Politics | The Atlantic

Inside the Plan to Send 1,000 DOJ Monitors to the Polls

2026-11-01T12:15:00-05:00

For more than 60 years, the Department of Justice has sent its attorneys and staff to polling places across the country to ensure that Americans can vote free of discrimination or intimidation. They’ve watched to see if Black voters were illegally hindered in any way, if those who use a wheelchair or walker could get into facilities, and if those who couldn’t read the ballot for any reason—blindness, lack of English proficiency, or simply not having the skill—had help. Officials selected locations that had had problems in the past or where people had reported concerns.

When the feds would show up in the Tucson area of Arizona, where Spanish speakers and retirees are as numerous as the cacti dotting the Sonoran Desert, local officials considered the monitors partners in protecting the right to vote. But ahead of the primary election this past July, when Pima County Elections Director Constance Hargrove learned that DOJ was sending six representatives—most of whom were criminal prosecutors—she became worried. Would they just witness the vote, as in years past, or were they planning to gather evidence to later try to undermine the results? Would they know the basic rules? She told DOJ’s coordinator during a phone call: “Remind them that they cannot take a gun or weapon into the vote centers.”

On Primary Day, the monitors’ activities seemed normal, Hargrove told us. But she’s still concerned about the plan to send 1,000 of them to polling locations in every state for Tuesday’s election. The number itself is “a tall order,” Hargrove told us, as most previous administrations—Republican and Democratic—have detailed far fewer. And then there’s this department’s track record on elections. DOJ under President Trump has taken up his years-long quest to prove that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. Officials have seized ballots in Georgia, gathered material from Arizona, and questioned election officials in Wisconsin—but still have not found evidence of the widespread voter fraud the president has alleged. In recent days, DOJ reminded all state election officials to preserve materials from their elections.

“I’m not going to freak myself out before Election Day, or my poll workers, or the voters,” Hargrove said. She has reminded workers to follow their training should the monitors—or anyone else—be disruptive: “You can always call 911.”

Her concerns and suspicions are widely shared among the dozen-plus local and state election officials we spoke with across the country. Some worry that a long-standing program created during the civil-rights era to prevent intimidation, particularly of nonwhite voters, could be used as an extension of the administration’s attacks on the democratic process. The officials also said they fear that monitors could misinterpret what they see and then share incomplete or inaccurate information with DOJ that could be used to undermine the results.

Kiersten V. Pels, a Justice Department spokesperson, strenuously objected to these concerns in a written response to our questions about the program. Pels noted that the election officials we spoke with did not cite an example of “a single voter who was intimidated by a Justice Department monitor.” Should local officials see monitors acting improperly, Pels said, they should report them to DOJ.

“The Department has monitored elections for decades, under administrations of both parties. Monitors observe. They do not interfere with voting, and they follow state rules on polling place access,” Pels wrote. “Every monitor has the same role: to observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department. The Department will review those concerns after Election Day and act where appropriate.”

This year’s program is overseen by Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who has described monitors as a way “to increase voter confidence, to troubleshoot problems.” Dhillon’s critics have noted her ties to prominent election deniers and her support of legislation limiting mail-in voting. Her division, meanwhile, has sued dozens of state election officials, seeking—so far unsuccessfully—access to voter rolls containing partial Social Security numbers and other sensitive information. The suits are part of a nationwide search for noncitizens who might be illegally voting. “We see a problem, frankly, with some election officials refusing to clean up their voter rolls and knowingly allowing noncitizens, for example, to stay on the voter rolls,” she told Bloomberg. “This is a federal crime.” In a July post on X, Dhillon described the monitor program as aimed at ensuring equal access to the ballot, as it has in the past. But, she said, it will also help make sure that no American’s vote is “cancelled out by someone who shouldn’t be voting.” (Voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, analysis after analysis has found.) Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told us that its monitors “will not be questioning voters about their citizenship status at the polls.” But Pels added that “if our monitors uncover evidence of such crimes while monitoring, we will use it.”

[Read: The election deniers’ long game]

The Justice Department has recruited criminal prosecutors to participate as monitors. Their inclusion overturns a longtime practice of not using those who have the power to charge people with crimes, and has raised questions about how the Justice Department might use their observations, particularly in places central to criminal investigations into the 2020 election, such as Arizona and Georgia. A former DOJ Civil Rights Division official, who requested anonymity to speak with us out of fear of professional retaliation, told us that previous administrations “never sent prosecutors, because we never wanted to do anything that might scare people.” Pels told us that monitors will not identify themselves as prosecutors.

Eric Neff, the acting chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section, said in a sworn declaration released as part of ongoing litigation that no FBI or ICE employees would serve as monitors. However, employees from the Federal Bureau of Prisons; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and the Drug Enforcement Administration would be involved—a departure from long-held norms, three former DOJ attorneys told us. Pels said that their inclusion is “not new policy” and that they are “not being sent as law enforcement.”

To try to understand how the monitors might act on Tuesday, we looked at how they operated during the primaries. Although they watched without incident in many states, that wasn’t the case in deep-red Wyoming. On Primary Day in August, two monitors showed up at a Cheyenne polling place and asked the poll workers “highly unusual” questions that were outside their purview, including about how electronic poll books were acquired and whether they could see the tabulators, according to one local official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns. Pels said the monitors’ questions were “routine” and disputed that they’d asked about the procurement of equipment. The local official told us that workers described the monitors as “very assertive,” and that they walked around “like they owned the place.” She added: “If you’re not expecting big, tall, beefy men, it could be rattling.”

Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon, a Republican, criticized the monitors’ activities at a public meeting, explaining that just as he doesn’t like the idea of the federal government “taking our guns,” he also dislikes the notion of it “taking our votes.” Pels told us that the Justice Department disagreed “with the public framing” that the monitors were “‘aggressive’ or did anything improper,” and said that Dhillon “had a cordial meeting” after the primary with the governor, the state attorney general, and a county election clerk.

[Read: The supporters urging Trump to declare martial law for the midterms]

We submitted roughly 200 public-records requests to states, counties, cities, and towns over the past several weeks, seeking to learn more about DOJ’s plan and the people carrying it out. Those records, along with our conversations with election officials, reflected that nearly all of the monitors’ visits during the primaries were professional. Some monitors asked poll workers about their training; some talked with voters outside polling locations. DOJ coordinated with local officials, advising when the monitors would arrive and what they could expect from them. A DOJ lawyer recently wrote to the lieutenant governor of Utah with an assurance that the program would run “the same way as in the past,” according to correspondence that we obtained. “Monitors follow all rules of the state and jurisdiction. Monitors dress in business casual clothing. No uniforms or pins identifying as DOJ are allowed.”

But a meeting a few days ago between DOJ and Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, reflected fears that this year’s election won’t be business as usual. During the conversation, which state officials told DOJ they were recording, Fontes asked why he should believe that the monitors are working in a nonpartisan manner, given the department’s recent lawsuit seeking to decertify Alaska’s Senate results if the Democratic candidate wins, according to audio of the meeting we reviewed. “It’s pretty patently obvious that a lawsuit filed based on a political outcome puts the department in a compromised position,” Fontes told the DOJ attorneys, who said they are sending roughly 20 monitors to the Phoenix area, plus more around the state. The DOJ officials replied that the monitors are, and would, remain nonpartisan. Fontes also asked if the monitors could be called to testify about their observations in court—as witnesses. Neff, the acting chief of DOJ’s Voting Section, responded that such a “speculative” scenario would be “assessed on a case-by-case basis.” Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told us that this stance is “nothing new” and not newsworthy. “That’s how the law works,” she said.

States can decline to let the monitors into polling sites and instead require them to stand outside at a distance. Some red states have a history of doing so, such as Missouri and Florida, which banned monitors during the 2022 midterms. Hennepin County, in Minnesota, asked monitors to stay 100 feet away from one voting location during the August primary election and will do so again on Tuesday. One video in August captured a local election judge debating with two men dressed in polo shirts about how close they could get. “I’m assuming you don’t want to interfere with our ability to check for your compliance with federal law,” one of the monitors told the judge.

Most of the monitors’ names and assigned locations are not publicly known, but through our public-records requests, and from research conducted by Democracy Forward, a legal nonprofit, we identified some of the more than 80 monitors who were sent to polling locations during the primaries. Among the DOJ employees sent to monitor the primary were: Chris Gardner, who represented the Fulton County Republican Party in 2024 as it supported an election-board member who sued after refusing to certify the results of that year’s primary; Joseph Voiland, who represented the Trump campaign when it tried to overturn the 2020 election results in Wisconsin; and Alexander Keely, now a senior adviser to Dhillon, whose Republican National Lawyers Association member profile says he served as a “Trump 47 Election Integrity Captain” for a Pennsylvania county in 2024. DOJ did not respond to questions about whether these employees would serve as monitors on Tuesday, and Pels stressed in a statement that all monitors go through the same training.

In Arizona’s Maricopa County, local officials were alarmed when we described to them in July the biographies of some of the monitors assigned to their county for the primary, including a DOJ violent-crime-section chief, a federal prosecutor who specializes in public-corruption criminal probes, and a man who pleaded guilty in 2016 to crimes involving unauthorized computer intrusions after hacking two election websites in Florida. David Levin spent 20 days in prison for those crimes. Levin did not respond to our requests for comment, but he has previously claimed that he had been attempting to show the Florida county its own security vulnerabilities and called his actions “one of the bigger mistakes I’ve made in my life.”

[Read: The election system wasn’t built for this]

Records show that Maricopa County officials told DOJ last week they would not allow Levin to monitor their elections. The county attorney’s office, led by a Republican, also asked DOJ to commit in writing that it “will not send any election monitors to Maricopa County whom the DOJ knows has a felony conviction of any kind, or a conviction for any election-related criminal offense, in any state in the Union.”

Pels told us on Saturday that Levin is “no longer with the department” and “will not be a monitor on Election Day.” She said that DOJ hired and trained “qualified individuals to serve our country in a non-partisan manner” and that staff are expected to carry out their duties ethically and legally, “no exceptions.”

Internal DOJ materials we reviewed show that monitors have been trained to focus on voter-access laws—and not to interfere with the election. At least two longtime attorneys in the Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section are helping coordinate the monitors, emails show. Former DOJ officials told us their involvement, and that of other career attorneys who have prior experience with the program, makes them confident in it.

Although 1,000 monitors is an unusually high number, the country has close to 100,000 polling locations, and millions of people vote by mail in the weeks before Election Day. The deployment is unlikely “to actually change voters’ experiences in very many places,” Anna Baldwin, a former monitor who is now the voting-rights-litigation director at the Campaign Legal Center, told us.

Still, the election officials we spoke with said they have been fielding questions from staff, poll workers, fellow officials, and voters who are worried about the federal presence. One Boston official told us that time normally devoted to the nuts and bolts of preparing to run an election has been spent fielding questions from poll volunteers such as, What would you do if the federal government intervenes in your election in some way? Boston’s election administrators have developed new procedures, such as assigning workers to take an inventory of ballots, should federal agents seize them. In Wisconsin, election clerks have been “getting hundreds of emails” from voters and advocacy groups, asking what the plan is if federal law enforcement shows up, a state election official said at a public meeting.

[Read: The real threat of election interference]

Isaac Cramer, the executive director of the Charleston County Board of Elections, in South Carolina, said he’s worried that the monitors may intensify anxieties at the polls. “When you hear DOJ is coming,” he told us, “I think that can bring some fear. It can bring questions.” When monitors went to his county for a primary runoff this summer, false conspiracy theories immediately sprang up online.

Many city and county clerks told us that in all likelihood, the monitoring won’t interfere with their ability to fairly and accurately run the election. But the precautions they’ve had to take, and the questions they’ve had to answer, show how a program meant to protect the right to vote is being seen as a way to undermine it.

The Questions Adam Hamawy Won’t Answer

2026-11-01T07:00:00-05:00

The photograph, from April 1993, shows a burly sheikh sitting on a couch wearing a gray kaftan, a white-and-crimson turban, and black sunglasses. His beard is thick and white. Reporters crowd into his Jersey City tenement apartment, waiting to hear him speak.

Omar Abdel-Rahman—the man newspapers called the Blind Sheikh—by then had a reputation throughout the Muslim world as the religious leader of Egypt’s largest jihadist group. In 1981, his words inspired the assassins of President Anwar Sadat. His rhetoric could be unremitting, as in a speech in Brooklyn in early 1993: “We must be terrorists, and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.” By spring of that year, law enforcement was investigating Abdel-Rahman’s possible involvement in at least two killings, including that of a prominent extremist rabbi. And that March, the FBI and foreign agencies had arrested several of Abdel-Rahman’s close followers, among them a man reported to be the sheikh’s part-time driver, on charges of helping carry out the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six people but had aimed for far more.

Adam Hamawy, who will almost certainly represent New Jersey’s Twelfth Congressional District come January, was at the press conference in the sheikh’s apartment the day the photograph was taken. He has said that he went there to translate something for Abdel-Rahman. Hamawy had met Abdel-Rahman two years earlier and became something of an acolyte, going to mosques across New Jersey to hear him speak, visiting the sheikh at home, and traveling with him to an Islamist conference in Detroit, where Abdel-Rahman and other speakers held forth on the necessity of violent jihad. In that photo, a bearded young man who resembles Hamawy kneels in front of reporters, his eyes trained on Abdel-Rahman. I asked Hamawy’s campaign multiple times whether that man is the candidate; the campaign did not reply.

Najlah Feanny / Corbis / Getty

Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman speaks at a press conference in Jersey City, New Jersey, in April 1993.

Two months after that press conference, in June 1993, Abdel-Rahman would be arrested for plotting what would have been another catastrophic day of terrorism in New York City; the plan included blowing up two Hudson River tunnels and the United Nations, and assassinating the Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak. Hamawy would testify as a defense witness at Abdel-Rahman’s trial in 1995, and Abdel-Rahman would be convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Today, Hamawy is a plastic surgeon in Princeton, New Jersey. He won his 12-candidate Democratic primary with 28 percent of the vote. Because his district is deep blue, he is expected to easily win his general election in November. Much about his story surely registers to voters as admirable. He was an infant when his family immigrated from Egypt to Old Bridge, a town of about 50,000 at the time, located 35 miles south of New York City. He worked through college and medical school, went to Ground Zero to care for rescue workers, and served in Iraq as a U.S. Army combat surgeon. He restored bodies broken by war—including that of Tammy Duckworth, now a U.S. senator, who lost her legs when a rocket-propelled grenade hit her helicopter. She has credited Hamawy with saving her life.

Hamawy already has found a place on the Democratic Party’s left wing. Although he is an observant Muslim—on primary night, he led supporters in chants of “Allahu Akbar!” (God is greater)—he is, unlike some fellow believers, pro-choice and an advocate for LGBTQ rights. He is passionate in his support for Medicare for All and in his insistence that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have endorsed him. Hamawy himself has endorsed and appeared with the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and campaigned with the far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who once said that “America deserved 9/11.” Hamawy has also declined to commit to backing House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, saying that the Democratic congressional leadership is “failing to meet the moment.”

Throughout his campaign, Hamawy has not fully accounted for why, as a young man, he kept company with Abdel-Rahman and others in his circle. Perhaps Hamawy was merely young, curious, and hapless and did not fully buy into the sheikh’s ideas. Or perhaps he harbored beliefs that he has since renounced. Hamawy himself has provided little explanation. When asked during the primary about Abdel-Rahman, who died in 2017, and his terrorism conspiracy, Hamawy told NBC, “I absolutely regret, and I condemn, what happened.” At the same time, he dismissed reporting about his relationship with the sheikh, attributing it to “right-wing media” and adding, “It’s racist. It’s really anti-Muslim.”

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who presided over Abdel-Rahman’s terror trial as a federal judge, has called the sheikh “one of the world’s leading theologians of terrorism.” And Abdel-Rahman’s influence continued after his conviction: While serving out a life sentence in prison, the sheikh issued the fatwa that Osama bin Laden would use to justify the September 11 attacks.

In August, I spoke with Hamawy by phone for about an hour, and when he talked about health care or being a son of immigrants, he was expansive and friendly. But when I asked about the years when he drew close to Abdel-Rahman, he began to bob and weave—as he had in his testimony during the sheikh’s 1995 trial—and sometimes contradicted himself, even as he said that there was nothing of interest to be discovered.

“This characterization as a ‘relationship,’ I think, really misrepresents things,” he told me. He has repeatedly referred to the sheikh—who was in his 50s when Hamawy met him—as a “blind old man.” Hamawy noted his U.S. military service and his promotion to lieutenant colonel: “Clearly I was trusted by our government to be able to perform these services.” At one point, when I was pushing for more details, he bristled: “Clearly, clearly you have nothing else to talk about.” His spokesperson eventually ended the interview, and has not responded to multiple emails with additional questions.

Hannah Beier / The New York Times / Redux

Adam Hamawy and Hasan Piker at a campaign event in Trenton, New Jersey, in May

Hamawy described Abdel-Rahman in the early 1990s as akin to a religious celebrity. “This was a person who was really everywhere in New York and New Jersey,” he told me, at a time when there were “not many leaders” in the Muslim community. “He was someone who led prayers and was known for his recitation of the Quran.”

Abdel-Rahman was in fact known for far more. The jihadist group in Egypt for which he acted as the religious authority, Gama’a al-Islamiyya, employed deadly violence in an effort to establish extremist Islamic rule in Egypt. Abdel-Rahman had declared in sermons that Sadat, the Egyptian president, was an infidel. He was jailed after Sadat’s death, but judges acquitted him on charges that he had sanctioned it; they ruled that although he had told his followers they had a duty to kill wayward Muslim leaders such as Sadat, there was not enough evidence to prove that Abdel-Rahman had directed the assassination. In 1990, a follower of Abdel-Rahman’s, El Sayyid Nosair, assassinated the radical right-wing rabbi Meir Kahane, who had twice been convicted on terrorism-related charges, in New York City.

Hamawy has said that he first heard the sheikh give a talk in 1991 in Matawan, New Jersey, and in his telling, their meeting afterward was incidental. “I met him,” Hamawy told me, not offering much more detail, “like so many others.”

This understates the nature of their eventual relationship, by Hamawy’s own previous account. In 1995, when the legal team defending Abdel-Rahman in his federal terrorism trial called Hamawy to testify, he made a point of greeting the sheikh, and mentioned phone calls, travel, and visits with Abdel-Rahman. “I have seen him in, you know, speak at different mosques all over New Jersey,” Hamawy said, according to the trial transcript. “I have seen him in his home.” He mentioned seeing the sheikh at a school “several times.”

In November 1991, Abdel-Rahman was invited to speak at an Islamic conference in Detroit, and Hamawy joined him on the 13-hour drive there in a minivan, along with five other men. (Some of the details of Hamawy’s backstory were first reported by The Washington Free Beacon and Jewish Insider.) Hamawy described his decision to travel to Detroit as a sort of lark. “I was a last-minute carpool,” he said in our interview. “I’m a college student.” (He had graduated from Rutgers earlier that year.) “It’s a free ride to go somewhere. It wasn’t like I was following him.”

Yet Hamawy testified during the trial that in Detroit, some of the men from the van shared a hotel suite; Hamawy was in the same room as Abdel-Rahman. Hamawy attended the conference too, and listened to the sheikh’s speech about jihad and the speeches of other hard-line Islamists.

Lorenzo Vidino, who studies Islamic extremism and directs the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told me that it is highly unlikely that Abdel-Rahman and members of his inner circle would throw open a door to a random newcomer. “You have in Abdel-Rahman one of the two or three godfathers of radical jihad in the world,” Vidino said. “There’s no chance for an outsider to spend meaningful time in a minivan with the Blind Sheikh.” Earlier this year, Mukasey, the judge in the trial, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Hamawy was more than a casual traveling companion of Abdel Rahman.”

[From the November 2012 issue: My conversion will not be televised]

The conference the men attended was titled “Towards a Global Islamic Economy,” and under questioning by Abdel-Rahman’s lawyer during the trial, Hamawy said that the event was focused on the economy. He told the defense lawyer that he had never heard Abdel-Rahman talk about jihad in America. Nor, Hamawy said in reply to a question from the prosecutor, had he heard Abdel-Rahman talk about robbing banks or attacking military bases.

Then one of the prosecutors, Patrick Fitzgerald, commenced his cross-examination of Hamawy. Do you recall, he asked, if Abdel-Rahman talked about the Egyptian leader Mubarak in Detroit? “Not really,” Hamawy replied. Fitzgerald handed Hamawy a transcript of the sheikh’s speech from the conference and gave him a moment to read it. Then he rephrased his question more pointedly: Do you recall Abdel-Rahman that weekend talking about Mubarak as “the backstabber who became the loyal dog to America?” Hamawy, his memory apparently refreshed, responded: “Yes.”

Fitzgerald asked Hamawy if Abdel-Rahman had talked in his speech about jihad and the importance of conquering the land of the infidels. Hamawy quibbled about wording and definitions but conceded that Abdel-Rahman’s speech centered on “a struggle in the sake of God, yes. It was a jihad.” (Fitzgerald quoted from speeches of Abdel-Rahman’s several times in the trial, making clear what the sheikh meant by that word, jihad. For example: “If God, glory be to him, says do jihad, it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with a missile.”) Among the other speakers at the Detroit conference was Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of a repressive, violent Islamist movement in Sudan and a friend of Abdel-Rahman’s.

As the trial went on, the prosecutor burrowed in, asking if the sheikh had ever described America and Israel as enemies of Islam. Yes, Hamawy replied. Fitzgerald then asked if Hamawy had ever heard Abdel-Rahman say that Muslims have an obligation to carry out jihad against enemies of Islam. “Of course,” Hamawy replied. “That’s what he always talked about. He talked about jihad, you know.”

The successful prosecution of Abdel-Rahman and nine others hinged largely on the testimony of Emad Salem, an undercover informant for the U.S. government. Salem had infiltrated Abdel-Rahman’s circle, pretending to be a disaffected Egyptian special-forces soldier turned jihadist, and was one of the band who traveled in the van to Detroit. One day during that trip, Salem testified, Abdel-Rahman took the group, Hamawy included, back to the hotel suite. They sat on the floor, and Abdel-Rahman grilled Salem on his military knowledge: Do you know dynamite? Yes, Salem said. Did he know how to blow dynamite up? Again, Salem replied yes. Then Abdel-Rahman inquired about Salem’s skill as a shooter. “He ask [sic] me to turn my rifle to President Mubarak’s chest,” Salem testified.

Hamawy, in his testimony, denied ever witnessing such a conversation, though he noted that Salem frequently talked in front of the sheikh about his abilities with bombs. He said that he and the rest of Abdel-Rahman’s circle suspected that Salem might be working for Egyptian intelligence and trying to entrap the sheikh.

Salem was a complicated figure who had lied under oath in the past. The lead federal prosecutor in the trial, Andrew McCarthy, later referred to him as “the strangest, wiliest, most impossible, most infuriating pain in the ass I ever will know.” But McCarthy also called him “breathtakingly effective.” Salem managed to tape-record countless hours of his conversations with suspects (though he was not able to record the conversation in which he said the sheikh told him to turn his gun on Mubarak). Jurors judged Salem credible enough to convict 10 men on 48 of 50 charges. A federal appeals-court panel unanimously affirmed the verdicts.

There was, according to Salem, more talk of rifle shooting on the drive from Detroit back to New Jersey. One of Abdel-Rahman’s followers asked Salem if he could train him and other followers in rifle target practice. In code, the men called it “deer hunting.” This follower told Salem that he and other followers hadn’t gotten a chance to practice with rifles since Nosair, who had organized past trainings, had been arrested. Can we, the follower asked, go deer hunting with you? Salem agreed: “I said, ‘Sure, why not, we will do that.’”

Hamawy, who was in the van at that time, was not asked during the trial about that conversation, nor did he speak of it on his own.

Hamawy remained on friendly terms with the sheikh after the Detroit conference. In the summer of 1992, before Hamawy entered medical school, he and two friends took a pilgrimage to Mecca and visited Egypt and London; Hamawy also stopped in Jerusalem. When asked during the trial who had recommended his travel agent, Hamawy answered: “Sheikh Omar.” A friend of the sheikh, he said, accompanied the young men on their flight to London. There, Hamawy testified, they relied on yet another friend of the sheikh, a man who worked in an Islamic bookstore, who found them a youth hostel.

At least two of the men Hamawy and his friends met on that trip, including the bookstore worker, were suspected members of Gama’a al-Islamiyya, prosecutors said. When Hamawy and his friends returned to London on their way home, Hamawy testified, he made sure to call the bookstore worker and thank him for his hospitality. Hamawy was asked during the trial if he knew what Gama’a al-Islamiyya was and said that he had heard of it; asked if he knew any members of the organization, he said, “I assume that Sheikh Omar was, yes.”

Once Hamawy entered medical school, he saw less of Abdel-Rahman. The sheikh was very much in the news in 1993 as followers of his were being investigated for their role in the World Trade Center bombing. In April of that year, Hamawy called Abdel-Rahman. “I hadn’t been able to see Sheikh Omar that much,” he testified in the federal trial. “I had called him earlier that week and told him: ‘It is my spring break now. If you need anything, you can just give me a call.’” As it happened, the sheikh called and asked Hamawy to translate a document for him as he was getting ready to hold the press conference in his Jersey City apartment.

The generous explanation for Hamawy’s affiliation with Abdel-Rahman is youthful fascination. It’s not unusual for young people to be captivated by radical leaders, only to wise up and turn away as the years pass. The American left offers many such examples of this, from those attracted by Soviet Communism in the 1930s to those who embraced the violence of the Weathermen and the Black Panthers. Young socialist Iranians embraced Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, only for many thousands to end up before his firing squads in years to come. In our interview, I asked Hamawy if there was something about Abdel-Rahman that spoke to him as a young man. Was he merely intrigued, or something like a true believer? He pushed back on my question.

“It wasn’t a personal relationship,” he said. “This is where reality and fiction is beginning to kind of diverge.”

In the course of his medical career, Hamawy has worked on missions of mercy in countries including Haiti, Sudan, Lebanon, and Syria; in 2024 and 2025, he spent several weeks at hospitals in Gaza. The details of two such missions raise additional questions.

By 1994, Yugoslavia had dissolved, and three of its republics—Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia—had descended into brutal ethnic and religious wars. About half of Bosnia’s roughly 4 million citizens were Muslim, and Bosnian Serb and Serbian military units carried out massacres and mass rapes against them. The suffering of Bosnia’s Muslims was a subject that consumed many millions of Muslims, and others, around the globe. Several witnesses in Abdel-Rahman’s federal trial testified that the sheikh and his followers spoke often of Bosnia and the duty of Muslims to fight jihad there.

No evidence suggests that Abdel-Rahman encouraged Hamawy to go to Bosnia. But as a medical student, he was among those who wanted to help. In the summer of 1994, Hamawy told me, he reached out to the Bosnian Mission to the United Nations, and asked about volunteering. In a 1996 interview with The New Jersey Star-Ledger, he said that the mission had recommended that he reach out to Benevolence International, a charity with offices in several countries, including the United States and Bosnia. Hamawy spent his first week in Sarajevo and the next four in Zenica, a hill city about an hour away. As he described it to me, he stayed with two local doctors and spent his days going to the charity’s warehouse and delivering medical supplies to local clinics.

Zenica was a contested and violent place at that time. Jihadists who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Russians in Chechnya were pouring into Bosnia. Zenica became the headquarters of the notorious brigade known as Odred El Mudžahid, or “The Jihadist Unit,” composed of foreign fighters from across the Middle East and Chechnya. A human-rights criminal tribunal later found that from 1993 to March 1994, the brigade had engaged in torture, looting, and massacres of Christian Croats and Serbs, soldiers and civilians alike, some of whom were beheaded; in January 1994, gunmen from the brigade had executed a British aid worker outside of Zenica. Much later, some commanders affiliated with the brigade were convicted of war crimes.

Benevolence International was an important player in that jihadist ecosystem. In the years after its incorporation in 1992, the charity provided medical assistance to impoverished Bosnian refugees. But during those same years, its guiding force was Osama bin Laden: According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Benevolence International’s office in Sarajevo was one of bin Laden’s “impressive array” of offices providing financial and technical support for terrorism.

After 9/11, the U.S. and Bosnia and Herzegovina investigated the group and raided several of its offices. They found many compelling links to al-Qaeda, including a photograph taken in Afghanistan in the late 1980s showing the Benevolence International director Enaam Arnaout and bin Laden holding rifles and a shoulder-fired rocket. They also discovered a handwritten letter in which bin Laden authorized Arnaout to sign on his behalf, and documents establishing that Arnaout had worked with members of al-Qaeda to purchase rockets, mortars, rifles, and bombs to distribute to fighter camps, including those of al-Qaeda. In 2002, Arnaout was indicted on charges of racketeering, money laundering, and concealing his terrorism ties, and the Treasury Department designated Benevolence a “financier of terror.” Arnaout pleaded guilty to illegally siphoning off charitable contributions to buy uniforms and other supplies for fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya, though as part of the plea agreement, prosecutors dropped the terrorism-related charges against him. (In 2005, a lawyer who had represented Benevolence International, Matthew J. Piers, wrote a defense of the organization in which he argued that the U.S. government’s investigation had caused its “malevolent destruction.”)

Hamawy told me that he knew nothing at the time about the group’s ties to al-Qaeda or its support for jihadist fighters. He simply believed that he was working with staff at what he told me was a UN-endorsed charity to deliver supplies to clinics overwhelmed with the sick and dying. (The UN did not keep a list of certified charities in Bosnia.) “I had no sense or even suspicion anything like that was happening,” he said. “To kind of imply that between my microbiology rotation and my psychiatry rotation, I was in the mountains acting as, like, you know, some nefarious player is, again, kind of ludicrous.”

When I spoke with Jeffrey Parsons, who led FBI anti-terror investigations for two decades and now works for the George Washington University Program on Extremism, he was inclined to believe Hamawy’s claim to ignorance about the specifics of the charity’s subterfuge. Al-Qaeda-linked charities often played a double game, and those on the medical side might have known little about the money and aid sluiced off for jihadists. Still, as with his ties to Abdel-Rahman, Hamawy’s apparent lack of curiosity is itself curious. “It is an interesting life choice,” Parsons told me. “He definitely went there willingly, and he was in a city and a charity that would become a core for big shots in al-Qaeda.”

[From the September 2026 issue: What happened to al-Qaeda?]

Decades later, in 2024 and 2025, Hamawy journeyed to Gaza for another medical mission as Israeli bombs fell around him. He worked at the European Hospital in 2024 and Nasser Hospital in 2025, and said that he was seared by the experience. The war there was more horrifying than any he had seen before, particularly for children, he told me.

He has been adamant in interviews that Hamas had no presence in or underneath these hospitals. He told me that as a surgeon he could walk anywhere, that he had a trained eye, and that he saw no signs of militants or weapons. In 2024, he told Jacobin magazine that he had not seen a single weapon at the European Hospital: “Not one rifle. Not one pistol. Not one grenade launcher. This was a completely benign civilian hospital with no tunnels underneath it.” ABC News asked him about Israeli and U.S. intelligence that Hamas gunmen had access to Nasser Hospital. “Their intelligence is just wrong,” Hamawy said. “In terms of operations and people, actually fighters that are actively in, that has not been observed by anyone that’s been in these hospitals over the last two years.”

Yet in the spring of 2025, the Israelis ordered staff and patients at the European Hospital to leave and bombed directly outside. Afterward, Israel said that its forces had found the body of Mohammed Sinwar, then the military leader of Hamas, in a tunnel that ran beneath the hospital emergency room. (His brother, Yahya Sinwar, had directed the October 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel.) In January 2026, Doctors Without Borders suspended “non-critical” medical operations at Nasser Hospital, stating: “Our teams have reported the presence of armed men, some of them masked; intimidation; arbitrary arrests of patients; and a recent situation involving the suspected movement of weapons.” Israel and the U.S., as well as The New York Times, have found evidence of Hamas’s presence at another hospital in Gaza, al-Shifa. Last year, I spoke with medical personnel who had worked there and at other Gaza hospitals. “You knew Hamas was there; I went to meetings where this was made very clear,” one Doctors Without Borders staffer told me. “Doors were hidden. There were units you did not get into, that had armed guards at the door.”

I asked Hamawy about Sinwar’s death underneath the European Hospital. Hamas confirmed more than a year ago that the Israelis had killed Sinwar, and has not disputed that he died in that tunnel. The Israeli military also took a group of foreign reporters, including from The New York Times and NBC News, through the tunnel under the hospital to the bloodstained room where Israeli forces said Sinwar had died.

“I don’t believe anything until we have third-party observers on the ground,” Hamawy told me. “To take the word of the Israelis and not take the word of the Palestinians seems kind of, like, illogical.” The Israelis, he said, “show you pictures that, to my experienced eye, look at it and say, ‘Hey, something doesn’t look right about this picture.’”

The problem for Hamawy is that, in the past, his intuitions have proven quite fallible.

