This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is closing out the midterms by talking about anything but. 

What’s happening? If polls bear out, Republicans are a day away from a catastrophically bad midterms result, potentially losing control of both chambers of Congress. 

Trump, however, has other things on his mind. On Monday, he made his final midterms pitch in a nearly hour-long press conference with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, where he focused heavily on the state of the newly reopened Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and his other DC construction projects (both planned and underway).

“This is a massive piece of pool,” he said. “And it was treated with a lot of love and then it was treated with a lot of hate, and we’re going to stop the hate.” 

What else has Trump been saying? Monday marked the culmination of the president’s strange campaign season, which has been heavy on disjointed rambling and musings about the posterior aspect of incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted (among others).

Trump has also spent the past few months urging Americans to vote in the midterms as if he were on the ballot — but polling suggests he may be more of a drag than a boon to Republican candidates locked in close races. 

What’s the big picture? We won’t know for sure how the midterms will turn out until polls close Tuesday night (and maybe not for a while after that, depending on how some key races turn out). 

Trump, though, briefly acknowledged on Monday that things are looking bleak for his party: “For some reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms,” he said, “but we gave this a very strong shot.”

And with that, it’s time to log off…

This is a few days late in coming, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t share my colleague Ian Millhiser’s tribute to the late Patrick Stewart and his iconic role on Star Trek as  Captain Jean-Luc Picard. You can read the full story here with a gift link.

As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow for the big day!

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

We’re at T-minus eight hours until Election Day — at least here on the East Coast — and Democrats are likely feeling good about their electoral odds right now. 

The party is strongly favored to win the House and make big gains in the Senate, with a serious chance of retaking both chambers. The final New York Times/Siena polls, released Sunday, put Democrats ahead of Republicans in at least five of the seven battleground states that will determine who holds the Senate. That includes Kansas and Texas, two states that haven’t elected a Democratic senator in generations.

The picture appears so dim for Republicans that even President Donald Trump seemed to acknowledge it during remarks this afternoon: “For some reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms. We gave this a very strong shot.”

But while many, many polls and pundits are forecasting a blue wave…I’m a little more cautious about making definitive predictions. Polling has only grown more difficult in recent years, as we saw especially clearly in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

Go a little deeper

Polling methodology sounds complex. (And it is!) But one of the field’s biggest challenges is actually pretty easy to grasp: Some people enjoy chatting with pollsters and filling out little surveys on their phones…and some people could not care less.

The poll-takers tend to be older, more educated, and more invested in politics. The poll-avoiders are often younger, less educated, and — in recent presidential contests — more likely to support Trump. Pollsters are aware of these imbalances and try to correct them by applying statistical adjustments after the fact, but it’s not a perfect science. 

It’s difficult to gauge, for instance, how the Republicans who do respond to polls might differ from the ones who don’t. And it’s impossible to know for certain how many people who say they’re going to vote will actually drag themselves to their nearest school gymnasium or fire hall tomorrow.

There are a few new wrinkles this year, too. Pollsters conducted fewer late-cycle surveys than they do in the typical midterm cycle, according to the Washington Post. That not only means that we have less data overall, but that the data we do have may not account for late-breaking developments, such as Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens’s surprise endorsement of a Republican in the Michigan Senate race or a ballot-stacking scandal in Alaska. 

Several close Senate contests are also in rural states — think Alaska, Maine, and Iowa — where reaching a representative mix of voters can be especially difficult for pollsters.

But even if the polls are right and a blue wave is likely, that doesn’t mean it will actually come to pass. My colleague Astead Herndon sees another possibility: The fear of a liberal takeover could motivate large numbers of Republicans to vote, even if they’ve soured on Trump or had previously planned to sit out this election. 

None of this is to say that the blue wave won’t happen, to be clear, or that it won’t happen on the scale that some pundits have predicted. But I wouldn’t take any victory laps yet. Polls just aren’t the same thing as elections. 

One link for later

➨ Brace for political fights with your family. They are, after all, an election-year tradition! Instead of clapping back at relatives with different politics, try to get curious about their positions. If in doubt, deploy the line “why does that matter to you?” Then explain your own views with an “I” statement, rather than a put-down or accusation.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that we’ve unwittingly dosed the world’s fish with anti-anxiety meds? Our bodies don’t entirely absorb these drugs, so trace amounts end up in our urine…and from there, in rivers and coastal habitats.
• Today’s trivia: Which US pharmaceutical giant was founded by a Union army veteran after the Civil War? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the name of the reclusive neighbor in Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. That would be Arthur “Boo” Radley, played by Robert Duvall in the 1962 film adaptation.

Here’s a hot take: The outcome of the 2026 midterms is unlikely to turn on close races in California. California has no statewide races that are expected to be close, and it is a solid blue state that recently redrew its US House maps to maximize Democratic gains.

So it’s a bit baffling that the Trump administration’s final bid to get the Supreme Court to interfere in the midterms, at least before Election Day, focuses on California. On Monday, the eve of the election, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department asked the justices to order California to “segregate” as many as 20,000 ballots and place them in a special pile where they may never be counted.

The case emerges out of a list of over 20,000 names that the Trump administration first sent to California on October 13, asking election officials to separate their ballots and verify the voters’ eligibility. The administration claims that these individuals are “likely” noncitizens, but that they are nonetheless registered to vote in California.

But it is unlikely that many — or even, potentially, any — of the names on this list are actually noncitizens who are registered to vote in California. Shortly after receiving Trump’s list, Los Angeles County officials took a sample of 200 names from the list to see if they are actually noncitizens who appear on the state’s voter rolls. In their preliminary review, they determined that nearly 40 percent of the names on the list belong to people who were born in the United States (and thus are almost certainly US citizens), and that 56 percent of the individuals on the list either canceled their registration or their registration is no longer active. Over 70 percent have never voted in California.

Again, this is only a preliminary review. It is likely that further investigation will determine that even more of these individuals are either citizens or not actually registered to vote in California.

This high error rate, moreover, closely mirrors a similar drama that played out earlier this year in Nevada. The Trump administration initially claimed that as many as 16,000 noncitizens appear on that state’s voter rolls, but when they later flagged a list of supposed noncitizen voters for Nevada officials, only 185 names appeared on the list. Nevada later determined that all 185 of these individuals are, in fact, citizens.

So Trump wants the Supreme Court to interfere in the 2026 midterms based on a list of 20,000 names that is completely unreliable, and that may not identify a single actual person who is both registered to vote in California and a noncitizen. And even if all 20,000 of these individuals did cast a vote in the upcoming midterms, moreover, it is unlikely that they would change the result of any election. Just shy of 11 million people voted in California’s 2022 midterm elections, so the 20,000 people identified by Trump’s administration are a tiny fraction of the California electorate.

And, on top of that, Trump’s lawyers are not even asking the Supreme Court to disenfranchise these 20,000 people — at least not yet. At this early stage of the litigation, Trump’s lawyers merely seek a court order requiring California to set these individuals’ ballots aside to determine if they are citizens or not.

None of what Trump’s lawyers are asking for is legal. But the most striking thing about this case, which is known as United States v. California, is its weakness. Even if the justices agree with the Trump administration’s extra-legal claim that it can require a state to set aside ballots based on a highly dubious allegation that some of those ballots might belong to a noncitizen, that decision is unlikely to change the result of any 2026 election — although it could potentially allow this administration to sow chaos in 2028.

Trump’s legal arguments are garbage

Just in case there’s any doubt, there is absolutely no legal basis whatsoever for the Supreme Court to rule in favor of Trump’s administration.

For starters, Trump’s lawyers rely on a statute which makes it a federal misdemeanor for some noncitizens to vote in a federal election. Notably, nothing in this statute regulates the state of California, or any other state. It does not prohibit state officials from counting any ballot, or require them to segregate any ballots into a special pile. This statute merely empowers the federal government to bring criminal charges against an individual noncitizen who votes illegally.

If the Trump administration actually believes that any of the 20,000 names on its list are noncitizen voters, in other words, then its recourse is to gather enough evidence to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that one of those individuals violated federal law. Then it can charge that individual with a crime and potentially obtain a conviction. The statute simply does not permit federal courts to order segregation of ballots.

Meanwhile, a separate federal law requires states to “complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.” So it’s actually illegal for California to comply with a request to remove the supposed noncitizens from its voter rolls, because this request came within 90 days of a federal election.

Additionally, as the Supreme Court said less than two weeks ago in Scanlan v. Coalition for Open Democracy (2026), federal courts “should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.” Trump’s lawyers filed their brief to the justices in the California case on the literal eve of an election.

Finally, as Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, explained in an opinion arguing that Trump must lose this case, it is unlikely that California could comply with an order requiring it to segregate the contested ballots even if it wanted to. The state says that segregating these ballots “would be a logistical and administrative nightmare” because the list “does not contain the information necessary to identify voters; the Registrar has no established system for segregating ballots; and trying to create one now risks shutting down the system the Registrar needs to run the entire election.” 

Additionally, Bennett writes, California “also lack[s] the ability to verify voters’ citizenship status before December 4, 2026—the deadline for counties to certify their election results to the Secretary of State.”

Given these flaws in Trump’s case, it is unlikely that even this Supreme Court will order California to set aside the contested ballots. And, if Trump somehow does prevail, it is also unlikely that such a decision would change the result of any 2026 race.

That said, in the unlikely event it does happen, a decision favoring Trump in California could allow him to interfere with the 2028 election — because it would enable the Trump administration to harass state election officials by sending them fabricated lists of “noncitizens” that the state would have to scramble to process while it was also trying to run an election. 

But it is still unclear what Trump is trying to accomplish by bringing the California case to the justices on the day before an election, when even this Supreme Court is unlikely to rule in Trump’s favor.

If this is the extent of Trump’s efforts to overturn an election that is expected to end badly for his Republican Party, then those efforts are unlikely to amount to anything at all.

With the midterms now upon us, polls continue to suggest that we’re headed for a blue wave election. One thing that might stop it is if Republican voters come out in big numbers on Election Day. But is MAGA even united behind their candidates? And do they have a plan to motivate a base that seems to be souring on a second Trump administration? 

Conservative radio host John Fredericks, a longtime Trump supporter whose show offers a window into the MAGA mindset, thinks the GOP can pull off a victory. Fredericks acknowledges that affordability is a real issue for Republicans, who triumphed in 2024 with promises to improve an economy that they haven’t been able to turn around. But he sees Trump as a closer — capable of stepping in at the last minute, firing up his supporters, and helping Republicans pull off an upset.

America, Actually host Astead Herndon spoke with Fredericks about both the financial pressures that voters are feeling and why they might not matter for the president’s most ardent supporters. Fredericks argues that things are improving — and thinks voters know it. He also shared his predictions about how Republicans might pull ahead in the Senate and offered three elections to watch that could be early bellwethers on election night. 

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

You are in touch with Republican voters and folks in the administration. I think you represent the kind of voice of that MAGA community. In that world, what is the final argument for the midterms?

Stay the course. Things are improving. The underpinnings of the economy are phenomenal. Everything we’re doing, they’re off the charts. Now, consumer spending, way up. It’s up at record levels. People don’t spend their money if they don’t think things are going to go well in the future. They just don’t.

You put a college football game on a Saturday. Every stadium is packed. You put on an NFL game. Every stadium is packed. You can’t get into a game. People have disposable income. That doesn’t mean that they’re not pissed because of gas, they’re not upset because of groceries. Their utilities are too high. Everybody’s upset over the cost of living and gas and diesel. And that’s a real problem. 

But at the end of the day, jobs are up, wages are up, and I think our voters, our Trump voters, are going to be patient enough to wait this out. 

Look, he had to go into Iran. Obviously, he got intel there that they were too close to getting a bomb, deploying it on a ballistic missile. If they did that, what [would] gas be now, what [would] oil be? Would it be $90 a barrel? It would be $400 a barrel. They’d have the whole world hostage. 

President Trump, after five decades, made the decision with Iran. He’d had enough. That’s kind of where we are. We need patience and grace.

I hear that, but the last inflation report before the election showed that consumer prices are up 3.7 percent year to year. You have gas hovering at about $4 nationally. As we both know, the fundamental promise of this administration was about lowering prices. They were pointing to things like grocery prices, meat prices. They were pointing to gas prices under Biden. 

Can’t we at least acknowledge that Trump has not followed through on his promises on that front?

If affordability was not an issue, the Republicans would win this election in a landslide. There’s no doubt about it. Things are too expensive for people, and having the interest rates go up doesn’t help either. Everybody can see that. Everybody feels it. I go to the store with my family, we feel it. You put gas in your car. It’s like $4. These [prices] have gotta come down.

I appreciate that you’re saying that, because we’re hearing a lot of Republican candidates basically say, “Well, Biden was worse.” But we’re talking about right now. 

The closing argument here is the fundamentals are getting better.

President Trump’s plan is working. It’s just taking time. And certainly his decision to stop Iran from getting a bomb from the intel that he got from our intel agencies [matters]. We don’t know how far Iran would be now had he not done that. So President Trump had to make that decision. It’s painful. It’s going to cost us seats. There’s no doubt about it. Can we hang on? I still think we can. The MAGA base is there. 

This argument that the MAGA base is crumbling is coming from right-wing clickbaiters. And you know who clicks on them? The Democrats. This is the doom loop, right? It’s all doom. It’s all gloom. 

Even you are acknowledging a slight affordability problem for this administration. You’re acknowledging that the Iran war is going to cost the party some seats. So can we say that this is all made up by doom grifters?

It’s not slight, it’s real. 

I’m not disagreeing on the affordability issue or the gas or diesel prices or the price of meat. Nobody’s disagreeing with that. The fundamental thing is, are MAGA voters going to stay home and abandon the president? 

The Trump voters [are] going to turn out, and I think they’re going to give this president the benefit of the doubt. This is now a turnout election. Here’s the problem the Democrats have: The polls are fake. They won the summer. We’re winning the fall. Trump is a closer. And I think that that patience is going to be there. 

It’s not where we’d like it to be. But you can see the fundamentals are getting better [in] this economy, and you have a job. The main thing is that you have a job and you don’t feel like your job’s at risk.

You have a job, your income is up, you have disposable income. It’s not where you’d like it to be, but that is what’s gonna drive this thing. You’re not spending money at a record level if you think you’re gonna get laid off. You just don’t.

When you look ahead to election night, what does success look like to you for Republicans?

Holding the Senate and holding the House. Anything else is a failure. Now I happen to think we’re gonna gain two seats in the US Senate. I’m the only person saying that in America. I have no doubt about it.

You are. If it happens, we’ll give you the credit for sure.

I think the House is going to be very, very close. I’ll tell you the race to watch. And it’s going to be over by 9, 9:15. 

Go to Virginia and go to Hampton Roads, the Second District in Virginia. Jen Kiggans [versus] Elaine Luria, the Democrat challenger. [Luria] was [in the office] before, then Kiggans was there. This seat has flipped back and forth since Obama.

It’s an early bellwether seat that could tell people where the night’s going.

That is the bellwether seat. If Kiggans holds this seat, it is going to be a very good night for Republicans. There are two other races to watch. [One of the] two to look at early is Rob Wittman [of Virginia’s First District]. If he wins that race, it’s a good sign. If he gets beat, they’re in trouble. 

The other one is [Brian] Fitzpatrick in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a moderate RINO Republican outside of Philadelphia. If [Democrats are] ever gonna take that seat, they’re gonna take it now. 

I’m gonna predict if those three [candidates] win, the Republicans are gonna hold the House.

Conventional wisdom holds that young voters are idealistic and socially progressive dreamers, while older voters are hard-headed, pragmatic, and much more attuned to pocketbook issues. 

