It’s going to take some time to fully comprehend what just happened in the midterm elections.

Last Tuesday brought a blue wave of historic proportions, with Democrats winning large majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as winning several new governorships. 

But now that the dust is settling from the results, it’s worth drilling down into just how historically unusual this win was — and untangling what, exactly, was the coalition that brought Democrats back to power. 

Overall, this was a once-in-a-half-century election; most of the population has never seen a blowout of this size in their lifetimes. Outcomes the political world believed to be downright impossible in our polarized era — such as Democrats flipping Senate seats in deep red states — actually happened. House candidates won elections in races they never expected to have a chance of winning themselves. And Democrats will have far more power over state government than at any point in decades.

How did the blue wave become a blue tsunami? Which voters swung the hardest? And what does the landscape look like moving forward? Let’s dig into the data. 

1. This wave was the biggest in a half-century

We’ve lived through wave elections before, but the size of this one is historic. One way to assess that is by examining the national House popular vote — that is, totaling how many votes for candidates of each party were cast in the 435 House of Representatives elections around the country. We don’t have a final tally of that for this cycle yet, due to slow counting of mail ballots in states like California. But estimates currently suggest Democrats are headed for over a 13-percentage-point popular vote victory — the largest in 50 years.

Indeed, even the much heralded Republican midterm waves of 1994, 2010, and 2014 didn’t get anywhere near that total; they topped out at 6 or 7 points. The only comparison in recent decades has been the 2008 wave amidst the financial crisis that swept Barack Obama into the presidency with huge majorities. But Democrats’ House majority next year will, it appears likely, end up a bit larger than the 257 seats Obama’s Democrats wound up with in 2009.

2. Massive swings in red state strongholds delivered Democrats a large Senate majority 

When it came to the Senate, not all states swung equally. It was striking how some of Democrats’ largest gains came in states President Donald Trump had won overwhelmingly just two years ago, many of which were in the South. 

The biggest swing in the country came in Texas, which Trump had won by 13 points, and Sen.-elect James Talarico (D) won by 12. But some states were even redder two years ago — Trump won Kansas by 16, South Carolina by 18, and Mississippi by 23 — and Democrats, incredibly, pulled off victories in some of those too. (The Mississippi race hasn’t been called, but Democrat Scott Colom very narrowly leads). Indeed, Democrats even came surprisingly close to flipping Louisiana, a Trump+22 state; their candidate lost there by just 2 points.

By contrast, other states like Michigan and Minnesota saw more modest shifts. And while moderate Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) finally lost her seat after decades of bucking partisan trends, she put up a uniquely strong fight: Maine was the only Senate battleground to vote to the right of its 2024 presidential vote, though in the end Collins still lost by about 6 points.

3. Republicans’ attempts to gerrymander themselves a House majority fell flat

Trump and the GOP knew all along that holding their narrow House majority would be a tall order. So they hatched a plan — they’d get Republican-controlled states to launch a highly unusual mid-decade redistricting push, to slant House maps in those states further in their favor. Indeed, they hoped to net more than a dozen new seats from newly favorable maps alone.

Outraged Democrats responded with a redistricting push of their own in California, to try and dilute some of these gains. (A similar Democratic measure in Virginia was struck down by state judges.) 

In the end, the GOP actually lost seats in some states it gerrymandered, like North Carolina. Still, that doesn’t mean their push was a total failure — in such a strong Democratic year, the new maps may have still helped the party avoid even greater losses, or laid the groundwork to win them back more easily later on.

4. Turnout among Black voters was quite strong

In April, the Supreme Court’s Callais decision dramatically weakened the Voting Rights Act protections that could require states to draw majority-minority districts — clearing the way for some of that aforementioned aggressive Republican gerrymandering, which often involved eliminating majority-Black districts in the South.

But when the results came in on Tuesday, there was a striking pattern — Black turnout was incredibly strong. Some reports attributed this to anger over the Supreme Court decision, suggesting it spurred outrage and increased mobilization. Whatever the cause, heavy Black turnout helped Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia become the first Black woman ever elected governor in US history, contributed to a blowout victory by Roy Cooper in North Carolina’s Senate race, and put the Senate seat in Mississippi — a state with the largest proportional Black population in the country, but with a white majority that’s long been heavily Republican — into contention.

5. Trump’s 2024 surge among Hispanic and Latino voters vanished

Trump’s strong performance among Hispanic and Latino voters in the 2024 elections shocked Democrats, and raised fears the party had culturally lost touch with communities that had been a key part of their base. But in retrospect, that outcome looks more like a blip — Latino voters swung heavily back to Democrats, helping power their big wins in Texas in particular. 

Polling showed a backlash to Trump’s harsh immigration crackdown among Latinos, but that perhaps even more important was the issue of affordability. “Latinos aren’t a monolith. But we are monolithically irate about how hard it is getting to stretch a paycheck,” Democratic consultant Chuck Rocha wrote in the New York Times, summarizing his research.

6. Some Democrats defeated Republicans even though they’d raised very little money

A wave as enormous as this one will wash some surprising winners to shore. And there were several House races where Democrats who had raised quite little money shockingly managed to win GOP-held seats — or appear favored to do so.

The above numbers don’t include outside spending, which was a major force in the midterms. But campaign fundraising is a good proxy for identifying some of the least-known candidates who made it across the finish line.

In some of these races — Teresa Benitez-Thompson’s win in Nevada’s Second District — the Democrat overcame enormous GOP spending advantages to win an upset. In others — like Tennessee’s Fourth District, where Republican Rep. Scott DesJarlais narrowly trails Democrat Victoria Broderick in a race that hasn’t been called — the incumbent appears to have been caught sleeping.

And in some, no one was more surprised by the outcome than the Democratic candidates themselves. Zack Mullock, who won New Jersey’s Second District, said he had to Google what his salary would be as a member of Congress after he won.

One of the most striking results was that LaKesha Womack, a community organizer who spent just about $56,000 in her race for North Carolina’s 14th District, ended up defeating a prominent state Republican —despite being served with a felony warrant in October for having allegedly failed to return a rental car in 2019.

7. Democrats won several new state government trifectas — and broke several GOP trifectas

Beyond Congress, the Democratic wave will have massive implications for governance of the states. The party won new trifectas — that is, control of the governorship and both houses of the state legislatures — in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Minnesota. That’s several new states where Democrats will be newly empowered to try and govern as they see fit — presenting major opportunities for progressive policymaking.

Just as seismically, Democrats broke up GOP trifectas in several states the party had long controlled. In addition to Bottoms’s win in Georgia, Gina Hinojosa will become the first Democratic governor of Texas in 32 years, Rob Sand won the governorship of Iowa, and Amy Acton won in Ohio — though in all four of those states, Republicans will continue to hold at least one house of the state legislature.

The impact of these wins could be very real. Democrats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin plan to try to raise their state minimum wages to $15 or $20 an hour. Democrats in Arizona and Texas plan to take aim at school voucher programs enacted by state Republicans. Medicaid expansion could be a priority in Texas and Georgia — though in each state, some GOP state senators would have to sign on.

Republicans began picking through their party’s post-midterms wreckage Wednesday to ask about — and argue over — how things went so, so wrong in President Donald Trump’s second term.

Tuesday’s blue tsunami not only washed out Republicans’ House and Senate majorities, it carried Democrats into office even in deep red strongholds like South Carolina, Kansas, and possibly Mississippi. It seemed to be a decisive thumbs down from the electorate on the second Trump administration.

These results also mark the effective start of the battle to determine what the Republican Party will become after Trump — both who the 2028 GOP presidential nominee will be, and what the party will stand for overall.

Within hours of the results, a sort of narrative warfare began to unfold, as different politicians, advocates, and factions tried to advance their preferred accounts of what exactly went wrong, who should get the blame, and what the party should change for the future. Here are three theories of what went wrong that are already starting arguments between big names on the right.

Was the war by far the most important thing – or just one problem among many?

The conversation about what went wrong is especially important for Vice President JD Vance, who remains the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, but is inextricably tied to an administration that increasingly looks like a failure. So it was noteworthy that he offered his own account of what happened.

Vance’s post-mortem glancingly mentioned a few issues, such as “cost of living/inflation,” and floated that he’d be open to changing immigration “enforcement” (though he reiterated he’d never support “amnesty”). He also cited voters’ belief that the United States should “change our relationship to Israel,” perhaps helping explain why Trump announced on Election Day that he’d decided to end aid to Israel after this year.

Yet there was one factor Vance wanted to be sure got most of the blame: the Iran war.

“The reason we lost is the war,” Vance wrote. What’s more, he claimed that “everyone knows” that is the case, and that “any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”

That position is no surprise coming from Vance, who has long been a critic of the hawkish GOP foreign policy establishment, and who had hoped to help steer Trump’s second term on a different course. 

Vance is associated with an “America First” faction that was deeply skeptical of US involvement in foreign conflicts, particularly in Ukraine and Iran.

But Trump ignored their advice, sided with the hawks, and launched his Iran war early this year. And though Vance stood by that decision publicly, he now wants it known that he was right all along. 

Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative magazine and a critic of the hawks, told me Wednesday that Vance had a tremendous opportunity to help negotiate an end to the conflict: “He’s in a pole position to get us out of this mistake, and I think if he does do that, he will be associated with ending the war, not starting the war.”

The right’s internal conflict between the hawks and the America Firsters, has long been bitter and personal, and goes beyond Vance. Aspects of it played out publicly among commentators Wednesday, with hawks like talk radio host Mark Levin deriding the idea that the war sank Trump. 

“The mid-terms were not lost over a single issue.  And anybody with a functioning brain knows that,” Levin posted on X. He added that, to the extent the war harmed Trump politically, it was the fault of the America Firsters’ campaign to “undermine” it.

But right-wing commentator Ryan James Girdusky argued to me that the war hurt Trump’s coalition beyond just driving up energy prices. “In 2024, TikTok was all, ‘Trump is great, Trump is the man,’” he said. “What’s the vibe on TikTok today? It’s, ‘You’re at war for Israel.’ That is a completely different narrative, and that’s a mainstream narrative on TikTok.”

Is this outcome a rejection of Trumpism – that necessitates something very different?

Another narrative some began advancing was that the midterm elections were a repudiation of Trumpism in general — and, particularly, all the ways Trump deviated from the GOP’s pre-Trump conservative principles. 

The exact specifics varied, but the conservative commentator Erick Erickson summed up the gist of it by writing:

It was gas prices. It was the war. It was also the corruption. The incompetence. The tariffs. The playing nice with Russia. The impression of cruelty. The overly aggressive deportations. The accidental arrests of American citizens who were Hispanic. The arrogance. The ballroom. The reflecting poll. The golf courses. The arch. The Qatari 747. The aggressive redistricting push. The threats against enemies.

There was also Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), who criticized “a hastily executed war, headline after headline of scandals, a ballooning $40 trillion debt, and unpredictable tariffs” while saying it was “time for Republicans to return to the principled conservative values that once defined us—and that we’ve steadily abandoned over the last decade.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a past and perhaps future Republican presidential candidate, had some pointed criticisms for the Trump administration even before the results were in. This week, he said that in addition to failures on affordability and the Iran war being a “big, big drag,” the administration’s aggressive approach to immigration under former Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem had created “unnecessary” conflicts. 

But DeSantis also emphasized another issue: corruption.“This swamp here is the worst it’s ever been,” he said. “Look at the amount of money these people are making, who are in the administration,” he went on, specifically calling out Trump lawyer Alina Habba for reportedly getting a $10 million a year contract while advising the Justice Department.

Then on Wednesday, DeSantis gave a lengthy press conference in which he portrayed the results as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans.” Again, he cited the cost of living and corruption, and said that he himself does not trade any stocks while he’s in elected office.

What can Republicans do about the economy?

There was widespread agreement on the right that Trump had failed to address voters’ concerns about affordability and high prices.

There was much less agreement on why, exactly, Trump had failed on the economy — and what Republicans should do instead.

To the GOP’s free market faction, Trump had blundered with his tariffs, which, in addition to being handled chaotically, helped drive prices up. Curtis, the senator from Utah, mentioned tariffs and a failure to address the debt as major errors from the administration.

Those sympathetic to the populist right were more reluctant to blame the tariffs per se. Gidurksy told me that “the tariffs didn’t do what the anti-tariff audience said they were going to do” — that they did not cause economic catastrophe or raise prices as much as economists had predicted. 

Indeed, beyond the tariffs, many on the populist right believe that the Trump administration’s true failure was not delivering on their economic populist rhetoric. For instance, Trump’s biggest legislative accomplishment — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — was mostly orthodox conservative Republican policy, focused on cutting taxes (particularly for the wealthy) and paying for it by slashing Medicaid and SNAP benefits.

But outside a couple of working-class flourishes, like exempting tips from taxes, it did little to address the broader affordability problem. Gidursky told me that the administration’s most acute problem was that gas prices, interest rates, and health insurance premiums kept getting more expensive, and the administration simply didn’t manage to address that.

