Happy Saturday! Overtime is for everyone. This week, Philip Rotner makes the case for a No Kings Act, Mona Charen has a few words for Republicans pinning their hopes on Marco Rubio, and Lakshya Jain explains how pollsters saw a blue wave coming and still missed how big it would be. Cathy Young checks in on how the results landed in Russia and Ukraine, and Mark Hertling shares three stories about what military service taught him. Plus, Bill Kristol talks China and espionage with Julia Curlee on Sunday.
Like something you saw? Share it with a friend! Even if it’s paywalled! Paid subscribers can share paywalled content now. Just look for the 🎁 icon in the share bar.
Joining BILL KRISTOL this Sunday at 11:30 a.m. EST is JULIA CURLEE to discuss Trump’s approach to China and the threat posed by Chinese espionage given the Nvidia scandal.
The 2026 Thanksgiving Cookbook is here! I have put together (with some new submissions) the annual Bulwark Thanksgiving cookbook. Even if you have your menu locked down, see what others in The Bulwark community and their families are cooking this holiday.
There are a few easter eggs in there, as well as some great new recipes, like the Perticone Family Braciole.
A not fun new worry… Airline travel over the upcoming Thanksgiving Holiday. Who had that on their bingo card? To all who may be stranded by the ground stop, I hope you get home in short order! Don’t worry, it’s all going to be OK:
Happy Saturday! This week in Overtime, I take you inside an Ohio Democratic victory party where people were crying, kissing, and, yes, breakdancing. Adrian Carrasquillo looks at how anger over ICE helped swing Latino voters toward Democrats. Brendan Hartnett counts who won the House districts with a Cheesecake Factory. And Will Saletan and Joshua Tait get at two questions Republicans would probably rather put off until Monday: How much did Trump cost them, and where does the party go from here?
If you’re a Bulwark+ member, THANK YOU for making all this possible.
We’ve got some big things ahead for next year that we can’t wait to announce. And did you see that Bulwark App got an update this week? And members can now gift articles to friends, even if they are paywalled.
If you know someone who’d get a kick out of the Cheesecake Factory math, share The Bulwark with them.
ICYMI: We’re running a 20% OFF FLASH SALE to celebrate sanity winning on Tuesday. We want you with us for what comes next! Upgrade before this sale ends Sunday.
Joining BILL KRISTOL this Sunday at 1 p.m. EST, is MIKE MURPHY to discuss the historic routing Republicans took at the polls. How will Trump will react over the next two years and how will the remaining Republicans deal with him?
Happy Saturday! I hope you’re catching up on sleep this weekend. I’m trying to. And if you knocked on doors, made calls, or worked the polls, I hope you get to sleep in a little longer than the rest of us. Thank you for doing the work that makes this whole thing run. See how fellow Bulwark+ members spent Election Day and night in our member chat.
By all means, enjoy a little schadenfreude scrolling this weekend, as a treat. You’ve earned it. Democratic governors-elect are putting together their administrations, and Democrats on Capitol Hill are getting ready to take over both chambers. January is still a ways off, though. Trump has plenty of time to make trouble before then, and we’re still at war with Iran. There’s a lot of work ahead, and we’re glad you’re here with us.
I put on my NPR voice… and joined the fine folks at WVXU, our local NPR affiliate, on Cincinnati Edition to talk about this week’s elections. Be sure to listen!
A holiday tradition returns… The return of the Overtime favorite, our Thanksgiving Cookbook, comes next week. For those of you who are new, we’d love to have your favorite holiday recipe(s). Submit them here.
Discussion Prompt: What’s one thing you think we’ll be talking about by the time the new Congress takes office that we aren’t talking about now?
Supporters react to incoming voting results during a midterm election night watch party at the Hilton Downtown Columbus on November 3, 2026 in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
AS WIN AFTER WIN was announced at the Ohio Democrats’ election-night party at the Columbus Hilton, I kept watching the younger Ohioans in the room. This was more winning than they had ever known. People were crying. People were kissing. After the speeches, some were even breakdancing.
