It’s a week, a month, a year when Republicans will continue to demand federal legislation to prevent the phantom menace of non-citizen voting. So at New York I wrote about new evidence that the whole thing is just an excuse to keep citizens from voting.

This week, congressional Republicans will counter Democratic demands for ICE reform by changing the topic to alleged noncitizen voting. The House is expected to pass the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act once again, though Democrats are sure to block it in the Senate. The SAVE Act would prevent roughly 21 million U.S. citizens from voting by requiring that they produce documentation they don’t have (like a Real ID, passport, or birth certificate). The premise for this legislation is dubious. It suggests that vast numbers of people are defying existing federal and state laws prohibiting noncitizen voting and influencing U.S. elections.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the myth of mass noncitizen voting to the MAGA mind-set. It’s at the heart of the white-supremacist Great Replacement Theory, which claims nonwhite immigrants are taking over America via the ballot box. And it’s not just fringe voices pushing this myth. It’s the basis for Donald Trump’s bizarre claim in 2016 that he would have won the popular vote against Hillary Clinton if not for the “millions” of votes cast by illegal immigrants. It’s a key part of Trump’s 2020 “stolen election” claim as well. In 2024, it ascended to the level of a foundational myth in MAGA circles. Throughout the campaign, Trump claimed America had been destroyed by traitorous Democrats who had opened the borders to herd millions of criminals into the country. Supposedly, once here, these “worst of the worst” aliens preyed on innocent citizens, fleeced taxpayers by accessing welfare benefits, and went to the polls to keep their Democrat enablers in power.

Given that background, it’s no surprise that the second Trump administration has put so much emphasis on aggressive mass-deportation efforts and on addressing mostly imaginary noncitizen voting with executive orders (like the one he issued in March on “election integrity”), legislative proposals (like the SAVE Act), and sinister-sounding plans to monitor and perhaps “take over” polling places during the 2026 midterms, potentially with armed thugs.

There has never been any evidence of signifiant levels of noncitizen voting in the United States. As Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice observed in 2024, it’s an “urban myth”:

“It’s worth saying, once again, that the notion of widespread noncitizen voting is a lie. An urban myth. It’s simply not true. States have a multiplicity of systems in place to prevent it from happening. Noncitizen voting is illegal four times over, and the reality is that it’s incredibly rare. My colleagues at the Brennan Center have compiled these resources on the topic. We’re fighting fear with facts.”

Recently, several states have conducted investigations into noncitizen voting, checking voter rolls against citizenship status. As Stephen Richer, a Republican and a former local-election official from Arizona, pointed out in a New York Times op-ed last week, all of these probes found noncitizen voting is “virtually nonexistent.”

Richer cited data from multiple states: There’s Utah, where an analysis of 2.1 million voter registrations found one noncitizen; Idaho, where noncitizens were found to represent “10 thousandths of a percent” of the voter rolls; and Louisiana, whose 390 verified noncitizen voters sounds substantial until you realize there are 2.9 million registered voters there; and Georgia, “in some ways the model for these investigations,” where a 2024 audit found 20 noncitizens among 8.9 million people on the voting rolls.

Michigan, said Richer, offers a good example of how even the tiny numbers of suspected noncitizens tend to melt away on examination:

“In Michigan, the Macomb County clerk, Anthony Forlini, who is running for the top election office in the state, the secretary of state, recently announced to great fanfare that he’d found 15 noncitizens on his county’s voter rolls of over 724,000 registered voters. The incumbent secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, then tasked her team with investigating the 15 files. It found that three of the people were U.S. citizens, four were previously removed from voter rolls, four were under further investigation and four do seem to be noncitizens.”

Richer added his own testimony: “In my four years in office in Maricopa County overseeing voter registration, I came across a total of two possible instances of noncitizens voting out of some 2.5 million registered voters.”

No, these jurisdictions don’t include the entire country, but if the conspiracy theory of a nationwide Democrat plot to overwhelm the country with noncitizen voting were real, there would be evidence everywhere. Instead, it’s nowhere.

We’ll hear much more this midterm election year about the SAVE Act and perhaps about ICE raids on or near polling places. These aggressive efforts to root out voter fraud are unnecessary and dangerous; they’re a real threat to democracy masquerading as a way to address an imaginary threat to democracy. The Big Lie of widespread noncitizen voting is a far bigger problem than the minimal noncitizen voting that appears to exist. Instead of making American citizens show their papers to exercise their constitutional rights, MAGA folk should be challenged to show their evidence.

From “Americans think everyone is corrupt: Voters have weird views about this, and progressive advocacy groups do a lot that’s counterproductive” at slowboring.com:

Donald Trump is running easily the most corrupt administration in decades. Whether selling off pardons for cash, delivering sweetheart deals on rare earth metals to donors, or earning hundreds of millions in deals with the United Arab Emirates while authorizing them to buy America’s most powerful computer chips, he is at every opportunity leveraging political power for personal financial gain.

This hasn’t translated to political success, though. After starting his second term much more popular than he was in 2017, he’s converged on his own poor approval ratingsfrom his first term.

And yet, it’s not as if there’s been massive political mobilization against his corruption.

The money machine works in part because Trump has, through persuasion or intimidation, induced the vast majority of Republicans to refrain from criticizing or challenging him on any of this in any kind of meaningful way.