At one point in our interview, Hamawy said that my line of questioning about the sheikh was “trying to characterize me, like everyone else is characterizing me, as: ‘Oh my God, this man is a Muslim man who came in contact with someone who, again, you know, ended up, like, serving for crimes, for years that I have condemned.’”

I could find no public evidence that Hamawy had denounced Abdel-Rahman prior to his candidacy and the media’s unearthing of that history. More to the point, asking about that history is fair game. He owes a fuller explanation to his would-be constituents.

Perhaps voters simply are no longer paying attention to his campaign. Hamawy’s Republican opponent, Gregg Mele, has no money and even less mojo; he is a near-perpetual candidate in New Jersey who has yet to come close to winning a seat. Most reporters have stopped covering the race, other than to track Hamawy’s encounters with other Democratic politicians on the left. In August, he attended the annual Panamerican Congress, a meeting of left-wing leaders in the Americas, held this year in Uruguay. And he and another likely U.S. representative, Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York, served as keynote speakers at the annual gala of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C.

Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, points out that New Jersey sits between two big media markets, New York City and Philadelphia, and remains an afterthought in both. “Political junkies to the side, a lot of people don’t know what’s going on,” Rasmussen told me about Hamawy’s race. “But you can count me as a person who thinks that there are really important questions left about his background.”

If we are to assume that Hamawy’s political coming of age included a turn away from men such as Abdel-Rahman, the puzzle is why he does not talk candidly about that change of heart, rather than continuing to insist that to ask such questions is hateful.

A Pro-Russia Strongman at Mar-a-Lago

2026-10-31T14:05:10-04:00

In the days after Tuesday’s midterm elections, luminaries of the MAGA movement will gather at Mar-a-Lago to turn their attention to 2028. Speakers will include a Cabinet secretary, the head of the Domestic Policy Council, and several members of Congress. Also present will be Milorad Dodik, the pro-Russia strongman who has bragged about spying on Americans and recently called Russian President Vladimir Putin “one of the most peace-loving leaders of our time.” Dodik is the de facto leader of Bosnia’s Serb population, concentrated in a political entity called Republika Srpska within Bosnia and Herzegovina. His push for secession risks reigniting bloody sectarian conflict in the Balkans.

Dodik’s travel plans were described to me by several people familiar with them. These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview nonpublic matters, said the details could change at the last minute. (His office did not respond to a request for comment.) But Dodik’s expected attendance reflects his reversal of fortune under the Trump administration, the success of a pricey foreign lobbying campaign, and a further alignment of American and Russian interests.

Republika Srpska paid two of Trump’s top political advisers, James Blair and Chris LaCivita, as consultants and brought them to the Serb-majority political entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina for elections earlier this month. (They later donated their earnings to Trump’s presidential library fund after news of the work became public and the president lashed out at them on Truth Social.) When his party won a decisive result, Dodik credited both Trump and Putin for their support. “If it had not been for Donald Trump’s magnificent victory,” Dodik told supporters after the favorable result, “we would probably be political corpses today.”

In 2022, the Biden administration sanctioned Dodik for what the Treasury Department called “graft,” “corruption,” and “bribery,” as well as threats to the stability of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Balkan nation where ethnic divisions catalyzed a brutal war from 1992 to 1995. The conflict climaxed in the genocide at Srebrenica, which until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was the most horrific mass murder in Europe since World War II. Dodik, according to the U.S. government, had attempted to sabotage the accords that ended the war, the Dayton peace agreement. He was accused of creating parallel state institutions in the federated country’s Serb-majority entity and of denigrating other ethnic and religious groups, above all Muslim Bosniaks. Numerous family members, allies, and companies were eventually also sanctioned. Formerly Srpska’s president, Dodik was stripped of that position and banned from holding office for six years after being convicted by the Bosnian judicial system last year of flouting decisions by the international envoy overseeing the Dayton Accords. He has rejected those decisions as politically motivated and void of constitutional authority, and continues to exercise near-total control over Srpska’s institutions.

Since Trump returned to office last year, the Srpska government has unleashed millions of dollars on lobbyists in a bid to burnish Dodik’s image with the people around Trump. The strategy has been to portray him as a martyr in the American president’s image—a victim of legal maneuvering and a crusader for Christian values holding back what some Serbian nationalists characterize as a tide of Muslim influence. Among those whose services Dodik and his allies have tapped are Rudy Giuliani, the president’s former personal lawyer; Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor who landed a pardon from Trump last year; and the firm employing Katie Wiles, the daughter of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

[Read: The Trump family sparks a revolution in Albania]

In October 2025, the Trump administration dropped the sanctions. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control did not offer a rationale, but the State Department had days earlier hailed several conciliatory steps taken by Srpska’s legislative body as the result of Washington’s efforts to “defuse the crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” State Department officials also pushed for the resignation of the international envoy who had clashed with Dodik. Christian Schmidt, a conservative German politician who had taken up the role of high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2021, complied in May of this year, telling a German newspaper that he had come under “enormous and unexpected pressure from the U.S.”

Diplomats in the region as well as experts have viewed the Trump administration’s concessions to Dodik with significant alarm because of his avowed separatist aims and his explicit backing by Putin. Both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are candidates for European Union membership.

The event planned for next week at Mar-a-Lago is an offshoot of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a right-wing jamboree that has enlarged its international footprint in recent years. It’s called the CPAC Circle Retreat and Gala and is billed as a “Gathering of Visionaries.” The website makes explicit the event’s connection with the next presidential election, stating, “As midterm election results come in, we’ll discuss what they mean for the political landscape and the road to 2028.” Speakers include the secretary of labor and at least two U.S. senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Rick Scott of Florida. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the brother of Flávio Bolsonaro, the failed Brazilian presidential candidate who recently arrived in the U.S. to evade possible prosecution on allegations of money laundering and tax evasion, is another advertised speaker. When I asked Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union and CPAC’s host, about Dodik’s attendance, he told me, “We will have a very interesting group of donors and VIPs, but we won’t comment on who will be in attendance other than who the speakers will be.” He added that the “focus will be on America’s future heading into 2028.”

It’s not clear whether Trump will be at Mar-a-Lago during Dodik’s anticipated visit, but his presence there will take him into one of MAGA’s main nerve centers. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. During a visit to Washington earlier this year, Dodik had photo ops with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Karoline Leavitt, the then–White House press secretary.

Current and former U.S. officials told me that Dodik may feel pressure to achieve his aim of securing Srpska’s independence soon, given that Trump is likely to be friendlier to him than a potential Democratic successor after 2028. Tuesday’s election in the U.S. will help determine MAGA’s long-term political viability. No matter the result, Trump will have another two years to keep giving Dodik what he wants.

Trump Has Pushed Some Texas Republicans Too Far

2026-10-31T07:00:00-04:00

The tiny Yorkshire terrier in a diaper was not central to my experience in Tarrant County, but she did set the tone.

Tia was the first creature to greet me when I arrived at Hillary Shepheard’s townhouse in Texas last week. She yapped until I settled into a chair at the kitchen island, when she switched to a minuscule growl. “Sorry,” Shepheard told me. “She always does this.” Shepheard, the blond-haired, 34-year-old leader of the Tarrant County Young Republicans, would apologize a dozen more times during the next half hour: for the clutter, for having forgotten to put on her “face” before I arrived, for leaving the charcuterie board to the very last minute. “My mom would kill me if she knew,” Shepheard said, plopping grapes into a colander. Her voice sounded raspy. She’d just gotten over the flu.

Life is chaotic for any political operative two weeks ahead of an important election. But the midterms have taxed Shepheard emotionally, too. In fact, this was the reason for our charcuterie gathering, which involved three other Tarrant County Republicans: a former politician, a party activist, and a professor. The five of us spent the evening discussing the midterms, which for some Texas conservatives pose a moral test that is bigger even than Donald Trump: whether or not to vote for Ken Paxton.

I have had several memorable experiences in Texas over the past year. In Lubbock, I was escorted from a Jasmine Crockett rally by armed guards. In Allen, I watched Paxton fans consume countless margaritas in celebration of President Trump’s long-awaited endorsement. And in Tyler, I saw Democrats gaze at James Talarico like an oasis in the desert.

[Read: ‘Elaine from Atlantic … she needs to leave’ ]

But nothing has been quite as instructive as listening to a group of Texas conservatives decide, in real time, how best to meet this current political moment. The choice seems anything but straightforward; they’ve been asked to fall in line behind a Senate nominee with enough baggage to fill a container ship. What happens on Tuesday will hinge on the decisions of people like the ones in Shepheard’s living room. After much internal debate, Tia’s owner had made her own choice clear. For the long-term survival of her party, she told us, “Ken Paxton has to lose.”

The five of us sat in white chairs around a glass table in Shepheard’s living room, stacking cheddar cubes on crackers from her hastily made spread. But our conversation didn’t begin with Paxton. It began, as so much seems to, with Trump.

All but one of the conservatives in the room said they’d voted for him all three times, although none seemed the type to put on a red baseball cap and do the YMCA. Shepheard had assembled a group of highly engaged, deeply partisan Texans, diverse in style if not ideology. “When you describe me, Brad Pitt–esque is totally fine,” John Huffman, a 43-year-old entrepreneur and the former mayor of Southlake, told me (although his beard actually makes him look more like Oscar Isaac in Dune).

Huffman’s attitude toward Trump has always been conflicted—but it seemed representative in the group. A self-described “Christian conservative,” he has never supported Trump in a primary election, but ultimately voted for him every time in November. He was disturbed by the events of January 6, but believed that Trump’s second administration “had an incredible amount of promise.” He’d hoped that the president would improve the economy, deport only violent “illegals,” and implement a more coherent tariff strategy. But now? Huffman feels that Trump has done the opposite on virtually all counts and started a brand-new war. It “makes no sense,” he said, as Shepheard nodded along. The president built a powerful coalition, “and less than two years later, he squandered it.”

Jill Tate, a 53-year-old Republican activist and the president of the Texas Federation of Republican Women, hadn’t been a Trump primary voter either. But she offered a softer assessment of his second term. “Most things I’ve been happy with,” she told the group. “There are certain things that I think make him …” Tate trailed off, sighed, and looked into the distance. She was trying to choose her words carefully. “He’s brought a different element to the party,” she went on after a moment. “He’s not a Reagan Republican; he’s his own brand of Republican, and that is one of the reasons the party’s looking differently.”

With what was perhaps the understatement of the century, we had reached the crux of our conversation. Trump has remade the Texas Republican Party in his image, transforming it into a machine built not for winning general elections, but for allowing him to dominate poisonous primaries. “What we have,” Huffman said, “is a fractured set of relationships that we are finding harder and harder to mend.” This reconfiguration has facilitated the rise of questionable characters and reactionaries. Bo French, the former chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party, once shared a poll asking whether Jews or Muslims were a bigger threat to America. Now French is the billionaire-backed Republican nominee for railroad commissioner, a job overseeing gas and oil in Texas. He continues to post bigoted messages.

Then there is Paxton. The three-term Texas attorney general is well known by now for facing accusations of securities fraud and bribery, for his alleged extramarital affairs, and for his less important but notable decision to pocket a $1,000 pen that did not belong to him. Still, many Texas Republicans adore Paxton for his commitment to MAGA. Others support Paxton in spite of the fact that his name appears to evoke instant and obvious disgust. At a “Come and Take It” rally for Paxton last week, one man told me he’d vote for the attorney general, even as he made a face. In another ringing endorsement, an elderly woman said she’d “vote for the devil himself” before siding with Paxton’s opponent.

Two Republicans in our group seemed to share this sentiment, even if they wouldn’t put it quite that way. Brandon Chicotsky, a 41-year-old marketing professor at Texas Christian University and the faculty adviser for its Turning Point chapter, was the only one who did not vote for Trump in 2016; he’d supported the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson. Sitting across from me at Shepheard’s house, he explained that the charges against Paxton and French were not enough to dissuade him. “I don’t like these people,” he said, “but I find it imperative for the function of government that they win.” Straightforward. So was Tate: “While you may have issues with Paxton, he’s gonna vote Republican,” she said, looking around at the others.

Even after ugly primaries, Texas Republicans can usually be relied upon to fall in line come November. (See: Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024.) But Huffman and Shepheard said they just weren’t willing to do it this time. Neither plans to vote for Paxton or French. “Our party needs a slap in the face,” Shepheard said. The pair, she added later in a follow-up call, can’t “define the Republican Party to the outside world.”

Huffman agreed. “I held my nose and voted for Trump three times, knowing that he didn’t share a lot of my moral compass,” but voting for Paxton “would be admitting to myself and my family and my friends that character truly doesn’t matter as long as your jersey is Republican.”

I admitted to being a little confused. Paxton and Trump have a remarkably similar set of ethical problems. Why support one but draw a line at the other? It was a question Huffman said he’d thought a lot about. The presidency matters more than a single Senate seat, he answered. “There’s also part of me that understands the compromise I had to make to vote for Trump, and maybe this is my way of reclaiming a little bit of that.”

Tate, a Republican activist for more than three decades, seemed to be struggling. She nodded occasionally as Huffman talked, but she was frustrated to hear him say this. The Texas legislature is red. The governor is a Republican. “We are exactly where we wanted to be 30 years ago,” she said. The Democrats stopped winning in Texas because the party couldn’t stay united, she added. “If we lose one statewide, the door is open. We cannot let it be open.”

But Huffman and Shepheard believe it’s too late—that Trump and his allies ripped the door off its hinges years ago. Last year, in a special election to fill a vacancy in the state Senate, Huffman lost a bitter three-way fight to a self-described “ultra-MAGA” candidate and a Democrat. The district, which Trump had won by 17 points in 2024, elected the Democrat by 14. (The “ultra-MAGA” candidate is running again this year but has since shed the label.)

If Paxton loses, perhaps Texas Republicans will feel compelled to reform the way the party runs primaries—which might, in turn, allow more reasonable, less morally compromised candidates to be successful. “Ken Paxton losing,” Huffman said, “may be the thing that could save the Republican Party in Texas.”

So, will the Paxton naysayers be voting for James Talarico? As if.

“I’m perfectly comfortable leaving that particular race blank,” Shepheard told me, although she would vote for Jon Rosenthal, the Democrat and former oil-field engineer running against French. “Talarico is a heretic, and a hard-left progressive,” Huffman said, not an unusual take among conservative Christians, who have been startled to hear Talarico defend abortion on biblical grounds and argue that God is nonbinary.

[Read: Things are about to get ugly in Texas ]

Talarico has made overtures to Republicans by appealing to faith and talking a lot about economic populism. In some cases, it’s worked: A parade of local and state GOP officials has publicly switched sides to support him. But most hard-core partisans, including the ones at Shepheard’s house, aren’t going to skip to the polls to cast a ballot for a Democrat. The ones who can stomach it will support Paxton. The ones who can’t will sit out the race altogether. Right now, polls show a tight Senate race, although Talarico has a slight, consistent edge. If the Democrat does defy the odds to win in November, his bipartisan appeal will be only a sliver of the story.

A better explanation will be that Trump and his Republican allies in Texas have finally pushed their own voters too far.

Redistricting Isn’t Going as Republicans Planned

2026-10-30T10:04:15-04:00

Don Davis was born in Snow Hill, a small town on the coastal plains of North Carolina. Growing up, he spent Sundays worshipping at the local Presbyterian church and summers working in the surrounding tobacco fields. At 29, he was elected Snow Hill’s youngest-ever mayor. He went on to represent the town of about 1,500 in the state legislature and then in Congress. The Democrat is now running for a third term, but in a very different district: If he wins, his constituents will no longer include his wife, his kids, or anyone else in Snow Hill.

Davis is used to having to figure out exactly who can vote for him. The first time he was elected to Congress, in 2022, he triumphed in a district that slightly favored Democrats. The North Carolina legislature redrew it to favor Republicans, and Davis won reelection in 2024 by less than two percentage points.

Then, in the summer of 2025, President Trump called for the GOP to gerrymander as many seats as it could to protect the party’s House majority, even though redistricting is typically done only once a decade, after a census. Democrats in some states retaliated with their own gerrymanders. North Carolina was one of seven states, both red and blue, to hastily redraw its maps after Trump’s demand; four more redistricted after the Supreme Court’s April Louisiana v. Callais decision gutted the Voting Rights Act. Many of the incumbents being targeted for defeat by Republicans are Black Democrats. Davis, who had his home and base of support in surrounding Greene County cut out of his district, is one of them. But the gambit may not succeed as planned.

Republicans are forecast to gain fewer than half of the seats they expected when they redrew the maps, in large part because voters are mad—over inflation, over corruption, over the Iran war. Here in North Carolina’s First Congressional District, many have an additional cause for anger: their gerrymandered map. The state, which is among the most politically divided in America, already has district lines that give Republicans a significant edge. The congressional delegation includes just four Democrats out of 14 representatives. The GOP-dominated legislature wants to cut that to three, and has drawn lines tailored to end Davis’s congressional career. If the new boundaries of his district had existed in 2024, Trump would have won the area by almost 12 points. (He carried the old district by just three.)

The new map removed four counties with large Black populations and added six Republican-leaning ones near the state’s coast. Under the new map, the proportion of Black voters in the First District dropped from about 40 percent to about 32 percent. After the redistricting, the Cook Political Report labeled Davis “the most vulnerable House Democrat in the country.” He seemed like a goner. But recent polls show a close race, with both parties spending eye-popping amounts of money—more than $52.9 million in total, making it the most expensive House general election on record, according to the data-tracking firm AdImpact.

Democrats have represented North Carolina’s First District since 1899, but Davis has been touting his centrist voting record in Congress. He often reminds voters that he has spent nearly all of his life in eastern North Carolina. “These are tobacco-cropping hands,” he told me, holding up his palms. (Federal law requires congressional candidates to live in the state, not the district, in which they are seeking office.) Davis is running against Republican Laurie Buckhout, a retired Army colonel whom he narrowly beat in 2024. Buckhout is now trying to capitalize on the more deeply red composition of the district. “We are Republican-majority districts,” she told a crowd at a rally with President Trump and a Republican candidate in a nearby district last week. “That’s simple math. There are more of us. All you got to do is get out the vote.” After she left the stage, Trump turned to her: “You’re running against Don Davis? I hear he’s a total disaster.”

It’s unclear if Trump’s support will help her. His popularity has cratered in the state; a recent poll from Elon University shows that only 34 percent of North Carolinians approve of the job he’s doing, despite the fact that he won 51 percent of the vote in 2024. Ben Lindemann was among the North Carolinians who voted for him. But the 49-year-old told me he will likely vote for Davis this year, in part because of the way Trump has governed. “I just don’t like the way he’s ruining our country,” Lindemann said.

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

In the past, Davis could count on votes from Greene County, where he ministers at the church he grew up attending. Now he needs to win over unaffiliated voters who may have never voted for a Democrat before in areas where he is less well-known. Billboards with his face line the highway: Don Davis supports lowering costs. Thank you Representative Davis, for supporting our veterans. There’s no mention of the Democratic Party; Davis, an Air Force veteran, is running as a brand unto himself. He often cites the times he’s crossed the aisle to vote with Republicans, including to end last year’s government shutdown, to fund ICE, and to condemn “socialism in all its forms.” In 2024, the website GovTrack, which assesses politicians’ voting records, ranked Davis the most conservative Democrat in the House.

The district is among the most rural and agricultural in the state; seemingly endless fields of sweet potatoes and cotton line the sides of country roads. Davis was one of only 14 Democrats who voted in favor of this year’s Republican-sponsored Farm Bill, arguing that it would provide necessary support for the district’s economy. Farmers—particularly those who cultivate row crops such as tobacco and cotton—have been squeezed by tariffs and soaring operating costs. Thomas Joyner, a sweet-potato farmer, told me Davis is the only Democrat he’s ever voted for, because he “genuinely wants to help agriculture.” Richard Anderson, a 63-year-old who grows tobacco, told me Trump’s trade war with China destroyed the crop’s profitability by leaving a glut of product. He said he’ll be voting for Davis, even though he voted for Trump in 2024 and identifies as an independent. “I think that his district is proof that people will cross the aisle,” Anderson said.

The gerrymander has given voters another reason to back Davis. People are angry about the redrawn lines, especially Black voters who feel the redistricting targeted them. Early votes cast by Black voters in North Carolina as of Wednesday were up 57 percent compared with the same date in 2022, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida. Voting-rights advocates have said that a backlash against redistricting is driving a surge of African American turnout across the South.

At the “Unapologetically Blue” banquet thrown by the Nash County Democratic Party earlier this month, more than 400 people showed up—the most in the event’s history, according to organizers. As I wandered among the crowd, attendees kept bringing up the unfairness of redistricting. “We fought hard for our rights. All of us did,” said 69-year-old Ernestine H. Stephenson, who is Black. Cynthia Pitchford told me that she grew up in the 1970s cropping tobacco; there were, she said, few other job options available for Black people in eastern North Carolina. Decades later, when Pitchford heard Davis was running for Congress, one of the first things she liked was their shared country background. This year, she decided to volunteer for him because she was so upset about the GOP’s gerrymandering. “I knew it was a ploy to try to pull votes away from him,” she said.

[Read: The arc of the Voting Rights Act ]

I heard the same at the homecoming game of Elizabeth City State University, a historically Black university, where Davis walked the stands of the school’s football stadium in a driving rain, shaking hands with fans. He told me that people bring up redistricting all the time. “I believe the general feeling is that no one’s really asked for this,” Davis said. “I mean, people feel that they’re left out.”

Buckhout lost to Davis in 2024 by only about 6,000 votes, and has since worked in a senior cyber-policy role in the Pentagon. She did not respond to my request for an interview, but when I talked with her supporters around the district, many said they believed she would fight socialism, which they said represents an existential threat to the country. Others applauded her military background and sense of patriotism. Buckhout spent decades in the Army and commanded an 800-person battalion in Iraq. “She’s strong and truthful,” said Rhonda Flood, a 61-year-old who has been volunteering for Buckhout’s campaign. Flood said the people she’s met while canvassing “know she’ll fight for the country, because she has.”

Buckhout faces the same problem as many other Republicans this cycle—if your message is that the country is on the right track, how do you motivate voters who are unhappy with the state of the nation to show up? Early-voting numbers indicate that, so far, Republican turnout in North Carolina is lagging. Buckhout’s answer has been to campaign hard on fears about socialism and transgender issues. At the rally with Trump, she referenced ongoing unrest in France, warning that similar chaos could come to America if voters stop choosing Republicans. “I have fought against those people, and this is no joke,” she said to cheers. (When I asked the Buckhout campaign whom she meant by “those people,” the answer was “violent extremists.”)

Buckhout has reminded voters that Davis in 2023 sponsored the Equality Act, which, if it had passed, would have banned discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. She also criticizes him for being the only member of the House to vote “present,” rather than yea or nay, on a 2025 bill that would have effectively banned trans student athletes from playing in federally funded girls’ school sports. (Davis said the issue should be left up to states, not the federal government.) Several Republicans I spoke with said they are voting for Buckhout because of her opposition to transgender athletes. (Davis has said he supports North Carolina’s ban on transgender athletes.) In 2025, Davis was one of only three Democrats who supported former Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors. When I asked Davis if he still supported the Equality Act, he said his support had “evolved.”

Davis opposed last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act—which Buckhout has touted on the campaign trail for its tax cuts and other help for working families. But as I traveled North Carolina, voters told me that the cost of living is surging at a relentless pace, and they were seeing little relief.

[Read: Going hungry in Trump’s economy]

The district once seemed an easy flip for Republicans. But in a year when the price of gas has spiked, tariffs are squeezing businesses, and some undecided voters are still trying to get to know the candidates, a redistricting plan that appeared to be a sure thing could backfire. If it does, Davis said he will leave Snow Hill and find a house within the district’s new lines.

A Cynical Ploy to Block California’s Wealth Tax

2026-10-30T07:00:00-04:00

The most important decision facing California voters this year is not which candidates to support for higher office, but whether to approve a wealth tax on the state’s approximately 250 billionaires. The ballot initiative that would impose the tax has plenty of enemies, among not only the superrich but also the many Californians, including Governor Gavin Newsom, who worry about losing the superrich to other states. But thanks to a deviously cynical electoral maneuver by the measure’s opponents, the people who ultimately doom it might include some of those who vote for it.

Proposition 40 was spearheaded by Dave Regan, who leads California’s large and powerful health-care workers’ union, in response to the Medicaid cuts in Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. If approved, the initiative would create a onetime 5 percent tax on all billionaire wealth, and the proceeds—perhaps as much as $100 billion—would be earmarked mostly for state health-care spending. To make sure the superrich don’t flee before they can be taxed, the policy would apply retroactively to anyone who lived in the state at the start of 2026.

Predictably, some of the billionaires in question are seeking to defeat the initiative. The Google co-founder Sergey Brin preemptively moved his residence and businesses to Nevada in 2025 and seeded the new political organization Building a Better California with $102 million from his stash. (That might sound like a lot, but the tax would have cost him about $12 billion.) Thanks to the donations of other tech tycoons, the group has raised more than $333 million in total.

[Read: If you tax them, will they leave?]

Plan A is to convince voters that Proposition 40 is unwise via a barrage of TV and social-media ads. In case that doesn’t work, the opponents have come up with Plans B and C: Propositions 41 and 42. These initiatives take advantage of a feature of California law: If two conflicting ballot measures pass in the same election, the one with more votes prevails. On the surface, both look innocuous and unrelated to the wealth tax. Proposition 41 is being pitched as a fiscal-responsibility measure, and Proposition 42 is ostensibly about protecting voters’ retirement savings. But the initiatives are designed to directly conflict with the wealth-tax measure. Proposition 41 would institute audit requirements for new special taxes and void any programs that are exempt from the state’s existing spending limit, which the new wealth tax would be. Proposition 42 would prohibit both retroactive taxes and any taxes on non-real-estate property, each of which describes Proposition 40.

This tactic is completely legal, and efforts to change the rules could have unfortunate downstream consequences. For instance, if counterproposals were disallowed, then a group that caught wind of an upcoming initiative could block it simply by being the first to gather enough signatures. Still, the rule can, perversely, lead to antimajoritarian outcomes by preventing proposals supported by more than half of the population from becoming law if another proposal on the ballot happens to, or is designed to, negate it.

Propositions 41 and 42 also take advantage of the possibility that voters will not realize that the measures conflict, and will vote yes on more than one of them. They might think that audits are sensible and that spending limits should be observed, or that personal property such as cars and engagement rings and 401(k)s shouldn’t be taxed, and fail to understand that these principles stand in the way of their belief that billionaires ought to pay a wealth tax.

Other voters might prefer audits to a wealth tax even though they’d be perfectly fine with both; in that sense, the countermeasure forces them to choose between two policies that could coexist. Still other voters are likely to be overwhelmed or annoyed by having to parse so many measures and decide to oppose all of them: Political scientists have found that the longer the ballot, the more likely people are to vote no.

[Read: The one tax the rich can’t escape]

Historically, Californians are not easily fooled by this type of gamesmanship. But in a close contest, only a small subset of voters needs to fit into the above categories for the countermeasure strategy to work. Imagine that 51 percent of voters want a wealth tax and 49 percent oppose it. If all of those who oppose it vote for Proposition 41, knowing that the measure will negate Proposition 40, and just 3 percent of the electorate votes for both, then Proposition 41 will pass with 52 percent of the vote, nullifying the wealth tax that 51 percent of Californians voted to approve.

Polls indicate that this outcome is possible. A September survey by the Public Policy Institute of California had the wealth tax passing 52–46, Proposition 41 passing 51–44, and Proposition 42 passing 54–43, which would result in only Proposition 42 (the one about taxing property) going into effect. (A more recent poll by the same organization showed the wealth tax at only 46 percent support.) A poll from UC Berkeley found that a larger slice of the electorate was undecided about the countermeasures than about Proposition 40, suggesting that some voters don’t realize the measures conflict.

At the turn of the 20th century, many western-state legislatures were captured by the owners of local railroad and mining monopolies. Progressives and populists introduced ballot measures as a way to circumvent those plutocrats and return power to the people. But, as the fight over Proposition 40 shows, that works only if voters can withstand plutocrats’ efforts to capture the ballot-measure process too.

Democrats Are Ready to Run Hegseth ‘Out of Town’

2026-10-29T13:57:38-04:00

Many Democrats have a post-midterm dream that goes something like this: Pete Hegseth, the push-up-loving, beardo-mocking former Fox News host who has led the Pentagon for almost two years with bombast and theatrics, is either fired or hauled before their new majority in the House to face impeachment—which would make him just the third Cabinet secretary in history to face such a sanction. “One of the first things we’re going to do in the majority, we’re going to run Pete Hegseth out of town,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who is in line to be speaker of the House should the Democrats win that chamber, declared at a rally this month, the closest he’s come to saying the I-word.

Many of his colleagues feel the same. Hegseth helped steer the U.S. into war with Iran, and then failed to deliver victory. He initiated strikes against speedboats allegedly carrying narco-traffickers off the coasts of South and Central America that many Democrats view as extrajudicial killings. He pushed out scores of seasoned generals, many of whom were held in high esteem on Capitol Hill. All the while, he has flouted any notion of congressional oversight. His acidly partisan approach to Hill relations dates back to his contentious 2025 confirmation process, when he broke tradition by declining courtesy calls with most Democratic senators. And he has, in his political opponents’ view, brought a macho crassness to the job, railing against “fatties,” “weirdos,” and “beardos” and introducing hormone supplements to ensure “high T” troops. Former President Obama last weekend mocked the well-coiffed Hegseth for focusing on “the jawlines and testosterone levels of our troops” and for being consumed by vanity. “How much time,” Obama asked, “do you think this defense secretary spends looking at himself in the mirror in the morning?”

From a Democratic standpoint, what’s not to impeach? Yet precisely because Hegseth and his behavior present such a ripe target for House Democrats, they might ultimately decide against pursuing that measure. After all, even if a Democratic-controlled House voted to impeach Hegseth, and even if the Democrats win a majority in the Senate and convene a trial, Hegseth almost certainly would retain enough support in the upper chamber to fall short of the required 67 votes for conviction. The alternative is for Democrats to try to rein in Hegseth without the spectacle of impeachment, relying instead on the aggressive pursuit of their more traditional oversight mechanisms—hearings, investigations, and conditions attached to the annual defense budget. If Democrats are going to go to war, as it were, with the self-styled secretary of war, they may prefer to fight a battle they think they can actually win.

If Thomas Massie has his way, Hegseth’s impeachment wouldn’t wait until the new Congress convenes in January. The outgoing Republican representative from Kentucky has said he plans to bring the articles of impeachment he filed this fall against Hegseth up for a vote during the House’s lame-duck postelection session. His eight draft articles include accusations that Hegseth plotted to conduct an illegal war in Iran (a conflict for which President Trump never sought congressional authorization) and that he approved the “kidnapping of a sovereign foreign leader,” a reference to the January seizure of the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Massie told Puck he thinks other Republicans who are poised to leave Congress may rally behind him. The vote to proceed with impeachment and the impeachment itself require a simple majority in the House.

[Read: Here’s who Democrats want to impeach next]

Democrats would likely welcome Massie’s move, even if it did no more than force Speaker Mike Johnson and Trump to come to Hegseth’s defense. A recent Politico poll showed that 63 percent of Democratic midterm voters would support impeaching the defense secretary. (Only Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a more popular target for impeachment, with 65 percent support.) And, should Massie’s effort fail, the Democrats have their own draft articles at hand. Representative Yassamin Ansari of Arizona filed impeachment articles against Hegseth in April. Her draft articles are similar to Massie’s but also include accusations of obstructing congressional oversight and mishandling classified information (in March 2025, Hegseth shared sensitive war plans in a Signal group that included The Atlantic’s editor in chief). Her effort has 16 co-sponsors, all of them Democrats, but she sees the ground shifting and holds out hope that Trump will get rid of his defense secretary before Congress has the chance to act. “The calls against Hegseth’s leadership have increased dramatically on both sides of the aisle,” Ansari told us. “We are really strongly pushing the president to replace Hegseth.”

The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told us in a statement that Trump strongly supports Hegseth. “Secretary Hegseth is doing a great job leading the Pentagon,” she said. Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson called Hegseth a “transformative leader” who has “slashed bureaucracy, unleashed innovation, and delivered for our warfighters every step of the way.”

The House has impeached only two Cabinet secretaries: William Belknap, the secretary of war, in 1876; and Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, in 2024. (In both cases, the Senate did not convict.)

Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat and former Army Ranger, was one of the seven impeachment managers during Trump’s first impeachment trial in the Senate, in 2020. He told us the party needed to be cautious in considering a third presidential impeachment. But he is far less squeamish about trying to remove Hegseth. “Pete Hegseth and the corruption he’s brought to the Department of Defense is at the top of my list,” Crow said.

[Read: The Top Gun: Maverick theory of Pete Hegseth]

Representative Adam Smith, who would lead the House Armed Services Committee should Democrats take over, told us that he and his colleagues will have limited powers even in the majority, especially if the administration rebuffs congressional requests for documents or witnesses. The Justice Department, for instance, under Trump’s onetime personal attorney Todd Blanche, may decline to enforce congressional subpoenas. That would make even lawmakers like Smith, typically more inclined to dig into the arcana of acquisition reform than stage a made-for-TV trial, more likely to consider the toughest sanction.

