If you look back from the day-to-day grind of political news at the big picture of Republican policy priorities right now, it’s amazing how much militarism at home and abroad we are seeing, as I pointed out at New York:

With all the bickering between Republicans over the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, it’s easy to miss something pretty important. Now Trump and congressional Republicans are attempting to pre-fund ICE and the Border Patrol for three more years without a single new “guardrail” on the conduct of immigration-enforcement agents. Since they are using the budget-reconciliation process to get this done, Democrats will have zero leverage over ICE practices until Trump has left office, even if they flip one or both houses of Congress this November.

So the struggle over immigration-enforcement policy that flared up when masked agents started killing U.S. citizens in Minneapolis is essentially over for the time being. Perhaps as a matter of public relations the administration will try to rebrand “mass deportation” as something else, but there’s no reason to believe they won’t proceed full speed ahead in doing the dirty work of rounding up, incarcerating, and removing millions of immigrants, many of whom came to America legally. Indeed, there is a new MAGA-aligned coalition arising that is pressing for a major increase in deportation goals, likely by targeting the employers of undocumented immigrants. No matter the packaging, armed and masked agents hunting down immigrants on an unprecedented scale will continue.

Meanwhile, there’s no question Trump’s second term has elevated war-fighting to job No. 1. The president is gambling vast political capital on an unpopular and strangely aimless conflict with Iran that has embroiled the entire Middle East and put America’s relationship with its long-standing NATO allies on life support while risking economic calamity as well.

And aside from the political (and human) costs of Trump’s horrifying new emergence as a warlord, it’s costing a lot of money too — to the point where it’s crowding out other priorities in a federal budget already drowning in red ink, as Trump’s own budget for the next fiscal year will demonstrate, Bloomberg reports:

“President Donald Trump is preparing to release a fiscal year 2027 budget plan on Friday that will frame his party’s midterm election message around a massive defense buildup, partially paid for by cuts to domestic agencies.

“A governing vision that directs tax dollars to the Pentagon amid an unpopular Iran war represents a political risk for the White House, especially against a backdrop of spiking gasoline prices. Trump could also face resistance from within his own party over envisioned cuts to health and science agencies that Congress rejected last year on a bipartisan basis.”

Trump has sworn since his first presidential bid that he won’t touch the “third rail” of cuts in Social Security or Medicare. So his twin devotion to mass deportation and a huge and regularly deployed military means everything else is literally under the gun. The president seems frustrated with the inability of people to understand this simple matter of arithmetic, as NBC News has reported:

“President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it’s ‘not possible’ for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to ‘take care’ of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending.

“The president’s remarks were delivered to attendees at a private Easter luncheon at the White House, where Trump also accused Democratic-led states of fraud.”

“He went on to say that he told Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, ‘don’t send any money for daycare, because the United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too.’”

It’s reasonably clear a significant majority of Americans have priorities other than mass deportation and “whatever wars.”

No wonder the president’s job-approval ratings are in free fall. A militarized America is not what a lot of Trump 2024 voters bargained for. They will be heard from in November.

There’s a lot at stake in statehouses in November, as I explained at New York earlier this week:

There will be 36 gubernatorial elections in November with each party defending 18 governorships. The overall partisan balance is currently close with Republicans holding 26 governorships and Democrats 24. Each party has a clear and achievable goal. The GOP is trying to avoid the usual midterm pattern of losses by the party controlling the White House (which has happened in 16 of the past 20 midterms), while Democrats are seeking their first national majority of governorships since their catastrophic losses in 2010.

Since governors have their own agenda and they command media attention that most members of Congress can only envy, national partisan divisions aren’t strictly transferable to gubernatorial elections. But in this day and age, straight-ticket voting is still ascendant and partisanship matters, as Sabato’s Crystal Ball observes in looking at the 2026 races:

“Republicans hold 22 of the 25 governorships in states that voted for Donald Trump all three times he was on the ballot (the exceptions are Kansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina), while Democrats hold 17 of the 19 states that never voted for Trump (New Hampshire and Vermont are the exceptions).

“Of the half-dozen states that backed presidential candidates from both parties in the last three elections, Democrats hold four (Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) and Republicans hold two (Georgia and Nevada). So Democrats are competitive with Republicans in the overall count despite there being more red states than blue states because they are doing better in the swing presidential states and they are a little more extended into redder states than Republicans are extended into bluer states.”

Among the red states with Democratic governors, two of them (Kentucky and North Carolina) are not holding gubernatorial elections in 2026. The current two-term governor of Kansas is Democrat Laura Kelly, who is term-limited and has benefited enormously from divisions in the GOP ranks. If Republicans can stay united, they will be favored to capture this governorship. Similarly, deep-blue Vermont’s very popular (and non-MAGA) Republican governor, Phil Scott, hasn’t announced his plans for 2026. If he retires, Vermont will almost certainly elect a Democrat.

One big question in the more numerous purple states with competitive 2026 governor’s races is whether a national Democratic breeze will flip what the Cook Political Report calls toss-ups in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. All five of these states were carried by Joe Biden in 2020 and by Donald Trump in 2024. Here’s a closer look at these crucial races.