Conventional wisdom, meet Gen Z. Between 2020 and 2024, voters in this cohort swung right by more than 20 percentage points — but now they’re boomeranging back away from President Donald Trump, mainly over the cost of living and a deep sense of economic anxiety, according to a number of recent surveys of young voters.

“Inflation/prices” is the top concern for voters under 30 in YouGov’s “most important issue” tracker, far above civil rights and civil liberties. The cost of living, corruption, and US involvement in foreign conflict were the top three issues for young Americans 18–29 (who say they have at least a 50-50 chance of voting in the midterm elections) in this fall’s Harvard IOP youth poll, with 65 percent of this cohort saying the cost of living is “extremely important” in determining their midterm vote.

Similarly, 49 percent of the same young Americans in the poll said their personal finances have gotten worse since Trump took office for a second term and 91 percent said the cost of living will be “important in determining their vote.” The final New York Times/Siena national poll of the midterms reported 0 percent of likely voters under 30 “strongly approve” of Trump’s performance on cost-of-living issues.

“It’s the economy, stupid” is not a new observation in politics, but the fact that Gen Z voters are prioritizing the economy above social issues marks a genuine shift from their earlier habits. As recently as 2020, healthcare, the environment and climate change, and racism topped young voters’ priorities, according to Gallup. Back then, 79 percent of youth told pollsters that the pandemic helped them realize how much politicians’ decisions affected their lives, which added a unique society-wide issue that often didn’t fit into traditional economic categories. And in the 2022 midterm cycle, Gen Z voters were the only age group to name abortion as the top concern in deciding their vote, ranking the issue 23 points higher than inflation in a Tufts University CIRCLE analysis of national exit-poll data. 

Not anymore.

What Gen Z wants from elections

Call it the post-culture war. Just two years ago, Trump returned to the White House in part thanks to anti-woke “manosphere” influencers popular with young men, even as young women became more liberal, especially on issues like the environment and abortion. 

Now, as the top issues are changing, there’s more consensus: Amid an AI revolution, rising inflation, and war in the Middle East, identity politics can feel like a luxury. Young women were actually more likely than young men to say that rising prices and inflation constitute “an urgent crisis requiring immediate action,” in the spring Harvard IOP youth poll.

The implications are potentially far-reaching — and not just for the midterms. Both parties will need to reckon with a rising generation consumed by cost-of-living concerns in ways that could challenge the status quo and force new compromises with older generations. Already housing has become a familiar flashpoint: Young voters feel locked out of buying a home, but what might help reduce prices for them could be seen as a plan to reduce property values for older voters sitting on a home they bought long ago. And on healthcare, both parties could face more pressure to help younger voters grappling with surging costs in employer and individual insurance plans, which could compete for federal dollars and attention with programs for seniors like Medicare. 

Lately, I’m hearing young people describe frustration with candidates for a focus on policies that feel tailored to boomers or Gen X, such as raising taxes to fund Social Security or slashing property taxes for existing homeowners, without much attention on remedies for young Americans in the short term, such as bringing down the cost of rent, making higher education more affordable, or increasing healthcare options for younger Americans unable to get a job.

In my focus groups with young voters, the economic anxiety is palpable.

“I feel like over the last year things definitely have changed,” a 21-year-old man from Miami said. “You see it generally even with gas prices…a lot of it has to do with the fact that our country has involved itself in a lot of different conflicts around the world at this point.”

Meanwhile, asked about the top political or social issue impacting her right now, a 23-year-old woman from Tucson, Arizona, said the price of everything felt too high: “The rising cost of living. Everything just feels more expensive like groceries, rent, gas…even as a college student last year. And healthcare is a big concern.”

And a 21-year-old student in Pennsylvania said he uses student loan refunds to finance daily necessities. 

“During the school year, I am relying on my refunds from school to pay my rent, to pay my car payment and car insurance, phone bill, internet, stuff like that,” he told me, adding, “right now, my focus is on economic issues because I feel that I need to continue working simply just to live, that I don’t have much room to focus on cultural issues, since what is on my mind is how I will be getting my next meal. Which then ties in cultural issues, but the main forefront is the economic issues.”

What changed for young voters? 

One interpretation for why younger Gen Z voters are putting economics ahead of cultural issues is simple: The economic outlook for young people is frightening, with constant talk of new technology transforming — or eliminating — the careers they hoped to pursue. 

One study found that employment among workers ages 22–25 in AI-exposed occupations was 19 percent lower than it would have been had it kept pace with their less-exposed peers — a gap that has widened since researchers first reported it in August 2025. Another found that only 30 percent of 2025 college graduates got a full-time job related to their degree (an 11-point drop from 2024). So it’s no shock that today, the majority of adults under 30 are more concerned than excited about AI, according to the Pew Research Center.

Meanwhile, just 63 percent of adults 18–29 said they are “doing okay” or “living comfortably,” which is notably lower than the 83 percent of adults 60 and over who say the same. Anecdotally, I often hear young people say that they feel like they’re worse off economically than their parents were at the same age. These are difficult claims to check, both individually and in aggregate. But a lot of it comes down to homeownership and the sense of financial stability that comes along with it, which feels like an impossible dream for many in Gen Z.

“Obviously cultural and those other issues are important, but at the end of the day the most important thing is putting food on the table, gas in the car, and the roof over your head,” a 26-year-old teacher from Illinois told me. “And it feels right now like that’s kinda impossible to do all three. You can put gas in the car and food in your stomach but it’s hard to find a house or apartment to rent or buy. It’s kinda like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where if your core issues aren’t satisfied you can’t look higher up the pyramid.”

Millennials who came of age during the Great Recession might find this all familiar. And in fact, in 2008, the Harvard IOP youth poll found that the economy was the top issue for young Americans ages 18–24.

Of course, worrying about the economy and voting on the economy are two separate things, and young voters — who turned out in 2008 at much higher rates than prior presidential years — will need to be convinced by politicians that it’s worth putting their trust in elections to help, let alone either party. 

The post-2024 CIRCLE poll of young people offers one interesting wrinkle in this regard. Those who didn’t vote were more likely than those who did to name inflation and the cost of living, as well as jobs and unemployment, among their top three priorities. (The 2024 election also saw lower youth turnout compared to 2020 — about 47 percent versus 50 percent, respectively.) We’ll see if that dynamic changes this midterm cycle.

When voters transition from voting on social and cultural issues to voting based on economic ones, it’s often said condescendingly that they’re voting with their “heads” rather than their “hearts” or that they’re “growing up” and learning that running a household takes more money and responsibility than they expected. I don’t think these young adults are growing up; I think they’re freaking out.

Jon Husted has a problem: People can’t seem to remember who he is. The former lieutenant governor of Ohio was appointed to be the state’s junior U.S. senator in 2025, after JD Vance became vice president. But Husted hasn’t much of an impression on the Buckeye State’s residents. In an August poll conducted by Emerson College, nearly four in 10 Ohio voters answered “unsure/never heard of” when asked their opinion of the Republican incumbent. Only 14% answered the same regarding his Democratic opponent, former Sen. Sherrod Brown. In fact, one in four voters in a Bowling Green State University poll even mistakenly identified Brown, a popular veteran of Ohio politics, as the incumbent. (In fact, Brown lost his seat to Ohio’s other Republican senator, Bernie Moreno, in 2024.)

The Husted campaign has tried to spin his forgettability as an asset, hoping to trick voters into thinking of Brown as a failed incumbent, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Brown is pulling ahead in the most recent polls, riding a larger national turn away from the GOP. So Republicans turned to the one person who knows how to get a headline: Donald Trump.

Bringing the president to campaign in Ohio has certainly helped to boost Husted’s name recognition, but at a painful cost. Now Husted has become the single most famous male victim of Trump’s relentless appetite for sexual harassment. 

The president’s public ogling of Husted started at a Youngstown rally on Oct. 12, when Trump delivered a monologue about how he’d “started examining [Husted’s] body” and had seen big hands and shoulders. Then he said the word “ass.” This caused a reaction of shock and laughter reaction in the crowd and also generated a lot of media attention. So Trump, like a narcissistic rat pushing the “applause” button, turned it into a running joke. At nearly every rally now, whether in Ohio or somewhere else, Trump raves about the 59-year-old Husted’s reputedly spectacular and muscular backside.

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Trump is famously a lifelong heterosexual, so many in the media and on the left are confused. They assume that latent homoerotic yearnings are burbling up, perhaps from the disinhibition that can occur among people who take regular tests for dementia, as does our president. But that’s unlikely, and not just because Husted actually possesses the softer derrière typical of a man his age. If genuine same-sex desire was behind Trump’s leering, the overtly homophobic crowds who populate MAGA rallies would be highly uncomfortable.

Instead, as videos show, they scream with the same laughter they produce when Trump goes on a racist tirade, encourages audience members to commit acts of violence or otherwise showcases his affinity for childish bullying, which remains his main and often sole selling point to his base. It’s a large-scale version of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, where Trump tried to impress the show’s host, Billy Bush, with braggadocious claims that he can grab women’s genitals and they have to put up with it. 

The MAGA crowd may not favor the term “sexual harassment,” but they get that’s what Trump is doing to Husted. He did the same bit with Nicki Minaj, making the rapper-turned-MAGA shill stand up and show off her backside to the crowd at a Michigan rally.  As feminists like to remind folks, sexual harassment is about demonstrating power, not lust. Husted is far from the only man Trump ever catcalls. As the New York Times notes, Trump loves making a spectacle out of men’s looks, for the approval of hooting MAGA audiences who get a vicarious thrill from watching Trump say inappropriate things to fellow Republicans, who have no choice but to grin and pretend they enjoy it. It’s a continuation of the other ways Trump displays his dominance over Republicans with fancy job titles, such as senators and Cabinet officials, by expecting them to flatter him grotesquely on camera or to wear ill-fitting shoes he has “gifted” them. 

None of this should make us feel any sympathy for Husted or other Republicans, who could at any point grow an actual spine and reject Trump’s abuse. These people grovel for their failing leader in the vain hope that some of his celebrity stardust will rub off on them and boost their political ambitions. Husted is a classic example of the problem now facing Republicans. Like most in his party, he has nothing to offer voters, unless they’re hyper-rich capitalists seeking deregulation or massive tax cuts. He has no discernible charisma of his own, either. So all that’s left is leeching onto Trump and hoping his ability to speak to the lizard-brain impulses of bigots will rally enough voters to drag Husted’s empty pair of pants (and his mediocre ass) across the finish line. 

What’s funny about all this is that Husted’s blandness is likely what landed him in the unfortunate spot of getting rhetorically goosed by Trump almost every night. By his own account, Trump knew very little about the Ohio Republican he was there to support at the Youngstown rally, but learned shortly beforehand that Husted played football in college. Trump, whose background is in reality TV, resorted to his tendency to reduce a person to a single defining trait that could fit on a chyron. So even though Husted’s gridiron career ended decades ago, Trump indulged in lame fantasies about how he thinks a football player should look like, complete with broad shoulders and well-defined glutes.

Likely, it would have ended with one iteration if he hadn’t praised Husted’s ass, which elevated a pedestrian effort to define a candidate into the realm of attention-getting weirdness. But of course that remark got everyone’s attention, and Trump will reliably return to any bit, no matter how bizarre, as long as it draws eyeballs. So it was that Husted, who was on the verge of being relegated to “Former College Football Player” in the sprawling reality show cast of Trump’s political orbit, instead became the butt of Trump’s favorite new joke.

It could be worse, of course. Trump has a similar bit he likes to trot out about Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for that state’s Senate seat. Except instead of being an imaginary muscleman like Husted, Trump has cast Paxton in the role of ugly loser. In nearly every speech where he mentions Paxton, Trump has to talk about how hideous the guy is and how poorly he supposedly dresses.

With both of these GOP candidates, Trump’s oversimplified, theatrical descriptors don’t have much to do with reality. Whatever he once looked like, Husted doesn’t really have the athletic build Trump fantasizes about. Paxton is nobody’s idea of a handsome man, but it’s simply not true that he dresses poorly. There are many terrible things we could say about Paxton, but his wardrobe appears perfectly fine — especially compared to Trump, who seems to believe that wearing enormously oversized suits will hide his ever-expanding bulk. But these two guys are now characters in Trump’s world, where, as in reality TV shows, individual humans are stripped of all their complexities to be turned into broad, easily consumed caricatures.

Whether he’s inviting the world to stare at these men’s allegedly spectacular rear end or daring them to smile while he calls them ugly, Trump is sending a message: He owns these people. He can define them in reductive, humiliating language, and they have been so hollowed out as human beings that they won’t even defend themselves. Normally, when a leader is both a lame duck and cratering in his approval polls, the way Donald Trump is now, that person’s party will start looking for ways to move on and forge a new identity. It’s a sign of how empty the Republican Party is that they seem incapable of doing that. They don’t just submit to Trump’s continued abuse, but even keep seeking it out. That must be a miserable experience, but clearly they feel that without him, they’re nothing at all. It’s tough to disagree. 

The post Ohio’s Jon Husted, object of Trump’s leering, is just an empty pair of pants appeared first on Salon.com.

Less than a week out from the 2026 midterms, Republicans across the country are feeling the heat from their party’s vote last year to shrink Medicaid by roughly $1 trillion over the next decade. The cuts, driven largely by new work requirements and eligibility checks, are expected to leave more than 7 million Americans without insurance by 2034. They’ll also hit hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes that everyone uses, whether or not they’re on Medicaid.

These cuts weren’t supposed to be noticeable to voters just yet. Republicans designed them to take effect in 2027, after the midterms.

But some of the damage is already showing up. Paired with a reduction in tax credits to help buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act, and rising employee premiums, the cuts are colliding with a broader voter revolt against the high cost of living — and have turned healthcare into a top midterm issue.

A slew of recent polling shows healthcare costs sitting at the top of voters’ economic worries as the campaign season winds down. A KFF poll from earlier this month found healthcare outranked food, housing, and utilities as a top concern, with nearly half of voters saying it was “extremely important” for candidates to be talking about. And in late September, an Associated Press and KFF survey of rural voters found that twice as many said the Trump administration’s healthcare policies had hurt the health of people in their community as said they’d helped. 

Republicans have tried to rebrand the One Big Beautiful Bill Act as the “Working Families Tax Cuts,” but Politico found voters largely unmoved by the new name, and Fox News recently gave Democrats a 22-point lead on who voters trust to handle healthcare.

Democrats, for their part, have put healthcare costs at the center of their closing argument. It’s the issue they’ve spent more on than any other, according to the Cook Political Report’s Battleground Issue Tracker, with more than $215 million across the  most competitive House and Senate races this year. Democrats trying to flip red seats are running ads on reversing the Medicaid cuts and on having relied on Medicaid once themselves, while outside liberal groups are spending millions of dollars in ads tying Republicans to the cuts, and leading an 8,000-mile bus tour through 36 cities. 

They’ll have even more to work with next year. The new Medicaid work requirements and the six-month eligibility checks that Republicans delayed past the midterms will all take effect in 2027, which means the first wave of people losing health insurance coverage will hit right as the 2028 campaign begins.

Republicans’ defenses aren’t holding up

Reducing Medicaid spending became a critical part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in order to help offset the multitrillion-dollar cost of extending President Donald Trump’s first-term tax cuts, adding some new ones, and funding ICE.

Mindful of the potential for political backlash, Republicans took steps to ward off attacks.

The main defense Republicans have relied on is to point to a $50 billion rural health fund that was also included in the bill. The GOP is touting it as “the single largest investment” in rural healthcare in over 20 years.

But fact-checkers and health analysts have been clear that this temporary infusion of funds, spread out over five years, doesn’t offset the $137 billion in permanent cuts projected to hit rural areas over the same decade. 

Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who voted to let the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reach the Senate floor but against final passage, leaned on this rural healthcare fund in a debate earlier this month. “If I had not allowed the bill to go to the floor, I would never have been able to author the $50 billion fund to help rural healthcare,” she said. Troy Jackson, her Democratic challenger, emphasized that the fund comes nowhere close to covering what Mainers stand to lose. “Senator Collins is like an arsonist who helped set the fire, and then she wants credit for bringing a cup of water to put it out,” he said.

Voters don’t need a fact-check to notice when a hospital shuts down or reduces service. In some cases, medical institutions aren’t waiting for the cuts to arrive, and are making decisions based on the federal funding they expect to lose. In Iowa, for example, MercyOne Clinton Medical Center ended labor and delivery services earlier this year, citing decreased Medicaid funding as part of the reason.

“The public’s not stupid, and we’re all already absorbing a lot of additional costs that we shouldn’t have to because of Republican decision-making in Washington, DC,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told Politico recently.

The second is to deny there is reduced spending at all. “It’s not an actual cut,” as GOP Rep. David Valadao of California said in a debate several weeks ago — the savings, Republicans argue, come from cracking down on waste, fraud, and abuse. 

This distinction is an important one in certain campaigns. Medicaid covers over 60 percent of Valadao’s California district, and he voted for the bill. Valadao also led a letter, signed by 12 other Republicans from battleground districts, declaring that “we cannot and will not support a final reconciliation bill that includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations.” Every one of them ultimately voted for it. 

Loss of coverage is already happening in Nebraska, the only state to start enforcing its new Medicaid work requirements ahead of the deadline.

The “no actual cuts” claim rests on a technicality that the law doesn’t reduce benefits for anyone who stays enrolled. But the roughly $1 trillion in savings the Congressional Budget Office scored comes almost entirely from people losing coverage. When Arkansas tried the same 80-hour-a-month work requirement in 2018, more than 18,000 people lost their health insurance within months. This happened mostly because people didn’t know about the changes or couldn’t handle the new paperwork.

Loss of coverage is already happening in Nebraska, the only state to start enforcing its new Medicaid work requirements ahead of the deadline. Millions more across the country are getting notices in the mail that they could lose their insurance next year.

The problems driving voter anger are about to get worse

Nebraska offers the clearest preview of what’s coming. The state began enforcing its Medicaid work requirements in July, well ahead of the federal deadline, and more than 1,000 residents have already lost coverage, according to the Washington Sun. Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, who voted for the bill, is tied with Dan Osborn, an independent, in a state that Trump carried easily.

“One out of two Republicans either are, have been or have a family member that is or has been on Medicaid,” Bob Ward, a pollster with the GOP firm Fabrizio Ward, told the Washington Sun. “It’s not like a theoretical thing.”

The rest of the country will experience these new administrative burdens beginning in January. Adults covered under the Medicaid expansion will have to prove every six months that they’re working, volunteering, or attending classes at least 80 hours per month, or demonstrate that they qualify for an exception.

There were Republicans, including some who ultimately voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, who warned in 2025 that voters would not respond well to billions of dollars in Medicaid cuts. Polling at the time found that 71 percent of voters who backed Trump also said they’d oppose cutting the federal health insurance program.

Several months before voting for the bill Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley warned that cutting Medicaid would be “both morally wrong and politically suicidal.” Trump himself told his fellow “cost-cutting Republicans” to avoid going “too crazy” and “REMEMBER, you still have to get reelected.”

Leaders working in healthcare say these changes will drive up costs for all patients, irrespective of whether they use other forms of insurance. For example, if there are fewer people able to access primary care through Medicaid, then more patients will need to utilize hospital emergency rooms for care, and hospitals are required to provide treatment there regardless of whether they’ll be reimbursed. To cover that lost Medicaid revenue, experts expect that some hospitals will need to cut staff, services, or close clinics. They’ll also likely shift costs onto everyone else, through longer ER wait times and higher premiums for patients still on insurance.

Workers who get insurance through their employers are bracing for hikes, too. KFF’s annual employer survey found the average worker is paying more than $600 more toward a family plan this year than in 2025, and the cost-shifting that follows Medicaid cuts is expected to push premiums higher still. One August survey of employers found average plans are projected to rise next year by more than 8 percent. Roughly 160 million Americans get coverage this way.

Republicans have made a bet that higher costs won’t hurt them next week or in two years. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who announced his retirement days before voting against final passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, warned that voters would come to understand who took away their health insurance coverage.

“If you’re a competent Democrat, you’re going to figure out how to communicate to them how it affects their lives,” he said that summer. “And it almost certainly will.”

A great deal is at stake in next week’s midterm elections. The partisan makeup of the new Congress will shape future spending bills, congressional investigations, and judicial nominations, among other things.

And yet, the most consequential bill of the next 12 months — and the one that speaks most directly to voters’ concerns about the cost-of-living — might well pass before the new Congress is seated.

The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 (BAAJA) could dramatically reshape America’s energy system. And the bill’s supporters plan to pass it during the House and Senate’s lame-duck session — the months between next week’s elections and the new Congress’s arrival. 

The bill is long and complex, revising the rules governing everything from how ocean-powered turbines are licensed to what some geothermal plants must pay in royalties. 

That said, the legislation’s fundamental aim is simple: to make building all forms of energy infrastructure easier. 

The BAAJA has united fossil fuel companies and green energy firms in its favor — while cleaving the climate movement in two.

Some climate hawks contend that the legislation pares back vital environmental regulations, while clearing the way for new gas pipelines and power plants that will drive up America’s emissions. “This is not the permitting deal that we were promised,” Jeremy Symons, president of the Center for Energy and Environmental Analysis, told me, citing its “historic environmental protection rollbacks.”

Others insist that the bill is a net-win for decarbonization. In their account, permitting reforms will do more to facilitate a buildout of green energy than to lock in America’s dependence on fossil fuels. 

“Fossil is the incumbent technology and fuel mix,” Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the center-left Searchlight Institute, said. “A system that makes it easier for everyone to build should advantage the nonincumbent.”

I think Flegal’s side has this right. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act will likely help renewables erode fossil fuels’ share of the electricity market. By itself, the legislation will not ensure a timely transition to a green electricity system. But it will get us a little further down that road, while also making energy more affordable for US consumers — which might well be the midterm electorate’s top priority.

This said, the current draft of the bill does contain one potentially major — and seemingly, accidental — flaw. Assuming Congress fixes that issue, climate hawks should join hands with Big Oil and push for the BAAJA’s imminent passage.

A carbon-free electric grid requires a lot of infrastructure 

The climate case for permitting reform begins with a simple observation: If you want to decarbonize America’s energy grid, you need to build a metric fudge-ton of new infrastructure.

Today, low-carbon energy sources provide about 43 percent of our nation’s electricity. Thus, even if America embraced “degrowth” — and froze its electricity consumption at current levels — zeroing out the power sector’s carbon emissions would require constructing a gargantuan number of new wind, solar, battery storage, and geothermal (and/or nuclear) projects. 

But of course, America is not actually going to freeze its use of electricity. And mainstream climate hawks don’t even want it to. After all, if every SUV owner replaces their gas guzzler with an EV, then demand for electricity will rise. And decarbonizing home heat or heavy industry will have the same effect. Indeed, to an extent, this basic process is already playing out.

“We’re seeing quite rapid demand growth,” Flegal said. “And that is not only — or even primarily — because of data centers. It’s because of broader structural trends toward electrifying our economy and onshoring manufacturing.”

Taking demand growth into account, a study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated that getting to a carbon-free electric grid by 2035 would require generating roughly 2,000 gigawatts of wind and solar energy; today, we generate roughly 396 gigawatts. 

The challenge appears even more formidable when measured in land. According to Princeton’s 2021 Net Zero America estimate, in a “high electrification” scenario, the US will need wind and solar developments that collectively span nearly 600,000 square kilometers of land — roughly the size of California and Washington state combined.

And even this may undersell the scale of the task. Achieving net zero does not only require constructing immense quantities of wind turbines and solar panels — complemented by battery storage and firm power sources like nuclear or geothermal — but also a vast network of new transmission lines.

America’s transmission infrastructure is already inadequate to our current electricity needs. But a carbon-free grid would demand far more high-voltage lines than today’s. This is because fossil fuel plants are more geographically flexible than renewable ones. Per unit of power generated, gas plants require a small fraction of the land that wind and solar do. And in regions with mature pipeline networks, gas plants can be located in a wide range of places. For these reasons, it’s not that difficult to site carbon power facilities near major population centers or existing transmission lines.

By contrast, wind and solar farms need to be located in areas with both favorable weather conditions and a great deal of affordable land. Such sites are often far from the urban areas where electricity is most needed. Therefore, to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, America will need a lot more transmission lines. According to NREL, to achieve a 100 percent clean electric grid by 2035 would require building between 1,400 and 10,000 miles of high-capacity transmission lines annually; in 2024, America built just 888 miles.

Given all this, a permitting system that’s biased toward stasis is one that’s biased toward fossil fuels: The harder it is to build new power plants and transmission lines, the longer our electric grids will need to rely on carbon energy.

This world was built for fossil fuels

Alas, the current permitting regime does, in fact, make building power infrastructure really hard.

There are myriad regulatory obstacles to energy development at the state, local, and federal levels. But one major hurdle is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a law that requires federal agencies to study the ecological consequences of projects before authorizing their construction. 

When first enacted, NEPA was not intended to dramatically impede infrastructure development. Indeed, the law does not actually hold proposed projects accountable to any particular environmental standard; it merely requires that a thorough study of the relevant ecological effects be carried out. 

But litigators successfully turned NEPA into a tool for obstructing projects — one used by both sincere environmentalists and opportunistic NIMBYs. Such lawyers argued that if the government’s study of a development failed to account for some significant environmental impact, then its authorization was invalid and needed to be redone. When courts started accepting this argument, federal agencies began drafting more and more comprehensive environmental impact statements (EIS), in hopes of preempting legal challenges. In the early 1970s, an EIS could be as short as 10 pages; by the 2010s, the average statement had ballooned to 661.  

Such extravagant due diligence takes time. As of 2024, the median federal EIS took more than two years to complete. And even so, NEPA lawsuits have continued to flourish.

A Stanford study published in 2023 examining 355 major infrastructure developments found that 28 percent of the projects requiring an EIS ended up facing litigation before construction. And the median NEPA lawsuit takes 19 months to resolve — despite the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, courts ultimately fail to identify any legal flaw requiring a new study, according to an analysis from the Breakthrough Institute. All this doesn’t merely slow projects down; by driving up expected costs, it also prevents many from being pursued in the first place.

A second obstacle to energy development is the exhaustive — yet somewhat anarchic — process for permitting interstate transmission lines. These lines must generally secure approval from authorities in every state whose borders they cross. The federal government already recognizes the impracticality of this arrangement when it comes to natural gas infrastructure: Uncle Sam has claimed the authority to site an interstate natural gas pipeline, in defiance of states’ wishes. But Washington lacks similar powers with respect to transmission projects.

High-voltage lines are further stymied by an absence of procedures for divvying up their costs. Over time, a single transmission project can lower electricity prices across several states. But precisely which jurisdictions will derive the most benefit isn’t always clear ahead of time. And this makes it hard for utilities to agree on how to allocate the lines’ upfront costs, which can nip the developments in the bud.

How the permitting reform bill addresses these problems

The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act tackles both of these barriers to energy deployment (along with many others).

To clear the way for new high-voltage lines, the bill empowers the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to overrule states that reject or obstruct new transmission projects. (Technically, FERC already has this authority in certain designated corridors. But current restrictions on this power are so binding that the agency has never actually sited a transmission line over state opposition in practice.)

As importantly, the legislation requires regional grid planners to adopt a common set of methods for estimating which jurisdictions will benefit most from a new transmission line (and thus, how much their respective utilities should chip in for it). This will hopefully foster greater consensus. But if it doesn’t, the bill opens up an alternative path to approval: Developers can go above the regional planners’ heads and ask the federal government to approve the line and impose a cost-allocation scheme.

Meanwhile, the legislation also constrains the reach of NEPA litigation. Under current law, after an environmental review is completed, plaintiffs can file lawsuits over that review’s purported flaws for up to six years. Under the BAAJA, they’d have only 150 days. Plaintiffs would also be required to demonstrate direct harm and show that they raised their objections during the review’s public comment process. Most consequentially, the law forbids judges from freezing projects solely because their environmental impact statements were inadequate. Instead, construction would be allowed to continue while federal agencies corrected their review’s deficiencies.

Cutting red tape is good for green energy

By reducing our permitting system’s bias toward the status quo, these reforms make the green transition a bit more possible. Renewables are rapidly growing more cost-competitive. And battery technology is steadily advancing. In a world where new energy infrastructure is relatively easy to build, green power has a good chance of dominating grids in the long run.

But there’s also cause for thinking that the BAAJA’s reforms will disproportionately benefit green projects in the near term. 

With transmission, the case is simple: When you look at today’s interconnection queue — which is to say, the backlog of projects seeking connection to the grid — you see that wind, solar, and storage (an enabling technology for weather-dependent renewable power) account for nearly 85 percent of pending capacity. Building out transmission infrastructure should reduce such backlogs, primarily benefiting green technologies in the process.

And the NEPA reforms are likely to benefit renewables more than fossil fuels, even in the short run. To see why, consider the following:

• As mentioned, solar and wind are extremely land-intensive. The former covers between 10 and 20 times as much ground as a typical gas plant (even when drilling needs are taken into account), in order to generate the same amount of energy; wind farms can require up to 200 times as much. 
• Many of the areas that are best-suited to renewable generation — those with abundant sunlight, wind, and open space — are in the western United States, where the federal government owns a large share of all undeveloped land.
• If an energy project is built on federal land, it must go through the NEPA process.

For these reasons, carbon energy development probably isn’t as burdened by NEPA as the renewable kind. Gas and coal plants just don’t need as much land in general — and less federally owned western acreage in particular. 

According to Daniel Palken, an energy expert at the philanthropy Arnold Ventures, NEPA’s suppressive impact on green development is well-illustrated by any map of wind and solar power in the US. (Disclosure: Vox has received a grant from Arnold Ventures. This story was not funded by that grant, and Vox has full discretion over the content of its reporting.)

“If you look at where the wind and solar congregates, it carefully builds in the negative spaces between where all the federal land is out west,” Palken told me. “Most of the West is de facto off-limits because they just don’t want to go through the process.”

“The NEPA provisions are described as Republican asks,” he added. “But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they asymmetrically aid renewables.”

More broadly, the notion that a lax permitting environment can enable a rapid expansion of green energy — and with it, a shift away from carbon power — isn’t just some distant hypothetical. Rather, that scenario has already played out in one of America’s most pro-oil states.

Texas has scant federal or state-owned lands and no NEPA-like environmental review process. “They’re the only state where you don’t need siting permission from either the state or localities to site a large energy project,” Palken said. “And they have had very forward-looking, long-range transmission planning policies.”

Thanks in part to this permitting environment, wind and solar power have flourished in the Lone Star State, rendering its electric grid far less carbon-intensive. In 2003, natural gas and coal generated 86 percent of the power on Texas’s main grid, while wind and solar supplied less than 1 percent. By 2025, renewables’ share had soared to nearly 38 percent, while fossil fuels’ had fallen to 54 percent.

The real problem with the BAAJA

To be sure, Texas is no climate hawk’s idea of utopia. Its permissive regulatory regime has enabled a remarkable green buildout. But by failing to regulate carbon pollution, that regime has also allowed a rise in Texas’s overall emissions, as gains in population, prosperity, and industrial investment have led to higher electricity consumption.

Given this, environmentalists reasonably deem permitting reform inadequate for achieving timely decarbonization. 