“Do we try to work in a reasonable place or do we go right for the jugular here?” Smith said, referring to Jeffries’s desire to see Hegseth removed from office. “Personally I think there’s no reason to expect that Trump and Hegseth are going to cooperate with us in any way. So I think that Hakeem may well be right.” The decision could amount to an early test of Jeffries and his ability to corral the different factions in the Democratic caucus. Even as he has talked lately about running Hegseth out of town, Jeffries hasn’t explicitly endorsed an impeachment strategy. “Pete Hegseth needs to be pushed aside by the president,” he told MS NOW this week, “or we’re going to have to deal with the situation if he is not.”

GOP grumbling about Hegseth’s performance has intensified over the past year. Representative Mike Rogers and Senator Roger Wicker, the chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, respectively, have objected to administration plans to cut the U.S. military presence in Europe and to Pentagon delays in providing aid to Ukraine. Senator Susan Collins and others complained when Hegseth fired respected military leaders, including Generals Randy George and Chris “C. D.” Donahue. Mike Johnson panned Hegseth’s plan to livestream an execution by firing squad. (Trump ultimately quashed the livestream.) Outgoing Senator Thom Tillis has described his vote to confirm Hegseth as the “biggest regret” of his career. Still, even those Republicans unimpressed with Hegseth have been loath to cross the president, and they continue to support most of Hegseth’s plans, including a boost in defense spending to $1.5 trillion.

[Read: How Pete Hegseth’s plan for a reality-TV execution imploded]

That suggests an uphill push for a conviction in the Senate—and a trial would provide Hegseth with a prominent, televised perch from which he could lambaste the effort, secure in the knowledge that his prospects of conviction are remote. That may be all the more desirable for him as Trump enters his lame-duck years and the MAGA faithful search for a worthy successor. The spectacle of Hegseth in a congressional hearing room defending his troops and hitting back against Democrats could boost the presidential ambitions he is said to harbor. Trump’s two impeachments ultimately helped his political standing by giving him a clear foe; Republicans might welcome a similar dynamic with the secretary of defense in the dock.

Should Democrats decide against impeachment proceedings, they are likely instead to resort to more common oversight measures. Riders to the defense-spending legislation could compel the Pentagon to comply with congressional mandates barring troop drawdowns around the world. Admiral Mitch Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, will likely face questions over a September 2, 2025, air strike that killed two men clinging to maritime wreckage in the Caribbean. Democratic lawmakers also want to declassify the Office of Legal Counsel memo that lays out a legal rationale for those operations, and potentially bring in military lawyers to testify. Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. military operations in the Middle East, could be asked about casualties from the Iran war—those of American troops and Iranian civilians—and damage to U.S. bases in the region. But all of these efforts would be politically fraught for Democrats, whom Republicans are sure to accuse of going after the troops.

Lawmakers told us they still don’t know the true state of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and other facilities that have been attacked, other than that they have sustained real damage. When Democratic Senator Chris Murphy made a fact-finding trip to Qatar this month, the Pentagon denied him permission to visit Al Udeid, the military’s regional air hub, which was struck by Iran, and barred military officials from briefing him. Lawmakers will push Hegseth on whether the military was negligent in protecting U.S. forces from Iranian drones and missiles—21 service members have died and more than 800 have been wounded in the conflict—and subjecting sailors to a record-breaking stint at sea. “My north star is anything jeopardizing the immediate safety and well-being of our troops,” Crow told us. “Are they getting equipment they need? Why is he firing the top ranks of the Army? There are a lot of questions.” The Pentagon may also be pressed to provide details of business deals made as part of Hegseth’s race to move the military into the age of artificial intelligence or to purchase Venezuelan oil.

All of that presumes, of course, that Hegseth remains in office. Trump has shown no inclination to fire him, though the White House may look for scapegoats in the event of a midterm drubbing. The Cabinet official most closely associated with the Iran war could fit the bill. Or Trump could find an off-ramp for Hegseth. Rumors abound at the Pentagon that the president will prevail on Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee to name Hegseth to her vacant seat should she win her race for Tennessee governor, as she’s expected to do. A spokeswoman for Blackburn’s campaign said the senator would not have any discussions about a potential replacement “until the appropriate time”; the Pentagon’s Wilson said the Blackburn idea was “nothing more than Beltway gossip by anonymous sources.” The White House declined to comment on the idea. Were it to happen, Democrats might be satisfied that Hegseth is out of the Pentagon—but less pleased to have him as a colleague.

The Trump Aide Trying to Stop a Blue Wave

2026-10-29T06:00:00-04:00

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The most powerful members of Donald Trump’s government, security details in tow, filed into the Capitol Hill Club in February for a pep talk from the president’s top political adviser, James Blair. Weeks earlier, Trump had predicted midterm defeat because, he explained, “when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms.” But in the green-awninged building just a couple of blocks from Congress, Blair wanted to share a more optimistic vision, urging everyone to focus on a particularly notable exception: In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt overcame economic headwinds to expand his party’s House and Senate majorities.

Blair is brash and intense, a combination that has irked some administration officials and lawmakers who prefer their staff to behave more like staff. The 37-year-old keeps his head shorn shiny and his lips pressed together—half smirk, half quiet skepticism—not unlike a drill instructor. His goal that day was to apply data-driven discipline to the careening Tilt-A-Whirl of Trump’s governing style. The team had already decided that it would abandon the traditional midterm playbook of downplaying the president. Trump would command center stage no matter what. “The ground you have is the ground you have, and you have to fight on it,” one Trump strategist told us. Like others, the strategist spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations and internal strategies.

But that was just the start. Blair laid out a strikingly optimistic view of the coming eight months. The map was stronger than in 2018, with fewer swing seats and a real chance of Republicans holding both the House and the Senate, Blair told the assembled crowd, which included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Blair emphasized that FDR was careful to calibrate his message in the 1934 campaign, arguing not that the problems had been solved but that things were getting better —and would continue to improve.

No one had any illusions that Trump would be as disciplined as FDR. The president would be “doing his own thing,” and that would help Republicans by exciting his base of loyal but infrequent voters, Blair told the group. But everyone else needed to stick to a message shaped by polling, so they could speak to people beyond the MAGA bubble. There was little doubt—then or now—about the dominant issue. “I think you’ll see him be very, very focused on prices and cost of living,” Blair had previously said about Trump’s expected midterm message—an exercise in wishcasting, it turned out.

Eleven days after the meeting, Trump launched a war against Iran. Voters already living on the edge—with the highest rates of car repossession since 2009 and record sales of Spam canned meat—found themselves stretched even further. Gas prices spiked more than 50 percent, diesel rocketed more than 70 percent, and inflation-adjusted wage gains vanished. By September, a poll found that 73 percent of Americans had concerns about buying groceries. Nearly two-thirds blamed Trump’s policies for the abnormally high prices.

The goal of maintaining House control soon slipped away, and states that Trump once won by double digits, such as Texas, Kansas, and Iowa, became Senate battlegrounds. The president showed no interest in displaying Roosevelt-style empathy for the economic struggles of ordinary voters. Instead, he talked about the new stock-market highs, his ballroom and golf-course projects, and his close friendships with billionaire tech oligarchs. “We’re in the golden age,” Trump thundered at a rally in Arizona this month. “You know, I knew we were going to do well. I didn’t know we were going to do well this fast.”

This would not be like 1934.

Those who work closely with Trump must live with contradictions. He makes the decisions but does not accept fault. He expects order but thrives on transgression. It’s easier to make it into his circle than to leave with your reputation intact. With just days to go before the midterms, Blair is reprising the role occupied in the past by the likes of Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman, architects of the Republican strategy who have the ear of the president. Blair ran Trump’s endorsement process, helped plan his travel, forced a brutal off-year battle over redistricting, and set up the independent spending machine that will deploy enormous sums to help Republican candidates, including more than $400 million raised by the president.

In many ways, political chiefs resemble Super Bowl kickers, trotted out for a game-determining field goal whose distance from the yellow uprights is not under their control. They receive outsize glory and blame. Political consultants alone can’t win elections, but they can keep the game from being lost unnecessarily. And now Blair finds himself a potential fall guy for a midterm result that could be disastrous for Republicans.

Blair’s critics describe him as imperious, smug, and in over his head—a fringe Florida political guy who stumbled into the big leagues. What Blair lacks in experience, one told us, he makes up for in arrogance. They also noted that his authoritative style may not work in the coming years, when he no longer has Trump’s power behind him. (Others said—some admiringly, some dismissively—that they suspect Blair would like to manage a 2028 presidential campaign.) Republicans have already begun the early stages of postelection second-guessing: What if the ad spending had started sooner? What if Trump’s self-aggrandizement had been tempered? What if Blair had stayed inside the White House, despite the boundaries of campaign-finance law, and not taken on outside clients, as he did in early October, when he made a weekend trip to the Republika Srpska? What if Blair had somehow persuaded him to endorse Senator John Cornyn of Texas, say, or averted the “Trumpapalooza” midterm convention that no one wanted?

[Read: Trump’s dream world in Dallas]

Ultimately, however, the only question that really matters is the one no one can yet answer: If the election goes poorly for Republicans, who will Trump choose to blame? The one thing everyone expects: The president will not blame himself.

Blair’s defenders argue that he has salvaged whatever chance Republicans still have to minimize losses. “All things being equal, if your goal is to tactically give your side every advantage, James has done exactly what you are supposed to be doing,” Chris LaCivita, the top strategist on Trump’s 2024 campaign, told us. Blair lobbied the president, for instance, to include his plan for congressional stock restrictions in this year’s State of the Union address, assuaging Trump’s concern about lawmaker backlash. (“This speech isn’t for Congress; it’s for the public,” one person who heard Blair’s argument told us, adding that the line proved one of the most popular in the address.) Blair has encouraged senators to campaign on health care by going after a boogeyman, whether health insurers or drug companies. They also say that, yes, Blair is intense, but he is solicitous of others’ opinions and doesn’t mind being challenged.

Perhaps most impressively, his allies say, Blair has managed to wrangle a motley crew of outsize, complicated personalities, getting them to work together. “James is very sure-footed in what he believes, and thinks he and the team can work around these situations,” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles told us. “He doesn’t like criticism—none of us do—but he’s pretty fearless, he believes his plan is right, and he’s going to go execute it, regardless of atmospherics.”

Trump has continued to rely on Blair as conditions have deteriorated, even though he publicly chastised Blair for the Srpska trip. As a rule, Trump prefers men with full heads of hair (one ally surmised it’s because the president believes they’re genetically superior, and a second person laughingly—but seriously—concurred) and usually likes garrulous operatives with big personalities. But Trump has come to appreciate Blair’s candor and political savvy anyway, one White House official said.

The Trump ally recounted a staff gathering last year on Wiles’s West Wing patio, where Trump held court. At one point, the president pointed to Blair and said, “I always thought he was a wet blanket and had no personality, but really, he’s a tough guy,” this person told us. Trump initially called Blair “Little James”—James Braid, who until recently was Trump’s director of legislative affairs, was “Big James”—but he soon alighted on a more complimentary nickname: “Brilliant James.” The flattery is mutual; “Hail to the Chief” plays whenever Trump calls Blair’s phone.

“He does what he believes is right, whether or not everyone agrees, and that is exactly what he was elected to do,” Blair told us in a statement about the president. “I’m certain that before long, even his critics will be forced to acknowledge he has always made the right decisions for our country and the American people. I’m proud to have supported him for more than ten years, and I will continue to stand with him.”

Blair has told associates that he considers himself an adherent of Jocko Willink, a retired leadership trainer in the Navy SEALs, who preaches the value of “extreme ownership”—the idea that a leader of any operation must take complete responsibility and never place blame elsewhere. “James is the most Italian non-Italian you’ll ever meet,” Tony Fabrizio, a Trump pollster, told us. “He’s very much into loyalty, keeping your mouth shut. You screw me, I’ll screw you.”

Two weeks before the election, Blair acknowledged his critics on social media. He referenced an Old Testament passage in which God asked for a volunteer to serve him “until the cities are laid waste and without inhabitant, the houses are without a man, the land is utterly desolate.” The prophet Isaiah answered that call, a response that Blair posted on X: “Here am I; Send me.”

We first met Blair at a dinner in Iowa shortly before the 2024 presidential caucuses, while reporting for The Washington Post. We were struck by his granular political knowledge and his confidence bordering on cockiness—a potent yet also potentially combustible combination. Michael James Blair was raised Southern Baptist, but moonlights as a metalhead; he attended Metallica’s two-night No Repeat Weekend at the Cowboys’ stadium in 2023. Like his four siblings, he has always gone by his middle name, and he has described the experience of growing up with three older brothers, including two who are now Florida law-enforcement officers, as shaping his disposition. He was introduced to Tallahassee political circles as the kid brother of Matt, a longtime lobbyist in the state, before falling into the orbit of Wiles, who helped Ron DeSantis run for governor and then launch his administration in 2018. Wiles and Fabrizio had worked on Trump’s first presidential bid, and by 2022, Blair had joined them in Trump’s circle. Blair earned the nickname “Oracle” for his optimistic view that Republicans were going to win big. Even though Republicans underperformed that year—largely because of the struggles of candidates backed by Trump—Blair was soon tasked with building Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Trump’s previous campaign had blown through its massive war chest, ending in debt, and the goal this time was to avoid the same mistakes. After the Federal Election Commission decided to allow campaigns and outside political-action committees to coordinate get-out-the-vote and door-to-door canvassing efforts, Blair pitched the campaign on a counterintuitive strategy, trying to take advantage of scant resources: outsource all of turnout and canvassing to PACs. He also authored a so-called gender memo contending that Trump could win by focusing more on turning out male voters who liked Trump than by trying to win over women voters.

[Read: Losing the ‘big-ass truck’ vote]

Skeptics within the GOP were more than happy to criticize Blair. They included Rove, who was credited with George W. Bush’s victories. Blair held his ground. “To stand up to what is supposed to be the gray hair, the grand poo-bah, the Wizard of Oz, who is saying, Don’t. There is no there there, that takes a lot of guts to do that,” Tim Saler, the campaign’s data expert, told us.

Weeks before Election Day 2024, Blair was in the Palm Beach, Florida, area with his wife—a former Tampa Bay Buccaneers cheerleader turned political consultant—and their three young children, watching, via webcam, as Hurricane Milton flooded their Tampa home. (They welcomed their fourth child earlier this year.) Those who worked with Blair say he never expressed doubts about whether his plan would work. “He shrugged it off by saying, Well, they’re wrong, I’m right, and they’re going to see that I’m right,” a longtime Trump adviser who worked closely with Blair during the 2024 race told us. “His view was basically, We just gotta win. If we win, we shut all these people up.” Winning also proved an aphrodisiac to the boss. “At the end of the day, the president likes guys who bring him victories, and James Blair has brought him a hell of a lot of victories,” Braid told us.

Saler said that, just weeks after Trump’s victory, he and Blair began to try to reshape the midterm landscape, starting with the gerrymandering push that became so associated with Blair that, as The Wall Street Journal first observed, some White House aides refer to it as “Blairymandering.” By February 2025, the two were in Blair’s West Wing office where they discussed, among other things, their goal of picking up more than a dozen seats by redrawing House districts, which states typically do only after the census. By April, Blair was presenting the plan to the president and securing his sign-off, triggering months of legal and legislative battles.

California Democrats surprised them by responding with their own gerrymandering plan, and South Carolina and Indiana Republicans rebelled against the White House demands, forcing a costly effort by Trump to punish some who had refused his orders. Even the Texas redistricting effort seemed, at times, lost, especially after a federal court froze the plan.

But the Texas plan went ahead with the Supreme Court’s blessing, and five of the seven Indiana Republican lawmakers Trump had targeted over their votes to block his redistricting push were ousted in their state’s May primary. That same month, it looked briefly like the redistricting push would lead to double-digit gains for Republicans: “16 net seat swing to GOP,” Blair posted on X at the time. Most now think Republicans will gain only a fraction of the seats Blair tallied. Republicans are likely to lose multiple seats in southern Texas near the border, including districts that saw their GOP majorities diluted. Yet Blair has argued that the new district lines will prove a major vulnerability to Democrats during the next election, with a presidential race on the ballot, when Republican turnout will likely rebound. Blair has assured people that if Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat, wins the speakership, it will be for just one term. He has also begun telling Republicans to prepare for another redistricting push next year, in order to take advantage of a spring ruling by the Supreme Court that further weakened the Voting Rights Act, imperiling seats that had been drawn to ensure adequate Black representation in the South. The point, it seems, is to stay on offense.

The presidential tradition, until recently, was to run midterm politics from inside the White House. Rove and Scott Jennings during the Bush years, and David Axelrod under President Obama, kept government jobs through the midterm cycles they ran. But in the early spring, Blair and other White House advisers, after consultation with lawyers, decided that it would be better for him to manage the independent spending effort from outside of government. Trump has long been concerned about top advisers billing him too much for their services, so Blair decided to forgo payment from the president’s political operation and took on private clients instead.

A full list of those clients has not been disclosed, but it includes the social-media company Meta, which hired Blair to advise its executives on how to publicly discuss data centers, according to people familiar with the arrangement. The Republika Srpska, a self-governing territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina that’s about the size of Vermont, was another; officials there hired Blair for advice on how to spot election fraud on their new Smartmatic voting machines.

The disclosure that Blair had joined LaCivita on an October trip to the pro-Russian enclave infuriated Republicans and earned the duo a rare public rebuke from the president, who hates the idea of anyone (other than his family) profiting off of him. “They are allowed to do work for others, just like all consultants in Washington, D.C.,” Trump wrote on his social-media platform. “If there’s a conflict, I will terminate them, immediately!” Blair and LaCivita later agreed to donate their payment for the Srpska trip to the Trump presidential library, and people familiar with the imbroglio say Trump has since calmed.

The episode might not have cost Blair much credibility among fellow Republicans if the party were on course to buck history and overperform in the midterms. But the final weeks of the campaign have been consumed by the affordability issues that Blair identified in 2025 as likely to be decisive. U.S. diplomats are being relocated out of the Middle East in anticipation of a resumption of conflict with Iran, global oil prices have reached levels not seen since May, and the average gas price in the United States remains elevated. Trump is at center stage, doing his own thing, just as Blair anticipated—and voters have rewarded him with record-low approval ratings, an almost-certain Republican defeat in the House, and a down-to-the-wire finish in Senate races that were once considered solidly Republican.

[Read: Trump’s gamble to end the Iran war ]

As it stands, Democrats enjoy an advantage of nine points on the generic ballot one week ahead of the election, far higher than Republican strategists were prepared to concede at the start of the year, when they mapped out plans to hold both houses of Congress. Inside the White House, officials looking for reasons to be optimistic have been closely tracking GOP enthusiasm in the Republican areas where Trump has been traveling, comparing surveys before and after his rallies. Even with less than a third of Americans approving of his job performance, he still has a clear pull on his base, they say.

But that may not be enough. Blair has long planned to see Metallica after the election, during the band’s residency at the Sphere. Regardless of the outcome, the show will likely be a welcome distraction from the stress of the past year. But the location, too, in the heart of Las Vegas, feels particularly fitting—a potent reminder that you can know the odds and the landscape, you can choose your strategy accordingly, and there will still be some things you simply can’t control.

* Illustration sources: Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty; Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress; Kayla Bartkowski / Getty; SKrow / Getty.

Trump Is Closing From Behind

2026-10-28T19:50:00-04:00

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Modern political history offers few examples of closing arguments that appear more out of touch, self-defeating, or downright bizarre than what Donald Trump has offered his fellow Republicans ahead of next week’s midterm elections. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan told voters to consider Jimmy Carter’s presidency and ask themselves, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?,” it helped turn a tight race into a Reagan landslide. But many stretch-run messages prove deeply ineffective and are quickly forgotten. Ahead of the 1998 midterms, Republicans went all in on investigations that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton only to be rebuked by voters. President Obama’s insistence in 2010 that the country was coming out of the financial crisis led to his party enduring a “shellacking.” And during the 2018 midterms, Trump and his fellow Republicans tried to stoke fears about an alleged caravan of migrants headed toward the United States, only to have skeptical voters hand the House of Representatives to Democrats.

This time around, Trump’s primary rationale for why voters should support the GOP, as best I can tell, is that the affordability crisis is a “hoax,” Bill Maher is a “loser,” and Senator Jon Husted of Ohio has a nice physique. That easy-to-mock message has been accompanied by a staggering number of missteps. Just for starters, he’s belittled the impact of his stalled war with Iran, sided with Russia as it continues to pummel Ukrainian cities, defended an attack ad from the GOP candidate for Ohio governor that repulsed other top Republicans, downplayed high energy prices while boasting that U.S. oil and gas companies are “making a freaking fortune,” embraced AI as the nation turns against it, obsessed over White House construction projects, and spent a lot of time talking about handsome men, Husted being just one.

Many Republicans, and even some in Trump’s orbit, don’t quite get it. What has happened, they ask, to the instincts of the man who authored two of the most improbable victories in American political history? Trump’s superpower was his intuitive understanding of what motivated his supporters. Many Republicans privately tell me that he’s lost that feel. Trump now lives, they think, in a gilded bubble, palling around with billionaires, oblivious to—and, even worse, uncaring about—the problems facing so many voters. His approval rating has slipped to the low 30s. He’s become so toxic that some Republicans in tight races don’t want him anywhere near their state or congressional district, believing his rallies will harm more than help.

Strategists in both parties expect Democrats to take control of the House, while the Senate is a true toss-up—a stunning reversal from the beginning of the year, when the upper chamber’s map looked so favorable for Republicans, and Trump cut a dominant figure. Suddenly, Republicans find themselves fighting to keep Senate seats in deep-red states: Kansas. Alaska. South Carolina. Ohio. Iowa. Mississippi. Texas.

Trump is campaigning across the country, imploring his supporters to turn out for him one last time. But he’s given Republicans next to nothing to run on, and polls show that voters believe his economic policies are failing, his deportation program has gone too far, and his war is misguided. He instead has leaned hard on the political battles of the past, reheating fears about transgender surgeries (from his 2024 campaign), Muslim terrorists (all the way back to 2016), and even communism. (The guy does have a fondness for the ’80s.) For good measure, Trump’s Department of Justice charged the former FBI Director James Comey for a third time—the first two didn’t stick—because nothing screams being in tune with the everyday concerns of voters than trying to revive a faltering retribution campaign against a political foe your administration once targeted over a photograph of seashells.

One Republican up for reelection who would speak with me only on the condition of anonymity, so as not to alienate the president, put it succinctly: “We may have lost the plot here.”

Not that long ago, the president was tossing Trump 2028 hats around, and Democrats were freaking out that he might be powerful enough to defy the Constitution. But that headgear now seems dated, as does the apparel line trumpeting that Trump Was Right About Everything! Many Republicans tell me that their party’s biggest problem just days from the election is that voters feel like Trump hasn’t kept his core promises.

End foreign wars? Nope, there’s a new one in Iran that’s sent gas prices up and depleted the U.S. munitions supply. Plus, Trump has appeared to side with Russia over Ukraine in a conflict he once promised to end in 24 hours. Bring prices down? Well, the war in the Middle East has made that impossible, as have Trump’s haphazard trade wars, including tariffs on once-friendly trading partners such as Canada and the European Union. And while many Americans are struggling, Trump and his family are growing exponentially wealthier. Deport the worst of the worst? Trump’s massive roundups are targeting not just violent criminals or gang members, but also longtime community members, neighbors, parishioners, teammates, and friends with no criminal records. Many Americans have been horrified by the violence unleashed by masked federal agents, especially the killing of two U.S. citizens in the streets of Minneapolis.

[Read: Trump’s gamble to end the Iran war ]

That Trump wants to focus on anything other than these broken promises while out on the campaign trail is perhaps unsurprising. At his Monday rally in Corinth, Mississippi, he spent seven minutes—nearly 10 percent of his entire speech—discussing his efforts to redecorate the White House.

The day before—when Trump traveled to a rally in Port Huron, Michigan—the president’s talking points included faulting President Biden for the war in Ukraine; falsely claiming that more oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz than before the war; deeming Norway a “shithouse country”; calling Abdul El-Sayed, the state’s Democratic nominee for Senate, a jihadist (five times); saying that, should he win, El-Sayed will be the only senator who must go through a metal detector to get to work; comparing a vote against El-Sayed to stopping a deadly terror attack; asking the Trinidadian rapper Nicki Minaj to stand before thousands of his supporters so that they could appreciate her butt; and lauding the boulder-like shoulders, thick fingers, massive feet, and firm backside of (who else?) Husted, his preferred candidate for Senate in a different state. Over the course of that day, he spent three and a half minutes talking about Husted’s football career, which is three and a half minutes more than he talked about the lawmaker’s policies.

Rather than dispel the notion that he has lost sight of what actually matters to voters, Trump on Sunday night released a social-media screed of more than 1,300 words (his longest Truth Social post ever) that assailed Maher for being ungrateful after the president hosted the comedian and talk-show host at the White House for dinner. The president has also fumed that Obama said over the weekend that Trump’s new White House decor is “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Trump angrily complained about the dig multiple times just yesterday.

[Read: Leave the Cheesecake Factory out of this]

Trump has also found himself on the wrong side of the day’s top issues. He misses few chances to mock the affordability crisis. Republicans and Democrats alike have swiftly turned on artificial intelligence, blasting the industry’s data centers as loud and expensive, and warning voters that the rapidly developing technology could take away their jobs or even their lives. Yet Trump has refused to regulate AI, knowing that the industry is propping up the stock market. His only nod toward change is trying to rename it “Super Intelligence.”

Last week, Trump loudly supported a controversial ad from the campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for Ohio governor. The video features the estranged mother of the Democratic nominee Amy Acton, Donna Arthur, who accuses her daughter of lying about her past. It doesn’t mention that the two women have not spoken for decades, after the candidate’s stepfather was indicted for molesting her. The backlash was fierce and bipartisan; the state’s current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, denounced the ad and demanded that it be pulled. Trump not only supported it but also urged Ramaswamy to “say thank you, God, very much” for such political good fortune. Divine intervention or not, several GOP strategists believe the ad could doom Ramaswamy.

Some GOP candidates in tight races—Susan Collins in Maine, John Sununu in New Hampshire—have sent word to the White House that Trump isn’t welcome to campaign alongside them. The president has instead been dispatched to deep-red states with the hopes of turning out enough of his die-hard supporters to avoid losing once-safe Senate seats.

Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, insisted to me in a statement that Trump is remaining focused while “crisscrossing the country with unmatched energy and enthusiasm to deliver a simple message: with Republicans in control of Congress, Americans can expect safer streets, lower taxes, a secure border, and energy dominance.”

The most eyebrow-raising October surprise has been Trump’s unfiltered and rather randy assessments of the male form. His motivations remain a mystery, but some in the president’s circle have theories. One outside adviser who is close to the president told me that it began when Trump, while rallying for Husted two weeks ago, was first told that the senator had played college football in the late ’80s. Trump was impressed and began publicly ruminating over the next few days about Husted’s physique, including declaring that the senator’s “ass is like a pile of muscle.”

That admiration quickly became a subject of interest on social media and cable shows, some of which resurfaced clips of Trump praising the good looks of Secret Service agents, generals, and a quarterback for the New York Giants. All of that prompted amused chatter about the 80-year-old president. But Trump has always been keenly interested in appearances, female or male, and has long made hiring decisions based on wanting looks out of “central casting.” As that adviser noted to me, Trump has spent decades in the public eye, obsessing about how his tan or hair looked on television; he’s given a lot of thought to his own appearance, so it’s not surprising that he’d think about how others look, too.

[Read: A different kind of fading president ]

What is more surprising to many around Trump is just how freely he is expressing those thoughts. Any filter appears to be long gone. Then again, there may be simpler explanations: Once the Husted comments went viral, Trump’s rally crowds have come to expect the lines and have begun to laugh along, reinforcing the president’s sense that the material is working. And Trump would rather discuss almost anything besides the price of gas—even Husted’s posterior.

Jack Rodriquez-Vars contributed research to this report.

Bernie Sanders Thinks the Democratic Party Is Moving Toward Him

2026-10-27T12:46:46-04:00

As the Bernie Sanders road show traveled south through Maine earlier this month, the crowds grew bigger and louder with each stop. About 650 people showed up at a convention center in Bangor, then 700 packed a former church in Lewiston, and finally more than 1,000 filled a high-school gymnasium in Biddeford. Sanders was stumping for Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate, and the faithful were nodding along to the hits. He pitched Medicare for All and raising taxes on billionaires. He decried wealth disparities (“an obscenity”) and Donald Trump (“the most dangerous president” in American history) with equal fervor.

What was surprising about Sanders’s appearance in the middle of one of the nation’s hardest-fought Senate races was less what he said and more that he was there at all. Mid-October in an election year is not usually Sanders’s busy season. The Vermont senator last had a tough race in his home state during President Bill Clinton’s first term. And although Sanders can draw a crowd like few other progressive politicians, Democratic candidates typically embrace him during primaries and then stick him on the sideline for the stretch run, when they’re rediscovering their love of capitalism and bipartisanship.

This fall, however, Sanders is in far more demand than usual. He’s campaigning for Democrats in some of the most competitive battlegrounds, entrusted not only with juicing turnout on college campuses—his assigned role in earlier years—but with persuading voters in Republican-leaning areas as well. From Maine, Sanders headed to Florida and then on to Texas and Michigan.

That Sanders finds himself, a decade after his first run for the presidency, arguably at the peak of his influence is all the more remarkable given that he recently turned 85 and that Democrats have spent the past two years wringing their hands over their party’s gerontocracy. According to YouGov, Sanders is the most popular current elected official in America—only the retirees Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger have higher ratings. Many of this year’s primary candidates whom Sanders backed defeated establishment opponents in states and districts that Trump had carried in 2024, and they now appear poised to help Democrats retake a majority in the House, and possibly the Senate. And when the party’s 2028 presidential free-for-all kicks off, Sanders’s endorsement could be among the campaign’s most sought-after prizes.

“He will be seen as one of the most consequential political leaders of the 21st century,” Representative Ro Khanna of California, one of several Democrats who are likely to try to carry the Sanders mantle to the White House, told me. (Whether offering such high praise will help win Sanders’s nod is another question.) Khanna noted that Sanders’s appeal may be on the upswing precisely because he’s not running for office, and unless he intends to stay in the Senate into his mid-90s, he is unlikely to do so again.

But in interviews over the past few weeks, candidates, strategists, and voters across the political spectrum attributed Sanders’s sudden October relevance to the mainstreaming of ideas that he has championed for years. Attacks on big corporations are now a hallmark of both parties. As many as two-thirds of American voters support Sanders’s signature Medicare for All proposal, long derided by Republicans as socialized medicine, according to a recent poll. Democrats who were stung by a second loss to Trump are rethinking their assumptions about what the public really wants. “Anyone who wants to win an election right now is a populist,” Phil Gardner, an adviser to centrist Democrats, told me. About Sanders, he said: “There is an increasing realization that his ideas have more currency and popularity than people might have thought back in 2016.”

Sanders has shown few obvious signs of slowing down, either politically or physically. At each of his rallies in Maine, teleprompters that were in place for Jackson’s speech came down when it was Sanders’s turn to speak. His aides say that he checks in frequently with questions about logistics or policy. (Two of my own conversations with them were interrupted because Sanders was calling on the other line.) Sanders was also quicker than much younger politicians to recognize the public’s growing fears about AI, and he’s been one of the most aggressive leaders on the left in demanding more regulation of the industry and a moratorium on new data centers. Democrats are begging not only for his presence in key states and districts, but for his financial help as well: He’s raised millions of dollars for candidates during this election, and last week he gave $1 million to boost Abdul El-Sayed’s U.S. Senate candidacy in Michigan.

[Read: The only thing capable of uniting Bernie and Bannon]

Unlike most politicians, Sanders avoids talking much about himself. During his Maine speeches, he made only glancing references to his growing influence. At one point, he noted that he’s been talking about oligarchy for a number of years. “Before I started talking about it, people would say, What the hell is an oligarch?” he told the crowd in Bangor. Then he added, to a loud cheer: “People know what oligarchy is today.”

I met Sanders after the speech, and when I asked him to explain his widening appeal, he initially shrugged as if to dismiss the question. But he could not completely hide his satisfaction with the sense that after he spent decades on the fringes of political debates, the country was moving in his direction. “I think the American people are undergoing a massive transformation in their views,” Sanders told me. “So maybe Bernie Sanders has not been all that crazy over the years.”

Sanders has always had a complicated relationship with the Democratic Party. He sought its presidential nomination twice, but he still likes to remind voters that he has run for election to the Senate as an independent. (Along with the Senate’s other independent, Maine’s Angus King, he caucuses with the Democrats.) Despite that distinction, he began his remarks in Maine by urging voters to set aside every consideration but party label when they cast their ballot. “If you want to hold Donald Trump and his disastrous policies accountable,” Sanders said, “the only way we do that is by electing a Democratic Senate.” The pitch was clearly aimed at the many independents and Democrats who have supported Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican, in previous years.