“Life is too expensive,” right-wing commentator Benny Johnson posted on X. “Especially for young people. This is a crisis. Communists will win on the ‘affordability’ question if we don’t end the war and fix prices.”

Still, coming up with an agenda that can actually address those voter concerns is more challenging, especially with the deficits and inflation concerns potentially constraining both parties from considering major new tax cuts and benefits. And making major long-term headway on spending cuts would likely require looking at programs like Medicare and Social Security that voters punished Republicans in the past for trying to remake, and that Trump moved the GOP away from considering touching. This tension between offering voters more direct help or retreating to austerity is likely to loom over the 2028 presidential campaign. But for now, Republicans are still struggling to figure out a clear agenda on the economy that resonates with voters. 

“Voters are signaling they are unhappy with the economy, the Iran War, and corruption,” the influential right-wing activist Christopher Rufo posted. “It’s about policy.”

When Abdul El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic nomination for an open Senate seat in Michigan back in August, it teed up the first true swing-state test for the party’s left faction, which had largely been confined to representing progressive enclaves in the Trump era.

They just passed that test. El-Sayed defeated GOP nominee Mike Rogers, and he’ll be the newest US senator from Michigan in January. 

His win is historic; El-Sayed will be the first Muslim to serve in the Senate. It also may be just the start: His charisma and ability to go viral have already made him a political star; some of his fans are already anticipating a future presidential run.

Yet his path to this point was far from easy. El-Sayed battled the Democratic establishment-backed US Rep. Haley Stevens in one of the most intense and bitter Democratic primaries in the country, and had to beat back an astonishing $30 million in AIPAC spending on Stevens’s behalf.

Then, in the general election, El-Sayed faced Islamophobic attacks from Republicans like President Donald Trump, who called him a “jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member” who would create “a nightmare of violence and terror” in the US. 

El-Sayed also maintained tense relations with some pro-Israel Democrats, who argued he was slow to criticize antisemitic rhetoric from his own supporters. These tensions came to a boiling point just two days before the election, when his primary rival Stevens stunned the political world by endorsing Rogers, saying El-Sayed hadn’t done enough to condemn an ad by a super PAC not affiliated with his campaign that had been criticized as antisemitic.

Other Jewish Democrats, however, supported and defended El-Sayed — including Sen. Bernie Sanders, a longtime supporter of his.

Indeed, El-Sayed’s political platform can be said to epitomize the next generation of the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. Domestically, he attacks billionaire and corporate influence, backs sweeping social welfare spending like Medicare-for-all, and wants to abolish ICE. And abroad, El-Sayed supports a full arms embargo on Israel.

Platforms like El-Sayed’s had already triumphed in several deep blue states and cities. But Michigan is a classic swing state that voted for Trump in two of the past three presidential elections. So El-Sayed’s nomination tested whether a progressive as bold as he could actually win in this environment amid fears from many Democrats — exacerbated by Trump’s 2024 win — that the party urgently needed to move in the opposite direction. And despite the last-minute twist with Stevens endorsing his opponent, El-Sayed did win.

He was, of course, helped by a nationwide blue wave that benefited Democrats across the country. Critics argued that, considering that wave, El-Sayed’s performance was not all that impressive, with his winning margin likely falling short of other candidates in (until now) redder territory.

But whatever the margin, a win is a win, and El-Sayed is now headed to the Senate as one of the most high-profile and influential figures in movement politics.

How El-Sayed won

El-Sayed’s victory has been a long time coming. A Rhodes scholar, epidemiology professor, and public health administrator, he first ran for office in the 2018 cycle, in the Democratic primary for Michigan governor. He ran as a champion of Medicare-for-all, and earned the support of Sanders and new Democratic star US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

He lost that primary campaign to Gretchen Whitmer, who went on to win two terms as governor.  But in the years after that campaign, El-Sayed continued to be an influential voice on the left, hosting podcasts and serving as health director of Wayne County (the Michigan county that includes Detroit).

After the Gaza war broke out, El-Sayed became deeply disillusioned with the Biden administration’s support for Israel, accusing Benjamin Netanyahu’s government of perpetrating a genocide. He voted “uncommitted” in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary in Michigan, saying he wanted to send a message to Biden that his vote was in jeopardy for the fall. (El-Sayed ended up endorsing Kamala Harris shortly after Biden quit his reelection campaign.)

But when two-term Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) unexpectedly announced that he wouldn’t run for reelection in January, El-Sayed decided to throw his hat into the open seat race to succeed him. A three-way contest between El-Sayed, Stevens, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow took shape; El-Sayed was the candidate favored by the left, Stevens was backed by the Democratic establishment, and McMorrow tried unsuccessfully to find a middle ground between them.

El-Sayed’s candidacy quickly gained nationwide attention as one of several primaries in which left insurgents were battling establishment favorites, emphasizing their criticisms of Israel, hostility to big money corporate donors, and support of Medicare-for-all. Indeed, once Graham Platner quit Maine’s Senate race in July, El-Sayed arguably became the highest-profile left candidate in the country.

In part, that was because AIPAC was showering those tens of millions of dollars on his race. The money was intended to squelch El-Sayed’s candidacy and to back Stevens — a staunch supporter of Israel in the House. But the spending may have backfired by seeming to confirm El-Sayed’s narrative that big money was arrayed against him. 

The primary ended up being a squeaker, with El-Sayed beating Stevens by less than 1 percentage point. In the general election, however, he won the backing of top Democrats like the party’s Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, as well as Harris and former President Barack Obama.

There were, however, continuing tensions with Stevens, who had initially endorsed El-Sayed after the primary, but later voiced concerns that he wasn’t doing enough to denounce anti-Semitism from his supporters — and threw her support to Rogers.

But, up against Rogers — a former member of Congress and onetime FBI agent who narrowly lost a race for Michigan’s other US Senate seat in 2024, and who had staunchly defended Trump until belatedly seeking some distance in the campaign’s final weeks — El-Sayed emerged triumphant, boosted by the nationwide Democratic wave.

Beyond making El-Sayed the first Muslim US senator, his victory is significant for another reason: Sanders, the Senate’s left champion, is 85 years old. Now, when it comes time for him to pass the torch to the next generation, he’ll have at least one longtime ally ready to take it.

Voters just ushered the United States into the post-Trump era.

The ballots are still being counted, and key races are still being called, but here’s the short version of the midterm election: It’s a blue tsunami.

Democrats looked set to take full control of Congress; they flipped crucial seats and won state-level offices where they’d barely been expected to compete. If anything, their performance was significantly stronger than expected — even after weeks of polls showing the party surging, and President Donald Trump’s approval cratering, and mounting outrage over gas prices, the war in Iran, healthcare, and corruption. It’s quite possible this is the biggest midterm wave since Watergate, and it appears likely to send large Democratic majorities to Congress.

What happens now? The historic shift that voters signaled Tuesday goes beyond just the raw numbers. Simply put, Americans are waking up in a different country today — one in which voters have decisively repudiated Trump’s party and opened up a new era of American politics.

Democrats won back groups they lost in 2024, like Latino voters, and made previously unheard-of incursions into MAGA territory, including rural and working-class white communities. Democrats even won the governorship of Texas — Texas!

One potential takeaway is that a new version of a Democratic coalition could be emerging. A more realistic way to see this, though, might be as the latest and loudest affirmation that the politics of the post-Trump era remain highly unsettled, with no voting group or state to be taken for granted by either party. 

The incoming class of leaders is a diverse portrait of America in the 21st century, and a picture of the kind of nation that Trump has explicitly been trying to roll back. Georgia elected the nation’s first Black woman governor; New Hampshire will send the first openly gay man to the Senate; and (as of this writing) the would-be first Muslim senator was leading in Michigan. In Kansas, a megachurch pastor won evangelical voters to the Democratic ticket, sending the state’s first non-Republican to the Senate in nearly a century. In an election where the closing Republican arguments often relied on tribal fears around religion, country of origin, masculinity, and gender identity, the results were a loud rebuke to those impulses. 

Taken together, the night was also, as election analyst Sean Trende put it, “a complete collapse of the Republican coalition.” Democrats will now have a chance to carry out the mandate they’ve been handed — on affordability, corruption, and foreign policy — and convince voters they can still be trusted with greater power in 2028 and beyond. How Trump responds, and the Republicans who must now balance their loyalty to a vengeful 80-year-old lame duck against a partywide emergency heading into the presidential cycle, will be one of the defining stories of the rest of his term. 

Here’s the story of the historic shift so far, and what it will mean for the country going forward.

The House: Democrats are poised to take control in a major way

Many of the Democrats’ newly won House seats could be hard for the party to defend in future elections, but for now the results could have major implications for how the chamber governs.

Both Democrats and Republicans have struggled with narrow majorities in recent years, in which a small handful of members can threaten to withhold their votes and tank legislation or procedural votes. The new Democratic majority is big enough to avoid that problem in the next session. But it also might diminish the influence of the energetic new progressive wing, since their votes would not necessarily be crucial to pass certain measures. 

From the very first votes counted in Indiana and Kentucky, in districts that Trump had won by double digits in 2024, it was clear that Republicans’ small House of Representatives majority would likely soon be washed out by a blue wave. But as the night went on, the size of the wave became more and more clear. Democrats were flipping Republican seats across the country, without any particular geographic or regional pattern to speak of. 

They flipped Republican-held seats in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and North Carolina. They looked favored to win more in Arizona, Michigan, Iowa, and Virginia. 

Democratic House challengers with mainstream political experience, like Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti (PA-8), won. So did Democrats with military experience, like Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Bennett (NJ-7). And so did Democrats with more against-the-grain backgrounds, like farmer Jamie Ager (NC-11).

The exact size of the Democratic majority wasn’t immediately clear as races remain uncalled, but forecasts on Tuesday night suggested it would likely be enormous — something like a 60-vote edge over the GOP in the chamber.

More votes means more leeway for leadership, which could perhaps give the party’s growing progressive faction, or a soon-to-be considerable moderate wing, less leverage to make demands and more freedom to vote “no” when their conscience or local politics calls for it. 

The Senate: Some very weak Republican candidates helped Democrats beat all expectations

Control of the Senate will be hugely important in shaping the final two years of Trump’s presidency — because a Democratic majority would make it much harder for him to confirm controversial nominees to administration positions. It would also likely make it impossible for him to confirm a new Supreme Court justice, should a vacancy arise.

Furthermore, if Democrats hope to achieve their ambitions next time they control the presidency (which they hope will be in 2029), they’d have to start building a Senate majority now — only a third of the chamber is up in each cycle.

The problem for Democrats was that political analysts had long believed the Senate map they faced this year would be forbiddingly difficult. They’d have to hold their own seats, including contests in swing states like Georgia and Michigan. 

To win a majority, though, Democrats then had to pick off at least four Republican seats, and some of those would have to be in deep red territory, which meant breaking into states Trump won big, such as Ohio and Texas.

In doing this, they didn’t just benefit from a blue wave. They also got help of a kind from a surprising source: Trump, whose choices and actions often seemed designed to put safe GOP-held seats at risk. 

Trump’s attacks on Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) spurred the veteran legislator to retire. Trump backed a primary challenge to Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) that resulted in a flawed and scandal-plagued candidate, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, becoming the GOP nominee. And when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died suddenly in July, Trump decided to appoint his sister Darline, a political neophyte, to his seat.

On Tuesday, Republicans lost all three of those races. In North Carolina, the state’s popular Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, easily triumphed over former RNC chair Michael Whatley. In Texas, 37-year-old state Rep. James Talarico became a nationally viral phenomenon with his faith-inflected message and defeated Paxton soundly. And in South Carolina, a pediatrician named Annie Andrews defeated Darline Graham in one of the night’s most shocking results. 

But the GOP’s Senate woes were broader. In Ohio, a state Trump won three times, former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) defeated Sen. Jon Husted (R), who Trump had appointed to fill JD Vance’s Senate seat once Vance became vice president. In Iowa, Republicans had viewed their candidate for the open Senate seat, Rep. Ashley Hinson, as one of the stars of the cycle, believing she did everything right. It wasn’t enough. She, too, went down to defeat, to state Rep. Josh Turek (D). In Maine, Sen. Susan Collins (R), who had long defied political gravity, finally lost to former state Sen. Troy Jackson (D).

And yet another shocker ensued in Kansas, a state that has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. Methodist megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton (D) led Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), a one-term incumbent whose campaign was dogged by reports that, back when he was a doctor, he’d sued patients for unpaid bills.

All in all, depending on how uncalled races in Mississippi and Alaska turn out, Democrats could end up with somewhere around 55 Senate seats — an impressive majority, particularly in a year when they weren’t expected to come anywhere close to that.

Governors: Democrats get their chance to lead

Even with significant majorities, Democrats will be limited in how much they can check Trump and enact their agenda in Congress. 

But at the state level, Democrats won major gubernatorial victories around the country, giving them an immediate opportunity to pursue policies that could directly affect hundreds of millions of Americans — including in states that they haven’t led in decades. 