So will the party pay a price for Trump’s corruption? They’re set to lose the House, which almost always happens to the president’s party during a midterm, but remain the odds-on favorites1 to hold the Senate, in which case Trump will be able to keep MAGAfying the judiciary and getting away with his corrupt schemes.

So how does he get away with it? Some people think it’s because the voters don’t care about corruption, but I think that’s probably wrong.

Searchlight Institute polling on this shows that voters just have an incredibly low estimate of the baseline level of integrity of politicians. Seventy-one percent say the “typical politician” is corrupt. Typical Republican? Sixty-eight percent. Typical Democrat? Sixty-one percent. Seventy-two percent say that “long-term elected officials” are probably corrupt.

I think it’s hard to make political hay out of Trump’s corruption because, while it looks extraordinary to me (and probably to you if you’re reading this), many voters see it as pretty normal.”

More here.

There’s been a lot of talk about venerable European parties melting down. At New York I discussed why this is happening and whether it could happen here.

If you aren’t too distracted by the unprecedented events in America’s political system recently, you might have noticed that even more shocking developments have overtaken established and once-indomitable political institutions in Europe. These include the stunning, real-time apparent collapse of the two major parties in Great Britain.

Politico’s Jamie Dettmer observes it like this:

“They seem like punch-drunk prizefighters struggling to catch their breath as they slog it out. Is the party over for Britain’s storied heritage parties?

“Neither the Conservatives nor their traditional Labour rival have proven strikingly fit for purpose for some time. Their combined share of the vote in recent elections has been falling and the tribal loyalties they could always rely on in the past are eroding. Increasingly the public impression is that neither has the ability to tackle the country’s huge post-Brexit problems.”

The Conservatives (a.k.a. Tories), a center-right party from the 19th century that gave the U.K. Disraeli, Churchill, and Thatcher, suffered the worst electoral fiasco in British history in 2024:

“They lost almost 70 percent of the 362 seats won just five years earlier. And equally alarming for party bosses, they attracted their lowest share of the vote ever in their modern history — a remarkable humbling for a party often cited as the most successful in the democratic world.”

Meanwhile, the left-leaning Labour Party has rapidly lost popularity since its massive electoral win in 2024.

With the two major parties in freefall, the ascendant entity is U.K. Reform, formerly the Brexit Party. Until very recently, Reform was a pariah party widely considered to be a xenophobic gang of demagogues. But it has not only won over the Tory rank and file, it has also attracted a growing number of high-level Conservative converts — former Tory members of Parliament and government officials who have switched their affiliation to Reform. This upstart, right-populist party generally comes out on top in U.K. polling these days.

In general, the two-party system in Britain as we’ve known it seems to be in danger of collapsing, Dettmer suggests:

“Scottish and Welsh nationalists have chewed away at the mainstream parties. So, too, have the revived Liberal Democrats — had they attracted two or three percent more of the overall vote 16 months ago, they might have won more seats than the Tories, becoming the main official opposition party. And now the Tories have a genuine competitor on the right.”

For many years, Britain’s first-past-the-post election system (like ours) was considered an unassailable barrier to minor parties, but it doesn’t appear that way right now.

This phenomenon is not limited to Britain — across Europe, many other center-left and center-right parties are seemingly being marginalized by new populist parties. In Germany, the far-right AfD party — endorsed by Elon Musk in late 2024 and defended by J.D. Vance in early 2025 — is threatening the power of the conventionally conservative Christian Democratic Union, the party of Angela Merkel and many other German leaders. At the same time, the center-left Social Democrats, an electoral powerhouse dating back to the late 19th century, is losing vote-share to the recently created left-populist BSW party. In France, fragmentation of past political allegiances has become the rule, along with predictable instability. But there, too, a far-right party (if an older, better-established one), Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, has become the largest political force in the country.

There is no single reason for these destabilizing political trends, but it’s clear that ambivalence about economic globalization, heavy levels of refugee migration, and the dislocations created by the COVID pandemic have all contributed to the struggles of the old centrist parties and the rise of more politically extreme competitors.

Of course, this isn’t limited to Europe — similar dynamics have roiled American politics. So it’s worth asking: Can the major-party meltdown spread to the United States?

Certainly there are pervasive signs of popular disgruntlement with both Republicans and Democrats. Gallup has been tracking self-identified party affiliation since 2001, when Americans were almost evenly divided into Democrats, Republicans, and independents. As of 2025, 45 percent self-identified as independents, an all-time high, while 27 percent identified with each of the major parties. But in contrast to Europe, none of this disaffection has fed the growth of minor parties. Indeed, in both 2020 and 2024, the major-party share of the presidential vote rose to 98.1 percent, as compared to 94.3 percent in 2016 (and as low as 81 percent in 1992). Nor have any of the periodic efforts to organize a new “centrist” third-party borne any fruit, despite constant complaints about partisan and ideological polarization. Yes, America’s own first-past-the-post system has made it hard to organize, fund, and gain ballot access for nonmajor parties. The major parties have fought like hell to maintain their duopoly.

But something else is clearly going on. And the most obvious thing when you compare the United States to Europe is that the “populist” movements that have upended the centrist parties across the pond have gravitated here toward one of the major parties, the GOP. Indeed, instead of undermining the two-party system, the enemies of globalization, refugee migration, and pandemic-driven anti-elitism have reinforced it as they took control of the Republican Party via the MAGA movement of Donald Trump.

