In “As Trump’s Coalition Breaks, Can the Left Pick Up the Pieces?,” Conor Lynch writes at Jacobin: “The coalition that sent Donald Trump back to the White House in 2024 marked the culmination of a long-term political realignment that conservative authors and activists had anticipated since the 1970s…While Kamala Harris captured an impressive 56 percent of voters with a college degree, she lost those without any college education by 13 points. Just twelve years earlier, Barack Obama had narrowly carried noncollege voters by 3 points, while Mitt Romney had won college-educated voters by four. The same trends were apparent for income: Harris won a majority of voters who earned over $100,000, while her Republican opponent won 52 percent of those making between $30,000 and $100,000 (once again the opposite of 2012, when Romney won 54 percent of upper-income voters)…While Trump had indeed won more working-class voters than any other Republican in the modern era, he was also the runaway favorite of business elites and the billionaire class. According to one analysis, the top three hundred billionaire donors in 2024 donated to Republican candidates by a remarkable five-to-one margin. The fervent support Trump received from some of the wealthiest men on the planet was difficult to reconcile with the GOP’s supposed transformation into a humble party of the working man and woman…The big question after the 2024 election was whether the Trump coalition could survive once billionaire priorities and working-class interests inevitably clashed. Not even two years later, the answer has become increasingly apparent…” More here.

Read “Latinos May Decide the Midterms, Defeating Trump and the Republicans” by Dan La Botz at international viewpoint.org for insight on the Latino impact on the midterms. A teaser:”Even Republican politicians have turned against Trump. Florida State Senator Ileana García, a co-founder of Latinos for Trump, made a vehement public criticism of Trump, saying, “This is not what we voted for… this is unacceptable and inhumane.” She gave expression to the sense of betrayal felt by many Latinos…Before the 1960s, Latinos were a negligible factor in U.S. elections, though there were already six million of them or 3.5% of the population. In many areas racist laws and practices excluded them from voting. John F. Kennedy’s presidential Viva Kennedy! campaign of 1960, brought Latinos into national politics for the first time. Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson patronized the Latinos and brought them into the Democratic Party coalition together with the AFL-CIO unions, Blacks, and women. By and large for the next fifty years Latinos were Democrats, with the exception of the Cubans who had fled the revolution of 1959 and resented Kennedy for failing to overthrow Fidel Castro…Waves of immigrants over succeeding decades made Latinos the largest U.S. ethnic minority. Today there are 65 million Latinos in the United States, making up 20% of the total U.S. population, while 13.5% are Black. The Latino population is diverse: Mexican Americans make up 57%, followed by Puerto Ricans, Cuban, Salvadorans and Dominicans. Some 36.5 million are eligible to vote. Most Latinos are Catholic but there are many Evangelical Christians. The largest groups are 8.5 million in California, 6.5 million in Texas, 3.5 million in Florida, 2.2 million in New York, and 1.3 million in Arizona. Not all Latinos are eligible to vote: 20 percent because they are not citizens and another 20 percent because they are under 18.” More here.

J. Miles Coleman and Kyle Kondik have an update, “Four Rating Changes, Headlined by Alaska Senate Moving to Leans Democratic” at the Center for Politics: As Kondik and Coleman write, “Of the Democrats’ red state Senate targets, Alaska may be the most promising, and we are moving the race from Toss-up to Leans Democratic…For the first time all cycle, Republicans now need to win more of our Toss-ups to hold the Senate than Democrats need to win in order to flip it…Other rating changes come in the Alaska and Oregon gubernatorial races, which both land in Leans Democratic from opposite directions, while South Carolina’s Senate election moves from Safe Republican to Likely Republican…This change means that 49 Senate seats are rated as Safe, Likely, or Leans Democratic, 47 at least lean to Republicans, and there are 4 Toss-ups. For the first time all cycle, Republicans now need to win more Toss-ups to hold the majority than Democrats need to win in order to flip it: Republicans need 3 of the 4 Toss-ups to get to a 50-50 majority with the vice presidential tiebreaker, while Democrats need 2 of the 4 to get to a 51-49 majority. Prior to this change, each side needed 3 of 5 Toss-ups to win the majority, and the Toss-up math was more favorable to Republicans earlier in the cycle. This calculation assumes each side wins their current leaners, which they may not…We are well aware that polling in Republican-held Senate races in Ohio and Texas suggest a small lead for Democrats, while Iowa and Kansas are essentially tied. As of this writing, we have not seen enough to move these races from where we currently have them (see Map 1 above). However, we watch every day, and when there is a critical mass of good reasons to switch, our readers will be the first to know. As per Crystal Ball tradition, we will eventually push all of the Toss-ups to Leans by the election.” More here.