[Read: Maine has changed. Susan Collins hasn’t.]

At the same time, Sanders also heaped plenty of criticism on Democrats, accusing them of deferring to corporate donors and ignoring the needs of the working class. “The Democratic Party itself is significantly responsible for the rise of Trumpism,” Sanders told me. He made clear that he hoped that the election of a slate of progressive Senate candidates—which includes Jackson, El-Sayed, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, and Angie Nixon in Florida—would force the party to pursue policies it has previously deemed too radical. All four of these candidates have also called for replacing Chuck Schumer as the Democrats’ Senate leader. Sanders is not going that far yet, but he told me that he would support a leader “who’s going to fight for Medicare for All”—a position that Schumer has yet to embrace. Sanders, too, could have more say in shaping party policy: He’s in line to become chair of the Senate’s powerful Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions if Democrats win the majority.

One reason Sanders is so much busier this fall is that so many of the candidates running in big races have him at least partially to thank for their nomination.

Sanders endorsed more than 80 candidates for federal, state, and local offices this year—a higher total, his aides told me, than he has backed in the past. By their count, nearly 75 percent of them won their primary. He had a few misfires; most notably, Sanders was an early endorser of Graham Platner’s Senate candidacy in Maine and stood by him through a series of controversies. Sanders joined Democrats in abandoning Platner after he was accused of sexual assault, an accusation which he denied. (“Let’s not get into Platner,” Sanders told me when I brought him up.)

Plenty of candidates have sought Sanders’s endorsement without getting it. Sometimes a simple Google search reveals that a candidate is not as progressive as they claim to be. Desperation is another turnoff. “The candidates that we don’t support,” he said, “are, Oh, Bernie, support me. You’re going to be my savior. I’m not doing anything [to win], but I need your name on my literature. That we don’t support.”

In some cases, a nonendorsement from Sanders can be as consequential as his blessing. During Wisconsin’s primary for governor, neither Sanders nor Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chose to endorse Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist who surged into a polling lead while running on a platform closely aligned with Sanders. She also had the support of Sanders allies such as Khanna and Our Revolution, a group that sprang out of his 2016 campaign but is no longer affiliated with the senator. Hong ended up losing the primary to the establishment-backed David Crowley by fewer than 4,000 votes statewide, a result so close that a Sanders endorsement might have made the difference.

Democratic leaders, worried that Hong’s nomination would have cost the party during the general election, cheered Crowley’s narrow victory. Sanders told me he had no regrets. His focus this year, he said, has largely been on federal campaigns. “I don’t know anything about the problems facing Wisconsin,” Sanders said. (That may be true, but some of his other endorsements include people running for county supervisor in Iowa; the city council in Tempe, Arizona; and mayor of Fontana, California.)

The candidates Sanders has endorsed in U.S. House races reflect his new position closer to the center of the Democratic coalition. Several such candidates have also earned the backing of the Blue Dogs, a group that has long prioritized fiscal discipline and, in the past, likely would have steered clear of an alliance with the free-spending Sanders. What these “Bernie Dogs” have in common are a working-class background—the group includes a firefighter in Pennsylvania and an ironworker in Ohio—and a populist message.

Sam Forstag, a smoke jumper running to flip a Republican-held seat in Montana, told me that if he wins, he would join both the Blue Dog Coalition and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Forstag had been working with a group defending Forest Service workers from Trump-administration cuts last year when Sanders added a stop to his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in Missoula and asked whether Forstag, a union leader and federal employee, would speak. The rally drew a crowd of 9,000 people on a Wednesday afternoon, and soon after, Forstag decided to run for office. Forstag had nothing but praise for the man who kick-started his political career. Sanders, he told me, “is one of a very small group of people in the U.S. Senate, let alone the House, who people can tell are just speaking truth. Even if you don’t agree with everything, he is not somebody who’s bound down to a party boss, and that is far too rare in today’s politics.”

At least on the House side, Sanders is not demanding ideological purity. Democrats such as Brian Poindexter, who is challenging Representative Max Miller, a Republican in a Trump-carried district outside Cleveland, and Rebecca Cooke, a candidate in western Wisconsin, are not running on Medicare for All. Sanders told me he’s okay with that. “There’s no litmus test,” he said. When I asked him whether he worried about diluting his brand, he sounded for a moment more like a conventional party leader than an anti-establishment insurgent. Citing Cooke as an example, Sanders said: “She comes from a fairly conservative district. She knows her district very, very well, and I trust her judgement.” He added: “If she was running in New York City, maybe it would be different.”

Sanders is not the only progressive favorite campaigning in tough swing-state races this fall. Ocasio-Cortez has also stumped alongside Jackson and El-Sayed, and Jackson invited Senator Elizabeth Warren up to Maine after Sanders’s visit. Meanwhile, some Democrats still aren’t rushing to appear with Sanders in the home stretch. Forstag told me that he’d be campaigning with fellow Montanans, not Sanders, as his race draws to a close. In Texas, James Talarico, the party’s standard-bearer for Senate, did not attend Sanders’s events, and neither did the Democratic candidate for governor, Gina Hinojosa.

Whether the visits by Sanders and his progressive allies will help or hurt Democrats in the Senate battlegrounds should become clear next week. In Maine, Collins sensed an opportunity to seize the political center: As Jackson hosted Sanders and then Ocasio-Cortez, she campaigned with the former Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. “Troy certainly has every right to invite whomever he wants to campaign with him in Maine,” Collins told reporters as she stood alongside Manchin. “So far it’s been from the far left of the party.”

Jackson was betting that even near the end of Sanders’s career, he could still bring out new voters. At the rally in Lewiston, I met Robert LaGrange, a retired cook who had come to see Sanders and told me that he would be voting this year for the first time in his life. “I just didn’t think my vote counted,” he said. Others told me that they were pleasantly surprised to see Sanders during the general election. “People are more willing to listen to him now with all that’s going on,” Mary Gilman, a retired teacher from Belfast, told me. Devyn Campbell, a 26-year-old fisherman from Boothbay, said he was glad to see Democrats such as Jackson campaigning with Sanders instead of “aggressively centrist” surrogates. “It shows the Democratic Party has finally learned its lesson after the last election,” Campbell told me.

[Read: The party that must not be named]

Sanders has also spent time in the past two years working with Run for Something, a group formed during Trump’s first term that is devoted to recruiting first-time candidates. Its president, Amanda Litman, has been among the loudest Democratic voices calling for the party’s older leaders to step aside; she has said that anyone over the age of 75 should not run for another term. But she sees no contradiction in Sanders’s enduring popularity in the middle of his ninth decade. “Should Senator Sanders run for reelection again? Absolutely not,” Litman told me. “That doesn’t mean he isn’t up to the moment, but part of the way I think he is proving himself up to the moment is succession planning.” I asked Litman whether she saw Sanders as passing the torch or holding onto it. She dodged: “He is using the institutional power he has to prepare to pass it,” she replied.

Sanders is now getting a warmer welcome from a party that had long held him at arm’s length—and that he has long refused to fully embrace. This renewed appreciation may have come too late for Sanders’s presidential ambitions, but the Democratic message in the twilight of the Trump era sounds more and more like his own.

Leave the Cheesecake Factory Out of This

2026-10-26T11:03:09-04:00

At 2 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, I found myself in a corner booth at the Cheesecake Factory, emerging from the fog of war.

Before me were a dozen half-empty plates, a cluster of dirty napkins, and several depleted beverages. The food had come in waves, unrelenting, like Normandy. There had been egg rolls, four ways; Roadside Sliders; a sheet tray of Factory Nachos; and something called Chicken Parmesan “Pizza Style.” Coke Zeros, I’d told the waitress at the beginning, and keep ’em coming. There had also been cake. Much cake.

I checked in with myself. I was nauseated, for sure. But another feeling, too, was detectable within the churning volcano of my digestive tract: It was something like joy.

Let’s back up. Over the weekend, Barack Obama criticized President Trump’s schlocky White House aesthetic by saying it looked like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” My first reaction was to laugh. It’s true! The restaurant is over-the-top opulent—as if ancient Egypt and Tuscany had a baby in Las Vegas. Any true Cheesecake Factory fan would certainly appreciate the joke, especially if they remembered the Iraq War and Saddam’s own design sensibilities.

What happened next, though, was disheartening. “Hasn’t eaten dinner that costs less than $250 in years. Has never been in a Cheesecake Factory,” the conservative commentator Scott Jennings wrote on X. “Undefeated at condescending to regular folks.” Other Republicans, and even some Democrats, logged on to police the former president’s tone. This was classic elitist Obama, they argued, making fun of the working man and his primitive taste. It was why Trump won and why Democrats will never win back blue-collar America. My “For You” page filled with commentary about which political party could more confidently claim ideological custody over the Cheesecake Factory.

Immediately, my head began to swirl like the raspberry drizzle in a Georgia Peach cocktail. My rage was congealing, like Cheddar Cheese Fondue on room-temperature Pretzel Bites. Enough! I wanted to scream. Leave the Cheesecake Factory out of your culture wars! Like any number of kitschy, charming American chain restaurants—Rainforest Cafe, Johnny Rockets, and even, God love it, Applebee’s—the Factory can obviously be mocked. But it must be mocked from a place of love. It should exist above partisan politics as a sacred third space, one of the few we Americans have left.

Quickly enough, my frustration gave way to hunger, then introspection, and then to investigatory zeal. Which is how, an hour later, I ended up at the Cheesecake Factory. (I was helped along the path by my editor, who said I could expense everything.)

My friends joined me at the restaurant, a block from the White House. No one asked why we were rushing to get a table. It wasn’t busy—just a handful of tourists and families—and we were seated quickly in a quiet corner, where James Blunt emerged softly from the speaker system. I looked around at the design, which I had seen plenty of times but never quite absorbed before: There were orange faux-marble ceiling beams, trellis-patterned dividers, and columns with faux-tile inlay. The vibe was vaguely Italian, loosely Moorish. There were no gilded trophies or signs, but I could see Obama’s point. I explained his joke to our waitress, who seemed about 20 and well adjusted enough to not be spending time on X. She laughed. “Oh, damn, we caught a stray!” she said. “That’s funny, though. Maybe that’s why we’re slow this morning.”

I knew that I loved the Cheesecake Factory before I ever went inside one. “Too expensive,” my mother would say before steering me toward the food court. But peering through the windows of the restaurant at Jordan Creek Town Center in Des Moines, I was awed by its sumptuousness: the orange, inviting glow from the knobbly chandeliers; the floral frescoes and painted columns; the generous fountain pops and the dense wedges of cake. It wasn’t attempting highbrow elegance but, rather, embracing a kind of madcap largesse, like a zany aunt who wears a lot of bracelets. Inside the Cheesecake Factory, everyone always seemed to be laughing.

[From the May 2026 issue: The best free bread in America]

Trump, Saddam, and the Cheesecake Factory share an unabashed commitment to aesthetic maximalism. To be sure, this commitment is slightly more appealing in a restaurant than in the office of a democratically elected leader of a country founded on the explicit rejection of monarchy. And there is obviously nothing appealing about Saddam’s palaces, or Saddam himself—which is why it is unfair to associate Saddam with the Cheesecake Factory in any way. I didn’t cover the Iraq War personally, being too young, but I can still promise you with a high degree of confidence that there were no Thai Lettuce Wraps on offer at the Babylon Palace. Laughter and togetherness were not, I gather, the order of the day at Qasr al-Nihayah.

Still, by all accounts, Saddam appreciated food—and especially, in spite of everything, American food. He was reportedly a great lover of hamburgers. After he was tried and convicted, but before he was hanged, his guards said he could polish off entire family-size bags of Doritos. (Nacho Cheese, I’d guess.) For breakfast, he apparently delighted in Raisin Bran Crunch. Just like my father.

Saddam might have been a happier, more reasonable dictator if he’d had a Cheesecake Factory nearby (this is what is known in journalism as a comically irrefutable assertion). The thing about the Cheesecake Factory is that the food is not simply good. It is absurdly varied, original, and, at times, totally, gloriously incomprehensible—a delicious crime against nature. The Cheesecake Factory has achieved in menu crafting what Saddam was rarely able to achieve in weapons manufacturing.

When we ordered our favorites yesterday, we tried to imagine what the Butcher of Baghdad might have enjoyed best. We had hamburgers three ways: Double Smash Cheeseburger Bites, burger sliders (which proved suspiciously similar to the Bites), and juicy cheeseburger meat wrapped in a crispy shell. We ate piping-hot macaroni-and-cheese balls, and saucy shredded chicken fried and sculpted into crunchy, almost papery triangles. Would Saddam have ordered the Buffalo Blasts? Of course he would have.

And these were just the appetizers! Later, we ate the Chicken Parm “Pizza Style” that was essentially a flattened chicken pie, topped with a coil of angel-hair pasta. We also had Chicken Madeira; a pile of thick, garlic mashed potatoes; and a grilled branzino, which I ordered because it was the dish that seemed to most resemble Saddam’s reported Iraqi favorite, masgouf, a roasted river fish. (Some other fun facts my friends and I learned in several minutes of Googling: Saddam apparently wrote a popular romance novel about himself. He was once given the key to the city of Detroit. The closest Cheesecake Factory to Baghdad is in Kuwait.)

We punctuated our meal with an alcohol-forward Lava Flow Punch, a Mai Tai, and the Georgia Peach, the Factory’s twist on a cocktail recommended by the rapper Drake. “We’re not driving today, right?” the waitress asked us at one point, looking nervous. We were not. But we were getting dessert. We requested a few of the restaurant’s namesake items, including a sprinkle-speckled Celebration Cheesecake featuring a birthday candle simply because we wanted one, plus a Chocolate Caramelicious Cheesecake With Snickers—a cake so out of control that after a single bite, one of my friends put down her spoon and exclaimed, “This is messed up!”

Indeed it was. Ultimately, it was a meal fit for a dictator, but one to be enjoyed by regular people. This, to me, is the beauty of the Cheesecake Factory. It is America at its utmost—all decadence, performance, and fun. The Cheesecake Factory is for all of us. Can’t we come together on this most American of pastimes—pursuing a deeply uncomfortable yet utterly satisfying food coma—without enlisting in the culture war?

Some Parents Are Rejecting Trump’s Free Money

2026-10-26T07:00:00-04:00

When Eloise, a veteran who lives in Michigan, first heard about Trump Accounts last year, her mind immediately turned to other projects that had borne the name of the businessman turned president: a university, an airline, steaks, casinos. All had gone bust, and several had left creditors or investors holding the bag. Pregnant at the time, she wondered whether opening a Donald Trump–branded investment account would put her first child’s financial future at risk.

“Both my husband and I, our first reaction was like, Oh, this is a scam,” Eloise told me. Despite her initial skepticism, she did further research to determine whether to claim the $1,000 seed money the government was offering to most babies born during Trump’s second term. In the end, she decided not to accept it, opting instead to open a more traditional account to put money away for her child. She said she was skeptical that the Trump Account would work as promised and had a “moralistic” opposition to associating her newborn with the president. “Ultimately, it’s like, the man’s a con man,” said Eloise, who asked to be identified only by her middle name owing to fear of reprisals from the commander in chief.

It is rare for people to turn down free money from the government. But that’s what happens when a polarizing president attaches his name to a taxpayer-supported program originally pitched as a vehicle to help America’s children achieve financial security. An investment idea once championed by Democrats as a pathway to stability for millions of minors is now at risk of becoming yet another casualty of the country’s partisan divide. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say the program has promise. But its greatest obstacle to achieving widespread acceptance may be its name.

Tax advisers and economists told me that the president’s decision to brand the accounts in his image had become a major impediment for potential beneficiaries. “I have had personal experience where people have said, ‘I just can’t go along with something that has that man’s name on it,’” said Tom O’Saben, the director of tax content and government relations for the National Association of Tax Professionals.

[Read: The Santa presidency]

About 7 million children had been signed up for Trump Accounts by late September, before the shift to automatic enrollment. That amounted to about 10 percent of the eligible population. With the pace of enrollment lagging, the Treasury Department late last month made a few regulatory changes aimed at jump-starting things. It shifted from an opt-in system, where signing up required filling out an IRS form, to an automatic system that could enroll more than 60 million eligible minors at once. It also allowed wealthy donors and corporations to contribute individual stocks directly into children’s accounts. The efforts have boosted the program’s reach, but what might have been an uncontroversial policy initiative has still become something of a political loyalty test. In addition to naming the accounts after Trump, lawmakers and regulators have restricted the most generous federal benefits to children born during his second term. They even named the document used to sign up for the account IRS Form 4547, to correspond with the president’s two tenures in office. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called it “the most aptly named tax document of all time” during a fawning press conference in which he hailed “the president’s gift to the American people.”

A survey of pregnant women and new moms conducted for the website BabyCenter in March found that scarcely half planned to open a Trump Account, while 27 percent said they did not plan to do so. A fifth of respondents said they did not know what the account was. The numbers were notable in part because all of the women surveyed would be eligible for the $1,000 seed funding. Even with the automatic enrollment, parents and guardians must claim an account for their children to receive the money.

“I don’t trust Trump and his entire Cabinet whatsoever, and I have concerns that this money is some type of scam—like the money might magically disappear one day,” a California mother whose baby is eligible for the seed funding, told me. She asked that her name not be published, because she is locked in a fight with her relatives about Trump Accounts. She worries that the money will be heavily taxed and will somehow eventually become “more of a burden than an asset.”

O’Saben said he regularly encounters such concerns when speaking with clients at his Illinois tax office. He tries to remind them that even though the program bears Trump’s name, the funds were allocated by Congress and are sourced from American taxpayers. He said the pitch from tax advisers to skeptical parents occasionally goes like this: The president’s multiple corporate bankruptcies and history of skipping payments to contractors should not be a factor in assessing the reliability of the new government-backed investment program.

“If anyone has an image of Donald Trump sitting at his desk and writing out checks to these accounts out of his own personal account, that shouldn’t be the perception,” O’Saben said. “Nor is that what’s happening.”

The Trump Accounts, known within the tax code as 530A accounts, were part of the major tax-cut bill Republicans passed last year. They operate as a new kind of individual retirement account, designed to give children an early pathway to financial security as well as a tangible lesson about the benefits of compound interest. Although the government provides the $1,000 seed money to babies born January 1, 2025, to December 31, 2028, any U.S. citizen minor with a valid Social Security number is eligible for an account. Once a child’s parents verify guardianship and claim the account, relatives, employers, and others can contribute funds to it—up to $5,000 a year. Those funds can currently be invested only in a broad index fund featuring U.S. companies. State governments and wealthy donors can also contribute. The money cannot be accessed until the year the child turns 18, at which point it becomes a traditional IRA. The child then assumes control of the account and can withdraw funds to pay for college, a home purchase, or other approved expenses without penalty, or leave the money in the retirement account. The White House Council of Economic Advisers has estimated that a child born in 2026 could have more than $300,000 in the account by age 18 if he or she receives the annual maximum of contributions each year, assuming average historical returns in the stock market.

Democrats have traditionally supported this kind of government-led incentive to give children a head start on building a nest egg. When he ran for president in 2020, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey made “Baby Bonds” a key part of his economic platform. Under that proposal, the government would grant every child born in the United States a $1,000 savings account at birth and deposit up to $2,000 each year until the child turns 18. Children from low-income families would receive larger contributions. Booker has spoken positively about the Trump Accounts, calling them “children’s investment accounts” in a July press release that said the program had built on his idea. The release noted that the children’s accounts were “also known as Trump Accounts” but otherwise downplayed the president’s involvement. Booker did not respond to my request for comment.

Representative Ayanna Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat who partnered with Booker to introduce the “Baby Bonds” legislation, has taken a different stance on the Trump-branded version. “Trump has stolen this idea and twisted it into a regressive policy that would exacerbate wealth inequality,” she told me. Because Trump Accounts rely primarily on private largesse rather than government support, she said, the ultimate outcome will “help the rich get richer and leave poor children behind.”

Some Democrats have suggested that the accounts might not survive long enough to provide the expected benefits after Trump leaves office. Representative Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, says he would “pass on a Trump account” if given the option, referencing the president’s namesake university that was accused of deceiving thousands of students and failing to deliver promised returns. “Trump University already taught us what happens when his name is on the brochure,” he wrote on X in July. “Does a $25 million settlement ring a bell?” Trump agreed to the settlement a decade ago to resolve lawsuits from students but did not admit wrongdoing.

The White House rejects claims that Trump Accounts will not live up to their promise. “With Trump Accounts, President Trump has secured a signature economic achievement designed to help every American child build savings and support a stronger financial future,” the White House spokesperson Matthew Middleton told me in a statement. “With automatic enrollment now complete and nearly 70 million Trump Accounts created, families have a simpler path to giving their children a jump-start on the American Dream.”

[Read: What the next phase of Trump’s presidency will look like]

During an event in the Oval Office earlier this month to celebrate automatic enrollment, Trump noted that no Democrats had voted for the legislation that created the accounts. He then pivoted to marveling at the fact that some senators had nonetheless offered praise for the program. “I may not like Trump, but I like the Trump Accounts,” the president said, attempting to capture the sentiment among his political opponents. “I have not heard anybody speak badly of it. It’s pretty amazing.” Nearby, a group of middle-school-age children stood holding a sign that read, Thank you for Trump accounts.

In August, California Governor Gavin Newsom called the program “one of the best things” Trump has done as president. He urged constituents not to “fall prey to the politics or the cynicism” and sign up for the accounts regardless of any partisan differences with the president. “It’s not Trump’s money,” he said. “It’s your child’s money.”

Democrats have slammed the tax-cut legislation that created the custodial accounts as a giveaway to the rich at the expense of the working class. Some argue that Trump Accounts do the same. “This $1,000 amounts to a bit of a gimmick,” Darrick Hamilton, an economist and the founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at the New School, told me. Hamilton, an early champion of the “Baby Bonds” program, testified about Trump Accounts at a congressional hearing last month, pointing out that with rising costs, low-income families would be hard-pressed to put any money into the savings accounts after paying their bills.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, is trying to cement the accounts as a major part of the president’s legacy. Frank Bisignano, the Social Security Administration commissioner and IRS chief executive, announced earlier this month that 26 million Trump Accounts had already been funded with $8 billion in investments, nearly double the amount from earlier in October.

The ultimate reach and durability of the program could depend on whether it gains broad acceptance. The California mother said that when family members recently asked for her son’s Social Security number, she thought they needed it for a 529 account set up for the child. She later learned that they had instead used the information to activate the child’s Trump Account and accept the $1,000 seed money. She told me that she considers herself a centrist rather than a Democrat or Republican but had still had opted against claiming the cash herself because “we don’t know what can happen to that money since Trump is so erratic and clearly corrupt.” She has since learned that her in-laws have been depositing monthly dividends from an inheritance into the Trump Account. When she tried to express how uneasy she felt about that and suggested alternative accounts, a minor family drama ensued, proving once again that divisions over Trump can seep into just about any aspect of American life—even free money for a baby.

*Illustration sources: Nora Carol Photography / Getty; Oddphoto / Getty; Yuri Gripas / Abaca / Bloomberg / Getty

Losing the ‘Big-Ass Truck’ Vote

2026-10-26T06:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Brian Finke

Updated at 5:30 p.m. ET on October 26, 2026

Along the highways and farm roads of the southern tip of Texas, the bright-red campaign signs for Eric Flores are impossible to miss. Flores, the Republican candidate for the state’s Thirty-Fourth Congressional District, has Ken-doll looks, with gel-stiff hair and the kind of physique that Donald Trump admires. His bio appears across the top of the sign: Infantry Officer. Prosecutor. Father.

A second set of nearly identical red signs are scattered across the district, only these show Flores with President Trump giving a thumbs-up, sandwiched between the declarations Trump Endorsed and Support ICE! When I first saw these signs, I did a double take. Why would any candidate want to be associated with ICE in the Rio Grande Valley, where the population is more than 90 percent Hispanic? The answer appeared in tiny letters at the bottom: Paid for by Northern Cameron County Democrats.

The attack ad captures how much has changed since Trump won in the Rio Grande Valley two years ago. Hispanic voters—especially men—were a key part of the national coalition that put Trump back in the White House. Trump and Kamala Harris roughly split the votes of Latinos in 2024, after several cycles of Democratic presidential candidates winning the group by double digits. Exit polls in Texas estimated that Trump won Hispanic voters there by 10 percentage points. But that support appears to have evaporated. Nationally, nearly one-fifth of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 now say they do not want Republicans to control Congress, a poll earlier this month found. And a late-summer survey of Hispanic Texans who are likely to vote in the upcoming election showed Democrats with a 2-to-1 advantage.

The Rio Grande Valley had been a Democratic stronghold for decades, and the region is crucial to the party’s midterm-elections strategy. The Texas U.S. Senate race has become the nation’s most expensive contest of 2026, as James Talarico tries to become the first Democrat to win statewide office there in more than 30 years. Recent polls show him in a dead heat with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. For Talarico to win, Democrats need the Rio Grande Valley to swing back, which would make Trump’s 2024 multiracial MAGA coalition look more like a one-off.

For Republicans, a Talarico win would be a political and psychological blow, signaling a new purple era for the state made possible by a population that’s trending more urban and college educated, and less white. GOP candidates, taking their cues from the president, have been framing the election in apocalyptic terms, telling voters that a Republican loss will usher in communism, open borders, and gender anarchy. Paxton frequently says: “If we lose Texas, we lose America.” Elon Musk donated $158 million last month to the main super PAC supporting Senate Republicans to flood the airwaves with negative ads.

[Read: ‘We have not seen ugly yet’]

I spent several days earlier this month driving around the Rio Grande Valley to speak with voters and candidates. I found a fair amount of sympathy for Trump among those who voted for him two years ago. Negative ads and wild social-media claims left others unsure whom to believe. It was clear to me that the region’s political realignment remains in flux. Hispanics in South Texas, especially men, remain up for grabs in a way they weren’t before Trump came along.

Brian Finke for The Atlantic

Representative Vicente Gonzalez, the Democratic incumbent running against Flores, barely held his seat in 2024, winning by less than 3 percentage points. Since then, Republicans have recast the district’s boundaries, pushing farther north into the more conservative-leaning Corpus Christi. Gonzalez, a former trial attorney who was first elected in 2016, is running as a folksy, I-feel-your-pain populist, not a tough guy, with ads that flip between Spanish and English. One shows Gonzalez grilling steaks at a backyard cookout and rationing meager portions to disappointed guests as he blames Trump’s tariffs for high food prices.

I had lunch with Gonzalez and about 20 of his supporters earlier this month at Frijoles, a restaurant in Brownsville. The group was mostly men, a mix of taxi drivers and local business owners who cracked jokes about involuntarily losing weight from smaller hamburgers. Steve Torres, who operates 11 Airbnbs that house engineers working at Musk’s nearby Starbase, told Gonzalez that his electricity bills are soaring. “I’m paying more than $4,000 a month,” said Torres, who voted for Trump. Last year, he closed two restaurants that he owned after struggling to compete with franchises that could better withstand higher costs. Gonzalez told the group that 200 fishing boats are moored along the Gulf Coast in the district because owners can’t turn a profit with diesel at $6 a gallon.

Others at the table grumbled about labor shortages created by Trump’s immigration crackdown. Workers are scared to leave their homes, and ICE sightings—real and imagined—are shared widely on social media. Gonzalez said he knows a restaurant owner who had to close one of his three locations because he didn’t have staff. “I know a farmer with 15,000 acres who only planted half because he doesn’t have enough workers for the harvest,” Gonzalez told the group.

Chuck Rocha, a political consultant who is advising Democrats in the state, told me that lots of voter groups are moving away from Trump, but that Latino men appear to be doing so at a larger rate “because they were some of the biggest swingers to Trump over the past 10 years.” Rocha has helped Democratic candidates create messages appealing to what he calls “the big-ass-truck economy for Latino men.” Those voters want to provide for their families and enjoy the money they earn, Rocha said. “When I was making a TV ad a couple of weeks ago, a guy pointed to his truck in the front yard and said, That fucking thing has become a lawn ornament because I can't afford to drive it,” Rocha said.

[Read: Going hungry in Trump’s economy]

Republicans have been using their fundraising edge to saturate South Texas with ads aimed at the region’s social conservatism. The Flores campaign has put up signs claiming that Gonzalez wants taxpayer-funded “child sex changes” because he voted against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer. His attorney sent the billboard company a cease-and-desist letter demanding removal of the advertisements showing Flores with Trump, The Washington Sun reported.

Brian Finke for The Atlantic

Representative Vicente Gonzalez shakes hands at Luby’s at Sunrise Mall in Brownsville, Texas.

One evening, I walked around a rough-looking colonia knocking on doors with Roel Garza, a 20-year-old business student canvassing for Democrats. Roosters erupted in several yards, and a guy in a welding mask was fixing a cattle trailer with a blowtorch, shooting sparks out of his carport. We sought out residents on Garza’s list who’d voted in previous cycles, avoiding the homes with barking dogs. One man who smelled of alcohol and had bloodshot eyes came out of his trailer to fire up a charcoal grill, and told us he’d voted for Trump but didn’t realize another election was coming up. Rosalina Saenz, a mother of six, told us she voted for Trump last time and was still happy with him. She told Garza that she was open to voting for Democrats in local races, but wasn’t sure who to support, because she’d seen so many ads “trashing” the candidates.

Garza told me that he thought a lot of people backed Trump last time because “they wanted that macho figure.” But they remain open to persuasion. It was just a matter of getting them to connect the administration’s policies with the problems in their lives. “Once people know the issues, they’re smart enough to know how they want to vote,” Garza said.

The home-building industry in South Texas is where Trump’s least popular actions have converged to squeeze men working in construction. High mortgage rates have sapped housing demand, fuel prices are driving up construction costs, and the ICE crackdown has squeezed the labor supply.

Benny Melendez, a general contractor who started his business seven years ago, invited me to a half-built house he is trying to finish outside McAllen. Melendez told me that he used to build on spec, investing his own money in a project with confidence that he’d quickly flip a sale. Now he builds only for clients who pay up front. Building a house used to take him four months, but now it takes eight to 12, he said, because he can’t find enough workers.

Melendez voted for Trump two years ago and doesn’t “hate” him. He was less generous, and more profane, about the Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who orchestrated an ICE crackdown that has become so disruptive that Melendez and other members of his trade group felt like they had to get more involved in politics. At least 15 men he used to work with have been deported, and several of them were arrested by ICE en route to a job site. “If you have a ladder on your truck, they’ll start following you, and they’ll stop you,” Melendez said. “It is difficult for me to hear a 40-, 50-year-old guy cry in private with me, telling me he’s afraid that ICE is going to take him.” Melendez told me that the Rio Grande Valley is best-known for having a low cost of living and being family-oriented. “And now those are the two things being taken away from us,” he said.

Brian Finke for The Atlantic

Benny Melendez, a general contractor who voted for Trump, visits a house he is building.

Brian Finke for The Atlantic

A crew of subcontractors working for Melendez was supposed to install kitchen cabinets at the house that day. They didn’t show. Neither did the guys scheduled to pave the driveway. ICE vehicles had been spotted that morning in the area, and alerts had gone out across radio stations and social media. Most of the ICE officers making the arrests are other Hispanic men who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, Melendez said, and as he watched video clips from construction sites, he recognized a close friend, despite his face mask. “I wrote to my friend and said, Dude, you know I love you, but you’re losing my respect,” he said. Melendez was even more disgusted when the friend told him the pay was too good to quit.

Melendez told me that construction workers across the Rio Grande Valley tune in each morning to the radio show El Zorro y Su Pandilla (“The Fox and His Gang”), which relays reports of ICE sightings. I went to see “El Zorro,” whose real name is Hector Lepe, at his home studio in Donna, where a pickup truck parked in the driveway was plastered with a promotional picture of Lepe and his wife. Lepe told me that callers often dial in to his show describing encounters with ICE and fears of what will happen to their families if they’re deported. It’s made him something of a community therapist for men who don’t have the time or money to see a professional.

Lepe, who grew up in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, said he crossed the border illegally as a young man and spent years as an itinerant farmworker until he broke into broadcasting. He obtained legal status through his marriage and became a U.S. citizen. Even though the Rio Grande Valley is a border community, and has federal immigration officers and agents everywhere, it used to be a “place where you could take your family to the movies, to the circus, to eat, to dance” without fear.

Lepe said that he’s been especially bothered by stories of recently deported tradesmen being reduced to working in low-wage Mexican assembly plants along the border. They’ve been separated from their children in the United States but try to remain as physically close as possible. “Imagine one day you get up to go to work, and they just take you,” Lepe said. He told me that he plans to launch a new project, La Rescata (“The Rescue”), for men in ICE custody to call so that someone will secure their truck and tools until a family member can safely retrieve them. He’s been encouraging listeners to register to vote if they’re eligible, and to show up for Democrats.