There are, unsurprisingly, distinctly American mutations of right-wing populism in the MAGA takeover of the GOP. There’s the very un-European religiosity of both pre-Trump and post-Trump grassroots conservatives, compounded by an anti-government ethos that helped fuse the interests of populists and economic elites. Trump’s own cult of personality helped make the transition from the old to the new system rapid–not only in his party but among Democrats, where ideological differences were generally subsumed in a common response of horror at the changes in the GOP.

What killed off much of the old pre-Trump Republican Party was the dynamic that accompanied its birth back in the 1850s: the rapid replacement of one of the two major parties by a new and different electoral coalition. America didn’t need a Reform U.K. or an AfD or a National Rally party to represent a radical new movement of cultural, economic, and social reaction. It had Trump’s GOP.

“Fundraising is a critical part of winning reelection, but sometimes incumbents have political problems that money can’t fix, Nathan Gonzales writes in “House: Money Isn’t Enough to Save Incumbents in Wave Elections” at Inside Elections. “When voter sentiment is against you, outspending your opponent isn’t sufficient to survive an electoral wave. This is important context when analyzing campaign fundraising reports…While there can be confusion over what constitutes a wave election, 2010 certainly qualifies. Republicans gained a net of 63 House seats in President Barack Obama’s first midterm election, with health care at the top of people’s minds. And 2006 fits the description as well, considering Democrats gained 31 House seats during George W. Bush’s second midterm when the president had lost much of his credibility after the war in Iraq and the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina…Under adverse political conditions, smart members gird themselves for the storm by raising money and leveraging that financial advantage most incumbents enjoy. But sometimes it doesn’t matter… Of the combined 74 House incumbents who didn’t win reelection in 2006 and 2010, 84 percent of them (62 members) outspent their challenger and still lost… Southeast Pennsylvania offers one of the best examples of this dynamic, which can plague both parties. In 2006, Democrat Patrick Murphy knocked off GOP Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick, even though he spent only three-quarters of what the incumbent did ($2.4 million to $3.2 million) in a suburban Philadelphia seat. Four years later, Fitzpatrick toppled Murphy while spending less than half of his opponent’s outlays ($2.1 million to $4.3 million)…This year’s financial dynamic in House races might look closer to 2006 or 2010 than to 2018… Yes, there’s mounting evidence that a Democratic House majority is within reach due to historical midterm trends. Trump’s job approval rating stands at 41 percent, according to Nate Silver’s latest average. And Democrats have been consistently overperforming in races across the country over the past 10 months… But there are signs of fatigue among Democratic donors. Losing yet another race to Trump isn’t great for morale… Still, as history tells us, underfunded challengers can defeat incumbents under the right political conditions. And, maybe most importantly, Democrats don’t need an electoral wave to win the House majority. They don’t need to gain 63 seats, 41 seats or 31 seats or topple dozens of incumbents as we saw in previous cycles… They need a net gain of three seats.”

In “Is Trump Losing Rural America? Jess Piper foretells the growing blue wave across the country,” The Contrarian’s Jennifer Rubin interviews Jess Piper, Executive Director for Blue Missouri, a grassroots fundraising organization that supports Democratic nominees for Missouri state legislature.  In the introiduction to the interview, The Contrarian writes that “Trump’s policies seem to have done nothing but negatively impact the people that voted him into power—especially in rural America. From farmers in Iowa to small business owners, people across the nation are feeling the effects of the Trump administration’s broken promises and inaction. In response, a growing number of Democratic candidates across traditionally Republican held areas are running for election…Jess Piper, Executive Director of Blue Missouri, joins Jen to give us an update on the growing blue wave forming in the South and the Midwest. The pair also discuss the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) pushback against Trump’s claim that Alex Pretti’s murder was justified because he was carrying a gun, and how Democrats need to run for office in uncontested districts. Video and transcript link  here.

U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) explains “What My Party needs to Do” at Democracy: A journal of Ideas: “Democrats need to stop telling Americans how to be and what to feel and believe. Instead, we need to listen. Then we need to solve the problems they’ve shared with us. In the last few years, it’s not just our message that was wrong—it was some of our policies, too. People didn’t recognize the impacts of the bills we wrote and the votes we took. That’s why Americans don’t believe us when we preach at them from auditorium stages, cable news desks, and social media posts…We have to get back to the values and ideas that draw people to be Democrats to begin with…Ever since the shattering loss of the White House and the Senate majority in 2024, Americans have been asking about the direction of the party. What do we stand for? Where will we take the country if voters give us the chance to lead again? We should have run better campaigns in 2024, but more than a year later, we also need better answers to those questions than what we offered on Election Day…Democrats did very well in the off-year 2025 elections, but success in larger elections in 2026 and especially 2028 will require a more affirmative vision. If we want to win again, we need to offer voters a concise, accessible framework that rests on the ideas that drew me and so many others to the party in the first place: opportunity, security, justice…The Democratic Party has to build things again, and we need to make sure that Americans are trained for the future that these technologies will bring. It’s a perspective that would reestablish us as a pro-growth party, not solely a pro-regulation party. We are a party that sees exciting and positive opportunities ahead for all of us—and will work to make them come true…We should fight for the right of all Americans to be secure in their homes, their communities, and their bodies—safe from violence, supported by effective policing that partners with communities, surrounded by secure borders and immigration policies that respect humanity, and assured of responsible gun ownership and safe schools…”