Arizona

Arizona is an intensely competitive state with a vibrant MAGA culture — sometimes too vibrant, as Democrat Katie Hobbes’s 2022 win over Kari Lake illustrated. Now, Hobbes is running for reelection with decent but not overwhelming job-approval numbers (53 percent approve, 35 percent disapprove, according to Morning Consult). The big development has been among her Republican challengers with the very wealthy and arguably more electable Karrin Taylor Robson dropping out recently. That made former House Freedom Caucus chair Andy Biggs the GOP front-runner, though Congressman David Schweikert is also in the race. Handicappers had considered this contest a toss-up, but most have now re-rated it as leaning Democratic with the arch-reactionary Biggs the likely GOP nominee. The primary is on July 21, with no runoff requirement.

Georgia

Brian Kemp has held on to Georgia’s governorship for eight years despite unfavorable shifts in the state’s political demography and Trump’s hostility toward him. (The president tried but failed to purge Kemp from office in 2022 after the governor joined Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Georgia.) Kemp twice defeated Democratic rock star Stacey Abrams. Now he’s term-limited, and the battle to succeed him has become a wild multi-candidate brawl. Among Republicans, Raffensperger and another 2020 non-election-denier, state attorney general Chris Cox, were facing Trump endorsee and state lieutenant governor Burt Jones in a relatively quiet race. Then a self-funding billionaire health-care executive, Rick Jackson, jumped into the contest and began running abrasive ads aimed at both Jones (whom he called lazy and corrupt) and Raffensperger (ads simply call him “Judas”). Georgia, importantly, does require a majority vote to win party nominations, so in this crowded race a May 19 primary is all but certain to lead to a June 16 runoff. Right now, Jackson (who is trying to get Trump to back off his exclusive Jones endorsement) and Jones are leading the polls, but Raffensperger and perhaps Carr still have a shot at a runoff spot.

Watching the Republicans somewhat from the shadows is a sizable Democratic field that formed even before Abrams declined a third gubernatorial run. The clear front-runner is former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is doing especially well among the large Black Democratic-primary electorate. Hoping to make a runoff against Bottoms are former state lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan, a party-switcher who pivoted hard against Trump but is trying to live down past conservative policy positions; Black political pioneer Michael Thurmond, most recently CEO of the large Atlanta suburb DeKalb County; and state legislator Jason Esteves, an up-and-comer who is both Black and Latino. Going into the cycle, Republicans were thought to have an advantage in this race, but between the name-calling and mud-throwing of GOP candidates and a midterm pro-Democratic breeze, that has changed.

Michigan

What makes the race to succeed term-limited Democrat Gretchen Whitmer unusual is the independent candidacy of former Detroit mayor (and until recently a Democrat) Andrew Duggan. With a business background and a record associated with Detroit’s economic comeback, Duggan has significant labor backing and some appeal to voters in both (and beyond both) major parties. But you get the sense he’s drawing more from Democratic front-runner and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who is campaigning as a center-left can-do pol in the mold of Whitmer. As a result, Republican front-runner John James (a two-term congressmen who built name ID and a strong identity as a Black conservative with two losing but credible Senate races in 2018 and 2020) is running slightly ahead overall in three-candidate polls. James is having to fight off several other Republican candidates, including 2024 presidential aspirant Perry Johnson. Michigan’s primaries aren’t until August 4, and there is no majority-vote requirement. Duggan will probably either fade by November or become a seriously competitive candidate who could win.

Nevada

Nevada could be an important barometer for 2026. Trump carried the state in 2026, and his signature “no tax on tips” initiative is especially popular here. There’s a reasonably popular incumbent Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, whose electoral base is in Democratic-leaning Las Vegas. But iffy economic prospects and a pervasive cost-of-living crisis in Nevada are creating a big Democratic opportunity in 2026. Early polls show Lombardo essentially tied with the Democratic front-runner, two-term attorney general and former legislator Aaron Ford, the first Black politician to hold a statewide elected office in Nevada. Ford does have a significant primary challenger in Washoe County (Reno) commission chair Alexis Hill, who is running notably to the front-runner’s left. But Ford’s advantage in name ID, endorsements, and fundraising is probably too much for any challenger to overcome before the June 9 primary.

In the general election, Lombardo will be saddled with incumbency in a less-than-ideal election year, and Ford must cope with negative publicity over out-of-state travel during his long tenure in public office. But it’s likely to be as close as the 2022 election, when Lombardo edged out the then-incumbent Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak. Nevada is that kind of state.

Wisconsin

Democrats have been on a recent upswing in the quintessential battleground state of Wisconsin, making gains against entrenched Republican majorities in the legislature and in the judiciary. But one key position they’ve held for eight years now, the governorship, is up for grabs in 2026 with incumbent Tony Evers choosing to retire. Republicans have quickly coalesced around the gubernatorial candidacy of House Freedom Caucus congressman Tom Tiffany, whom Trump endorsed in January. But Democrats have a huge field with no real favorite. The best known candidate by far is former state lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes, who lost a 2022 Senate race to Ron Johnson that a lot of observers expected him to win. But with an August primary (there is no runoff requirement in Wisconsin), there’s plenty of time for other candidates to challenge him. One to watch is Mandela’s successor as state lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, a suburban Milwaukee politician who has made Medicaid expansion her signature issue. Another is David Crowley, who became Milwaukee County’s first Black executive in 2020 at the age of 33. There are also two viable candidates from the progressive bastion of Madison. One is state senator and veteran abortion-rights champion Keldra Roy. And another is state legislator and professional chef Francesca Hong, a self-identified socialist.