First Amy Acton, then Sherrod Brown and James Talarico. Then Gina Hinojosa. Every time the room started to settle down, something else would get the audience screaming again. Ohio Democrats, who have had decades of practice managing expectations, were suddenly having trouble keeping up with the rapid pace of victory. Accustomed to looking elsewhere for good news on election night, they cheered for the Texas victories nearly as loudly as they did for their own.
Ohio Democrats have spent years watching their state’s name become a shorthand for what their party had lost. For decades, they have mostly known electoral heartache. A former presidential battleground had become a launching pad for Donald Trump’s would-be successors, sending JD Vance to Washington and offering Vivek Ramaswamy what he plainly expected would be a rung on the ladder to the presidency.
Now Acton was headed to the governor’s office, and Brown was headed back to the Senate.
Whenever I had good reception, my phone lit up with texts from childhood friends expressing happy incredulity: Was this really happening? At the Hilton party, I even ran into a high school classmate I hadn’t seen in years. He had the same question: How was all of this winning possible?
I’d spent Monday nightat Ramaswamy’s final campaign stop in West Chester, where he and a coterie of quarter-zipped GOP candidates for other state offices declaimed against Acton for refusing to debate, for her role in the state COVID response, and for substance problems they alleged on the basis of vibes alone.
Skipping the debates was a gamble. But on Tuesday night, Acton stood on stage and told a cheering crowd that her heart was full. And she offered an unanswerable rejoinder to Ramaswamy’s personal campaign against her.
(Photos by Jim Swift)
“Do not underestimate a scrappy kid from Youngstown,” she said. “Do not underestimate the people of Ohio.” Ramaswamy’s concession call reportedly went to voicemail.1
When I interviewed Acton in August, she kept coming back to a somewhat peculiar leitmotif for a statewide campaign: community. She brought up Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and talked about the loss of civic institutions that used to connect Ohioans to one another.
Once upon a time, “people didn’t know what party you were in, they knew what union you were in,” she told me.
People regularly cried at her events, often surprising themselves, she told me. Her read was that they were exhausted by the fighting. They wanted things to get better, but they were wary of getting their hopes up. “Hope feels scary ’cause people have been burned before,” she told me then.
Speaking from behind a lectern marked “Governor-Elect” on Tuesday night, Acton returned to her theme. She asked something of the people celebrating with her.
“Do not give up on one another. Please, don’t give up on anyone in your life,” she said.
“For me, that is what this race has always been about,” she said, “putting the heart back in the heart of it all.”
SHERROD BROWN TOOK THE THEME of looking out for one another and scaled it up to the governmental level. He spoke of a congressional stock-trading ban, a government that puts working people first, and a fight against the corruption ordinary Ohioans pay for.
“I do not work for the utility companies. I do not work for data centers. I do not work for Wall Street,” he said. “I work for you; I work for Ohio.”
Then: “So we will fight to end these tariffs.”
I spent years working in Republican politics, back when free trade was something the party championed and fought about with people like Brown. Now, here I was at a Democratic victory party, listening to the man promise to fight a Republican president’s tariffs, and nodding along in agreement.
As unexpected victory after unexpected victory continued to blow up attendees’ phones—a black woman elected to the governorship of a former Confederate state; numerous districts gerrymandered to favor Republicans but won by Democrats; big majorities in both chambers of Congress—that scrappy kid from Youngstown came in with a line that connected this new feeling of hope to her own story.
“Together, we are going to build an Ohio where no matter where you were born, you belong,” Acton said. “You can build the life of your dreams and you can be whoever you want to be. Maybe even governor.”
This may not have been a deliberate choice on Acton’s part; reception at the Hilton was atrocious. Then again, it may have been, and if it was, who could blame her? Ramaswamy was putting millions behind his despicable ad with Acton’s estranged mother just last month.