Coons continues, “Security also means financial security. Democrats should help Americans keep more of what they earn and save for the future. That means making our economy a fair playing field, so that a day’s work lets you provide for your family, put some money aside for a rainy day, and build wealth…We should ensure the government is fair and free of corruption. Americans should be confident that they’re playing by the same rules as everyone else, no matter how wealthy or well connected…Security also has global dimensions. It means we partner with allies, lead with our values, and defend liberty to secure our place in the world. We should build a foreign policy that keeps Americans safe—and understands that diplomacy, development, and aid, along with a strong military, are key parts of that equation…Democrats must speak to and act on legitimate concerns starting with opportunity and followed by security before they can be heard on justice. Focusing principally on security leads to a velvet prison—a nanny state where you can get by but never have the incentive or ability to thrive, where you will always be safe so long as you never step out of your proverbial front door. If we focus on justice when folks don’t feel they have security and opportunity, they will think we are out of touch and tone-deaf. But if we see justice as the means by which we work on opportunity and security, then we can pursue a pro-growth agenda and a pro-security agenda…Another source of opportunity are the immigrants who do work Americans can’t or won’t do in sectors like agriculture and construction. There simply aren’t enough Americans to do these jobs without making our homes and groceries so expensive that they would be out of reach. If immigrants don’t fill these roles, food rots in fields, prices go up, jobs disappear—and everyone suffers. So, if we apply the principle of opportunity, we end up with an immigration policy that brings in highly skilled immigrants and immigrants willing to work in sectors that desperately need them even as it ensures that our borders are secure, so we don’t let in more people than our economy can absorb…Americans feel our borders are endlessly porous, and that our broken system makes it easy for people to cut the line, skirt vetting, and dodge supervision. We need to ensure they know our goal is their safety, a secure border, and laws that apply equally to everyone…We keep Americans safe by deporting the violent criminals who are most likely to commit crimes again. When deporting everyone is your priority, you don’t actually have priorities. It is not possible to humanely deport the more than 14 million people in this country without legal status or documentation. So, we should focus on those who have committed serious crimes…A just immigration policy ensures due process, including the opportunity to plead your case before a judge, so that we don’t accidentally deport American citizens or those legally allowed to live in this country. A just policy doesn’t force undocumented immigrants who have been here almost their entire lives to remain in the shadows, nor does it ignore international law on issues such as asylum. None of these principles detract from Americans’ security and opportunity. Instead, they add to them, ensuring the systems we put in place protect Americans and immigrants alike, reflect our values, and drive us toward a future of growth and freedom.”

From “Whole Hog Politics: Republicans’ alarming nosedive with white working class voters” by Chris Stirewalt at The Hill:

In 1980, nearly three-quarters of voters nationally were white Americans without college degrees. In 2024, it was about 40 percent. Greater cultural diversity explains some of that, but the key element that changed our politics so much wasn’t about ethnic identity but rather education.

In 1980, a college degree was far less essential as a stepping stone to success and entry to the managerial class. Only about 17 percent of all adults older than 25 back then had a bachelor’s degree or more. Now, a four-year degree is the ante price even for many kinds of administrative jobs. Accordingly, about 40 percent of adults now have college diplomas, a share that will continue its climb as those baby boom Americans who were new in the less credentialist job market of 50 years ago pass away — and out of the demographic tables — in large numbers over the coming 15 years or so.

What changed our politics, though, wasn’t so much that more people were going to college, but rather that those who did and those who did not started voting very differently … the white ones, anyway.

According to the University of Virginia Center for Politics analysis, Black voters from 1980 to 2020 were not only consistent in their preference for Democrats, but also there was no significant difference between Black voters with or without college degrees.

Over the same period, white voters without college degrees went from narrowly favoring Democrats (2.2 points in the 1980s) to overwhelmingly favoring Republicans in the 2010s (23.7 points). College-educated white voters went on exactly the opposite trip, going from solidly Republican (12.2 points) to kind of Democratic (2.5 points). What the heck happened there?

…In each of President Trump’s three presidential contests, a majority of his overall support came from white voters without college degrees. That would be an alarming degree of dependency on one shrinking demographic group, unless … you could score increasingly high shares of those voters.

The last time Republicans won the national popular vote before 2024 was in 2004. That year, white working-class voters split about evenly, with a slight edge for then-President George W. Bush. He got a little more than half of a group that was back then a little more than half of the electorate itself.

Twenty years later, the white working class made up about 40 percent of the electorate, but Trump won 66 percent of them. Like a diver on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, Republicans are going from increasing heights into a smaller and smaller pool. Which is fine, as long as you hit the target.

Which is why, if you are a Republican, you might want to let your eyes drift through the crosstabs of the most recent survey from Marist College’s excellent polling unit. Trump’s approval rating among whites without college degrees — the same voters that went for Trump by a 2-to-1 ratio in 2024 — is 46 percent. Trump is at 43 percent with these voters on his handling of the economy, including an abysmal 38 percent among the women of that group. These voters don’t even like the tariffs that are supposed to be a boon to them: 35 percent approve of Trump on the import taxes.

