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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One thing I’m hearing 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what was the answer? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a good point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think we did some things very well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do you think Democrats are talking less about climate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

More immediate than the Green New Deal.

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

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

Were you surprised Trump won the state in 2024? 

No.

Why not? 

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

Some have called it a polycrisis — overlapping crises.

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

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

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

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

But you’re telling a kinda hopeful story. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then add that to the litany of broken promises.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what’s a governor to do? 

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

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

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

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

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

What I’m hearing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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