A February Marquette Law School poll of the Democratic gubernatorial field showed Hong with 11 percent, Barnes with 10 percent, and no one else out of single digits; 65 percent were undecided. A TIPP poll in March matching Tiffany against three Democrats showed him leading Hong by 3 percent but trailing Barnes by 2 percent and Rodriguez by 3 percent. So this race has a long way to go.

The gubernatorial races highlighted above aren’t the only potentially newsworthy contests, of course. Republicans are thought to have a solid advantage in Ohio, where Trump has won three times and Republicans have controlled the governorship since 2010. But likely GOP nominee and 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is in a very close race with former state health director Amy Acton. Similarly, in Iowa, where the bottom has fallen out for Democrats since 2014, state auditor Rob Sand, the only Democratic statewide elected official left, has a shot at the governorship thanks to the very unpopular performance of retiring incumbent Republican Kim Reynolds and the large GOP field lining up to replace her. Perhaps the weirdest possibility in the whole country is in California, where a scattered ten-candidate field in the state’s nonpartisan top-two primary could in theory send two Republicans to the general election and lock out the Democrats, who have an enormous majority in the electorate. So don’t get too fixated on congressional elections. There’s plenty of drama down-ballot.

Public opinion continues to sour on Trump, and the Iran War is making it worse, as I explained at New York this week:

Three weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, it’s going badly for Donald Trump: spiraling energy prices, confused messaging, diplomatic disarray, and ever-lengthening timelines for conclusion of the conflict. The war is as unpopular as Trump himself, though the administration is urging the media and the public to focus solely on its military successes. The commander-in-chief’s public approval is already weakening, with the worst very likely still to come. And things aren’t going very well on the home front, either, between gas-price shocks and long waits for screening at airports caused by a fight in Congress over the administration’s outrageous immigration enforcement practices.

In the Silver Bulletin polling averages, the president’s net job approval dropped to a new second-term low last week, and fell still more this week (it’s now at minus-16.7 ; at RealClearPolitics Trump’s average net job approval has also reached a second-term low of minus-15.0 percent). The mix of pollsters — some of whom would show Trump as relatively popular under any conceivable circumstances — builds some instability into the president’s numbers, but the overall trend lines are pretty clear. His job-approval average (now at 40.0 percent at Silver Bulletin) has been under 43 percent since mid-December; his job-disapproval average (now at a second-term high of 56.7 percent) has been over 54 percent since the beginning of the year. His current job-approval rating is lower than that of any president at this point in his first term dating back to World War II. That includes his own first term.

The war isn’t helping him. Now that it’s been part of the daily news for a while, the percentage of Americans with no opinion about the war has dropped steadily, and we can get a sense of the underlying level of support. It’s net negative in every recent poll. In the most recent surveys, the percentage of Americans supporting the war ranges from a low of 33 percent at the Daily Mail, to 35 percent at Reuters/Ipsos, to 37 percent at Economist/YouGov, to 40 percent at CBS News and Emerson, to 43 percent at Morning Consult. Polls with crosstabs invariably show strong support among self-identified MAGA folk (78 percent, according to a March 16 Economist-YouGov survey), with declining support among Republicans generally (73 percent) and Trump 2024 voters generally (69 percent). In the same poll, support for the war drops to 25 percent among Hispanics, 23 percent among independents, and 22 percent among those under the age of 30.

In terms of what happens next in the Middle East, polls consistently show majorities of Americans opposing the introduction of U.S. ground troops. The recent Economist-YouGov survey, for example, shows 64 percent of Americans opposing that development, and even a slight plurality of MAGA supporters opposing it. A more nuanced set of questions from Reuters-Ipsos, however, indicated that if ground troops are limited to “special forces” operatives, it wouldn’t be as strongly unpopular: While only 7 percent of Americans would support a “large-scale invasion,” 34 percent would support a “special forces only” deployment (a percentage that rises to 63 percent among Republicans, aside from the 14 percent who would back a full-on invasion).

Aside from the war, Trump’s approval numbers on specific issues remain underwater and relatively stagnant. According to the Silver Bulletin averages, he’s at net minus-9.8 percent (a bit better than when ICE atrocities were dominating the news) on immigration, minus-21.7 percent on the economy, and a dreadful minus-32.7 percent on inflation. These last two numbers bear watching if, as expected, high gasoline and other energy prices persist and other economic indicators remain shaky as the war drags on.

The generic congressional ballots showing party preferences in votes for the U.S. House remain solidly if not overwhelmingly pro-Democratic. Silver Bulletin pegs the Democratic advantage as 5.3 percent; it’s at 3.8 percent at Decision Desk HQ and 4.8 percent at Real Clear Politics. For what it’s worth, at this point in 2022 RCP gave Republicans a 3.5 percent advantage in the generic congressional ballot, and the GOP ultimately posted a net gain of nine House seats and flipped control of the chamber. With Republicans holding a mere two-seat majority in the House right now, there’s a lot of reason for Democrats to be optimistic about breaking up the GOP trifecta in November.

