Delta and southwest Mississippi. It’s a heavily Black district, somewhere around 63 percent Black. He’s held this seat for 33 years and has brought millions to the district for health care, infrastructure, and agriculture. 

So residents are worried that Republicans are trying to edge him out and replace him with a more conservative leader who may not have the same concerns as the community. 

How are these fights affecting people’s interest in the midterms? Are you hearing more determination to vote, more doubt that voting matters, or something else?

People are fired up. They’re incredibly engaged. I’m hearing from a lot of people who are more determined to vote in November than when I covered redistricting in Alabama in 2024. It seems to me that the threat of losing representation has made people more aware of the moving parts. So they’re attending hearings, participating in rallies, registering to vote and checking their registration, phoning a friend and making plans to be at the polls on November 3.

What is the national conversation about redistricting missing that becomes clear when you spend time in these communities?

I think the national conversation is missing the voice of the community. It’s one thing to report on the politics of redistricting, but there’s a layer of real concern from residents that shouldn’t be ignored. They’re worried about hospitals closing. They’re worried about public schools losing funding. They’re worried about the rising cost of groceries and gas. I find that talking to and listening to residents helps me understand a community more than calling up a lawmaker and asking them their thoughts. There’s a place for that side of the conversation, of course, but I’ve always tried to center people who will be most impacted in my reporting, and I feel that leads to a better story for our listeners.

With the 2026 midterm elections fast approaching, polling increasingly suggests that the GOP is in for a bad time. As the Iran war drives up inflation and fuel prices, Republicans are on the back foot not just in swing states like Michigan, but in redder parts of the map: Iowa, Texas, and maybe even Kansas, among others. (Not to mention Georgia and North Carolina.) 

It’s shaping up to be a Democratic wave, in other words, and a major repudiation of President Donald Trump. According to Sarah Longwell, the publisher of political news site the Bulwark, there’s a clear reason why this is the cycle that things seem to be falling apart for Trump, who has dodged scandals and bad poll numbers before. “The average person is often voting on instinctual things,” she explains, “and those instincts are a lot of your animalistic desires for things to be okay materially.” And for many voters right now, things are not okay materially.

Longwell would know: She regularly speaks with voters for her podcast, The Focus Group, and she’s the author of the new book How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time. 

Longwell talked with Vox’s Astead Herndon for a special live recording of the America, Actually podcast at the Texas Tribune Festival earlier this month about why voters are both more and less complicated than punditry sometimes suggests, what the future holds for the Republican Party post-Trump, and the lesson Democrats need to learn to capitalize on their wins.

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Longwell, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

One of the themes in the book is to talk to voters like real adults. What does that mean? 

There was a long period of time in our history where the artifice of politics was part of the performance of politics.

You could give a good speech. You’d do a debate. Those are not the rules of politics in this communications environment anymore. Every single one of you, if you’re a Bulwark person, you interact with me. I am in your ear, and we’re having a conversation.

We have a parasocial relationship. I walked in here and met a bunch of people, and they were like, “I feel like I know you.” And people want to feel like that about their political leaders now. And so they want to know what makes you tick. Are you a real person? And so the artifice of a debate on CNN is starting to feel really stupid, no offense to CNN.

People demand more now. And a lot of it is just that artifice is falling away for voters. Donald Trump understood that as a person who had been in people’s living rooms as a performer. Democratic politicians still have not figured it out. 

One of the things that comes through in both the book and I think the work that we both do is how voters don’t always fit into those neat ideological boxes.

I always tell the story about when I was at the Iowa caucuses, and I remember in 2019 in the Democratic primary, someone telling me they were stuck between Bernie [Sanders] and [former New York City Mayor Michael] Bloomberg, and asking, “How did you get there?”

And what was the answer? 

I think the short answer was they liked a strong guy where they knew what he believed in. And they did not care which side of that coin that was, as long as it felt consistent and something they could put their hands around.

If ideology is not the controlling paradigm for voters, how should we think about the different ways people are sorting themselves right now? 

My answer is genuinely not to sort them as much. This is the reason people say things like, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and then everybody gets bored with that answer, and they want to talk about 10 other things because they’re like, “Well, that’s so straightforward.”

But I try in the book to say it really is about improving people’s material well-being and ensuring their safety. So you go back to: What are the most human things that people want? They want to be able to afford gas. They want a job. They want a job [where] they think that they can go up the ladder. 

They want their kids to get a good education. Then they want to be safe. They want to know that they’re safe in their community. They want to know they’re safe in the places that they go. And Donald Trump and Republicans really do understand: People vote with weird animal instincts. 

Now, I bet a lot of the people in this room are college-educated suburban voters, but the average voter in a general election is a 55-year-old white guy without a college degree.

The average person is often voting on instinctual things, and those instincts are a lot of your animalistic desires for things to be okay materially — your cost of health care, and then for you to be safe. And so if you think about those base-level desires and then think about what Democrats spend most of their time talking about, you’re like, “Is that the thing that captures all these people?”

When I watch Democrats as somebody who’s an immigrant into the Democratic ecosystem, there’s a lot of, like, “And you get a policy, and you get a policy, and you get a policy.” And I don’t really understand that because everybody needs cheaper gas.

Everybody needs groceries that they can afford. And so talking about the things that unite us or that everybody needs, to me, is the secret sauce for how Democrats should think about policy. 

Three years ago, Democrats thought that being against January 6th was a thing that united everybody. There was a belief that pro-democracy arguments were going to unite people across ideology. Why did that fail in 2024? 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as Trump gets terrible poll after terrible poll, and this is my point.

The coup, all of the horrible things he said about women, all of the lawsuits — I mean, he told everybody an election was stolen. Why is he underwater right now? Because of gas prices, because of a war in Iran, because the negative personal consequences of his policies are hitting people.

I know that it frustrates people. I’m so aware of the frustration where people are like, “Why are people so selfish? Why don’t they think about the bigger picture of democracy?” And one of the things I try not to do is magic words — consultant stuff, because a lot of consultants do that. They’re like, “Say freedom,” and “Say affordability.”

There’s nothing to back it up. But the one magic word I do think that Democrats should start using is “America,” and swap it in for “democracy.” And the reason is, voters practice democracy in America by its individual things.

They practice free speech. They like rule of law. They like checks and balances. So they like the elements of democracy, but they don’t think about them up here as democracy. And also the word democracy now is very polarized, right? Republicans think that Democrats are a threat to democracy because they stole the 2020 election. And Democrats think Republicans are a threat to democracy because they lied about the election being stolen and then tried to overturn the entire government.

I think one side of that equation is more right than the other. But I think that’s why it didn’t work. 

I want to look ahead. Our show focuses on building a roadmap for American politics without Trump, and part of that question has been about Republicans.

They have made themselves into a new kind of America First-esque party. But what does that mean without Trump at the center of it? When you’re in your focus groups, is it clear what values or principles Republicans believe in besides what Donald Trump says to them?

