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Tag: 2026 midterms

  • Talarico Contests MAGA’s Conquest of American Christianity

    Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon with his Christian nationalist mentor Doug Wilson.
    Photo: @PeteHegseth/X

    At the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on February 5, President Donald Trump indulged himself in a 75-minute rambling tirade devoted to glorifying himself, attacking his enemies, claiming a Republican monopoly on faith, and pledging to “viciously and violently” defend his kind of Christians. But his wasn’t the most alarming speech at the event. That distinction belonged to Trump’s secretary of Defense, as Baptist minister Brian Kaylor observed:

    Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself the “Secretary of War,” spoke after Trump to baptize the U.S. and especially its military. He did so by highlighting the worship services he’s been leading at the Pentagon. And he even suggested that soldiers can gain salvation by fighting for the United States.

    “America was founded as a Christian nation. It remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it. And as public officials, we have a sacred duty 250 years on to glorify him,” Hegseth said as he pointed upward. “That’s precisely why we instituted a monthly prayer service at the Pentagon, an act of what we see it as, spiritual readiness.”

    This was just an appetizer. As Kaylor notes in a separate dispatch, Hegseth has used his government-sanctioned Pentagon worship services to promote the rawest kind of Christian nationalism, most recently treating military leaders to the spiritual stylings of Doug Wilson:

    The Idaho pastor and self-described “paleo-Confederate” preached about the importance of trusting God for protection in battle and praised the monthly worship services as perhaps a sign of a new revival like the Great Awakening or the biblical Day of Pentecost….

    Wilson, an outspoken proponent of Christian Nationalism, has sparked numerous controversies over the years for what he preaches and teaches. He has downplayed the horrors of slavery and defended enslavers. He also pushes a hardline version of patriarchy, not just insisting only men can serve as pastors or in other church leadership roles but also that they should rule in families.

    Hegseth doesn’t just promote Wilson’s views at the Pentagon; he is a member of a congregation affiliated with the denomination Wilson founded and seemed thrilled to be able to welcome this prophet of patriarchy to bless America’s war fighters: “Thank you for your leadership, for your mentorship, for the things you’ve started, the truth you’ve told, your willingness to be bold.”

    Irreligious folk accustomed to hearing this sort of divinization of cultural conservatism proclaimed as “Christianity” should be aware that this isn’t what all Christians believe. Indeed, when it comes to the fraught subject of church-state separation, Christian nationalists stand at one extreme on a spectrum that includes many millions of believers who staunchly defend rigorous church-state separation on religious grounds. The same day that Hegseth and Wilson were whooping it up for a militarized American Jesus, Texas legislator and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico gained a viral YouTube audience for an interview with Stephen Colbert in which he pronounced Christian nationalism as, well, basically unclean:

    We are called to love all our neighbors, including our Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, agnostic, atheist neighbors. And forcing our religion down their throats is not love. It’s why I fought so hard for that sacred separation in our First Amendment.

    My granddad [a Baptist minister] raised me to believe that boundary between church and state doesn’t just benefit the state or our democracy, although it certainly does, but it also benefits the church.

    Because when the church gets too cozy with political power, it loses its prophetic voice, its ability to speak truth to power, its ability to imagine a completely different world. And this separation between church and state is something we have to safeguard. It’s something we have to fight for.

    And I think we need someone in the U.S. Senate who is going to confront Christian nationalism and tell the truth which is that there is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism. It is the worship of power in the name of Christ. And it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.

    Talarico, as it happens, is a Presbyterian seminarian. Mainline Protestant horror at the Prince of Peace being turned into a Man of War is not unusual, although until now it has gotten little attention. Alongside the faith-based backlash to Trump’s mass-deportation effort, which is especially strong among Catholics, we are beginning to receive regular reminders that alongside partisan and ideological polarization is a quiet battle among religious believers spurred by the particularly aggressive version of Christian nationalism espoused by Trump allies. It may be an accident that Talarico’s interview went viral after CBS clumsily discouraged its airing at the behest of Trump’s thuggish FCC chairman Brendan Carr. But the MAGA conquest of American Christianity will not be uncontested.

    Ed Kilgore

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  • Trump May Have Already Signed His Last Big Piece of Legislation

    Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

    Hard-core conservative Republicans have been agitating lately for a follow-up to last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. A second budget-reconciliation measure would let them do various things that Democrats would normally be able to block in the Senate, if not in the House. Some want a Second Big Beautiful Bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, such as Trump and Republicans unsuccessfully tried to pass in 2017. Others may want to implement some of Trump’s recent proposals to put thousands of dollars into the pockets of taxpayers right before they vote in the 2026 midterms, deficits be damned.

    But whatever fantasies Republicans were harboring seem to have come to an abrupt end. Last week, the president said one Big Beautiful Bill was enough, per Politico:

    President Donald Trump on Tuesday ruled out pushing another one-party reconciliation package through Capitol Hill.

    “In theory we’ve gotten everything passed that we need,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Larry Kudlow. “Now we just need to manage it. But we’ve gotten everything passed that we need for four years.”

    … The president didn’t rule out any legislation in the remainder of his term, but indicated he’s focusing on smaller-scale bills.

    “Do we have other things in mind? Yeah. We do — we have things in mind,” Trump said. “And we have, perfecting a little bit about what we did.”

    This means Trump is standing pat for the midterms, at least legislatively. Sure, he and his congressional allies will pursue “messaging bills” like the SAVE Act, which they are currently ventilating about at great length. But they know that such bills won’t survive a Senate filibuster. And it’s abundantly clear by now that Senate Republicans won’t kill the filibuster, either; this is the one thing — perhaps the only thing — they won’t give Trump in a million years, since they need to preserve the filibuster for a future Democratic presidency. So what Trump is admitting is that it’s time to buckle down for the midterms and forget about addressing troublesome issues like health-care costs or ICE outrages that would require a degree of genuine bipartisanship that has largely gone out the window since the president’s second inauguration.

    Obviously enough, the president will continue his efforts to expand his own powers to the maximum, making legislation — and Congress itself — largely unnecessary. But if you look closely at what he told Kudlow, he wasn’t just talking about 2026; he said, “We’ve gotten everything passed that we need for four years” [emphasis added]. Now, in part he may be thinking of the current brouhaha over ICE; the super-funding of immigration enforcement in the OBBBA means his masked thugs don’t need further money from Congress until every single immigrant has been deported. But more generally, he may feel inclined to stop relying on Congress for much of anything until he leaves the White House in 2029.

    The truth is, of course, that he may not be able to rely on Congress for much of anything in the last two years of his presidency. The odds are very high that Republicans will lose control of the House in November. History says so; conditions in the country are nothing like those in the two midterms since FDR when the president’s party didn’t lose House seats. And the handicappers agree: The Kalshi prediction market currently projects a Democratic majority of at least ten seats. Republicans are favored to hold on to the Senate, but a Democratic-wave election could still flip the chamber. Even if Republicans lose only the House, you can forget about any budget-reconciliation bills like the OBBBA. And thanks to the torching of bipartisanship by the 47th president and his congressional allies, compounded by Trump’s lame-duck status, there’s precious little Congress will be able to do on a simple majority-vote basis.

    Yes, in the waning days of a Trump administration there will still be occasional crises over must-pass legislation involving appropriations and debt limits. (It’s now estimated that the federal debt limit will again be breached by the spring or summer of 2027.) There may be partial or full government shutdowns now and then, which could lead to bipartisan negotiations on spending or even unrelated matters. And a lot of the overall atmospherics in Washington will depend on whether there is a Republican Senate to approve Trump’s judicial and executive-branch appointments (if not, you could see a vast number of judicial openings along with temporary appointments to key federal offices). But any way you slice it, the legislative phase of Trump 2.0 may be coming to an end. And the president himself seems fine with that. Believe it or not, he may become even more aggressive in asserting that he can do whatever he wants without congressional authorization.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Texas Special-Election Shocker Signals Big Trouble for GOP

    Photo: Desiree Rios/The New York Times/Redux

    It’s definitely possible to overreact to special-election results. These episodic contests, often far downballot, tend to attract low, sometimes skewed voter turnout. But the special elections held since Donald Trump’s 2024 victory add to the evidence that his party is headed for some real problems in November.