In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms is set to become the first Black governor, and the first Black woman to govern any state in America, after defeating Republican businessman Rick Jackson. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa rode a backlash over data centers to beat Greg Abbott, long considered one of the most politically successful and influential conservative governors in the country.

In Iowa, Democratic state auditor Rob Sand, who campaigned as a pragmatist, won the governorship. And in Ohio, Democratic public health expert Amy Acton overcame a last-ditch ad from Republican Vivek Ramaswamy that featured her own mother — who lost custody of a then-12-year-old Acton after her husband was indicted for sexual abuse — to handily win her election. 

A bright spot for Republicans is Florida, where Rep. Byron Donalds overcame a surprisingly tough race against Democrat David Jolly and is set to become the state’s first Black governor. 

Latino voters gave Democrats a second chance

Underlying some of the night’s most surprising results were powerful demographic currents — for the GOP, not unlike a wave quickly pulling back from the beach. Trump had shocked Democrats over the last 10 years by making steady gains with Latino voters, first with conservative-leaning Cuban Americans in Florida, and then in 2024 with Mexican American and Puerto Rican voters around the country moving right over concerns about inflation and border security. 

But Trump’s economic mismanagement and aggressive deployment of ICE helped spur a backlash from early on in his second term that culminated in a massive swing back toward Democrats in key races. From South and Central Florida to rural Kansas to the Rio Grande Valley, Latino voters again favored Democrats, helping power candidates to big wins.

Nowhere was the impact greater than in Texas, where exit polls found Talarico won 64 percent of Latino voters in his race against Paxton, giving Democrats a statewide victory after decades of failure. Trump had won 55 percent of the Latino vote just two years earlier. 

The gerrymanders didn’t work. In fact, they sparked a backlash.

Republicans, egged on by Trump, had a last-ditch plan to save the House: Break from the usual once-a-decade redistricting process and gerrymander seats wherever state Republicans had the ability to do so. They got an added boost from the Supreme Court, which overturned decades of Voting Rights Act protections for minority-majority districts in its Louisiana v. Callais decision. 

It didn’t work. While the new maps gave Republicans an advantage on paper, the scale of the blue wave was so big that it quickly overpowered it. In Florida, Democrats herded into Trumpier districts appeared to all survive their contests. And in North Carolina, the situation was even worse for Republicans, with the former state house speaker who masterminded the new maps, Tim Moore, trailing in his own congressional run with nearly all votes counted in what was expected to be a solidly Republican seat. 

It may have backfired in ways that went beyond the House results. There was a massive surge in Black turnout across the South, where voting rights have long been a touchstone issue, that spilled into statewide races. Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates not only won by wide margins in Georgia and North Carolina, but put up shockingly competitive fights in Mississippi and Louisiana Senate races that only came on the national radar late in the cycle.  

The most important takeaway: Voters are really, really, really mad 

Americans chose to overlook some pretty glaring concerns with Trump when they sent him back to office in 2024, but they did so with a clear mandate: Get prices down, secure the border, and bring a positive resolution to conflicts abroad. 

It’s clear now he blew it, and they aren’t happy. 

The scale of voter outrage was the story of the night, just two years after Democrats faced its wrath and arguably far more intense this time. Sixty-two percent of voters in preliminary exit polls disapproved of his job as president, 53 percent of them strongly; 62 percent said he prioritized his own interests more than the country’s; 65 percent believed he had made the economy worse; and 44 percent said their own financial situation had worsened since his election.

It’s a complete loss of confidence, and a sharp contrast to his — in comparison now, modest — rebuke in the 2018 and even 2020 election, when voters still credited his economic stewardship even as they rebelled against his personal behavior and broader agenda. 

Both parties now know just how poisonous the current Trump brand is. The question is whether Democrats can offer a compelling alternative vision now and — above all, after years of anti-incumbent sentiment — prove they can deliver tangible results. Even on a historic night, a majority of voters told pollsters they held an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. 

The outcome of the midterm elections is perhaps the single most important factor in determining how the final two years of Donald Trump’s presidency will play out — and what impact it will have on people’s lives in the United States and around the world.

If Republicans defy the polls and hold both chambers, Trump would have the chance to pass more sweeping legislation on party-line votes, confirm more loyalist nominees to important positions, and continue remaking the judiciary, all while keeping oversight to a minimum. Democrats would have limited tools to object, Republicans would keep a free hand to run Washington, and Trump would be able to cite the results to maintain party loyalty. Practically and politically, the next two years would look a lot like the last two.

Conversely, the better Democrats do, the more power they will have to block Trump’s agenda, check his power, investigate his administration, and advance priorities of their own on issues like the economy, healthcare, the war in Iran, immigration enforcement, corruption, and more. But they’d also face significant limits on their power, from the Senate filibuster and Trump’s veto pen to White House tactics that could delay or derail oversight. 

So what are the real midterm stakes? Which moves from a Democratic Congress would be symbolic and which could have an immediate impact on real-world outcomes? And what might prevent them from achieving their goals?  

To get a better sense of what Democrats could actually do if they won power in Congress, I spoke to current and former congressional aides as well as plugged-in outside experts. They generally painted a picture of a grim slog akin to trench warfare. Some believed the expectations of the Democratic base would far outpace what could realistically be achieved, and that frustration and disappointment were inevitable.

But some also expressed surprising optimism that, if Democrats played their cards right, they could score real and meaningful accomplishments — in driving policy change, in bringing wrongdoing to light, and in laying the groundwork for far more ambitious goals in the near future.

Whether they can do this will depend in part on politics and messaging, but also on how they use the formal tools that would be newly available to them with a congressional takeover: legislation, investigations, and — in the case of a Senate win — the confirmation process.

Legislation: How new Democratic majorities could legislate in a way that actually matters

House Democratic leaders are proudly talking about the bills they plan to quickly pass if they win the majority on topics such as healthcare, tariffs, and the war in Iran.

But the reality is that, so long as the Senate’s 60-vote requirement for ordinary legislation to advance remains in place, such bills aren’t going to make it to Trump’s desk without winning significant Republican support. (And even if they do make it to Trump’s desk — say, via the special budget reconciliation process — he could veto them.)

Instead, for Democratic majorities to do meaningful things with legislation under Trump, they’d likely have to pursue one of the following three approaches.

1. Confrontations on the must-pass bills

Lots of bills go nowhere in Congress, but some are viewed as “must-pass.” Some have practical consequences for failure after a certain deadline: If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the country will default on its debt with potentially catastrophic consequences; if government funding bills aren’t passed, the government will shut down, as it did for 43 days last year.

Often, if one or both chambers flip in the midterms, a bold new majority tries to use one of these bills to make policy demands on the president, believing the bill’s “must-pass” status gives them leverage. Then, a showdown unfolds, as both sides play chicken before a looming deadline.

So if Democrats win the majority, they will have to decide: Which much-pass bills do they want to make demands over, what do they want to demand, and just how hard do they want to demand it?

Experts I spoke to were skeptical Democrats would push too hard on the debt ceiling. “The Democratic position in the past has been, ‘We don’t threaten the full faith and credit of the US government,’” Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic-aligned think tank, told me. The consequences of default seem, to them, too devastating to risk, and they’re historically reluctant to legitimize Republicans’ use of the debt ceiling as a weapon under Democratic presidents.

Some sort of fight seems likelier on government funding — after all, even while in the Senate minority, Democrats used the filibuster to shut down the government late last year, demanding that Republicans extend subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. They could run that playbook again, saying they won’t fund the government unless Trump agrees to their demands on healthcare (such as rolling back Trump’s Medicaid cuts), ICE (where they’ve demanded new accountability measures and restrictions), or other issues. 

Many are skeptical that Democrats will successfully strong-arm Trump into making concessions in this way. When last year’s shutdown stretched for over a month and its consequences — for unpaid government workers and recipients of government benefits — grew more acute, enough Democrats eventually gave in even as they seemed to have the upper hand in polling. But it’s likely that the party’s base will urge them to try again — and if they do, their theory that they have more leverage over Trump this time will be tested.

2. Bipartisanship

The alternative to trying to shake the president down is to actually try and get Republican votes — passing measures with bipartisan support. 

And don’t scoff — though partisan battles will get all the headlines, there’s still a surprising amount of bipartisan action on substantive issues in Congress. During the final two years of Trump’s first term, bipartisan bills on Covid relief, energy, and trade passed. Under President Joe Biden, bills on infrastructure, semiconductors, same-sex marriage, and presidential election reform won bipartisan support. And this year, a bipartisan housing bill became law, and Congress hopes to pass an electricity permitting reform deal before the end of the year, too.

Some of these bills were standalone; others became law because they were attached to must-pass bills, such as government funding, or the National Defense Authorization Act. That’s a potential way to get something Trump doesn’t like into law — get enough Republicans on board, and hope that either Trump will conclude it’s too much of a headache to veto it, or that support in Congress is so strong his veto will fail (two-thirds of both the House and Senate can vote to override a veto). There’s precedent from this year’s bipartisan housing bill, which Trump allowed to become law without his signature.

Matthew Fiedler, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me that Democrats could try to add riders on appropriations bills that block certain controversial Trump administration regulatory actions. “That feels potentially achievable to me,” he said. But, to get those bills to Trump’s desk, they’d have to get the consent of Republican negotiators in Congress. 

Bipartisanship can be achieved through working with the other party and compromising with them. But another route is through political pressure — say, if a proposal is so popular and politically potent that the other party feels they have no choice but to go along. “Bipartisanship is not always the signal of a kumbaya environment,” Charlie Ellsworth, a former aide to Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer who currently advises the advocacy group Public Citizen, told me. 

That’s what happened with Rep. Ro Khanna’s (D-CA) bill to release the Epstein files last year; GOP leaders tried to hold it back, but the dam broke and it eventually passed with overwhelming majorities in both chambers. If Democrats win the majority, they could similarly put pressure on the GOP by forcing votes on issues where the party might be divided — like tariffs, or the Iran war.

3. Groundwork for the future 

The other route for legislating to really matter in the next session is more forward-looking — Democrats could be crafting bills that they truly intend to pass in 2029, if a new Democratic president is sworn in and the party holds Congress.

The idea here is that the next president may have a limited window to pass major legislation, so he or she will be looking for ideas to take off the shelf. And the more serious legislative work that gets done in this Congress, and the more Democratic consensus is built ahead of time, the better-prepared certain bills could be for that opportunity.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, for instance, included several provisions that House Republicans had crafted during the Biden administration. Similarly, Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act included prescription drug provisions that House Democrats had crafted during Trump’s first term.

“There’s a lot of consequential prep work that can happen during these time periods, even when there’s not a real prospect of the legislation becoming law in this term,” Fiedler said. 

The flipside is that if Democrats flock to unworkable ideas in this Congress in order to appease an interest group or win a messaging fight, they may feel pressure to follow through in the next Congress — and problems may result. Take the first year of Trump’s first term, when he and the GOP felt compelled to deliver on their longtime vow to repeal Obamacare — but since they hadn’t come up with a specific proposal to do it that was politically viable and hadn’t seriously grappled with the many potential downsides for patients, the effort ended in failure.

“Democrats need to be cognizant that if you’re going to do a test run and draw a contrast between what Democrats are for and what the president opposes, you should expect the American people will ask you to deliver when you have the power,” Ellsworth said.

Investigations: How Democrats could think creatively to get around Trump’s stonewalling

Democrats say it’s urgently necessary to investigate a plethora of Trump administration scandals, from the Trump family’s crypto investments to Trump’s granting of pardons to his fundraising for the White House ballroom construction to aggressive actions by ICE, and much more.  

Winning control of either the House or Senate is crucial to these efforts because it would give them a hugely important investigative tool: congressional subpoena power. Democratic majorities would be newly able to issue legally binding requests for documents and testimony. (Currently, stuck in the minority in both chambers, all they can do is ask nicely.)

Why do investigations matter? One goal can simply be to unearth new facts about what’s been going on inside the executive branch, which can help determine their next steps. A second can be to spur criminal investigations, though this seems unlikely while Trump is in power, given his co-option of the Justice Department. 

A third can be to pave the way to impeachment if significant wrongdoing is exposed. That said, in contrast to Trump’s first term, Democrats sound far less eager to impeach him this time around, though some have floated potentially impeaching Cabinet officials. 

Finally, a fourth goal can be to use hearings and other activity to focus the press and public’s attention on certain topics and potentially build momentum for action in response. Many Democrats feel that their 2021-2022 House January 6 committee, which featured dramatic public testimony and audiovisual presentations, was an innovator here.

The catch is that the Trump administration could — and likely will — just refuse to comply with subpoenas aimed at officials or agencies. In Trump’s first term, he vowed to fight “all the subpoenas” from House Democrats, and for the most part the administration followed through, declining to cooperate or asserting executive privilege. 

If faced with this stonewalling, the usual next step is for Democrats to sue, and hope courts will compel compliance from the administration. The perennial problem, though, is that such lawsuits often take a long time to resolve — and could well stretch on into the next president’s term.