On how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is conducting its operations? The white working class clocks in at 40 percent approval. On foreign policy generally, it’s 43 percent. On Greenland, it’s 13 percent.

More here.

Bill Scher addresses a question of growing concern, “How Worried Should Democrats Be About Trump Stealing the Next Election?” at Washington Monthly: “President Donald Trump betrayed his panic about the 2026 midterm elections when he vented at Dan Bongino, formerly the number two official at the FBI and now a podcaster, about his baseless conspiratorial thoughts about immigrants and voting. After glazing his “landslide” 2024 victory (in which he defeated Kamala Harris by a 1.5 percent popular vote margin), he asserted: “You’re never going to have that again if you don’t get these people out. These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegaly.”…He complained about his party’s handling of election laws: “Amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting in at least—many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” …Trump’s call for a partisan takeover of the electoral apparatus understandably triggered reciprocal panic in Democratic circles about voter suppression and outright vote stealing. Considering how far Trump was willing to go to steal the 2020 election—from disparaging mail ballots to pursuing dubious litigation to egging on an unruly mob hellbent on obstructing the Electoral College count—every American committed to free and fair elections must remain on the highest alert until Trump has fully left the political sphere….”

Scher continues, “Last March, the president issued an executive order imposing restrictive voting rules on states. The Justice Department has been trying to piece together a national voter database from unredacted state voter roll data, which the Brennan Center says is an “attempt to force states to remove voters from the rolls based on incomplete and likely inaccurate information.” Last week, FBI agents, with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard creepily looking over their shoulders, seized 2020 voting records from Fulton County, Georgia. Trump, based on what he told Bongino (“you’re going to see something in Georgia”), is planning to use the records to further his gaslighting claims that Joe Biden stole the election in Georgia when we have plenty of evidence that Trump was plotting the theft. And considering how Trump has already abused his power with National Guard and ICE deployments designed to punish Democratic-run cities, we can’t discount the possibility that he will try to send armed agents to election sites with the intent of intimidating voters…  But, as with any bully, these real and potential acts of force and intimidation mask underlying weakness. A president simply doesn’t have the power to take over a Constitutionally designed, decentralized, 50-state managed election system. And as with any bully, the way to respond is to have your eyes wide open, but also have no fear…  That’s what we’ve been seeing. Most states aren’t turning over their unredacted voter data. Trump’s Justice Department has sued 24 of them, and last month, federal judges dismissed the cases involving California and Oregon. Also, last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to pressure Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to turn over the data, suggesting that compliance would end ICE’s Operation Metro Surge, but Walz has not budged. In Georgia, the Fulton County government has sued to recover its voting records.” More here.

Greg Sargent and the New Republic report that “Trump’s New “Prison Camp” Threat Unleashes Fury Even in MAGA Country.” An excerpt: “Right now, more than 70,000 migrants are languishing in detention—a record—but the administration is running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds, and it would supercharge expulsion capacity…Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to buy a warehouse in Virginia’s Hanover County, which went for Trump by 26 points in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond’s northern suburbs. Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned the proposed sale, with local reports suggestingonly a “handful” backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors opposed the transaction. The warehouse owner canceled the sale…Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the Republican-dominated Roxbury Township Council, in slightly-Trump-leaning Morris County, recently voted unanimously to oppose ICE’s plans to buy a warehouse there, with some locals sharply protesting the scheme for humanitarian reasons. The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City came out against a proposed ICE warehouse, with the owner also nixing the sale. Officials in places like Kansas City, Missouri, and Salt Lake City, Utah, are also dead set against plans for ICE camps in their locales…Guess what: The opposition is only getting started. As MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow noted in a useful overview of the opposition Monday night, we’re already seeing mass protests outside existing facilities. Those are smaller than some of the gargantuan new camps ICE hopes to create, yet migrant deaths are already soaring in the current facilities, and the bigger ones will be even worse. “If they build them, they will fill them,” Maddow said, labeling them “prison camps.” She added: “How do you think those facilities are going to be run?”…The pushback has come together surprisingly quickly. What explains this? A bizarrely overlooked finding in a recent Pew Research poll sheds some light: It finds that a huge majority of Americans oppose mass immigrant detention. The wording is critical here:…Do you favor or oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while their cases are decided?…Favor: 35 percent…Oppose: 64 percent…Trump’s overall approval on the issue is in the toilet, and ICE has become a pariah agency. Majorities oppose deporting longtime residents with jobs and no criminal record and view immigration as a positive good for the country. In that Pew poll, 60 percent of Americans oppose pausing visa applications for the 75 countries Trump has singled out, apparently in keeping with his hatred for “shithole countries,” and two-thirds oppose ending asylum applications for people fleeing horrors abroad.” More here.