    The latest Democratic win is quite the shocker: In a very large (larger than a U.S. House district) state-senate district deep in the heart of Texas that Trump won by 17 points, local union leader and Democrat Taylor Rehmet trounced veteran conservative activist Leigh Wambsganss by 14 points (it was technically a runoff election for the two candidates who finished first and second in the first round in November). There’s nothing about this traditionally very conservative Fort Worth–area district that made it particularly susceptible to an upset of this depth, which contributes to the sense that it’s part of a national vibe shift, as this account of recent state legislative special-election trend lines indicates:

    CNN number cruncher Harry Enten summed up the situation and what such trends have meant in the past:

    A closer look at the Texas results, moreover, makes it difficult to attribute them just to a temporarily skewed pro-Democratic turnout pattern that won’t hold in November. Yes, turnout was very low, possibly because the election was, unusually, held on a Saturday. But not only Democrats turned out:

    Wambsganns, incidentally, “vastly outspent Rehmet as Republicans including Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick mounted a furious funding push in a bid to tilt the election in their favor in the final days,” noted the Texas Tribune.

    Another rationalization Republicans sometimes offer for special-election (or, for that matter, midterm) losses is that some Trump fans feel no particular need to vote if his name isn’t on the ballot. That, indeed, is why he has been much more engaged in preparations for the 2026 midterms than was the case in 2018, when Republicans lost pretty badly. But as Aaron Blake observed at CNN, Trump and his allies were very focused on this race:

    The race was important enough to earn the involvement of the national committees, top statewide Republicans and even Trump.

    Trump posted three times about the race in recent days, in clear hopes of juicing Election Day turnout for Republicans.

    But it didn’t work. In fact, in a pretty rare occurrence these days, Democrats actually did better on special Election Day than in early voting. While Rehmet won early voting 56-44, he won day-of voting 58-42, according to results from Tarrant County.

    Trump’s call clearly wasn’t heeded.

    The two candidates will compete for a full term in the Texas state senate in the March primaries and November general election. But the special election is setting off alarm bells among Texas Republicans, who face a potentially difficult U.S. Senate race (incumbent John Cornyn has two primary opponents, including MAGA favorite Ken Paxton) and are counting on major gains in U.S. House races in the state after the legislature conducted a mid-decade partisan gerrymander at Trump’s request. And if the GOP is in trouble in Texas, there could be trouble everywhere.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Trump Repackages Random Ideas Into ‘Great Healthcare Plan’

    Out of the blue.
    Photo: X/@WhiteHouse

    For many years, dating all the way back to 2015, Donald Trump has promised he’d someday offer a health-care plan to replace Obamacare. For months Republicans have fretted over allegations that they are clueless or heartless about rising health-care costs, exacerbated by their refusal to extend expiring Obamacare-premium subsidies received by around 22 million Americans. They’ve tossed out a bunch of random conservative health-care panaceas, as has Trump, mostly revolving around health savings accounts and other individualistic measures for undermining Obamacare-style regulated insurance markets.

    Today, without any warning, Trump released a video claiming a bunch of these well-worn ideas represent the “Great Healthcare Plan” he’s been talking about for so long.

    It’s significantly less vague than most of his past maunderings on health care but hardly anything you could call a blueprint, as the New York Times observed:

    The plan was short on specific details and left much of the direction for how to finalize it up to Congress. It amounted to a few paragraphs on a webpage, released with a video of Mr. Trump promoting what he called “the great health care plan.”

    Trump’s video unveiling this “proposal” was an odd pastiche of boasts about what he’s already done in the health-care arena (particularly his jawboning of pharmaceutical companies to lower prices for some drugs), denunciations of the “Unaffordable Care Act” (a term he clearly considers a bon mot), and wild claims about how incredibly good and cheap health care will soon become. He talked of lowering prices by far more than 100 percent, which is a mathematical impossibility. He failed even to mention the biggest problem Obamacare was created to address: the refusal of insurers to provide coverage for people with preexisting conditions or inherently expensive treatments. And once again, Trump’s impulses led him in contradictory directions; despite his denunciations of Obamacare, one of his big ideas is to build on an Obamacare discount feature called “cost-sharing reductions.”

    It’s unclear what Congress is expected to do with this plate of spaghetti thrown against the wall. Not a single Democrat will support this “plan,” which whatever it is, clearly aims to blow up Obamacare, just as Trump and the GOP unsuccessfully tried to do in 2017. That means the only path forward is via the party-line budget-reconciliation procedure, like the one that produced last year’s One Bill Beautiful Bill Act. Going in that direction in an election year with a topic as complex and controversial as health care may please conservative hard-liners who have been longing to destroy Obamacare for many years. But it hardly seems doable in a Congress where Republicans have such tiny margins of control.

    More likely than not, the president is just engaging in some high-visibility pre-midterm “messaging” to show concern over a set of problems that have stumped him and his party for eons. Maybe it will eventually turn into a proposal that more or less hangs together, even if its enactment by Congress is the longest stretch imaginable. Unfortunately, Trump’s claim that he has a “plan” will almost certainly kill off the already languishing efforts to come up with a bipartisan fix for the Obamacare-premium spike that is just now beginning to be felt in pocketbooks everywhere. He should have kept his rambling thoughts to himself.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Democrats Want to Run on Affordability. Trump Has Other Plans.

    Congressional Democrats have their issue for 2026.
    Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

    One of the big political stories of 2025 was the Democrats’ search for a message that could bring their party back from its calamitous 2024 losses. They began with a lot of confusion and divisions. Some progressives wanted, as they have for many years, a “populist” economic message that bashed “oligarchs,” heartless corporations, and global elites. Some centrists wanted to begin the comeback by jettisoning “woke” cultural stances and paying much more attention to moderate-minded median voters. Everyone acknowledged that Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris had failed to fully comprehend the damage that persistent inflation was doing to voter perceptions of their competence and compassion. And there was a potential common ground between centrist advocates of an “abundance” agenda that would help Democrats get big things done that benefited regular folks in tangible ways, and progressive billionaire-bashers who also focused on helping people make ends meet, albeit through different measures.

    It’s hard to identify the precise moment when these varying strands came together into a message and agenda on “affordability.” But a big breakthrough occurred on November 5, 2025, when centrist gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia and one notable progressive mayoral candidate in New York all won smashing victories by focusing on the rising living costs that belied Trump’s 2024 promises that he would bring back pre-pandemic prices on virtually everything. It wasn’t working just in blue states and cities, either. In Georgia on that same day Democrats beat two incumbent Republican state public-service commissioners by holding them accountable for rising power bills. And the next month a lefty Democratic candidate in a special congressional election in deep-red Tennessee over-performed expectations with an “affordability” message, despite all kinds of problems with her record and issue positions.

    With polls showing Trump’s job-approval numbers on handling inflation and managing the economy diving and his tariff initiatives getting much of the blame, it looked like Democrats had found their lightning in a bottle in a way that unified the party’s factions and also showed they had learned from the Biden-Harris-Walz debacle. Perhaps the best indication they were on to something special was the urgent concerns Republicans were starting to express about persistently high living costs. Even Trump seemed to be trying to get with the program, though he kept stepping on his own message by complaining that the economy was doing great, that restive voters were offensively ungrateful, and that the entire affordability issue was a “hoax.” It was beginning to look like Democrats were getting their mojo back, particularly after they triggered a government shutdown that proved they were willing to “fight Trump” on favorable ground (in this case, the “affordability” problem with health-care costs generally and Obamacare premium subsidies expiring in particular).

    While Trump was experiencing the downside of being the party in power in a period when voters were unhappy with government’s performance, he also retained the ability to control public discourse by audacious actions that surprised the opposition and literally changed the subject of partisan debate. In fact, he’s done that twice in the past week, first with his military strike on Venezuela and then with his robust defense of an ICE agent who killed an unarmed civilian in Minneapolis, apparently for no good reason.

    Neither development came out of nowhere, of course. The Venezuela action followed a long buildup of military forces in the waters near that country along with lethal attacks on alleged “drug boats” and wild threats against Nicolás Maduro for supposed “narco-terrorism.” And it also reflected a new national-defense strategy involving near-imperial U.S. hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. The killing in Minnesota was the inevitable product of Trump’s mass-deportation initiative with its reliance on terrorizing immigrant communities into “self-deportation” with thuggish tactics from armed and masked federal agents. It also stemmed from Trump’s decision to target Minnesota immigrants to exploit a child-care scandal linked to Somalis that happened on the watch of Democratic state and local officials.