“It is unfortunately possible for the recipients of congressional subpoenas to resist and drag out these proceedings,” Tim Heaphy, the former chief investigative counsel for the House January 6 committee, told me. “And lawyers knew that, so they could run out the clock.”

Anticipating this resistance, Democrats have floated that they may focus their subpoenas on people or companies outside the government who they think might have information about executive branch malfeasance. 

These potential subpoena targets include donors to the White House ballroom construction effort, investors doing business with the Trump family, private companies that have gotten federal contracts, lobbyists that have helped secure presidential pardons for their clients, and law firms that made deals with the Trump administration.

The administration may still at least attempt to cite executive privilege to try to quash these subpoenas. “I’ve heard that there’s already some discussion about whether the executive branch would have standing to object to a subpoena handed to a government contractor,” Heaphy said. Democrats also hope to get cooperation from whistleblowers and government officials who actually want to share what they know.

But some have called on congressional Democrats to do more to try and ensure there will be consequences for defying subpoenas. For instance, Congress could theoretically assert a power known as “inherent contempt,” ordering noncompliant officials to be detained (or, potentially, fined); this power has not been invoked since 1934. If they tried to use this power against administration officials, a major constitutional battle would ensue. Others have suggested the less dramatic approach of making government funding contingent on agencies’ or officials’ cooperation with investigations.

Josh Chafetz, a Georgetown law professor and an expert on congressional power, told me that, to succeed with investigations, Democrats would have to think creatively. Simply litigating the Trump administration’s defiance, he said, was “a fool’s errand.” He added: “If they follow that playbook, they’re going to get the same results — which is, nothing will happen in those investigations over the next two years.”

Confirmations: A Senate takeover would have big stakes for how the Trump administration functions

If Democrats manage to win the Senate, there will be another major consequence — Trump will need their approval to confirm judges and many administration officials. 

Trump has nominated several extreme or controversial figures to his administration; and, because the GOP Senate majority was inclined to defer to their party’s president, the vast majority of them were confirmed. (Sorry, Matt Gaetz.) These nominations can have very real consequences: if Trump had selected someone other than Pete Hegseth, who was only one vote away from not being confirmed, as defense secretary, perhaps he would have heard more warnings about the risks of war with Iran.

A Democratic Senate would be far more skeptical of confirming particularly controversial nominees for administration positions. But more broadly than that, all Trump nominees would face tougher scrutiny. “The administration’s going to find it very hard to get pretty much anyone confirmed,” Chafetz said.

The official line from Democratic leadership is that they will be happy to confirm qualified Trump nominees — but that Trump is simply nominating unqualified people. “If the nominees are as crappy as his present ones, very few of them are going to get through,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — the likely majority leader, if Democrats win the Senate — told Semafor last month.

A confirmation blockade wouldn’t lead to an urgent crisis, since Trump’s administration is full of confirmed appointees already. But as various officials leave the government — voluntarily or involuntarily — Trump will want replacements. Democrats will have to weigh just how far they want to go in slow-walking or delaying Trump nominees. Some Democrats will also want to use nominees as bargaining chips in their dealings with the administration, while others may think obstructing noncontroversial nominees is antithetical to how government should function.

Trump would likely respond by trying to rely more on “acting” appointees for key roles, as he did in his first term —  but there are legal limits on who can be appointed to an acting role, and how long they can serve there. 

Judicial nominees, meanwhile, serve for life if they’re confirmed. So a Democratic Senate majority would be most skeptical about confirming Trump’s judge picks, particularly at the circuit court level and certainly at the Supreme Court should any vacancy arise. 

For the Supreme Court, this is most consequential; conservatives currently have a 6-3 majority. But there are four Supreme Court justices in their 70s, with the oldest being 78-year-old Clarence Thomas and 76-year-old Samuel Alito. 

If Republicans hold the Senate, either could retire confident a right-wing successor would be confirmed. But if Democrats take over the chamber, they’d likely follow the precedent set by the GOP when they refused to even consider President Barack Obama’s nominee for the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat in 2016 — holding it open for the next president to fill.

That said, there may be a brief window for Republicans to try to confirm a justice in the final session before the new Senate majority is sworn in, if one or more do decide to step down.

The political stakes: In Trump’s last two years in power, will he be hemmed in — or emboldened?

Finally, looming above and affecting all these issues, is the political reality that the midterms will deliver what’s taken as a verdict on Trump’s second term so far. 

If Democrats’ win is huge, Republicans will engage in a frenzy of finger-pointing and blame-casting as the party grapples with what comes next for them after the Trump era, especially with a presidential contest starting up in which he won’t be on the ballot. Practically, Trump will be more hemmed in, and though he will surely stoke further controversies and crises, he will be a weakened figure facing constant challenges from Congress.

Conversely, if Trump’s GOP defies the polls and holds both chambers, he’ll likely treat it as a complete vindication of his second-term approach — and feel emboldened to plunge ahead on his most controversial agenda items, from ICE crackdowns to the Iran war, confident Congress will do little to stop him and the next Republican nominee (whether Vice President JD Vance or someone else) will take his side.

If there is a Democratic wave in next week’s midterm elections, one of the biggest reasons for that will be young voters.

While voters of all ages have soured on President Donald Trump and the Republican Party since his 2024 victory, polls show that the decline has been particularly pronounced among the young people who’d backed him in surprising numbers just two years ago. That election result prompted endless conversation about a “vibe shift” among Gen Z, and whether younger voters had turned against “woke” progressives, become radicalized by “manosphere” podcasts and TikTok algorithms, or lashed out against Biden-era gerontocracy.

But the story looks very different heading into November. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found that, of people aged 19–34 who voted for Trump over Kamala Harris, only 49 percent approve of his job performance as president. (In contrast, among Trump 2024 voters aged 50 and above, about 75 percent still approve of him.)

Pew also found earlier this year that partisan identification among young adults has shifted — or, rather, reverted. 

In 2022 and 2023, Democrats had a 17-point advantage among adults aged 18–29 — 55 percent of them said they were Democrats or leaned toward Democrats, while just 38 percent said they were Republican or leaned toward the GOP.

In 2024, that gap closed, and Republicans actually took a slight edge, 47 percent to Democrats’ 46 percent. But now, in 2026, Democrats are back to a 16-point advantage, getting 54 percent of young voters compared to the GOP’s 38 percent.

And it isn’t just that fewer young people are saying they’re Republican. Those who remain Republican are also saying they’re less likely to vote this year.

According to the Harvard Youth Poll released last week, 50 percent of Democrats aged 18–29 say they’ll definitely vote, but only 34 percent of Republicans in that age range say the same. That’s a 16-point partisan gap; the biggest this poll found in recent midterm cycles.

The core reasons for all this in a sense aren’t too surprising. Like older voters, young voters say they’re most concerned about issues like the cost of living, corruption in government, overseas wars, and the cost of health care.

But the swings — and the feelings of betrayal and disappointment among prior Trump supporters — have been particularly dramatic among the young, which raises the question of what about their experience and outlook is influencing their politics in particular. 

To answer that, I spoke to advocates and political consultants focused on young voters. Here’s what they see as the origins — and limits — of the coming youthquake.

How to think about the Gen Z “Trump regretters”

Rachel Janfaza, founder of the Gen Z-focused strategy firm The Up and Up, told me that we should think about young people who voted for Trump in 2024 as really three separate cohorts.

First, she said, are the “hardcore MAGA young people who still stand by the president, just like the older MAGA folks.” They supported him in 2024, and they still do.

Second, she said, are the young people who “are very much on the America First train” but who “resent the fact that Trump’s basically become part of the establishment, whether it comes to building a White House ballroom, or the Epstein files, or starting new wars” — and have moved away from him as a result.

These young people are much less likely to move toward Democrats, but many of them could be disillusioned and not bother to vote this year.

Third, she said, is “a large cohort of young people, predominantly young men, who were never hardcore MAGA, but who voted for Trump in 2024 because they were frustrated by the political conversation at large.” 

“They were frustrated by their economic situation; they were tired of political correctness and the pendulum swinging too far in the direction of ‘wokeness,’” Janfaza continued. These people, she said, now feel “politically homeless.”

Tina Tang of the Democratic-aligned firm Navigator Research has conducted many focus groups interviewing young people who now regret voting for Trump. She told me that many of those “Trump regretters” said they’d initially hoped he would bring change to the political system generally, and that he’d deliver on his promises about the economy and jobs. 

“Young voters are especially worried about jobs right now,” Tang said. “That was actually one of the biggest frustrations we heard from young voters this time around: frustration with the job market. We hear a lot about how he promised a lot of things; he promised the economy was going to get better, that costs were going to come down, that there would be more jobs.”

Young people are pragmatists. They’re losing faith in the system because they think it isn’t delivering.

Several of those I interviewed also urged caution about the common trope that young people tend to be strongly progressive or liberal, a longtime assumption that led many observers to be caught off guard by their swing toward Republicans in 2024.

Indeed, the Harvard Youth poll released this week found that 25 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds thought of themselves as liberal, 23 percent as conservative, and about 46 percent as something in between.

Santiago Mayer, founder of the progressive youth-focused group Voters of Tomorrow, told me that while Gen Z voters often have liberal values and policy views, they often didn’t define politics in ideological terms: “I think for a lot of things many of us would consider progressive, for them, they are common sense, and they’re not necessarily analyzing these issues through a political lens.”

Indeed, Mayer said that while the politicians who are most appealing to young voters can vary in ideology, “the one thing they have in common is that they are very pragmatic and very practical. They are talking about how they’re going to improve things today and how they’re actually going to create material, tangible change in young people’s lives.”

Tang of Navigator Research concurred, telling me that young people are “absolutely still very skeptical of both parties.” She added: “What we hear from young people a lot is: they want to see results.”

And the results they crave are, above all, about the economy and cost of living. Janfaza told me that there’s been a longtime misconception among pundits that young voters are obsessed with identity and the culture war — but, she argues, that was never quite true, and it’s even less true now.

“Now, climate and abortion do not even make it into the top issues that young people are saying they care about,” Janfaza said. “And it doesn’t mean that they don’t care about those issues, but the economic concern just ranks much higher.”

Indeed, she believes that the “flirtation with socialism” among some young voters is really more about policies such as affordable housing, affordable health care, and affordable education — as well as a promise to break with the status quo. “That’s really what young people are hungry for.” 

Key to young people’s worldview is that they’re feeling increasingly pessimistic about that status quo. One striking finding in the Harvard Youth Poll was that, when asked whether they expected to be financially better or worse off than their parents when they reach their age, more said worse — a first-time finding for the poll.

“I think you see that in the numbers that there’s a level of nihilism amongst young voters,” Mayer said. “They’re basically giving Democrats another chance. But I worry that this is kind of our last chance to get them to believe in democracy.” 

And, he worried, if Democrats don’t deliver actual improvements to their lives, “they’ll be gone for good.”

The harrowing allegations of rape at a Cornell University fraternity have been rippling out in both New York state and national politics.

Democrats have tended to voice sympathy with the accuser, saying that they stand with her and other victims. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said there was “a culture of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia” in elite institutions across the country. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said Cornell “protected her abusers, letting them off with a slap on the wrist.” 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the accuser was “failed” by local police and county prosecutors who did not bring charges, so Hochul appointed state Attorney General Letitia James to take over the investigation. Days before that appointment, James posted on social media that “what this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable,” adding: “To her, and to all survivors: you’re not alone. We stand with you.” 

Some Republicans, meanwhile, are accusing Democrats of rushing to judgment. Saritha Komatireddy, who is running for attorney general of New York against James, said in a debate that James had “screwed this one up by prejudging it.” The investigation, Komatireddy said, “requires someone who approaches the case with fairness, impartiality and integrity.” And right-wing commentators like Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro have questioned the accuser’s story.

But beyond the procedural fight over this particular investigation, many Democrats have also called for changing the law to make cases like it that involve drugs or alcohol easier to prosecute in general. 

This might seem like a clean issue for the party, in line with prior progressive efforts to crack down on sexual assault via Title IX and expanding statute of limitations laws. 

However, it’s not so simple: According to my conversations with experts and advocates involved in these reform conversations, this is where the Democratic unity begins to fray, because of a divide between two key parts of the progressive coalition. 

The impulse to create stronger protections for victims has crashed into the left’s longstanding suspicion of the criminal justice system. And as a result, a coherent policy response has been hard to craft — and may end up being impossible to get agreement on.

On one side are advocacy groups for women and for victims of rape or sexual assault. They argue that current law — in New York and other states — makes it far too difficult to successfully prosecute perpetrators, and that it should be changed. They’ve advocated for closing what they call the “voluntary intoxication loophole,” which they say makes it harder to prosecute abusers of victims who have willingly consumed drugs or alcohol.

On the other side are various progressive or left constituencies that are deeply skeptical of the criminal justice system. These constituencies — which include key figures in New York’s Black political establishment, public defenders, supporters of criminal justice reform, and members of the Democratic Socialists of America — are united by a shared antipathy to mass incarceration and what they see as disproportionate police targeting of minority communities. 