Flat and muggy, the Lower Rio Grande Valley is about 250 miles south of San Antonio, and for most of the past century, it was practically an island, with Mexico on one side and millions of acres of Texas cattle ranches and scrublands on the other. Its counties have some of the highest poverty rates in Texas. Their residents were reliable Democratic voters who benefited from the social-welfare policies of the New Deal and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. The RGV was LBJ country.

The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 transformed the Rio Grande Valley into a trade and logistics hub for the manufacturing boom in northern Mexico. Its population doubled to about 1.5 million, and today the McAllen metropolitan area is the state’s fifth largest after Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. Wealthy and middle-class families from northern Mexico began arriving, too, fleeing drug-cartel violence and kidnapping-for-ransom terror. Developers gobbled up farmland to build subdivisions and faux-Mediterranean mansions not far from unincorporated colonias with dusty ranch houses and trailers. For working-class Hispanic families, the Rio Grande Valley offered a South Texas version of the American dream with big houses, cheap gas, and plentiful jobs.

Bobby Pulido, the Democratic candidate in the Fifteenth Congressional District, has been campaigning on nostalgia for that aspirational vision. “The thing that the Democratic Party doesn’t understand is you don’t get anywhere down here calling people ‘the rich,’ as if it’s pejorative,” he told me. “That’s what a lot of people here aspire to be!” We were driving around a wealthy suburb in Edinburg, not far from where Pulido grew up.

[Read: The return of the Democratic manly man]

Pulido, who is 53, was already a celebrity in the Rio Grande Valley, a two-time Latin Grammy–winning Tejano-music star whose 1995 hit “Desvelado” (“Sleepless”) featured a video of him wandering San Francisco, singing of unrequited love. Pulido’s Republican opponent, Representative Monica De La Cruz, dismissed him early in the race as unqualified, a washed-up singer from quinceañera parties. The comment backfired when Pulido started playing for free at local quinceañeras, generating publicity and easy access to large gatherings of potential voters who, Pulido notes, are already celebrating and drinking when he arrives.

Pulido’s family has long straddled music and politics. His father, Roberto, is a Tejano icon; his uncle was the top Hidalgo County executive and another uncle was its district attorney. Pulido studied political science in college, and—like Trump—is a natural showman, campaigning with swagger and a flair for spectacle. Last weekend, he played a concert to a sold-out arena. His opening act was a mariachi band that includes several members who were arrested this year by ICE.

De La Cruz won the district in 2024 by more than 14 points, but the latest polls show Pulido ahead. His campaign has focused on high gas prices, tariffs, and ICE cases that have stirred local outrage. Pulido denounced the actions of ICE last month after officers pepper-sprayed and detained two 17-year-old U.S. citizens, and this month he called attention to the government’s attempt to deport Giovanna Perez, a mother of four whose husband was at Army basic training when she tried to pick up her family’s military-ID cards at a base in Corpus Christi and was turned over to ICE.

Brian Finke for The Atlantic

Bobby Pulido attends a political rally.

I asked Pulido about the shifting politics of immigration enforcement in the Rio Grande Valley, where jobs at Border Patrol and other federal law-enforcement agencies have long been a path to middle-class life, especially for many Hispanic men whose parents immigrated here. Trump’s inroads with Hispanic voters two years ago were partly fueled by frustration with Biden’s inability to contain mass migration, as hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers—mostly from Central and South America—streamed into the region, overwhelming local charities and public services.

“When I was growing up, we were all Tejanos here for the most part. There were not many Mexicans,” Pulido told me. “This was a pass-through area, where people would go up north to look for opportunity.” That changed when drug-war violence sent families fleeing for safety. “Our restaurants got a lot better, because they started bringing in Mexican cuisine. Then, slowly but surely, they brought businesses, they started investing, and, man, we started booming. We started growing, and then something else happened: We started integrating with them,” he said.

The next day, I went to a happy-hour event for De La Cruz at a nearby tavern. There were about 40 people in the room, and De La Cruz, a former insurance agent, told them she got into politics to stand up for Border Patrol agents after a neighbor, the wife of an agent, had asked for donations of stuffed animals to give to children coming across the border without their parents. “I wanted to be their voice. I wanted to stand up,” De La Cruz told the crowd.

Like other Republican candidates, De La Cruz told her supporters that the implications of the midterms would extend far beyond South Texas. “This election is about making sure that your grandchildren, that your great-grandchildren, will have a free country to live in,” she said. The September 11, 2001, attacks were a galvanizing moment in her life, she noted, adding that Democrats had selected “a radical Islamic communist” as mayor of New York City “where the Twin Towers fell,” referring to Zohran Mamdani. The audience responded with cheers. “This election is about saving the soul of our country that was founded on Judeo-Christian values,” she shouted.

More quietly, De La Cruz has tried to distance herself from Trump’s mass-deportation policies, and during an interview after her speech, she told me that she supports “common-sense enforcement policy.” I asked why she voted, along with other Republicans, for two bills that together gave ICE more than $100 billion for immigration enforcement—10 times its annual operation budget. De La Cruz tried to steer the conversation to affordability and grew irritated when I pressed her about the ICE funding. She said she is candid with Republican leaders in Washington and tells them that enforcement should focus on criminals, “not hardworking families,” and that when a constituent needs help with ICE, her support for the Department of Homeland Security gives her clout that Democrats lack. “When I call Washington, D.C., for one of these families, guess what? They pick up the phone,” she told me.

Brian Finke for The Atlantic

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

Her campaign has been attacking Pulido for having played with a former bandmate who was a convicted sex offender. (Pulido says that he hadn’t been aware of the man’s criminal record and cut ties when he learned about the conviction.) Last week, De La Cruz seemed eager to distance herself further from the White House, and was running new ads that tout her as a corruption fighter who will stand up to members of her own party.

The next day, I went to see a Democratic candidate whose win seems like a foregone conclusion: Representative Henry Cuellar, an 11-time incumbent. Cuellar was meeting with supporters at a private residence where plates of cabrito (“kid goat”) were served around a pool. Trump had just called Cuellar a “LOSER,” and “one of the most disloyal political people on Earth!” in a Truth Social post. The president told Republicans to vote for Tano Tijerina, a former Democrat who switched parties in 2024.

In 2024, Cuellar and his wife were indicted on more than a dozen counts of bribery and corruption-related charges for allegedly taking $600,000 from an Azerbaijani energy company and a Mexican bank. Cuellar denied wrongdoing. Trump pardoned him last year, but to the president’s disappointment, Cuellar stayed with the Democratic Party.

Republicans redrew the boundaries of Cuellar’s district last year, but they used Trump’s 2024 margin of victory, rather than the closer margins of local races, to calculate their advantage. As Hispanic voters have swung back toward the Democrats, Cuellar’s district has turned bluer. The latest polls show him with a double-digit lead, and earlier this month the largest Republican House PAC essentially raised a white flag, redirecting $3 million in planned spending to more competitive races.

Cuellar’s district includes Starr County, one of the poorest in the state, which has a Hispanic population of about 97 percent. Trump lost to Hillary Clinton there by 60 points in 2016. Eight years later, Trump won it with almost 58 percent of the vote. It was the first time the county had voted for a Republican president since 1892. Cuellar told me that many of his constituents are men who work in oil and gas, and they once feared Kamala Harris would squeeze the industry. Now they’re getting crushed when they fill up their pickup trucks. “People used to tell me: El Trumpo va muy fuerte. Not anymore. The wind has changed. And the two issues are immigration and the cost of things,” Cuellar said, using the Spanish for “Trump is really strong.”

Cuellar’s district includes the border town of Roma, whose historic downtown is perched on a bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The Trump administration had installed a floating orange barrier in the middle of the channel to block migrants from swimming across. It looked like a giant pool noodle.

Mass crossings into the Rio Grande Valley during Biden’s term galvanized voters for Trump in 2024. At the McAllen Country Club, I met with Judge Richard Cortez, the chief executive for Hidalgo County, who had to deal with the crisis. The golf course was under renovation, so the club looked out on a parched expanse of barren hills and construction machinery. Cortez was one of the South Texas Democrats who had urged the White House to halt illegal border crossings even if it meant angering pro-immigrant groups in the party’s base. “I knew Biden was in trouble with immigration because we were living it,” Cortez told me. He invited Biden to visit—twice, he said—to no avail.

When I asked Cortez whether he thought Trump still retained support among male voters in the district, he introduced me to a group of men drinking whiskey and playing dominoes across the bar. Cortez said they were local big shots in real estate and manufacturing. All four men said they planned to vote Republican. “The Hispanic vote has gotten more conservative here,” one of the men, Henry Temkin, told me. “People are getting a little bit more knowledgeable. They’re not voting straight Democratic like they used to. They’re analyzing what the policies are.” He said he didn’t believe the polls showing Democrats poised to win.

During my visit, I kept thinking back to something that Rocha, the political consultant, had told me: Many of these voters are not “voting for the Democrats because they love the Democrats.” The party has a lot of work to do before the 2028 presidential election, he said.

Many Rio Grande Valley voters who supported Trump in 2024 still backed Democrat candidates in local races downballot. But the Democrats’ legacy advantage is fading in a place where families are acutely sensitive to big changes in federal policies—on immigration, taxes, inflation. Election support will be won and lost based on whether the government is making voters’ lives better, or not.

Jack Rodriquez-Vars contributed research for this story.

This article originally stated that Donald Trump and Joe Biden roughly split the votes of Latinos in 2024. The Democratic presidential nominee that year was Kamala Harris, not Biden.

The Party That Must Not Be Named

2026-10-23T07:00:00-04:00

For most of the past two decades, Ohio Democrats have hobbled home in defeat on Election Day, beaten and battered in a state that used to be a national bellwether. In 2024, Donald Trump ran up an 11-point margin, while Sherrod Brown lost his seat in the Senate. But earlier this month, I found Brown campaigning at Ohio State University, his red L.L.Bean fleece blending in with the students’ scarlet-and-gray apparel. It was the last day for Ohioans to register to vote.

“O-H!” Brown said. The students’ response came automatically: “I-O!” they screamed. Maybe they could try “O-H … I-vote,” Brown suggested with a smile. It didn’t quite catch on. After blowing a 20-point lead against Texas early in the college-football season, the Buckeyes have turned things around—and Democrats are clearly looking to borrow more than a chant from their playbook.

Beating a Republican Party that has dominated the state for the past two decades, they believe, requires speaking directly to voters’ frustrations. Brown, in particular, has focused his campaign on reminding everyone how terrible things are, and is betting that tapping into Ohioans’ anger—spurred by a combination of high prices, an unpopular war, and a flailing president—might just be enough to return to the Senate. Less than two weeks from Election Day, there are signs that the strategy may be working. Most polls show Brown and Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor—a first-time politician and physician who served as director of the Ohio Department of Health during the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic—leading or tied with their GOP rivals.

At Ohio State, Brown’s cheery greeting was prelude to a bleak speech about the future that awaits young Ohioans. The 73-year-old warned that life would be much harder for these students than it was for him when he graduated (Yale, but he went on to earn two master’s degrees from Ohio State) five decades ago. “The system’s rigged,” he began, then listed all of the ways that young people are screwed: Corporations make more money than ever. Their CEOs earn hundreds of times more than the average worker. The dream of homeownership might be entirely out of reach for young Americans. Normal people, Brown kept repeating, just cannot get ahead anymore.

Brown was telling a group of ambitious students at the state’s top-ranked public university that they don’t have a future—or at least not the future they want. And they were captivated. Afterward, when Brown chatted with them individually, some looked like they were talking to a therapist.

Freshman Trent Carson told me he’s already afraid that he won’t be able to find a good job when he graduates. He also worries that his cousins, who are truck drivers, will be out of work if the price of diesel remains near record highs. Josie Speakman, the pink-haired College Democrats president who introduced Brown, voiced a similar pessimism. “It feels like we can't get ahead, despite working harder than ever,” she said. The system is broken, she said, but Brown is going to fix it.

Brown’s speech lacked rhetorical flourishes; he spoke to the students in his signature rasp, offering no major ideas beyond pledging to end the Iran war and get rid of tariffs. Barack Obama he is not, except that Brown is the only Democrat besides Obama to win statewide political office in Ohio since 2006. Brown’s project this year is not to fix Democrats’ tattered image in the state; in fact, Brown seems determined not to remind anyone that he’s a Democrat unless he absolutely has to. His campaign ads target the incumbent, Jon Husted, for taking money from Jeffrey Epstein’s benefactors and supporting AI data centers that raise Ohioans’ electric bills. They do not mention Brown’s party affiliation. Nor does his campaign website. “In large swaths of Ohio, and the country, the Democratic Party’s reputation has become toxic,” Brown wrote in The New Republic last year.

Not that Brown’s political identity is a secret. Husted, who was appointed to the Senate last year by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine after J. D. Vance became vice president, was in elementary school when Brown was first elected to the Ohio legislature. It was the same year Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.

Brown is following the same approach that gave Trump three consecutive victories in Ohio: lean into voters’ grievances and convince them that voting for him is a way to fight back against the rotten status quo. It doesn’t matter if Ohioans think that Democrats are lousy too, so long as they vote for this one candidate who just so happens to be a member of the party.

One Republican strategist told me that in Brown, a candidate who is well known and well liked, Republicans face a formidable opponent amid a terrible political environment for the party. “People obviously do not feel better economically,” the strategist, whose organization did not authorize him to speak publicly about campaign dynamics, said, “so they’re taking it out on us.”

In 2024, Brown was also leading in the polls just weeks before the election, and then lost the Senate seat he had held for nearly two decades to now-Senator Bernie Moreno. So what’s different this year? Brown’s answer is simple: Everything has gotten worse. Life got more expensive. Washington got more corrupt. And because he’s no longer an incumbent, he can somewhat more convincingly claim to be an outsider. “The system’s more rigged than it was,” Brown told me during an interview with a group of reporters after the Ohio State event. “My message hasn’t changed.”

Republicans have responded by attempting to both validate voters’ concerns and suggest that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Ohio Republican Party Chair Alex Triantafilou, a lawyer from the Cincinnati suburbs, is spending the final weeks of the campaign traveling the state in a rented white minivan. Gas prices now average $4.07 per gallon in Ohio, down from $4.48 a month ago, after the legislature approved a 90-day gas-tax holiday—a policy proposed by Acton that Republicans adopted and repackaged into a victory for her Republican competitor, Vivek Ramaswamy.

[Read: Vivek Ramaswamy’s appalling campaign ad]

“I think if there’s any part of the Iran war that poses an issue for voters, it might be with gas prices, but we’ve solved that here in Ohio,” Triantafilou told me this month at a coffee shop near Columbus. He had driven more than 100 miles from Cincinnati that morning for a couple of meetings and was about to turn around and head back. He said he doesn’t think Ohioans are going to vote on how much it costs to fill up their tanks and considers the issue of affordability to be overstated by the media. The stock market is up, he pointed out.

Husted made a similar argument in a pep talk earlier this month to conservative activists going out to canvass in Delaware County, on the northern fringes of Columbus. “We have the most jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in our history,” Husted told reporters before the canvassing event. “We made progress.” He sought to remind voters that inflation was worse a few years ago, when Joe Biden was president and Brown was in the Senate.

Husted is no MAGA warrior. When he spoke to supporters at a barbecue on a farm near Athens recently, he earnestly asked attendees to call loved ones daily until the election and remind them to vote. A former collegiate Division III defensive back, Husted once turned down an opportunity to coach college football, and he still looks like someone who’d rather be outside tossing a ball around. At a rally in Youngstown last week, Trump was captivated by Husted’s athletic past. “I looked at his ass,” Trump said with admiration, “and then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands. He’s got these, like, claws. And I got it, you are a great athlete.”

[Read: All the president’s hotties ]

It was Trump’s second time in Ohio in as many weeks. In a midterm election, when turnout tends to be lower, getting Trump’s biggest fans to go to the polls is the way to win, Ohio Republicans told me. They’re banking on that remaining true, despite the president’s broad unpopularity. “I understand the national environment sucks. In the other states, there are gonna be blue waves,” Michael Hartley, a Republican consultant in the state, told me. But he remains convinced that Ohio favors Republicans and that those Republicans listen to Trump: “If we turn our people out, we win.” But Husted’s choice to tether himself to the president does not guarantee success when 60 percent of Ohioans disapprove of Trump, up from 44 percent at the start of his current term.

Trump is not the only one with an image problem in Ohio. It’s not hard to find prominent Democrats willing—eager, actually—to criticize their own party. And though Democratic self-flagellation is nothing new, what’s different in 2026 is that bashing their own party might be a winning strategy for Democrats in the state.

Ohioans are not voting for Democrats “because they’re Democrats. They’re voting for them because we’re not Trump,” Tim Ryan, a former Democratic representative from the Youngstown area who lost a 2022 Senate race to J. D. Vance, told me. Allison Russo, a former minority leader in Ohio’s state house who is now running for secretary of state, says that the party’s organizing efforts in the state have been “terrible” and that the party’s brand is “crap.” But Russo, who still speaks with a southern drawl from her childhood in Mississippi, isn’t particularly beat up about that.

“I would argue the Republican brand is becoming just as toxic,” Russo told me when we met in Upper Arlington, the Columbus suburb where she lives. She thinks she might win, which surprises even her. “What I thought my chances were at the beginning versus where we are now has shifted dramatically,” she said. A Democrat has not been elected Ohio secretary of state in 20 years.

A decade ago, as Trump barreled toward his first term in the White House, then–First Lady Michelle Obama offered Democrats some advice on how to respond to his divisive brand of politics. It was, she said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, the Obamas’ family motto, a mantra of sorts that she and her husband would repeat to their young daughters as they grew up in the public eye: “When they go low, we go high.” Democrats grabbed onto the slogan, but the Obamas’ strategy of earnest, upbeat politicking did not help the party defeat Trump. In Ohio a decade later, Brown’s campaign all but repudiates the approach. When he tried to go high in the past, he “was shouted down by the ugly,” Diane Valentino, an elementary-school teacher in Delaware County, told me on the first day of early voting. She had arrived at the Delaware County Board of Elections before doors opened at 8 a.m., and stood with a small group of activists who were passing out Democratic flyers and sample ballots from the back of someone’s car. In this year’s election, Valentino felt, Brown had no choice but to “call out the darkness” of Ohio Republicans. “He didn’t strike first, but he had to step up,” Valentino said.

[Read: Jon Ossoff is doing something different]

After Brown cast his ballot that day in Columbus, he stopped to talk with a group of reporters. I asked him whether his campaign has a positive message to voters, or if tapping into frustration is the driving force heading into the final weeks of the campaign. “The positive message for my campaign,” Brown said, is, “I don’t see politics as left or right. I see it as whose side you’re on.” Not a Democrat—just on your side.

Obama himself is the one massive exception to the “don’t remind people you’re a Democrat” strategy. This weekend, the former president will make his first visit to Ohio since 2018, the last time Brown won. When Obama announced that he would speak at a rally with Brown and Acton in Cleveland, he said that he wants to elect “Democrats up and down the ballot.” That includes Brown—just don’t expect him to say so.

A Congressional District Where the Iran War Is Personal

2026-10-22T14:18:03-04:00

John Quillin thought America’s Middle Eastern wars were safely in the past. He spent two decades in the Navy, enlisting not long before the September 11 attacks and retiring as a chief petty officer about 18 months after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan. “Now we’re right back in it,” he told me, “and it’s taking a huge toll on everybody.”

I met Quillin as he handed out Democratic sample ballots outside an early-voting location in Chesapeake, Virginia. He is one of more than 80,000 veterans—along with more than 30,000 active-duty and reserve personnel—who live in Virginia’s Second Congressional District, where the debate over the Iran war is about far more than rising gas prices. The district wraps around Naval Station Norfolk, home of the Navy’s Fleet Forces Command. Since 2008, the seat has toggled between the major parties four times, and the results have mirrored overall House control. Polls show a tight race with money pouring in from both sides.

Both Jen Kiggans, the Republican incumbent, and Elaine Luria, the Democratic challenger, are veterans who have centered their campaigns on the military, but in very different ways. Luria, a former Navy commander, is telling voters that the conflict in Iran has needlessly weakened the military and is endangering strategic goals in other parts of the world. Iran is a war of choice, she argues, that is taking a toll on service members through extended deployments, even as costs balloon and the timeline for bringing it to a close keeps shifting. People are worried about their friends and family members on active duty, she told me, and are “concerned about the fact that we are running the fleet into the ground.”

Kiggans, a former naval-helicopter pilot, presents herself as a candidate who can work with the opposing party, and she has broken with the administration to champion an offshore wind development. But she is putting no distance between herself and Trump on the war, echoing his insistence that America must prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. Kiggans told the Associated Press last week that Luria has “chosen the side of Iran” and that “it’s like the Democrats are now siding with the Iranians and not standing with our military.”

Many Republican voters in the district told me they agree with her support for Trump’s war, and are willing to endure temporary hardships if it means long-term success. Lance Lesher, a Navy veteran and the chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia Beach, told me that Iran has been at war with the United States since the country’s 1979 revolution—and that Trump was right to act when he did.

“I mean, high prices for gasoline—no one likes that,” the 59-year-old Lesher told me. “I think most people, though, at least most older people, have the perspective—is it worth it? Is it worth paying $5 a gallon for gasoline for six months for Iran to not have a nuclear weapon?”

Luria is wagering that undecided voters who are now paying more to fill their gas tanks and grocery carts won’t agree with that premise. At a meet and greet in Suffolk, Elisha Harris, a pioneering local football coach, started a call-and-response that summed up Luria’s pitch: “Gas was three-fifty. Now it’s over four. Diesel hit a record. We can’t take much more. Every fill-up’s a drain—”

“It ain’t been the same, without Elaine!” the crowd responded.

[Read: Trump is considering a plan to strike Iran before the midterms]

Luria was first elected in 2018, turning the district blue amid an anti-Trump wave. She held the seat two years later, but Kiggans then beat her by three points in 2022 after tying the Democrat to the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Luria is now hoping to return the favor, by capitalizing on the unpopularity of Trump’s foreign policy.

Kiggans sits on the House Armed Services Committee, which has not held a public hearing on the Iran war since May 19. Calls for greater House oversight surged this spring amid reports of deteriorating conditions aboard aircraft carriers, including the Norfolk-based USS Gerald Ford, which took part in the opening days of the conflict. The carrier returned to Virginia in May after an 11-month deployment that was beset by plumbing issues and a fire that left hundreds of sailors without a place to sleep. When asked in March about the ship’s reported maintenance issues, Kiggans told a local news station that she was concerned about them, but that “this is not Carnival Cruise—this is the U.S. Navy.” It’s a line Luria repeats often, claiming that Kiggans has failed to provide oversight as the war degrades military readiness and needlessly endangers lives.

“I know the number of veterans in this room who have served in uniform, like I have. And we have our sailors deploying in harm’s way,” Luria told the crowd in Suffolk. “The lack of sensitivity and compassion, her inability, on the Armed Services Committee, to stand up and ask tough questions of our military leadership—I mean, the silence is deafening.”

The idea that Congress has abdicated oversight of the military repeatedly came up in my conversations with Democratic voters across the district. Many said that they were proud of their service and hold the military in the highest regard, but that patriotism also means criticizing the country and pointing out its mistakes. Mike Carter, who spent years flying F/A-18 Super Hornets, told me he’d come to the Luria event because he worried that the military and country were losing global respect. Marsha Simmons, who cast an early ballot for Luria, told me that her husband served in the Navy, and she worried that today’s Department of Defense was not taking national security seriously enough. Donna Grieco said that she loved her eight years working as a Navy nurse, and that the experience made her especially concerned about the long deployments sailors are enduring. “I don’t agree with the war,” she told me. “And I feel like the demands we are putting on our sailors—it’s not necessary.”

Not every veteran sees it that way. Over Mike Cassidy’s 22-year Navy career, he sailed the Baltic Sea and helped fight ISIS. He was deployed five times to the Persian Gulf. Cassidy’s service convinced him that American adversaries such as Iran need to be confronted. “I know what we’ve been up against in that part of the world,” he told me at a Republican Party barbecue. “I can tell you that we’re doing the right thing.”

[Read: Trump is preparing for a long war]

At 9 a.m. on a Saturday, the Lockside Bar and Grill in Chesapeake was packed with people decked out in glittery hats and red, white, and blue. Kiggans stood at a podium flanked by two American flags. “My oldest just had his first flight in an F/A-18 this week!” she announced. People whooped. “So many of us have family members that serve, and have kids that we’re leaving this great country to,” she went on. “It is the greatest country in the world. We’ve got to keep it that way.”

At times, the rally seemed less about Kiggans than about Trump. His core supporters cheered when Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio took the stage and recited a list of MAGA world’s greatest hits: the Steele dossier, Jack Smith, Fani Willis. “Thanks for helping the president,” Jordan said to applause. “Talk about someone doing what he said he would do.”

Kiggans has voted six times against resolutions that would have directed Trump to end the war with Iran. She declined an interview request, but in April, she said on a conservative talk-radio show that she “couldn’t be a stauncher supporter” of military action against Iran. When I asked the campaign whether she still held that position, Kiggans said in a statement that she wants the war to end quickly, but “Iran has been an enemy of the United States for decades and has been the sponsor of terrorism and terrorists around the world who have killed or injured thousands of Americans. Iran can never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.”

The race will likely hinge on a small number of voters who have not yet made up their mind. Kiggans knows this and has avoided uncomfortable questions about how the war is going. At an event in Virginia Beach this month with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kiggans was asked by a reporter if the war has had an impact on her campaign. A staff member quickly cut in: “We’re not going to talk about that.”

*Illustration sources: Peter Casey / The Virginian-Pilot / Tribune News Service / Getty; Nathan Howard / Getty; AFP / Getty; Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty.

What the U.S. Is Really Doing in Venezuela

2026-10-22T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Lynsey Addario

Updated at 11:08 a.m. ET on October 27, 2026

I.

We drifted past abandoned drilling platforms, ghostly remnants of better days. Cormorants perched on the metal bars of broken oil rigs, drying their wings in the sun. When we reached a swirling, brown-green oil slick, Carlos slowed his motor. Raw oil could damage the engine, he said, and we’d already had to return to shore once that day to swap boats. We floated for a bit. Carlos, who makes his living as a fisherman on Lake Maracaibo, pointed out some surface bubbles, evidence of a leaky pipeline beneath the water. There was a strong smell of gas. He lit a cigarette anyway and laughed.

That morning, Carlos and his team had caught about 30 pounds of fish in the lake, a brackish estuary where oil was discovered more than a century ago. The subsequent boom built the cities of Caracas and Maracaibo, three generations of wealth, and four decades of democracy. A century later, tens of billions of barrels’ worth of reserves remain beneath the water. Some of them might now be controlled by the American government.

They will not be easy to extract. After the boom came the bust, at first slowly and then very fast. Hugo Chávez, who ruled the country as a leftist authoritarian from 1999 to 2013, and then Nicolás Maduro, the autocrat who succeeded Chávez and ran the country until he was removed by an American military operation early this year, undermined the industry, chasing away engineers and impoverishing workers. Even as they said they were building “Bolivarian socialism,” they removed benefits, lowered salaries, and created a capricious, repressive regime. Millions of people left the country.

Most American and European companies left too. The Russian and Chinese companies that arrived to replace them invested very little. Lake Maracaibo, the largest body of water in South America, also became one of the largest environmental disasters in South America. Two decades of neglect produced leaks, spills, poisoned water, and the ghostly drilling platforms I saw from the fishing boat. Fishermen sometimes rinse their crabs and shrimp with gasoline to remove the crude oil. All of their nets turn brown.

Billions of dollars of investment will be needed to remediate the site and recover more oil. In the meantime, people who live around the lake, like millions of other Venezuelans, work hard and earn very little. Their fish have to be sold immediately, because electricity is unpredictable and freezers are thus unreliable. Rapid inflation—20 percent in July, an annualized rate of 783 percent—has made everything unaffordable. In a Caracas market, I found prices and exchange rates written on whiteboards, because they change every day.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

A collapsed high-voltage transmission tower in Lake Maracaibo, amid other deteriorating oil and electrical infrastructure

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Fishermen and their families live along the polluted shores of the lake, the largest body of water in South America—and one of the continent’s largest environmental disasters.

The state is absent, or indifferent. Carlos pointed to a scar on his leg that he said was an old gunshot wound, the souvenir of an assault by one of the pirates who control the lake: “If you don’t pay them, they kill you and take your boat.” The coast guard is supposed to patrol the lake, he said, but it is rarely there.

The oil industry offers few well-paying jobs. At a lakeside town, its beaches blackened by oil, Francisco, a former boat mechanic at the state oil company⁠—Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA—told me he had quit because he got tired of not having the right tools and spare parts. One of Francisco’s neighbors, Iliana, told me her husband had quit PDVSA too, after his salary plummeted from $50 a day to just a few cents a day. He now works for a Russian company that pays about $35 a day, but he has to spend most nights sleeping on the drilling platform.

From a great distance—Washington, say, or Mar-a-Lago⁠—Venezuela is sometimes described as a bonanza for America, a trove of riches. On January 3, the day that the U.S. military captured Maduro, Donald Trump promised that it would be. “We’ll run it properly; we’ll run it professionally,” he said at a press conference that day. “We’ll have the greatest oil companies in the world going and invest billions and billions of dollars, and take out money, use that money in Venezuela, and the biggest beneficiary are gonna be the people of Venezuela.” But at that same press conference, he also announced that he would be working with a new president: Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s deputy and a leading member of the regime that had caused the destruction in the first place. He dismissed the country’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado—who was the true winner of Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election—as a “nice woman” who “doesn’t have the respect within the country.”

In Venezuela, this language sounded jarring. Since then, it has become even more confusing, because it is so at odds with reality. When I asked people living right next to some of Venezuela’s largest oil fields whether Rodríguez had made any difference to the industry or the country, they laughed or sneered. Iliana told me, “People thought that things would change, but in reality nothing changed.” José, another fisherman who used to work for PDVSA, had a darker view: “The gringos came to rob everything—the oil, the minerals. We are rich in everything, but here, we don’t have anything.” Later, a local oil engineer told me that none of the American agreements matters anyway, because the Venezuelan government is illegitimate and so “nothing is legal.”

These opinions are widely shared. Perhaps surprisingly, given the disparate worlds they inhabit, the views of Maracaibo fishermen are not far from those of Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard economist who served decades ago in a very different Venezuelan government, one that opened the country’s natural resources to foreign investment through a transparent process. In the 1990s, PDVSA explained to legislators, foreign companies, and the public what it was doing. Contracts were made public. Money produced by oil investments long funded social programs, including scholarships to study at American universities. These produced warm feelings toward America among educated Venezuelans that outlasted years of Chavista anti-gringo propaganda.

The political and business relationship now being forged between America and Venezuela is completely different. It’s not a relationship of two equals, obviously. But nor is it exactly an occupation. Some have compared it to the Anglo-Persian oil deal of the early 20th century, or the 1905 treaty that gave the U.S. government control over the customs service of the Dominican Republic, but neither of those analogies is quite apt. Searching for a model or a reference point, I asked Hausmann how he would describe it. “A coalition of two kleptocracies,” he said.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Clauimar Aguiar lives beside an oil field in Cabimas, Venezuela, where vast petroleum reserves coexist with poverty and failing infrastructure.

II.

What happens to Venezuelan oil when it is pumped out of the ground? Where does the money go afterward? And how did that change following Trump’s announcement, on August 28, of “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY”? None of these questions has a simple answer. Over several days in Caracas and Madrid (where much of the Venezuelan opposition currently resides), and in telephone calls to Boston and Houston, I asked six people—two formerly in the oil industry, two still in the industry, and two in academia—to explain the details. All of them struggled to do so. One of them, an industry executive in Caracas who would speak only off the record, covered four pages of my notebook in diagrams and drawings, taking more than an hour and a half to explain how the previous legal system had worked, how a hydrocarbon law had been rewritten, how the new deals were unfolding and the old deals were being revised.

Perhaps the complexity is the point: Maybe the situation is hard to understand because neither the Rodríguez regime nor the Trump administration really wants anyone to understand it. Hausmann told me the Venezuelan constitution says that “anything of national interest should be approved by parliament, by the National Assembly. They haven’t done that, and so right now they are protecting themselves through obscurity.”

Despite the obfuscation, some of what Trump says is true: The U.S. really is controlling the sale of “millions and millions of barrels of oil” in Venezuela, as well as the sale of gold and other minerals. As a condition of lifting the economic sanctions that the U.S. had previously imposed on the country, all royalties and taxes from licensed companies are deposited into a special account originally set up in Qatar and later moved to Citibank. Industry analysts believe that more than $13 billion worth of oil has been sold since January, but that number is speculative. At a congressional hearing on September 15, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent refused to confirm it. Repeated requests from congressional Democrats for more information have also received inadequate responses.

Some of the funds have been returned to the Venezuelan government. At another congressional hearing, a State Department official told legislators that money was being provided to pay “the salaries of government workers in Venezuela,” among other things. Hard currency is also made available to Venezuelan banks. But although there is no evidence that money is being stolen or siphoned off to pay for other Trump-administration projects, there is also no evidence that it is not being stolen or siphoned off. Ostensibly, the accounting firm KPMG is auditing the process, but despite requests from Democrats in Congress, an audit was not released by the October 8 deadline. In his congressional appearance, Bessent did not say if or when it would be.