For the most part, 2028 presidential polls aren’t that meaningful. But for one once-and-possibly-future presidential candidate, signs of home state weakness could be significant, and I wrote about it at New York:

There’s an old tradition in American politics whereby the last presidential nominee is referred to as the “Titular Leader” of the party, to be displaced, if at all, at the next party nominating convention. According to that tradition, Kamala Harris is owed considerable deference if she chooses to attempt a comeback in 2028. It’s hardly unprecedented for a losing major-party presidential candidate to win subsequent renomination: it’s happened eight times in U.S. history, most recently in the very election Harris lost. And anyone would have to admit that Harris’s defeat came with rather a large Joe Biden-sized asterisk.

Still, there’s a lot of merited skepticism about a Harris return to the biggest arena in politics in 2028, aside from doubts as to whether she will even try it. It’s not like she’s actually won a contested presidential nomination before: in 2019 she dropped out of the race before voters voted, and in 2024 she inherited the nomination when it was too late for anyone to challenge her. Yes, she’s doing relatively well in early 2028 polls (though suspiciously, her best showings invariably seem to be polls conducted by overtly pro-Republican outfits like Rasmussen Reports, I&I/TIPP and Harvard-Harris), but a lot of that is probably due to name ID rather than a sober assessment of alternatives. But there’s one constituency that knows her very well: her home state of California, where she served in public elected office from 2002 until her elevation to the vice presidency in 2020. And initial polling there doesn’t look particularly golden for Kamala Harris.

A Politico survey of a Democratic presidential test ballot in California released on March 12 showed Harris trailing her friendly career-long rival Gavin Newsom by a 28 percent to 14 percent margin. Harris barely led Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (12 percent) and Pete Buttigieg (11 percent) in the poll. And there was worse home-state news for the former vice president:

“She struggles even more in a concurrent survey of POLITICO’s audience of key political and policy influencers in the state, including political staffers, lobbyists, policy advisers and others — the kind of people most familiar with the former state attorney general and U.S. senator.

“Harris, whose rise in politics had mirrored Newsom’s for decades back to their early days in San Francisco, until she was chosen as vice president, draws support from just 2 percent of political and policy influencers likely to vote in the Democratic primary, compared to 17 percent who back Newsom, according to the survey.”

Actually, in the California “influencer” survey, Harris ran not only behind Newsom, AOC and Buttigieg, but behind Mark Kelly, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, J.B. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore and Rahm Emanuel. That is some bad home cooking.

One poll could be an outlier, but now there’s another: a new survey from the respected Berkeley-IGS polling operation shows Harris running a mediocre fourth:

“28% of the state’s Democratic voters now select Newsom as their first choice to be their party’s nominee should he launch a bid for president in 2028. New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez places a distant second at 14%, followed by former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg at 11%.

“Former Vice President and California Senator Kamala Harris trails, receiving just 9% support among Democratic voters in her home state, while Arizona Senator Mark Kelly places fifth at 7%.”

This kind of standing in a place where she has appeared on statewide ballots five times is concerning. Yes, you can argue that she has a national base beyond California, especially among Black and Asian-American voters. But her lack of strong support in the largest state in the union, which happens to be her own, will be of considerable concern to donors, activists and other power brokers with a role to play in 2028. If Harris wants to run again, she should mend some fences in California.

The partisan messaging war over the DHS shutdown took a new twist this week in favor of Democrats, as I explained at New York.

Last month, Democrats refused to supply the votes to fund the Department of Homeland Security until the Trump administration and congressional Republicans agreed to place new guardrails on ICE and other immigration-enforcement agents. Since then, the GOP has tried to blame Democrats for the inevitable chaos. This has included airport delays, as unpaid TSA employees began to take days off, and jitters about FEMA not being prepared to handle natural disasters.

With Trump’s war of choice in Iran, there are fresh fears about threats to DHS’s core mission of defending the homeland against national security threats. Here’s a typical attack from the White House earlier this week:

“As Radical Left Democrats drag the Department of Homeland Security shutdown into its 24th day, everyday Americans are paying the price. Now, as TSA officers work without paychecks for the third time in nearly six months, crippling staffing shortages and hours-long security lines are gripping airports as millions of families head out for spring break …

“It’s not just airports reeling from the effects of the Democrat Shutdown. Democrats have cut off resources and funding for FEMA, the U.S. Coast Guard, and thousands of federal law enforcement officers — jeopardizing America’s border security, maritime safety, and ability to respond to emergencies.”

In the Senate, however, Democrats have managed to turn the tables. As they have repeatedly done, Republicans offered a bill to fund all of DHS, but Democrats this time around offered an amendment, as The Hill reports:

“Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, asked for unanimous consent for a measure to fund the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), U.S. Coast Guard and other agencies. It would not cover Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”

Predictably, Republicans blocked the Democratic amendment, but it served to mess up the GOP’s talking points. They could no longer claim Democrats wanted Americans to wait in long airport lines or risk exposure to natural disasters. Murray’s Republican counterpart on the Appropriations subcommittee responsible for the funding bill, Katie Britt of Alabama, retreated to a much older attack line that didn’t mention TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard, or anything other than the masked agents Democrats have been seeking to get under control all along:

“We have political games being played by our Democratic colleagues instead of putting the people of this nation first,” Britt said. “Mr. President, what we’ve just seen put forth by the senator from Washington would effectively defund our law enforcement officers that are charged with keeping Americans safe.” Then Britt added, “Look, we’re not going back to the era of defund police. We’re not doing it.”