David Mamone’s “Democrats Playing the Economic Populist Card in Iowa Midterms. The combination of farm-state economic woes and Democrats speaking the language of working-class people has residents saying the state is ‘getting purple’” at The American Prospect provides an interesting midterms read. A sample: “But unlike in previous political cycles, the path for Democrats to win back Iowa, a state Donald Trump carried by more than 13 points in 2024, may not run through the political center. Instead, Democrats are trying something different: an economic populism aimed directly at voters who believe that too much of the economy is controlled by corporations, monopolies, and investors far removed from the communities where they do business…“A populist can be a demagogue or a genuine,” says Ferguson, chief executive of a local family health products business and an at-large city council member in Fairfield. In a Midwest state like Iowa, he says, left-populist messaging can work “to the extent that it’s genuine.”…The argument is spreading up from the down-ballot races. Democrats running for Senate and governor in the state are also betting that voters who have drifted toward Trump can be won back by talking less about ideological labels and more about who controls the economy…Josh Turek, the party’s Senate candidate, is facing Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson after Joni Ernst, the Republican incumbent, decided not to seek re-election. Turek, a two-time Paralympic gold medalist in wheelchair basketball and state representative, calls himself a “common-sense prairie populist.” He is running on an anti-establishment economic message combined with a culturally moderate platform.” More here.

With every day, the possibility of major Democratic midterm wave seems to grow, so at New York, I threw caution to the wind and looked at the sunniest possible side of the situation.

We all know a blue-wave election seems likely in November. But the number and nature of states that could get caught up in this wave is becoming the stuff of Democratic dreams. Just in the last 24 hours, we’ve had two remarkable examples: Donald Trumpfelt the need to campaign in South Carolina for Senator Darline Graham, marking his territory with malodorous comments referring to Graham’s Democratic opponent, Annie Andrews, as “Trannie Annie” (apparently taking quite literally his bizarre and bigoted claims that Democrats favor “transgender for everybody”). And then, the staid, cautious Cook Political Report political handicappers moved the Kansas U.S. Senate race into the “toss-up” category.

Let’s pause to reflect on the improbability of Senate races in Kansas and South Carolina becoming competitive. The Palmetto State was the original site of the Deep South’s realignment toward the GOP back in 1964, when soon-to-be senator-for-life Strom Thurmond became a Republican and then Barry Goldwater carried the state, the first of 14 out of 15 GOP presidential winners there. When Thurmond retired at the age of 100, he was succeeded by Darline’s older brother, Lindsey, who won four Senate terms and was working on another when he suddenly died in July.

Kansas, where Cook now considers Democrat Adam Hamilton an even bet to defeat incumbent Republican senator Roger Marshall, has backed exactly one Democratic presidential candidate in the last 90 years. The last Democratic Senate win in the Sunflower State was 94 years ago. Something extraordinary is happening this year. Aside from Kansas, in next-door Nebraska, independent candidate Dan Osborn has better than a puncher’s chance against Republican senator Pete Ricketts.

And those aren’t the only surprising battlegrounds. Alaska has gone Republican in 16 of 17 presidential elections since its admission to the Union. Donald Trump won it by 13.1 percent in 2024. Its Senate race is also a toss-up, per Cook, and in fact, Democrat Mary Peltola leads in the RealClearPolitics polling averages. No state has trended more rapidly and firmly Republican in the very recent past than Iowa, where Trump won three times (by 13 percent in 2024) and the entire congressional delegation is Republican, as are all but one statewide elected official. The Senate race there is another toss-up per Cook; Democratic candidate Rob Sand is well ahead in the gubernatorial race; and Democrats have a good chance of flipping three of the state’s four U.S. House seats. Iowa’s electoral twin is Ohio, which went from highly competitive to very red during the Trump era. Both the U.S. Senate race (with Democrat Sherrod Brown holding a lead in the RCP polling averages) and the gubernatorial race are Cook toss-ups.

Texas is a legendarily red state, having gone Republican in the last 11 presidential races. Democrats last won a gubernatorial race there in 1990; for the Senate, the drought extends to 1988. The 2026 Senate race is yet another toss-up, with Democrat James Talarico leading the RCP polling averages. More surprising yet, the gubernatorial race, on nobody’s radar nationally as competitive, is now rated “Lean Republican” by Cook. There’s also a good chance Democrats can partially or fully neutralize the U.S. House gerrymander undertaken in Texas last year at Trump’s command.

Perhaps as significant as these highly competitive races are two Senate matchups in southern states carried by Trump in 2024 that national Republicans appear to be conceding: Georgia, where Jon Ossoff has a huge financial advantage along with a consistent lead in the polls over bumbling Republican Mike Collins, and North Carolina, where Roy Cooper is cruising against handpicked Trump candidate Michael Whatley.

Why isn’t the GOP willing to go toe to toe with Democrats everywhere, given its well-known national super-PAC cash advantage? It’s just having to defend too much home turf, as Punchbowl News reports with respect to the most expensive House races:

“— In Florida’s 25th District, where Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) faces Republican Scott Singer, the ad price tag is now at $42.2 million.

“— In North Carolina’s 1st District, where Rep. Don Davis (D-N.C.) faces Republican Laurie Buckhout, the price tag is now $38.8 million.

“— In Iowa’s 1st District, where Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) faces Democrat Christina Bohannan, the price tag is $37.4 million.

“We’ll note that President Donald Trump won each of these districts by between 8 and 12 points in 2024. Two of them were redrawn to strongly favor the GOP this cycle.”