Absolutely not. They don’t have anything. This is why I wrote the book. I wrote the book because we have 2026, we have 2028, and we have 2032. 

By 2032, there’s going to be a new census, and things are going to get worse for Democrats. Hear me on this. People are not grokking this yet. The map — people are leaving California for Texas, people are leaving New York for Florida, and it’s just going to get harder for Democrats to win if this same trajectory that we’re currently on holds.

But there is a generational opportunity right now, and it’s why I desperately wanted to bring this book and get it out there. The Republican Party at this moment is as hollowed out as … Donald Trump is going to leave it in shambles. There is no Trump heir who can do what Trump does, who has the longstanding parasocial relationship with voters where they give him this blank check that other people don’t get.

But my concern is that 2026 will go really well and that Democrats will say, “See? It’s fine. Everybody likes us.” They don’t.

This was the big mistake in 2022. The midterms were extrapolated [to signal] Biden’s re-election, and those were not the same thing.

They are not the same thing. And again, the average voter is a 55-year-old white man without a college degree. And you can just hold that in your head and picture that guy and say, “Do we have candidates who can appeal to that guy?” 

I was being annoying when I was flying here, tweeting things, and there’s a new poll out for [Pennsylvania Gov.] Josh Shapiro. He is beating his Republican opponent by 21 points in the poll right now. This is the largest swing state in the country, and Democrats hate Josh Shapiro.

Hate feels a little strong. I think the left doesn’t like Josh Shapiro. I don’t think that’s the whole party.

That’s a good point.

I’ll just say, as a slight Josh Shapiro stan, perhaps I feel more than most people’s antipathy to the idea of Josh Shapiro running. I get a lot of people just being like, “Absolutely not. He’s a corporate centrist. We would never consider him. And also he’s Jewish slash Zionist.”

And a lot of this is Twitter discourse, but it feels like he doesn’t get the same buzz or interest, which seems insane to me when you’ve got somebody that popular in such a big, important state that Trump was able to win twice. 

The electoral argument for the Josh Shapiros of the world is clear.

Twenty-one points in Pennsylvania at any rate is impressive, but let’s use him as an example, because I do think it speaks to where some Democrats have gone in the last couple years. The polling will tell you that the majority of Democrats want to see their party reshift its relationship with Israel and want to see things like an arms embargo.

Polling would tell you that the majority of Democrats believe that they shouldn’t be taking corporate money, or that things like AIPAC money are bad. How does a Josh Shapiro — let’s use him as an avatar. … Is that compatible with where the Democratic base is right now, even if it’s clearly compatible with Pennsylvania?

The way that you just said it doesn’t sound compatible. But I don’t think that it’s incompatible. 

This is a book about what the voters think, and the voters want a new relationship with Israel, hands down. Without question. They want America to reevaluate our relationship with Israel. And the next Democratic presidential candidate is going to have to do that.

And I have a theory about this. I do think that the 2028 nominee is very likely to be a Jewish person who is highly critical of Israel, because I think that it helps to heal the deep divide right now on this issue within the Democratic Party.

Now, do I think it’s more likely that that is the very handsome Jon Ossoff? I kind of do. But I just … a big part of this book is, “Don’t you want to win? Don’t you guys want to win?” Like, do you want to win more than you want to be right about everything?

William Lawrence is a Democrat running to represent Michigan’s Lansing-area Seventh Congressional District with a campaign that largely focuses on data centers and affordability. It’s not an unusual story in 2026 — but not long ago, Lawrence was cutting his teeth in progressive politics as a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, primarily focused on organizing around the climate crisis.

His arc, from progressive activist to politician, is emblematic of a bigger trend, as a wave of millennial progressives in midterm races across the country try to lean into issues that have broader, more immediate appeal with voters.

But that arc also raises big questions about the left’s changing priorities. In a recent interview for Vox’s podcast and video series America, Actually, host Astead Herndon spoke with Lawrence about his past activism and how he has pivoted. “It can sometimes feel like…folks hop from issue to issue, whether it’s climate, even anti-AI right now, without those things being solved,” Herndon told Lawrence. 

According to Lawrence, “that’s the reality of the time. It seems like everything is unraveling, and it is because the whole social, economic, political compact is being renegotiated, not just in this country, but on a global stage.” Still, Lawrence said, that earlier organizing shapes how he sees different challenges today.

The two also discussed whether opposition to data centers and AI has wide, regular-voter appeal in places like Michigan and how Lawrence went from hopeless and disengaged to regaining a sense of agency through organizing.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

You started in Sunrise and were at the forefront of a young progressive movement that was aligned at that time — in 2018, 2019, and I think still — with progressive members of Congress like Rashida Tlaib or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

I remember reporting about Sunrise at the time. The goal was to elect a Bernie Sanders, but the other goal was to have the party largely embrace things like a Green New Deal. How would you grade the efforts of the climate movement of that time, looking back?

I think we did some things very well.

We put climate jobs and justice at the top of the agenda for the incoming Biden administration. I think the Bernie-Biden task force is an often overlooked but very important chapter of that whole story, where Bernie and Biden both understood they had to bring their people to the table.

And that’s how Build Back Better got negotiated. We fought hard for Build Back Better, and ultimately came up two votes shy in the United States Senate.

Do you see that as a success or a failure of the climate movement?

I think Build Back Better was a success in coming to the table and negotiating, from the Green New Deal to Build Back Better, and then what we ended up with was the Inflation Reduction Act after it passed the final filter, which was Sen. Joe Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. At the time, now, how I felt about it was, this is historic. This is the largest investment in green jobs and infrastructure in United States history. I know how hard it was to get here. I’m tremendously proud of the work that I did and so many others did.

Just in my district alone, we’ve delivered $26 billion in investment for manufacturing and sustainability because of the Inflation Reduction Act. But at the time, we knew that this is maybe 5 percent or 10 percent of what we need in scope. And now we’re experiencing the consequences of that.

Obviously, we still have a very volatile economy. We still lack energy security because we now have closed the Strait of Hormuz. We’re still too dependent on a global oil market, and we could use many more investments in solar and other kinds of renewable energy than we have now.

And ultimately, it wasn’t enough for the Biden-Harris administration to be able to win reelection, because people didn’t feel it enough in their pocketbooks.

Why do you think Democrats are talking less about climate?

I think it’s the intensity of the crises that we face. It feels like we’re falling through midair, after the end of all of the constitutional protections, the rule of law, and the economic security that people had previously enjoyed. 

There are a lot of very acute and urgent crises, and I think that that has bumped climate, which is a super massive but also somewhat slow-moving crisis, a little bit lower on the priority list just in terms of what comes up for people on the Hill.

You went back to Michigan to focus on housing and advocacy. Did that make you think a little differently about the national work you were doing?

I think it’s fair to say that when I was younger, I got very focused on this climate issue, and I was very focused on it because it is this existential crisis we all face.