The former camp argues that false rape and sexual assault allegations are vanishingly rare, that these crimes are hugely underpunished, and that the law needs to be updated to make these prosecutions easier. But the latter camp argues that Black and other nonwhite men are often falsely accused, and that it would be unwise to hand prosecutors another tool they could use to put men in jail in cases where ascertaining consent is more difficult.

It’s a fraught debate. Modern-day progressives have strongly backed the Me Too movement as well as campaigns for racial justice and criminal justice reform. Progressives want to be on the side of victims against the privileged and powerful — but sometimes, they have different ideas about who falls into which category.

The legal issues around “voluntary intoxication” and rape charges, explained

The current controversy in New York focuses on efforts to close what advocates call the “voluntary intoxication loophole” in rape and sexual assault law.

Every state says rape is a crime. Every state says it’s a crime to have sex with someone who is unconscious. And every state says it’s a crime to have sex with someone who is incapacitated due to unknowingly being dosed with drugs.

But what about someone who chooses to drink or take drugs, who remains conscious, and who doesn’t outright refuse consent? Should there be a standard by which the law deems that person incapable of meaningfully consenting, because they are too intoxicated? 

Many states have long had laws on the books saying yes — that someone who voluntarily drinks or does drugs can reach a state where they are too mentally impaired to consent to sex, even if they’re conscious and capable of communicating. But about half of states don’t have such a law, according to the Associated Press. And this hasn’t been an especially partisan issue to this point, with a mix of red and blue states adopting each standard.

The push to change the law in New York predates the Cornell case, and goes back to the late 2010s. At that time, the Me Too movement had put Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. in the hot seat, with advocates criticizing him for not initially prosecuting Harvey Weinstein and arguing he was soft on rape and sex crimes generally. 

In the midst of pivoting on the issue (he had Weinstein indicted in 2018), Vance claimed that, in certain of these cases, his office was hamstrung by what he called a “loophole” in New York law involving intoxication. “Prosecutors cannot bring sex crime charges in cases where the victim became voluntarily intoxicated and was unable to consent,” he wrote in a letter. So really, Vance said, it was on the legislature to change the law.

Quickly, critics argued that Vance had misstated the law, saying it was not actually true that a loophole allowed people to rape voluntarily intoxicated New Yorkers with impunity. Vance’s office later acknowledged that his initial comments were “inartfully put.” 

The problematic cases, Vance’s team argued, were about victims who were “too intoxicated to consent” but who were also at least partially conscious and didn’t outright express their unwillingness — this, they said, was the “gap in the law.” “There’s a real problem that we have with people getting drunk and then being taken advantage of,” Vance said. 

So some Democrats and groups advocating for victims of sexual assault and rape kicked off an effort to change that law, in New York and elsewhere. Their favored bill says that lack of consent can be established if an alleged victim is “temporarily incapable of appraising or controlling their conduct” — and if the accused knew or reasonably should have known that.

Critics argue, though, that such bills go too far, and could make it easier to prosecute sexual encounters that, to the accused, seemed consensual. 

“The proposed legislation fails to provide any objective guidance about when a partner is too intoxicated to legally agree to engage in sexual conduct,” the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said in an emailed statement.

Skeptics of the bill outlined several scenarios that concerned them, including scenarios where one person seems to consent but later decides that, in retrospect, they were too intoxicated for it to have truly been consensual. 

“You get all these scenarios where two people meet up at a bar and they both become voluntarily intoxicated,” said Yung-Mi Lee, a public defender and a former president of New York’s criminal defense lawyers association. “So then, if someone later says, ‘I was voluntarily incapable of appraising my conduct, I lost my inhibitions,’ they could say, ‘You committed a rape against me.’”

To advocates for victims’ rights, these concerns are overstated. “The burden that’s placed on a victim of sexual violence is such a large burden to bear in the first place that these changes to the law are really just slightly opening the door,” Rebecca Zipkin of the advocacy group World Without Exploitation told me.

“The current situation is not working to provide justice for survivors,” Stefan Turkheimer of RAINN, a network for rape and abuse survivors, told me. “The status quo is not okay.”

Why it hasn’t passed in New York

Versions of the voluntary intoxication bill have been signed into law in recent years in Minnesota, Michigan, and Texas. The bill has also repeatedly passed the New York state Senate by overwhelming margins. But it has never been brought to a vote in the lower chamber, the New York state Assembly.

That’s because, advocates for the bill told me, they’ve faced resistance from some influential parts of the Democratic Party and progressive coalition. 

Indeed, the skeptics are said to include two factions that are often at odds: New York’s Black political establishment and the Democratic Socialists of America. 

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie controls which bills come to a vote in his chamber. He was an architect of the state’s sweeping bail reform law, a critic of what he called the existing “racist and classist system,” and has said he would be “a failure as a Black man” if he did not pass criminal justice reform. 

“It is generally known that Speaker Heastie does not believe in creating new crimes because he believes New York suffers from overincarceration,” Lizzie Asher, an advocate for changing the law and a co-founder of the Justice Without Exclusion Coalition, told me. (Heastie has said that he did not bring the bill to a vote because it lacked enough support among his chamber’s Democrats.)

Assembly member Latrice Walker is another champion of criminal justice reform; she even did a hunger strike in 2023 to protest rollbacks to the bail reform law. She spoke out about her concerns about the voluntary intoxication bill earlier this year, telling the New York Times that while she wanted survivors to get justice, she was “cautious about the creation of new laws and our duty to preserve due process protections.”

Zipkin and other advocates have also pointed to the six DSA-affiliated members of the assembly, who are associated with a general skepticism about the criminal justice system and incarceration, as a potential obstacle. None are currently listed as cosponsors of the bill. Back when Zohran Mamdani was in the assembly, he too declined to sign on, advocates noted. 

The DSA as an organization is very critical toward the police and prison system; many DSA members have called for defunding or abolishing the police in the past, and the DSA’s national platform still holds out “fully abolishing the police and prison system” as a long-term goal.

These objections may be harder to maintain amidst a wave of outrage around the Cornell case. Speaker Heastie announced he was creating a working group to reexamine the voluntary intoxication issue. The group includes Walker, whose office told Vox she would not comment on the law while “they undertake their important work.” Heastie told the group to give him recommendations by the end of the year, for consideration in New York’s 2027 legislative session. 

Is this a bigger divide among progressives?

The divide is coming into public view due to national attention on the Cornell case — but it’s long predated the current moment. 

Back in 2016, a California judge gave Brock Turner, a Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, a six-month jail sentence. Advocates for victims’ rights were furious at what they deemed an inexcusably lenient punishment; nationwide outrage and an ultimately successful campaign to recall the judge ensued. 

But some progressive supporters of criminal justice reform felt queasy about the idea of punishing a judge for not locking up a defendant long enough. Skeptical of the criminal justice system and the value of incarceration, they worried this public fury would incentivize judges to be harsher across the board.

“What ultimately will happen is that the people that we represent — people of color, minorities, the disenfranchised, the poor in our communities that make up the people ensnared in our criminal justice system — they’re the ones that are going to bear the cost of this recall,” Sajid Khan, a public defender in Santa Clara County, California, said in 2018.

In practice, these two groups of advocates have generally managed to coexist in the progressive coalition. That’s in part because the Me Too cases that get the most attention have tended to be from white-collar work environments or college campuses, rather than in the dispossessed or marginalized populations that criminal justice reformers are more typically focused on.

But some argue that there’s a more fundamental tension here. Aya Gruber, a professor at the USC Gould School of Law, has written a book arguing that feminists’ efforts to ensure rape and domestic violence are punished more severely have, in practice, ended up contributing to racist mass incarceration. 

“I just think it is a really dangerous thing to start expanding the criminal law in ways that grant all this power to prosecutors,” Gruber told me. “This idea that somehow all this cultural power is going to be used against already privileged people and thus have some sort of egalitarian aspect to it makes it very tempting. But we can identify populations that are more heavily policed, and they are generally not privileged populations.”

This past January, when the New York Times asked President Donald Trump about concerns he was blatantly intermingling his family’s business interests with the presidency, he had a pithy response. During his first term, Trump said, he learned that “nobody cared.”

But after a seemingly endless set of headlines about influence-peddling and profiteering involving Trump or people close to him, voters care now.

A Fox News poll asked voters how concerned they were about more than a dozen issues, and “corruption in government” ranked at the very top. In Gallup polling, the amount of respondents saying they thought government corruption was widespread reached 89 percent — a record high. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe Trump is using the presidency for personal profit, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, including a substantial minority of Republicans.

Even Trump seems a bit more worried than usual. Earlier this month, he distanced himself from two of his top political advisers’ foreign consulting work and threatened to fire them if it presents a conflict. Vice President JD Vance was questioned in a CBS town hall that aired Saturday about whether he’d witnessed any potential corruption in the White House (he said he hadn’t).

Accordingly, corruption has emerged as one of the key themes in Democrats’ closing midterm message, with candidates of all kinds hammering it in ads, debates, and interviews. And party strategists have landed on a particular argument about it: They want candidates to link it to Democrats’ message about voters’ other top concern, affordability. 

That is, things aren’t just expensive because of government incompetence — it’s actually powerful interests conspiring to rip you off with the help of politicians compromised by campaign donors and personal conflicts.

Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff has been hammering this theme all year, listing eye-popping improprieties among what he calls the “Mar-a-Lago Mafia,” while also arguing that pharmaceutical companies and corporate landlords are corruptly driving up your prices. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, too, regularly argues that “we have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.” In Kentucky’s Sixth District, House candidate Zach Dembo put out a reform plan while warning “corruption has cost our families, driven up our prices and enriched politicians more interested in their own bottom lines than us.”

Indeed, the Washington Post and Politico report that candidates across the country are being egged on by Democratic messaging firms urging them to make that link. One memo from the Democratic group Senate Majority PAC recommended arguing that corruption “drives up the price of everyday goods: gas, groceries, utilities, housing.” Republican strategists have also noticed voters making a connection between corruption and prices in battlegrounds like Ohio, according to CNN, suggesting their efforts may be breaking through.

“Voters care about corruption right now because it explains why their lives keep getting more expensive while the Republicans are creating a separate class of people who act as if the rules don’t apply to them,” Lauren French, a spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC, told me.

This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together?

And Hakeem Jeffries, the potential next speaker of the House, said this week that corruption would be at the top of the party’s 2027 agenda alongside affordability and healthcare: “We’re going to hold the crooks accountable who’ve visited unprecedented corruption on the American people — beginning on day one.”

This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together? If you’re already going to attack the other side for cutting taxes for big business while slashing healthcare, it’s not a huge leap to name donors or candidates who might benefit and suggest a connection.

“Voters are asking: ‘Why is life getting harder when I’m doing everything right?’” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me. “The answer is: Because somebody paid to make sure it would.”

The message is clear enough. But what would these candidates actually do about it? 

In practice, the strategy is a consequential victory for the rising progressive wing of the party, which has long argued that Americans’ economic problems are the result of corporations’ and billionaires’ greed and corruption. And it’s leading candidates to embrace many ideas that have long been pushed by progressive advocates — some of which involve “good government” reforms to block conflicts of interest, and others of which involve taking on big business and the ultra-wealthy. 

While enacting some of these ideas may be difficult, there’s little doubt they’ll be a priority in the near future — and some might even draw bipartisan support. Here’s what they’re proposing. 

Democrats’ 3-part anti-corruption agenda

Under the broad umbrella of “corruption,” we can think of three basic categories of ideas that Democrats are embracing.

The first category is: investigating Trump and other people in and around his administration for potential malfeasance. 

Congressional Democrats have said that they want to investigate the Trump family’s crypto investments, their solicitation of foreign business investments, whether Trump granted pardons in exchange for money, corruption in government contracting, the jet gifted to Trump by the government of Qatar, fundraising for the White House ballroom construction, whether Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding was funded by a Russian oligarch, and much more.

In such a target rich environment, one question will be what to prioritize. Another will be: How can these investigations best be designed to achieve actual results? But Democrats are vowing that they will use the powers of congressional majorities to investigate corruption vigorously on many fronts.

The second category: proposing broader ethics or government reforms to the system as a whole.

Progressive advocates have long had a set of favored reforms around this front, such as restricting dark money, super PAC, and corporate spending on elections, as well as requiring greater transparency around donors. Populists on both the left and right have supported banning stock trading by members of Congress. 

Mary Peltola, running for Senate in Alaska, supports term limits for members of Congress; so does Talarico. Trump’s controversial pardons have also sparked interest from some congressional Democrats in limiting the presidential pardon power, an issue that candidates like Kansas Senate nominee Adam Hamilton have also raised.

It would be challenging for a new Democratic Congress to pass any of these reforms into law (for one, they’d need Trump’s signature or a veto-proof two-thirds majority of both chambers). Furthermore, several of these ideas — particularly on campaign finance and term limits — would almost surely be deemed unconstitutional by the current Supreme Court majority. So the path to success on this front is more challenging; unless a particular idea can strike a chord and win broad bipartisan approval.