There are even stirrings of GOP fear in some of the reddest places in the country. In South Carolina’s political twin, Mississippi, Democrats are putting some national money into Democrat Scott Colom’s long-shot challenge to GOP senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. And in Arkansas, Senator Tom Cotton is bestirring himself to run a ton of ads to head off an even longer-shot Democrat, Hallie Shoffner.

Add it all up, and suppose for a moment that the Democratic trend we’ve been seeing in the early autumn not only continues but intensifies. What are the maximum gains Democrats might envision if they get all the breaks?

If they win all the Cook toss-up Senate races (along with North Carolina, a flip that’s no toss-up), they’d have 54 senators, more than they’ve had since 2010 and enough to make the occasional turncoat John Fetterman irrelevant. If they could pull off upsets in a couple of those deep-red states, the margin would be accordingly higher, not only providing a firewall against Trump’s excesses but giving them a very strong head start on controlling the Senate after the 2028 elections and perhaps giving a new Democratic president a governing trifecta. An ideal House outcome per Cook would be a Democratic sweep of competitive races that would net 47 House seats and give the party a 35-seat majority (more than they’ve enjoyed since 2008). That dream scenario probably won’t transpire, but then again, who would have thought Kansas and South Carolina would ever even be in play?

The following article stub comes from “Eric Schmitt’s a Joke. The Assaults on Jack Smith Are Anything But. The Missouri senator and other Republicans made fools of themselves Tuesday. But that won’t stop them lying about—and trying to destroy—Donald Trump’s prosecutor” by Michael Tomasky at The New Republic:

We’ve all had our laughs now at Eric Schmitt. I plan on continuing to laugh at him for quite some time. That was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen a United States senator do. But it was also two other things besides embarrassing.

First, it was deeply revealing—of the Missouri senator’s crazed conspiratorial mindset, and of his presumptions about the world. What convinced him in the first place that former special counsel Jack Smith was in cahoots with Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Perhaps it came from some dark fascist corner of the interwebs that you and I don’t even know about, and from there to X to Fox News and so on. Basically the same way people came to believe Haitians eat dogs.

It was also amusingly revealing of Schmitt’s (and his staff’s, and let’s face it, modern conservatism’s) cultural prejudices. They checked the NBA schedule and the men’s college basketball game roster and saw just one game with a 7:30 p.m. start time—Warriors vs. Hawks in Atlanta—and thought, “A-ha, we’ve got our man.” But it seems never to have occurred to them to check the women’s college schedule. After all, what kind of man wants to go watch girls bounce balls around? A deep-state Hillary lover, that’s who! They’re probably kicking themselves for not thinking of it!

But the second thing Schmitt’s own goal was, besides embarrassing, was ominous. Because it showed how deep down this absurd rabbit hole the Republicans have gone—and the depths to which they’ll descend to try to find something on Smith. This perfervid posturing was on display Tuesday not only from Schmitt, but from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, who you could tell thought he was about to lower the boom on Smith about something having to do with his clandestine relationship with former CIA chief John Brennan. When a confused Smith said he’d never met Brennan, Grassley went all Emily Litella (there’s an old reference for you!) and ended his questioning under the kind of abrupt and petulant silence one might associate with a six-year-old being bluntly informed that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

More here.

In “On immigration, Democrats should look to the Nordic model,”  Will Marshall writes at The Hill: “As Democrats and other center-left parties struggle to understand why working-class voters have turned against them, they reach readily for economic explanations. Yet most flinch from confronting another potent driver of blue-collar anger — uncontrolled immigration…Of course, that’s partly an economic issue too. But it also illuminates the deep rift between elite and popular opinion on emotive questions of national sovereignty, cultural identity and democratic agency in deciding who can enter one’s country and become a citizen…Stopping illegal immigration has been President Trump’s most reliable rallying cry. His call to wall America off from a flood of “criminal aliens” in 2016 helped him forge a strong bond with non-college voters. He went back to the immigration well in his 2024 comeback, when those voters again ranked the issue as a top concern, second only to high living costs…Hostility to mass migration also is the rocket fuel propelling neo-nationalist populists in Europe. These include the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which recently made startling gains in state elections; France’s National Rally, now leading polls ahead of next year’s presidential election, and the United Kingdom’s fast-rising Reform Party…Across the West, working-class voters feel betrayed by political elites who lecture them about the aggregate economic benefits of more immigration and belittle their doubts as nativist if not racist. Despite the issue’s enduring salience, few center-left parties have figured out how to defuse it…Denmark is a conspicuous exception. Since the Social Democrats came to power in 2019, they have slowed the pace of immigration while speeding up deportation of uninvited gate crashers. They have also moved aggressively to integrate migrants into Danish society, passing “parallel society” laws to prevent their concentration in segregated communities.”