    But predictable as they might have been, both incidents unsettled Democratic hopes of spending 2026 talking about “affordability,” and spurred fears that Trump would drag them “off-message” onto potentially treacherous and even divisive ground. As Politico reported, some Democrats sought to quickly “pivot” from criticism of Trump’s adventure to their now-favorite preoccupation:

    Across the country, candidates and lawmakers are slamming Trump’s decision to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and are using the moment to hammer their domestic affordability message.

    “Ohioans are facing higher costs across the board and are desperate for leadership that will help deliver relief,” former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is running to reclaim his seat, said on X. “We should be more focused on improving the lives of Ohioans – not Caracas.”

    The frame from Democrats shows how potent the party views affordability as an issue in the midterms, one that Trump and his team have grown increasingly preoccupied by after across-the-board losses in 2025.

    Trump’s seizure of multiple news cycles to lord it over the hemisphere and endorse lethal law-enforcement policies also made it hard for Democrats to follow consultants’ advice to ignore his provocations as much as possible, noted The Hill:

    Political strategists say Democrats running in competitive races in this year’s midterm elections for the House and Senate should steer clear of making President Trump the centerpiece of their campaigns.

    While Trump’s approval ratings are low and Americans have been frustrated by his job performance in the first year of his second term, the strategists say the key to winning is to home in on economic issues — particularly affordability. …

    It’s not as though Trump won’t be mentioned, people familiar with the strategy of the House Democrats’ campaign arm say. It’s that the president will be secondary to the primary focus of how Democrats can make the economy better. 

    Many rank-and-file Democrats reject this Trump-o-phobic approach. Some think Venezuela and ICE are big issues that must be confronted even if they’re “off-message” or believe Trump’s larger threat to democracy and traditional American values goes deeper than the wallet, and would exist even if life was “affordable” for most Americans. It’s a tension between cold calculations and red-hot emotional reactions to this president’s regular outrages that will likely continue in the opposition party so long as he is in office.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Trump’s Latest Outrages Could Ramp Up Pressure for Another Government Shutdown

    The lights could yet go off on January 30.
    Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

    There’s a lot of conflict in Congress to begin 2026, but the odds of another government shutdown — which could happen when stopgap spending authority runs out on January 30 — have been dropping. The trigger point for the long shutdown that began in October, the deadline for extending Obamacare premium subsidies, has come and gone, and while all Democrats and some Republicans still want to resurrect them, the issue isn’t time sensitive in quite the way it was. Plus, Congress is actually making progress on regular spending bills covering agencies till the end of the year, which could make the scope of government operations vulnerable to a shutdown significantly smaller. Beyond that, midterm elections are now less than a year away, and they will provide Democrats with the most important opportunity to check Donald Trump without interrupting vital government services.

    And so, as NOTUS reports, Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have been putting out the word that January 30 will pass without too much drama:

    Days into the new year, congressional Democrats are livid over a litany of issues, including President Donald Trump’s unilateral invasion of Venezuela, stalled action on health care and, most recently, an immigration agent fatally shooting a woman in Minneapolis. But they are split on how to fight back.

    With another critical government funding deadline on Jan. 30, Democratic leaders don’t appear willing to leverage their votes for spending bills in exchange for action. In fact, they appear to be openly forecasting there won’t be a shutdown at all.

    But this mind-set was developed before Trump decapitated the Venezuelan government and asserted “control” over that country while repeating threats to attack Mexico and Colombia and acquire Greenland. And it’s also before an ICE agent shot and killed a motorist in Minneapolis and the entire Trump administration doubled down on aggressive law-enforcement deployments and treated protesters as “domestic terrorists.” Now the rage of Democratic activists at Trump is bubbling up from its steady boiling state into geysers of fury, and the last thing Democrats in Congress want is to again let them down and provoke their wrath. And a few leading Democrats are wondering if an end-of-January interruption of funding might be in order after all, suggests NOTUS:

    “We’re about to have the DHS budget before Congress,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Senate Appropriations Committee member, said Wednesday. “And it’s clearer than ever that Democrats can’t support this budget if there aren’t constraints on the growing illegality of DHS, and it appears the lethal illegality of DHS.”

    Sen. Chris Van Hollen, another Appropriations Committee member, said that “nobody wants the government shut down,” but “it’s going to be important that Trump and his administration work on a bipartisan basis to address a lot of the issues.” He also cited the DHS budget as a point of concern.

    It’s worth remembering that funding for DHS, which supervises ICE, and for the Department of Defense (or as Trump and Pete Hegseth call it, “War”), which executes Trump’s bellicose global designs, will almost surely be included in the next stopgap spending bill that has to be passed by January 30 to keep the government humming. So it could very well be the target on multiple grounds for Democratic protests and demands both within and beyond Congress.

    As that potential choke point approaches, the mood among congressional Democrats may become a lot darker, particularly if the most recent administration outrages at home and abroad are just the beginning of many reminders that the 47th president is a dangerous would-be tyrant. Will they and “the base” remain patiently focused on the midterms? Or will Democrats feel the need to put sand in the gears of the machinery of government in the confident expectation that the party controlling Washington will get the blame for the ensuring disruptions of programs and services?

    Right now, you’d have to bet both parties will find a way to avoid another shutdown even as they gird their loins for a vicious and competitive midterm election. But if Trump continues to run wild, and his allies in Congress continue to enable him, all bets could be off until the government is refunded for the rest of the year and the campaign trail takes over.

    Ed Kilgore

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  • Indiana Republicans Defied Trump and Bomb Threats to Stop Pro-GOP Redistricting

    Photo: Kaiti Sullivan/Bloomberg/Getty Images

    Indiana Republicans defied bomb threats, swatting incidents, and a pressure campaign led by President Donald Trump when on Thursday they voted down a bill to make an all-GOP congressional delegation. In contrast to an easy approval in the state house, 21 Republicans joined ten Democrats in the state senate to sink the plan to wipe out two Democratic U.S. House districts.

    The campaign lasted four months and included Trump and J.D. Vance, both of whom had repeated personal meetings with gerrymander-shy Republican lawmakers, along with House Speaker Mike Johnson, Governor Mike Braun, Indiana senator Jim Banks, and a host of national conservative groups. As Politico explained, Charlie Kirk even spent the last weeks of his life threatening primaries for Republicans who opposed the effort.

    Now Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, is among many MAGA allies threatening vengeance in primaries for those who dared defy Trump’s orders to help rig the midterms. And Democrats nationally will be happy with the diverted GOP time, energy, and money devoted to Hoosier bloodletting, along with the continued presence in Congress of Indiana Democrats Andre Carson and Frank Mrvan.

    Trump’s effort to make Republican-controlled states redraw their congressional maps to give the GOP enough seats to withstand a potential Democratic wave has been hit or miss. Last week, the Supreme Court gave Trump a big win by overruling lower-court judges and putting back into place a Texas congressional map designed to give Republicans as many as five new House seats. He experienced earlier setbacks in Kansas and Ohio, whose Republicans also declined to wipe out Democratic districts, while Democrats successfully retaliated with a ballot initiative in California that is likely to cancel out or exceed Texas’s GOP gains.

    It’s getting late in the day for any further pre-midterm gerrymandering. Florida Republicans will give it a try despite constitutional barriers, and Virginia Democrats seem likely to counter. But overall, the GOP bid to insulate itself from the wrath of voters in November 2026 is losing momentum. Perhaps Republicans and their leader should focus a bit more on making themselves more popular than they have appeared to be in virtually every 2025 vote.

    Ed Kilgore

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  • What Will America Look Like After 3 More Years of Trump?