She further suggested that Democrats weren’t willing to negotiate over their immigration enforcement demands. But Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called b.s. on that charge.

“We are constantly in communication with the White House,” Schumer said. “It’s not that there’s a lack of means of communication. We’re sending things back and forth. It’s a substantive problem. The White House will not budge on things Americans want like warrants, like de-masking. Plain and simple.”

Instead of being vulnerable to the charge of holding DHS hostage to its demands regarding ICE, Democrats are arguing that it’s Republicans who are holding DHS hostage to its refusal to restrain ICE, despite abundant opportunities to secure funding for the rest of the department. Some Republicans might have hoped that Donald Trump’s decision to throw Kristi Noem under the bus would be enough to end the dispute. No such luck.

The erratic changes of direction and outright flip-flops in the White House are a sign of GOP disarray, as I explained at New York:

The Trump White House is already trying to convince MAGA folk that an America First foreign policy means a war in distant Iran. And now it’s attempting an even bigger stretch: convincing voters that their heavily touted mass-deportation push is no such thing. Axios reports:

“White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair privately urged House Republicans on Tuesday to stop emphasizing ‘mass deportations’ and instead focus their messaging on removing violent criminals, according to sources in the closed-door briefing …

“Immigration enforcement has been a defining issue for Trump and congressional Republicans, and was a central pillar of their 2024 campaign message.

“The administration has leaned heavily into aggressive enforcement actions in its first year.”

That’s putting it mildly. But as Axios also notes, “mass deportation” in action polls poorly: “Nearly half — 49% — of Americans say Trump’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive, including 1 in 5 voters who backed the president in 2024,” according to a Politico poll from January.

You might call this a bit of reverse engineering. During the 2024 campaign and the initial phases of the administration’s mass-deportation initiative, Team Trump created and promoted the impression that virtually all its targets would be hardened criminals. That has very visibly not been the case, since all sorts of peaceable legal immigrants, not to mention garden-variety domestic, health-care, and farm workers, have been brutalized by ICE — as have U.S. citizens and total bystanders. The victims of Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller haven’t been just the “worst of the worst” but also more sympathetic figures than their masked tormenters, all in all. So it’s rational (if not ethical) that Trump’s political advisers want to pursue the same policies under a modified slogan that seeks to take the “mass” out of “mass deportation.”

It’s theoretically possible that the administration will alter immigration-enforcement policies instead of simply rebranding them. But that could discourage the MAGA base.

If the administration changes what it’s doing, not just what it’s saying, you can perhaps add nativist ultras — even Stephen Miller himself — to the ranks of the 2024 Trump voters who feel the 47th president isn’t keeping his promises.

Having lived through a lot of military conflicts that initially enjoy bipartisan support, I thought it was important to note at New York that Trump’s Iran War is different:

As expected, on March 4 the U.S. Senate rejected Tim Kaine’s War Powers Act resolution ordering Donald Trump to cease attacks on Iran within 30 days unless he gets congressional authorization. It was basically a party-line vote, with (as is often the case) Rand Paul voting with Democrats for the resolution and John Fetterman voting with Republicans to kill it. The vote was mostly symbolic anyway since the House counterpart resolution was on the road to failure, too, and Trump could veto any war-powers measure that arrived at his desk.

But what the Senate vote did establish is that Trump can conduct his war on Iran without interference from Congress indefinitely — or more specifically, until the Pentagon runs out of money to prosecute it. And once again, his party is fine with giving this supposedly peacemaking president a blank check, even though he’s done a wretched job of providing any coherent rationale for going to war, any consistent set of war aims, or any clear timetable for winding it all down. The branch of the federal government with the exclusive constitutional authority to declare war seems ready to stand aside.

If the war does drag on long enough to exhaust the vast new funding Congress gave the Pentagon last year, there’s already talk of giving it more. Senator Lindsey Graham, credited (or blamed, by some) for talking Trump into a regime-change war against Iran, made that clear this earlier this week, notes Politico:

“During closed-door meetings on Capitol Hill … senior intelligence and defense officials described a vast military operation that many members anticipate will require extra funding on top of the nearly $1 trillion Congress has already given the military over the last year.

“’I think there will be a supplemental coming,’ Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters upon leaving his classified Senate briefing. ‘We’ll have to approve that.’”

Actually, they won’t “have to” approve additional funding. If the money runs out, suddenly Democrats will have some leverage over this war, just as they do over all spending that’s not provided for in a filibusterproof package like last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (which by all accounts isn’t happening again prior to the midterms and won’t happen at all if Democrats flip control of the House in November). And despite their tendency to write blank checks for this administration, cries for more money for the war in Iran could arouse questions from conservative fiscal hawks, as a separate Politico report observes:

“Passing any emergency funding will be a major fight on Capitol Hill, with Democrats already decrying the lack of details about how much the military is spending and Republican fiscal hawks wary of more spending. Reuters reported Tuesday that Deputy ‌Defense ⁠Secretary Steve Feinberg has been leading Pentagon work on a roughly $50 billion request.”