Marshall continues, “European progressives have decried the shift as a concession to right-wing xenophobia. But Mette Frederiksen, who won her third term as prime minister last June, maintains that a restrictive migration policy is integral to her party’s historic commitment to social solidarity…“Being a traditional Social Democratic thinker means you cannot allow everyone who wants to join your society to come,” she told the New York Times. With porous borders, “it’s impossible to have a sustainable society, especially if you are a welfare society, as we are.”…Center-left governments in other Scandinavian countries are following Denmark’s lead. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store’s “Plan for Norway”includes calls for “clearer and stricter” immigration laws that tighten rules around family unification, speed up deportation of immigrants who don’t qualify for asylum and combat criminal gangs that help people enter the country illegally…Sweden’s Social Democrats, historically a working-class party, also have executed a U-turn on immigration. “We had one of the most generous asylum systems in Europe, and that was wrong,” admits the party leader Magdalena Andersson, who is working to form a center-left governing coalition…Democrats, who have long admired the Nordic economic model, should learn from the new Nordic model on immigration. It offers a humane path to curbing illegal migration in contrast to the cruel and violent tactics of Trump and his sadistic henchman Stephen Miller…The party, however, has yet to reckon with the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration debacle. Biden loosened asylum and parole rules and until 2024 made little effort to secure the border. Migrants saw the green light and surged across it in record numbers…Voters won’t trust Democrats to enforce immigration laws until they break emphatically with progressive demands for “decriminalization” and open borders. They should recall that Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton kept illegal immigration under control despite taking flak from the left and immigrant rights’ groups for robust deportation programs.” More here.

Morgan Chalfant reports that “Fewer young Americans are ‘thriving,’ poll finds” at Semafor: The number of young Americans who say they’re “thriving” is near a low point while the share of middle-age adults who say the same is at a nadir, underscoring the level of relative dissatisfaction among these key demographic groups ahead of the midterms…Only 44% of adults ages 18 to 29 describe themselves as thriving, according to Gallup, 20 points lower than the high measured in 2010. Forty-five percent of adults 30 to 44 say the same; both figures have declined in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic…These declines appear to be tied to increases in rates of depression, among other factors…The share of those ages 45 to 64 is also at a low of 46%, on par with the measure during the 2008 financial crisis…In sharp contrast, those 65 and older are more likely than ever to say they’re thriving, which appears largely driven by satisfaction with their economic situation.” More here.

“The 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election should be referendums on a central issue: whether the holder of the highest office in the land, and his relatives and friends, can accumulate fabulous wealth because he holds that office,” William W. Taylor III writes in “Corruption in the White House: Does Anybody Care?” at The Nation. “Despite his claim to business genius, there is no confusion about how Donald Trump has made money as president and whether it is wrong for him to do it. The rejoinder is that what he has done is not illegal. That may be so for some of his gains: The laws that prevent conflicts of interest for all other federal officials do not apply to the president. The current Supreme Court has defined corruption narrowly, requiring an explicit agreement to give or receive a thing of value in exchange for an official act, and given the president broad immunity. A court will have to determine whether manipulating the stock market, trading on inside information, profiting from pardons, or extorting things of value from foreign governments are protected as part of his “official duties.” But whether it is illegal or not is beside the point: It is morally and ethically wrong. And it must be disqualifying for Trump or any other officeholder…And Ruth Marcus has chronicled the going price for pardons in a recent article in The New Yorker, “Trump’s Pardon Economy.”…Nothing in our history comes close to this president’s abuse of his office. His colossal income is from investments in industries that are directly affected by White House policy. These industries benefit when their businesses are deregulated or when, as the UAE tycoon found, restrictions on sales of certain products are lifted. There is no doubt that this president has used the power of his office to benefit himself. And he is getting a lot more than a snuffbox.” More here.

From “Working Class Weekly: Costs and Corruption Beat Culture War” at  the workingclassProjest. substack.com.”: “Two weeks ago, we shared new findings from the Working Class Project’s latest survey of working class voters across the battleground, conducted by GBAO this September. Last week, we looked at how these voters’ views of the two parties have shifted over time: Democrats now hold the edge on favorability, lead on nearly every positive trait we tested, and voters tie Republicans to nearly every negative one…This week, we’re looking at what the polling tells us about the effectiveness of Republicans’ culture war attacks, and how they stack up against Democrats’ working class messaging…As we shared last week, Republicans are in a tough spot with the working class voters we’ve been tracking the last two years. They’re bleeding support across the battleground, Trump’s favorability continues to erode, and 1 in 5 working class Trump 2024 voters now regret their vote for president. With these voters feeling squeezed by rising costs and the Iran war, Republicans are betting that culture war attacks are their winning message. But our polling shows that while these attacks resonate with some voters, they’re landing weaker than more directly addressing the issues voters care about most at this moment: lowering costs, rewarding hard work, and combatting corruption.” More here.