Happy Halloween 👻! Once you’ve recovered from tonight’s spooky activities, hang with the gang tomorrow night for a preview of what to expect on Tuesday. Sunday’s members-only live stream starts at 8:30 p.m. ET. Tim Miller, Sam Stein, Lauren Egan and more of the Bulwark fam will be covering the latest races and taking your questions, which you can drop in the comments of this post. So grab your favorite beverage, candy, kick back your feet and tune in to prepare for the week ahead.
Happy Halloween! As the elections approach, I’ve been thinking a lot about our friend Shane DiGiovanna, whom we lost this year. Shane loved elections—and especially the maps. I would have loved to hear his take on this year’s electoral map and what it might mean for 2028.
He’ll be on my mind over the next few days. So many of you donated to his charity after his death, and I want to thank you again.
I’ll also be thinking of Shane over the upcoming holiday as I watch The Slightest Touch, a new HBO film about Colin Farrell and his friend Emma Fogarty, who has lived with EB for forty years.
🎵 On the Jukebox…🎵A new single from friend of the newsletter Chris Jones & The Night Drivers, in collaboration with Mountain Home Music Company called See It Now. You can watch Jones talk about it here, but:
It’s a song in praise of flip-flopping, or looking at it in a more positive light: it’s a song about coming to a different viewpoint after reflecting and taking a deeper look. Maybe that’s something we should all do more often.
Near Gettysburg? Our friends at Principles First are gathering at The Barn Resort on Thursday, November 5, at 6 p.m. for Ours to Keep: What’s Next for the Republic. Two days after the midterms, there should be plenty to discuss about where the country stands… and what comes next. Details and tickets here.Use code gettysburg26 for a treat: free admission!
Congrats to Bryce B…. Who won our World Series prediction contest, picking the Brewers to beat the Rays. His winnings are on their way. And congrats to all Brewers fans out there on this historic win.
While baseball is over for now… It is playoff football here in Ohio, and my alma mater is on the move! Here’s an interview with my high school English teacher, the great “Chico” Kyle, who happens to be one of the most successful high school football coaches. He talks about helping kids go from wanting to be the star to wanting to contribute to the team… and why even the star had to get his schoolwork done. Whatever happens in the midterms, we’d all do well to give Chico a listen.
Happy Saturday! This week, Cathy Young checks in on Trump’s pro-Ukraine defenders, Mona Charen examines what the right gets wrong about France, Pete Buttigieg joins us in Charlotte, and Jonathan Cohn interviews Abdul El-Sayed. Plus: Is Ohio the heart of it all in politics these days? I ponder that while coping with another October without a Cleveland championship. Welcome to Overtime.
Join Lauren Egan for an AMA: Got midterm questions? Lauren Egan is taking your questions during a Reddit AMA on Monday at 1 p.m. ET in r/politics. Ask her about the 2026 midterms, Democrats’ chances to retake Congress, and the battle over the party’s future heading into 2028. Join on Monday using this link.
BOOK CLUB: THIS WEDNESDAY! Join us for the next edition of The Bulwark Book Club to discuss The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865–1915.
Mona, JVL, and the author, Jon Grinspan, will discuss the book with Bulwark+ members on Wednesday, October 28 at 1:30 p.m. ET.
Before the book club, Mona highly recommends Netflix’s Death by Lightning about the assassination of James Garfield for a vivid depiction of the time we’ll be discussing.
🚨OVERTIME🚨
THANK YOU, SOUTHEAST! What a whirlwind through Columbia, Charlotte, and Atlanta. To the 2,000-plus who joined us: Thank you for the kind words, gift bags, t-shirts, stickers, and treats. And to our Founders and Best Friends: It was great to spend some time together. You made the trip a blast. Some BTS photos here.
Walking for their neighbors… Haitian community members, faith leaders, and supporters are walking more than forty miles from Springfield to Columbus, calling for permanent protections for Haitian immigrants and an end to the use of ankle monitors. Their four-day pilgrimage concludes Saturday.