This does create a messaging problem for those Republican fiscal hawks who happily vote to let the president do whatever he wants with our country’s massive war machine but aren’t sure they want to pay for it. Just as importantly, a debate over war funding in Congress would provide a forum for Democratic questions about the purpose and duration of a conflict no one had reason to anticipate just a few weeks ago.

So for now, Republicans fully own this war, and share responsibility for the president’s decision to make it his top priority for the foreseeable future. It comes at the expense of other international obligations, and instead of any action on an “affordability agenda” his advisers and GOP lawmakers have been begging him to undertake ever since Democrats began winning off-year elections in 2025. Trump’s party better hope it all goes very well and ends very quickly.

At New York, I offered some thoughts about the opportunity costs (and for Democrats, opportunities!) of Trump pursuing a war of choice in an election year:

Donald Trump’s “war of choice” against Iran is a big departure from his administration’s alleged determination to focus on improving the domestic economy and addressing concerns about affordability before crucial midterm elections this November. But aside from the president’s spectacular failure to stay on message, there is a more specific problem with the sudden lurch into a regional war in the Middle East. To the extent Trump had an actual affordability agenda (other than calling concerns about living costs “a hoax”), a central pillar was keeping energy prices low by demolishing any obstacles to maximum exploitation of fossil-fuel resources. Aside from the beneficial effect this might have on prices for other goods and services influenced by energy costs, the “drill baby drill” mentality was designed to reduce gasoline pump prices, one of the most visible inflation indicators from the perspective of regular folks.

Suddenly, the United States has produced an energy-price crisis for itself and for the whole world, Reuters reports:

“Traffic through the Strait ​of Hormuz was closed for a fourth day after Iran attacked five ships, choking off a key artery accounting for about 20% of global oil and LNG supply. …

“The conflict risks triggering a renewed spike in inflation that could choke off economic recovery in Europe and Asia if the war is prolonged in a region that accounts for just under a third of global ​oil production and almost a fifth of natural gas.

“Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer, on Tuesday said it may be forced to cut production by more than three million barrels per day ​in a few days if oil tankers cannot move freely to loading points, according to two Iraqi oil officials.”

While other countries face the most dire immediate economic consequences from a war that Trump is now projecting to last a month or more (“whatever it takes,” to be precise), it’s about to affect Americans too:

“American motorists could soon pay more at the pump amid spiking oil prices due to the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran, with experts predicting gasoline prices could rise sharply this week.

“The price of West Texas Intermediate crude, a type of oil primarily produced in the U.S., jumped 6.2% on Monday to $71.19 per barrel, according to data from FactSet. Brent crude, the international benchmark, surged nearly 9% to $79.31 per barrel on Monday, its highest point in more than a year.

“Gas prices in the U.S. could start moving higher as soon as Monday, according to GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan, who predicted that some gas stations could be charging as much as 30 cents more per gallon by the end of the week.”

And the indirect effects could be even more severe, as Canadian energy expert Rory Johnston told our own Benjamin Hart:

“I think if this lasts a couple more days, we’ll see it reflected at the gas pump in terms of overall gas prices. Diesel will be even more acutely affected. I think the big impact will be on freight and shipping rates, and that’s going to hit consumers more on the price of produce, the price of random consumer goods. That’s the type of stuff that diesel will complicate more. So I think you will see an impact at the price of the pumps, but the biggest impact won’t be as visible to consumers immediately. It will take a while to work through the supply chain.”

As part of their furious spin about a war that’s already unpopular outside Trump’s Republican base, administration gabbers are arguing that Trump’s expansion of fossil-fuel production is giving him the strategic flexibility to wreck global oil markets without catastrophic consequences, notes the New York Times:

“The Trump administration has said that it has more leeway to act aggressively in the Middle East because the world is flush with oil and gas, thanks in part to record U.S. production, and has less to fear than it once did from energy price shocks.

“The ongoing war in Iran could put that theory to the test.”

While it may be comforting to Americans to be told they won’t be paying as much for this war as they might have had Trump not impatiently brushed aside environmental fears about fossil fuels, it doesn’t explain the decision to subordinate economic policy to another presidential military adventure. Yes, MAGA true believers are buying Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear-weapon and missile programs posed an immediate threat to the United States, but other Americans aren’t at the moment. So his decision go in this radical direction sure looks like a conscious choice to subordinate the daily concerns of his own people to a globalist agenda and an alliance with Israel that already troubles a majority of Americans.

Even as Republicans cheer this war, Democrats have an obligation to discuss the agenda being blown up by the explosions in Iran.

After recovering from the dull headache induced by watching Trump’s State of the Union Address, I gave some thought at New York to the growing resistance of MAGA folk to any “pivot to affordability” prior to the midterms.

Virtually every Republican political strategist agrees that the economy, and particularly the cost of living, will be the dominant issue in the 2026 midterms. Convincing swing voters that Donald Trump is decisively bringing back the best-ever economy and lowering the price of essential goods and services — which he promised to do a thousand times during his 2024 campaign — is the key to the Republican Party’s hopes of defying the odds and hanging on to control of Congress in November. It’s reinforced by many polls that show the economy is the No. 1 concern for voters, and that there’s a great deal of anxiety, some of it generated by the rise of AI and the immense power of billionaires on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, that goes beyond prices at the gas pump and the grocery store.