Simon Rosenberg explains that “Dems Up 11 In Gallup Party ID, Troy Jackson Up 4 In Maine, “Elections are decided in November, but they’re won in October” at Hopium Chronicles, and writes: “With 4 weeks to go all the data is pointing to a good election for us. We’ve seen it in the overperformances in special, local, and state elections of all kinds in states all across the country since early last year. We’ve seen it in the heightened Democratic performance in the primary vote in state after state throughout 2026. We’ve seen it in the many, many Republican retirements from the Senate and House this year. We’ve seen it in the voter registration data from the past few months. We are seeing it in the national polls, battleground state polls, the generic ballot polls, and are starting to see it in the early Early Vote data too. We are seeing it in the lowest consumer sentiment readings we’ve seen in 65 years. We are seeing it in how Rs are already abandoning battleground states and districts that Trump won in 2024, and we are seeing in the panicky on-the- record and blind quotes we are seeing from Republicans in story and after story, day after day after day…My main point to this morning is that there is a mountain of data, from all sorts of sources, all pointing in the same direction my friends – that it is going to be a good election for us, and a bad election for them – without any really serious outliers or challenging data that you can point too.” More here.

In “Words & Phrases: A Crazy Rant Isn’t a ‘Speech’ or an ‘Interview’,” Jennifer Rubin writes at The Contrarian: “Donald Trump’s political toxicity, rampant illegality, and utter incompetence should not obscure a bigger worry: namely, that he is stone-cold nuts. Yet the legacy media continue to use language to describe his “speeches” as ordinary political addresses and “interviews” as within the realm of normal presidential interactions with the press…

Legacy media’s sanewashing of Trump’s campaign appearances as “speeches” bears less and less resemblance to the reality of his verbal incontinence, evidenced in recent campaign blather about Iran:

We did it in one night with those beautiful B-2 bombers. They left Missouri. They flew both ways, 37 hours. They were refueling. We have the greatest tankers. We have the greatest military in the world. They went from Missouri and then at one o’clock in the morning, with no moon, dark as can be, these unbelievable machines led by the most incredible pilots in the world, they unloaded every single bomb, went right down air chutes into this, uh, drug factories, really. That’s what they were doing. They were nuclear and drugs. They were doing drugs, but they were doing the nuclear. These drug factories/nuclear factories were hit so hard.

When he unilaterally dragged us into a war, did he think we were attacking “drug factories” (or did he think the Iranians were “doing drugs”)? Examination of his unedited verbal vomit should provoke further, frightful questions about the 25^th Amendment.” More here.

Avery Lotz explains why “Americans don’t want taxpayer dollars funding campaign ads: poll” at Axios: “Nearly nine in 10 voters say using taxpayer money to pay for election-related ads featuring the president or Cabinet members is inappropriate, including 80% of Republicans, according to a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll…Why it matters: The administration’s decision to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on Trump-fronted ads weeks before the midterms is facing an uproar and overwhelming public opposition…While the administration insisted the ads were actually PSAs, Trump later announced that a super PAC affiliated with him would foot the bill for future ads (but not reimburse the taxpayer dollars already spent)…Friction point: New polling suggests the TV spots, which the White House said “are a reminder for Americans to love their country,” might not get much love from voters…The poll of 4,506 adults found that just 9% of Americans find it appropriate to tap taxpayer funds for election-related television ads featuring the president or cabinet members…Zoom out: A majority of Americans also panned other actions Trump has taken: 68% say it’s inappropriate to block media outlets from entering the White House, and 72% say the same about naming federal institutions and buildings after a sitting president…Zoom in: A White House official contended in a statement to Axios that the “PSAs are clearly not political,” saying Trump “is not on the ballot and the ads don’t have a call to action.”

• But one is nearly identical to a 2024 Trump campaign ad, using the same footage and narration, with the campaign sponsorship tagline replaced with a disclaimer: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”
• Earlier this month, Democrats called on the Government Accountability Office and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to investigate the use of taxpayer money to produce and air the ads.

Between the lines: Axios’ Alex Isenstadt scooped late last month that the ads released so far were “just the beginning” and that Trump himself — pleased with the war-room-stylesocial media posts his digital team regularly pumps out — was hand-picking the ads himself.” More here.

The following article stub comes from “Life in America Feels Unsettling Right Now. Can Democrats Offer a Compelling Answer?” by Michael Baharaeen at The Liberal Patriot, via “The Long View” at TLP Revisited by Baharaeen and Ruy Teixeira:

Dear readers,

We believe there’s value in revisiting old ideas and arguments as circumstances change, so we are starting a new, semi-regular segment: TLP, Revisited. From time to time, we will reprint some of our favorite pieces from The Liberal Patriot and add a little commentary reflecting on them from the perspective of today.

As we note in this piece, a recurring theme of the 21st century has been instability: the dot-com crash, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and subsequent fallout in the Middle East), the Great Recession, mass migration, rapid technological change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of populist movements on the left and right (to name just a few).

And over the past few years, artificial intelligence has emerged as a new and increasingly omnipresent force in daily life—one that many people are wary of and feel they have little control over. Consider:

• 63 percent of Americans say AI is advancing “too quickly,” while just 19 percent say it’s moving at about the right pace (and a mere two percent say it’s going too slowly);
• 59 percent expect AI to reduce the need for humans to perform important or creative tasks;
• 57 percent say they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits (compared with 34 percent who say the opposite);
• Half (50 percent) of Americans are more concerned than excited about the growing use of AI in daily life, versus just ten percent who are more excited than concerned; and,
• Three in five (59 percent) of Americans say they have little or no control over how AI is used in their lives.