Carroll Doherty, former director of political research at Pew Research Center, writes in “Is the Time Finally Right for Real Immigration Reform?” at The Dispatch that “Americans are making a distinction between the stability at the border and the chaos and violence they have seen on the streets of Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities where the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has surged its enforcement agents. Thus, a New York Times/Siena University poll last month found that Trump’s approval rating for handling the U.S.-Mexico border was 50 percent, 10 points higher than his rating for immigration overall… What do Americans want from immigration policy?…  Recent national polls have focused mostly on the two killings of American citizens in the past month at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents and their heavy-handed tactics more generally. The movement to rein in ICE—or even “abolish” the agency, in the dreams of some liberals—has spread from the halls of Congress to the citadels of American popular culture…Yet there has been less attention paid to the complex, unresolved question that has long been at the heart of America’s immigration predicament: what to do about the estimated 14 million people living in the United States illegally… Trump’s maximalist approach—the “largest deportation in the history of our country,” as he put it during the 2024 campaign—has retained a fair amount of popular support, despite the backlash over the tactics employed by ICE and Border Patrol agents…The same January New York Times/Siena poll that showed that Trump was underwater on immigration policy, and ICE even further underwater at 36 percent approval, found an almost even split on the administration’s mass deportation policy: Fifty percent of respondents supported it, and 47 percent opposed it…That’s consistent with other recent polls that ask respondents only about their views of the current deportation policy. Yet it’s often overlooked that, when given the opportunity, consistent majorities of Americans express a preference for finding a way to deal with illegal immigrants in the U.S. without resorting to mass deportations.” More here.

The following article, “How Trump Botched Immigration and Gave Democrats a Win: Which Democrats may immediately fumble away” by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Democrats do love a good government shutdown—though this time it’s just the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes ICE, that would be deprived of funding. Last time around in October, they said the government shutdown was over the price of health care, one of their best-polling issues with voters. That fight fired up their base and may have helped them win big in elections in New Jersey and Virginia.

This time they may shut down the government agency responsible for immigration enforcement, one of their worst-polling issues in recent years. Put this way, the Democrats’ strategy doesn’t seem to make sense.

But it does make sense to Democrats today and for a very simple reason: the Trump administration has managed to take an issue Republicans have dominated for years and turn it into a big loser for the GOP on multiple fronts.

Public approval of Trump’s handling of deportations, and specifically his use of ICE, has plunged precipitously. Trump now polls heavily net negative on the immigration issue, not far off his overall net negative job approval. As Nate Silver points out:

On average, over the course of his term, Trump’s net approval on immigration has been about six points better than his overall rating; it had been his least-bad issue. Now, that gap has mostly evaporated.

To be clear, the public hasn’t completely changed its mind on the issue of illegal immigration. Far from it. There’s still majority support for deporting all illegal immigrants back to their home countries, as shown by recent polls from Cygnal (which was taken after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis) and from Marquette University. Significantly, the Marquette poll, which was taken after the killing of Renee Good but before that of Pretti, showed essentially no change in support for deportation from their November poll.

Consistent with this, the Cygnal poll shows majority support for “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcing federal immigration laws to remove illegal immigrants from the U.S.” And according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, voters still prefer the Republican party over Democrats when asked who would better handle immigration, and especially border security. This is confirmed by the even more recent Marquette poll, which showed Republicans preferred over Democrats by 18 points on “immigration and border security.”

But that’s the theory. When it comes to the Trump administration’s practice, as instantiated in ICE’s real world activities, voters are strongly negative on the results. Approval of ICE has plunged precipitously. In The New York Times’ latest poll, approval of ICE has sunk to just 36 percent compared with 63 percent disapproval—a net negative approval of a whopping 27 points. Among the critical independent voter group, disapproval has hit a remarkable 70 percent. Even the fringe view that ICE should be abolished is getting a more sympathetic hearing from the public.

As to specific tactics, voters in the poll overwhelmingly feel ICE has gone too far—61 percent versus 26 percent who think they’ve been about right and 11 percent who think the tactics haven’t gone far enough. Other polls have similar results. These views are likely to get even more lopsided in the wake of Pretti’s death.

It wasn’t so long ago that the idea of actively and aggressively resisting immigration enforcement belonged to a small slice of the activist left. That is no longer the case. Thanks to how severely the Trump administration has overplayed its hand, resistance to enforcement has been mainstreamed and receives tacit support even from many who believe the Democrats are not trustworthy on immigration, and who still support the overall goal of cracking down on illegal immigration.

President Trump has staged a master class in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It underscores a lesson neither party seems interested in learning. Both have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters, who would never vote for the other party anyway, over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way. They have not operated as institutions geared to construct broad coalitions and win large general-election victories. Instead, they have focused on fan service—satisfying their most partisan and loyal constituencies.

Ironically, America’s 50-50 political divide has made it difficult for either party to break out of this pattern. You might think that two minority parties would each feel pressure to expand their coalitions and construct a majority, but actually, both have behaved as if they were the rightful majorities already. Each finds ways to dismiss the other’s wins as narrow flukes and treat their own as massive triumphs. Indeed, each has responded to close election losses with various forms of denial.

This is sustainable only because elections are so close. Politicians learn big lessons from big losses or big wins, so neither party has learned much in a long time, and neither can grasp that it isn’t popular and could easily lose the next election.

Read more…

The issue that Democrats last year thought might boost them this year has not gone away. One key Senate candidate understands, as I noted at New York:

Enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies benefiting over 20 million Americans expired at the end of last year. It was such a big deal that the need to address it became the principal Democratic rationale for triggering the longest government shutdown in U.S. history last October. It remained a big deal as 2026 arrived: The House actually passed a “clean” three-year extension of the subsidies on January 8, with 17 Republicans joining Democrats on the vote. There were bipartisan negotiations in the Senate to cut a deal that would include some sort of subsidy extension.