The third category, then, would be on policies that would actually seek to deliver on that promised link between affordability and corruption — policies that seek to drive down voters’ healthcare costs, utility bills, and grocery prices by challenging malfeasance from corporations or special interests.

The people in the Democratic coalition that have ideas for this are predominantly associated with the progressive wing of the party and specifically the “anti-monopoly” movement. These progressives tend to argue that behind almost every high price is a corporation trying to get one over on consumers, via price fixing or some other monopolistic behavior. 

The new messaging linkage of corruption and affordability boosts these progressives’ credibility inside the party — because it’s exactly what they’ve been saying for years. So expect new Democratic majorities to pursue investigations into and propose legislation about pharmaceutical companies, utilities, tech giants, food conglomerates, and more.

To this end, Talarico has proposed breaking up “healthcare monopolies,” Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has proposed to “break up corporate concentration in agriculture” by challenging “consolidated seed, fertilizer, and chemical market monopolies,” and Peltola wants to block “anti-competitive” mergers of grocery chains that drive up prices.

Still, there’s a debate among Democratic wonks and commentators over whether taking on corporate villains and unwinding mergers is actually likely to succeed in delivering lower prices for consumers. 

Skeptics on the party’s center left argue that broader economy-wide forces are more important than individual cases of corporate wrongdoing. They argue that President Joe Biden already pursued a strategy of “turning to the federal government’s antitrust authorities to try to tame red-hot price increases,” as the New York Times put it in December 2021, and it failed to rein in inflation.

Other policies candidates have sometimes mentioned in their corruption and affordability combo platter could more directly address costs — scrapping tariffs, undoing health care cuts — but also might add to deficits, putting more pressure on inflation, which could in turn keep interest rates higher on mortgages and auto loans. So there may not be any easy choices for Democrats if they gain control of government after 2028, and the most effective message might not necessarily be the most effective policy.

But the momentum for change is there inside the party. Just as the first post-Watergate midterms ushered in a generation of politicians determined to enact new good-government reforms, it’s likely there will be significant energy from Democrats behind both corruption and affordability issues for the foreseeable future. If they win congressional majorities, and especially the presidency in 2028, they’ll get to put their theory to the test.

Twelve years ago, Vermont Democrats tried to make their state the first in the nation to have a single-payer government-financed healthcare system — a bold experiment to push the limits of American health coverage when Obamacare was just being launched.

Their plan failed, and rebooting it became politically impossible, even in Vermont: The Democrats lost the governorship to Republican Phil Scott for what turned out to be a decade.

This year, that could finally change. A progressive political newcomer named Amanda Janoo is taking on Scott in what polls show is a tight governor’s race.

And if she wins, the state could be poised to try a whole new national experiment: One of Janoo’s central campaign promises is to create a pioneering health system where the state pays the full tab for primary and preventive care, while leaving the rest to the existing system.

Janoo’s candidacy is an example of the policy experiments that are becoming possible nationwide in a projected “blue wave” year, when Democrats could sweep into power in a number of states. But in the healthcare universe, her plan is also an example of how even progressive policy idealists are trying to learn from past failures and focus on what they think can actually be achieved.

Compared to the sweeping ambition of Vermont’s 2014 effort, or Bernie Sanders’s signature “Medicare-for-all” idea, Janoo’s proposal for single-payer has very specific limits. Under Janoo’s proposal for “universal primary and preventive care” (she typically avoids the term “single-payer”), the state government would pay for Vermonters seeing primary care providers such as doctors and nurse practitioners. This government coverage would be universal and free for patients, and insurance companies would be cut out.

However, other parts of the health system — such as hospitals, specialists, and prescription drug companies — would remain under the existing insurance system, for now.

Every effort so far to enact full single-payer at the state level has failed — even in blue states, bills and ballot initiatives have regularly gone down to defeat. Vermont’s previous single-payer experiment made it the furthest — it was signed into law but abandoned before being implemented, when the governor concluded it was unworkable. Wherever it’s gained steam, politicians and voters have blanched at the high costs of moving their health systems onto state budgets, and the high taxes that would be necessary to fund them.

Now, Janoo is making an attempt to refurbish single-payer as something more achievable, by cutting off a smaller slice of it.

“I think it’s clear at this point that a profit-oriented healthcare system is a terrible idea,” Janoo told me in an interview on Monday. But after assessing that the state budget made it “unrealistic” to do single-payer immediately, she concluded, “we could do universal primary and preventive care,” financed by a tax on the wealthiest.

Indeed, single-payer for primary care seems more achievable precisely because primary care is a relatively less expensive part of the healthcare system. But Janoo hopes it will pay major dividends — that better preventive care will improve Vermonters’ health, reducing costs elsewhere in the system by, for instance, making some hospital visits unnecessary.

In speaking to health policy experts about this idea, I heard much sympathy for the goal of universal primary care, but many questions about the details. Would Janoo’s plan be sufficient to bring more primary care doctors to Vermont — and, not unrelatedly, would it pay them more? Would her hoped-for cost savings from preventive care actually materialize? Is picking up the tab for a relatively less expensive part of the healthcare system the best use of sparse state funding?

These questions are becoming national ones, as healthcare gains traction as a political issue again. It isn’t just Vermont where primary care reform ideas are gaining steam: Democrats in Minnesota, Washington state, and elsewhere have discussed them. “There is growing interest in a number of states across the country in doing a universal primary care for all program,” Kevin Grumbach, a family physician and a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California San Francisco, told me. Even Scott, Janoo’s opponent, signed a law calling for a study of universal primary care.

One dividing line emerging, though, is whether to keep insurers involved, or to clear them out with a single-payer system, as Janoo wants. Insurers are unpopular with the public, but they can be a formidable political opponent when they argue that the benefits voters currently enjoy might be lost. Scott has said that the idea of universal primary care is appealing — but that if universal is “just code for single payer, I’m not interested. We’ve already been through that.”

Yet Janoo is hoping that single-payer for primary care will be a stepping stone — a trial run for eventually making the rest of the state’s health system single-payer down the road.

“I think about this often,” Janoo told me. “How do you build the new system as you transition the old — or hospice the old?”

Amanda Janoo is tired of “corporate neoliberal bullshit”

Janoo has long been an unorthodox economic policy thinker. Her rise is part of a broader trend in which progressives and leftists are winning primaries and gaining influence in the Democratic Party — but she doesn’t fit the prototype of the democratic socialist candidates in New York City, Colorado, and elsewhere who’ve gotten much attention this year. Instead, she comes from a different strand of the left, a movement based on a dissident strain of economics and openly skeptical of the benefits of economic growth.

Dating back to when she graduated from college in 2010, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, she was part of a younger cohort rebelling against what seemed the glaring failures of the economic establishment. “The one thing coming out of university I was clear on was that neoliberalism was the worst,” Janoo said on a podcast last year. “This whole idea that governments should just take a hands-off approach to the economy and trust in sort of the disciplinary powers of the global free market to lead them to infinite growth seemed highly problematic and very anti-democratic.”

So for graduate school, Janoo attended Cambridge to study development economics under the “heterodox” economist Ha-Joon Chang. She then spent several years working abroad in international development for the United Nations and other organizations, before moving back to Vermont and working as an economic policy consultant.

In recent years, Janoo became deeply involved with the “well-being economy” movement: an international group of advocates, academics, and experts who criticize what they deem modern capitalism’s obsession with economic growth, and say the “well-being” of humans and the environment should be prioritized instead. They overlap with the “degrowth” movement, which outright argues economic growth should be reduced; last year, Janoo led a workshop at a DeGrowth Institute event on “Degrowth Policy Design.”

Trump’s return to power horrified Janoo. “I’m feeling angry about the rise of fascism and the growing threat of world war, because I feel like we don’t have time for this shit,” she said in a speech at an environmental event last year. ”The planet is on fire and ecosystems are collapsing, and that should really be the focus of all of our attention.” But, she said, “I believe I was born in this moment of history for a reason” and vowed “to fight for democracy — for life.”

So Janoo decided to jump in the race for governor of Vermont. While she is not running on a degrowth platform, her campaign is deeply informed by aspects of the movement’s thought: skepticism about growth’s benefits, a sense that untrammeled capitalism is leading the world to disaster, and that localism provides a better way. For instance, candidates for governor typically pledge that they’d help bring business investment in, but Janoo said in a July debate: “A lot of the problems we’re facing is because we focus so much on attracting external business.” 

“Our economy is not super-diversified, and it is not really centered in the most essential kinds of goods and services you want to make sure people have access to no matter what happens — because honestly, things are bad now and they’re going to get worse,” Janoo told me. “I feel a little bit like a collective prepper right now. My motto is, protect what we love, produce what we need.”

In the Democratic primary, Janoo’s opponent, Aly Richards, had closer ties to the party establishment and led in fundraising. But Janoo ran as a progressive outsider; she promised to advance a “more economically populist vision” instead of “corporate neoliberal bullshit.” Her health plan became a point of contrast with Richards, who said she wouldn’t run on “magical thinking,” and that she wanted a version of universal primary care that would keep insurance companies involved. Janoo won the primary by 2.5 percentage points.

Now, she’s facing Governor Scott, who’s long been viewed as politically untouchable in the state — in 2024, he won his fifth two-year term by a margin of 52 points. But polls show a much closer race this time around, and Janoo could have a national blue wave at her back. If that wave helps carry her into the governor’s mansion. And if she makes it there, Vermont will have its first Democratic trifecta in a decade — and with it, the opportunity for major progressive policy change.

Amanda Janoo’s plan: Single-payer for primary care

Advocates for primary care reform argue that it should be at the top of Democrats’ agenda, in Vermont and elsewhere, because the system is in crisis.

Primary care providers are overwhelmed and underfunded, they say — and, as a result, there aren’t enough. Grumbach, the family physician and UCSF professor, said “the workload, the lack of resources, and the gap in compensation” — as compared to more highly paid specialists — “has made it very hard to recruit people coming out of medical school to want to be family doctors like me.” 

Patients, then, are having trouble finding doctors they like, and aren’t getting sufficient access to preventive care that could help them be healthier. “The emergency rooms are functioning and doing a lot of the work that normally primary care would do,” Janoo told me. “People are waiting a really long time to see anyone, and so often health issues that could have been caught sooner become more serious and dangerous.” 

Finally, both providers and patients complain that insurance companies make the preceding problems worse, by adding administrative burdens and bureaucratic hassle. 

So what would Janoo’s plan do?

First, her plan would guarantee free, government-paid primary and preventive healthcare for all in the state, by cutting insurers out of that part of the system.

Second, she wants to phase out the “fee-for-service” model of care, where primary care providers are paid based on specific services. She’s suggested, instead, either government-paid annual salaries, or per-patient per-month payments.

Third, she wants to try and try and make sure there are more primary care providers in the state, via more spending. “We would need some relocation incentives, so maybe $100 grand if you want to move here, or a student loan repayment program,” she told me. “My hope would also be that we could be a place for foreign-trained medical professionals to come here and be safe and accepted and to bring some cultural diversity,” she added.

As for how it would be paid for, Janoo proposes an income tax increase on the wealthiest Vermonters that, she said, would be comparable to the tax break they got in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year. Though she hasn’t settled on a final amount, she hopes these new taxes would raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

Would Janoo’s plan work in practice?

In speaking with health policy experts both inside and outside Vermont, though, I heard various questions and doubts about Janoo’s plan.

Some of the problems mix the practical and political. For instance, under this plan, primary care visits would be free, but tests such as MRIs would likely still require the existing insurance system, as would most prescription drugs. Janoo acknowledged to me that deciding how many things the government should pay for would “always be a challenge,” but said her first priority was access to getting people at least some healthcare.

There are also questions about whether this primary spending is really targeted at patients’ most urgent problems. Erasing the copay for your doctor visit might be nice, but those copays weren’t driving people into medical bankruptcy. Janoo’s reform plan leaves the bulk of hefty health spending from hospitals and treatments for very sick people untouched.

The core challenge to Janoo’s reform will be the one that has dogged single-payer reform attempts everywhere: money.

Other questions are about whether Janoo’s hoped-for benefits from better preventive care — she’s said the state could save as much as $300 million a year — will materialize.

“There’s no question that better access to primary and preventive care makes people healthier in the end,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president of the health policy nonprofit KFF, told me. “But advocates have long tried to sell prevention as saving money. I think it’s more likely that it costs money, but keeps people healthier.” One reason for this, he said, is that better preventive care could help identify more underlying illnesses and conditions in patients, and spur more spending to try and address them.

The shift to a salaried model for providers could bring other practical challenges. Though Janoo hopes that ditching fee-for-service will free up providers to see more patients, others suspect a guaranteed salary might incentivize them to see fewer, and wonder what role the government would play in trying to hold such providers accountable.

Finally, I also heard some disconnect between what providers said they wanted, and what Janoo thought they wanted. When we talked, she told me her impression was that primary care providers were most eager for changes in their work environment. “I’ve asked them, ‘If you could get paid a good annual salary — like, average for the nation — and you didn’t have to deal with insurance and the fee-for-service structure, would you do that?’ They say, ‘Absolutely.’”