In the face of all this, it’s not hard to understand why so many Americans feel that the world around them has become so unsettling. And any party that hopes to win and exercise political power would be wise to speak to this growing sense of instability.

Right now, the party that appears to be on the cusp of winning power is the Democrats. Their standing has dramatically improved since this piece was first published. But with any newly acquired power will come a great responsibility: they must rise to the occasion by showing strong, steady leadership and offering a path for navigating this new world that eases people’s fears as much as possible, rather than feeding on them.

Originally published on June 17, 2025.

As Donald Trump ran for a second term in 2024, a attack line he frequently leveled at Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was that they were both “weak.” He focused specifically on the porous southern border and conflicts abroad, problems he said never would have happened under his leadership. Enough voters ultimately bought this argument. In a post-election study from Third Way, among the top words they associated with Trump were “strong” and “leader.” The AP VoteCast survey similarly found voters were likelier to view Trump (56 to 43) than Harris (46 to 53) as a “strong leader.”

More here.

From “How Senate Democrats can stop Trump from stealing the midterms”  by David Walbert, author of Stealing Elections, American Style at The Guardian:

Article I of the constitution makes each chamber of Congress the “Judge of the Elections [and] Returns … of its own Members”. No matter who state officials or courts say won, Congress has the final word on who will be seated.

That gives Trump a potential path to corrupt the congressional election – create confusion and doubt about close elections, challenge the results, and have the members of the House decide congressional election contests to determine who will be seated. His electoral vote scam was stopped in 2020 when the attorney general and other officials refused to join his effort, but they’ve been succeeded by people loyal to Trump, not the law.

There have been hundreds of congressional election contests in the country’s history, beginning with the very first Congress in 1789, and they are very different from the 62 election cases Trump and his Republican allies brought and lost in 2020. They lost those cases because they were decided by judges operating under rules of evidence that don’t allow conspiracy theories, unproven allegations and bogus “expert” opinions, but that kind of sham “evidence” could drive congressional decisions determined by politics, not facts.

For the scheme to work in the midterms, Republicans would have to have an initial majority in the House when the new Congress is seated on 3 January 2027, since that initial majority will control who else is seated.

When the current Congress ends on that date, all now-seated representatives lose their status as members of Congress. Furthermore, candidates who win election in November don’t become representatives simply because of the election returns. They become members of Congress only after they take the oath of office required by the constitution.

It’s at that juncture where the danger lies, and the problem has been discussed by lawyers, writers and pundits since it was raised in the Guardian.

Federal law requires the clerk of the current House to “make a roll of the Representatives-elect”, and persons on that roll are sworn in as the initial members of the new Congress. Jeffrey Toobin and others, such as the retired judge Michael Luttig, are concerned that Republicans could appoint a loyal clerk – a “GOP toady”, in Toobin’s words – who would prepare a fraudulent list of representatives-elect.

Some commentators dismiss that threat, believing the law is so clear the judiciary would not let the roll be subverted by politics or a corrupt clerk. Maybe I’ve tried too many cases, including at the supreme court, where what looked white and black became gray, but I’m afraid those who feel the law is so clear are overly optimistic. They also underestimate the heavy hand of politics in such litigation.

In my book Stealing Elections, American Style, I point out that for 150 years, beginning with the 1876 Tilden-Hayes presidential election, “[p]artisan affiliation has been a near-perfect predictor of Supreme Court justices’ votes in cases that involved a presidential candidate’s claim to the office”. I am quite sure that same “rule of decision” would weigh on the scales if the current supreme court were called on to decide a case that would determine which party controls the next Congress.

More here.

There is naturally a lot of uncertainty surrounding how, exactly, Donald Trump will react to an adverse midterm election result. But one thing you can take to the bank, and I wrote about it at New York. Democrats should be prepared for what’s coming.

There’s naturally a lot of speculation in legal and journalistic circles about what exactly Donald Trump might do to change, deny, or challenge the midterm losses his party is widely expected to suffer a little over a month from now. One of those potential tactics, per the Guardian, should come as no surprise:

“Election experts have warned Donald Trump’s administration could use the crucial hours and days after November’s midterm elections to disrupt the results after struggling to enforce a crackdown on voting. With less than six weeks remaining until polls close, and control of US Congress in the balance, the post-election ‘counting window’ is seen as as a particularly vulnerable moment by former US federal government officials.”

It’s easy to conjure up a scenario wherein Trump exploits this window. In 2018, he joined congressional Republicans in claiming that mail ballots undermining early GOP leads in key midterm races represented likely ballot-box stuffing by Democrats. This conspiratorial suggestion turned out to be a dress rehearsal for a far more serious phenomenon in 2020, when Trump claimed victory in the wee hours of Election Night with vast numbers of ballots — particularly mail ballots, which take longer to process than in-person ballots — still uncounted. This “red mirage” stunt, essentially an effort to call the election from the White House while Republicans held an early lead, was much-predicted by observers who at the time were often mocked as paranoid. But Trump not only launched this playbook right on schedule, he also made it the cornerstone of an election-denial crusade that culminated in the Capitol Riot of January 6, and which he is still pursuing nearly six years later as a foundational myth of the MAGA movement.