A historic World Series… For the first time in forty-six years, both teams are chasing their first championship. Naturally, I’m sad my Cleveland Guardians didn’t make it past the Rays. I’ve seen this movie before—I watched them get eliminated while we were on the road for our live tour, just as happened right after our Detroit live show in 2024—but it was a great season for Cleveland. Good luck to your team, and to Bryce B and Uncanny390, who both picked the Brewers in the Overtime World Series Bracket contest!
Trump and his cronies keep using slurs like they’re going out of style—which, to be fair, they are. On Monday in Kansas, Trump denounced news reports that he said portrayed Sen. Roger Marshall as “a Shylock-type guy.” And yesterday, after Trump tussled in the Oval Office with reporter Andrew Feinberg of the Independent—calling him a “sick person” and saying “I actually think there’s something wrong with you”—a White House communications account described Feinberg as a “Mongoloid Moron.”
Trump, as he ages, is losing his last fragments of self-control, and his comms staffers are rotting their brains more every day in the bigoted fever swamps of right-wing social media. The slurs will continue until morale improves. Happy Wednesday.
Ramaswamy’s October Surprise Blows Up in His Face
by Jim Swift
Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s October surprise was supposed to make voters question Democrat Amy Acton’s character. Instead, yesterday, a leak of his attack ad featuring her estranged mother blew up in his face.
By Tuesday evening, after the ad had been roundly condemned—including by other Ohio Republicans—Ramaswamy’s response was to announce he would spend $4 million promoting the ad.
The video surfaced Monday night. DJ Byrnes, author of the Ohio politics newsletter The Rooster, published a recording featuring Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur. Byrnes said a voter saw it in a poll, recorded it, and sent it his way.
For hours, it was unclear who was behind the ad. V-PAC, the super PAC supporting Ramaswamy, said it wasn’t involved. Ramaswamy’s campaign initially defended the attack without answering directly if it was responsible.
At The Bulwark, we like to say that we know who the bad guys are. But honestly, sometimes it’s really not so hard to tell. Join us.
In the minute-long video, Arthur calls Acton a liar, disputes her account of growing up homeless, and tells Ohioans not to vote for her. “My daughter needs help,” she says, “and she can’t help you if she needs help herself.”
What the ad doesn’t say is why Acton and Arthur are estranged. Acton says she last saw her mother when she was 12. Her stepfather had been charged with raping her. She and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody. Her mother and stepfather then skipped town while out on bond, according to a 2019 account in the Youngstown Vindicator.
National Reviewobtained court records corroborating key parts of Acton’s account, including the criminal proceedings against her stepfather. Her account of abuse and homelessness was also public in 2019, years before she ran for governor.
Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, has corroborated his sister’s account. He says he also suffered abuse in the household, and that their mother stayed married to the man who raped Acton until his death.
Even Ramaswamy’s copartisans were quick to denounce the ad. After learning of the circumstances behind Acton’s estrangement from Arthur, Dan Hauser, a strategist for Sen. Mike Lee, deleted his post sharing the video and apologized for sharing it. Lydia Mihalik, the director of Ohio’s Department of Development under Gov. Mike DeWine, condemned the ad.
Others questioned what, exactly, the campaign thought it would accomplish. Former Republican communications consultant Liz Mair said the ad made her sympathetic to Acton, while Fox News contributor Mary Katharine Ham wondered how anyone expected it not to backfire. Chris Christie reposted footage, shared by a Democratic strategist, of himself roasting Ramaswamy on the presidential debate stage. Nikki Haley weighed in, too: “Not laughing. Just seeing what we tried to tell everyone back then. He’s a bad guy.”
Acton’s campaign responded to the Arthur video Tuesday afternoon with an ad featuring Stearn. “I received a lot of abuse, but Amy always got the worst of it,” he says, describing how his older sister—at “11 and 12 years old”—tried to protect him.
By Tuesday evening, the backlash had followed Ramaswamy into a town hall in Westerville. Shortly after he took the stage, a heckler confronted him about Acton’s mother. The man was escorted out.