Opacity has consequences. Partly thanks to this system, the major new investments necessary for a real recovery have been slow in coming. The old oil fields I saw near Maracaibo, as well as the untouched reserves in the Orinoco River belt, will require billions of dollars and very long time horizons to develop or redevelop. Any company planning such a project needs to believe that its contracts, and the political and social stability required to preserve them, will last for a decade or more. Francisco Monaldi, an oil-industry analyst at Rice University, told me that although the new hydrocarbon law, passed on January 29 under American pressure, is an improvement, it still affords Venezuela’s Ministry of Oil the flexibility “to give you the best deal in Latin America, or the worst”—and then to change the terms of that deal later if it chooses. No wonder the current situation—an unpopular, illegitimate Venezuelan president propped up by an unpredictable and term-limited U.S. president—makes big companies nervous.

If the oil companies would prefer an elected Venezuelan president and a stable political system, this is not a matter of benign, high-minded principle. Oil executives “are not in the business of charity; these are not nuns,” Monaldi said. “But these guys know when things are being done in a way that will eventually create trouble for them.” With the exception of Chevron, which remained in Venezuela throughout the Chávez-Maduro era and is still reinvesting the revenues it earns in the country (although nothing more), most large companies have merely sent envoys to Caracas, signed memorandums of understanding, and returned home. Gold refiners are equally ambivalent about processing the Venezuelan gold bars that a Trump-friendly company removed from the country, according to The New York Times, because the gold was likely mined by criminal organizations and the industry has strict rules about proof of origin.

Trump’s “biggest oil deal in world history” seems to have been designed to encourage American companies to start drilling faster and, more important for him, to distract from the oil crisis created by his war in Iran. But the announcement may have had the opposite effect because the deal, at least as it has been described in public, is even more opaque than the existing arrangement, and is even more unpopular. After the announcement, thousands of people left angry messages on the U.S. embassy’s social-media pages, reflecting both fury and surprise. And no wonder: The U.S. administration’s main business partner is a company called North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), whose notorious CEO, Alejandro Betancourt, is a household name in Venezuela. Betancourt has been investigated for money laundering in multiple countries, including the United States, Switzerland, and Spain. (He has previously denied wrongdoing and has never been charged with a crime.) After being arrested at London’s Charing Cross Station on a Swiss warrant in November 2025, he was stuck in England for more than six months while the extradition case proceeded. Spanish police searched his estate outside Madrid as recently as August 28. The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration pressured Swiss officials to halt an investigation and lift an extradition request, seemingly in order to allow Betancourt to travel to the U.S. and Venezuela and close the deal.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Venezuelans play dominoes by flashlight during a rolling blackout in Maracaibo. Although the region sits atop some of the country’s largest oil and gas reserves, many residents spend much of the day without electricity.

Inside the country, Betancourt is infamous for bungling an upgrade of the electricity grid, overcharging for used, poor-quality equipment and enriching himself in the process. People openly blame him for blackouts and power cuts that continue to this day. An opposition leader told me that he’d been hearing Betancourt’s name cited as an example of regime corruption since he was a teenager. The fishermen in Lake Maracaibo knew exactly who he was, and everyone else I met did too. An analyst in Madrid told me that everything he thought he understood about U.S. intentions in Venezuela had been upended by the deal with Betancourt.

Like the system of oil payments, the deal with Betancourt is also suspiciously difficult to describe. In essence, the Venezuelan government has allocated 17 oil fields to NABEP, a company originally created with an American businessman, Harry Sargeant. According to the White House, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital has acquired not ownership but “a 35% equity stake in its corporate parent”; others explained that the acquisition is a share in a contract, but this is again uncertain. The State Department seems to get the right to buy 20 percent of NABEP’s oil at production cost—whatever that means—as well as the first right of refusal on the other 80 percent. Some analysts told me they fear that the Rodríguez regime, to stay in power, will sell its oil below market prices.

No money was exchanged, and none has been invested. The Pentagon and NABEP are now responsible for attracting people who actually know how to drill oil to Venezuela—including to places without roads or infrastructure of any kind. I asked several oil analysts and economists, inside and outside the country, if the Trump administration and Betancourt could simply give drilling contracts to their respective friend groups in America and Venezuela. They all said yes.

A few people did try to see a glass half full. If more oil is pumped, then at least some money will eventually reach people, for example, which is better than no money. “It’s a process,” said Enrique Novoa, the former president of the Venezuelan Petroleum Chamber. “Tomorrow we hope to work a little bit better than today.” But even among those trying to look favorably on the deal, everyone I met was either surprised or confused that the United States—a longtime critic of the Marxist language and statist practices of the Chávez and Maduro regimes—had so quickly and enthusiastically embraced the corrupt habits, and the corrupt personnel, of the Chavista elite.

At the end of the day I spent floating through the postapocalyptic landscape of Lake Maracaibo, I met Juan Pablo Guanipa, one of the best-known opposition leaders in Venezuela. Guanipa, who lives in Maracaibo, was released in February after eight months in prison. He was detained on the street the next day, placed under house arrest, and then released again. He is still followed by the Venezuelan security service wherever he goes. Sitting in a room filled with books, we talked about the oil deal, the poor economy, the rising frustrations of Venezuelans.

I asked him whether he found the new union between Americans and Chavistas peculiar. Of course he did, he told me. Most perplexing to him, it seemed, was the absence of Yankee pragmatism, the most basic thing Venezuelans expected of Americans. At the very least, American capitalists should know about the rule of law. “I never thought we would reach a moment when we would have to convince the United States of the obvious—that Venezuela needs a legitimate government, that we need elections, and that we need change.”

III.

There is a straightforward way for Venezuela to acquire a legitimate government, one that would reassure both oil companies and ordinary people that a stable political and social order will endure: The regime could hold an election or a referendum, and let people choose the next president.

The U.S. administration, which not only controls Venezuela’s most important sources of income but also holds the threat of further U.S. military action over the heads of Maduro’s former henchmen, could help make this happen. Indeed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said that it will. He has described a three-stage process: stabilization, recovery, and transition. With American encouragement, the regime and a part of the opposition—members of the last legislature recognized as legitimate, elected in 2015—have begun transition negotiations. Several people involved told me that although slow, the negotiations have been productive. In the first round, in August, discussions focused on reforming the supreme court, which slavishly followed the demands of the Maduro government, and which must be independent to ensure that the regime does not refuse to recognize an election result, as it has done in the past.

Unfortunately, many still aren’t convinced that the transition is real. In large part, this is because Trump’s description of Venezuela—a country where he says people are “really happy” and “dancing in the streets”—differs so dramatically from the reality they can see. But it’s also because Trump seems so enthusiastic about a status quo that includes Betancourt, Rodríguez, and a host of other figures from the past. A few days after meeting with Rodríguez on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, he described her as “very nice, very terrific,” without naming a date for elections. On September 2, when a reporter asked him about Venezuelan elections, Trump said, “I just don’t think they’re ready yet. You know, it’s very new.”

Is democracy in Venezuela “new”? Are Venezuelans “not ready”? This language sounds just as strange and discordant to Venezuelans as the talk of great wealth supposedly flowing in their direction. After all, they did have a presidential election, and not that long ago. In July 2024, when Rodríguez was the vice president, Maduro was the regime’s candidate. He lost decisively, even after stacking the cards in his favor. In the run-up to the vote, his regime disqualified María Corina Machado, who had been selected in a national primary, a decision she called “judicial criminality.” They also nixed her first-choice substitute before finally allowing Edmundo González, a retired diplomat, to run as her surrogate. Then they harassed his supporters, used state media to insult and demean them, and even arrested them for fake crimes.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Venezuelan security forces form a barricade on the streets leading to Miraflores, the presidential palace in Caracas, as anti-government protesters demand the release of political prisoners. More than 320 remained incarcerated as of early October.

González won a landslide victory anyway, and the opposition could prove it. Anticipating that the regime might try to falsify the results, Machado and her team mobilized more than 600,000 volunteers to monitor polling stations and report irregularities using secure messaging apps. They collected and scanned the tally sheets produced by each voting machine, and uploaded them to a secure website, sometimes at great personal risk. In Antímano and La Vega, two barrios in western Caracas, I met community activists who regaled me with stories of that campaign. I was told of women who hid tally sheets in their underwear, of a man who stashed one underneath his toupee, of others who dressed as Maduro supporters to avoid being searched at the doors of polling stations. One local community leader told me that his 8-year-old son had gone around to polling stations on his bicycle and collected the printouts, knowing no one would suspect a child. Maybe Trump is “not ready” for democracy, but I met people in Antímano and La Vega who have fought for it longer and harder than most Americans.

The regime never published its own evidence. Instead, it declared victory and launched one of the most brutal repression campaigns in the country’s history. Security and paramilitary forces fanned out across the country, arresting thousands of people and killing dozens. Independent organizations, including humanitarian groups, were effectively banned.

If Venezuelans aren’t convinced that their country is making progress toward democracy, it’s also because the apparatus that carried out this wave of repression is still in place. Numbers differ, depending on who counts as a political prisoner, but as of early October, 920 to 1,110 of them have been released since January, while more than 320 remain incarcerated. I met some of their relatives, camped outside the U.S. embassy because they had given up on their own government and hoped that the Americans would help them. “Marco Rubio says there are no political prisoners,” one of them told me. “But the political prisoners are still behind bars.” As of early September, no one from the U.S. delegation had acknowledged or interacted with the families. These kinds of protesters still face risks too: In the second week of September, a man who had joined a march organized by the prisoners’ families was arrested, in public view, by men without uniforms.

Even among the political prisoners who have been released, hundreds are still, like Juan Pablo Guanipa, constantly followed, or else forced to report regularly at a courthouse, as if the regime were reminding them that they are only temporarily free. Perkins Rocha, a lawyer who was one of the opposition campaign’s representatives before the electoral council in 2024, is still under house arrest. Seized off the street a month after the election, Rocha, a bespectacled scholar of constitutional law, was charged with terrorism, treason, criminal association, incitement to hatred, and conspiracy. He was taken to the country’s most notorious prison, El Helicoide, where he spent two weeks in handcuffs, his head sometimes covered by a hood. After that, he spent many months in concrete rooms with no windows, sometimes shared by up to 20 people. Since his release in February, he has remained at home with an ankle bracelet, which he jokes is like “prison but with sunlight.” To visit him in his Caracas apartment, I had to check in with the policemen who stand in the lobby of his building and beside the elevator outside his front door. One of them took my name and wrote it on his hand.

But the most important reason Venezuelans doubt the prospects of a democratic transition is the long absence of Machado, the opposition leader. Machado went into hiding after the election, at an unknown location inside Venezuela. In December 2025, she finally escaped the country, taking a fishing boat to Curaçao, the Dutch island territory off the coast of Venezuela, before flying to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

A protester holds a sign that says “Come back already Mari!”—a reference to the opposition leader, María Corina Machado.

In January of this year, Machado visited Trump at the White House, and she made what seemed to be a bid to win his favor, presenting him with her Nobel medal in appreciation of his “unique commitment” to Venezuelan freedom. But if she hoped that this would persuade him to throw American power behind her and the country’s democratic opposition, that doesn’t seem to have worked: Nearly a year later, Trump has not proposed a date for an election and Machado has remained stuck abroad, first in Washington, D.C., then in Panama.

Initially, the U.S. administration advised her not to go back: Her safety could not be guaranteed. Later, her attempts to return were blocked, and not only by the Rodríguez regime. Rubio did explicitly say—albeit in a Spanish-language interview, which Venezuelans would understand but his boss would not—that Machado has “every right to enter her country whenever she wants to return.” But private planes she has chartered have been refused landing rights, even by Curaçao and Aruba, another Dutch territory. A boat she hired mysteriously developed “engine trouble.” A commercial airline would not let her board.

Multiple people in Caracas told me that U.S. diplomats in the city describe Machado as a “problem.” Indeed, if the Trump administration’s most important goal is to cement oil deals with corrupt figures linked to Rodríguez, then perhaps she is. Machado has been clearer than others about the need to hold the regime accountable for past crimes. She has long argued that private companies should play a bigger role in the Venezuelan economy, a position that, ironically, puts her at odds with those in the U.S. administration who want to work with the Venezuelan state to extract resources.

I spoke with her while she was in Panama in early September, and she told me that her main concern, other than returning home, is that too many people, Americans included, do not “understand at all what is going on in Venezuela. Everything I hear is about conventional formulas for transition that take into account everyone’s interests and opinions except the people’s, as if the people did not matter.”

Both in Caracas and in Washington, there are clearly actors who aren’t that interested in “the people” or what they want. But if the U.S. government wants to carry out a transition without Machado, the attempt will backfire. If Betancourt is the country’s most famous symbol of past misrule and corruption, Machado remains the most famous symbol of a democratic future. Without her, no election will be legitimate, and legitimacy is a necessary part of ending the Venezuelan crisis. “There are 1.1 million Venezuelans living in the United States, and 65 percent are willing to come back,” Machado told me. “But they are not going to do it while the same regime that expelled them in the first place is still in power.” Legitimacy is required for the construction of a Venezuelan military that can cooperate with the U.S. in the fight against criminal networks in the region, instead of being part of them. And again, legitimacy is the missing ingredient in oil-market reform, the insurance that companies need before they will make long-term investments.

Even if Machado returns (as perhaps she will have done by the time you are reading this article), nobody imagines that the country’s path will be straightforward. In a busy open-plan office, crowded with people talking over small plastic cups of black coffee, I met Henry Alviárez, the national coordinator of Vente, Machado’s political party. Alviárez told me that after he was released from prison in February, Vente had to “rebuild everything—regroup, recover the organization, and recover our direction.” Vente started with 55,000 people, Alviárez said, and was up to 150,000 in September: “We now have structures throughout the country and in all municipalities, and according to the polls, we are the leading party in Venezuela.” It is planning to launch a national debate—using online platforms, social media, and town halls—about what Machado calls a “grand national agreement” to amend the constitution, the educational system, the health-care system, and more. Vente isn’t asking for an immediate election. But the party’s leaders at least want to know when one will take place so that they can plan.

Some do believe they should wait: wait for the influence of the Rodríguez regime to wane further; wait for the Trump administration to lose power; wait for the congressional Democrats and the Republicans who support Venezuelan democracy to take action; wait for more oil to start flowing. There are risks to a transition, after all. No one can be sure when the economy will start growing again, and a new government could be blamed if it doesn’t. But if waiting seemed like a good strategy six months ago, the risks are increasing quickly. Everything here looks normal, Alviárez said, gesturing at the people drinking coffee. But appearances of normality are deceptive: “There is a feeling of exhaustion and a desire for change that can only be channeled through a clear leadership and a clear objective. It can only be resolved if people finally have a date for elections. That could prevent a social explosion.”

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Oil pollution is so pervasive in Lake Maracaibo that fishermen sometimes rinse their catch with gasoline to remove the crude oil.

Some people, he told me, without naming names, “have said that María Corina is coming to destabilize the country. No. She is coming to channel that anger and conduct it toward a civic, peaceful process: an election.” After fighting Chavistas and their Russian, Iranian, and Cuban allies for so long, nobody in Venezuela’s historically pro-American democratic opposition ever expected a U.S. administration to stand in their way. But if it does, they are preparing to fight that obstacle too.

IV.

On June 24, two earthquakes shook Caracas, the seaside city of La Guaira, and several smaller towns along the coast. Suddenly, the risks of waiting became clear.

Within minutes of the quakes, several large apartment buildings collapsed, including a public-housing complex built by the Chávez regime for victims of a 1999 mudslide. Tens of thousands of other buildings were damaged. At least 6,500 people died (the full number is still unknown), more than 16,800 were injured, and about 17,000 became homeless.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

A 2-year-old child bathes outside her family’s tent at a camp for people displaced by the earthquakes, which left more than 17,000 Venezuelans homeless.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Two sisters, both sick with chickenpox, live in a makeshift shelter at a beachside camp for displaced people. Heavy rains flooded the shelter the night before.

Some governments, even some authoritarian governments, rally during a crisis. In the face of this tragedy, the Venezuelan regime froze. Rodríguez has enough police officers to guard Perkins Rocha’s elevator. But she did not have enough soldiers, police, or rescue workers to dig Venezuelans out of the rubble, to offer people medical help and food, or to find homes for them in the days that followed.

I visited La Guaira, the city most badly affected, the week before school was scheduled to begin. No one I met in the refugee camps knew where their children were supposed to go, or whether studies would resume at all this year. One local school had been taken over by refugees who had no intention of relinquishing it, because they still had nowhere else to live. On the site of the collapsed public-housing complex, where bulldozers had finally arrived to take away the rubble, I met Ellie Solano, a bereaved mother who asked the men with machines to leave one part of the debris untouched, because she knew it lay on top of a sports field where her son had been playing. Two months after the disaster, she was searching for his corpse, digging in the early mornings and in the evenings, when it wasn’t too hot.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Volunteers and relatives dig through rubble in search of the bodies of missing loved ones after back-to-back earthquakes flattened entire neighborhoods.

Over the course of a day in La Guaira, I asked everyone I met how long it had taken for a government official to offer help after the earthquake. Some said four days. Some said five. Some thought it had been more. “We didn’t see policemen. No army, no nothing,” one woman told me. “It was people helping people, neighbors helping neighbors, and like that, many, many days.”

It still is. Just as grassroots movements emerged in Ukraine to support the army after the 2022 Russian invasion, many different kinds of voluntary organizations suddenly appeared in La Guaira after the earthquakes. Some, like Alimenta la Solidaridad, a charity founded a decade ago, had deep roots in the community already. Before 2024, Alimenta had more than 200 soup kitchens around the country. After the election, the regime restricted the activity of independent organizations and Alimenta had to shut down the kitchens. But the group revived itself after the earthquakes, reasoning that the situation had changed and, as Juan Andrés Saavedra, one of the group’s leaders, told me, “the government didn’t exist.” Saavedra now organizes teams of volunteers who bring food every day to several sites, including the refugee camp inside the school.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Skarlys Rodríguez looks through a classroom door at a school in La Guaira that has been converted into a temporary shelter for families displaced by the earthquakes. Rodríguez runs the shelter.

Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic

Children gather for free lunch at a community kitchen.

In some societies, the absence of the state leads to anarchy. In others, people organize themselves instead. Venezuela is one of those countries, as Machado herself told me in an interview in December 2024. Even when she was in hiding, even when the political situation was at its most dire, Machado was certain that the experience of election organization had brought about “anthropological change,” forging connections among people from different parts of society, inspiring them to want to reform their country from the bottom up.

Nearly two years later, Venezuelans kept telling me the same thing. One young woman, a political activist who had left the country and only recently returned, told me that the earthquakes and the chaos that followed were a sobering reminder of the lessons learned during the 2024 election campaign: The government won’t save us; the Americans won’t save us; we have to work together.

“We are on our own,” she said.

A photo caption in this article originally described a group of Venezuelans playing checkers by flashlight during a rolling blackout. In fact, they were playing dominoes. The article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “After the Apocalypse.”

Trump Jr. Privately Breaks With His Dad

2026-10-20T15:25:00-04:00

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Donald Trump Jr. had a simple vision for his father’s foreign policy during the 2024 presidential campaign: If elected, Donald Trump was going to keep America out of another war in the Middle East.

“Remember when they said Trump would get us into a full-blown war with Iran?” he wrote on X that April, as Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones toward Israel. “Times like these should make us all realize how lucky we were to have Trump, his strength and his resolve.”

Two and a half years later, the president has enmeshed the United States in a full-blown war with Iran—and Trump Jr. isn’t happy about it.

Trump Jr. has repeatedly voiced his opposition to the ongoing Iran war in private conversations, two people who have spoken directly with him about the conflict told us. The president’s son, these people said, opposed the war from its outset and made his opposition known to his father. He has long been skeptical of foreign intervention, these people told us, and believed the U.S. should not enter another Middle East war. Trump Jr. was also especially close to Charlie Kirk, the late conservative activist, who had broken with the Trump administration to oppose the war in Iran.

“Don has kept his views on the subject private, as he would never publicly break with his dad on an issue like this, but I can’t imagine anyone who knows Don would be surprised by his personal views on the subject,” a person close to the president’s son told us. A spokesman for Trump Jr. declined to comment. The White House didn’t respond to questions about Trump Jr.’s position on the war, and an official said in a statement, “Iran has been decimated, and one way or the other, the conflict in Iran will be over very soon.”

The White House’s decision to ally with Israel against Tehran has exposed a deepening rift within MAGA—not just over Iran, but also over what “America First” actually means. The divide pits nationalists who see foreign wars as a betrayal of domestic priorities against hawks who argue that American power must be wielded more aggressively against its adversaries. For years, the two camps coexisted under Trump’s promise of strength without the cost of another major war. Iran has made that balancing act harder to sustain. “Don Jr. is the most MAGA of them all,” one of the people who spoke with him about his opposition to the Iran war told us.

Even within the administration, some of the president’s closest advisers, including Vice President Vance, have voiced private opposition to the war as they deliberated whether to join Israel in its military campaign. Others, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, were skeptical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s initial pitch in February that a regime-change operation—particularly one conducted from the air—was remotely realistic.

The political costs are mounting. A Pew Research Center survey conducted over the past month found that 65 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the Iran operation, compared with 33 percent who approved. Republican approval fell from 69 percent in March to 63 percent. Nearly half of Americans expected the conflict to drag on for more than a year—far beyond the administration’s initial estimate of about four to six weeks.

[Read: Don Jr.’s wedding trap]

The economic consequences have sharpened the political fallout. Rising gas prices, driven by disruptions to the energy markets, are squeezing already strained household budgets. The midterm elections will test whether Republicans can defend a war that many voters oppose, while convincing those same voters that the administration is focused on their economic concerns. Republican candidates have been forced to defend a war with immense costs and an uncertain conclusion—one that the president initiated without congressional approval.

Trump Jr.’s private opposition offers yet another reminder that doubts about the war are not confined to the president’s critics or the fringes of the Republican Party. It also points to a deeper sentiment within the president’s base that he has betrayed key campaign promises: to avoid foreign wars and to make life more affordable for the average American.

Maine Has Changed. Susan Collins Hasn’t.

2026-10-19T06:00:00-04:00

Senator Susan Collins desperately needed to change the subject. As she stepped around cow manure at the annual Fryeburg Fair, a reporter was asking her about President Trump’s musing that he might campaign in Maine during the closing weeks of the election—an invitation that Collins, trying once again to save her seat, almost certainly had not extended to a man with an approval rating of 32 percent in the state. A campaign staffer tried to cut off the questioning, but the nearly 74-year-old Collins has not won five Senate elections through luck alone, and she quickly found a way out of the tricky Trump talk. “I do have some important news today,” she declared to the assembled scribblers.

Collins went on to announce that she had persuaded the Trump administration to speed up the release of $38 million in home-heating assistance for Maine. Never mind that her office had already publicized the news earlier that day, or that none of the journalists with Collins reported for local publications. This was either Collins at her senatorial savviest, or a stodgy politician reaching for a tattered playbook.

As temperatures plunge, the cost of heating oil is as potent a political issue in Maine as the price of gas is everywhere else. Collins has built her reelection campaign on the idea that she alone, as the chair of the Senate’s powerful Appropriations Committee and the lone Republican elected to Congress in all of New England, can deliver for Maine. She has boasted of bringing home billions for her sparsely populated state over the years. At a debate this month, Collins crowed that she had secured an exemption for road salt—another crucial supply during Maine’s perennial winter freeze—from the tariffs that Trump has slapped on Canadian goods. (“We can’t eat road salt,” her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, retorted.)

This strategy has worked for Collins before. In 2020, she defied polls forecasting her defeat and won reelection by nearly nine points over a well-funded Democratic opponent even as Joe Biden carried Maine that year by a similar margin. The contours of that campaign were largely the same as the one Collins is currently waging: Democrats tried to tie her to an unpopular Trump, denounced her claims to be independent, and assailed her vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a potential death knell for Roe v. Wade. Collins prevailed by leaning on her bipartisan record and the federal aid she had secured for her state.

Six years later, Democrats have reason to believe that a message that fell short in 2020 will resonate more deeply now. Both Collins and Trump have lower approval ratings in the state than they did then, and the decisive vote Collins gave to Kavanaugh proved consequential when he sided with a majority on the Supreme Court in overturning Roe. (Collins, who supports abortion rights, has said she relied on Kavanaugh’s statements that he considered the 1973 ruling to be settled legal precedent. Earlier this year, however, she told reporters that she did not regret her vote.) Democrats have added ammunition against Collins following a ProPublica report that, in late 2024, the FBI was on the verge of launching a bribery investigation into federal contracts she had helped land for her campaign donors (one of whom had pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions). The probe ended after Trump took office and the Department of Justice slashed its public-corruption units. Collins has denied wrongdoing.

On paper, Maine should be the easiest state for Democrats to flip during a year in which, polls suggest, voters are intent on punishing the GOP. It is the only state that Kamala Harris carried in 2024—she won by seven points—where a Republican incumbent senator is on the ballot. Yet Democrats have not been able to put Collins away. Polls show a close race; Jackson is leading narrowly in some surveys, and Collins is ahead in others. She is faring no worse—and in some cases better—than Republican incumbents running in more conservative states such as Ohio, Alaska, and Kansas.

Collins is benefiting, too, from a Democratic campaign that has at times verged on the shambolic. Party leaders initially tried to recruit Governor Janet Mills to challenge Collins, despite the fact that Mills would have been, if elected, a 79-year-old Senate freshman. Mills entered the race but withdrew when polls showed her getting crushed in the primary by Graham Platner, the progressive oyster farmer. Platner shot quickly to national stardom, surviving the revelation that he had a tattoo resembling an infamous Nazi emblem, but he was forced to withdraw following allegations of sexual assault (which he denied).

[Read: Platner just made things harder for Democrats ]

Democrats then nominated Jackson, another Bernie Sanders acolyte who had finished third in the party primary for governor earlier this year. Jackson and Collins hail from the same rural county in northern Maine, and he still sounds like he grew up a few miles from the Canadian border. Jackson followed his father into logging before entering politics; he’s served in the state legislature for most of the past two decades, rising to become the leader of the Maine Senate. He lacks both Platner’s strengths and weaknesses—less obviously flawed but also less polished and charismatic. “Troy does not have the energy or the engagement that Graham did,” Wendy Frayer, a 53-year-old social worker from Auburn, Maine, told me at a Jackson rally. “He probably lost some votes.”

Whether Jackson can reassemble, and possibly expand, Platner’s coalition is a key question in the closing weeks. But when I spoke with both Democrats and Republicans in Maine recently, they each argued that the race will turn less on voters’ views about Jackson than on their opinions of Collins. “Troy Jackson is a nonfactor,” one Democrat who’s not working on the campaign told me after being granted anonymity to speak bluntly about the party’s candidate. “The question is: Will the trends catch up with her this year?”

Collins is, at this point in her career, a pretty sporadic campaigner. She does not regularly hold large rallies or town halls, and during a six-day stretch in mid-October that I spent in Maine, her staff notified reporters of only a single public appearance aside from a televised debate with Jackson. (The rivals held four debates over two weeks, so voters have gotten to hear plenty from both candidates.)

The Fryeburg Fair, however, is always a fun stop for Collins, as well as an ideal place for her campaign to demonstrate that her connection to Maine’s voters remains strong. The annual festival is the state’s biggest, drawing upwards of 20,000 people a day and transforming a small town near the New Hampshire border into “Maine’s second-largest city,” according to a fair official who served as Collins’s guide for the day. Fryeburg sits in a rural county that voted overwhelmingly for Collins in 2020, and during a two-hour stroll through the fairgrounds, people flocked to her. “Please win,” one man told Collins as he introduced her to his family. (She offered campaign stickers to the kids.) “I’m doing my best,” the senator replied with a smile. Collins gamely posed for photos with all who sought them, including a pair of teenage boys wearing shirts that read I ❤️ Boobies, which they had purchased from a nearby T-shirt vendor. (One of them did remove his hat for the photo out of respect.) Collins also tolerated the reporters who were trailing her, although as she made her way through a fragrant, high-traffic stretch near the livestock barn, she chided one of them: “Don’t make me walk in shit.”

I was struck by how many people not only recognized Collins but seemed to be familiar with her accomplishments—an indication of both her standing and the imprint of millions of dollars that she and her allies are spending on TV ads. Multiple Collins supporters brought up, unprompted, the record-setting 10,000th consecutive Senate vote without an absence that she cast in June. “Character is huge, and Susan Collins has a great character record,” Chet Charette, the deputy fire chief in Fryeburg, told me. Charette is backing Collins even though he wants to see term limits for members of Congress, which she opposes. (During her first campaign, in 1996, Collins pledged to serve only two terms in the Senate.) “She’s a lot more cognizant than a lot of them are,” Charette said.

By virtue of her lonely position in the middle of a polarized political climate, Collins must also rely on votes from people whom she frequently disappoints. Outside the Portland TV studio that hosted one of her debates, a boisterous crowd of Collins supporters cheered her arrival. When I asked Marc Fournier, a 55-year-old from nearby Westbrook, why he was backing Collins, he began with a disclaimer: “Susan Collins is not my favorite person.” He explained that he was displeased Collins had opposed some key Trump priorities. “She’s giving votes away,” Fournier complained. But he added: “Just because I disagree with her doesn’t mean I’m not going to vote for her.”

As Collins was concluding her visit to the Fryeburg Fair, a man who gave his name as Jim greeted her with a notably less friendly message. He told Collins he had supported her for years, but she had lost his vote when she backed Kavanaugh and helped Trump “stack” the Supreme Court. “You don’t stand up when it’s important,” Jim said. “I do,” Collins protested.

[Read: The guard that won’t be changing]

A key explanation for Collins’s political resilience is that in deep-blue New England, plenty of Democratic voters pride themselves on rewarding GOP moderation. In 2024, Vermonters elected Phil Scott, a Republican, to a fifth term as governor by a 50-point margin even as they backed Kamala Harris for president and Sanders’s return to the Senate. New Hampshire has elected Republican governors for the past decade.

Yet that tendency among some Democrats in the region to vote for the “good Republican” extends less and less to federal officeholders in the Trump era, and the force of political gravity that Collins must overcome is stronger this year than ever before. When it was my turn for a question in Fryeburg, I asked Collins what she would say to Mainers who are unhappy with the direction of the country and who might use this election to vote for change. “Well, first of all, I contest the premise of your question,” Collins replied, pointing to her “enormously favorable” reception among the fairgoers. At that moment, a man started loudly heckling her. “You can’t eat road salt, can ya?!” he shouted. “There are always a few exceptions,” Collins observed with a tight smile, before going on with a lengthy defense of her record delivering for Maine. She did not seem especially concerned that her critics have grown significantly in number over the years or that, in a few weeks’ time, they could marshal the votes to end her long career.

Democrats’ Sudden Revulsion Toward Big Tech

2026-10-19T06:00:00-04:00

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A new boogeyman arrived in Democratic campaign ads this year with such force that it was possible to forget it had ever been absent. Slotted between clichés about “rising costs,” the “rigged economy,” and the elusive “fair shot” for the middle class, the familiar villains of billionaires, insurance companies, and “MAGA extremists” were joined by a friend turned foe.

“Big Tech’s invading Ohio, driving up our electric rates, damaging our environment, destroying our farmland,” Representative Marcy Kaptur of Ohio warned in one ad. Roy Cooper, who is running in North Carolina for Senate, said in another: “My plan stops grocery stores from using AI to overcharge you.” A 30-second spot in Wisconsin features Rebecca Cooke, a congressional candidate, promising voters seated around a kitchen table: “I don’t want to be beholden to any of these Big Tech companies.” And the House Majority PAC, a group closely aligned with Democratic leaders that has been attacking Republicans for their proximity to the new baddie on the block, released an ad labeling the incumbent Republican in Wisconsin’s Third District “Data Center Derrick Van Orden”—and suggesting that he was designed by artificial intelligence to serve its interests.

The sudden Democratic revulsion toward Big Tech and all its offspring—data centers, artificial intelligence, tech oligarchs—has defined this midterm election and will likely continue through the early innings of the 2028 presidential campaign. For most of the past few decades, Democrats cast themselves as a futurist party heralding a digital utopia, a posture founded by Al Gore and solidified when Barack Obama traveled to Google’s headquarters in 2007 to announce his presidential campaign’s commitment to “use technology to reach ever-expanding horizons.” Republicans were the ones warning about censorship and centralized power, as corporate executives clumsily adjusted the levers of permissible speech on social media.

But partisan passions on tech have been realigning from the moment President Trump delivered his second inaugural address in 2025, with Silicon Valley’s centibillionaires as background props. The president’s hostility toward attempts to rein in AI has solidified the shift. Democratic politicians and strategists now enter the final weeks of a midterm season convinced that they have uncovered a way to persuade Trump’s voters to at least hesitate before voting for Republicans. “Trump and his anti-AI-regulation posture is dragging the party to a politically suicidal place,” Rob Flaherty, one of Joe Biden’s top digital strategists, told me. “They are grabbing the wrong side of an 80–20 issue at exactly the wrong time.”