“Clean energy will not win in the marketplace at the scale and speed needed unless fossil fuels are held accountable for their pollution,” Symons, of the Center for Energy and Environmental Analysis, told me. “Gas and clean energy are growing hand in hand.”

Such concerns animate environmentalists’ objections to the current bill. Two of their complaints warrant attention here — the first because it is widely held but unpersuasive, the second because it is compelling but easily addressed.

Environmentalists’ less convincing objection to the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act goes like this: Democrats have no good reason to accept the current legislation’s trade-offs. After all, the party will almost certainly have more power in the next Congress than it does in today’s. With control of the House — and perhaps also the Senate — Democrats would have more leverage in negotiations. And they could use this clout to secure permitting relief for green energy projects without throwing as many bones to Big Oil.

“A system where you’re allowed to build the most economic energy resources with fewer encumbrances, fewer delays, and fewer restrictions is, almost by definition, a more affordable system.”

Daniel Palken, energy expert

But there are a couple of problems with this reasoning. For one, permitting reform will still require President Donald Trump’s sign-off in 2027, even in Democrats’ rosiest midterm scenario. And it isn’t remotely clear that the White House will feel compelled to offer Democrats a more environmentally friendly permitting reform bill just because the party captured Congress (especially since the Democratic majorities will likely be inundating the administration with subpoenas and corruption investigations). 

For another, however imperfect the legislation may be, it still creates a permitting environment that’s more favorable to green development than the status quo. If Congress passes permitting reform now, the green buildout will likely be further along by 2029 — or whenever Democrats next take full control of the government, at which point they can tweak permitting and environmental rules how they see fit.

The more compelling critique of the BAAJA concerns its “project certainty” provisions. Ironically, this part of the bill was actually a Democratic priority. And it was conceived as a response to the Trump administration’s capricious cancellation of renewable energy permits. 

Essentially, the “project certainty” section would prohibit federal agencies from revoking or modifying previously issued permits — or “otherwise interfering with the construction or operation” of permitted projects, unless they uncover a violation of existing law.

But some environmental lawyers fear that the bill’s language is vague and broad enough to threaten the EPA’s future rulemaking authorities: If a Democratic administration tightened air pollution standards, that might “interfere with the construction or operation” of a permitted gas plant. Courts might therefore rule that such regulations are unlawful. 

This is genuinely concerning. But it would also be easy for legislators to preempt this scenario with a few tweaks to the bill’s wording. 

“I think there is a pretty narrow technical fix to be made that ensures the project certainty section is doing what the drafters wanted it to do,” Flegal said, “which was not to prevent future regulatory action but just to make it harder to rescind legally issued permits.”

When in doubt, err on the side of lowering energy costs

Assuming the “project certainty” details are ironed out, the BAAJA should be good for the climate. And it’s all-but guaranteed to be beneficial for consumers. 

According to one analysis, the legislation’s transmission provisions alone would save US households well over $1.1 billion annually on their electric bills. 

Further, even the bill’s most regrettable consequences from a climate perspective — such as its facilitation of new natural gas pipelines — would likely be positive for affordability. In particular, such infrastructure could help ease high home heating costs in colder, energy-scarce states like Maine — an issue that some Democratic candidates are explicitly running on.

“A system where you’re allowed to build the most economic energy resources with fewer encumbrances, fewer delays, and fewer restrictions is, almost by definition, a more affordable system,” Palken said.

Thus, to green America’s grid — and save Americans’ money — Congress needs to cut red tape. They should waste little time in doing so.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

No sooner had early voting started this year than analysts noticed a curious trend: Democratic voters were choosing to vote a lot like…Republicans. 

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Democrats who cast their ballots early have most commonly done so by mail. But this year, they’re voting in person, and in huge numbers — even narrowing Republicans’ traditional early voting lead in states like Florida and Texas.

The abrupt shift may have something to do with President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the mail voting process, and it almost definitely reflects the anxiety and vigilance that many Americans feel about the midterms this year. In less than a week, they’ll decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. 

The stakes are arguably unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical norms and limits. So as we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, I’ve been partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for a series of weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. 

Previously, we dug into the ways both parties are changing, the bipartisan backlash to AI and data centers, the politics of high costs, and the changing mood toward Israel. This week, for our final installment, we’re tackling something a little more fundamental: the integrity and security of the voting process itself. It’s a worrying subject, but by no means a hopeless one. Let’s get into it.

Go a little deeper

Let me begin with a metaphor that may or may not reassure you: Imagine there’s a serial killer outside your house, and they’re trying to get in and kill you.

That’s pretty terrifying, under any circumstance. But also: Your house is an absolute vault. You have reinforced steel doors. You have good locks on all the windows. And the police are actually on its way now.

“I don’t want to understate the threat” of election interference, Benjy Sarlin, Vox’s editorial director of politics said when he relayed this metaphor on the America, Actually podcast last month. But if Trump is the serial killer trying America’s doors and windows…then understand this house is pretty well-defended. 

Take mail voting, the issue that has so (literally) moved Democrats this year. You’ll recall that Trump tried to sabotage the practice by implementing new, last-minute rules that would have effectively canceled mail-in voting in some places. 

But the Constitution clearly assigns the power to regulate and administer elections to the states and Congress, and courts blocked the administration’s rules. In mid-September, the Supreme Court declined to let them take effect for this election. So there’s one lock made good. 

The Trump administration has also demanded unprecedented access to states’ voter rolls, suing 30 states and Washington, DC, to obtain them. Of those cases, courts have dismissed 27 of them (though many dismissals are being appealed).

Earlier this month, the DOJ went further and demanded that California officials set aside the ballots of some 20,000 registered voters that it alleged were likely noncitizens. In the predictable legal battle that followed, courts sided with the state. A federal judge excoriated the administration in an opinion on Wednesday, ruling that the ballot segregation order “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election.” The Trump administration has already appealed the ruling. 

Other forms of meddling are possible. Asked in August about declaring a national emergency to impose new voting requirements, Trump replied — unnervingly — that “stranger things have happened.” And the president and his allies have floated drastic measures like deploying federal agents to polling sites or seizing “suspect” ballots, a threat tangible enough that it’s reportedly unsettled a number of FBI agents. 

Just last week, the Trump administration attempted to preemptively contest the results in Alaska’s Senate race, claiming that the presence of two Dan Sullivans on the ballot — the incumbent Republican and an independent newcomer — risked confusing voters. The New York Times has since reported that Democrats enticed Dan Sullivan 2.0 to run for exactly that reason. In some corners, the ensuing scandal has raised concerns that Republicans could refuse to seat Democrat Mary Peltola if she wins. 

But even that possibility is fairly remote. While there are mechanisms for both state officials and US lawmakers to challenge election results, those procedures are pretty regimented. And any attempts to disrupt voting, vote-counting, or the certification of results would likely face both a flood of lawsuits (which voting groups have already prepped) and a public outcry that could ultimately and lastingly hurt Republicans.

Trump might not care overmuch about democratic norms or the rule of law, but he does likely care about the risks of a longer-term political backlash. To this day, Benjy said, a lot of Republicans still blame Trump for losing them Georgia’s Senate seats: His election denialism after 2020 helped drive huge numbers of Black Georgians to the polls, where they voted in two Democrats. 

The number of Democrats voting early and in-person suggests the possibility that a similar dynamic is at play now. In other words, there is real risk — but lots of people are fighting to keep the proverbial bad guys out. 

Races to watch:

• Alaska Senate race, where Trump is ready to contest a Democratic win;
• Wisconsin governor’s race, where Republican Tom Tiffany has promoted Trump’s lies about the 2020 election; 
• Nevada’s secretary of state race, which could similarly put an outspoken election denier in charge of the state’s voting system.

More from Vox: 

• How election officials are thinking about Trump’s threat to the midterms
• The one thing everyone can do to fight for free and fair elections
• Trump has a plan to steal the midterms. It will probably fail.

One link for later

➨ Turn on the (early morning) lights. It’s getting darker earlier and earlier these days, and it’s often pitch black when my alarm goes off. That means it’s time for an annual tradition: digging out my bulky, 10,000-lux light box. Bright morning light, from a box or the sun, sets your body’s internal clock and helps regulate your sleep. It can also mitigate seasonal affective disorder, which starts plaguing many sufferers around Halloween.  

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there’s an extremely rare and spooky form of lightning that can appear indoors? It’s called “ball lightning,” and it’s one of the most mysterious weather phenomena in the world.  
• Today’s trivia: What’s the name of the vast Andean empire that ruled from its capital in Cusco? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you where you might find an arroyo. These seasonally dry streambeds cut through deserts, where they can serve as a “highway” for wild animals. 

Americans want changes to their healthcare, and the candidates in this year’s midterms are making bold promises about how they are going to improve it: Medicare-for-all, or a public health insurance option, or free primary care for everyone. If Democrats win big this year, they could build up momentum to control Congress and the White House in 2029, which could leave them well-positioned to take on the thorny problem of how to fix the US health system.

History suggests that this won’t be easy. For every Affordable Care Act, you have the failed attempt to repeal it or the calamity of the Clinton-era healthcare initiative. Americans want change — but they fear it, too. I’ve spent years reading healthcare polls, talking to voters, attending focus groups. The public’s opinion of the healthcare industry has grown more and more sour, and distrust of the medical establishment is at an all-time high. People are sick of having a broken health system, but they worry that big changes could end up being bad for them. 

Even though a meaningful attempt at reform is still years away and universal health care in any form might seem like a progressive pipe dream, the industry is not sitting idly by. 

As Democrats have started to roll out policy proposals in anticipation of winning back Congress, the industry has been there to start making its case. In some campaigns, that means backing Republicans, but it also means lobbying Democratic Party leaders to hold the line against their more progressive members who want to push for far-reaching changes. 

The question now is: Will their old playbook work? Can the industry convince Democrats to scale back their policy ambitions, or is their grip on Congress loosening?

“The next two years are actually quite pivotal, for doing the groundwork and all the necessary socializing, consensus-building,” said Kim Monk, a former congressional healthcare staffer who co-founded the private-sector research firm Capital Alpha Partners. “That’s the work that gets you to a point where either party decides, okay, this will be on our platform — or not.”

That will be the tug-of-war of the next two years: a PR battle waged between health companies with hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal on one side and progressive lawmakers, activists, and patient advocates on the other that will ultimately determine what’s possible in the next phase of American healthcare.

The healthcare industry doesn’t want Democrats to win too big

In the short term, the industry is hedging its bets in the face of a Democratic wave. 

Private enterprise has historically backed the Republican Party, but that’s starting to shift. What the healthcare industry values above all else is balance. Democrats operating without any constraints are more likely to impose government regulations on medical companies. But full GOP control comes with its own risks, like the $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which has already led to clinics and hospitals laying off staff or even closing facilities altogether.

“At least for the short term, I imagine the healthcare industry would welcome control of Congress by Democrats, creating more predictability, forestalling more cuts in Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, and potentially reversing or delaying some of the cuts that have already been made,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF. “The longer-term political calculus for the healthcare industry is more complicated. Many Democrats are pushing for a bigger role for government in health care.”

In other words, while healthcare companies might welcome a Democratic House as a check on President Donald Trump’s unpredictability, they aren’t necessarily hoping for a massive blue wave that could make significant reforms a serious possibility if Democrats were to win the White House in 2028. 

The industry’s MO when it looks like a wave election is brewing is to balance the scales: I reported in 2016 how, in what was looking like a good year for Democrats, the drug industry poured money into the campaigns of Republican candidates by a 6-to-1 margin in competitive races, hoping to stifle the agenda of presumed President Hillary Clinton. (Of course they, like the rest of us, are still susceptible to being wrong.)

And that’s how the industry has been approaching the 2026 election: In many of the pivotal House and Senate races, they are backing the GOP. 

As healthcare journalist Merrill Goozner reported last week, the American Hospital Association PAC and PhRMA, a drug industry trade group, have given a combined $14,500 to Republican incumbent Jon Husted and none to his Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown in the historically expensive Ohio Senate race. In Maine, Republican Sen. Susan Collins has received donations from all of the major healthcare trade groups — hospitals, pharma, insurers, and doctors — while her opponent, Democrat Troy Jackson, got none. (He also has sworn off corporate PAC money.) Even in an open race without an incumbent, like the Iowa Senate campaign, the Republican candidate has scored donations from hospitals and pharma, but the Democrat has not, Goozner reported.

If Democrats take the House but not the Senate, that would immediately put a damper on their healthcare reform plans — whereas winning a Senate majority would allow them to start drafting and debating bills in both chambers with an eye toward what could actually pass if they win in 2028 too.

“If there is actually a blue tsunami next week and Democrats get 51-plus [members] in the Senate, that’s a really big deal,” Monk said. “You can’t just say this doesn’t matter because Trump’s going to veto it, because I think it very much becomes a 2028 issue.”

And even as they work to push the next Congress more to their ideological liking, the healthcare industry is preparing for the fight that comes after.

The industry is prepping its counterattacks on ambitious healthcare proposals

After the midterms wrap up, the next two years in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail will be crucial. The industry is already working to set the terms of the debate and push back against big changes.

Each subset of the industry has its own versions of this argument: Pharma warns that price controls could stifle innovation, insurers warn that coverage mandates will increase premiums, hospitals warn that constraints on their funding could lead to closures and job losses. (There’s a well-known saying among DC insiders that every congressional district has a hospital, making every member potentially susceptible to the industry’s message that new healthcare legislation could result in their own constituents losing their jobs.)

They’ve started by trying to discredit the more sweeping health policy proposals before new members ever arrive in Washington, DC. In Texas, for instance, Republican groups have leaned on an industry-commissioned study to attack Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico for supporting Medicare-for-all, warning that it would lead to cuts for rural hospitals — at least according to an analysis produced by the Partnership for America’s Future, a coalition of industry groups that exists explicitly to oppose Medicare-for-all or a public option. They ran a similar ad against Democrat Janelle Stelson, who’s trying to topple incumbent Rep. Scott Perry in Pennsylvania. 

The industry is trying to plant the idea in voters’ minds that these big, bold proposals may sound superficially appealing, but carry significant risks: You could lose your plan, you could lose your doctor, you could pay higher taxes. (And they often have their own studies to back those arguments, like the one cited in this year’s campaign, to counter the evidence offered by advocates in support of reform.) And it might work exactly like it has in the past. As John McDonough, a former congressional healthcare staffer and author of America’s Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era, put it to me, the history is clear: “Every comprehensive effort, defeat, and every incremental effort succeeds.” That is in part because of the healthcare industry’s influence and its success in framing the debate.

On top of trying to sway the competitive races, the industry is also trying to keep its most important allies within both parties happy ahead of the midterms. As the Center for Health and Democracy’s data shows, the health insurance industry PACs alone have given tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic and Republican leaders, as well as senior members of the healthcare-focused House and Senate committees.

It’s another hedge, an attempt to keep the members who will decide what’s on the agenda next year on their side. The industry supports reversing the GOP’s massive Medicaid cuts and increasing funding for the ACA marketplaces, two top-priority items for Democrats if they win Congress in the midterms. But they are hoping the party’s leaders will steer their members away from some of their more radical ideas for overhauling healthcare. Because while individual sectors within healthcare may squabble over smaller-scale reforms, the entire industry is united against plans to fundamentally change the US health system. (They are also increasingly owned by the same parent company, as consolidation in the medical sector becomes more and more common.)

“The healthcare industry is all for more people having coverage and stable government financing,” Levitt said, “but will circle the wagons to fight Medicare-for-all.”

Already, whenever Democrats start talking about their health policy ideas, the industry is ready with a response. Last month, as some Democrats announced support for a public insurance option, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future argued it would reduce access. “A public option is not the answer to the affordability and access challenges patients and families are facing,” said the group’s executive director, Lauren Crawford Shaver.