But it was after the pandemic that I wanted to bring my work closer to home. I wanted to do the work of putting down roots in the place that had raised me and make my life there. And in seeking to organize there, it was clear that we needed an in to organize that was more immediate.

“I believe in the agency of regular people taking charge of our own lives and working together to build a better future.”

More immediate than the Green New Deal.

Than the Green New Deal or than the looming climate crisis. People know that that’s an issue, but they’re like, “I’ve gotta pay rent at the end of the month.” And as an organizer, I believe that you have to listen to people, you have to hear what’s going on for them, and then work on issues that have the potential to bring people together.

Housing is one of those issues. Whether you’re in the city of Lansing, whether you’re in small towns, urban, rural, suburban, young or old, everybody can agree that the rent is too damn high and it’s too hard to buy a home anymore.

Were you surprised Trump won the state in 2024? 

No.

Why not? 

Because I saw it all unfold. We hoped to deliver more through the Biden-Harris administration than we ultimately did through Build Back Better. We didn’t deliver as much to relieve the economic anxiety that people were feeling. And then I do believe that the war and the genocide in Gaza and our blank check to allow that to happen with our money and our tax dollars destroyed the Democratic coalition that had been assembled from 2017 through 2020 for the purpose of beating Trump.

I just saw that unfolding over the course of the whole year, just like a slow-motion train wreck.

I want to ask locally, what do you think is most important in this race: housing, data centers, or pushing back against Donald Trump?

If I had to choose, I’d say data centers because that’s where people in the district are finding some common ground across the spectrum — in fighting back against the concentrated power in Silicon Valley, which has been fully enabled by [incumbent Rep.] Tom Barrett and Donald Trump.

So you’re saying that’s the issue that allows you to create cross-ideological coalitions?

Yeah.

Our last question is, just thinking through the scope of your career and the kind of progressive work: It can sometimes feel like folks hop from issue to issue, whether it’s climate, even anti-AI right now, without those things being solved, right?

Like, we still have a climate crisis. The rent is still too high. All of these things are still happening. How am I to trust that AI is the crisis of our time when I’ve heard so many crises of our time?

Some have called it a polycrisis — overlapping crises.

That’s the reality of the time. It seems like everything is unraveling, and it is because the whole social, economic, political compact is being renegotiated, not just in this country, but on a global stage. I don’t think it serves us to lie about that. I mean, here’s the reality, folks.

Everything is up in the air. Does it feel like you’re falling through midair? It’s because we are. All the old protections, all the old agreements have been chopped up. So we have got to come together. This is what I believe in more than anything, if there is a through line…I believe in the agency of regular people taking charge of our own lives and working together to build a better future. 

That’s what I learned as an organizer, and that’s what gave me hope actually, at a time when I was doomer-ing in my younger years. And I told you, I wanted to just drop out of society and all that. It was seeing that regular people have come together before, and they’ve won a better future for their kids and grandkids, that gave me a path to follow in.

It does feel like a powerless time, I have to tell you. And a lot of this AI revolution, to your point about control or about agency. We’ve talked to so many people who just think that these things are happening to them, rather than feeling that they are participating in the changes afoot.

But you’re telling a kinda hopeful story. 

I’m a hopeful guy. I was angry too, even when I got into this race. I was angry especially about the wars. But then in campaigning, I’ve met so many people across the district, old friends, new friends, and they give me a lot of hope because you just see the way that people are already performing miracles on a daily basis.

In 2024, Donald Trump’s victory was powered in large part by massive gains with Latino voters. He won 48 percent of those voters that year, up from 36 percent in 2020 and 28 percent in 2016. But now, that support is plummeting; Trump’s approval rating among Latinos who voted for him recently fell from 93 percent to 66 percent, where it was at the beginning of his second term.

Why? It has a lot to do, as with everything these days, with the economy. 

It was the same in 2024. During that election, voters were experiencing rising costs and stagnant wages — the same trend that has continued until today. In 2024, though, Joe Biden and his administration — which also meant Vice President Kamala Harris — took the blame from all voters, and particularly Latinos. Today, the blame is falling on Trump. 

America, Actually host Astead Herndon caught up with Stephanie Valencia, who co-founded Equis Research, a political research firm that specializes in Latino voters, to unpack some of these recent shifts and explain them. 

“I think one important data point to understand about the Latino voter is Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other part or any other racial subgroup,” she said on the podcast. “And so what that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more.” 

That’s why, when the economy is bad, this group is primed to be a “swinging giant” in US politics, Valencia explains — and right now, it appears to be swinging hard against Trump. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

Equis has called Latinos one of the last great wild cards in American politics. Is that because of some of the double-digit swings that we’ve seen among this voting group over the past few elections?

Yes, it absolutely has to do with that. Latinos often get given the title the “sleeping giant,” which I just want to get rid of from everybody’s vocabulary. 

We should be called the “swinging giant” based on how much shift we have seen election to election. A third of Latinos consider themselves kind of independent or apolitical, and that swinging middle really is deciding every single election.

Your playbook gets into messengers and particularly how we reach folks where they are. It makes a Spanish-Spanglish distinction talking about the different types of media that Latino voters consume. 

I wanted to ask, in that vein, what’s the single biggest mistake campaigns make in terms of not reaching folks where they are?

Oh man, how long do we have so I can tell you how many mistakes? They’re really simple unforced errors. I’m going to give a very concrete and simple example that I think illustrates that. 

Look, I’m Latina. I grew up speaking mostly English, but I listen to Spanish-language radio. I watch a lot of YouTube, and on YouTube I’m watching people like Karol G and Carin León. A lot of people — a lot of Latino swing voters — have the same media consumption habits that I do.

The first problem or challenge that a lot of candidates make is they just simply translate their English ad into Spanish. And that is, to me, one of the biggest mistakes because there are a lot of things that people want to be communicating in Spanish that don’t translate word for word. There are sayings in Spanish that don’t translate directly from English or more direct ways you can communicate.

I’m sure it immediately reads Google Translate rather than an original message for said community.

Exactly. So that’s mistake No. 1. Mistake No. 2 is when they’re deploying that ad digitally, as a proxy for talking to people, they’re going to use Spanish-language browser settings. So they say, “We don’t want people who speak English to see the Spanish-language ad.”

So the way they find that set of voters is just by going to people who have Spanish-language browser settings. 

Like I said, I don’t have a Spanish-language browser setting. Everything I consume online is set in English on Chrome, but I still watch a lot of content in Spanish on YouTube.

So you’re missing a voter like me who’s going to see a Spanish language ad from a James Talarico or a Manny Rutinel and be turned on by it because I’m going to say, “Hey, that candidate’s speaking to our community. That candidate has enough respect to develop a Spanish-language ad.” 

We did some testing a couple of years ago that showed that over 70 percent of Latinos who see an ad in Spanish think that party or candidate cares more about Latinos. It matters that much.