Republican campaign advisers, including those in Trump’s circle, admit the new vulnerability—and are taking tentative steps to address it. The president laid out a voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March, aiming to assure voters that new AI server farms would not increase their utility bill. The Republican-led House voted in September to request that state regulators require those standards, legislation that was then championed by Senator Jon Husted of Ohio, who is in a tight race with his Democratic challenger, former Senator Sherrod Brown. “The data center brand is the anchor,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote in an August memo, describing a drag on Husted’s reelection efforts that was first reported by The New York Times. Republican strategists were also alarmed by how much voters responded to the issue: “This messaging is significantly more effective than traditional messaging tracts, as it introduces new information on a highly relevant, emerging topic.”

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

But the memo declaring “a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle” had little influence over Trump’s own rhetoric, and the president spent much of September insisting that concerns of an AI-induced apocalypse were a “hoax” and “sick conspiracy.” While his Cabinet went on television to defend data centers as a great American boon, Trump gathered the leaders of the nation’s technology companies at the White House so that he could praise them and they could praise him. Democrats have been delighted. When the progressive data firm Catalist asked in a poll which party Americans trust when it comes to “responding to the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs and society,” they favored Democrats by eight percentage points in July and August. The lead grew to 12 points in September, just as the explosion of television advertising started hitting screens. “Donald Trump decided to convene executives from Big Tech and then lecture the American people that their concerns about data centers are unfounded,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told me in a recent gaggle with reporters. “This is extraordinary stuff.”

The anti–Big Tech ads have saturated swing districts around the country. Reset Tech—a left-leaning group focused on the intersection of AI, media, and democracy that supports more technology regulation—recently used advertising data collected by the tracking firm AdImpact to quantify the messaging shift. From 2020 to 2024, a period that includes three congressional and two presidential cycles, Republican candidates and their allies spent more than $7.3 million on 26 ads that name-checked Big Tech, while Democrats spent just $512,000 on two ads. This cycle the polarities have reversed. Democrats have spent $14 million on 86 ads that mention Big Tech, compared with almost $6.3 million by Republican interests on 37 ads. The contrast in this cycle regarding spots critical of the data-center boom is even more profound: Democratic candidates and groups have run 286 critical ads, compared with 121 ads by Republican interests.

Rishi Bharwani, the U.S. director of Reset Tech, told me that the investments Democrats have made over the past three months to “seed this issue” are now helping produce changes in polling. “This will play a meaningful factor in the outcome of the 2026 midterms,” Bharwani said, “and put Democrats on a strong footing going into the presidential election cycle.”

[Read: Trump’s see-no-evil AI policy]

Democratic strategists began tracking the opportunity earlier this year, when polling from House districts showed surprising concern about AI. In one batch of Democratic polls from March, which I obtained, unfavorable views of AI stood at an average of 63 percent across Maine’s Second District, California’s Twenty-Second District, and Colorado’s Eighth District—all battlegrounds.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, was an early tech critic, and her 2025 campaign focused on online safety for children. She told me that she became interested when, during her time in Congress, Republican leaders in the House refused to call a vote for the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which had passed the Senate with 91 votes. Since then, she has signed multiple bills in New Jersey that regulate social-media access for children and clamp down on the use of algorithms to set grocery prices and rent. “Trump is the Republican Party in Washington,” she said. “Democrats have to step into this, and they have to lead here, and I think you see it in these campaigns.” Just this week, two candidates from opposite ends of the party’s ideological spectrum—Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate candidate in Michigan, and David Crowley, the candidate for governor in Wisconsin—released plans for technology regulation.

Flaherty and Bharwani argue that the potency of this issue will only grow as AI’s disruption persists. Polls this cycle continue to show that AI barely ranks as a priority for voters. But Democrats believe that they can tie it to the cost of living and economic insecurity—issues that are at the top of the list. A Democratic-aligned super PAC called Tomorrow Together, which Flaherty co-founded, recently began testing the theory with a $4 million ad buy in four House districts. The ads connect concern over Big Tech with the populist frustration over diminished economic opportunity. One of the taglines: “Lining their pockets, emptying yours.”

Bharwani said that the Democrats’ new stance is a recognition that Obama’s vision of a virtuous cycle of tech-driven innovation never came to pass. “What we all experienced was a ton of growth in the tech sector, the creation of numerous new billionaires, and even the world’s first trillionaire, and a bunch of working families basically recognizing that they’re not sharing,” he told me. “These tech companies are actually undermining their economic security and their safety.” That argument is now being served up to prospective 2028 presidential contenders, who will be shaping the next vision for Democratic governance in a nation where technological change continues to accelerate.

He Joined the Military. They Reported His Wife to ICE.

2026-10-16T07:05:00-04:00

Giovanna Perez loaded her four kids into the car on September 21 and drove from their home in Weslaco, Texas, to Naval Air Station Corpus Christi. She had a 9:30 a.m. appointment to pick up the ID cards that would allow them to access military medical insurance, facilities, and commissary stores. Her husband, Pedro Gutierrez, had recently enlisted in the Army and left a month earlier for basic training at Fort Benning, in Georgia.

Perez approached the military guards at the gates with some trepidation. Her parents illegally brought her across the U.S. border from Mexico when she was 6 years old. Now 35, she and Gutierrez have been together since they were 17 and have carefully kept her immigration status a secret. Gutierrez is a U.S. citizen, but marriage does not give legal status to someone who is in the country unlawfully. When the Obama administration started the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to protect immigrants like Perez who had arrived as children, she did not apply, for fear that the government might someday use the information against her family.

Perez told us that her husband believed that joining the Army would allow him to serve his country, give his family access to health care—including the costly medications his son takes—and potentially protect his wife from deportation. He had already submitted her application for a benefit called Parole in Place, which offers a path to legal residency for the close relatives of service members. Officials at Fort Benning had assured him that she would have no trouble getting IDs for herself and the children, and that it didn’t matter that she didn’t have a Social Security number, Perez told us.

At the gates of the Navy base, guards told Perez they had no record of her appointment. She remained calm as they directed her to a nearby office to get a visitor’s pass. That’s when two military officials took the family into a room for questioning. “In my head, I thought it was just protocol for the safety of the base, but it started getting weird,” Perez said. As she answered, she told us, one of the military officers appeared to be relaying her responses to someone through text messages.

Two other men entered the room. They wore khaki pants, she said, not military fatigues. The patches on their shirts said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It appeared to Perez that they’d been waiting for her, at the base or somewhere nearby. The men told Perez to report to the ICE office in Harlingen, Texas, in three days. Her older children, ages 17, 15, and 11, were confused. “My kids were just, like, What’s going on?” Perez told us. “Are they gonna detain you? Why are they doing this to us? I thought you were supposed to be safe.”

Perez didn’t know what to tell them, and she had no way to call her husband. When she went to the ICE office three days later, she was booked and issued an order to appear in immigration court. She suspected the military shared her information with ICE. And now the government was trying to deport her.

Perez’s attorney, Alex Martinez, told us he’s trying to determine whether other families have been targeted in similar ways. He suspects that the government has been using Parole in Place to gather information for immigration-enforcement purposes—the opposite of what military recruits are led to believe.

“There’s no bigger betrayal to our soldiers than to use their trust in a program, set out by our government to protect their families, and ultimately use it to destroy their families while they’re serving our country and putting their lives on the line,” Martinez told us. “You’re stabbing your own soldiers in the back.”

Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The Atlantic

Perez shows a photo of her husband, who is at military training.

The Associated Press in August identified at least 50 cases in which close family of active-duty service members were arrested by ICE. What’s different about Perez’s case is that U.S. military personnel appeared to be working with ICE to identify a potential target and use a long-standing military-recruitment tool—the promise of legal status for loved ones—to facilitate an arrest.

ICE confirmed to us in a statement that Navy personnel had reported Perez to immigration officers when the family arrived at the base. The Department of Homeland Security and ICE “value the contributions of all those who serve in the U.S. military,” the statement said. “Having a family member in the military is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws. Military service by an immediate relative does not automatically grant parole, lawful status, or immunity from immigration enforcement."

Perez told us the ICE officers seemed to be expecting her, told her they knew that Gutierrez had applied for Parole in Place, and asked questions about a trip her son had taken with his grandmother to Mexico years earlier.

Neither the Army nor the Office of the Secretary of Defense responded to requests for comment, but one defense official told us that there have been “varying degrees of cooperation between military installations and the Department of Homeland Security” for more than a year. The official declined to be named because he, like others we spoke with, was not authorized to talk publicly about this issue. Another official told us that DHS often made such requests to installations at a local level, but there were inconsistent degrees of cooperation. The Navy declined to comment.

[Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.]

Within months of President Trump’s second inauguration, military mental-health specialists began telling us that service members within their units were fearful about how the administration’s crackdown on immigrants could affect their families. They described spouses afraid to go on base while their partner was deployed, family members too scared to leave their home, and uniformed service members accompanying loved ones to immigration appointments or hearings with the hope that their presence would make immigration officials or judges pause. Such worries, the specialists said, were becoming a distraction for those serving, particularly during deployments. It was an early sign of a break in a long-standing bargain: A government that asks Americans to take extraordinary risks would not add stress that could distract service members from their missions.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth frequently touts the military’s surging recruitment numbers. Less often mentioned is the military’s success in recruiting from some of the country’s most heavily Hispanic communities, including the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, where Perez and Gutierrez live. Hispanic recruits accounted for nearly 27 percent of new Army soldiers last year, up from just less than 20 percent in 2020, according to Army statistics. This population remains key to the Army meeting its recruiting standards even as service members from these communities have reported that their families have been targeted by ICE.

Military law enforcement cannot provide direct support to civilian law enforcement, under the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th-century law that was intended to keep the military from meddling in the affairs of southern states. But to secure an installation, military police can inspect those who enter. “Anytime somebody makes an appointment on a military base, that information could get shared throughout the federal government,” Margaret D. Stock, an immigration lawyer and former Army Reserve officer who helped develop the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program, told us. Under the Trump administration, those who serve, along with their families, are no more protected from immigration enforcement than those submitting their data to any other government agency. “The military is no longer immune from this,” Stock said. Some troops are asking for overseas assignments where they can live with their family members, far from ICE agents.

In April, ICE officers arrested the 22-year-old wife of a U.S. soldier when the couple moved to an Army base in Louisiana. The woman, Annie Ramos, was born in Honduras and had a previous deportation order issued in absentia when she was a toddler. Ramos was released after Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a Democrat, spoke with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on her behalf.

Bobby Pulido, a Democratic candidate in the Rio Grande Valley who is running for Congress, has cited her case as an example of ICE overreach by the Trump administration. “The scary part is they’re doubling down on it. They don’t care,” Pulido said in a video clip with Perez that his campaign posted on social media on Wednesday.

It used to be that the military was seen as a potential pathway to U.S. citizenship. Military service can qualify noncitizens for expedited naturalization, and the Pentagon has at times recruited people who were not permanent residents. More than 180,000 members of the U.S. military have become naturalized citizens since 2002, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In 2008, at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon launched the MAVNI program, which allowed some immigrants who were living legally in the U.S. but were not citizens to enlist based on specialized skills considered vital, including medical expertise and foreign-language proficiency. The program expired in 2017 and was not renewed. The government established the Parole in Place benefit in 2010, allowing family members to remain in the United States and apply for legal status. Approval is discretionary and does not guarantee a green card. But the promise remains a powerful recruiting tool for the armed services in immigrant communities.

[Read: The northern passage]

Perez said she has no criminal record and no previous deportation orders. She met her husband at a quinceañera party when they were teenagers in Laredo. Gutierrez drove commercial trucks but decided to enlist in the Army to secure health-insurance coverage for the family and college-tuition aid for their older children. Fixing Perez’s immigration status was another incentive for him, she told us.

Gabriel V. Cárdenas for The Atlantic

Perez plays with her 2-year-old son at their home in Weslaco, Texas.

It was in a 20-minute weekend phone call that Gutierrez learned the country he was serving had been trying to deport his wife and separate his family. Had Perez been sent to a detention center, as many immigrants are, Gutierrez would have been forced to leave basic training to care for his children—a governmental loss of not just a new service member but also roughly $50,000 in sunk training costs, according to Army estimates. Perez stays home to take care of their 2-year-old, and she told us she has no idea what would happen to her children if ICE sent her to Mexico. “I have no one,” she said. “I’m by myself.”

Her husband will graduate from basic training on November 5, and Perez and her children plan to drive to Georgia for the ceremony at Fort Benning. They were issued their military IDs, so they should be allowed onto the base. Perez told us that she’s in a discussion group with other military families who are asking a lot of questions about who will be allowed to attend the graduation. Five days after the ceremony, Perez will be due back in court in Texas.

Watching for a Blue Wave in South Carolina

2026-10-16T07:00:00-04:00

Updated on October 16 at 9:55 a.m. ET

Nancy Lacore found out she was fired as the chief of the Navy Reserve almost a year to the day after she got the job. On a Friday morning in August 2025, Admiral James Kilby, then the acting chief of naval operations, called Lacore to his office in the Pentagon. She went alone, and when she asked how Kilby was doing, his reply—“Not good”—told her all she needed to know. By the time Kilby delivered the news, he had tears in his eyes, Lacore says. He told her that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had directed him to relieve her of command effective immediately. No reason was given. “I kind of fell forward a little bit on the table,” Lacore told me. “It just knocked the wind out of me for a second.”

Lacore is among the dozens of military leaders that Hegseth has sacked or ousted over the past year and a half, many of them women and people of color. She’s since taken a different path: Lacore recounted her story to me after a campaign event outside Charleston, South Carolina, where she is asking voters to send her back to Washington—this time as a member of Congress. When Lacore left the Pentagon on that summer Friday, she never returned, her 35-year military career effectively over. (The Pentagon declined to comment.) By January, she had launched a bid as a Democrat for the House in South Carolina’s Low Country.

South Carolina’s First District is a reach for Democrats, but it is one of more than a dozen races across the country where the party is testing how deep into GOP territory it can advance in November. President Trump carried the district by 13 points in 2024. Democrats flipped the seat in 2018, during their blue midterm wave in Trump’s first term. But Republicans won it back two years later and then redrew the district’s lines to cement their advantage. Now the unpopularity of both Trump and the outgoing incumbent, Representative Nancy Mace, has put the seat in play again for Democrats. (Mace ran for governor—she lost badly in the primary—instead of for reelection to the House.)

Democrats see Lacore’s long military record, moderate policy positions, and steady demeanor as an ideal fit for a constituency that is more country-club Republican than MAGA, and which seems to have grown exhausted by the headline-grabbing Mace. Indeed, most of the political operatives I spoke with said Lacore would probably be in an even better position if Mace were her opponent; instead, she is facing Jenny Costa Honeycutt, a Republican Charleston County council member who is distancing herself from Mace by pledging to steer clear of “clickbait politics.”

Lacore is a former Republican who left the party during Trump’s first presidential run. Like many other Democratic candidates this year, she has placed affordability at the center of her platform. She talks about her experience as a mother of six kids as much as her decades in the Navy, and the challenges she faced juggling a large family in which both she and her husband were service members, and overseas deployments seem to resonate in a district with a large military presence. During a veterans’ forum I attended, Lacore’s call to end the Iran war drew hearty applause.

Although Lacore mentions her firing by Hegseth on the campaign trail, she’s not trying to portray herself as a “resistance” hero. (Such candidacies have not fared particularly well.) She pitches herself as a supporter of border security and law enforcement; one of her daughters, she notes, is a police officer. When I asked Lacore where she parted ways with the national Democratic Party, she took the opportunity to distance herself from the far left: “I am not a socialist,” she replied.

“They can’t really hang a lot of the woke stuff on her or try to make her out to be some sort of weirdo,” Ed Sutton, a Democratic state senator in the area, told me.

Without a long political record to scrutinize, Republicans have harped on Lacore’s thin ties to the district; she bought a home in the Charleston area only last year, having planned to retire there at the end of her four-year term as Navy Reserve chief (which Hegseth cut short). During a debate last Wednesday, Honeycutt took every opportunity to remind viewers that Lacore had been, until recently, an out-of-towner.

Lacore’s Democratic-primary opponents pursued the same line of attack, but the appeal of that critique with so many transplants and retirees populating the stretch from Charleston to Hilton Head Island is questionable. The local population has grown so rapidly in recent years that concerns about overdevelopment have become a potent political issue. Lacore has criticized Honeycutt for her work representing developers in the area. “There are more people in my town now who are not from here than there are people who are natives,” Will Haynie, the mayor of Mount Pleasant, a Charleston suburb, told me. Many newcomers to the area are, like Lacore, military service members. “That is not a disqualifier,” he said.

Haynie, a Republican, endorsed Lacore early in her campaign. He had backed Mace when she first ran for the seat, in 2020, but he’s become disenchanted with the Trump administration and told me he was looking for a Democrat who would fight for the area’s needs and help restore the balance of power between Congress and the presidency. “I was looking for a Democrat that I could trust, a Democrat who’s a proven leader, and a Democrat who I think would be very independent,” Haynie said. “I didn’t just do this as a political stunt.”

During her veterans’ event, Lacore leveled nearly as much criticism at Mace as at Honeycutt, saying the district had long been “ignored” by Mace. Voters there spoke of their representative with open disgust and noted approvingly that Lacore struck them as everything Mace was not. “The longer she was involved in politics, the crazier she got,” Gary Gould, a 73-year-old retired consultant, told me of Mace. Lacore, by contrast, “dripped character and credibility,” he said. “It seems like she knows her way around Washington without being tainted by being a politician.”

Honeycutt’s campaign did not make her available for an interview. Mace, however, responded to an inquiry almost immediately. She defended her popularity in the area, noting that she had brought hundreds of millions of dollars to the district and won her most recent race, in 2024, easily—her margin of 16 points outperformed Trump. (That election, however, came before she launched a high-profile crusade against the first openly transgender person elected to the House, Representative Sarah McBride; before she allegedly berated airport security officers; and before the publication of stories in which colleagues and associates described her as “unstable” and “unhinged.”) Mace took issue with both Lacore’s and Honeycutt’s messaging about her. “If somebody wants to call me clickbait politics,” Mace told me, or say that she’s “ignoring the district, I’d hate to see what they think their definition of serving it is, and I would hate to see how they would navigate attacks by the establishment on their record.”

[Read: The GOP’s culture-war Hail Mary]

Mace has raised concerns about the GOP’s standing in South Carolina’s Senate race, in which nervous Republican groups have begun spending on behalf of Senator Darline Graham—sister of the late Lindsey Graham. But Mace is supporting Honeycutt and believes she’ll defeat Lacore. “I think she’ll win handily,” Mace said. “She has been in the community a very long time.”

Lacore’s other liability could be some lingering resentment from a contentious primary. She won with the help of significant outside spending from Democratic groups such as the Bench, which has backed some of the party’s most prominent recruits, including James Talarico in Texas, Josh Turek in Iowa, and Adam Hamilton in Kansas. Lacore’s top rival in the primary, Mac Deford, has yet to endorse her candidacy, and when I spoke with him at a gathering of Democrats in Charleston, he told me he had not yet seen her campaign aggressively enough among people “who traditionally do not vote for Democrats.” (A Lacore spokesperson responded: “I would invite Mac to come to the many events we’re doing in every corner of the district where a bipartisan coalition of voters is showing their support.”)

Lacore has significantly outraised Honeycutt, and the Democrats’ main House super PAC has reserved ad money for a late push on her behalf. Republicans remain confident that they’ll retain the seat, though their allies are spending as if it might be at risk. A spokesperson for the GOP’s House campaign committee told me Democrats are wasting money on a “solidly Republican” seat. (The Cook Political Report today moved the race in the Democrats’ direction, changing its forecast from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.”)

Democrats last week circulated a poll showing Lacore narrowly ahead of Honeycutt, but they aren’t quite predicting victory, either. “Anybody who tells you it’s not a tough district doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” John Moffett, a Charleston-based Democratic strategist, told me. But, he said, “if there’s a candidate that can win this race right now, it’s Nancy Lacore.” Judging from the polling nationwide, the ingredients are in place for a blue wave. In South Carolina, both parties are wondering if it will be big enough to carry Lacore to Congress.

Going Hungry in Trump’s Economy

2026-10-14T11:31:56-04:00

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Driving through Arizona on a Saturday morning, I saw a line of cars nearly a mile long stopped along a high-desert highway. I slowed, thinking there had been an accident. Then I realized that all of those people were waiting in line for food.

Weeks later, I went back to the area and met Kandy Soto. The retired administrative aide and courtroom clerk had once been a regular donor to her local food bank. But when I met her last month, she was a recipient of other people’s generosity, preparing to fill a bag with groceries that her family could no longer afford. Soto told me that the cost of canned vegetables seemed to creep up nearly every time she went to the store. After checking prices against her budget, she might buy some cheap fish fillets or canned meats, but beef or poultry were out of the question. Sometimes she left empty-handed.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When she voted for Donald Trump two years ago, Soto counted on him to fulfill his promise to “make America affordable again” following painful spikes in inflation under Joe Biden. She wonders what kind of life Trump and his family are living, because she sees no signs of the roaring economy he talks about. Her own family has had a run of bad luck: Her husband had to stop working after injuring his neck and requiring surgery. Then they learned that their modest retirement income made them ineligible for public assistance. All the while, prices for gas and groceries climbed. The situation grew so dire a few months ago that the 66-year-old Soto had to set aside any feelings of shame and drive 20 miles to the Community Cupboard Food Bank in Prescott. “It takes an older person a lot of giving up to do something like this,” she said.

Jesse Rieser for The Atlantic

The Community Cupboard in Prescott, Arizona

In the surrounding county, Yavapai, Trump took 66 percent of the vote on his way to winning Arizona two years ago. In 2016, he staged a final campaign rally here before Election Day. Trump is counting on the region to help blunt what polls forecast to be a Democratic rout next month, and will hold a rally Wednesday in Bullhead City, about 200 miles to the northwest. But the president’s grip appears to be loosening, and the state of the economy explains why.

The toll of rising prices has been especially acute in Arizona. About half a million residents have lost their food stamps since the summer of 2025 because of changes in Trump’s signature tax legislation, which limits assistance and penalizes states that make mistakes when they grant benefits. The law is still being phased in, and Arizona was among the first states to enact the changes.

Nearly everyone I spoke with in the area last month, including Trump supporters, said they feel worse off than they were before the 2024 election. Unemployment in Arizona stood at 3.8 percent in August 2024; this August it was 4.9 percent, according to federal data. Many people I spoke with in the county said they are working, but their paychecks haven’t kept up with increased prices for gas and food. Almost all told me they are angry about Trump’s decisions to start a war and spend hundreds of millions of dollars ornamenting a capital city they will never see. They were incredulous to hear him claim that their lives have improved with him in office. Many said they are also disillusioned with Congress and with both political parties. They lamented the corruption they see as endemic in the government and in large corporations, and denounced billionaires, whom they view as capitalizing on their pain.

[Read: Trump voters are over it]

People told me they are anxious about many things: future employment opportunities, feeding their children healthy meals, keeping small businesses running, affording car repairs. Trump has said that “the American dream is back.” But not for the people I spoke with in Yavapai County.

Jesse Rieser for The Atlantic

A political sign at the Apache Lodge, a historic motel

Victoria Dombrowski has found a way to help her family in this economy: the barter system.

She lost $800 a month in food stamps after state officials, who administer the program, took aggressive action to comply with new eligibility requirements mandated by the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Dombrowski, a stay-at-home mother of two young children, told me she had completed the renewal paperwork and had made it all the way to the end of the process, which included an interview with a caseworker about her financial situation. But even after waiting on hold for days and enlisting help from a nonprofit group, she couldn’t get through to staff at the Arizona Department of Economic Security. “And so I just gave up,” she said. I met Dombrowski at a dollar store, where she now shops because she can no longer afford Walmart.

Dombrowski’s husband works at an auto-parts store, but his income isn’t enough to support the family. So she occasionally began picking up boxes of free food that were offered in the community. But more often than not, she said, the food was expired or the offerings were sugary desserts that didn’t give her kids the nutrition they needed. “My fridge is still empty,” she said. Dombrowski once prided herself on making her family hearty home-cooked food, such as meatloaf and potatoes. Since losing food aid, she has had little choice but to serve cheap microwavable meals. She and others have started bartering for services. For her son’s birthday this summer, she trimmed a dog’s nails; in exchange, a friend brought animals to her home for a petting-zoo-themed party.

Across Arizona, food banks are seeing profound need. They served, on average, 626,881 people monthly in 2024; about 786,366 Arizonans have used a food bank each month this year, according to the Arizona Food Bank Network. Wages aren’t rising as fast as expenses, and more Arizonans continue to lose their food stamps due to changes from the tax bill.

Jesse Rieser for The Atlantic

Veteran’s Memorial Island in Prescott

The Community Cupboard Food Bank in Prescott recently received a call on behalf of 17 veterans in the community who had “no food, whatsoever,” Jim Phelps, the organization’s executive director, told me. Workers made an emergency haul one night, packing a Tesla with two loads of food to distribute. Ron Brannon was one of the people waiting for something to eat. Brannon, a tall and lanky disabled Army veteran, told me that if he worked really hard at it, he could stretch his Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits until the tenth of each month. His monthly total was recently cut to $60, and when his balance hits $0, “I just go without,” the 68-year-old said. Sam Riske, a 32-year-old former military police officer who wore her baby in a carrier as she waited in line for food delivered by the Community Cupboard, told me that she’s been trying since February to get answers from state officials about the status of her application for temporary cash assistance for low-income families. This summer, she said, her family lost about $780 in monthly food benefits because she didn’t keep up with her eligibility paperwork. To make ends meet, she has taken up dog sitting. Her partner has taken odd jobs.

[Read: Public anger is rising]

Outside a popular carnicería in Prescott Valley where federal officials carried out immigration-enforcement operations this summer, a woman who declined to give me her full name out of fear of drawing attention to her situation complained of high food prices and a shortage of laborers that has squeezed her family’s roofing company. But all of that is the least of her concerns, she said as she loaded groceries in her car. Her husband was recently deported, and she’s just trying to make it through the day, running her household and managing employees. “It’s hard right now,” the 37-year-old said. She isn’t counting on anything to get better anytime soon. Inside of the meat shop, banda music blared. A manager politely asked me to leave, explaining that the immigration operations had made customers fearful. Business had been down since then, and she didn’t want the presence of a reporter to make it worse.

Many Republicans I talked with said they supported those immigration crackdowns, even though they brought pain and fear to many people in their community. Dawn Zimmerman, a cosmetologist who owns a studio in Mayer, Arizona, told me that Trump, whom she voted for in 2024, is “doing a lot.” But with out-of-control costs, she added, people are “freaking out.” Prices for hair products have exploded, she said, and her clients are now buying them for less at big-box retailers or online. Fewer people are coming to get their hair done. But she is reluctant to raise prices, because so many clients are older or on fixed incomes. Zimmerman didn’t vote in the primary election, she said, but does intend to vote in November. When I asked if she planned to support Republicans, she was noncommittal: “It’s hard right now because there’s a lot of—there’s more deceit.” I asked what she meant. She cited Trump’s tendency to offload blame for why people can’t see “how good the country is doing”—and how disconnected he seems from her pain.

Trump’s October Surprise

2026-10-12T17:08:00-04:00

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It rained most of Sunday in Washington, as the remnants of Hurricane Isaias washed over the East Coast. Unable to golf, and stuck inside the White House, President Trump spent part of his morning on social media touting the size of his rallies and defending Christopher Columbus. He also declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to halt strikes against each other’s energy infrastructures. Except that he hadn’t first confirmed that with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—and Russia spent the hours that followed bombarding Ukraine with missiles and drones, hitting a Kharkiv power plant.

Trump’s inability to bring the Iran war to a close has left him incensed but also oddly paralyzed, two people close to him told us. One of them, an adviser, said that Trump “is used to snapping his fingers and having the whole world—Republicans, world leaders, the media—come to attention, and he is losing his mind that Iran won’t listen.” Iran has resumed menacing oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and the average price of diesel in the United States has crossed the $6-a-gallon mark, raising the cost of goods that travel the nation’s highways on trucks.

Republicans are panicked that those high energy prices could help Democrats take control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, which are now only three weeks away. Trump has been searching for a scapegoat, and appears to have settled on Ukraine. Although blaming a European country that’s fighting for its existence for the rise in global oil prices might seem implausible, Trump seems to prefer that to accepting responsibility for his decision to attack Iran. His broadsides against Ukraine, moreover, are consistent with his decade-long deference to Vladimir Putin. With rare exceptions, Trump has aligned with Moscow over Kyiv throughout the four-and-a-half-year war. He wants Ukraine to end the fighting—and has pressured the country to agree to terms that Zelensky finds unacceptable.

A U.S. president siding with the Kremlin is quite an October surprise. But in just the past few days, Trump appears to have fully turned against Ukraine. He announced on Friday that he had reached an agreement with Putin to import Russian diesel fuel, undercutting the new sanctions bill against Moscow’s energy industry that Trump signed into law last month. Even if the roughly 2.25 million barrels headed to the U.S. only marginally ease fuel costs, the deal allows Trump to tout efforts to help Americans while also providing Russia with additional revenue. (Another few million barrels are set to ship next month.)

Despite the opposition of European allies and some Republicans on Capitol Hill, Trump has followed up by placing even more pressure on Ukraine. He called for Zelensky to be replaced. His aides have threatened to withhold arms sales unless Kyiv stops targeting Russian diesel plants. Some in Trump’s orbit have suggested that the U.S. go further, and stop sharing intelligence with Kyiv. That was the context in which Trump announced his fictional energy cease-fire. A senior Ukrainian military officer told us that Trump’s statements are “simply beyond comprehension.”

“Things are already incredibly difficult for us here,” the officer said, speaking, like others who talked with us, on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “But apparently, there’s always another level below rock bottom. Things can always get worse.”

Ukraine has expanded its strikes deep into Russian territory in recent months, targeting the larger nation’s oil refineries. Those attacks sparked an energy crisis in Russia and were cheered across Europe—but not in the White House. Russia imposed a ban on diesel exports in response, which added more pressure to global diesel markets already under strain from the war in Iran. Zelensky told Trump and his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that he was willing to stop attacking Russian oil refineries if the Russians halted attacks on Ukrainian power plants, a White House official told us. But Trump doesn’t see the strikes as equivalent—and demanded that Ukraine first stop attacking Russian refineries, the official said. Zelensky refused.

“Zelensky is overplaying his hand and pissing the president off,” the White House official said. “The president is asking for one thing: stop hitting the refineries. Give him that.”

[Read: Trump’s latest appeal to Russia could outrage even his allies]

Trump’s next move against Ukraine came, as it so often does, after a phone call with Putin. Zelensky’s aides have expressed frustration that Putin has swayed Trump at crucial junctures in the conflict (once, even, while Zelensky was flying to Washington to meet with Trump in an effort to secure access to new U.S. weapons). This time, Trump spoke with Putin on Friday to wish him a belated birthday, even though some in the White House counseled against the call, the adviser told us, believing it would yield little. During the 90-minute conversation, Trump told Putin that he would lift the sanctions on Russian diesel exports. (Some in Kyiv believe that the deal was agreed to earlier, because a ship carrying Russian oil and gas is already approaching the U.S.)

That undermined sanctions applied in 2022 and undercut the tougher Russian-sanctions bill that Trump signed last month; the law was named in honor of one of its champions, the late Senator Lindsey Graham. A bipartisan group of lawmakers was infuriated by the move, and some Republicans denounced Trump for siding with Putin. Four GOP senators—Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of ⁠Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and John Curtis of Utah—joined some of their Democratic colleagues to release a statement yesterday saying that lifting the sanctions “runs directly counter to that law” and that the U.S. should not provide “Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians.”

Zelensky, who was blindsided by the diesel deal, deemed it “not fair and not honest.” He had spent more than a year trying to repair his relationship with Trump, which hit its nadir in February 2025 during a shouting match in the Oval Office. Since then, Zelensky has taken to flattering the U.S. president, and he has tried to capitalize on Trump’s occasional annoyance that Putin will not end the war. Trump and Putin’s Alaska summit last year yielded little more than a photo of the two that hangs in the Palm Room at the White House. Even if Trump wouldn’t fully support Ukraine, officials in Kyiv had hoped he would not actively hurt their cause. That hope may be fading.

Recent talks between Kushner, Witkoff, and Putin have included the promise of massive business deals that Russia could strike with U.S. interests once the war concludes, according to reports. Ukrainian officials have long believed that Trump’s foreign policy focuses on opening up business deals—and the potential enrichment of the president’s family and friends—over the defense of democracy, human rights, or territorial sovereignty. Some officials in Kyiv believe that Russia’s economy, which has been remade to fuel Putin’s war machine, will not implode, despite the pressure of increased drone strikes and sanctions. A Ukrainian official close to the negotiating process told us that means “we need to change our strategy, stop fooling ourselves,” and find a way out of the war with Europe’s help. That, the official said, would likely require a new emphasis on negotiations.