Yet Grumbach told me that, for the primary care system, “Problem number one is not enough money, problem two is not enough money, and problem three is not enough money.” In his telling, it’s more money that’s the real key to incentivize more new doctors to practice primary care, and help pay other staff and health workers who could actually deliver good preventive care.

If so, the core challenge to Janoo’s reform will be the one that has dogged single-payer reform attempts everywhere: money.

If the government takes on the responsibility of paying primary care providers and setting salaries for them, providers will want those salaries to be high. If they aren’t high enough, the shortfall in primary care providers will worsen. But the higher such salaries are, the higher the taxes the state would need to raise to pay them. Essentially, taxpayers would be asked to shore up doctors’ salaries to keep them in the state — turning the healthcare argument from one kind of difficult political issue to another.

Getting the balance right would be a challenge for the government, with much at stake. But Janoo says her background in industrial policy has convinced her that it’s possible. Furthermore, she hopes, it will be just a starting point for the full single-payer system she still thinks is urgently needed.

“​​My hope is, when I’m governor, that I can start to work with some of our neighboring states,” Janoo said. “Because if we could create a New England-wide system, we could move to universal healthcare really quickly. “I think it’s a moment where people recognize we need a universal healthcare system.”

And, she added, “If we had done it previously, it would be much cheaper than it is now.”

If President Donald Trump had his way, the Republican Party would be top-to-bottom the party of AI — or, in his preferred branding, “super intelligence.”

But down in the very state where Trump has his “winter White House,” two Republicans have put forth a very different vision for the party’s future — and have been far more eager to take on the artificial intelligence industry.

Most notable is the term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis, who devoted much of his final year in office to a failed effort to pass an “AI bill of rights,” which would have imposed tougher restrictions regarding child safety and other topics. He’s warned that AI could “set off an age of darkness and deceit,” blasted “tech oligarchs” for putting people at risk, and called Anthropic “very creepy” for exploring whether AI could be conscious.

“He clearly understands what the risks are, and I find he’s also very good at calling bullshit on disingenuous arguments from the Silicon Valley lobby,” Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist who co-founded the Future of Life Institute, an AI safety nonprofit, told me. (DeSantis hosted Tegmark at two events in Florida this year.)

The other is DeSantis’s handpicked attorney general, James Uthmeier, a longtime close ally who is now trying to win the AG’s office in his own right — and who filed a high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI in June. Last week, Uthmeier asked the judge in the case to block OpenAI from developing new models unless they had “independent third-party guardrails and approval.”

“The danger of these AI systems is real and growing,” Forrest Saunders, a spokesperson for Uthmeier, told me. “Florida and the nation have seen case after case of violence, child exploitation, and models that operate beyond their developer’s control.” He added that Uthmeier “welcomes innovation, but Floridians will not be the test subjects.”

With AI cresting as a national anxiety — or a national opportunity, depending who you talk to — both major parties are still finding their footing on the issue. And though Trump is clearly trying to get Republicans in lockstep behind the industry, a very strong current is pulling the other way, responding to populist concerns and parents’ complaints to stake out a much more skeptical position. Florida has emerged as a bellwether for what Republican policies might look like if conservative America turns decisively against AI, especially as Trump’s political clock runs out.

DeSantis and Uthmeier aren’t unique in the GOP for having concerns about AI — a handful of House members and senators want further action, and populist opposition to data centers has bubbled up in races around the country.

But the two have gone furthest in taking on the industry directly — and they’ve done so even though it puts them on the wrong side of Trump. 

In recent days, I spoke to several Florida political observers and advocates on the AI issue. Most believe that DeSantis and Uthmeier are affirmatively trying to stake out what the GOP’s position on AI should be in a post-Trump future, and to better align with an electorate that’s turning sharply against the industry, despite what the president may say. 

“He’s trying to skate where the puck is going,” Jeff Brandes, a former Republican state senator, told me. (DeSantis’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Beyond the quest for political advantage, the stakes are very real. Will there actually be a significant and influential force on the right that takes the concerns about advanced AI’s harms seriously — and is willing to act to try and rein them in, before they do great damage? 

DeSantis and Uthmeier are hoping the answer is yes — and that they will be the ones leading that charge.

Ron DeSantis’s quest for an AI bill of rights

In this case, the politics and the personal are intertwined. DeSantis occupies a unique place within the party at this particular moment that’s given him an incentive to buck the national consensus on the right, especially when it comes to Trump, and explore an independent approach.

In his first decade in politics, DeSantis had a charmed rise. In 2012, he embraced the Tea Party to win a seat in Congress; in 2017, he bear-hugged Trump to get his endorsement for governor. He then became a national conservative star for opposing pandemic-era public health restrictions and waging war on “wokeness,” winning his 2022 reelection in a nearly 20-point landslide.

“He is always out front, even ahead of other Republicans, on issues that he makes more important,” Peter Schorsch, editor of Florida Politics, told me. “I would joke with people that I didn’t know how to spell ESG or DEI before he brought these to the forefront.”

But what followed was a failed presidential primary campaign that put DeSantis on the wrong side of Trump and then sent him back to Florida with an uncertain political future. 

Early last year, just weeks after a report that DeSantis’s wife Casey was considering running to succeed him as governor, Trump publicly urged Rep. Byron Donalds to enter the race, promising his “Complete and Total Endorsement.”

Also early last year, DeSantis, who had long run roughshod over Republican legislators, was faced with a new thorn in his side: an ambitious new state house speaker, Daniel Perez, who was more interested in cultivating the Trump White House than the governor. Perez took a far more assertive stance in shaping legislation and rejecting some of the governor’s demands than his predecessors; he also publicly blessed an investigation into a charity tied to Casey DeSantis. A bitterly personal feud between Perez and DeSantis ensued.

In the midst of all this, last summer, DeSantis got AI-pilled. 

In July 2025, DeSantis announced that he was going to develop a state plan to deal with the rise of artificial intelligence. “We can’t just turn the reins over to a bunch of tech overlords,” he said. (DeSantis had long been a critic of major tech and social media companies on the grounds that they are too “woke” or politically hostile to conservatives and their ideas.)

At another event that month, DeSantis said: “I think this is, like, the biggest issue that’s facing our society.” He mentioned AI’s potential impacts on the economy, on jobs, on students, and on the spread of “false narratives” as troubling to him.

“I welcome technologies that will enhance the human experience. I do not welcome things that are going to supplant the human experience,” DeSantis said in September.

His interest in state action put him on the opposite side of the Trump administration, which was advocating for a 10-year moratorium on state regulation of AI — arguing that forcing the industry to abide by a patchwork of state regulations would slow its growth. (David Sacks, a key Trump adviser on AI, championed this argument.)

Last December, at the Florida mega-retirement community the Villages, DeSantis rolled out his proposed “AI bill of rights.” It did not focus on existential or civilizational risks, but instead more practical concerns around child safety. Megan Garcia, a Florida mother whose 14-year-old son died by suicide after conversing with a chatbot “companion,” appeared at the press conference.

As introduced in the Florida state senate, the bill would have required that parents consent to minors speaking to companion chatbots and forced companies to disclose when users weren’t speaking to a human, among other provisions. The state senate passed it in March.

But it was dead on arrival in the Florida House of Representatives — where Perez had aligned himself closely with the White House. “We do believe that the federal government should take care of AI, and whatever legislation or policy has to pass on a national level,” Perez said. 

Brendan Steinhauser, who heads the AI safety advocacy group Alliance for Secure AI, told me that he saw Perez at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser around this time, and asked him about safety risks. “He leaned to me and whispered, ‘We’re with you, but the president has made it clear not to move forward on this stuff,’” Steinhauser said. “So, the White House basically put the kibosh on that effort.” 

DeSantis complained publicly that Perez was pursuing a “personal agenda” and thwarting badly needed legislation. It was to no avail — the bill didn’t move. But Perez did — Trump nominated him as ambassador to Brazil in June, and he was confirmed in August. (A request for comment from Perez, submitted to the State Department, received no response.)

James Uthmeier’s lawsuit against OpenAI

Though DeSantis hit a wall in the legislature, his attorney general was soon waging his own battle against OpenAI in court.

The attorney general is an elected position in Florida, but when Marco Rubio vacated his Senate seat to become secretary of state, DeSantis filled the seat with the state AG, Ashley Moody.

Then, to fill the newly vacant AG job, DeSantis chose one of his closest aides, who had served as his general counsel, chief of staff, presidential campaign manager, and chief of staff again — Uthmeier. 

Uthmeier is a Florida native who had worked in Rubio’s Senate office; he graduated from Georgetown Law School in 2014. After that he joined the firm Jones Day and worked with Don McGahn; when McGahn was named White House counsel in Trump’s first term, Uthmeier went with him to the new administration, ending up at the Commerce Department. Then, in 2019, he headed back to his home state to work for the new governor, DeSantis, and has been close by his side ever since.

Now, though, DeSantis is term-limited, and Uthmeier is trying to get Florida voters to elect him for a full term as AG on his own. (Trump’s allies had reportedly urged then-Speaker Perez to challenge Uthmeier in the GOP primary, hoping to supplant a DeSantis ally; Perez demurred, and Uthmeier won the nomination unopposed.)

To make his mark, Uthmeier has filed several high-profile and politically charged lawsuits — for instance, he sued Starbucks over its corporate diversity politics (the company recently settled), and Pfizer about the safety of its Covid-19 vaccine. He’s also subpoenaed the NFL over its “Rooney Rule,” which requires teams to interview minority candidates for top coaching and operations jobs.

He’s also become the face of the administration’s challenge to the AI industry. In April, Uthmeier stood in front of a podium with an “Investigating OpenAI” sign, announcing he’d opened a criminal investigation into the company.

The impetus was a shooting at Florida State University last year that killed two people and injured six others; the accused shooter had consulted ChatGPT about various topics related to his plans hours before the attack.

“If ChatGPT were a person, it would be facing charges for murder,” Uthmeier said then. “This criminal investigation will determine whether OpenAI bears criminal responsibility for ChatGPT’s actions.”

There have been no criminal charges yet. But in June, Uthmeier filed a wide-ranging civil lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging deceptive business practices, negligence, fraudulent misrepresentation, and other legal violations, because the company marketed ChatGPT as safe when they knew it could be quite dangerous. The suit also named OpenAI CEO Sam Altman personally as a defendant. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

Like DeSantis’s AI bill of rights, Uthmeier’s lawsuit originally focused on practical concerns and real-world harms that have already occurred, like the shooting. “Since its release in 2022, ChatGPT has advised teenagers on how to kill themselves, mix unsafe combinations of drugs, become anorexic, helped plan one mass shooting and one multiple homicide in Florida alone,” one filing in the lawsuit reads.

But after the summer’s ominous parade of AI headlines — such as OpenAI agents autonomously hacking the company Hugging Face, and new statements from current and former AI lab employees warning the technology could cause human extinction — Uthmeier turned up the heat, asking the judge in the suit for an injunction blocking OpenAI from developing new models without independent third-party safety evaluation.

“Defendants claim they cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government. They have asked the government to tie them to the mast” he wrote in a filing last week. “Plaintiff brings good news to the Defendants: The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help with a motion to enjoin you from harming Floridians with your reckless, unacceptably risky product.”

“Though a reasonable person would say there is no amount of money worth a 10% chance of the extinction of the human race, Defendants see it differently. They are intent on growing their $1 trillion valuation,” the filing continues. “It is only by the grace of the Almighty that one of Defendants’ AI agents hasn’t compromised a water supply or shut down a power grid — yet.”

OpenAI has not yet filed a response on the merits in this suit, but a company spokesperson has previously said that, in the case of the Florida State University shooter, ChatGPT “provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activity.”

The future

Uthmeier, age 38, is viewed in the state as a potential rising star with a talent for getting headlines, who could well have a long career in state GOP politics — if he wins in November, that is.

While DeSantis has been credited for changing Florida from a swing state to a solidly Republican one, some recent polls have raised the possibility it might swing back. A September survey by St. Pete Polls found Uthmeier ahead of his Democratic challenger, Miami attorney and former state Rep. José Javier Rodríguez, by just a single-point margin. 

And though DeSantis and Uthmeier have become major AI critics, the Floridian topping this year’s GOP ticket, Rep. Byron Donalds, is currently being hammered with attacks about his statement last year that the state needs to “embrace” data centers. He’s been nicknamed “Data Center Donalds” by his Democratic opponent, former Rep. David Jolly, who has also been close in some recent polls.

As for DeSantis, few expect the 48-year old to go quietly into retirement. When asked over the spring whether he’d run for president in 2028, he told reporters, “You never know.” 

Brandes, the former Florida state senator, told me that he thinks DeSantis’s AI push is about “looking for wedge issues where he can have a different opinion from Trump’s successors as he prepares for whatever future ’28 or ’32 provides for him.”

That is: The Republican Party of 2026 might still be too influenced by Trump to go fully anti-AI. But if Trump’s influence ebbs, if the populist backlash against AI spreads further, and especially if there are more worrying AI-related reports or incidents with real-world harms, perhaps there could be an opening on the right for a leader who’s taken the problem seriously, even when it meant going against powerful figures in his party.