    On and on and on and on.
    Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

    Donald Trump has a flexible attitude toward truth and facts, typically embracing whatever version of reality that suits his purposes. His latest rally speech in Pennsylvania was something of a “greatest hits” display of fact-checker challenges on a wide range of issues. But he said one thing that no one should doubt or deny:

    Ain’t that the truth. Trump’s omnipresence in every form of media, his knack for audacious and offensive utterances, his huge echo chamber of followers and supportive media, and his unpredictable and often shocking presidential initiatives all combined to make his first four years in office feel like 40. And that experience was free and easy as compared to his second administration. It began with the appointment of some of the most controversial appointees in living memory, a blizzard of executive orders, and then the passage of the most sweeping single package of legislation in the history of Congress. Toss in the occasional military strike or domestic National Guard deployment, regular raids by masked ICE and border-control agents, and serial disfigurement of the White House, and you’ve got the show that never ends. Three more years could indeed feel like an eternity.

    So what will America look like after three more years of this barrage? As always, the administration’s intentions are opaque. But there are several outside variables that will dramatically shape how much Trump is able to do by the end of his time in office (assuming he actually leaves as scheduled on January 20, 2029). Here are the factors that will decide the outcome of this three-year “eternity.”

    One huge variable is the outcome of the 2026 midterm elections. If history and current polling are any indication, Democrats are very likely to gain control of the U.S. House and bust up the partisan trifecta that has made so much of Trump 2.0’s accomplishments (for good or ill) possible. With a Democratic House, there will be no more Big Beautiful Bills whipped through Congress on party-line votes reconfiguring the federal budget and tax code and remaking the shape and impact of the federal government. A hostile House would also bedevil the administration with constant investigations of its loosey-goosey attitude toward obeying legal limits on its powers, and its regular habits of self-dealing, cronyism, and apparent corruption. The last two years of the Trump presidency would be characterized by even greater end runs of Congress, and in Congress, by endless partisan rhetorical warfare (as opposed to actual legislation).

    It’s less likely that Democrats will flip control of the Senate in 2026, but were that to happen, Trump would struggle to get his appointees confirmed (though many could operate in an “acting” capacity). We’d likely see constant clashes between the executive and legislative branches.

    Conversely, if Republicans hold onto both congressional chambers, then all bets are off. Trump 2.0 would roll through its final two years with the president’s more audacious legislative goals very much in sight and limited only by how much risk Republicans want to take in 2028. You could see repeated Big Beautiful Bill packages aiming at big initiatives like replacing income taxes with tariffs or consumption taxes; a complete return to fossil fuels as the preferred energy source; a total repeal and replacement of Obamacare and decimation of Medicaid; a fundamental restructuring of immigration laws; and radical limits on voting rights. Almost everything could be on the table as long as Republicans remain in control and in harness with Trump. And with his presidency nearing its end, you could also see Trump tripling down on demands that Republicans kill or erode the filibuster, which could make more audacious legislative gains possible.

    The U.S. Supreme Court will also have a big impact on how much Trump can do between now and the end of his second term. Big upcoming decisions on his power to impose tariffs will determine the extent to which he can make these deals the centerpiece of his foreign-policy strategy and execute a protectionist (or, if you like, mercantilist) economic strategy for the country. Other decisions on his power to deport immigrants and on the nature and permanence of citizenship will heavily shape the size and speed of his mass-deportation program. The Supreme Court will soon also either obstruct or permit use of National Guard and military units in routine law-enforcement chores and/or to impose administration policies on states or cities. And the Supreme Court’s decisions on myriad conflicts between the Trump administration and the states could determine whether, for example, the 47th president can sweep away any regulation of AI that his tech-bro friends oppose.

    A separate line of Supreme Court decisions will determine Trump’s power over the executive branch — most obviously over independent agencies like the FTC and the Fed, but also over millions of federal employees who could lose both civil-service protections and collective-bargaining opportunities.

    Even a president as willful as Trump is constrained by objective reality. His economic policies make instability, hyperinflation, and even a 2008-style Great Recession entirely possible. If that happens, it could both erode his already shaky public support but also encourage him to assert even greater “emergency” powers than he’s already claimed.

    Trump’s impulsive national-security instincts and innate militarism could also lead to one of those terrible wars he swears he is determined to avoid. It’s worth remembering that the last Republican president was entirely undone during his second term by economic dislocations and a failed war.

    Let’s say Trump has the power to do what he wants between now and the end of his second term. What might America look like if he fully succeeds, particularly if his policies are either emulated by state and local Republicans or imposed nationally by Washington?

    • A country of millions fewer immigrants, with immigrant-sensitive industries like agriculture, health care, and other services struggling.
    • A more regressive system of revenues for financing steadily shrinking public services.
    • A fully shredded social-safety net feeding steadily increasing disparities in income and wealth between rich and poor, and old and young, Americans.
    • Cities where armed military presence has become routine, particularly during anti-administration protests or prior to key elections.
    • Elections conducted solely on Election Day in person, with strict ID requirements and armed election monitors, likely on the scene during vote counting as well.
    • A new “deep state” of MAGA-vetted federal employees devoted to carrying out the 47th president’s policies even after he’s long gone.
    • A world beset by accelerated climate-change symptoms, particularly violent weather and widespread natural disasters, and a country with no national infrastructure for preventing or mitigating the damage.
    • An economy where AI is constantly promoted as a solution to the very problems it creates.
    • A world beset by accelerated climate-change symptoms, particularly violent weather and widespread natural disasters, and a country with no national infrastructure for preventing or mitigating the damage.
    • A scientific and health-care research apparatus driven by conspiracy theories and cultural fads.
    • A public-education system hollowed out by private-school subsidies and ideological curriculum mandates.
    • And most of all: a debased level of political discourse resembling MMA trash talk more than anything the country has experienced before.

    Some of these likely effects from Trump 2.0 are reversible, but only after much time and effort, and against resistance from the MAGA movement he will leave as his most enduring legacy.

    And if Trump bequeaths the presidency to a successor (either a political heir like J.D. Vance or a biological heir like Don Jr.), then what American could look like by 2032 or 2036 is beyond my powers of imagination.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Trump’s Gains With Latino Voters Are Evaporating

    President Trump’s current standing among Latinos has regressed back to where it was when he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
    Photo: Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

    In June, the Pew Research Center’s analysis of validated voters in 2024 gave us the most definitive information on how Donald Trump won the presidency over Kamala Harris and all the underlying trends. And it left little doubt that the most important gains Trump made between his 2020 defeat and his 2024 win were not among young voters or Black voters or white working-class voters, but among Latino voters:

    In 2020, Joe Biden won Hispanic voters by 25 percentage points, and Hispanic voters supported Hillary Clinton by an even wider margin in 2016. But Trump drew nearly even with Kamala Harris among Hispanic voters, losing among them by only 3 points.

    This big shift among Latinos voters was decisive. And since Latinos make up the most rapidly growing segment of the electorate, a lot of the “realignment” talk surrounding Trump’s return to power stemmed from a theory that Latinos were undergoing a sort of delayed ideological sorting out that meant they might keep trending Republican and become a solid part of the GOP coalition. If true, that might have been disastrous for Democrats.

    But a new study from Pew, long an authority on Latino voters, suggests otherwise. Trump’s appeal to Latinos is clearly sagging and could erode even further if he doesn’t change his policies on immigration and the economy:

    70% of Latinos disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job as president.

    65% disapprove of the administration’s approach to immigration.

    61% say Trump’s economic policies have made economic conditions worse.

    Even among the Latinos who voted for him in 2024, Trump’s job-approval rating has dropped from 93 percent at the beginning of the year to 81 percent right now. Fully 34 percent of these Trump voters say his second-term policies “have been harmful” to Latinos. And 2024 Harris voters seems to loathe him universally. Overall, Latino voters view what’s happening under Trump 2.0 with great trepidation:

    Hispanics are pessimistic about their standing in America. About two-thirds (68%) say the situation of U.S. Hispanics today is worse than it was a year ago, while 9% say it’s better and 22% say it’s about the same.

    This is the first time that most Hispanics say their situation has worsened in nearly two decades of Pew Research Center Hispanic surveys. When we asked this question in 2019, late during Trump’s first administration, 39% said the situation of U.S. Hispanics had worsened and in 2021, 26% said this.

    When asked about how the Trump administration’s policies impact Hispanics overall, far more say they harm Hispanics than help them (78% vs. 10%).

    That’s a significantly darker outlook than Latinos had in 2019, shortly before they gave Joe Biden 61 percent of their votes.