During his call with Trump, Putin declined to commit to resuming peace talks, the Kremlin later told reporters. Yet Trump continues to view Zelensky as the primary impediment to peace—and the business deals it might bring—and he called for Ukraine to hold elections to select a new president. (Zelensky has said he will hold an election if Putin agrees to a 60-day cease-fire.) Trump also views Zelensky as an obstacle to his coveted, yet elusive, Nobel Peace Prize, for which he was passed over again last week. A senior European official told us that the U.S. has threatened to stop selling weapons to Ukraine via Europe if the strikes continue, and some close to Trump have suggested that the U.S. stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, as it briefly did after the 2025 Oval Office argument.

[From the November 2026 issue: The Baltic states prepare for war]

Ukraine was already bracing for a difficult winter. Moscow has escalated its attacks on Ukraine’s cities. It has grown its missile stockpiles and debuted a jet-powered drone that Ukrainian defenses have had difficulty stopping. Europe has tried to fill the gaps left by Trump’s indifference—and the U.S. being bogged down in Iran—but Zelensky’s aides believe that Putin will use the winter to pummel their cities before making another lunge at Kyiv in the spring. If, suddenly, Ukraine were left without U.S. intelligence or American-made weapons, Kyiv might be in its most vulnerable position since the first days of the war.

Trump’s admiration for Putin has been one of the most enduring geopolitical subplots of the past decade. He refused to publicly acknowledge Russia’s efforts to help elect him in 2016, infamously siding with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies during the leaders’ summit in Helsinki during his first term. More recently, he has refrained from holding Putin to account for helping Iran, even after American intelligence agencies revealed that Moscow gave Tehran targeting information to strike U.S. military assets in the region. Some of Trump’s closest outside advisers have privately wondered what Putin has done to so thoroughly enthrall the president; Trump’s respect for the Russian leader appears undiminished despite the humiliating struggles Putin has faced during the Ukraine invasion.

Instead, Trump has taken steps to help Putin shed his status as an international pariah. Though Putin has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Trump welcomed him to Anchorage last summer. Trump’s move to undo the diesel sanctions could provide a boost to Russia’s faltering economy. And he has overruled the objections of some in his own party by inviting Putin to this winter’s G20 summit, which the United States is hosting at a Trump-owned golf course in Doral, just outside Miami.

If Putin accepts the invitation to that December meeting, it would be the first time he has attended a multilateral summit in a Western country since his invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky has said he’ll be there, and is hoping to meet with Putin to negotiate the end of the war. Trump has mentioned to advisers, one of them told us, that he’d like both sides to arrive to Doral ready to make a deal, so he can then preside over a peacemaking summit. Maybe then, Trump has suggested, he can finally win that Nobel.

What Trump’s Chatbot Told Me About the Election

2026-10-09T07:00:00-04:00

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Around the same time that the world learned that swarms of autonomous AI agents were escaping their testing environments and carrying out sophisticated hacking attacks this past summer, researchers who focus on election security were running tests of their own. They wanted to see whether the safeguards that top AI companies had enacted to prevent their technology from disrupting the upcoming midterms would work in the real world. The results were ominous.

In response to sample prompts designed to create misinformation, several chatbots produced realistic photos of a man stuffing ballots into a mailbox, a man holding a foreign passport while trying to vote, and FBI agents investigating a voter-registration organization. The chatbots also created fraudulent government documents and deepfake videos of government officials purporting to substantiate election-conspiracy theories. In some cases, the chatbots acted in violation of their own policies. They even helped the researchers, from the Brennan Center for Justice, hone the prompts that would create propaganda to boost specious claims of election fraud.

The resulting images were so realistic that when the researchers asked other chatbots to determine whether they were real or fake, several of the leading AI firms’ models were stumped. Much of the activity contravened safety systems that companies had touted just months ago—and some seemed to run afoul of various state laws, researchers found. The experiment shows just how wide the gap has become between the fast-moving technology and the glacially paced effort to regulate it, Lawrence Norden, who helped conduct the research as the Brennan Center’s vice president of elections and government, told me.

“All the companies apparently have some guardrails to try to prevent this from happening,” he said, citing AI firms’ written guidelines around misinformation and cybersecurity. “They’re easily circumventable, and the tools themselves make it easy to circumvent them. That’s really what makes me think we’re not ready.“

Washington and Silicon Valley have been consumed in recent weeks with debate over the extent to which ever more intelligent AI agents may put all of humanity in danger. Much less attention has been on what researchers and election officials told me is a more pressing short-term reality: The November midterms are more vulnerable to AI-powered disruption or manipulation than most voters realize. Few signs indicate that the federal government is taking the risks as seriously as it should. Instead, as misinformation and cyberhacking threats rise, the agencies and entities responsible for protecting America’s electoral infrastructure have been gutted, downgraded, or otherwise neutralized. As a result, the 2026 midterms are shaping up to be the first live, real-world test of whether the jumble of state, local, and industry policies designed to protect against a breakdown in election systems can hold up in the AI era. Few election and cybersecurity experts believe that this patchwork is well suited to stopping a serious attack.

[Read: Trump’s see-no-evil AI policy]

Such attacks could be carried out in different ways. Sophisticated misinformation campaigns using the latest generative technology could convince voters that the election has been compromised. Election officials are also concerned that AI-assisted cyberattacks could take down critical voting infrastructure. There is little evidence that AI agents would have the ability to infiltrate vote-counting systems to manipulate actual votes, which are almost always backed up by a paper record.

The breaches of the AI company Hugging Face and attempted hacks of government agencies by rogue agents in recent months have led companies to pause some AI development, call for new regulations, and implement measures to counter the mounting risks to public safety. There are few signs that the technology’s threats to election security are creating a similar level of caution. Some state and local officials, with little guidance from the federal government, are scrambling to prepare for a range of unpredictable scenarios, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told me. The tools available to malicious actors are rapidly improving, forcing government officials to play catch-up. “As we think about the threat of AI, we think about deepfakes; we think about bots, hacking, and disrupting our official websites or bringing down essential voter-registration systems,” Bellows said. “It means that we have to work even harder to protect ourselves.”

The Brennan Center study—and similar tests run this year by other organizations, including the pro-democracy group States United—found that it has become easy for AI to create confusion before, during, and after an election. In one instance, researchers used a publicly available AI tool to reproduce a version of a disinformation video created in Russia and released in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. “The ease with which we created this video—which, in the past, would have required actors, cameras, and production infrastructure—illustrates the power of modern chatbots to generate misinformation easily and prolifically,” the Brennan Center researchers wrote in their August report.

Brennan Center

An AI-generated image from the Brennan Center study shows a man casting a ballot while holding a foreign passport.

Brennan Center

An AI-generated image Brennan Center researchers created with ChatGPT that they say appears to show a person instructing people how to fill out their ballots.

The chatbots did provide some guardrails. When researchers posed as election skeptics and tried to prompt various chatbots to confirm a series of conspiracy theories, the models consistently tried to debunk such claims. The States United probe found that the models improved their accuracy over time, and ChatGPT and Google AI both became markedly more accurate in answering election-related inquiries from late 2025 to early 2026.

At the same time, chatbots’ inclination to be friendly—and occasionally sycophantic—sometimes led to banter that appeared to validate false ideas about election fraud. “That feeling you can’t put your finger on? It was put there deliberately by people who raised hundreds of millions of dollars off it,” Anthropic’s Claude told a Brennan Center researcher who posed as a user with doubts about the 2020 election. “Questioning elections is American as apple pie,” xAI’s Grok told another researcher.

The study’s authors were often able to bypass safeguards that AI companies had set up to prevent their agents from producing election-related misinformation, either by changing the settings or by switching among different AI models when they ran into roadblocks. They asked one AI model to create an image showing someone altering the postmark dates on mail-in ballots; it did so but replaced the mail-in ballots with regular mail. The researchers then took that image and asked a different AI model to replace the regular mail with mail-in ballots. It did so without hesitation.

It is easy to imagine how in the chaotic aftermath of a close election, such imagery could provide the kind of alleged evidence that skeptics could use to undermine the results, T. J. Pyche, a former election administrator who serves on the AI + Elections Clinic advisory board at Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory and as the vice president of the nonpartisan group Ready for Tuesday, told me. Paradoxically, election officials may also benefit from how skilled AI technology has become at producing fake images and video, he said. When he conducted trainings for election administrators early last year, he would show them a series of videos and ask them to identify which were authentic and which had been generated by AI. Most could do so with relative ease, even if they divulged fears that average voters might be duped. Today, little distinguishes fake images and videos from real ones. But that could reduce the believability of extreme examples of AI-generated propaganda, Pyche noted. “Something that they have going in their favor is that people don’t believe anything anymore,” he said. “People since have moved toward thinking that everything’s AI.”

[Read: The only thing capable of uniting Bernie and Bannon]

The spread of misinformation is only one of the threats that AI poses to the electoral system. Election administrators have also warned that the risk of cyberintrusions has increased significantly now that automated agents have developed the ability to circumvent cybersecurity defenses and secretly work together to find vulnerabilities. Governmental networks have already been targeted. Last month, researchers learned that AI agents had been probing U.S.-government websites, attempting intrusions on the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights and initiating unauthorized interactions with the Census Bureau. In Australia, OpenAI agents bypassed cybersecurity defenses and accessed several government websites this past summer, including a Medicare-statistics portal. In a statement last week apologizing for the breaches, the company revealed that the agents had accessed public and private Medicare files. OpenAI said that it had not found evidence that patient records were breached.

The fact that America’s elections are so decentralized—more than 10,000 entities manage the voting process at the state and local levels—has long been hailed as a kind of defense mechanism against foreign tampering. Someone trying to flip a statewide election would presumably have to compromise the vote in multiple jurisdictions and polling locations to have a large effect on ballot totals. But many of those offices operate on limited budgets and are especially vulnerable to AI agents that can penetrate weak defenses.

Several municipalities in Maine experienced cyberintrusions this past summer that forced some government services to shut down temporarily. Although AI does not appear to have been involved in the breaches, the fallout still stood as a warning about how fragile our electoral system is, Bellows said: “When cyber adversaries are targeting little tiny towns in rural Maine, we have a problem—and AI just accelerates that problem.”

Geopolitical developments—the United States is at war with Iran and locked in strategic standoffs with other adversaries—only heighten the level of danger. “These kinds of sophisticated models can be integrated into activities by foreign threat actors—Iran, Russia, China all being high on that list,” Isabel Linzer, a policy analyst on the elections-and-democracy team at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me. “It is worrying because we are, on one hand, reducing the defense capabilities, while we are also seeing an increased threat environment because the technology has advanced.”

Donald Trump, who last week met with the CEOs of several top AI companies, has downplayed the risks. The president suggested that he is not interested in implementing new federal restrictions on a technology that he asserted “will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution.” He said that the companies are doing “tremendous self-policing” and previously claimed that the only guardrail AI needs is a “STRONG AND SMART” president.

The Trump administration has been especially hostile to efforts by state and local election administrators to protect themselves against cyberintrusions. The main agency responsible for shielding election systems from cyberthreats, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has been decimated by staff cuts and dysfunction since Trump’s return to office. CISA’s work on election security has been scaled back significantly as well. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to prime his supporters with misinformation about elections, repeatedly calling voting in America “rigged” and vulnerable to wide-scale fraud.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the record. A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that the Trump administration will ensure that the upcoming elections are free and fair. A spokesperson for CISA did not respond to a request for comment.

[Read: How Trump left America vulnerable to cyberattacks]

Norden, the Brennan Center official, said that his team got in touch with companies to discuss fixes after his research identified flaws in their models’ handling of election misinformation. A Google spokesperson pointed me to a September 9 blog post in which the company outlined measures it had implemented to shore up its cybersecurity defenses ahead of the midterms. Other AI companies have touted similar election-security programs, including special watermarks that help flag AI-generated content. Nate Evans, a spokesperson for OpenAI, referenced the company’s own watermark program in a statement. “Our goal is to support people’s ability to participate freely in elections and make their own decisions with reliable information and effective safeguards,” he told me. “On cyber, we are also working closely with cyber defenders across the elections ecosystem and we continue to monitor for cyber abuse.” A Meta spokesperson pointed me to a February blog post showing how the company is preparing for the midterms. An Anthropic spokesperson sent me the company’s April 24 blog post on the company’s “election safeguards.” Spokespeople for xAI, Perplexity, and DeepSeek—all of which were tested in the Brennan study—did not respond to my requests for comment.

AI could help with parts of the electoral process that can be monotonous and time-consuming, some officials told me. Bill Gates, a former Maricopa County supervisor who now leads Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory, told me that he has been working with election officials to find ways to use AI to reduce redundancy and increase efficiency. “There are these sort of tedious tasks that exist in elections—tedious but extremely important,” he said, referencing things such as translating material into foreign languages and creating real-time social-media updates. “To the extent that AI can be of help there, that’s wonderful.”

Shortly before the 2024 election, researchers trained an “AI tutor” to provide truthful information about election administration. When election skeptics participating in a study learned facts about election administration and interacted with the chatbot, they were more likely to soften or reverse their views about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 presidential race, Adam Berinsky, an MIT professor who helped run the study, told me. Berinsky acknowledged that “in the real world,” it might be difficult to persuade a large number of Trump supporters to spend time engaging with a chatbot that rejects their preconceived notions about the voting system. Election skeptics have plenty of alternative AI options to choose from—including one that bears the imprimatur of the U.S. government. Last week, Trump unveiled America.gov, a chatbot designed to offer Americans a centralized place to ask questions about the government and its services.

A day after the chatbot was unveiled, I logged on and asked whether the 2020 presidential election had been “rigged,” as Trump claims. It demurred. “I can’t say whether the 2020 presidential election was ‘rigged,’” it responded, declining to offer a “political judgment.” It gave similar answers when I asked whether Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate, whether evidence of widespread fraud existed, whether mail-in ballots had been compromised, and whether any judges had backed up Trump’s claims that the election had been stolen.

When I posed those same questions this week, the chatbot seemed to have gotten smarter—or at least slightly more responsible. It noted that federal agencies have reported that the 2020 federal elections were secure, that courts dismissed Trump’s claims of fraud after the election, and that there was no widespread evidence of ballot tampering. Still, America’s chatbot stopped short of confirming that the 2020 election was free and fair, saying, “That is political commentary, which I do not provide.”

Kathy Hochul’s Improbable Turnaround

2026-10-08T10:47:36-04:00

On many mornings, as New York City is waking up, a diminutive grandmother from Buffalo puts on sneakers and a baseball cap and takes a 45-minute walk with her husband around the streets near their apartment on Manhattan’s East Side. Her security detail keeps its distance, and hardly anyone seems to recognize Kathy Hochul on these strolls, even though she has been the governor of New York for the past five years.

Not many big-state governors enjoy such anonymity, but the spotlight has been slow to find the 68-year-old Hochul. Andrew Cuomo excluded her from his inner circle during her years as his deputy. Since succeeding him in 2021, she has operated in the shadow of much larger political personalities, be they fellow Democrats eyeing the White House or the polarizing Queens men—President Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani—who generate far more headlines.

What attention Hochul attracted in her first years as governor was largely negative. She won her own full term in 2022 by six points, a relatively narrow margin for New York that Nancy Pelosi blamed for costing Democrats control of the House. (The party lost five winnable congressional races in New York that year.) By late 2024, Hochul’s approval rating had dropped below 40 percent, and the Democrats who were plotting primary challenges included her own handpicked lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado.

But the past two years have yielded an impressive turnaround. Hochul has drawn praise for forging productive relationships with both Trump and Mamdani. She easily dispatched opponents on her left (Delgado quit his campaign for governor in February) and her right (Representative Elise Stefanik’s bid lasted just more than a month). Hochul appears on track to secure another four-year term as New York’s governor, and if she remains something less than an A-list political celebrity, she has earned the respect of a party that all but dismissed her not long ago.

“Kathy Hochul is the comeback governor of America,” Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat who was once one of Hochul’s harshest critics, told me. As recently as late 2024, Torres used words such as erratic, chaotic, and embarrassing to describe her performance; he warned—and this was not meant as a compliment—that she could be the Democrats’ “new Biden.” But he has learned not to underestimate her. “You do so at your own peril,” Torres said. Mamdani, who as a state legislator said that Hochul had “failed our constituents across the state,” has had a similar conversion. “She’s done incredibly well,” he told me in an interview.

Some Cuomo loyalists chalk up Hochul’s recent success to luck as much as skill. Democrats nationwide are poised to have a much better election next month than they did in 2022. And as people close to the governor readily acknowledge, having Trump on one side and Mamdani, a democratic socialist, on the other opens up a wide lane for a moderate to govern.

Hochul’s allies, however, are more likely to attribute her turnaround to a canny and dogged politician understanding the power of her office. Without much fanfare, they point out, she has delivered the kind of affordability agenda—centered around expanded child care, housing, and energy production—that Democrats say the party needs to win back the voters they’ve lost. Impatient and quietly competitive, Hochul drove her staff to speed up the announcement of a one-year moratorium on the construction of large AI data centers so that she could be the nation’s first governor to make such a move. She also overhauled the state party’s campaign apparatus, and in 2024, Democrats won back four of the congressional seats they had lost two years earlier.

In conversation, Hochul sometimes speaks so softly that she can be hard to hear. But in a series of interviews this summer, she was eager to tout her success as the product of a deliberate strategy to ratchet down what she described as an ego-driven culture of confrontation in New York politics—one that pitted Democrats against one another as well as against Trump. “I didn’t need to go to war,” Hochul told me. She could, she said, generate more media coverage by first creating conflict and then beating down her opponents. But she’s chosen a different approach. “I win, but I don’t have to destroy people in the process,” she said. “Not always.”

Nonetheless, Hochul said she has taken careful note of the many former critics who have returned to her fold: “There’s a long line of people asking for forgiveness.”

Adam Pape for The Atlantic

Governor Kathy Hochul visits the Mamá Tingó Childcare and Learning Center in Manhattan.

Hochul is the first woman to serve as the governor of New York, and as such, she is also the first mother to lead the state (and, she often adds, the first grandmother). She calls herself the “mom governor,” and when I asked her, over breakfast at a Manhattan diner, what had prepared her to deal with prideful men such as Trump and Cuomo, she turned not to any professional or political experience but to child-rearing. “I’ve raised toddlers. I’ve raised teenagers,” Hochul said. “So many times when things are swirling around, I’ve had to be the eye of the hurricane, be that calm voice.”

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Comparing Trump to a child has become something of a cliché, but as much as any Democrat during the president’s second term, Hochul has figured out a way to work with him without capitulating to his demands. (It probably helps that unlike many leaders in her party, she is not looking to take his job in two years.) Hochul has persuaded Trump to reverse course at times, such as when he agreed to restore $187 million in cuts to counterterrorism funding for New York. She also claims credit for Trump not federalizing the state’s National Guard or surging ICE into New York City following deployments into other urban centers. During a White House meeting of governors in February, Trump told the assembled state leaders that he would not ramp up immigration enforcement in New York unless Hochul requested it.

Hochul told me her conversations with Trump are sometimes cordial and sometimes combative. She tries to appeal to his vanity and business interests, warning him that the “chaos” of major ICE raids would hurt not only his own bottom line but those of his many wealthy friends in New York. “I’ve used that many times,” Hochul said. “We just angle the argument based on a shared interest, and it works—most times.” Last year she pitched Trump on taking over the redevelopment of Penn Station, the nation’s busiest transit hub and an eyesore that Hochul referred to as “a hellhole.” Hochul correctly surmised that the longtime developer would take her up on the offer, and the move relieved her of responsibility for a project that had bedeviled her predecessors. (Characteristically, Trump officials have made it known that the president wants his name stamped on the complex, a proposal that Hochul has yet to publicly veto.)

The president has leveled public attacks on Hochul as he campaigns for her Republican opponent, Bruce Blakeman, a county executive on Long Island. Trump has called her “stupid” and a “Dumocrat,” criticizing her most recently for opposing his tariffs on Canada and for refusing to go along with his renaming of Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”

In private, however, the president’s tone is often different. He’ll tell Hochul, according to an aide privy to their calls, “You’re so mean to me, but I like you anyways.” They’ll sometimes talk politics as well. Hochul happened to have a call with Trump on the day last December when Stefanik quit the governor’s race. Stefanik, a top Trump surrogate in Congress, had wanted the president’s endorsement in a primary against Blakeman, but Trump had stayed neutral. Hochul told me she had asked the president why he hadn’t backed Stefanik, given how strong an ally she had been. Trump hemmed and hawed, she said, praising Stefanik while also noting his long friendship with Blakeman. Hochul, not letting him dodge the question, pressed again. Finally, Trump said of Blakeman: “He looks the part.”

“So that’s why I’m running against Blakeman,” Hochul said as she recounted the call in her office. Then, in a bit of bravado, she added: “And that’s why he’ll be in Trump’s Cabinet next year.” (The Trump ally whom Hochul defeated in 2022, Lee Zeldin, is now his EPA administrator.) The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

By comparison, Hochul’s relationship with Mamdani has been easier to manage. From the start, their political priorities were largely aligned. After Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for mayor last year, Hochul endorsed his campaign against Cuomo, who was running on a third-party ballot line, at a time when neither of New York’s other two most powerful Democrats, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, was offering Mamdani his support. (Mamdani returned the favor by endorsing Hochul’s bid in February.)

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Hochul also had a vested interest in the new mayor maintaining a drop in crime in New York City after voter concerns about public safety upended her 2022 campaign. Before endorsing Mamdani, she told me, she implored him to pledge that he would keep as police commissioner Jessica Tisch, the technocrat and billionaire heiress whom many in the business community had credited as a stabilizing force. Hochul hinted that she had made Tisch’s retention a condition of her support. “It was important to me,” she said. (Mamdani told me that the call factored into his decision, though he described her push for Tisch as “more of a recommendation.”) When Mamdani made his choice public several weeks later, he called Hochul to give her a heads-up. “I heard you on that,” he told the governor.

Adam Pape for The Atlantic

Hochul greets New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani before a press conference at Manhattan’s High Bridge Recreation Center.

After Mamdani won the mayoral election in November, Hochul gave him advice on dealing with Trump. Before the two met in the White House that month, she urged the mayor-elect to “find common interest” with the president. “Take the sights off of New York City,” Hochul told him, she recalled to me. “Don’t let us be in the bull’s-eye.” Mamdani ended up charming Trump to a degree that surprised nearly everyone, helping allay fears that the city was next on the administration’s list of targets.. “I absolutely took that advice,” the mayor said. “To me, it speaks to how she looks at this work as how best to deliver for people. And if you are working backwards from that as your intended outcome, it allows you to prepare for each and every meeting, no matter the level of agreement or disagreement with whomever you’re meeting with.”

Hochul and Mamdani, of course, do not agree on everything. She opposed his campaign push to raise taxes on millionaires and corporations to fund an expansion of social programs. More recently, she criticized the city’s rollout of a new levy on expensive second homes—the so-called pied-à-terre tax—and gently suggested that he keep his focus on the city rather than pick fights with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (whom Mamdani wants the federal government to arrest for war crimes). But on the whole, they have gotten along swimmingly. “She is sincere,” Mamdani said. “Whether I’m standing next to her at a press conference or whether I’m sitting across from her at a table, it’s the same kind of conversation.” He noted wryly that in politics, that often isn’t the case.

That Hochul spent even a day as governor is an accident of history. She was never a governing partner of Cuomo’s, much less his heir apparent. He tried multiple times to replace her on his ticket.

She fended off one attempt, in 2018, by marshaling calls of support for her candidacy from Democratic leaders in key upstate counties. In early 2021, Cuomo’s team sought to find a soft landing for Hochul in the Biden administration, but Cuomo was forced out of office over sexual-harassment claims before it could happen. Hochul told me she had stalled for time, suggesting roles—such as ambassador to Canada—that she knew she wouldn’t get. “I ran out the clock,” Hochul said. (Through a spokesperson, Cuomo declined an interview request, but his predecessor, former Governor David Paterson, told me that Cuomo had told him directly that he planned to replace Hochul during a 2022 campaign.)

Hochul’s success in keeping her job as lieutenant governor reflects a persistence, even a stubbornness, that has helped her climb up a rickety political ladder. She has rarely been the first choice of Democratic power brokers, but she’s shown a willingness to fight for herself, wearing down opponents. She’s also benefited repeatedly from the lack of discipline of male politicians. In early 2011, Hochul was serving as a county clerk in Buffalo when a married Republican House member in a nearby district, Representative Chris Lee, resigned amid revelations that he had sent a shirtless photo of himself to a woman he met on Craigslist. (The scandal was rather tame by today’s tawdrier standards.)

Party leaders wanted Hochul to run for county executive, doubting she could win a special election in a red district just six months after Republicans had swept Democrats out of the House majority. But Hochul, with encouragement from her daughter, decided to run for Congress. Democrats brought her polling showing her that she’d be a shoo-in for the local race; they warned her that she’d receive no help from the national party if she ran for the House. Hochul wouldn’t budge. “That just pissed me off,” she told me. “At that point I’m like, I’m definitely doing it.”

Before long, she began pestering the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Steve Israel, with calls and emails to convince him that the race was worth the party’s investment. “Just relentless outreach,” he told me. Still, Israel was reluctant. “I did not want to start my chairmanship of the committee by sinking and wasting money on an absolutely futile race,” Israel said. Before committing support, he gave Hochul fundraising and polling targets that he believed would be impossible for her to meet. When she exceeded them, the DCCC gave her the money she requested, and Hochul ended up winning, a major upset that buoyed Democrats nationwide and, for a time, made her a darling of the party. Hochul would narrowly lose her seat the following year after redistricting gave her an even more conservative electorate, but her tenacity made a lasting impression on party leaders.

In need of a new running mate in 2014, Cuomo asked her to join his reelection bid. His first lieutenant governor had declined another term, citing the toll that hours-long drives through the state’s hinterlands had taken on his ailing back. (The No. 2 post, which does not come with a plane, is anything but glamorous.) Hochul provided Cuomo gender balance on the ticket and the chance to improve his performance in western New York, one of the few regions he had lost in his otherwise-dominant showing in the 2010 election. With Hochul aboard, Cuomo won Erie County—home of Buffalo—four years later. After that, her usefulness to him faded.

Hochul’s ascension to the governorship, in August 2021, was not exactly sudden; Cuomo had faced calls to resign for months, and he lingered in office (against Hochul’s wishes) for two weeks after announcing he would step down. But Hochul did not get off to a strong start. “She had a pretty tough transition,” Representative Joseph Morelle, an upstate Democrat and longtime friend of Hochul’s, told me.

Hochul’s first pick for lieutenant governor lasted just seven months until he resigned after being indicted on bribery charges. She battled with the Democrat-controlled legislature, which rejected her nominee for chief judge of the state’s highest court. Many voters came to believe she was out of her depth; Republicans began calling her the “worst governor in America”—a label they are still using in campaign ads.

Hochul’s first campaign for a full term was rocky too. Her aides now acknowledge that she was slow to respond to concerns about rising crime and the influx of migrants arriving in the state (some because they were bused in by Republican governors). Though she had traveled widely across New York as lieutenant governor, she remained unknown to many voters, some of whom still mispronounce her name as Hawk-ul.

Hochul is the first governor in more than a century from Buffalo, a city on the shores of Lake Erie that is culturally and geographically closer to Cleveland than it is to New York City, home to the bulk of the state’s Democratic voter base. She likes to project a steely image. When I asked about the opprobrium she received early in her tenure, which sometimes seemed to veer into disrespect, she recalled a saying that her mother used to repeat: “No one can make you feel bad without your permission, and I give it to no one.”

But her advisers told me that she can, in fact, be quite sensitive to criticism and slights. The finger-pointing by Pelosi stung particularly hard; years later, one aide prefaced a reference to the former speaker with a string of expletives.

Adam Pape for The Atlantic

Although Hochul has sought to avoid drawn-out public battles with fellow Democrats, she’s played her share of hardball politics behind the scenes. “People think that she is a pushover when she really is not,” a Brooklyn state senator, Roxanne Persaud, told me, attributing those perceptions in large part to assumptions that people have about women in power.

After Delgado moved to challenge her last year, Hochul took away his office space and reassigned almost all of his staff. Hochul allies told me that she had to demonstrate that she was not merely, as one of them put it, “the nice lady from Buffalo.” “You can sense when people become comfortable in their own political skin, and I think she exudes that now, which gives voters confidence,” the Reverend Al Sharpton told me. “I judge a lot of politicians based on, do they have enough self-confidence, enough spine, to say no? And she does.”

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Hochul hasn’t won over all of her critics on the left. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union of America, who had heard I was working on a story about Hochul. He was not a fan. “She’s absolutely clueless about fostering relationships,” Samuelsen said. He criticized her handling of a variety of labor disputes, including a strike by Long Island Rail Road workers in May, and he accused her of repeatedly going back on her word in negotiations. “She’s just completely untrustworthy, and kind of like a junkyard dog.”

During the 2024 election, Hochul infuriated progressives in New York City by abruptly pausing implementation of a long-planned toll on vehicles driving into Manhattan. The first-in-the-nation policy, known as congestion pricing, held the promise of simultaneously relieving traffic, improving air quality, and providing a much-needed infusion of money into the city’s century-old subway system. Most saw the move as a politically motivated sop to suburban voters in GOP-held seats around New York City, where Democrats feared a voter backlash if the policy went forward.

After the election, Hochul worked out a compromise by reviving the toll but at a lower rate. Then Trump handed her a gift: Before even taking office for a second time, he declared that his administration would block the state’s plan, and the issue wound up in the courts. For added effect, the White House posted an image of Trump wearing a crown beside the declaration LONG LIVE THE KING.

The president’s involvement turned a factional Democratic fight over taxes into a battle that unified the party and allowed Hochul to defend her state’s sovereignty against federal overreach. “New York hasn’t labored under a king in over 250 years, and we sure as hell are not going to start now,” the governor declared. Nearly two years later, the toll remains in effect—courts have consistently ruled in the state’s favor—and the issue is not a major flash point in the midterm campaigns. The episode exemplifies Hochul’s tenure as governor—a rocky start, some compromise, a little resilience, and more than a bit of luck.

Hochul is not a scintillating public speaker, or even an especially smooth one. At the events I attended, she had a tendency to garble her words, occasionally turning finely honed sound bites into mush. In May, her attempt to dunk on Trump’s claim that he was a huge New York Knicks fan ahead of the team’s NBA Finals run backfired. “I’d ask him to name the starting lineup from the 1993 championship team and see how he does,” Hochul said, mistaking the year of the team’s last NBA trophy by two decades. During a school event, Hochul awkwardly misidentified the state senator who represented the area even though the lawmaker was standing right behind her.

She’s better at retail politics. Hochul seems to actually enjoy the endless introductions, photo ops, and meet-and-greets that many politicians only tolerate as necessary tedium. The connections she makes also feel sincere. At a different school in a Republican-leaning area of Long Island, I watched as a local superintendent got choked up during a private meeting while he described his appreciation for her visit and the new pre-K center she was there to celebrate.

Hochul used to describe herself as “a Biden Democrat,” and much like the former president, she’ll often use her own upbringing as a reference point. Her parents started their marriage living in a trailer park near the Bethlehem Steel plant where her father worked, before moving to a small apartment. “It was a tough life,” she told the audience in the Bronx. “My parents, in one sense, had their dignity, their success defined by the home.” At the opening of the pre-K center, she recalled her struggles as a young mom in the workforce. “I could not find affordable, accessible child care at all,” she said.

In addition to the drop in crime and expansion of pre-K and child-care centers, Hochul is promoting a $25 billion plan to construct or maintain 100,000 affordable homes across the state. Not above an election-year giveaway, she announced that the state would begin sending eligible families $200 energy-rebate checks, aimed at offsetting rising prices. (Hochul also mailed out “inflation refund” checks in 2025.) Hochul’s executive order on data centers placed her on the leading edge of an issue that is consuming Washington. At events across the state, she links AI to a broader economic agenda that she says is aimed at protecting workers—particularly women—from the threat of job displacement.

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Hochul is expected to win her next term more easily than she did her first. Exactly how much she’ll improve remains an open question; a Quinnipiac University poll showed her leading Blakeman by 19 points, but other surveys have found the gap to be much smaller, and her aides caution not to expect a landslide. The electorate is more polarized now, and besides, even after more than a decade in statewide office, Hochul is still introducing herself to some voters. She told me that when she’s not disguising herself in a baseball cap, more and more people take notice of her. As I watched her make the rounds at neighborhood festivals in Brooklyn and Harlem recently, plenty of people surrounded her for photos. Others showed little interest.

At the conclusion of a festival in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, Hochul was walking back to her armored SUVs when a man on a nearby park bench recognized her and stood up to say hello. She walked over to greet him, and they had a pleasant exchange. As she was leaving, he asked the governor one more question: “What’s your name again?”