If anything, Trump has become even more adamant about mail ballots representing prima facie evidence of fraud since he tried to reverse his 2020 defeat. He’s tried to restrict or even ban mail ballots via both executive order (thwarted by the courts) and legislation (the infamous SAVE America Act blocked by Senate Democrats). His most audacious bid for a preemptive strike on mail ballots was his scheme to give the U.S. Postal Service the power to refuse to deliver ballotsthat don’t pass a hastily contrived test for proof of citizenship. It was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court just a couple of weeks ago. He still rants regularly about the subject, as does his domestic policy chief Stephen Miller.

All of this evidence, combined with so much precedent, suggests that a premature Trump victory claim during the 2026 counting window, followed quickly by vague allegations of fraud, is all but certain. The only development (other than an unlikely GOP win) that might make such Election Night lies difficult would be a Democratic wave so high and deep that there is no early GOP lead to begin with.

Perhaps to deal with that contingency, Trump has also been flirting with an additional specter — the idea that foreign governments may tamper with election machines in a manner that makes even the early counts suspect. That could be used to justify some sort of federal intervention before the results can be certified. This was, indeed, a major subtheme of Trump’s bizarre July 16 prime-time speech fanning multiple election conspiracy theories, during which he claimed there was concrete evidence that China meddled with the 2020 election.

In reality, Trump’s claims involved warmed-over proof of occasional foreign-government efforts to test the security of election systems but no evidence at all that they succeeded or had any impact on election results. Still, this could supply him with a way to claim a rigged election even if there aren’t any early GOP leads to mischaracterize. But more importantly, the notion of foreign-government election tampering could provide a pretext for a federal takeover of election machinery or ballots in the guise of dealing with a national security threat. What makes that especially alarming is that it might happen well before the states can certify the results. State certifications of Joe Biden’s win — which Trump tried and failed to reverse in Congress with the aid of a mob — represented the weak spot of Trump’s 2020 gambit. So preempting them altogether could produce a constitutional crisis with no clear path to resolution.

At The New Republic, Greg Sargent argues that “In Texas, Something Seismic Is Happening—and It’s All Trump’s Fault. Thanks to the economy and ICE, Trump has lost Texas Latinos. And James Talarico is developing a humane pro-immigrant message that’s resonating—even in this ultra-Trumpy state”  Sargent writes further, “James Talarico may or may not win the Senate race in Texas. But here’s something we can say right now: Given how close Talarico is coming in this red state after running such an overtly pro-immigrant campaign—which Talarico has done on and off from the outset—it should shape how Democrats handle the immigration issue going forward pretty dramatically…There’s a paradox at the center of Talarico’s spirited bid. He’s running in a state that Donald Trump carried by 14 points in 2024. Yet he’s actually leaned into the moral issues around immigration more aggressively than most other Democrats running in tough areas have this cycle, despite it being widely touted as Trump’s “strength.” Democrats can learn from this—and not in the ways they might think…Last week, during extended remarks in Austin, Talarico seized on the news that ICE shot a local Venezuelan immigrant in the back—he’s now in detention—to make an expansive moral case that immigration is good for our country. He called for “more legal pathways” for immigrants to come here and “live the American dream,” which he said would make our country “richer and stronger.”…I’ve obtained new data that drives the point home. In August, Texas Southern University polled three competitive House districts in Texas—the 15th, 28th, and 34th. These Latino-heavy districts, which abut the border’s southernmost portions, all swung hard toward Trump, heavily driving the “realignment” narrative. Yet the poll found the Democratic challenger leading the GOP incumbent in the 15th by five points and the Democratic incumbents leading their GOP challengers in the 28th and 34th by 11 and three points, respectively…” More here.

In “Courts Are Not Going to Save Voting Rights,” Jennifer Rubin writes at The Contrarian: “The courts have been, at best, imperfect guardians of voting rights. The U.S. Supreme Court’s MAGA majority rejected Donald Trump’s attempt to wreak havoc with mail-in voting and turned away a MAGA re-redistricting map in Missouri…However, the MAGA majority allowed states to proceed with individual inquiries to the flawed SAVE immigration data base, which is likely to result in false flags of noncitizen voters. On this one, “Completely absent from the majority opinion is any analysis of potential harm to voters who might be incorrectly flagged as noncitizens and removed from state voting rolls,” Rick Hasen wrote. “That should have figured in the balance of the equities.” Fortunately, “this case is likely to have limited impact on the midterms, because … the NVRA prohibits mass purges of voters in the 90 days before the election … [meaning] states can still use the database now for individualized determinations.”…Above all else, the massive blow to the Voting Rights Act in the Callais decision, resulting in the evisceration of Black and Hispanic representation in the South (and elsewhere), hangs over the 2026 election and beyond…Where does this leave us? Naturally, lawyers and voting-rights advocacy groups who devote themselves to defending voting rights in court continue to sketch out what amounts to a whack-a-mole strategy: Challenging illegal executive orders on their face and again as implemented; winning at the lower courts, then scrambling to defend wins from the predations of a SCOTUS MAGA majority that draws the line only when abject chaos (e.g., Missouri maps, Post Office redesign) threatens to turn an election upside down. Well, when you have a hammer (litigation), everything looks like a nail (a court case)…But this strategy is insufficient, if not misguided.” More here.