Republicans were all over the place on health-care costs more generally. Some tried to change the subject to non-insurance health-care cost issues like pharmaceuticals. Others spoke of some huge conservative health-care overhaul that would be enacted on a party-line vote using budget reconciliation (a sort of One Big Beautiful Bill Act 2.0). On January 15, Donald Trump himself suddenly announced he was unveiling a “Great Healthcare Plan” that turned out to be a hodgepodge of old Republican gimmicks fleshed out with vague promises, with no real plans for legislation.

And then … everyone got distracted, mostly because federal immigration agents conducted a mass-deportation “surge” in Minneapolis that resulted in two deaths, a terrorized city, worldwide outrage, and a partial government shutdown. Even as the two parties in Congress fought over the immigration-enforcement guidelines Democrats were demanding, prospects for any sort of bipartisan action on health care sickened and died, as The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week:

“Top Senate negotiators said an effort to renew expired healthcare subsidies had effectively collapsed, likely ending the hopes of 20 million Americans that the tax-credit expansion could be revived and lower their monthly insurance premiums.

“Talks had centered on a proposal from Sens. Bernie Moreno (R., Ohio) and Susan Collins (R., Maine) to extend a version of the enlarged Affordable Care Act subsidies for at least two years, while cutting off higher-income people from participating and eventually giving enrollees the option of putting money into health savings accounts. It also would eliminate zero-dollar premium plans. But lawmakers from both parties now say the chances of a deal have all but evaporated.

“’It’s effectively over,’ Moreno said Wednesday. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.)—the architect of an adjacent plan—agreed.”

Some conservative Republicans are still talking about a second budget reconciliation bill to repeal and replace Obamacare (the task that famously eluded them during Trump’s first term), but this seems extremely unlikely given the fragile nature of GOP control of the House, obvious intraparty divisions over the substance of health-care policy, and the universal preoccupation with the midterms.

Speaking of the midterms, every day that goes by without action on the aftermath of the Obamacare subsidy lapse, it becomes an even more potent campaign issue for Democrats. One Democratic senator whose reelection in November is critical to his party’s hopes of flipping the Senate, Jon Ossoff, has made it his principal campaign issue. It’s pretty clear why he’s focused on the issue. Georgia, like other red states that rejected the Affordable Care Act’s optional Medicaid expansion, is a place where reliance on private health-insurance markets that go under the name of Obamacare is especially important. About 1.5 million Georgians, or 13 percent of the state’s population, obtained health insurance via Obamacare in 2025. Facing premium hikes, that number has dropped by 200,000 in 2026 so far. And those sticking with their policies are paying premium increases averaging 75 percent over last year’s costs. Ossoff talks about this problem constantly:

“‘If we don’t extend these tax credits, it’s projected that half-a-million Georgians will lose their health insurance altogether,’ Ossoff said [in early January]. ‘More than a million Georgians will see their health insurance premiums double, in some cases triple.’

“’I challenge all of my opponents today … to make clear where they stand,’ Ossoff said. ‘This is not a time for vague promises and political talking points. Do my opponents support throwing half-a-million Georgians off their health insruance? … I think it’s a very straightforward policy and moral question.’”

Ossoff is taking advantage of the fact that three major Republicans who are competing in a tight race to oppose him in November — congressmen Buddy Carter and Mike Collins and former football coach Derek Dooley — want to discuss almost anything else. Carter and Collins voted against the subsidy extension, and Dooley has no known position. As they compete for a potentially decisive Trump endorsement for their May primary (with a June runoff quite likely), they are not about to go out on any limbs on health care, particularly if it involves continuing what Trump calls the Unaffordable Care Act.

While the issue is particularly acute in Georgia, it will be a point of contention in campaigns everywhere, particularly if Trump and the GOP continue to ignore it or make vague promises to do something about health-care costs some other day in some other ways. Health-care policy has been a political albatross for Republicans for many years, and this looks like one year it could weigh on them heavily.

From “How to Deter Trump From Rigging and Overturning the Midterm Election” by Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect:

The good news about Donald Trump’s efforts to take control of the upcoming election is that the legal changes he’s seeking to make won’t get through the Congress. The bad news is that his illegal efforts might succeed.

When Trump first raised the topic on a podcast over the weekend, his own press secretary felt compelled to say he was only referring to his support for the SAVE Act, now pending before Congress, which would require a raft of documentation from those trying to register to vote. Given the 60-vote threshold that the bill will run up against in the Senate, however, the nation will be saved from SAVE by Democratic opposition.

Similarly, Trump has no legal authority to get states to send him their voter rolls, which he fairly lusts after so he can strike likely Democratic voters from these lists. That absence of legal authority was rather glaringly revealed last week when Attorney General Pam Bondi offered Minnesota a deal: If the state just forked over its rolls, she hinted that the administration might just withdraw its ICE and Border Patrol goons. No administration action has revealed so starkly as Bondi’s ploy the fear Trump harbors about the coming election, and the absence of legal channels available to him to rig or curtail it.