    Since Latinos trended away from Biden in 2024 in no small part because of his economic policies, this finding could be especially important:

    When asked about the overall U.S. economy, Hispanics’ views are mostly negative and unchanged from 2024. Some 78% say the economy is in only fair or poor shape, while 22% say it’s in excellent or good shape. In 2024, 76% gave the economy a negative rating. 

    Unsurprisingly, Trump’s mass-deportation policies are distinctly unpopular among one of ICE’s chief target populations, as it has become clear that they are not at all focused on “violent criminals”:

    52% of Latino adults say they worry a lot or some that they, a family member or a close friend could be deported. This is up from 42% in March …

    19% say they have recently changed their day-to-day activities because they think they’ll be asked to prove their legal status in the country.

    11% say they now carry a document proving their U.S. citizenship or immigration status more often than they normally would.

    Yes, concerns about Trump’s immigration policies vary among those with different countries of origin, but the overall picture remains negative:

    Across Hispanic origin groups, about two-thirds of Central Americans and Mexicans disapprove of the administration’s approach to immigration. By comparison, 63% of South Americans, 58% of Puerto Ricans and 50% of Cubans say the same.

    Puerto Ricans are by definition American citizens by birth, and Cuban Americans, long a Republican stronghold, are increasingly either American born or were naturalized some time ago. But Republican hopes for big Mexican American voting margins in states like Texas and Arizona may be in vain as long as Stephen Miller is in charge of deliberately cruel immigration policies.

    Even if Trump manages to improve his current standing among Latinos, the idea that they are in the process of permanently trending Republican like the white Southerners of an earlier generation seems delusional. And if current trends persist, Latinos could contribute to a significant Democratic midterm victory in 2026.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Trump Could Save Himself by Saving Obamacare

    Trump could again draw in all the congressional leaders and force them into a deal.
    Photo: Melina Mara/Getty Images

    This isn’t the first time that we’re reading stories about Republicans taking their first baby steps toward a post–Donald Trump future. Pundits, rivals, and opponents have been looking over the horizon for signs that Trump’s grip on his party would fade since 2016. But the combination of sinking presidential job-approval ratings, terrible off-year election results, occasional acts of congressional defiance, and more-deranged-than-usual Truth Social posts has revived talk of Trump’s mojo eroding. Add in the fact that the president has run his last campaign and you can understand why the “lame duck” label is beginning to stick to him. If his so-far-faithful servants on the Supreme Court let him down in a series of big cases between now and next July, a real jailbreak atmosphere could infect the GOP and the whole world of political observers who have had to live with this turbulent man every minute for a decade.

    This trend has to be excruciating for the president, who believes he has already saved the country and has earned the right to a perpetual victory lap in which he consolidates his lofty place in global history by ending wars and cutting big investment deals wherever he goes. Instead he’s having to deal with a rebellion in the very core of his MAGA movement over his relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein, and cope with widespread public concerns over the “affordability” of life in America. This last problem clearly baffles and sometimes angers Trump, who has bought his own spin about the economy being better than ever and on the brink of new heights thanks to AI.

    There is, however, something he could do right now that would reestablish his relevance, confirm his mastery of Congress, and address affordability concerns while reducing the odds of a GOP midterm apocalypse. He could reengage on the issue of extending Obamacare subsidies and buy some time for his party to finally figure out what to propose on health care.

    As you may recall, the Democratic calculation immediately before and throughout the recent record government shutdown was that Trump would negotiate a subsidy extension deal and impose it on his party. But he refused to come to the table, and instead, began denouncing Obamacare itself as though it was still 2015. He also began encouraging Republicans to go back to the poisoned well of proposals to repeal and replace Obamacare with some sort of beefed-up individual health accounts instead of fixing the current system and heading off a huge insurance-premium price spike. It has sure looked like Trump was leading his party back to the agenda that bombed in 2017 and led to the loss of the House in 2018.

    But now there are Republicans in both congressional chambers trying to steer their party and their president back to a temporary Obamacare subsidy patch that can head off electoral disaster while letting them continue to talk about some wonderful Obamacare alternative that will appear a bit down the road (say, after the 2026 midterms). As Punchbowl News reports, the talented dealmaker Katie Britt seems to be front and center in this effort:

    Republican senators have been privately lobbying President Donald Trump to support a limited short-term extension of Obamacare subsidies, arguing it would save the GOP from a 2026 drubbing and buy time for Congress to pass a longer-term health care plan that mirrors the president’s preferences.

    Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) has spoken with the president several times this week to pitch the idea, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

    Britt seems to have a special rapport with Trump based in part on her physical appearance. She’s also a shrewd politician who understands her party’s immediate needs:

    A short-term extension of the Obamacare subsidies could mean one, two or even three years, with strict eligibility crackdowns, such as income caps and anti-fraud provisions. A Trump-led push would provide political cover for vulnerable Republicans; it would also save Thune from having to deal with a divided conference.

    There’s activity in the House, too, where a bipartisan group that includes Democrats Tom Suozzi and Josh Gottenheimer and Republicans Don Bacon and Jeff Hurd have a two-year extension plan, per Punchbowl:

    The bill would add a new income cap, extending the enhanced credits for families of four earning less than $200,000 per year and phasing them out for families of four earning between $200,000 and $300,000.

    One other idea under discussion is a one-year subsidy extension with income caps and fraud-prevention changes, paired with a commission to negotiate a longer-term solution next year.

    Time’s a-wasting, though, since the Senate vote on health care that John Thune agreed to is coming up in weeks and the politics of a short-term Obamacare subsidy-extension deal are tricky. Some Democrats are fine with Republicans doing nothing and giving them a powerful midterm message. And again, there is zero way House Republicans allow a vote on, much less agree to, any Obamacare extension unless Trump calls them in and demands it, along with all sorts of rhetorical window dressing about his determination to kill Obamacare and atomize its remains sometime real soon.

    A deal is still a long shot. But Democrats need to retroactively vindicate their government-shutdown strategy, which fell short of its principal goal when Trump refused to play his part. Republicans need to get the Obamacare premium spike out of the news until November 2026. And Trump needs to show he’s still the Man, the straw that stirs every drink in American politics. The ingredients are there for the deal that has eluded everyone for so long.

    Ed Kilgore

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  • GOP Redistricting May Backfire Due to Team Trump’s Incompetence

    The Department of Justice’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon, who’s had a bad week.
    Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

    At some point earlier this year, Donald Trump took a look at his shaky political standing and decided two things. First, he really wanted to hold on to the trifecta control of the federal government that made all his 2025 power grabs possible. And second, he recognized that keeping control of the U.S. House during the 2026 midterms would probably require a big thumb on the scales, which he could most easily achieve by quite literally changing the landscape. He went public in July with a national effort to get red states to remap their congressional districts immediately so that the GOP would go into the midterms with a cushion larger than the likely Democratic gains. And it all began with a blunt demand that Texas give the GOP four or five new seats in a special session that was originally supposed to focus on flood recovery.

    Texas complied, and other red states followed suit, even as Democrats — most notably in California — retaliated the best they could with their own gerrymanders. But now, the original map-rigging in Texas has just been canceled (subject to U.S. Supreme Court review) thanks to the ham-handed incompetence of the Trump administration, as Democracy Docket explains:

    A federal court Tuesday delivered a devastating blow to Texas Republicans’ attempt at a mid-decade gerrymander. And the court found that a July letter sent by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — intended to justify the GOP’s aggressive redraw — effectively handed voting rights advocates a smoking gun proving it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. …

    Unless the U.S. Supreme Court reverses it — Texas has already said it will appeal — the state must use its 2021 congressional map for the 2026 elections, killing what had been the GOP’s biggest planned redistricting gain of the decade. 

    The blow to Trump’s plans came from two federal district-court judges (one of whom is a Trump appointee) who were part of a three-judge panel. Their order made it clear that DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, under the direction of Trump appointee and longtime Republican operative Harmeet Dhillon, stupidly insisted on making its instructions to Texas Republicans revolve around the racial makeup of the desired new districts, which is a big constitutional no-no:

    “It’s challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors,” the judges wrote. “Indeed, even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General — who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration — describe the DOJ Letter as ‘legally unsound,’ ‘baseless,’ ‘erroneous,’ ‘ham-fisted,’ and ‘a mess.’”