Let’s stay in 2024 for a second longer. Your research found that Project 2025 and Trump’s mass deportation plans were not top of mind for most people, and that they were thinking about the economy. I wanted to ask about that because I remember the RNC signs at the convention saying, “Mass deportations now.” One number says that 62 percent of Latinos now think that Trump wants to deport undocumented immigrants broadly. 

Why did it take till post-election to realize those threats of mass deportation were real considering they were so front and center during his campaign?

I think this is really important for us as avid news consumers to understand the kind of news that the average voter, and especially that voter who’s coming in and out of elections, is consuming.

What they were seeing on mainstream media, perhaps even Fox News at the time, was a focus on people or Trump surrogates who said he was going to focus on serious criminals, securing the border, and violent criminals.

And so that’s what people bought. Fast-forward to 2026; the people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there. 

They were told he was going to focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was going to focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that.

And then add that to the litany of broken promises.

I’m hearing a distinction between a focus on the border, which Republicans did try to prioritize rather than the interior deportations that may have been more attributed to Stephen Miller than Donald Trump. But we have certainly seen that be a focus of the administration once they came back into office.

You mentioned the shift that has happened since 2024, and that’s really important, of course. Trump’s approval rating with Latinos is now worse than with non-Latinos, a stunning reversal in 18 months. 

You mentioned the factors that have contributed there, but is this really just the economy?

It’s the economy, it’s the war, and it’s immigration. It’s those three things. 

One thing that is really interesting to note about Trump’s approval, other than that it’s at basement levels — and he’s very much pulled down the GOP with him broadly and with Latino voters — is that in Trump 1.0, his approval on the economy and the cost of living was actually better than his everyday approval on his total job.

And he has been underwater with Latinos almost this entire term so far on the cost of living and the economy. It’s almost been a complete and total reversal.

Listen, you tell people you’re going to fix egg prices and gas is going to go down, and then you do the opposite, and we’re hearing that story universally across different electorate groups. 

You’re saying that’s still the main story when it comes to Latinos also?

Yes, it’s still the main story. I think one important data point to understand about the Latino voter is Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other part or any other racial subgroup. What that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more. 

We have less savings. We have lower rates of home ownership. So the safety nets that other people might have, we just don’t have. 

That really has exacerbated the kind of impact that people are feeling right now as they’re trying to make ends meet.

You mentioned the exponential growth in the terms of people who now regret or are disappointed with their vote for Donald Trump. Does that mean a preference for Democrats? How should we think about the binary choice between D and R versus what is a clear story about a backlash to Donald Trump’s actions?

I think it is a huge mistake for Democrats to rest on their laurels and think that because of what people are feeling about Trump and Republicans and the sense of disappointment and promises broken that that is automatically going to translate for them as a party and as a brand.

Right now, the Democratic brand has suffered a repeated set of blows among Latino voters. Twenty years of comprehensive immigration reform hasn’t been delivered. It’s a thing that comes up in almost every focus group. 

And part of what the build-up to 2024 was, was not only 20 years of a promise undelivered; it was the chaos at the border, it was feeling like Democrats were focused on everything but Latinos and their families, or everyday Americans and their families, and that they had lost that thread.

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

One big idea: It’s decision time for Kamala Harris

On Wednesday, LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic Party megadonor Reid Hoffman threw cold water on the prospect of a 2028 presidential campaign from former Vice President Kamala Harris. “I think it would be a very challenging path for her and it’s going to be a very noisy field,” Hoffman said when asked at a Politico event in Washington, DC, whether Harris should run again.

His statement comes the same week CNN aired an interview with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who told Jake Tapper (while fly-fishing?) that he would not run for president if Harris did so — a curious move from someone who swung through South Carolina barely two weeks ago, and who has long been treated as a presumed frontrunner for 2028.

Taken together — and thinking back to our America, Actually episode on the question of whether Harris will run — I think you’re seeing the early stages of what I’d call a light public pressure campaign.

Let me explain: Harris has been curiously mum on most things politics since 2024, but it’s clear she wants to be taken seriously as an option for 2028 and has weighed in from time to time on issues (this week it was AI safety). When we recorded our episode in June, her allies emphasized two political points over and over: She’s leading the early 2028 polls, and nobody has supplanted her with the two groups that anchor the Democratic base, Black voters, and women. But they stressed something else, too. Her former communications director Jamal Simmons told me Harris “should do what makes her happy,” and that “she’s earned the place to run, earned the right to run.” Harris surrogate Erin Wilson put it more sharply: “The idea that she does not deserve the opportunity to make that decision — or that she does not deserve the opportunity to put an infrastructure in place beyond the construct of 107 days — I think is incredibly unfair.”

To me, it seemed the group was less interested in making the case that Harris should run in 2028, and more interested in pushing back against an emerging elite consensus that she shouldn’t. They were fighting for the right for her to choose for herself, without Washington input or pressure from the media. And it came with an implicit acknowledgment: They understood that the party’s biggest donors, whose money and access shape much of the early stages of a presidential race, had moved on from Team Harris.

Hoffman’s statement is particularly notable because of the ideological lane he occupies. He’s not just any rich Democrat — he’s bankrolled several of the party’s newest post-2024 ventures, from the abundance-adjacent WelcomeFest crowd to the $10 million he put behind a super PAC boosting James Talarico’s Senate bid in Texas this summer. If Hoffman’s asking Harris to move on, that’s likely representative of the larger left-of-center apparatus, which is looking for a unifying contender who can fend off a challenge from the activist left in 2028.

Here’s what John Morgan, another big Democratic donor, told me about Harris over the summer:

I do not [want her to run]. I think that everything associated with the Biden administration needs to be put to the side and moved on. … I just think that everything that happened has left a bad taste, and we need a fresh start on that side of the aisle.

As Morgan also pointed out, this was once a group that backed Harris — or at least was initially open to her, even dating back to her first presidential run. Now, he says, the math doesn’t work:

I don’t think the money would come to her and the votes wouldn’t come. … Her natural base is gonna be California, and she’s gonna be competing heavily with Gavin Newsom in California. So they’re gonna be kind of cannibalizing each other’s donors.

Which brings us to Newsom, another left-of-center Bay Area Democrat with a long history of friendly rivalry with Harris who surely knows these donors have had a change of heart. He knows the Reid Hoffmans and John Morgans want a fresh face. He also knows Harris’s allies are right: Just as we heard in South Carolina, Harris maintains favorability among Southern Black voters specifically, and they’re likely the most important voting bloc of any Democratic presidential primary. 

And remember, candidate timing matters: A former vice president with universal name recognition like Harris could take a playbook from Joe Biden, who let Democrat after Democrat announce before he finally entered the 2020 race in April 2019. (And I imagine Newsom also watched Harris freeze the California governor’s race for months — leaving state Democrats in the dark as she decided whether or not to enter.)

So what’s a governor to do? 

Here’s what I think is happening this week: Newsom is putting pressure on Harris to make a decision early. And in doing so, he gives donors an incentive to make clear what they’re saying privately: They don’t want Kamala Harris to run.