But just as the midterm campaign season begins in earnest, Trump’s MAGA movement, and perhaps Trump himself, are showing signs that they really don’t want to dwell on the economy beyond braying that it’s better than ever, blaming Democrats for every problem, and implying that unhappy Americans are ingrates.

Immigration has always been the favorite issue of Trump’s base. What made Trump’s 2024 comeback magical to his most loyal supporters was that he finally stopped dillydallying around with border walls and travel bans and pledged to deport every single undocumented immigrant in the country, and maybe some documented immigrants as well, as part of an effort to purify a country cursed by diversity.

A year ago, the immigration issue was a net positive for Trump as border crossings plunged. But it soon became obvious that his mass-deportation program would go far beyond the “worst of the worst,” or the violent criminals Trump and J.D. Vance liked to talk about, to encompass millions of peaceful, productive people working in farms and factories and hospitals. Many were legally in the country under refugee protections the administration soon revoked. Some were small children, others even citizens, including bystanders who had the temerity to get in the way. And the whole enterprise was being supervised by the cartoon villains Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, deploying a huge army of hastily assembled and poorly trained masked thugs. When immigration agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota and virtually the entire administration lied about it, the issue turned sharply negative for Trump and the GOP. Hence the demand in Republican ranks for an “affordability pivot” that would displace images of blood in the streets with hopes of relief from high prices and poor job security.

Then came the president’s State of the Union address, in which he churned through the affordability passages in a sleep-inducing manner and only came to life when he could return to savaging immigrants and the Democrats who defended them. And now a reenergized MAGA movement is waging a two-front war to keep immigration front and center in the national political discourse.

First, Trump supporters are running ads capitalizing on the Trump SOTU stunt in which he demanded that Democrats (who had agreed to a strategy of seated, “silent defiance” during the speech) stand up to validate a contrived choice between protecting “American citizens, not illegal aliens.” The big narrative line on the first ad I saw was: DEMOCRATS ARE FOR ILLEGAL ALIEN CRIMINALS.

We will see these images again and again in individual and partywide GOP campaigns between now and November, suggesting that Democratic protests over ICE tactics and mass-deportation overreach are just a veil for a fundamental disloyalty to the country. This was a big part of Trump’s 2024 campaign narrative, and it’s back with a vengeance now.

Second, MAGA influencers are joining Trump in insisting that congressional Republicans make promoting the SAVE Act, their top, and perhaps only, priority this year. The bill would deny voter registration to anyone who cannot produce very specific documents proving citizenship. Democrats universally oppose this legislation, partly because it addresses a completely imaginary noncitizen-voting plague and partly because up to 21 million U.S. citizens don’t have ready access to the documentation it requires. If imposed in the brief period prior to the midterms, the legislation would upturn voter rolls and suppress millions of valid votes.

SAVE Act proponents understand perfectly well that it will never see the light of day in the Senate. But they are nonetheless insisting that Senate Republicans keep it on the floor for weeks, maybe even months, in an effort to force Democrats to stop it via a “talking filibuster” that would have to go on and on. Senate Republican leader John Thune is beside himself about these demands, Punchbowl News reports:

“[House Speaker Mike] Johnson has met with and boosted MAGA influencers like Scott Presler, who are leading the charge.

“The online vitriol has become so heated that all of Thune’s social media posts — even one congratulating a Korean War hero awarded the Medal of Honor — are regularly spammed with calls to pass the SAVE America Act, some using threatening language.

“Thune has also been on the receiving end of public and private lobbying from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), both on X and during senators-only GOP Conference meetings.”

Advocates for the SAVE Act invariably cite polls showing strong bipartisan support for some sort of voter ID (which most states require anyway prior to voter registration or initial voting) that’s far short of what this legislation would demand. It’s likely that if Republicans insist on a monthslong national debate on the subject, support for this specific kind of voter ID would steadily shrink. But any way you slice it, a day spent ventilating about the completely made-up noncitizen-voting scourge (and all the attendant conspiracy theories and election denials justified by this myth) is a day when Republicans are not addressing affordability. That might be fine with MAGA activists, but GOP candidates in purple states or marginal districts will surely think otherwise. Aside from the peril associated with ceding economic issues to Democrats, a nation riveted on immigration is going to be reminded again and again that the Trump administration is carrying out mass deportation in a manner that large majorities of Americans are rejecting as cruel and unnecessary. It’s a lose-lose proposition for the GOP, but MAGA does not care.

Looking back at the last Trump Midterms of 2018, and ahead to 2026, a destabilizing possibility occurred to me that I discussed at New York:

This week, there’s been a lot of attention focused on the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to its stunning decision blowing up the rationale for Donald Trump’s tariff agenda. In his bitter remarks about the decision, the president went out of his way to praise dissenters Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh.

It’s Alito who could make some additional political news later this year. To understand why, you must step back to 2018, when Trump faced his first midterm election as president and the dynamics looked grim. He had lost the popular vote in 2016. His job-approval ratings had been underwater from the second week of his term in office. One of his two big first-term initiatives, legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare, had ended in dismal failure. And unsurprisingly, his party wound up losing 40 net U.S. House seats and control of that chamber.