    The judges noted that while Texas insisted the 2025 map was drawn for partisan reasons, the DOJ letter made no such claim and framed its demands entirely around race.

    That omission was pivotal.

    The grand irony is that this same DOJ Civil Rights Division subsequently sued California to invalidate that state’s voter-approved gerrymander on grounds that the legislators who drew the map had taken race into account in designing the new districts. Trump’s lawyers live in a house with no mirrors, it seems.

    The Texas ruling came at a time when Trump’s whole map-rigging exercise seems to be unraveling all over the country. On the very same day, Indiana’s Republican-controlled state Senate killed a special session that Trump, J.D. Vance, U.S. senator Jim Banks, and Governor Mike Braun had all demanded in order to wipe out two Democratic U.S. House districts. Kansas Republicans have similarly balked at Trump’s orders to kill a Democratic district. Voters in Missouri seem poised to cancel that state’s recent gerrymander designed to eliminate a Democratic seat in a ballot initiative. Fearing litigation, Ohio Republicans cut a deal with Democrats to make two Democratic-controlled House districts a bit redder instead of flipping them altogether. And on November 4, voters in Virginia solidified Democratic control of that state’s legislature and elected a new Democratic governor, which greatly facilitated plans to remap that state’s congressional districts to flip as many as three GOP seats.

    Republicans could still gain seats in Florida, and a U.S. Supreme Court review of the Voting Rights Act could create all sorts of chaos. But Trump’s gerrymandering crusade will soon hit the wall of 2026 candidate filing deadlines. As Punchbowl News observes, his party could actually lose ground overall: “It’s not impossible to imagine that [Democrats] end up netting more seats than the GOP in these mid-decade redraws, a stunning change of circumstances that didn’t seem possible only a few months ago.”

    Trump clearly opened a Pandora’s box in Texas, and he and his party — not to mention his bumbling and heavily politicized legal beagles — are now dealing with the consequences.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Once Again, Republicans Have a Trump Problem

    He’s going to dominate the midterms just like he dominates his party.
    Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

    While presidents are always a dominant influence over the political parties they lead, that sway tends to fade toward the end of their tenures if they serve two terms. This is why they are typically called “lame ducks” at some point after being reelected. But Donald Trump is already well past the usual sell-by date because he has been his party’s presidential nominee three times. The prior politician with such an extended hold on a major party was Richard Nixon (nominated and defeated in 1960, elected in 1968, and reelected in 1972). Though Nixon won his last race in 1972 by a huge landslide, that didn’t turn out well for Republicans (Nixon resigned in 1974, and the GOP subsequently lost the White House).

    At the moment, Trump seems to be defying the lame-duck precedent. No president has ever had a more dominant position in his own party, having crushed all intraparty dissent in his triumphant 2024 reelection campaign and then reduced the usually proud congressional leaders of the GOP to the status of loyal satraps. Whatever their private misgivings, all Republicans publicly sing his praises. And the most frequently uttered excuse for the major Republican underperformance in the off-year elections on November 4 was that Trump wasn’t on the ballot to bring those low-propensity voters who tilted his way in 2024 back to the polls.

    The problem now, of course, is that Trump won’t be on the ballot in the 2026 midterm elections, either. So if the key to victory is to turn out every single pro-Trump voter, that would mean making the midterms even more of a referendum on the incumbent president than it will be in any case. That would certainly be Trump’s preference, of course; the Sun King always believes he is the source of all radiance. Unfortunately, as his steadily eroding job-approval ratings show, his agenda is not very popular. And when it comes to his administration’s greatest weakness, a perceived inability to reduce living costs, his current prescription seems to be to claim things are better than they appear, as the Associated Press reports:

    President Donald Trump took a victory lap on the economy on the one-year anniversary of his successful election, boasting of cheaper prices and saying the U.S. is the envy of the globe even while the Republican Party faced a rebuke from voters anxious about their own finances in Tuesday’s off-year elections.

    Trump, speaking Wednesday at the America Business Forum, said he thinks that communication was the problem, insisting that “we have the greatest economy right now” and that “a lot of people don’t see that.”

    “These are the things you have to talk about,” Trump told a packed arena at Miami’s Kaseya Center that included top business executives, global athletes and political leaders. “If people don’t talk about them, then you can do not so well in elections.”

    This, too, was the economic-messaging strategy of Joe Biden for much of his term in office, and it rather clearly did not work. It’s true that owning the status quo and treating it as threatened by the nefarious opposition is a way to mobilize already-loyal base voters. But it’s a bad idea if swing voters aren’t happy, and they definitely aren’t happy now. So looking ahead to the midterms, Republicans have a classic base voter–swing voter dilemma that won’t resolve itself.

    Perhaps swing-voter-sensitive Republicans can convince their leader to modify his policies and priorities to make them more generally popular. But Trump is not exactly renowned for taking advice, particularly if that means admitting error. And for his entire career, he has pursued a base-in, rather than a center-out, political strategy, counting on polarization to put him in a position to win with superior voter mobilization and the mistakes of his opponents.

    If Republicans decide on yet another MAGA messaging extravaganza with Trump at the center as always, then the one thing we know for sure is that the GOP’s persuasion strategy for swing voters will be strictly negative. If you cannot occupy the political center, you try to push the other party out of the center by regular assertion that it is extremist. Trump is without question a master of this tactic, and we’re already seeing him warming up for 2026 by calling Zohran Mamdani a communist and treating the entire “radical left” Democratic Party as beyond the pale. One question Republicans will have to answer, however, is whether key elements of the electorate will get tired of polarization theater and finger their president as the main perpetrator. Any way you slice it, though, he will not get out of the spotlight until his political career has ended, if then. And that’s a problem for the GOP.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Trump’s Redistricting Race Is Already Going Off the Rails

    Virginia Democratic legislative leader Scott Surovell has a redistricting tiger by the tail.
    Photo: Minh Connors/The Washington Post/Getty Images

    With all the appalling things going on every day in Donald Trump’s America, it’s tempting to view the nationwide scramble to redraw congressional maps before the 2026 midterms as just another typical incident of partisan gamesmanship. But it’s actually quite unusual. Since at least since the beginning of the 20th century, states rarely conducted redistricting other than after the decennial Census and the subsequent reapportionment of U.S. House seats between the states. Court decisions occasionally forced a mid-decade redistricting (particularly during the sadly distant heyday of the Voting Rights Act). But when then–U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay engineered a redistricting of the Texas House delegation in 2003 to help Republicans reconquer Congress in 2004, it was a national scandal.

    So when President Donald Trump ordered Texas Republicans to suddenly upturn the state’s congressional map because he knew his party was likely to lose control of the House in 2026, it was a very big deal. And when he subsequently ordered Republicans to do the same thing in every single state where they had the power to pull off such blatant, minority-disenfranchising power grabs, it touched off a wild arms race between the two parties that may not subside until candidate filing deadlines for 2026 have passed. Having flipped up to five House seats in Texas, and one in Missouri, Republicans are now looking at the possibility of rewriting maps in Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Democrats are retaliating with a big redistricting push in California, also aimed at netting five seats, which will be approved or vetoed by voters on November 4. Democrats in Maryland, Illinois, and New York are thinking about joining the gerrymandering jamboree.

    But the best sign of how out of control the redistricting craze has become is the out-of-the-blue plan now emerging from Virginia, where Democrats are considering a truly mad dash to flip two or three House seats before the midterms, as the New York Times reports:

    The next front in the nation’s pitched battle over mid-decade congressional redistricting is opening in Virginia, where Democrats are planning the first step toward redrawing congressional maps, a move that could give their party two or three more seats.

    The surprise development, which was announced by legislators on Thursday, would make Virginia the second state, after California, in which Democrats try to counter a wave of Republican moves demanded by President Trump to redistrict states to their advantage before the 2026 midterm elections …

    Democrats now hold six of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats. Redistricting could deliver two or three additional seats for the party, depending on how aggressive cartographers choose to be in a redrawing effort.

    This is happening less than two weeks before a general election in Virginia in which every statewide elected office and every seat in the lower chamber of the legislature are up for grabs. Democrats have extremely narrow margins of control in both chambers, which isn’t expected to change on November 4. But the sudden gambit seems to have taken Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger by surprise. In Virginia, the governor (until January that’s Republican Glenn Youngkin) plays no role in the passage of constitutional amendments, which is what the Democratic plan will require.