It’s cynical, but that’s politics — and I think it’s a much more likely scenario than the one where Newsom earnestly gives up his agency to a longtime political rival. And notably, while the headlines focused on his pledge not to run if Harris gets in the race, I think the setup to it was even more telling. Before making the pledge, Newsom volunteered his own doubt that there will be anything to defer to: “I don’t know if she runs, but we’ll see. But I wouldn’t run if she ran.”

Democrats know Harris’s decision will have a big domino effect on the rest of the race — so much so that it’s worth getting answered early (meaning: as soon after the midterms as possible). But the comments from Newsom, Hoffman, and others should be instructive to Team Harris — and anyone who wants her to mount another presidential campaign. 

This would not be 2020, or even 2024; if Harris were to run, she would likely do so without much support from the major liberal institutions or the left-of-center donors.

In a time of anti-elite backlash and grassroots anger at things like the rise of artificial intelligence and corporate consolidation, that could be an opportunity to embrace a more populist, bottom-up message. There’s just one problem: Is that who Kamala Harris is?

What I’m hearing

This week I talked to Sean Scott, a reporter following faith, immigration, and politics for the Maine Monitor. I wanted to ask him about how the Senate race is playing out from a local perspective — and specifically about how issues like immigration have manifested on the campaign trail.

There’s been so much focus on the candidates in the Maine Senate race — but you’ve been tracking some of the issues that have locally shaped the race. What’s one that has come up in Maine? And how has it played out? 

Immigration policy has been a big issue in Maine this year, and it came to a head this summer after ICE agents shot and killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford. The shooting occurred shortly after former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner had dropped out of the race because of sexual assault allegations, and many of the Democrats vying to replace him went to Biddeford to speak out against the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement. This included the eventual nominee, Troy Jackson, who said ICE should be dismantled.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins, meanwhile, has drawn scrutiny for her role in negotiating funding for DHS. Protesters stormed her Biddeford office the day of the shooting, calling for her to be voted out. Collins has said she’s pushing for reforms within the immigration agency, and said she asked ICE officials to prioritize Maine as they rolled out body cameras. But the investigation into the fatal shooting is still ongoing, and I think many Mainers are waiting to see if the agency will be held accountable.

Donald Trump’s push for hardline immigration enforcement has been deeply unpopular. Are there any surprising coalitions that have developed in Maine in response?

I cover religion, and one thing that has been really interesting to me this year is the way coalitions of progressive faith leaders have responded to the administration’s mass deportation efforts. This was especially visible during the federal immigration enforcement surge Maine saw in late January. Faith leaders formed a “human wall” outside a business with an immigrant workforce to try and protect them. Nine faith leaders were arrested for trespassing during a pray-in at Sen. Collins’s Portland office, calling for her to vote against any DHS spending bill that would maintain funding for ICE. Faith leaders were instrumental in coordinating mutual aid efforts to help families who were afraid to leave their homes — one minister told me she collected rugs for an immigrant family with young children living in an apartment, worried that a noise complaint could lead to their detention. And a multifaith coalition held a weekly vigil at the jail in Portland for months while immigration detainees were being held there. That jail ended its contract with ICE in April. Just last week, a coalition of clergy from different faiths in Bangor came together to demand that a landlord terminate a lease with ICE.

You’ve been following the rise of Turning Point USA in Maine and the network of evangelical churches that has been central to that rise. How intertwined is the conservative faith community with Republican politics in Maine? 

Maine is one of the least religious states in the country, so it isn’t always front of mind for people. But I reported this spring on one network of evangelical churches that has taken an increasingly active role in politics in recent years, and on how we’ve seen some Republican lawmakers in Maine become more explicit about tying their faith to their politics since Trump took office. The state Senate minority leader started a weekly men’s Bible study for legislators last year. That Bible study, plus increased public outreach by a Christian lobbying group and an expanded prayer caucus at the statehouse, show how conservative Christianity has become more visible in Augusta over the past two years. And Charlie Kirk’s death has certainly spurred greater interest. As of May, Maine had at least 28 church-based Turning Point Faith chapters, twice as many as any other state in New England. The debate over transgender student athletes has been a big one this year, and conservative faith communities have certainly played a role there.

From a national perspective, it feels like the Maine Senate race has maybe gone under the radar since the fallout over Graham Platner, the previous Democratic candidate. Is there still a lot of energy and focus on the race in Maine?

I can’t speak to why the national interest has dwindled, but people are certainly still paying attention here! There’s lots of national money flowing in, and the ads are nonstop.

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

One big idea: What are Republicans actually running on? 

The first-of-its-kind Republican midterms convention began in the same vein as President Donald Trump’s second term: open grift. The president announced a pledge to give every American $5,000 if Republicans win the House and the Senate — part of what he’s calling a new dividend for American voters, and what some Democrats are calling an attempted bribe.

Obviously, there are lots of questions about Trump’s announcement: Who will pay for the $1 trillion-plus dividend? Taxpayers. Could this even happen without congressional approval? Probably not. Why not just vote on it now, while Republicans control Congress? It would likely fail.

But I think the pronouncement — and the GOP convention broadly — is best understood as a proxy for the Republican message in the midterm elections, not a policy roadmap for what Trump would do if Republicans maintained control of the House and Senate.

So what can we actually glean from the GOP’s two-day bonanza in Dallas, and how does the message they were offering on that made-for-TV platform match up with the message they’ve delivered on the campaign trail? I took a close look at the convention speeches on Wednesday and Thursday, dug through our America, Actually reporting focusing on Republican voters and their candidates, and pulled together some trends that help explain the GOP strategy for defying the odds (and the polling) come Election Day.

1. Republicans are mostly in hiding

One reason Trump’s midterm convention sticks out in this year’s landscape: It’s one of the rare places Republicans will campaign out loud. Congressional candidates, even in battleground House districts, have rarely held public events or town halls this year. And as Trump’s unpopularity has continued to grow, driven by rising gas prices and an unpopular war with Iran, it’s not like the GOP has responded by mounting a defense of its leader. They’ve mostly gone AWOL, a result of the electoral pickle the president has put them in. 

Trump is undoubtedly still the most powerful figure within the party, particularly among the Republican base, but Trump is also the biggest motivator for the Democratic base, and is increasingly off-putting to independent voters, who backed him in 2024. His approval has sunk to 33 percent in one recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, the lowest of his presidency, and that same poll found Democrats markedly more fired up for the midterms than Republicans — an enthusiasm gap that’s poison for the party in power. The independents who put him over the top have soured as the war drags on: a UMass poll found more than two-thirds disapprove of his handling of Iran nationally, and four in five say the war has driven up their gas and food prices.

So when Trump tells voters at the GOP midterm convention to “pretend that he’s on the ballot” and turn out in November, I think his opponents listen with glee. Democrats are in the position they’re in because of a brewing electoral backlash to Trump — and the reason Republicans are so hard to find on the campaign trail is that they sense that same backlash is brewing, too. Check out what Ted Cruz said on The View this week: “The big open question is, do Republicans show up?” Cruz asked. “If we stay home, there’s a blue wave.”