Meanwhile, the health insurance lobbying group, AHIP, released a 40-page document in October on how to improve affordability and access, using it in part to argue against a public option because it would “stifle competition and threaten the coverage most Americans want to keep.” Centrist Democratic groups who receive industry support have said they are “preparing for war” against Medicare-for-all, according to the news outlet Sludge.

The industry is not omnipotent, however, and the debate could still change if Americans’ healthcare gets worse over the next few years. The US uninsured rate has been on the rise as pandemic protections expire and the costs of healthcare rise for millions. Unless Democrats succeed in stopping the Republican Medicaid and ACA cuts in the OBBBA, that problem is going to get worse — and that could also force Democrats to think bigger about how to fix it.

“I am not sure anyone has fully absorbed how damaging and disruptive that is going to be — including to hospitals and health systems,” Jonathan Oberlander, professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina and the former editor of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, told me over email. “Large coverage losses will trigger great instability in health politics and perhaps open more of a window to bolder proposals.”

So, will the industry’s arguments still have juice? After the medical industry enjoyed a brief rebound in popularity during the pandemic, 50 percent of Americans say they have a negative view of it, while 37 percent have a positive view, per Gallup. And the appetite for reform is growing: 64 percent of Americans say it is the government’s responsibility to make sure that everyone has healthcare coverage — the highest share at any time, except for the late 2000s, shortly before the ACA became law.

Even the hospital industry, which has long enjoyed more public support than pharma or insurance companies, is seeing its popularity waver: A Families USA poll from August found that an overwhelming 81 percent of Americans thought hospital prices were unreasonable.

“Hospitals have done a great job of pleading poverty on Capitol Hill. ‘We’re probably the only provider who basically has to provide care to whoever shows up. We have no reason to be efficient. Just give us more money,’” Monk said. “I think that argument is wearing a little bit thin.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton could have picked any number of messages for his first Senate campaign ad of the general election back in May. Texans care a lot about cost of living, border security, healthcare, and corruption, among other issues. But Paxton’s very first ad went with something that pollsters don’t generally ask about. He accused his opponent, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, of being “Too Low-T for Texas.” Too low in testosterone. Not manly enough. 

Voters generally don’t rank masculinity as a top issue in any race, but Paxton’s opening salvo wasn’t completely out of left field. Young men broke for President Donald Trump by a shocking margin in 2024. During that campaign, Trump played to the “manosphere”, appearing on many a bro-y podcast and leaning on his macho, politically incorrect image for an audience burned out on the politics of Woke 1. 

Paxton, whom Trump endorsed over incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) in the primary, is as closely linked to the president as any candidate on the ballot — so it’s not all that surprising to see him attempt the same strategy.

And Texas, after all, has its stereotypes: rugged individualism. Cowboy boots. Smoked meats. Texas Rangers. The list goes on.

Starting with the “Low-T” ad, the Paxton campaign has been all in on exploiting the politics of masculinity and traditional ideas about gender and gender roles to cast Talarico as not man enough to serve as senator — and the rest of the Republican ecosystem has followed suit. 

In May, Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller tweeted that “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.” Vice President JD Vance recently walked right up to the line of calling Talarico gay at a rally in the state. Elon Musk’s super PAC has flooded the state with AI slop commercials like this one, in which an adult drag queen in a sparkly jersey dunks on some female athletes. The commercial attacks Talarico for being supportive of trans athletes. Trump himself has also weighed in, accusing Talarico of veganism — fighting words in some Texas circles. (Talarico, 37, is a cis man, says he has a girlfriend, and denies being a vegan.)

Attacks are one thing, though, and an effective political strategy another. To figure out whether Paxton’s masculinity campaign is working, the Today, Explained team headed to Texas.

“People are mad about other things”

At a Paxton rally in Fort Worth, Texas, on a recent Monday night, Jacenta and Susan Sims were riling each other up, seeing who could get the best dig in at Talarico’s manhood. 

Susan pointed to her own chest. “My shirt says ‘No Tala-freaking-way.’ Because he is kind of a freak,” she said. She listed some of Talarico’s past comments on gender to support her statement. “Like, how are you talking about God like he’s nonbinary and there’s six sexes?” 

Talarico said God was nonbinary during a Texas legislative session in 2021, making what he later described as a “cringey” point about God being above human categorization. Also in 2021, he claimed during a debate over trans kids in sports that there were six sexes. He recently walked that statement back, saying there were only two sexes.

Jacenta Sims at the Paxton rally wasn’t having it: “If you really had to look deep, he’s probably got some lace on his panties. There’s nothing masculine about him.” Susan piped in, “He looks like a little boy. He’s not tough enough.” Back to Jacenta: “And we need masculinity back in Texas.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that voters who are already all in on Paxton would also be all in on this line of attack. But those are not the voters Paxton needs to convince.

“I don’t care if Talarico’s gay or not. I don’t believe he is, but it wouldn’t matter to me if he is.” Jesse Sandoval said outside the Tarrant County Elections Center in Fort Worth. He’d just cast his ballot in early voting. “I just felt that they were doing that to try to deflect from the real issues.” 

Another early voter, Michael, didn’t want to give his last name, and works as a cook at a local restaurant. “I just feel like this whole toxic masculinity thing is so unnecessary,” he said. “I was raised by someone who was very, very aggressive and just a very macho man. And I feel like you have to educate yourself as to why those things are not — why saying stuff like that isn’t okay, you know?”

Walt Thompson, also at the polling place, said, “Because he’s soft-spoken, they feel that he’s gay. And you know, he’s not. He’s just not this big rugged looking guy. They can’t accept that.”

Nate, a 32-year-old construction worker who also declined to share his last name, said 2026 is a whole different moment from the last presidential election. “If this was 2024, those [messages] are effective. But I think this year it’s not gonna be effective,” he said. “People are mad about other things. When people care about gas prices, they can’t run on that.”

In other words, the culture wars hit differently when you can’t afford to feed your family or drive to work. 

It’s (still) the economy, stupid

Matt Angle is director of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic research PAC and communications firm. He says these attacks on Talarico’s masculinity are a tell from Republicans. 

“What the Republicans are worried about is people staying home,” Angle told Today, Explained. “Those people, they’re mad about the economy, they’re mad at Trump, and [Republicans] are trying to motivate them by playing to their prejudices. … They desperately need fear to be the motivator rather than anger and frustration.” 

So far, it doesn’t seem to be working. Most recent polling puts Talarico in the lead. The Cook Political Report is calling the race a toss-up. The last time Texas elected a Democratic senator was 1988, but Talarico appears to have a real shot at breaking decades of Republican dominance. 

Angle says Talarico’s laser focus on a message of affordability is breaking through to voters.  

“They’re understanding that their salaries aren’t going as far as they should. And they like that somebody’s talking to them about the cost of groceries, the cost of housing, the cost of healthcare,” he said. 

Who gets to own masculinity, anyway?

There’s another key factor in how the GOP’s masculinity attacks are landing: the messenger. Paxton, after all, isn’t exactly a paragon of traditionally masculine virtue. (Just ask Trump, who can’t stop needling his hand-picked candidate for the way he dresses, looks, and talks.)

According to Jill Tate, president of the Texas Federation of Republican Women, many of her members had grown skeptical of Paxton’s candidacy. That’s because his wife, Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce last year on what she described as “biblical grounds.” The actual filing listed adultery as the reason for divorce. 

“I’ve been involved in Texas politics over 30 years,” Tate said, “and this is the first time I’ve truly been concerned we could lose a statewide [race] since the Republicans took over in the ’90s.” 

Angela Paxton recently did her ex a solid, giving a speech to the Republican women in Tate’s group called the “elephant in the room” speech. She also cut an ad boosting “the Republican ticket,” though not Paxton by name.

“She talked about the fact that while our candidates may fall down and they may do things that are disappointing and morally wrong, it is extremely important to remember that that is the human side. And that’s not what they’re going to do in office,” Tate said of the speech, which urged the audience to vote for the team — for Republicans — rather than on the moral failings of one person. 

Tate believes that the speech changed some minds and could push women in the room to vote for Ken Paxton instead of just staying home. But outside of a room of diehard Republicans, that message — vote for Ken Paxton despite Ken Paxton — may not be a compelling one, no matter how much ads try to paint his opponent as less masculine.

“Texas is a knife fight uphill every day for Democrats,” Angle, the Democratic strategist, said. But in 2026, the mix of a weak Republican candidate and anger at the economy might be enough to give Democrats a chance — and help neutralize Paxton’s efforts to turn the race into a referendum on a very specific view of masculinity.

Ryan Rusak, a veteran Texas politics writer, agrees. “I think that where Talarico can use this to his benefit is to turn it around to say, ‘Okay, well, these guys who wear the boots and eat all the brisket are the ones that got us $5 gas. They’re the ones that got us into a war in Iran. They’re the ones that have gotten it to where you can’t buy a house even in a place where we still make it fairly easy to build houses.’”

“Had we not had an environment like this,” Angle said, “I think it might have been harder for James to break through.”

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. And be sure to check your inboxes this coming Wednesday for a special post-midterms edition! Let’s get into it.

One big idea: Talk of a blue wave makes it less likely 

We’re in the thick of what I’ve come to call the silly season of an election cycle. Just days out from November 3 — but weeks into early voting — this is often the time when predictions, analysis, and expectation setting from both parties gets laundered through the media; and is most disconnected from the data. Why? Reasons vary — but I mostly find it an effort to proactively explain the expected results. 

For example: in expectation of Democratic Party success, we’re seeing a wave of stories that preemptively explain how that support materialized and what implications it carries. Nate Silver declared on Ezra Klein’s podcast that next Tuesday could mark the “end of the Trump era” if Republicans perform as badly as the polls suggest. Democratic factions are already trying to claim credit for populist messages on corruption and affordability or moderation on cultural issues in red states that they expect to deliver big wins.

Surely, our reporting on America, Actually also speaks to the possibility of this result: We’ve tracked President Donald Trump’s unpopularity from the beginning of the year, when MAGA radio host John Fredericks said the administration’s handling of the Epstein files was ruining its credibility. We’ve gone to Trump’s UFC event in Washington, DC, where young men told us they’d turned on the president after the Iran war. We’ve been to a Speedway in a battleground district in Pennsylvania, where Trump’s own voters said the high price of gas felt like a betrayal from a president who promised to do the opposite. 

However, in this post, I wanted to consider one reason why we all could be making a familiar mistake. In the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections there were similar expectations of an anti-Trump wave that never fully materialized, even as he lost that second run. And this isn’t just a criticism of the polls: Some of that overperformance, I suspect, has to do with Republicans’ electoral strategy. 

Let me explain: Fear has become Republicans’ one and only source of voter motivation. GOP candidates are not engaging in debates, virtually hiding from the campaign trail, and not really offering a competing vision against their Democratic opponents. They are simply seeking to scare voters about what a Democratic congressional voters may mean, whether it’s the recent freakout about Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s relatively tame promise about accountability for Trump’s enablers, or the rank Islamophobia we’re seeing deployed against Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, or the endless ads warning candidates will pursue some radical LGBTQ agenda.

Still, just because something is unseemly (or bigoted) doesn’t mean it’s not an effective electoral strategy, and it should be noted that conjuring up fears about women and minority candidates may be the oldest (and most successful) electioneering tactic in the book. And a big part of these attacks is an explicit or implied argument that, whatever you might think of the Republican or Democrat in an individual race, a big Democratic majority would have the power — and feel emboldened by their success — to go way further than you should be comfortable with for years to come.

Here’s what I’m saying: Over the years, I’ve found the No. 1 motivator of Republican voters on Election Day to be the expectation of a Democratic wave. That is, after months of coverage that focuses on Democrats leading the polls and issues with Republican unity and enthusiasm, the exact focus causes Republicans to, eventually, come out on Election Day. It’s not that the polls missed white working-class voters (though they sometimes do) or even that Republican signs of base dissatisfaction were wrong (plenty of them really were unhappy with Trump in 2016). It’s more that, for many GOP voters, dissatisfaction with their own party will usually be overcome by their disdain for their liberal opponents and a nervousness that they might change the country in ways that can’t be reversed later on. The Democratic base is often seeking inspiration; the GOP base is largely motivated by fear.

Here’s what John Fredericks, the radio host, told me for our upcoming episode about the GOP’s “final argument”: 

“These fake polls came out over the summer. Democrats are going to win. Democrats are going to win. Trump is down… It was like a fake news, fake poll, full court press that went on for months, that has now motivated MAGA voters out of fear to turn out.”

And to some degree — I believe him. To me, this is a clear reason why Republicans often outperform their low expectations. But it’s also a reason to step away from the takes of electoral silly season, especially with Election Day just around the corner. Voters can consider the issues themselves; there’s no need for constant speculation about the results that overly raises expectations for one side or panics the other.

We already have the scope of information we’ll get: Democrats are well-positioned to take back the House. They’ve expanded the map in the Senate elections and in governor’s races across the country. They’ve done so with a relentless focus on affordability and lowering prices, eschewing the talk of climate change and social issues for priorities that are more tangible to their base. 

But that doesn’t mean there’s a cakewalk to a blue wave. And if anything, the expectation of its arrival may make it more hard to accomplish.  

What I’m hearing

This week, we spoke with Mikella Schuettler, a Report for America corps member with the Associated Press in Arizona. She’s been covering how federal policy changes to benefits affect different communities, including refugees and other legal immigrants. 

You reported on refugees and other legal immigrants losing Medicaid coverage. Who is affected, and what have you heard from families about what losing that coverage means for them? 

My reporting focused on people including refugees, victims of human trafficking, and others who were granted legal asylum, pushed from Medicaid as a result of last year’s tax and spending reductions bill that Republicans often refer to as the One Big Beautiful Bill. Coverage has generally not been available to undocumented immigrants, but it’s been standard to offer legal immigrants, including those who are fleeing wars or genocide, healthcare coverage in order to support their entry into the country. 

I spoke to a family who entered the US on a T-visa, which is a special visa for victims of human trafficking. Their 17-year-old son got into a car accident five years ago and requires various machines and medications in order to survive, but without Medicaid coverage they won’t be able to pay for almost any of his care. When I spoke to them, they were unsure of how long he would be able to live. His mother told me she believed the Trump administration was attempting to make it so difficult for immigrants, even legal ones, to live in the US that people will self-deport. Though she understands this, she knows her son won’t survive traveling back to Mexico either. 

How are people finding out about these changes, and what options do they have when their coverage ends? 

In Arizona, people received letters in the mail anywhere from about two months to just days before their coverage was cut. Additionally, if people have somehow missed these letters (perhaps they haven’t updated their addresses), it’s possible they’ll only discover they’ve been cut when they go to receive care. If the state has accurately assessed a person’s immigration status, there is no opportunity to appeal the decision once cut. 

In Arizona, unlike many other states, the cuts also impacted some lawfully present children. 

I spoke to a single mother whose son has autism and was frustrated because she felt abandoned by the system with no way to appeal. Medicaid pays for a speech pathologist and some additional support after school, which allows her to work in a long-term care home. She received the notification that her son’s coverage was ending in the mail about a week before the deadline. At first, she told me she felt relieved because she knows all her immigration papers are in order. She was shocked to find even though she’s working, paying taxes, and legally entered the country, there was no way to appeal this decision.

In your reporting, are people connecting these changes to decisions in Washington? How, if at all, is that showing up in conversations about the midterms? 

None of the people I spoke to can vote in the federal election. However, I’ve spent the last week speaking to voters across Phoenix, and healthcare is a galvanizing topic for both Republicans and Democrats. Over the past few years, federal prosecutors in Arizona have found countless instances of people defrauding the Medicaid system, raking in millions of dollars to run addiction rehabilitation centers that either don’t exist or don’t provide the care they allege. This has really angered a lot of people and soured attitude towards the Medicaid system in general. 