    The timetable is almost madcap. Democrats will need to approve the proposed constitutional amendment next week. Then they would have to pass it again in the next legislative session that begins in January. Only then can they schedule a referendum timed to enact the measure before candidate filing for the midterms ends. No telling when the actual proposed maps will be made public. There is absolutely no margin for error at any step. But that’s how frantic people in both parties have become to get control of the chain reaction Trump began with malice aforethought.

    The stakes are huge because of the literally incredible things Trump might do in the last two years of his presidency if his slavishly submissive party continues to hold a governing trifecta beyond the midterms. The longer implications are ominous too, if it becomes routine for parties to repeatedly change congressional (and ultimately, state legislative) maps in order to maintain or seize power regardless of the overall contours of public opinion. It will be quite the white-knuckle ride.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Dwelling on the 2024 Defeat Is a Waste of Time for Democrats

    These two people are not going to be on any 2026 ballots.
    Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

    Look, I get it: There are many reasons Democrats feel the need to look back at the electoral calamity of 2024. The Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, has books to sell. Joe Biden loyalists feel they must rehabilitate his tarnished image. Operatives and donors who were knee-deep in the Biden or Harris campaigns naturally have scores to settle and grudges to air. And above all, the ideological warriors of the Democratic left and center want to blame each other for the debacle, just as they’ve blamed every Democratic defeat large or small on each other since about 1968.

    In wallowing in the 2024 defeat, Democrats are avidly assisted by Republicans experiencing intense Schadenfreude at their misery. The GOP is deeply invested in spinning the close 2024 results into an irreversible realignment that will make Donald Trump and his heirs masters of the universe until the end of time.

    So I’m not under the illusion that Democrats will be able to eschew 2024 reminiscences altogether. But they should give it a try. The Washington Post reported earlier this week that the Democratic National Committee was slow-walking its official “autopsy report” on 2024 until 2025 elections are over, out of concern that negative discussion of the party (and, for that matter, of the accuracy or inaccuracy of the “autopsy” itself) might affect organizers’ morale or even voter turnout. Here’s a better idea: Democrats should put off any official 2024 “autopsy” until late November 2026, when the midterms are done.

    This recommendation does not stem from a preoccupation with vibes or a belief that Democrats can’t handle bad news or division over what happened in 2024. The more basic truth is that much of what happened in 2024 is probably irrelevant to what will happen in 2026, and revisiting it all is just a big, fat waste of time, at least until the next presidential election cycle arrives. Here’s why.

    Midterm elections are fundamentally different than presidential elections in multiple ways. Basically, different electorates show up for each. Presidential election turnout is invariably higher (it was 67 percent in 2020 and 64 percent in 2024). Voters who participate in presidential but not midterm elections are often referred to as “low-propensity voters.”

    Until very recently, Republicans had an advantage among the “high-propensity voters” most likely to show up for midterms. But in the Trump era, that advantage has shifted to Democrats. So a lot of the endless debate over Trump’s gains among low-propensity voters in 2024 might not even be relevant to the 2026 electorate.

    Presidential elections are mostly comparative, i.e., a choice between two candidates representing the two major parties (although perceptions of the party controlling the White House have a significant effect on that choice). Midterm elections are mostly referenda on the party in power, particularly when that party has trifecta control in D.C., as Republicans do today. So polls showing that voters favor one party or the other on certain issues can be a bit misleading; their perceptions of the president’s performance on those issues is more germane.

    This is why at least some of the fretting about the supposed weakness of the “Democratic brand” coming out of 2024 is probably excessive. In a first-past-the-post system dominated by two major parties, the “out” party will benefit from any and all misgivings about the “in” party. Trump’s persistently underwater job-approval numbers help explain why he’s trying to rig the midterms through gerrymandering and voter suppression.

    There is also a tendency, which is real but hard to quantify, for voters who are aligned with or even support the agenda of the president’s party to vote against it as a “check against presidential power.” This helps explain why the party controlling the White House almost always loses congressional seats (and often governorships and state legislatures) in midterms.

    The situation facing voters next year isn’t going to resemble the one that existed in the very strange 2024 election. Whether their “brand” is weak or strong, Democrats are not going to be led by 81-year-old Joe Biden and then by a relatively untested Kamala Harris. Yes, some Democrats believe they have too many old politicians in office or running for office, but it’s a different problem from a historically old man being the accepted head of the party and the most powerful person in the world.

    Similarly, it makes a world of difference that Democrats will not control the White House and Congress in 2026. There is an ineradicable group of voters (growing larger with younger cohorts) who are profoundly unhappy with the status quo and will swing between the two parties based on who controls the country. This “I hate everything” vote was a millstone for Democrats in 2024. It won’t be in 2026.

    The 2024 election was fought over seven battleground states that were seriously contested by both parties: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump carried all of them, which created the mirage of a landslide (as though all those 75 million Democratic votes didn’t actually count). In the 2026 midterms, the big battle will be over competitive Senate and especially House races. Of the nine Senate races deemed competitive by Cook Political Report, just three are in 2024 battleground states. Thirty-nine House races are rated as competitive by Cook. Eleven are in 2024 battleground states. Different strokes (and messages) may be appropriate for different folks.

    Without a deep dive into the particulars of 2024, Democrats clearly made some mistakes that you don’t need an “autopsy” to identify. It’s been obvious at least since the swiftboating of John Kerry in 2004 that falling silent in the face of relentless opposition attacks is almost always a very bad idea — see the Harris-Walz campaign’s decision to look the other way or change the subject as the Trump-Vance campaign relentlessly pounded her using clips from the bizarre 2019 interview in which Harris appeared enthusiastic about spending taxpayer dollars on gender-assignment surgery for prisoners who were also illegal immigrants. I’m reasonably sure future candidates won’t make that mistake.

    The single biggest reason 2024 is relatively useless as a model for 2026 is that Trump won in no small part because a significant slice of voters simply did not buy Democratic claims that he was dangerously authoritarian, cruel, and indifferent to the suffering he wanted to inflict on noncriminal immigrants and people dependent on government help to make ends meet. Some remembered his first term as relatively benign (aside from a pandemic for which he was not blamed), while others, particularly younger voters, thought all politicians were pretty much the same.

    We’ve now had more than nine months of dramatic proof that Democratic warnings about Trump 2.0 were, if anything, understated. That won’t matter to Trump’s MAGA base; indeed, their own anger and hostility to democracy seem stronger than ever. But it will matter to many of the same swing voters who opened the door to Trump’s return to power.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • The Other Demand Democrats Should Make During the Shutdown Fight

    Here’s the real battleground.
    Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images

    As congressional Democrats sort through their strategic options for managing the current government shutdown, they should keep in mind the unavailability of some prize they might otherwise seek and the variable rewards associated with others. In the real world, Donald Trump isn’t going to reverse the Medicaid cuts enacted in the Republican megabill or permanently eschew Russ Vought’s claims of executive-branch power over spending authority. Now that he’s hailed Vought as the Grim Reaper and labeled Democrats as “the party of Satan,” about the most the opposition can realistically expect is a suspension of mass federal-employee layoffs if the government reopens, and even that’s a stretch. Yes, the most realizable goal is some sort of extension (probably partial) of Obamacare premium subsidies, and that’s a pretty big deal. But that would mean giving up a portion of the Democratic case that Trump is ravaging health-care coverage, so the prize would be shared.

    The limited public concessions Democrats can claim have led some observers to suggest they focus on issues that the public may not perceive as vital but that really would restrict Trump’s ability to act like a dictator while providing relief to his victims. Jonathan V. Last suggests a few at the Bulwark:

    A legislative end to “Kavanaugh stops.”

    Ending qualified immunity for federal law enforcement officers.

    Mandating that federal law enforcement officers cannot wear masks and must display identifying badges/markings at all times.

    Closing the “emergency” loopholes that the administration has claimed for everything from tariffs to acts of war.

    Removing the secretary of state’s discretionary power to revoke visas.