Afterward, speaking to reporters, Ramaswamy finally admitted that his campaign had made the ad. He argued that voters should listen to people who know Acton “well,” including her mother, and said he had never met Arthur and that she wasn’t paid for the ad.
Ramaswamy also said he wished the campaign were about substantive issues, accused Acton of spreading lies about him and his family, and decried her decision not to debate him.
Sources close to Ramaswamy’s campaign told Axios that the ad performed well in testing with persuadable voters. The outlet reported that the resulting $4 million statewide push began streaming Tuesday night.
Campaign manager Jonathan Ewing called it a “campaign-ending moment for Amy Acton.”
This is not the first time Ramaswamy has had a problem involving a campaign ad and a child abuser. I reported just a week ago that Ramaswamy’s property-tax ad featured Vernon Edwards, a registered sex offender who pleaded guilty to two counts of gross sexual imposition involving his niece, who was younger than 13.
The campaign pleaded ignorance. “The man has been removed from the ad,” spokesman Evan Machan told me. It also deleted an earlier social-media video showing Ramaswamy shaking Edwards’s hand and complimenting his patriotic shirt. But the ad featuring Edwards ran during the Browns victory over the Ravens, after the campaign had promised to remove him from it.
Ramaswamy’s campaign’s callousness, mendacity, and shoddy staff work would be a liability in any race. But it seems especially likely to hurt him in an environment where Republicans already have a problem with a nagging child sexual abuse scandal.
Manufacturing Trans Panic
by Andrew Egger
Ohio isn’t the only red state where Republicans seem to be resorting to desperate tricks to salvage a race. In Texas, Ken Paxton and his supporters have been trying to turn transgender issues into a centerpiece of his race against Democrat James Talarico. Now they’re trying to whip up a new, artificial trans panic to make the sale.
Last week, GOP voters across the state started receiving strange—and, to them, enraging—text messages. “New school year?” one read. “Here’s your complete guide on bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at school.” The text then linked to the “Back to School Toolkit” of the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), a state trans advocacy group.
These confusing “back-to-school” texts—which arrived long after the start of the school year and mysteriously seemed to land mostly in Republican inboxes—caused an immediate outcry, with conservative influencers going viral denouncing them across social media. But TENT denied sending the texts at all.
The texts, it turns out, were only the prelude. This week, a more extensive and expensive campaign unfolded along similar lines. This time, Texas voters—again, primarily Republicans—received mailers at home, purportedly from an organization called the “Texas Transgender Student Union”—an organization incorporated last month in Wyoming, with no physical or online presence save the mailers themselves. Again, the mailers linked repeatedly to resources on TENT’s website, as well as to the American Civil Liberties Union.
While the faux TENT text messages simply reminded voters that trans advocacy groups exist, the mailers went much further, containing reams of language seemingly designed to confirm conservatives’ worst fears about such groups’ intended aims.
TENT’s actual Back to School Toolkit focuses on legal resources for trans students in navigating Texas’s increasingly trans-hostile laws, reminding them what sorts of activities and activism state law does and doesn’t restrict. It also has educational resources for students and their parents who want to protect themselves from Texas conservatives’ increasingly militant view that a child presenting as trans is prima facie evidence of child abuse, and how families might deal with, for instance, having Child Protective Services called in against them.
But the mailer that circulated this week presented a very different worldview, one in line with the common Republican belief that the chief aim of these organizations is to lure trans children awayfrom their families. It contains sections on “What to do if your parents don’t support you” and “What if I want to be emancipated?”
“Even if your family doesn’t accept you as you are,” the mailer reads, “groups like this are ready to become your found family.”
In a statement to The Bulwark, TENT strongly denied any association with either the earlier texts or the mailers. “TENT did not author, authorize, approve, or distribute these materials. Any and all materials are not affiliated with our organization and are impersonations.” The group declined to comment on the experience of being turned into an electoral scarecrow apparently by Republicans, citing their need as a nonprofit to refrain from commenting on partisan political activity. They also—understandably, but perhaps unwisely—largely scrubbed their website, meaning that their own resources can today only be accessed through internet archives.