At the same time, the stories I’ve heard from people who rely on coverage are indicative of what future cuts could look like. In January, states will implement various work requirements that are projected to force millions of US citizens off Medicaid, requiring them to prove employment before getting coverage again. These cuts coming down the pipeline after the midterms are also a major concern for voters in Arizona, who worry emergency rooms will be overrun by people who aren’t insured.  

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Eighteen years after his first conviction, and seven years after his much-debated death, the ghost of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is suddenly inescapable again. 

He’s the subject of scores of midterm campaign ads, each more lurid than the last. A second bill mandating the release of the Epstein files is currently kicking around Congress. And on Monday, House Democrats released a new report alleging that the Justice Department helped cover up details of Epstein’s relationship with President Donald Trump, calling — very aspirationally! — for an independent criminal investigation.

Of course, no one really expects Trump’s attorney general to name a special counsel to investigate the Trump administration. In a statement, one White House spokesperson panned the report as “a desperate attempt by crazed Democrats to distract Americans.” (The timing, just one week before the midterms, does seem pretty fortuitous.)

The document, which runs to 50 pages, draws on public accounts and staff interviews with an unspecified number of survivors, including a former pageant queen who alleges that Trump raped her in 1993. The woman had previously accused Trump of groping her, which a Trump spokesperson dismissed at the time as “fake.”

Go a little deeper

When it comes to Epstein, however, Democrats don’t need a lot of new material to damage Trump. The scandal, and his administration’s handling of it, continue to cast a long, dark shadow over Republicans. 

That’s surprising to me, candidly, because the decades-old dealings of even a very despicable sex offender don’t have any bearing on Americans’ day-to-day costs or experiences. And Trump has been able to brush off a lot of other unsavory behavior and associations. 

But the Epstein story has lodged in the brains of some voters who helped elect Trump — including young voters whose growing disillusionment could make a big difference in next week’s elections.

Many of these young voters “resent the fact that Trump’s basically become part of the establishment” and see the Epstein files as evidence of that, the political analyst Rachel Janfaza recently told Vox. Some also feel burned by Trump’s campaign promise to release the government’s investigative files on Epstein…and his about-face once in office. 

Democrats, sensing an opening, are hammering the issue. Relentlessly so. According to data from the tracker AdImpact cited by NBC News, there are currently more than 500 campaign ads airing across the country that include the words “pedophile” or “predator.” 

Many of them reference Epstein or the so-called Epstein files, and three-quarters are backed by Democrats. One recent ad featuring an Epstein survivor, and targeted at Kansas Republican Roger Marshall, slams the incumbent senator’s September 2025 vote to block a procedural measure that would have released the Epstein files. (The Senate later moved to release the files by unanimous consent.) 

Another ad, this one in Maine, claims that Epstein’s “business partner” funneled $3 million to Sen. Susan Collins’s super PAC. (Importantly, the connection between Epstein and this purported partner is so tenuous as to be nonexistent.) 

These ads will fade after Tuesday, of course. But you haven’t heard the last word on this. Should Democrats win control of either chamber, they’ll gain the power to subpoena witnesses and documents for yet more Epstein investigations. 

Some Democratic leaders in the House are already salivating over that prospect.

One link for later

➨ Ask better questions than “what do you do?” Small talk is often dominated by idle chatter about traffic, weather, or jobs. To actually get to know your conversation partner, try leading with questions that get at their interests: what a friend’s friend is reading, for example, or what a barista’s favorite beverage is. You can even draft a little list of go-to questions in advance to deploy in conversation when you need them. Just don’t treat the exercise like a checklist. The real key to better small talk is being curious. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that concrete is the second-most-used material on Earth? (The first is water!) Mixing and pouring concrete is responsible for a huge share of global emissions, but there are efforts underway to make it more sustainable.
• Today’s trivia: An arroyo is a stream — or at least, a streambed — found in what type of environment? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the lovable yellow dog in the comic strip Garfield. That would be Odie, whose look evolved over the years as illustrator Jim Davis sought to distinguish him from his iconic canine rival Snoopy.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s midterm barnstorming is getting uglier and more desperate. 

What’s happening? At a campaign rally in Port Huron, Michigan, on Sunday, Trump launched a new round of anti-Muslim attacks against Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, describing him as a “jihadist” who “should never be allowed inside the halls of our great beautiful Capitol.” 

“If Abdul and the Democrats win,” Trump told supporters, “they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.”

What’s the context? Trump’s speech marks the crescendo — so far — of what has become an increasingly Islamophobic midterm campaign by the Republican Party, centered on El-Sayed. 

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, Michigan’s Republican Senate nominee, has repeatedly tried to link El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, and Republicans have also attempted to wield Islamophobia against the Democratic Party as a whole.

On Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told Fox News that his Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa, “supports Sharia law,” while at the Republican midterm convention in September, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said that “communism” and “Islamism” were allying against Republicans.

What’s the big picture? In addition to his overt Islamophobia, Trump’s presence on the campaign trail in the final few weeks of the midterm elections has been decidedly strange and surprisingly heavy on physical descriptions of Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH). 

Now, with just eight days to go, Trump’s itinerary features rallies in Mississippi, Texas, Ohio, South Carolina, and Florida — all Republican states where the party has found itself, to one degree or another, with a tougher-than-expected Senate race on its hands. 

It’s hardly the travel schedule of a president who feels good about his party’s chances— such as in Michigan, where El-Sayed is leading in most recent polls.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

US elections may not be until next week, but two other countries held theirs over the weekend: Serbia and Brazil. As my colleague Caitlin Dewey reports in Vox’s Today, Explained newsletter, both resulted in surprise victories over right-wing nationalist parties, with Serbia ousting its incumbent strongman, Aleksandar Vučić. 

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory over Flávio Bolsonaro is also especially good news for the climate: As the New York Times reported earlier this month, the fate of the Amazon rainforest may well have hinged on the outcome of the election.

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

Democrats have been emphasizing lots of issues in the runup to the 2026 midterms: The Iran war. The state of the economy and healthcare. Corruption. And…hotness.

Specifically, their candidates: The internet is awash in clips of Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed pumping iron and podcasters proclaiming that “America deserves a hot president” in a video interspersed with photos of Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff.

Having a good-looking candidate is by no means a new tactic — famously, it may have helped John F. Kennedy win election over Richard Nixon — but the online left is adapting that strategy for the internet and fandom age. 

Grace Panetta, a politics reporter for The 19th, wrote about how “thirst edits” of Ossoff in particular are proliferating online. Panetta says the organic origins of a lot of these videos are of particular interest to Democratic operatives, who see it as a way to gain back ground they lost on the internet after the 2024 election. 

Panetta spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about who’s thirsting over Democratic politicians in the first place, how 2026’s hot candidates are different from those of yore, and whether it’s actually giving them a boost. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Where are these edits coming from?

Regular online creators. And it’s important to note at the outset that these are not paid partnerships. The campaign is not paying these influencers to make edits about how they think their candidate’s really attractive. 

That’s partly why I wanted to dig into it, because it’s organic. These are just online creators wanting to draw visibility and attention to a candidate that they really like.

Jon Ossoff is currently running for reelection in these midterms. How do we know for sure that he isn’t somehow behind the campaign?

I spoke to several creators who make these videos and they said that they’re doing it for the love of the game and they’re just supporters. His campaign did not give me a quote or a statement for this story. So it’s fair to assume that he’s not directly involved and he doesn’t repost these videos. 

But as people pointed out to me, his campaign knows that they have an attractive, compelling candidate. And they’ve previously been vaunted for their digital strategy this cycle of putting out very high-quality livestreams of his rallies. There’s a lot of material for an enterprising TikToker who wants to make these edits or clips. They have a lot to work with. 

His campaign, as one person put it, is definitely playing into that, but not directly engaging. It’s a fine line to walk.

Is it just an Ossoff thing or is this going on with other candidates? I do recall that Abdul El-Sayed hits the gym.

Famously so. Yes, he hits the gym. I just watched so many videos for this story. I also came across a fair number of Gavin Newsom edits. There are people who think he gives sort of a Patrick Bateman, American Psycho vibe.

There are also official Democratic accounts, including the TikTok account for the DNC, the headquarters account, which was formerly Kamala HQ, who have been posting edits of Ossoff and also Abdul El-Sayed, who kind of leans into this gym-bro persona. 

The headquarters account posted a side-by-side of Ossoff and Abdul El-Sayed with the caption, “There are 69 days until election day.”

Nice.

Yes. There are also lots of edits of Mamdani, and former President Barack Obama. Obama nostalgia content goes hard on the internet. So you’re seeing these more official side Democratic campaign accounts leaning into it and playing up their candidates.

Having an attractive candidate is nothing new. You mentioned Obama. JFK was famously dashing. What feels different about what you’re seeing now on social media?

I think this is really a culmination of a lot of different things happening right now in politics and specifically within the Democratic Party. 

After their loss in 2024, there was a lot of conversation about the gerontocracy, how we’re governed by a lot of really old people, for the most part, in this century. And also about Democrats’ digital strategy and the aftermath of 2024. 

One thing that a lot of people in that digital space have been talking about is how Republicans and the Trump campaign really capitalized on getting that organic engagement on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where a lot of Americans are now going to get at least some of their news, and also engaging with and encouraging the creation of this kind of organic content on platforms and from creators that are not always expressly political or official-side. 

“A candidate’s messaging strategy is only as good as the content and only if it meets people where they are and actually speaks to a real need people have.”

As one Democrat I talked to put it, she thinks it’s a way for Democrats to win back the internet and to really create a contrast with the Republicans. And she said to have fun on the internet because Republicans are having fun on the internet and it appears to be working for them, or at least it was in 2024.

Is there something about this being something on the left that makes it sort of tricky? This is, broadly speaking, objectification, right?

It is a fine line between thirst and objectification. And there is also a gendered element to it that it is mostly men that these types of videos are being made about. 

Now, granted, a lot of people make sort of hype edits or positive content about AOC because she’s a very popular female politician on the left, but it’s true that women candidates are held to higher standards in terms of how they present themselves and how their supporters portray them. 

It is a very real dynamic that you could have all these videos about Jon Ossoff, and it’s not seen as detracting away from his overall message or his seriousness as a politician.

Is there a drawback of focusing on looks? Does it make the Democratic Party or these candidates seem superficial or not that serious?

President Trump has been the defining figure in our politics for 10 years now. And he is famously very, very image focused and image obsessed. We live in a very image-obsessed society, and I think there’s kind of a bipartisan acknowledgement of that. 

And looks matter to people in all kinds of ways. They do matter in politics, they do matter to voters. Whether you like that that’s the case or not, it is the reality. And I think the way that a lot of people on the left see this is, people want to look at attractive people. People take attractive people more seriously and are more willing to listen to them. So we should play into that and play that up. 

That’s also been the case on the right. President Trump famously loves people out of “central casting.” There’s been this whole movement on the right about making conservatism sexy again. And especially at the beginning of the second Trump term, you had all these influencers talking about how the second Trump term was going to usher in this great age of hotness, which is of course very based on sort of stereotypical male-centered Eurocentric beauty standards. 

I think the genie’s out of the bottle on this one in terms of the fact that our politics and society is very image-obsessed. And I think the left, being locked out of power, realizes they have to play on those terms and they have fun doing it.

You could look at it as giving “Kamala is brat,” which famously did not work. Is it working in any tangible way for Ossoff, for Abdul El-Sayed, or anyone else?

I think a lot of the time in politics, the success of a message is really dependent on the broader political situation. I think a part of the reason that the Kamala’s brat thing didn’t work is people were like, “Okay, that’s great, but my gas is too expensive and prices are too high and I’m not happy with how things have gone under the Biden administration, so I don’t really care.” I don’t know that specific digital strategy makes or breaks a campaign or candidate, but it feeds into a bunch of larger factors. 

Something that a lot of people I spoke to said they liked about Jon Ossoff is how he is incredibly serious in Senate hearings. He doesn’t grandstand. He really holds Trump administration officials’ feet to the fire. He’s been very focused in his role in the Senate and on the campaign trail about calling out corruption. He’s a very, very gifted speaker and orator.

So I think a candidate’s messaging strategy is only as good as the content and only if it meets people where they are and actually speaks to a real need people have. And I think people are really unhappy with the second Trump term and politicians being super old and out of touch, and it’s a perfect storm of factors that makes it work for him.

ELLSWORTH, Kansas — David Rankin has never been one for putting up campaign lawn signs. As a lifelong Republican in a town of 3,000 — where Donald Trump has won by 50-point margins since 2016 — he’s never seen a reason to put a candidate’s name in his yard.

But recently, Rankin and his wife Dina did something new. Frustrated with their senators in Washington, DC, they went out to their front lawn and hammered in a sign in support of the Rev. Adam Hamilton, a Methodist megachurch pastor running for US Senate — and a Democrat.

As signs of a midterm blue wave rise around the country, perhaps no state has been more surprising to watch than Kansas, a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in 94 years. A string of polls now show the incumbent GOP Sen. Roger Marshall locked in a tight race for survival, buffeted by low approval ratings, a string of personal controversies, poor campaigning, and Trump’s unpopularity over healthcare cuts, fuel costs, beef prices, and tariffs. 

Kansas is now a toss-up, attracting both national attention and last-minute cash investments from the national parties. Pundits have pointed to a range of reasons: the national backlash against the president; the unusual weakness of Marshall’s candidacy; the persistence of pocketbook issues for Kansas voters.

But there’s also something more interesting afoot, a difference that may have its own national repercussions. Hamilton’s campaign is a rare instance of a Democrat deliberately rallying people of faith, boldly proclaiming the Gospels, openly talking about Jesus Christ, and asking voters to find — and embrace — a profoundly Democratic message in the beliefs they profess every Sunday.

“Our faith is respectful…it reflects the ideas of justice and fairness, things that are just fundamental to the Bible,” Hamilton told me in early October. “Two thousand verses in the Bible talk about poverty and taking care of the poor. That’s not what you hear from Christian nationalists.”

That was part of the draw for the Rankins. They had known about Hamilton for a while. Friends had been to his church, and David — a retired choir director — told me that his own Presbyterian congregation had used Hamilton’s books and various sermon series as part of their Bible study. So when they found out Hamilton had decided to run earlier this year — as a Democrat, no less — they prepared themselves for the possibility that they might have to break with their political party this year.

“Things are not right right now. They’re not right in Washington and we have to do better,”  Rankin told me. “His faith is just going to make him better as he serves us.”

If Hamilton, and a handful of other candidates of faith in nearby Iowa and Texas, win, it could signal a shift in US politics — or at least a tremor in one of its most rock-solid certainties. One of the defining stories of the last century has been the realignment of religion, religious life, and religious voters on the political spectrum — and the complete shift of evangelicals toward the GOP. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Democrats could routinely count on majority support among white evangelical Protestants in congressional elections, and at least substantial support from them at the presidential level. But by the 1990s — with Americans becoming more evangelical and evangelicals becoming more Republican — the GOP had effectively locked in a permanent voting bloc, especially powerful in the heartland and the South.

Meanwhile the opposite has been true for the Democratic Party: Rapid liberalization and secularization has moved nonreligious and anti-religious voters toward the Democrats, while religious Democratic voters tend to come from smaller progressive churches. The shift has only accelerated in recent years, as Trump has consolidated evangelical voters, while white college-educated voters — who are largely secular — moved left. And when blue-state Democrats try to deploy faith-based messages, they get derided or dismissed as awkward, disingenuous, or off-brand. 