    If, as is entirely possible, it’s exactly these sort of obscure but crucial legal and institutional issues where the White House will be most obstinate, then different calculations might come into play. Ultimately, if Congress or the courts won’t do their part to restrain Trump’s power grabs, the only recourse is a decision by voters to take away his governing trifecta in November 2026, most likely by flipping the House to Democratic control.

    Democrats understand that unique opportunity, which is why they are putting so much emphasis on health-care policy, an area of historic weakness for Republicans and a particular vulnerability for Trump. In focusing their demands for reopening the government on health care, they are in effect rehearsing their midterm message. But there is perhaps one other thing they can do to boost their chances of winning in 2026 that could become a key demand in negotiations to end the shutdown: limiting the administration’s assault on the election system. It’s far too late for Democrats to do much (other than retaliate, as California is doing) about Trump’s unprecedented campaign to convince red states to redraw their congressional maps to shake loose a few more Republican-leaning districts, reducing the number of seats they’d need in order to hang onto the House. But there are other election-rigging measures they should try to prevent.

    Specifically, Democrats could demand a hold on any steps to implement Trump’s dangerous and probably unconstitutional executive order of March 26, which aimed at instituting a national voter-ID system, restricting or even banning voting by mail, and getting rid of voting machines. As election-law wizard Rick Hasen noted immediately: “The aim here is voter suppression pure and simple.” Because of the legal obstacles Trump’s “reforms” face, and since the administration hasn’t done much to put them in place, quietly shelving them might be doable, and would prevent a lot of havoc next year. While they are at it, Democrats should definitely secure a personal pledge from Speaker Mike Johnson that he will not refuse to seat Democratic House candidates whose elections are state-certified on specious grounds that “voter fraud” occurred or that the results are too close to implement. This is the 2027 version of the attempted 2021 Trump election coup I fear most.

    The bigger point here is that all the great messaging and tactical victories Democrats can devise won’t amount to a hill of beans if Trump once again denies the adverse result of an election and this time manages to hang onto total power. Nothing matters more than keeping that from happening.

    Ed Kilgore

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  • Gavin Newsom’s Responsible Retaliation Against Trump

    Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

    The ability to retaliate against Donald Trump’s power grabs and other outrages is a rare pleasure for Democrats, which is why Gavin Newsom’s counter-gerrymandering effort in California is so wildly popular among Democrats. If Democrats can’t stop Trump’s egregious policies in Congress (and they really can’t) and the U.S. Supreme Court is either enabling him or slow-walking efforts to rein him in (which it clearly is), then they need different arenas in which to contest his authoritarian ways. Since Trump chose to intervene in state-government prerogatives by ordering the Texas legislature to grab the GOP some new U.S. House districts, it made perfect sense for California to respond, even though it would require a constitutional amendment enacted via an insanely expensive ballot-initiative fight.

    But Democrats shouldn’t reflexively ape Trump’s every excess, particularly in formulating an agenda for their eventual return to power. They currently have the high ground with a small but strategically critical share of voters who dislike partisan power grabs no matter who is carrying them out. These voters may not want to restore Democrats to power in 2026 or 2028 if they believe that when it comes to lawless conduct, “both sides do it.” It’s not some sort of lack of fighting spirit that makes Democrats value the Constitution, including such key restraints on presidential power as the separation of powers and the Bill of Rights. An essentially stable system of laws and institutions is what can keep America from lurching back and forth between authoritarian governments of the left and right every four years and eventually a meltdown of democracy itself.

    Fortunately, much as many rank-and-file Democrats would relish a tit-for-tat fight to the end, current Democratic retaliatory efforts are measured and, more important, are necessary to the occasion.

    Newsom’s Prop 50 isn’t a legislative coup like the one in Texas; it places the prospective congressional map before voters for their approval or disapproval. It doesn’t scrap California’s nonpartisan redistricting system in favor of the kind of pure legislative powers enjoyed by Texas Republicans; it puts it aside until the next regular round of redistricting when it will be resumed. And its goal isn’t some sort of Democratic seizure of power along the lines that Trump and his party are undertaking every day; its goal is to break the GOP trifecta in Washington next year so that Congress will no longer be a pure rubber stamp for whatever the president wants, making it possible for something approaching normalcy during the last two years of the Trump era.

    Making that happen, and then presenting 2028 a real referendum on the future of the country, is the prize Democrats should value above the emotional satisfaction of turning the tables on Trump or the GOP once they return to power. It’s hard to maintain any sense of restraint or equilibrium about politics and government right now but, with skill and luck, we’ll someday remember this moment as a terrible aberration rather than a new normal.


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    Ed Kilgore

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  • Trump Abruptly Changes Strategy on Mail-Ballot Ban

    Another flip and flop, this time on how to ban voting by mail.
    Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

    Donald Trump began this week with a bang. He posted a long screed on Truth Social attacking voting by mail and voting machines and vowed to issue an executive order banning both these frequent targets of MAGA conspiracy theories about Democratic election theft. Legal experts immediately observed that Trump has zero power to do these things, given clear constitutional provisions letting states control election administration and permitting Congress alone to regulate federal elections. The president gave a bizarre twist to this threat by citing an endorsement by Vladimir Putin of his contention that voting by mail is bad (perhaps because the Russian president thinks voting itself is bad, or at least unnecessary).

    Less than a day later, however, Trump seems to have gotten the memo that this is one presidential power grab that doesn’t even begin to pass the smell test. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, made it known that the new plan was to pursue legislation rather than executive action to radically restrict voting opportunities. Roll Call reports:

    [Leavitt] signaled that the administration had ditched the president’s approach.

    “The White House continues to work on this, and when Congress comes back to Washington I’m sure there will be many discussions with our friends on Capitol Hill, and also our friends in state legislatures across the country, to ensure that we’re protecting the integrity of the vote for the American people,” she said. “And I think Republicans generally and the president generally wants to make it easier for Americans to vote and harder for people to cheat in our elections.”

    Asked what changed so quickly, and whether Trump had received a legal ruling from within the administration that his office lacked the authority to make such a dramatic election change, a White House spokesman merely lobbed accusations at Democrats and repeated Trump’s 2024 campaign platform on the issue.

    This is famously not a White House where mistakes or even self-contradictions are ever acknowledged. But the change of strategy doesn’t alter the likely trajectory of Trump’s latest voter-suppression crusade.

    Leavitt can talk about consultations with Congress as much as she wants, but the fact remains there is not even a single chance a Trump-sponsored election administration bill could survive a Democratic filibuster. Democrats themselves tried to establish national voting and election rules of a very different nature during Joe Biden’s administration, but it went nowhere for the same reason.

    Her reference to state legislatures is a bit more interesting since, if he chose, Trump could lobby Republican-controlled state governments to restrict voting by mail or abolish the use of voting machines. Utah, an all-mail-ballot state, recently gave Trump a pound of flesh by banning the practice of counting mail ballots postmarked before Election Day but received afterwards, which the president attacked in an executive order he issued earlier this year. If you somehow thought Trump might hesitate to dictate to the states on such matters, his recent demands that Texas and other states steal some U.S. House seats for the GOP should have resolved that question.

    As election-law expert Richard Hasen explained today in the New York Times, there are some other power grabs Trump might pursue prior to the 2026 or 2028 elections:

    He has directed federal government departments to vacuum up state voter registration data and to investigate voter fraud. He has been sending federal troops into American cities, and we cannot discount the prospect of his ordering ICE and other federal agents into Philadelphia, Milwaukee or other places with large minority populations around Election Day. He might even try to use the 2017 designation of the U.S. election system as “critical infrastructure” — a designation aimed at assuring adequate federal protection of state election systems, made during the Obama administration — as an excuse to meddle with secure and safe state and county election processes.

    But whatever the president chooses to do or threaten to do, the one sure thing is that his broader goal is to delegitimize any elections his party loses, just as he sought to delegitimize the 2020 presidential results. Per the Times:

    Mr. Trump wants his supporters to believe that Democrats can win only by cheating. “Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM,” he wrote in his Monday post. … It’s a recipe for further polarization and, as someone in Mr. Trump’s orbit told The Times, “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

    Trump may flip and flop and reverse himself five times a day on both his political strategy and tactics, as he has repeatedly changed his tune on voting by mail. But his underlying war on the credibility of elections abides.


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    Ed Kilgore

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