But at the same time, Republicans actually posted a net gain of two U.S. Senate seats and increased their majority from a fragile 51-to-49 margin to a more robust 53 to 47. Why? Well, according to many GOP spin-meisters, it was to a significant degree owing to “Kavanaugh’s revenge,” as CNBC reported at the time:

“Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., both credited the so-called Kavanaugh effect for Republican victories in key Senate races against red-state Democrats.

“Graham, in a thread of tweets Wednesday morning, said that the constituents of those Democratic incumbents who voted against Kavanaugh ‘held them responsible for being part of a despicable smear campaign orchestrated by the left.’

“The ‘#KavanaughEffect,’ Graham said, should be renamed ‘#KavanaughsRevenge’ …

“Republicans in critical states for the party were ‘highly offended’ by the Democrats’ conduct during the confirmation proceedings, McConnell said, and the fallout from the process acted ‘like an adrenaline shot for GOP turnout.”

Graham, as you may recall from his feral attacks on Senate Democrats during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, chaired the Judiciary Committee during that confirmation fight and contended that accusations of sexual assault against the soon-to-be Justice were blatantly unfair — nay, villainous. So it was natural for him to claim the hearings enraged both Republicans and swing voters and saved the Senate (an interpretation that also inflated his own importance, as it happens).

It was a dubious interpretation of the midterms at the time, but the important thing is that many Republicans believed it. And that could feed a parallel development going into the 2026 midterms: a possible retirement by Kavanaugh’s senior and very right-wing colleague Samuel Alito.

Alito has been on retirement watch for a while now. He’s 75 years old (and will turn 76 on April 1) and recently celebrated 20 years on the Supreme Court. And as the intrepid Court watcher Joan Biskupic noted in 2024 after he twice lost an initial majority on a case, Alito’s influence within the Court has been slipping, leaving him visibly frustrated:

“Alito has long given off an air of vexation, even as he is regularly in the majority with his conservative ideology. But the frustration of the 74-year-old justice has grown increasingly palpable in the courtroom. He has seldom faced this level of internal opposition.

“Overall, Alito wrote the fewest leading opinions for the court this term, only four, while other justices close to his 18-year seniority had been assigned (and kept majorities for) seven opinions each.

“His unique year in chambers was matched by the extraordinary public scrutiny for his off-bench activities, including lingering ethics controversies and a newly reported episode regarding an upside-down flag that had flown at this home in January 2021, after the pro–Donald Trump attack on the US Capitol.”

There is also evidence that Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, would like him to step down from the bench so that both of them can openly express their political opinions.

Thus, there’s been speculation, mostly from the political left, that an Alito retirement could happen before or immediately after the current Supreme Court term. The Nation’s legal expert Elie Mystal, then Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Joseph Stern, drew attention to the odd timing of a new Alito book. Here’s the clue on which Mystal focused:

“[T]he book is scheduled to be released October 6, 2026. That’s a curious date. The Supreme Court starts its 2026–27 term on October 5, the first Monday of October. Alito’s book is set to drop the next day.

“It sure feels like Alito doesn’t plan on having a real job the Tuesday his book launches and instead thinks he’ll be free to run around the country promoting it.”

There’s also a political reason Alito might want to step down at this particular moment. He clearly cares about his legacy on the Court and wants to solidify the conservative majority for which he and Justice Clarence Thomas have served as the point of an ideological spear. Trump is leaving office at the beginning of 2029, and it’s possible Republicans will lose their Senate majority in November. Confirmation of anyone remotely like Alito would be impossible with a Democratic Senate and difficult with a smaller majority than Republicans currently enjoy.

Add in the “Kavanaugh’s revenge” theory of 2018, and you can see why Republicans might really want to press for an Alito retirement and then a good, savage Senate confirmation fight over a controversial nominee to succeed him, possibly 40-somethings like Andrew Oldham or Emil Bove, both Trump-nominated Circuit Court judges. If Alito was to retire at the end of the current term (perhaps announcing the retirement earlier), then the shape of the future Supreme Court could become a base-mobilizing issue for the GOP, all right — but potentially also one for Democrats.

That leads us back to the idea that poor Kavanaugh’s persecution by Democrats “saved the Senate” in 2018. The alternative explanation is that Republicans had an insanely favorable Senate landscape that year in which three Democrats who lost (Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri) were doomed from the get-go by the rapidly rightward trends of their states, and a fourth, Florida’s Bill Nelson, lost by an eyelash in another red-trending state after being massively outspent by then-Governor Rick Scott.

Even if you believe the Kavanaugh fight provided Republicans with a net benefit in 2018, there’s no reason to assume the same thing will happen in 2026, a year in which the Senate landscape is far less favorable to the GOP than it was in 2018.

But between Alito’s motives for retiring, the GOP’s fear that it could lose control of the confirmation process, and the “Kavanaugh’s revenge” mythology about 2018, don’t be surprised if there’s a Supreme Court fight this summer or fall. Democrats would be happy to bid farewell to the author of the infamous decision reversing Roe v. Wade. Even if it hurts rather than helps their midterm prospects, Alito’s right-wing fans will be happy to welcome a younger version of the cranky conservative onto a life-time seat on the Court.