2. Even Trump is on the defensive

It’s rare to see Trump acknowledge any semblance of failure, but he came close during his speech during the convention’s first night. Trump was clearly on the defensive throughout his remarks: he sought to make the case for his (unpopular) tariff policy, he defended the (deeply unpopular) Iran war but without the usual bluster, and he acknowledged that gas prices may not fall until after Election Day. Last year, he predicted gas prices would soon hit $2 a gallon; this week he’s asking for still more patience after they hit a record $4.15 on Labor Day. From his speech:

“You know, it happens to me all the time. Guys come up, ‘You know, I wish you didn’t do the war in Iran, gasoline’s up, ba, ba, ba.’ And I say, ‘Well, let me ask you…let me ask you one question. Can Iran have a nuclear weapon?’ ‘Absolutely not.’ ‘Well, then I’m right, then I win, okay?’” 

But it’s worth remembering that “be patient” is a controversial message even among Republican voters. When our America, Actually team spent a day outside gas stations in Allentown this summer — deep in PA-7, one of the most contested House districts in the country (watch the episode) — we heard a clean split. There were some Republicans willing to eat the higher price in service of Trump’s war:

“Yes, because our president is actually doing something about Iran. He’s not sugarcoating it. It’s something we need to do, and in the long run it’s gonna be better for everybody.”

And there were other Republicans who voted for Trump and are furious: “I voted for him with his promises to the American people…and I think he’s let us down.”

Another put the broken promise plainly: “I blame the president because he indicated to us he’s gonna drop all these costs. I know it can’t happen overnight, but when is it gonna happen? It’s outrageous.”

The message now is to wait until after the election. A lot of the president’s own voters at the pump aren’t sure they can.

3. Notice the candidates who weren’t there

Maybe the most revealing thing about Trump’s convention was the guest list, or more notably, the no-shows. MAGA celebrities who owe their careers to Trump packed the stage, but not a lot of the Republicans who are actually on the ballot in places they must win. Notable absences include candidates like John Sununu in New Hampshire and Susan Collins in Maine, and various congressional candidates from battleground races. And while their political calculus may be obvious — they want to avoid a Dallas-with-Trump photo op that ends up in a challenger’s attack ad — it reflects the “win by hiding” strategy that candidates not named Vivek Ramaswamy seem to be deploying.

Here’s the play in a nutshell: keep enough distance from Trump to maintain credibility and independence, but rely on Trump to raise money, drive up Republican turnout, and savagely attack Democratic opponents.

When conservative activist CJ Pearson came on our show, he insisted the GOP doesn’t have an electability problem at all — voters will see Democrats as too radical on topics like socialism and transgender women in sports, which came up repeatedly in the convention, and Republicans can still find ways to address affordability concerns. “These are 80/20 issues,” he said. ”And so I actually really like our odds here…we’re going to overperform. The Senate, we’re gonna hold onto. The House will be a dogfight, but I like our chances.” He even predicted this exact week, telling me the party would “see a change in his messaging and a reset at the midterm convention in Dallas,” after which “you’ll see those numbers start to change.” Whether Dallas actually delivered that reset — or just a $5,000 bribe and a defensive Trump — is, generously, an open question. And the attendance sheet suggests some of Pearson’s own party’s candidates aren’t waiting around to find out.

4. The JD Vance tightrope

One person who doesn’t have the benefit of keeping distance from Trump is JD Vance, his vice president and the presumed GOP frontrunner for the 2028 presidential nomination. He’s close to right-wing voices who have soured on Trump, and has to worry about voters longer than the president will have to, and the Iran war, tariffs, and Trump’s promises all present conflicts for him. Just last week, he took heat from prominent voices in Trump’s coalition for his refusal to disavow Tucker Carlson, the podcast host and former TV anchor who’s become a vocal critic of the Israeli government and Trump’s second-term agenda. 

Looking ahead to his speech tonight, I’ll be watching how carefully he handles Trump’s tariffs, the Iran war, and gas prices. He’s tried to strike a more empathetic note on the economy than Trump, who has described talk of an affordability crisis as a made-up narrative to hurt him politically that — to the extent it was real — was President Joe Biden’s fault anyway. “They caused [it], but we’re fixing it,” the president said Wednesday.

Vance says he won’t “sit down” with Trump to discuss his 2028 plans until after the midterms, but Trump is not the kind of person who seems likely to give his successor a lot of room to run away from his record. 

What I’m hearing

This week I talked to Charlotte Matherly, a reporter at the Concord Monitor who has been following the underdiscussed New Hampshire Senate race. New Hampshire is one of the Democrats’ must-win states to take back the Senate, but there’s been some concern that Republican candidate John Sununu — a former New Hampshire senator with a long family legacy in the state —  could give Democratic nominee Rep. Chris Pappas deep problems. I talked to Matherly about lessons from the state’s primary and what to expect in the general election.

So, the New Hampshire primary just happened — what were the takeaways? And why has this race gone under the radar? 

With the progressive versus moderate conversation happening nationally, that was my biggest question heading into Tuesday. Would we see that progressive wave or ripple or whatever you want to call it here too? Because we did have a progressive candidate [Karishma Manzur] run against Chris Pappas, who really focused on humanitarianism and ending what she saw as US complicity in foreign wars.

Voters who liked her were really passionate about her, but in the end, I think people just wanted to vote for what they know, and [Pappas] was already in Congress. The progressive wave that we’ve seen across the country has not necessarily translated here. 

Why do you think New Hampshire has stood apart from the national progressive wave? 

To give you context for New Hampshire politics, it’s always kind of different from the national electorate. We’re a true purple state — independents are the largest voting bloc here. But there are some quirks. Like, for the past 20 years, except for a few exceptions, voters tend to send Republicans to the state legislature, but usually vote for Democrats when it comes to Congress or presidential elections. So splitting your ticket is really common here. And I hear from people every time I go out to the polls that someone has switched their party in the past few years, or they fall back and forth. So it’s really hard to tell where the partisan lines fall here. 

How has the Republican candidate, John Sununu, handled Donald Trump’s popularity? 

Years ago [in 2024], Sununu actually penned an op-ed calling Donald Trump a “loser.” And there’s been some bite from the party about that. But Trump actually ended up endorsing him, and he’s also shared the backing of powerful fundraisers and a lot of conservative organizations hoping to flip the seat red. But still, Sununu is trying to emphasize his independence from the administration. He’s saying he’s not worried about currying favor or anything like that, but he hasn’t really put too many policy differences between himself and Trump. 

One example that I can think of is that he said he opposed the [reported $300 billion] included in Trump’s deal with Iran that was earmarked for reconstruction. He had said he didn’t think that the US should provide any money for reconstruction. And so there’s been a few things like that that he has tried to sort of strike out on his own from the president.