The result: In recent years, Democrats have mostly ceded religious voters, outreach, and messaging to Republicans. That has made it almost impossible for the party to compete in red and rural states, where white evangelical voters make up a substantial share of the electorate. In turn, Democrats have faced increasingly long odds to win those Senate seats, or expand the electoral map in presidential contests.

Whether he wins or loses in Kansas, Hamilton’s overperforming campaign poses a high-stakes question for Democrats nationally: Can a true moderate, a self-described radical centrist, and an openly religious person offer a road map for reclaiming Christianity and winning back religious voters? 

Maybe Hamilton does represent such a playbook. But to watch him on the trail, you find another fact that makes his path look much harder for other Democrats to walk.

It’s not just that Hamilton is a religious Democrat, or even that he’s mastered a message for religious swing voters hoping to reconcile their faith with a Democratic candidate. He’s also a deeply talented public speaker, well-connected community leader, and authoritative religious voice willing — unlike most pastors — to wade directly into electoral politics. He is, in other words, a unicorn.

He’s the leader of a very unique church — not just a politician “affiliated” with Christianity or training to join the clergy, but an established figure in an established institutional denomination that insulates him against attacks on his faith and character. (One of those came from no less than Vice President JD Vance, who attacked Hamilton in September as “dressed in the skin suit of our religion.”) The skills that come with leading a megachurch also lend themselves easily to campaigning — but might not be replicable for others, at least not to this extent. And Hamilton has managed to ease concerns from secular or nonreligious liberals, without compromising his centrist, at times heterodox, religious and political beliefs.

His campaign could change control of Congress. But beyond that, it also offers a new, possibly more effective, political language for Democrats in a post-Trump world.

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On a recent Thursday in Hutchinson, Kansas, Adam Hamilton found himself therapizing a crowd of several hundred. “Republicans for Hamilton” pins floated in the audience at this downtown theater in the middle of the state, as he diagnosed the problems in Washington that have bled into Kansas. Members of the US Senate, Hamilton said gently, had become like Dorothy’s traveling companions in The Wizard of Oz: They’d lost their minds, their hearts, and their courage.

Along the way, he said, they, and President Donald Trump, had torn apart the fabric of the community, turning neighbors into suspicious strangers. Heads nodded in agreement; those closest to me sighed and lowered their heads. Hamilton recounted something a mother once asked him: to be “somebody who’s going to help me not hate my neighbors with the red caps anymore.”

“And she wasn’t talking about Chiefs fans,” he quipped. Laughter broke the silence.

To see Hamilton in action feels like being thrown back to a forgotten era of politics: His tone is conciliatory. He’s eager to dispense with the “extremes.” He slips into preaching about “radical love,” and he’s comfortable quoting scripture and referencing Christian teachings when answering policy questions. Time permitting, he shakes hands and greets everyone in a room.

His public persona is built far less on his political experience — this is his first race — than on his three decades of experience leading a megachurch. In his own telling, tending to the middle has been a defining part of his life’s work.

His faith journey started in high school. Raised nominally Catholic, he embraced atheism as he watched his parents go through a divorce and after his grandmother died by suicide. After a late night of smoking weed with a friend, he heard a knock at the door: a Pentecostal missionary was inviting him to church. Though not necessarily sold on this movement, he did meet his wife LaVon at church — and they married a week after graduating.

Yet around this time, he says he felt a stirring to become a pastor. He enrolled at the evangelical Oral Roberts University to train as a preacher, but was thrown into despair, disillusionment, and doubt when his two best friends died in an accident. Seeking counsel and comfort from Pentecostal pastors and leaders, he was met with platitudes (“Everything happens for a reason”) and unanswered questions — and so began a journey that led him to John Wesley, the English theologian, and the movement he founded, Methodism.

“I carry my pocket testament with me everywhere,” Hamilton told me, pulling out his copy of the Gospels and the epistles of John, as he tends to do on the trail. “This is my defining story. This book and its story define how I understand what it means to be human and is at the center of my life.”

He was just 25 when he founded the Church of the Resurrection, commissioned by his bishops in the United Methodist Church to start a church “for thinking people.”

The point was to “use your intellect and not check your brain at the door,” he says on the stump. “And have a heart. Focus on both a spiritual life, but also on living out faith and justice in the world. These things go hand in hand.”

And so it came to pass that a congregation that started off meeting in the chapel of a funeral home in the 1990s grew into Kansas’s largest church, and the largest Methodist congregation in the country. The church now has nine locations across two states counting about 24,000 members between them, anchored by a spaceship-looking complex in Leawood, a Kansas City suburb.

Hamilton, and members of the church, are quick to point out the radical centrism of the church: It’s split roughly evenly between Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Hamilton himself is a former Republican. The Leawood location features both a 3,500-capacity sanctuary, with a full orchestra and 80-person choir for traditional services, a smaller space for modern, nondenominational-inspired worship, and a chapel.

And though the spotlight of the campaign has brought scrutiny, media visits, and broadsides from out of state, it’s also Hamilton’s experience in the church, combined with an unpopular and inexperienced GOP incumbent, that have made the race competitive. 

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The light pouring through the Swedish chapel’s windows in Lindsborg seemed to amplify the hundreds of singing voices. Hamilton, stumping at the front of the room, had broken out into song — “All Creatures of Our God and King” a hymn based on St. Francis of Assisi’s 800-year-old prayer — and the crowd at this Lutheran college quickly joined in.

“You just got to take the time to do that,” he said after the final alleluia.

Before the song, he had been speaking about the Christian roots of his campaign: the Biblical call to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly, all for the sake of God’s creation. Oftentimes life, and especially politics, make it hard to see the beauty in nature, he was saying, and the complexity in everything.

Hamilton’s popularity in both his church and among Kansas voters owes a great deal to the fact that he’s a moderate. Coming from the coasts, that word, used around Hamilton, doesn’t quite mean what I expected. A “moderate” in American Democratic politics usually describes a longtime Democrat who carves out a middle lane on very specific issues — usually defense or reducing the deficit. But Hamilton has no trouble with complicated, unfixed, occasionally heterodox views, including on hot-button social issues.

Take a question a woman in the chapel asked him about abortion: What does he think about reproductive rights in a state like Kansas?

He’s spent the last two decades writing and talking about his evolving thoughts on abortion. He calls himself “pro-life with a heavy heart,” telling the woman that, as a pastor, he feels “personally moral tension when it comes to abortion.”

But he would be taking on a different role as a US senator, Hamilton said. Crisis pregnancies “lead me to have compassion, and say there needs to be legal and safe access to abortion,” he said. On this issue, politicians are usually pressured to take absolutist positions to satisfy their party’s base, but Hamilton sees his own view as representing what most Kansans actually want. People here have already voted multiple times to preserve abortion access, he said, and when an effort to undo abortion rights protections in the state constitution was on the ballot in 2022, it lost by nearly 20 points. He said he believed at the time that the legislature should not “be making that decision for women who are facing really difficult situations.”

This particular tension comes from his mother’s own experience: Worried she wouldn’t be able to support or raise a child at 17, her father, a TWA pilot, had encouraged her to travel to Switzerland for an abortion when she got pregnant. She considered it, but ultimately refused, leading to her being kicked out of her home and moving in with Hamilton’s 16-year-old father. Even today she tells Hamilton to remember her story — “I just can’t imagine how much poorer the world would be if I had gotten on that airplane and you had never been born.”

“There are things that are clearly black and white, but there’s a lot where there’s room; I may not ever get to where you are, but I can see where you’re coming from and I can respect you for that,” Hamilton said to me and other reporters after the chapel event. “People on the extremes on either end, they don’t want me telling the story about my mom. … But in the broad center, the folks who are on the left say, ‘You know what? That’s real. I know that you’re going to solidly make sure that there’s abortion rights.’ And on the right, people say, ‘I appreciate the fact that you understand the moral tension.’”

He applies a similar mindset to LGBTQ issues. His own church welcomes gay and lesbian people, even as he accepts that individual Methodist congregations can choose their own approach (he advocated for that middle ground while trying to prevent a schism between the mainstream UMC and a traditionalist and conservative offshoot that broke off in 2023).

On the trail, Hamilton hews to the middle on other policy issues as well, raising concerns about the national debt, endorsing border security and ICE’s “original” purpose, letting local communities decide on AI data centers, and critiquing “far-left climate” activism. He’s running ads condemning socialism and the extremes of both sides. And he peppers his speeches with the phrase “independent-minded Democrat.”

In the same way, Hamilton is not afraid to evangelize. He’s both eager and willing to talk about his faith, to preach the Gospel, and to share his personal journey to God, while also reassuring liberal, nonreligious people, and Democrats broadly that he believes in the separation of church and state. He isn’t one of those Christians, he seems to suggest, but he is still uncompromisingly Christian.

“We’re not running to force our religion on other people, but we are running as people who say our Gospel calls us to something different,” he said. When comparing the core priorities of the GOP — fiscal responsibility, limited government, personal civil liberties, and a strong defense — with the core priorities of Democrats — social safety nets, education, the elderly, making sure that vulnerable people are cared for — the space to be a gospel-reading Democrat is quite obvious, he said. 

“Jesus never talked about civil liberties,” Hamilton said. “He never talked about fiscal responsibility, a strong defense or limited government. But he did talk about, ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.’ … Which of these two sounds more like Jesus in the Gospels?”

Which is where the lessons for other Democrats appear plainly. Hamilton thinks the party he joined earlier this year could learn a few things from his campaign, and those of other people of faith running as Democrats across the country.

“Sometimes they have inadvertently alienated religious voters who are just right of center who would easily have come on board if they felt like they were welcomed,” he said. “The Democratic Party would be far stronger and wiser if they were openly willing to say, ‘Of course we embrace people of faith and we need them.’”

And it’s that ability, to combine faith with moderation and openness, that is compelling to the voters across the political spectrum I talked with.

“I’m a Christian and I feel that in Christianity we feed the hungry, clothe the poor, all those things that I read in the New Testament. And I feel that he gets that,” Susan Combs, a 73-year-old registered Republican, told me. “This Christian nationalism that is going on is not really, to me personally, it’s not what Christianity is about.”

She and others pointed to Hamilton and Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, as examples of a kind of Christian political revival. Both of them, plus a handful of other Democrats running on openly faith-based messages, present case studies for strategists, scholars, and others who are watching the campaign for political lessons.

When Talarico and Hamilton use religious language, “it really stands out, even though it’s really more of a return to what we’ve seen in the past,” Dave Campbell, a religion and politics scholar at the University of Notre Dame, said. “The trick with religious language is that people from within a religious community, they pick up on the subtleties. Do they really speak the way I do? Do they really understand the world the way I do? And if you don’t really understand those nuances, your rhetoric can come off as not only inauthentic, but even offensive.”

The former Baptist pastor, religious researcher, and professor Ryan Burge noted that Democrats will likely not be able to pull many white evangelical Christians into their coalition. 

But his own examination of the data shows that there’s ample room for Democrats to grow their margins among white Catholics and mainline Protestant voters — those who belong to old non-evangelical institutional churches like the Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Methodist churches.   

These voters will remain up for grabs in future elections — though outreach may only work in certain states that still have strong mainline traditions. “You can’t win in a place like Arizona — that’s not where your base is,” Burge said. But traditional denominations are still strong in the heartland and farm country. “A place like Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, even Missouri to some extent, Wisconsin — those are the kind of places I think that message would do well,” Burge said. “It wouldn’t do well nationwide, though.” 

Burge told me the key for Democrats to be competitive in religious spaces again will be to win over old mainliners “who used to be a Bill Clinton voter, even an early Obama voter, who got lost by the progressivism of the Democratic Party on social issues. That’s the kind of voter that you can win back, the 75-year-old Lutheran, Presbyterian.” 

The bigger question, Burge told me, is an uncomfortable one Democrats as a party must face: that the secular far left is loud, but not large. “A lot of those people [who are religiously unaffiliated] are actually open to the idea of religion,” he said. Even among those who don’t identify with any particular organized religion, atheists only make up less than one in five.

“A lot of [religiously unaffiliated people] do believe in something. Those people are not going to be turned off by some religious talk,” Burge said. “At some point you’ve got to say to the loud secular left, ‘Hey, we appreciate you and we want your votes, of course, but you’re going to vote for us anyway. We need the votes of Catholics and mainline Protestants and those kinds of people. They’re the ones we’re going for.”

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At a rally in the Kansas City suburbs in September, Vice President JD Vance unintentionally delivered an in-kind donation to Hamilton’s campaign. He leveled an attack liberal and mainline Protestant Christians have long fielded from the religious right: that Hamilton’s faith was just “left-wing radicalism dressed in the skin suit of our religion.”

“That is not Christianity,” Vance, a Catholic convert who grew up in evangelical, Pentecostal, and nondenominational faith traditions, said of Hamilton, also calling him “a guy who would insult your faith and spit on your religion to accrue donations to himself.”

By contrast, he described Marshall as “a proud Christian” with “real faith and real principles.” Marshall also attends a mainline Christian church. 

More than 100 Methodist clergy came to Hamilton’s defense in the wake of the broadside, urging Marshall, and Vance, to be more careful on the campaign. “When you attack Adam’s pastoral ministry, his home congregation, and our denomination as a whole, you sow seeds of division and dissent,” they wrote. “You tear at the fabric that is the body of Christ.” 

The pastor of Marshall’s old church called Hamilton “a middle-of-the-road pastor” who is “pretty good at loving his enemies.”

Trump himself recently called him “a Radical Left LUNATIC Dumocrat,” who is “is not one us [evangelicals].” 

But the personal attacks on his faith, and the defenses, may have only underscored one of Hamilton’s perceived advantages. In Kansas, at least, moral character has become one of the defining stories of the race. It’s no coincidence that Hamilton’s big break came in September, when a major New York Times investigation upended the race by reporting that Marshall — a former OB-GYN — had sued more than 700 former patients, some of them new mothers, for unpaid medical bills. Many were charged 18 percent interest, and 81 were arrested in debt-collection cases. Campaign ads interviewing doctors who said Marshall’s practices were unusual and Marshall’s former patients soon inundated Kansas airwaves. 

“It is ridiculous to suggest that Dr. Marshall ever arrested patients,” Abbi Enders, Marshall’s campaign press secretary, wrote in response to a question from Vox about the article. “The Kansas Bill of Rights states, ‘No person shall be imprisoned for debt,’ proving this to be a blatant lie.” Many of the arrests in the cases of Marshall’s former patients were due to missed court dates.

That story broke right before Hamilton trounced Marshall during a debate at the Kansas state fair. Videos of Marshall being drowned out by booing crowds spread quickly — while competing clips of Hamilton talking about being both liberal and conservative also went viral during this window. 

Hamilton’s favorability has become a prominent example of another shift in Trump-era American politics: the sense that Republicans are now losing the character war, nominating deeply flawed candidates who project strength and bluster at the expense of integrity, decency, and other qualities people trust. Across red states like Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, and Texas, Democrats have held an edge in polling when voters were asked which party’s candidate has better moral character.

In Kansas, more stories would soon drip out, contributing to the deteriorating public image of Marshall: reports that Marshall’s primary residence was in Florida, not Kansas; an unpaid cookie bill from a 2020 campaign event; allegations of inappropriate usage of officials funds or taxpayer money for campaign purposes.

The result: Hamilton leading the field of key toss-up Senate races with the highest net favorability ratings in a CNN average of polls from September and October.

Republicans have fired back, going after his religion and church. Vance and Marshall attacked his church’s participation in a Pride festival. Marshall campaign ads have criticized the church’s handling of decades-old child sexual abuse allegations against a former volunteer at a church camp, alleging that Hamilton “protected a pedophile.” Trump, at his rally in Wichita last week, delivered his own spin on these accusations, saying Hamilton “used church dollars to fund anti-religious transgender activity,” and “shielded a child sexual predator at his church.” 