As we’ve seen in Atlanta over the weekend, Trump can use the FBI to try to seize ballots, though he’s being sued by local government officials over that action. Come November, he could, I suppose, send in the feds to stop the vote counting in Democratic cities (and keep in mind that virtually every large American city is heavily Democratic). The problem with that is that if an urban county can’t certify its votes, neither can the state in which it’s located certify its votes. Impounding the ballots in, say, Harris County (Houston and its suburbs) means that Texas can’t certify its statewide election results for senator, governor, and its members of Congress and the legislature. Trump would probably be fine with that if he’d interceded in so many states that the new Congress couldn’t convene, but it’s hard to imagine that Republican elected officials would feel the same way.

More here.

There is a pundit consensus that, absent any political earthquakes in the coming months, Democrats are favored to win a majority of the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterm elections, and with it, the speakership. The U.S. Senate, however, is a tougher call, with the smart money betting on Republicans holding their majority, according to Kyle Kondik at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. As Kondik, explains, “The 2026 midterm may once again be a “Blue Wave,” as we saw in 2018, Donald Trump’s first midterm as president…But that environment wasn’t enough for Democrats to win the Senate that year, and it may not be in 2026, either…While Democrats have made progress over the course of the last year in positioning themselves to compete in enough Republican-held seats to win the majority, the GOP nonetheless remains favored to hold that majority…The basic asset for Republicans, and problem for Democrats, is the structure of the Senate map. With Republicans having knocked out all of the remaining Democrats from states that voted for Donald Trump all three times he was on the ballot—a group of 25 states that accounts for half of all the Senate seats—Democrats either have to start winning in redder states again or, over time, essentially sweep all of the Senate seats in blue and purple states…Despite Republicans defending 22 of the 35 seats being contested this November, only a pair of those are in states where Democrats are currently very competitive: Maine, which consistently votes Democratic for president but also has the only Republican senator from a Kamala Harris-won state, Susan Collins; and North Carolina, which consistently votes Republican for president but often elects Democrats in other statewide races. Meanwhile, Democrats have to defend a couple of Trump-won states, namely an open seat in Michigan and the Georgia seat held by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D). We are upgrading Ossoff’s race to Leans Democratic—more on that below—but these other three races remain Toss-ups. Holding Georgia along with all of their other seats and flipping Maine and North Carolina would get Democrats to 49 seats—still two short of the 51 they need for a majority. Democrats have attracted credible recruits in additional, Republican-held seats, most notably Alaska and Ohio, but they may just run into a red wall even if the political conditions are very favorable in November.”

Here’s the U.S. Senate race midterm map, according to Kondik:

Jennifer Rubin explains “Why Dems Should Force Kristi Noem Out: Keep the momentum going,” and writes at The Contrarian: “Creating a record, presenting the evidence through credible witnesses, and forcing Republicans to defend the indefensible (just as the original videos of the killings did) are part and parcel of rallying the people, throwing Republicans on defense, splitting the Republican cult, and, candidly, throwing Trump’s party and underlings into panic that others could also face Noem’s fate…From a purely political standpoint, the calls for her to quit are already sowing divisions among Republicans. “Sens. Thom Tillis and Lisa Murkowski called for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to resign Tuesday, making them the first Republicans in Congress to say she should step down,” NBC reported. And, to boot, Tillis called out Miller for the same treatment. (“GOP Sen. Thom Tillis on Stephen Miller: ‘Stephen Miller never fails to live up to my expectations of incompetence,’ he said, later adding, ‘I can tell you, if I were president, neither one of them would be in Washington right now,’ also referring to Noem.”) Squeeze Noem and watch her drop the dime on others, including other Cabinet members, Vice President JD Vance, and Trump…By making Noem’s ouster a necessary but not sufficient condition of dismantling Trump’s police state, Democrats should also force Republicans up for reelection (e.g., Sens. Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, John Husted of Ohio, and John Cornyn of Texas) to justify why they are covering for her (and Trump). That should make for some effective debate moments…Finally, without the White House or majorities in either chamber of Congress, Democrats do not have a surplus of “wins” to tout. To reassure the base that elected Democrats are fighting for them and to encourage protestors to achieve progress through nonviolent action, a win of this magnitude — knocking out a Cabinet secretary in charge of arguably the most important domestic initiative of Trump’s second term — would be an invaluable sign of momentum. And for a regime that survives on the aura of invincibility, each stumble, loss, and scandal should be treasured.” More here.

If Trump’s self-dealing and corruption is going to be a concern for midterm voters, then this article should be a must-read for Democratic campaigns. David D. Kirkpatrick reports that “Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion: In August, I reported that the President and his family had made $3.4 billion by leveraging his position. After his first year back in office, the number has ballooned” at The New Yorker. Here’s the lede: “At the start of Donald Trump’s first term, he promised that he and his family would never do anything that might even be “perceived to be exploitive of office of the Presidency.” By contrast, his second term looks rapacious. He and members of his family have signed a blitz of foreign mega-deals shadowed by conflicts of interest, and they’ve launched at least five different cryptocurrency enterprises, all of which leverage Trump’s status as President to lure buyers or investors. Ethics watchdogs say that no other President has ever so nakedly exploited his position, or on such a scale. Trump recently explained to the Times why he cast aside his former restraint: “I found out that nobody cared.” You can read the rest of the story by signing up for a free New Yorker newsletter right here.