Last month, Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon won the state’s Democratic Senate nomination in a major upset over her better-funded opponent, retired Army Lt. Col. Alex Vindman. Her victory was quickly slotted into a narrative about the Democratic Party’s insurgent progressive movement, which has triumphed in House and Senate primaries in Michigan, Colorado, New York, and elsewhere. 

But while Nixon supports progressive policies, she argues there’s more to the story than a simple progressive-versus-centrist tale. She says that she out-worked and out-organized her opponent — and that Floridians across the political spectrum are hungry for change. 

Vox’s Astead Herndon invited Nixon on a special pop-up episode of America, Actually to break down how she won the nomination, why she thinks there’s a path to victory in what many analysts believe is a solidly red state, and what she wants to get done as a senator if she prevails in November.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

Why do you think your victory took so many by surprise?

It took so many by surprise because people both tend to underestimate a Black woman — especially a progressive Black woman in politics — and then one who wasn’t able to raise as much money. But as a former single mom for 12 years, I know how to make a dollar stretch.

This win is attributed to good old-fashioned grassroots organizing. I am a former union organizer. I am a community organizer, and I know the importance of people power and talking to people and getting them energized about why they should vote and why they should see themselves in this country.

How much would you ascribe your win to the type of politics that you’re describing here versus the progressive policies that you championed? Should we take this as a sign that Medicare-for-all and “abolish ICE” have strong support in Florida?

It’s all of it, right? It is the hard work that we put into this race to raise awareness about who I am and the policies and positions that I stand for, which are policies and positions that the majority of hardworking, everyday people stand for. 

Just because we want access to quality healthcare and affordable housing and fully funded public schools, they try to fear-monger and make it seem as though we are communist and we’re not.

We are not communist. We are people who want to put hardworking, everyday people in power so that they can determine and shape what our communities look like and what our economies look like. There’s nothing radical or extreme about that.

Democrats are still dismissing your chances to win a general election. Prominent pundits have said that Democrats should not invest in Florida, and that would amount to wasted money. Political forecasters moved the race in the Republican direction after your primary victory, arguing that the progressive politics makes it easier for Republicans to win in a state like Florida.

I wanted to ask about electability. Can you give me the case for how you can win a statewide race amongst such skepticism? 

The same way that I was able to win a primary being outspent and out-raised 18 to 1. I am building a very unique, diverse coalition of people. We’ve had Republicans and independents that crossed over in the primary to vote for me in the primary. They also volunteer in our campaign. They’ve made donations. 

We literally have a bunch of Republicans and libertarians who have been stating that they are voting for me because they like that I am no-nonsense. They appreciate that I am trying to put a check on what is coming out of Washington, DC, all of the cruelty and the corruption, and that is the winning message.

Look, we’re up against a woman, [incumbent Republican Sen. Ashley Moody], who allowed the theft of $10 million. She allowed money to be stolen from medically needy and low-income kids, to be diverted toward two citizen-led ballot initiatives that actually caused us to not have better health in our communities. 

People are frustrated, and that’s all Ashley Moody has done — just look out for herself, her campaign donors and these billionaires. People are ready for elected officials to stop bailing out these big businesses [and] actually look out for everyday people.

In November 2023, you introduced a resolution to the Florida House calling for “the immediate de-escalation and ceasefire…in Israel and occupied Palestine.” It was rejected 104 to 2. And it earned you some bad blood with some of the members of the Florida Jewish Caucus. The chair actually said that the resolution was born out of ignorance and antisemitism.

Obviously, the Democratic Party base has shifted on that issue over the last several years. There’s been an open discussion about whether Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did themselves damage in the 2024 election by not breaking more explicitly with Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Do you think that was a mistake for Democrats?

I would say yes. I would say that we have to have really uncomfortable conversations amongst our different communities and we just have to talk. But I feel that they did do a disservice in regards to just going along with the AIPAC lobby.

You had mentioned that you don’t support sending any money or any weapons to Israel at this moment, but I also wanted to ask about things like BDS, the movement to boycott, divest, or sanction Israel. Is that something you support?

It is. I’m a Black woman who is a descendant of slaves, and who is the descendant of people from the civil rights movement, and I know how we used boycotts and we used protest to gain our civil rights for our community. So I’m fully supportive of that.

You repeatedly said that you don’t support defunding the police on your website. It says that you support demilitarizing the police. And that “real safety comes from good jobs, strong schools, affordable housing, and healthcare for all — not from more cameras, more cages, and more agents.”

What is the difference between that and defunding?

Whatever folks think the difference is. I’m not going to box myself in because I understand how they’ll try to cut and clip things with me saying certain words.

But doesn’t that sound a little bit like lessening the resources that go to police to focus on other things? I mean, that sounds a little like the same thing.

It sounds like I know that is my position. I want to defund Flock cameras because bad cops are stalking their ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends. And so to-may-toe, to-mah-toe. I literally said this before and that is what I am for. I’m not trying to get clipped in any kind of way.

Let me ask you this way. I appreciate the focus on root causes, and I think you’ve laid that out that that’s where you want the energy to go — that real public safety comes from focusing on the things that cause people to commit crimes in the first place, but those often take a long time to show effect.

If we’re talking about the root causes of crime, what is the message to someone whose community is unsafe right now that does not include policing?

What I would say is, making sure that we invest in making sure people have more jobs and we invest in community control of the police. I totally believe in civil review boards and that type of thing, but I believe in making sure that people’s most basic needs are met. 

One of the things that I believe could help that right off the bat is things like universal healthcare, or at a minimum, extending the ACA subsidies so that we can drive down these healthcare premium costs. Or fully funding these programs that allow people to have access to first-time homebuyer programs. 

I was a single mom for 12 years, and I took part in the first-time homebuyer program that was funded from the federal government. That trickled down to the state and then to the local government. That helped me with down payment assistance as well as closing costs and those types of programs. We need to put policies in place that are allowing people to be good.

We need to push for universal child care. For every $1 that is invested by the government, it puts $3 back into the economy so parents can get to work. They can be able to make sure that they have money to put their children in different programs. We need to invest in programs to keep our children off the streets.

There’s been so much effort to put you in one of the boxes that have defined the Democratic ideological battles — DSA versus establishment. I hear in this interview how that doesn’t neatly fit with what it seems like you’ve done in Florida. 

Where do you think this campaign fits into the ongoing question of where do Democrats go next?

We’re coalition builders, we’re aggregators. Folks should know, I was a vice chair of a local Democratic Party. I was also the field director and the political director with the state party. I have never fit in a box. I was a union member and I also led a statewide organization that was straight-up progressive.

We need all these things to fight back against this Donald Trump regime. Look, this man is not going to leave willingly in 2028. He’s created a paramilitary force in the form of ICE that is getting away with shooting people and slaughtering them on camera while they’re masked without any accountability. They’re pushing to see how far they can go.

Granted, Black people have been getting slaughtered on camera without accountability for a while, but now they are doing it to people who aren’t just Black, who aren’t just Latino. They are banking on us being normalized with what’s happening.