Marshall has continued calling Hamilton a far-left, “woke megachurch CEO,” and went after his church again at a debate last week, asking if he was “leading from the middle when one in four churches left his denomination? Is that what you call leading from the middle when you split the Methodist church?”

“People know what I’ve stood for — they know I’m not some woke, far left, whatever,” Hamilton said in an interview. “And I feel at peace about it.” Still, “that’s 24,000 other people in my church that you’re attacking and you’re attacking every other mainline Christian across the state of Kansas as you’re doing that.”

When asked about this charge in an email, Marshall’s press secretary did not respond. 

---

When Hamilton discusses religious liberty and the separation of church and state, he makes something clear: “I’m not running to be the chaplain of the Senate.”

Over the days that I followed him, he repeated this line, usually in response to liberal-leaning voters curious or skeptical about endorsing someone so vocally religious. 

“If anything, that might have been a negative,” Sally Gillihan, a Democrat, told me in Hutchinson. “I was really worried that that’s what he was relying on, that’s what he was going to go to bat for.” After hearing him talk about policy, religious freedom, and restoring normalcy, those fears went away.

Others, including Sam Buttram, a 2020 Marshall voter who works in the cattle industry, told me that Hamilton’s religiosity wasn’t a selling point for him, but that it’s “a lot of what makes him who he is,” which makes him trust his character. “I just wish more politicians were like him…independent-minded, wanting to do the right thing for the people instead of worried about staying in office or agreeing with some other politician.”

Ultimately, Hamilton’s unexpected campaign success so far might be due to the combination of all this — not only his faith, but the impression that many voters have that he is guided not by right or left but his own values, as evidenced by his heterodox views and moderate temperament. In his case, those values are informed by his faith, but for other Democrats in other red states, they might not need to be. 

Still, that might not make it any easier for Democrats trying to emulate the Hamilton playbook. 

Much of Hamilton’s success, Burge told me, is due to his unique position. “People don’t realize how good megachurch pastors are at stuff like [campaigning]. When you’re used to talking to 2,000, 3,000 people every weekend, you are a politician,” he said. “It’s a superpower though. … You’ve got to be a one in a million kind of person.”

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.”

Election Day is almost here — but even after the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the election won’t really be over. The vote count will take days or even weeks in some states. President Donald Trump seems certain to raise objections to results he doesn’t like — he’s already getting started in Alaska — and he has threatened to marshal the forces of the federal government in his efforts.

It’s an anxious moment for American voters: Will we have a free and fair election — or not? Luckily, says Eliza Sweren-Becker, deputy director in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, there is still one thing that every American 18 and older can do to make sure their voice is heard: vote.

“I think that is the intent. It’s to create a lack of confidence. It’s to discourage voters from participating,” Sweren-Becker told Vox’s Astead Herndon on America, Actually. “But the only way that that campaign to undermine our confidence and to sow distrust actually works is if voters stay home. The way to defeat that attempt to shake voters’ trust in democracy is just to participate.”

Sweren-Becker spoke with Astead about what states could do to speed up their vote counts and ensure everyone has a chance to cast their ballot, the need to restore the Voting Rights Act, and the long-term impact of Trump’s election denialism.

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

Let’s start with Election Day. More than a dozen states count late-arriving ballots. President Donald Trump has used the shifting vote counts as pretense to further his own election interference claims.

How prepared should folks be for a long wait in November for results? And how that could impact confidence in the results?

You’re absolutely right that we may get results out of states or in certain races in the days following Election Day. Voters should not expect to have the final result on Election Day.

And when you hear reporting on the news that somebody’s ahead or somebody’s behind, remember: They haven’t counted all the votes yet.

The critical thing is we need to count every vote, and every person’s vote needs to be counted.

So while it is true that some states allow ballots to arrive after Election Day, they all have to be cast by Election Day. The Supreme Court just this year said that it’s totally appropriate for states to set their own ballot receipt deadlines. We have to be patient, as an American electorate, to get the proper results to count every ballot and make sure all the voices are heard.

But isn’t it kinda wild that we can’t get results on election night? I saw Donald Trump cite the Brazilian presidential election, and while I know he’s doing that from a self-interested place, I did think for a second: Why does it take so long for us to put these results together?

I could totally understand why people would prefer the results faster. And candidly, could states do better at preparing and counting faster? Sure. But they have limited resources. They are working their butts off to prepare for the election with the staff that they have, and then they work tremendously hard to count properly, accurately, as fast as they can.

Could states change their policies to allow them, in some places, to pre-process ballots, to allow them to get to results faster? Sure. I’m not saying states shouldn’t change their policies to create more efficiency here. But given the rules of the road that we have, we need to make sure that every properly cast ballot is counted.

If I’m someone who is concerned about election security and free and fair elections, what should I be looking out for?

So, for example, I have heard that there is some anxiety about mail voting.

If you want to cast a mail ballot, just know that you probably have a bunch of options in your state as to how you can cast it. You can certainly rely on the mail and have USPS deliver that ballot, but of course, we know occasionally mail gets delayed. Your state may have ballot drop boxes. You may have ballot drop-off at election officials’ offices, or even at polling places.

Find out your options.

Yes, definitely find out your options. Voters should also check their voter registration status. Make sure it’s up to date with their current address. Of course, if you’re not registered to vote and you still have time in your state to register, please do register.

Everyone should participate. Our democracy works best the more of us that can participate. If your registration date has not passed, don’t forget to register to vote. Vote with your friends, vote with your community, vote with your family. Voting should be joyful. It’s a civic experience that I think is really fun.

I try to take my kids with me to vote because it’s exciting. They get stickers. Everyone loves stickers.

It’s half the reason I go.

It’s also a reminder. You get your sticker, other people see you, they know it’s Election Day, maybe they go out to vote.

It’s a way to be part of your community and invest in your community and to choose who you want to be a leader of your community.

What about after Election Day?

Earlier this year, Democrats and Republicans in Congress circulated a letter asking members to commit to recognizing state-certified winners and “oppose any attempt to refuse or delay a seating of a member-elect.” We saw House Speaker Mike Johnson delay the swearing-in of an Arizona representative last year,

That seems to me like maybe a preview of what might be to come. How fearful should we be of these post-election attempts to block members from being seated?

I think those scenarios are highly unlikely. I understand why folks are worried about them, but the reality is, states have their own certification processes, which are laid out in state law and that are mandatory for them to follow. It is not discretionary whether states certify their elections. So once there is a new Congress, we have confidence that they will be seated according to how the voters actually cast their ballots.

I want to end by thinking about Trump’s consistent questioning of the integrity of our election system. If he ultimately doesn’t try to actually steal the election, what is the long-term impact of his relentless focus on it and support for policies like the Save America Act?

Just because we have won in many courts against this administration doesn’t delude me into thinking that this administration is just going to stop in this years-long campaign to sow doubt in our election systems.

I think that is the intent. It’s to create a lack of confidence. It’s to discourage voters from participating. And to some degree, I think the administration has succeeded in creating some confusion about the rules or a lack of confidence. But the only way that that campaign to undermine our confidence and to sow distrust actually works is if voters stay home.

The way to defeat that attempt to shake voters’ trust in democracy is to participate in our democracy and to turn out and to make their voices heard regardless of party, regardless of candidate. To say that we will not be made to fear participation in our democracy, but we are going to continue to seize it and take joy in it and show that we deserve a stronger representative democracy that serves all Americans.

What are things that could happen to inspire trust in our electoral system? Are there reforms that you think might make the public feel a reinvigorated sense of confidence?

There are certainly things that Congress could do to create a national floor of voter access and ensure that someone’s right to vote doesn’t depend on what state they live in. That includes basic reforms like same-day registration, online voter registration, universal access to mail voting that doesn’t require strict satisfaction of certain excuse requirements, which still exists in many states.

I think it’s time for Congress to ban partisan gerrymandering. I also think it’s time to restore the Voting Rights Act, and Congress can enact a statutory right to vote that is meaningfully enforceable so that voters can go to court if their voting rights have been burdened, and they can get a real remedy.

That has been really undermined by the Supreme Court, but Congress can and should respond. They have it within their power. The Constitution gives Congress the power to set rules for elections. They should.

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Thursday seeking to block former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola’s victory in the 2026 US Senate election. If you’re confused by this development, you should be. Because the election won’t happen for more than a week.

The case arises out of an odd candidacy that might undercut incumbent Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan’s reelection bid against Peltola. A man named Dan J. Sullivan also secured a spot on the ballot, and Republicans fear that the not-Senator Sullivan’s presence on the ballot might trick voters who wish to vote for the incumbent into voting for the not-senator instead.

In the abstract, it’s a fair concern. But there are two reasons to doubt that not-Senator Sullivan will attract many voters who actually wanted to vote for the Republican. According to a sample ballot published by Alaska’s Division of Elections, Sen. Sullivan will be identified as a “Registered Republican” and as the “Incumbent,” so voters will be told which Dan Sullivan to vote for if they wish to reelect the one who is actually a senator. 

Additionally, Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, a system where voters rank candidates in order of preference, and votes cast for losing candidates are redistributed to voters’ next choice. So an Alaska voter who wants to reelect the Dan Sullivan who is actually a senator, but who is confused as to which Dan Sullivan is the incumbent, can simply rank both Dans Sullivan as their top two choices, and the ranked choice system should ensure that their vote is counted as a vote for Senator Sullivan (and against Peltola).

The question of whether not-Senator Sullivan may appear on the ballot, moreover, has already been litigated. Initially, the Alaska Division of Elections, which is led by a Republican, attempted to disqualify the not-senator because it concluded that he did not seek election to the Senate in “good faith.” Not-Senator Sullivan sued, and an Alaska court ordered him reinstated as a candidate because “the Division’s decision to exclude Mr. Sullivan from the primary ballot was based on a ‘good-faith’ requirement that does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, the Alaska Statutes, or the implementing regulations adopted by the Division” — that is, there is not actually a law that prevents the not-senator from running, even if he is intentionally running as a spoiler candidate.

This lower court order was affirmed by the Alaska Supreme Court last June. If Republicans thought that this decision violates federal law, they could have asked the Division of Elections — which, again, is run by a Republican — to appeal to the US Supreme Court.

Instead, they appear to have let the issue lie until less than two weeks before Election Day, when Trump’s Justice Department filed a new, federal lawsuit claiming that not-Senator Sullivan’s presence on the ballot is somehow illegal, and asking a federal court to preemptively block a Peltola victory in the upcoming election. Trump says that he personally told the Justice Department to file this suit.

It is difficult to find an actual legal argument, much less a persuasive one, anywhere in the Trump DOJ’s complaint initiating the lawsuit. Trump’s lawsuit also runs afoul of something called the “Purcell principle” — a concept that, ironically, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the same day that the Trump administration filed its suit — which says that federal courts should be reluctant to intervene in election-related disputes when the election itself is about to happen.

It is likely, in other words, that the Trump administration’s attempt to overturn a Democratic victory that hasn’t even happened yet will fail. But the mere existence of this new lawsuit, which is known as United States v. Alaska, is an ominous sign that the Trump administration will use every tool in its shed to overturn Democratic victories in the upcoming election.

So what are the actual legal arguments in the Alaska case?

It is a bit of a stretch to even describe the Justice Department’s complaint in this case as a “legal” document, as the complaint does not so much as point to any law that either not-Senator Sullivan or the state of Alaska may have violated, and instead vaguely alludes to legal sources that use terms like “integrity.”

Specifically, the Justice Department points to a federal law which says that it has four purposes, one of which is to “protect the integrity of the electoral process.” It also points to the Supreme Court’s decision in Bullock v. Carter (1972), which said that “a State has an interest, if not a duty, to protect the integrity of its political processes from frivolous or fraudulent candidacies.”

But the statute that Trump’s lawyers quote, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, does not concern which candidates’ names should appear on the ballot. As its name suggests, it is a law about voter registration, and it imposes requirements on states, such as requiring them to register voters when those voters obtain a driver’s license.

Similarly, while Bullock does include a single line indicating that states may enact laws targeting “frivolous or fraudulent candidacies,” nothing in the opinion suggests that sharing another candidate’s name makes someone’s candidacy frivolous or fraudulent. The decision itself concerned unusually high fees charged to a candidate for public office in Texas, and the Court concluded that Texas’s fees were unconstitutional. 

The line about “frivolous or fraudulent candidacies,” meanwhile, was included to clarify that states still have some power to regulate ballot access. While Bullock concluded that Texas’s fees were excessive, the opinion also suggests that states may impose more reasonable filing fees on candidates to discourage unserious candidates from seeking office. Alaska, for example, charges a modest filing fee of $100 to US Senate candidates.

The Trump DOJ’s entire argument, in other words, appears to turn on the fact that it identified two legal sources that use the word “integrity” in contexts that bear little resemblance to the Alaska case. 

Nevertheless, Trump’s lawyers claim that the court must prevent Alaska from certifying a Peltola victory “pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan.”

This lawsuit also cannot be squared with one of the Republican Party’s favorite legal doctrines

Even if Trump’s Justice Department had a persuasive argument that leaving not-Senator Sullivan on the ballot is illegal, they should still lose Alaska because they waited too long to file the case.

In Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), the Supreme Court warned that “court orders affecting elections, especially conflicting orders, can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls,” and it added that this “risk will increase” as Election Day draws closer. More recent decisions, many of them joined only by the Court’s Republicans, have read this “Purcell principle” quite expansively to forbid federal courts from issuing election-related decisions in the months leading up to an election. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has even claimed that Purcell prevents federal courts from issuing election-related decisions as soon as nine months before the general election date.

Supreme Court decisions invoking Purcell to shut down lower court orders altering a state’s election rules are now very common in the weeks leading up to an election. On Thursday, for example, the Court relied on the Purcell principle to block a lower court order that would have made it easier for college students to vote in New Hampshire. The Court began its decision with this line: “This Court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.” 

Trump’s DOJ, meanwhile, did not even file its lawsuit seeking to preemptively invalidate a Peltola victory until less than two weeks before Election Day. If Purcell means anything, it must mean that a federal court cannot force Alaska to kick a candidate off the ballot mere days before a federal election.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is getting a head start on litigating the midterms. 

What’s happening? The administration is asking a federal district court in Alaska to potentially block the certification of Alaska’s US Senate race, should incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, a Republican, lose to his Democratic challenger, Mary Peltola. 

It’s the first major lawsuit of the 2026 midterms aimed at directly challenging the results, and very likely a sign of things to come after polls close on November 3.

What is the administration arguing? Sullivan is currently in a close race against Peltola, a former US representative who polls suggest may hold a slight lead. But the race is complicated by the presence of a second Dan Sullivan, Daniel J. Sullivan, on the ballot (no relation).

According to the lawsuit, which names Alaska’s state elections director and several state elections entities as defendants, the election could be “tainted by the inclusion on the ballot of Daniel J. Sullivan.” 

The suit asks that “Defendants not certify any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion,” which it defines as a loss by the incumbent Sullivan in the event that the other Sullivan attracts enough votes to alter the outcome of the election. 

What’s the context? The second Dan Sullivan’s appearance on the ballot has already been litigated. After he was initially disqualified from the ballot, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that he should be included, and he finished third in the state’s August primary (the top four vote-getters appear on Alaska’s general election ballot).

How worried about this should I be? For now, not very. Trump filing lawsuits disputing election results was all but inevitable, even if it’s surprising to see him start this early. 

None of that means he’ll succeed: Trump and his allies filed dozens of election lawsuits in 2020 and were largely laughed out of court. (Plus, this particular lawsuit has been assigned to a judge appointed by President Barack Obama.)

And with that, it’s time to log off…

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Thanks for reading, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!