Is the best shot Democrats have at defeating safe-seat Republican senators…not running candidates at all?

That’s the theory behind the party’s approach to several Senate races in deep red territory this year — races in which they hope independent candidates might manage to take down Republican incumbents, if only the Democratic Party would get out of the way.

In Nebraska, South Dakota, and Idaho, the candidate who won the Democratic primary has since quit the race — often with some “urging” from the party establishment — to pave the way for a two-way matchup between a Republican incumbent and an independent. (Democrats tried to similarly clear the way for an independent in Montana, but the party’s nominee refused to quit the race.)

The theory is that the Democratic brand is so toxic to so many voters in these states that it’s impossible for a Democrat to win there nowadays — but that there’s no great love for the Republican establishment either, and dissatisfaction with the political status quo more generally. So perhaps a fresh-faced independent could capture essentially all of a red state’s Democratic voters and peel away enough Republicans and independents to win.

It’s a bold bet and, most believe, unlikely to succeed — but polls do show surprisingly close races in some of these contests. And it’s not an entirely new strategy. In several red-state Senate contests dating back to 2014, Democrats concluded that the only way to win is not to play, even as all the independents they cleared the way for have lost.

But this year’s crop of independents stands out. For one, they’re running in a national environment that seems much more hostile to the GOP, making it more plausible that one or more makes it to Washington. For another, they’ve formed a loose alliance over group text, and they have something of a shared platform — a focus on economic populism and taking on corporate power, while downplaying cultural issues. 

Brian Bengs, the independent running in South Dakota, told me: “I think I can speak for the others when I say our collective efforts are based on the idea that the left-right social issues are what is being used to keep us at each other’s throats. The real fight that we need to have is big money versus little folks — the regular folks.”

They also have some specific plans for how, if elected, they’d get together to shake up how the Senate works.

“If a couple of us, maybe just as few as two independents, get across the line, we can deny a majority to either party. We can create a Fulcrum Caucus,” Todd Achilles, the independent in Idaho, told me. “Both parties would have to negotiate with us to get stuff done.”

Whether these candidates win or lose, their stronger-than-expected candidacies have made Republican incumbents take notice, and are an intriguing model of how to bring at least some competition to states that seem very solidly red — or even, potentially, very solidly blue. Should they perform well in November, their shared message could end up influencing candidates across the partisan spectrum. 

Furthermore, if they do reach critical mass in the Senate, it could mean the rise of an informal third party, one that can advance its own agenda in Washington. Yet it should also be noted that the more of them win, the harder the math for a Republican majority specifically gets, since they’d be knocking Republican incumbents — and only Republican incumbents — out of power.

Amidst rising dissatisfaction with both parties, there would seem to be an opening for a different approach. But busting up the two-party system is easier said than done — particularly when all these candidates have past ties or present coziness with Democrats that, their opponents argue, call their supposed independence into question.

The Dan Osborn model

Democrats have tried this strategy of clearing the field for independents in red-state Senate races before — in 2014, when entrepreneur Greg Orman (I) challenged Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS); in 2020, when orthopedic surgeon and commercial fisher Al Gross (I) challenged Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK); and in 2022, when former CIA officer Evan McMullin (I) challenged Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Yet all those independents lost by double digits.

But the current model of an independent challenger was inspired by a different candidate — Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, who came surprisingly close to unseating Sen. Deb Fischer (R) in 2024, and is now challenging the state’s other GOP senator, Pete Ricketts, this cycle.

Osborn has a background as an industrial mechanic, labor leader, and Navy veteran with a plain-spoken affect. He did not graduate from college, he’s said he didn’t own a suit, and he has forearm tattoos. He had led a strike at a Kellogg’s plant in 2021 that won concessions in the company, but he was later fired. 

Union figures helped recruit him to challenge Fischer; the consultant Daniel Moraff (who later coaxed Graham Platner to run for office in Maine) also became involved in Osborn’s campaign. Osborn’s admaker Tommy McDonald later co-founded the consulting firm Fight Agency, which is now semi-famous for challenging the Democratic Party establishment by backing Zohran Mamdani and Platner’s campaigns.

Dating back to his initial campaign launch, Osborn’s messaging focused heavily on criticizing “monopolistic corporations,” aligning him with a faction on the left that believes the Democratic Party doesn’t do enough to challenge big money and concentrated corporate power. Osborn also took moderate or conservative stances on some cultural issues, supporting gun rights and President Donald Trump’s border wall. (“If Trump needs help building a wall, well, I’m pretty handy,” he said in one ad.) The Democratic Party stood aside; no Democrats filed to run in the primary.

The result was that in 2024, when Trump won Nebraska by 20 points, Osborn lost his race by just 6.7 percentage points. That closer-than-expected outcome in a disappointing cycle for Democrats made many in the political world take notice, spurring polls and research projects about whether it could be replicated elsewhere — and whether, amidst more favorable national conditions, it could actually succeed.

A squad of independents?

So this cycle, in addition to Osborn himself running again, there are several other candidates trying their luck as independents with similar platforms. 

In South Dakota, Brian Bengs, a Navy and Air Force veteran, had previously run for Senate as a Democrat in 2022 and lost in a landslide. Working as a park ranger in 2025, Bengs told me that he became dispirited by DOGE cuts to the National Park Service, and got in touch with Osborn to discuss whether he should run again — this time as an independent against South Dakota’s other GOP senator, Mike Rounds. 

“Our economic system and our political system have the same problem, which is too much concentration of money and not enough competition,” Bengs told me. “And it is producing poor results for regular folks in both systems for the same reason.” 

The winner of South Dakota’s Democratic primary, Julian Beaudion, quit the race in August, saying he’d faced “intimidating threats to drop out,” setting up a two-way face-off between Bengs and Rounds.

In Idaho, meanwhile, Army veteran, former corporate executive, and former Democratic state legislator Todd Achilles is running as an independent against 83-year-old Sen. Jim Risch.

Before running for office, Achilles had written for the American Economic Liberties Project, the left’s leading anti-monopoly think tank. He told me that “toxic concentrated corporate power,” brought on by “wave after wave of mergers and consolidation,” was destroying free markets in the US, as well as corrupting the political system. 

“You can’t tell the difference between a corporatist Republican and a corporatist Democrat anymore,” Achilles said. “They’re both checks from the same organizations, the same special interests.” 

In the Idaho race, too, the winner of the Democratic primary dropped out after state party leaders withheld their support.

Finally, in Montana, Seth Bodnar, an army veteran and former president of the University of Montana, is running as an independent for an open seat contest against Republican Kurt Alme. But Democrats’ high hopes that Bodnar could take on Alme untrammeled went awry when the winner of the Democratic primary, Alani Bankhead, refused the entreaties of practically the entire state party establishment to drop out. As a result, polls suggest, Bodnar and Bankhead will split the anti-Republican vote and likely let Alme cruise to victory.

The independents’ big plans for exercising leverage in the Senate

These various independents running have a lot in common — they all have military backgrounds and roughly similar platforms. They’re also all on a group text, per the New York Times — and they’ve started to think about how they could shake up the Senate if they win.

The few independents elected to the Senate in recent decades — centrist Joe Lieberman in Connecticut (after he lost the 2006 Democratic primary), socialist Bernie Sanders in Vermont, and center-left Angus King in Maine — had little in common with each other, but all ended up deciding to caucus with the Democratic Party after they won, believing that’s the best way to score their preferred committee assignments and help advance their priorities.

But Bengs, Achilles, and Bodnar have vowed that they would not do this. They’ve all said they wouldn’t caucus with either party if they win, and that they’d instead caucus with any other independents, making what Achilles calls the “Fulcrum Caucus.”

Achilles told me that, if these independents stick together, they could demand major reforms to the political system such as term limits and age limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, restrictions on dark money spending on elections, and bans on gerrymandering. “I think we’re all aligned on this,” he said. (Several of these ideas would likely be shot down by the current Supreme Court as unconstitutional.)

“The goal is to deny the majority,” Bengs told me. “So neither Team Red or Team Blue gets to impose their will on the other side, without either going through us or working together — which would be a win unto itself, if they would work together.”

With the Senate growing more fiercely partisan in recent years, many have wondered why centrists on both sides don’t get together and try to seize control of the agenda. 

Yet the unity of this hypothetical new independent bloc already seems a bit shaky — in part because Osborn hasn’t committed to this strategy. In fact, Osborn has recently begun offering a new answer to the “caucus question” that has dogged him throughout two campaign cycles.

“I’ve given that a lot of thought and completely done a 180 on that,” Osborn told me. “Caucusing with nobody, you wouldn’t get anything done. I’m gonna caucus with everybody.” 

That meant, he said, he’d try to caucus with both parties at once. When I asked him whether that was possible and how it would work in practice, he told me, “Nobody really knows, and nobody’s been able to tell me that I can or can’t.”

While Osborn is an underdog, he is generally believed to be the independent candidate with the best shot at winning — several recent polls have shown his race to be tight. Since he has a shot of actually being in the Senate and having to follow through on his promises, he may feel less eager to box himself in.

But are they actually just Democrats?

When I asked the independents why they weren’t Democrats, they offered varying answers. Osborn said that “Biden and Harris failed on our border,” and that “if we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country.” He also said Democrats weren’t fighting hard enough for guardrails on the artificial intelligence industry, and complained that “Chuck Schumer’s daughter just got a job at OpenAI.”

Bengs said “the open borders of Biden” were disastrous, called defunding the police and abolishing the police “stupid ideas,” and said he condemned socialism. Achilles criticized “the dangerous decision to put President Biden forward for a second term” and the “corporatist” lean of the party generally.

But the reality is that prominent Democrats have implicitly or explicitly backed all their candidacies — and some of the candidates themselves were registered Democrats very recently.

Bengs told me he was a registered independent for his entire life, until he wanted to run for Senate in the 2022 cycle, to prevent Sen. John Thune from winning reelection unopposed. When it was too difficult for him to get on the ballot as an independent, he sought the Democratic nomination instead. And when he learned that state law required a party nominee to be a member of that party, he registered as a Democrat. When he lost, he swiftly became an independent again.

“My biggest weakness in this race is the fact that I ran as a Democrat in 2022, and that I was a registered Democrat for 13 months,” Bengs said.

Achilles, for his part, said he was a registered Republican for most of his life — but that, in 2024, state Democrats wanted to appoint him to an open state legislature seat, so he joined the party.

Then, in June 2025, he resigned from the legislature, announced he had switched his party registration to unaffiliated, and launched his Senate campaign against Risch, saying “the two-party system is just fundamentally broken right now.”

“It makes it a lot easier to tag you as a secret Democrat if you’re a former Democratic officeholder or a former Democratic Senate candidate,” Jacob Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, told me.

Osborn’s version of the problem is a series of leaks that have come out in recent weeks, in which he addressed Democrats privately and struck a very different tone than he typically does in public.

The Trump border wall he’d publicly backed was “a symbol of racism,” Osborn privately told a group of Latino and Black Democrats last year. “It’s a joke,” he added. “It does nothing, you know.”

Another recording, from a private campaign-related event, featured Osborn discussing how “Billy Bob in fucking Red Cloud, Nebraska” waves the Trump flag because he wants to be “on the winning team.” He added: “That’s all they care about because their lives probably suck.” (Osborn apologized for those comments after they were leaked, and said: “My life sucks too.”)

“When you’re funded by Democrats, hold the same policies as Democrats, and let your campaigns be run by Democrat consultants with ties to Chuck Schumer and Zohran Mamdani, you’re a Democrat,” Bernadette Breslin, press secretary for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told me in a statement.

That’s the message that Republicans will be broadcasting to voters in these red states. Whether it will work will depend on each particular state and matchup. In Montana, Bodnar has the additional problem of the Democratic candidate staying in the race to split the vote.

But Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, argued to me that Bengs and Achilles have the toughest road — in 2024 Trump won their states, South Dakota and Idaho, by the overwhelming margins of 30 and 36 points, respectively. “It is just hard to find the votes in those states,” he said. But he pointed out that Rounds is up on the airwaves in South Dakota, and said Risch appears to be “taking the race seriously” and “running a real campaign” — so, at the very least, these runs mean the incumbents won’t take another term totally for granted.

Osborn, in contrast, has “the proof point” of coming within 7 points of winning in 2024, Rubashkin said, and this is now a more unfavorable national environment for the GOP. The question is whether his own behavior and comments will have damaged his prior reputation for independence, particularly once they’re amplified by millions in spending from his opponent Pete Ricketts, the self-funding scion of a billionaire family, and the super PAC backing Ricketts.

Still, if Osborn pulls it off, it will be seismic — as the candidate himself mused on one leaked recording. 

“If I beat Pete Ricketts, if a shop floor mechanic — independent mechanic — beats an entrenched Republican billionaire in a state like Nebraska, I will be one of the most popular politicians overnight, right?” he said. “And people are going to want to listen to what I have to say.”