First lady Michelle Obama says, “They go low, we go high.” I’m saying, “We get loud, we push back. We organize stronger and harder so that we can win and change this country and build a new vision for the next 250 years, where we have a Florida and an America for all.”

After 12 years of dominating American politics — either as president, as a candidate, or from the sidelines — Donald Trump will finally exit the stage in 2028, and it’s anybody’s guess what will come next. But one thing we do know is that Gen Z, many of whom were children during Trump’s first campaign, will play a large role in shaping that future.

What’s less clear is what direction they might choose or what their politics are in the first place.

We do know a few things, thanks to a Vox collaboration with the polling firm Murmuration. For one, they’re highly independent: Almost 30 percent answered “none of the above” when they were asked to choose their political label in Murmuration’s survey. They’re an economically insecure cohort, at least for now; Murmuration found that only 28 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 30 said they could cover an unexpected expense of $500. And they had the largest gender gap of any age group when it came to supporting the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024 — women preferred Kamala Harris by 17 percentage points over men.

To find out more, Vox’s Astead Herndon spoke with Gen Z researcher Rachel Janfaza for a recent episode of America, Actually. They discussed the group’s political identities, preferences, and top issues, and what that all could mean for politics going forward. They discussed an important distinction between two versions of Gen Z, and whether its infamous gender gap is shifting. They also touched on how, contrary to seemingly everyone else, Gen Z is hope-maxxing.

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Janfaza, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

You’ve done a lot of work around the different Gen Zs. I’ve heard you talk about Gen Z 1 versus Gen Z 2. How would we describe those differences?

I call this the theory of the two Gen Zs. I really started to cultivate it doing focus groups with young people in 2022, hearing the way that high school students at the time and college students at the time just had a different outlook, and I realized that those who had graduated high school before the start of the pandemic, those Gen Z-ers, just had a different worldview than the younger half of Gen Z, who were still in high school at the time that the pandemic hit.

And that is because of the taste of independence that people on the older cusp of Gen Z had prior to the lockdown situation. Anyone who is between roughly 29 and 22, I would say, is Gen Z 1.0, and anyone younger than that would be Gen Z 2.0.

And there’s no official end date to Gen Z right now. Like, it’s sort of 1997 to 2012, so it’s not very clear yet.

Can you just name for me what the difference was between the generations? How did that shape a different form of politics?

Gen Z 1.0 really came of age during Trump’s first term in office. This was a new phenomenon. He was breaking down past barriers, and we saw a lot of youth-led activism in response to actions or inaction from the first Trump administration.

You saw things like the March for Our Lives and climate strikes and the Black Lives Matter movement. And there was this very real sense that, you know, if we protest and demand change, perhaps there could be a difference.

Whereas Gen Z 2.0 came of age during the Biden era. This was a post-Covid sort of upbringing. And they really grew resistant to authority because they saw Democrats in charge during the time when kids went back to school and when there were things like mask mandates and vaccine mandates, especially in blue areas across the country where Democrats were handling the way that schools were reopening.

Young people whose lives and childhoods were on the line felt like they were guinea pigs in an experiment that they didn’t sign up for, and I think this is when we saw a movement away from Democrats. I don’t necessarily think that was toward Republicans.

Trump capitalized on this in 2024. Broadly speaking, Gen Z 2.0 is far less trusting of authority and institutions, far more independent. They hate labels, and this isn’t just political. They hate labels when it comes to gender, their relationships. No one wants to be boxed in. I hear this all the time in my focus groups, and so they just moved away from both parties writ large.

I also want to ask a couple of questions specifically about the gender divide, because that was such a big topic in the 2024 election.

We heard at that time, and I reported on, the change among young men that we saw manifested in that race. There was a 17-point gap between the votes of Gen Z men and Gen Z women. Before we get to where we are now, what do you think drove that gap?

No. The easy thing to say is it’s the algorithm, but that’s not the whole picture. I think a lot of young women felt like their bodily autonomy, freedom, rights were on the line. And a lot of young men care about that, but when I asked them, “What’s the top issue in the 2024 election?” few said abortion. They were like, “I care about that, but that’s not an issue that personally affects me.” And so I think that’s sort of what it came down to.

Women literally felt like it was their futures that were in question. And when you talk about the gender gap, you noted that young men shifted to the right, and that’s of course true.

Young women, since 2017, have remarkably moved to the left. And there have been a number of different causes to that, but every time there’s been a social wedge issue, whether it was early with immigration during Trump’s first term, the MeToo movement, the conversation about reproductive healthcare access and the fall of Roe v. Wade and the Dobbs decision … there have been so many examples of things that have pushed women further to the left, and then also a frustration with the way that Trump talks about women or accusations that have been made against him.

This is part of what I think makes this political period for Gen Z so fascinating. The Trump era will shape history across every generation, but Gen Z are the ones whose ideology was forming. And so there was this real sisterhood that emerged between young women during this time, where both on social media and in person, they were finding camaraderie around this shared fear for their future, but also appreciation of their individual rights and freedoms.

And young men didn’t see that same sort of bonding happening. And we talked a lot in 2024 about how Democrats had a problem with young men because they weren’t actively reaching out to young men. I’m the first person to say that Democrats really screwed that up, and that was a problem. But I think that there were not shared spaces for young men to come together in that way as there were for young women. I think that was part of what has driven this gap as well.

Should we update our thinking, though, of that gender divide from then to now? Like, are we still seeing the same big gaps between voting and political behavior from Gen Z men and women?

No. So largely, when I ask young people about the gender gap, they acknowledge that it exists, but they don’t like it. They don’t want to be stuck in this divide. Gen Z wants out of the gender war. They do.

We’re also now seeing a generation unite around a new set of issues that are pretty communal, that everyone can kind of agree upon. There’s a new shared set of issues that are less gendered and more affecting everybody.

AI? What are you talking about?

AI and the economy. Gen Z now agrees that the two main issues are AI and the economy. And obviously those are related.

I see this. You’re saying the gender gap among young people was at its peak because the parties were positioning themselves on gendered lines as well. And now, because of the consensus about issues that touch everyone, mainly the economy and AI, it’s a little bit of a permission structure to put the knives down in the gender fight because everyone’s lives are affected by this.

I think a lot of the gender war in the first place was kind of manufactured by people who were talking about Gen Z and not to them. You had the main candidates for president playing into that, too, and it was a man versus a woman, and it was kind of like, “These are your two options.” And we’re far past that.

I’ve talked about how Gen Z is hope-maxxing. You can say, “Oh, like it’s giving Obama,” but they really are looking for something to feel excited about. It’s enough of the doom and gloom. Growing up in this era has been exhausting.

The division and the vitriol isn’t fun for anyone. And maybe it’s the hopeless optimist in me, but I think that there is a real appetite for a post-Trumpian era of politics that is just less toxic. And that feels more hopeful and gives you something to rally around and unite around, rather than to be divided.