This has only made it easier, even as it’s become clear that the mailers were impersonations, for conservative activists to argue that the mailers’ contents are broadly similar to TENT’s own advocacy materials. But, again, the opposite is true. You can still read an archived version of TENT’s “back to school toolkit” yourself. Far from being a roadmap and encouragement for trans Texas students to escape their families, the “family resources” section of TENT’s toolkit is entirely focused on helping “families navigate heightened state scrutiny, especially as state agencies have been weaponized against supportive parents and guardians of [trans] youth.”
All this is entirely in keeping with Texas Republicans’ unbelievable smear campaign against Talarico, which has darkly twisted his past enthusiastic advocacy for trans students.
The GOP messaging apparatus has repeatedly insinuated—and sometimes outright stated—that “Talafreako” has a pedophilic fetish for trans youth. In lurid GOP-funded ads, an AI model of Talarico in a dress sings about how he wants to change “the gender of all of your offspring,” or an AI Talarico in scrubs prepares to perform a sex-change surgery on a little girl. On the campaign trail, JD Vance returns again and again to the same line: “A guy that age who is so obsessed and focused on transgender children, I don’t know about you, but I never want to see that guy’s web browser history.”
Republicans would like it if Trump were popular and successful, and they could just run on that. Since he isn’t, they’d like for their threadbare old warnings that Democrats are all communists in disguise to scare voters back to their side. But that doesn’t appear to be working either. For Texas Republicans, this is the Hail Mary play: Insist that Talarico and trans organizations are working hard to steal your children from your home and subject them to “transgender mutilization,” all in furtherance of their own dark sexual urges. It probably won’t work. But that doesn’t make it any less contemptible.
Dana Bash Sees a Political Earthquake Coming in Texas and Maine… How do democracies fall apart, and why do the people who could stop it so often look the other way? SARAH LONGWELL hosts DANA BASH on Bulwark Takes.
QUICK HITS
WILL VANCE GET THE ROSE?: Vice President JD Vance wants Republicans to see him as Donald Trump’s heir apparent, and lately he’s been discussing the possibility more. “I really have not made up my mind about what to do in 2028,” he told journalist Mark Halperin on Monday, adding that “I think if I run, the president will endorse me.”
Trump doesn’t seem so sure. Asked to weigh in on the vice president’s prediction yesterday—with Vance standing right behind him—the president begged off. “He’s a very talented person and he’s a very good person,” Trump said, “but we’ve literally—I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it.”
“No sir,” Vance quickly replied. “I said that, too.”
“Who would believe that?” Trump went on. “I don’t talk about it with him, he doesn’t talk—it’s early, very early right now. We have to get through the midterms. We’ll see how it goes.”
TAKING THE OIL: Another can’t-miss report on Trumpian corruption this week from ProPublica. Yesterday, the publication obtained the 18-page strategic partnership agreement governing the United States’ new imperial access to Venezuela’s oil reserves:
The document reveals carefully constructed terms that favor U.S. interests at every turn and cements the power of a small group of people handpicked by the Trump administration to govern and profit from the deal. The role of the Venezuelan government and the potential benefits to its people are largely absent from the text.
One of the most criticized aspects of Trump’s announcement has been his choice of a partner: Alejandro Betancourt, a globe-trotting Venezuelan oligarch who has faced money-laundering investigations in three countries.
The Trump administration is taking a 35 [percent] stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by acquiring shares in a Barbados-registered parent company. The deal document provides little information about the owners and investors behind the parent company, who could receive enormous wealth from the arrangement.
The agreement also safeguards Betancourt’s position as chief executive of NABEP and says the U.S. government will work with the parent company to appoint a powerful seven-member board to govern the venture for an initial 15-year term. Those aspects of the deal, according to people with knowledge of how it came together, were designed to prevent future U.S. and Venezuelan leaders from dismantling the enterprise.
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