Lucky for Republicans that their U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt (MO) is not up for re-election next month. As Rebecca Beitsch explains in “Schmitt faces fallout after debunked Jack Smith narrative” at The Hill: “Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) is facing accusations he tried to launch a conspiracy tying former special counsel Jack Smith to others who prosecuted President Trump — a line of questioning that unwound when the senator apparently confused two basketball teams. ..Schmitt seemed poised for a gotcha moment with Smith when he asked him if he ever attended a February 2024 NBA game in Atlanta where the Hawks played the Golden State Warriors…Schmitt gave a sly smile when Smith first denied attending the game and later implied he was catching the prosecutor by surprise…“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff. So I’ll give you a second to process it, so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself,” Schmitt said…His staff displayed a poster of texts of Smith’s staff discussing seat numbers, and Schmitt said “for context” the date of the game was just after Fulton County, Ga., District Attorney Fani Willis (D) acknowledged a romance with a staffer — drama that rocked the case into Trump’s election interference in Georgia…But the demeanors of the two men changed over the course of the exchange, with Smith becoming increasingly confused and Schmitt’s staff swiftly removing a poster featuring the text exchange the senator implied proved the prosecutor’s travels…MS NOW zoomed in on Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), seated next to Schmitt, with a stunned look on her face as Smith recalled he had attended a game in Maryland where the Iowa Hawkeyes were playing.” Schmitt escaped the consequences of his gaffe in the short run. But videos of the exchange are all over the place, and they are sure to resurface in a big way if he ever runs again. Read more here.

From “The Week Republicans Finally Panicked About Trump” by Susan Glasser at The New Yorker: “The surprise of the election is not that Republicans, faced with terrible polling numbers and a historically unpopular war, would break with a President from their party. Ask George W. Bush how that political dynamic works. Panic is infectious in politicians. The problem is that it’s much, much harder for today’s G.O.P. candidates to flee from Trump after a decade of turning their party into a virtual cult of personality. Until now, Trump managed to keep his hold over politicians who might otherwise have broken with him on an important issue because of his fervent maga base, which would loudly punish even the most minor deviations from the President’s positions, no matter how eccentric or at odds with core conservative ideology those positions may have been…But now Trump is losing a crucial part of that base—a rapid and unexpected decline best tracked in the portion of the electorate that expresses strong support for the President, which has dropped sharply to just thirteen per cent in recent surveys. “I feel like I was sold a bill of goods,” one formerly solid Trump voter told the Times’ Sabrina Tavernise. In another recent survey, sixty per cent of white likely voters without a college degree— a critical part of Trump’s base—said that they disapproved of how he is handling the cost of living. maga isn’t punishing the panicking politicians; it’s joining the panic…And this, to me, is the real surprise of 2026: the President may be brought low this fall not by the Democrats who would crawl over broken glass to defeat him but by the very voters who sent him back to the White House in the first place. Iran, it seems, may finally have done what January 6th and all the rest of Trump’s countless misdeeds could not. Has Donald Trump’s lame-duck era already begun?” More here.

From “Trump’s Luck Is Finally Running Out” by Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times:

Amy Walter, the publisher and editor in chief of The Cook Report, wrote last Tuesday under the headline “Political Gravity Finally Caught Up With Trump. Now the G.O.P. Has to Try to Spend Their Way Out of It”:

Trump’s staying power in our politics — even, astonishingly, despite the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — gave the president the confidence and latitude to pursue unpopular policies and blow off scandals that would have sunk any of his predecessors.

But now, the economic consequences of his sweeping tariffs and the war in Iran have done the one thing all the controversies of his first term were never able to do: splinter his coalition and sink his approval ratings to all-time lows.

Perhaps more damaging, Trump’s inability to pull his candidates across the victory line has become conventional wisdom.

Charlie Cook, a colleague of Walter’s, also wrote last Tuesday:

While many have long predicted that Democrats will enjoy a “blue wave” election, I think of it more as a “red undertow,” which will pull many Republicans under and significantly trim the margins for many others.

A blue wave implies an endorsement or affirmation of Democrats and their policies. But Democrats’ brand is still in tatters. … Fortunately for Democrats, this election will in most cases not be about them.

It will, of course, be mostly about the occupant of the White House. Over the last 90 days, President Trump’s political standing has transitioned from very unpopular to toxic and now to radioactive.

Smarter.Vote, a voter analysis website, currently assesses a 73 percent chance of a Democratic takeover of the House, with a post-election makeup of 228 Democrats to 207 Republicans.

Smarter.Vote foresees a much closer and more contested Senate outcome, with Democrats now having a 57 percent chance of taking control, with a 51-to-49 majority.

More here.