Turning Point USA leaders announced the organization received 18,000 new chapter requests after founder Charlie Kirk‘s wife, Erika, addressed the nation for the first time since her husband’s assassination.
Republican Minnesota state Rep. Elliott Engen shared a screenshot Saturday of a conversation with a TPUSA leader, where they said they received 18,000 requests to start chapters at colleges and high schools.
Prior to Erika’s speech, TPUSA reported having 9,000 college chapters and 1,100 high school chapters.
“This is the Turning Point,” the TPUSA leader wrote in the text exchange.
Erika Kirk delivers an emotional speech two days after Charlie Kirk’s killing, with a tribute message and photo of him displayed on the podium.(Courtesy: Turning Point USA)
In a viral live stream from Kirk’s office Friday, Erika said her husband’s work and message — centered on faith, patriotism and moral conviction — will not die.
She said his mission will become “stronger, bolder, louder and greater than ever,” encouraging young people to join or create Turning Point USA chapters if there is not one in their area.
“He wants you to make a difference, and you can,” Erika said. “The movement is not going anywhere, and it will only grow stronger when you join it.”
A memorial honoring Kirk at the Timpanogos Regional Hospital is flooded with “We love you, Charlie” posters, flowers and American flags. More signs and flowers have been placed for Kirk on Utah Valley University’s campus. (Fox News Digital/Deirdre Heavey)
In an Instagram post sharing photos of her husband lying in his casket, she added, “they have no idea what they just ignited within this wife.”
“If they thought my husband’s mission was big now..you have no idea,” she wrote. “You. All of you. Will never. Ever. Forget my husband @charliekirk1776 I’ll make sure of it.”
Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
Alexandra Koch is a Fox News Digital journalist who covers breaking news, with a focus on high-impact events that shape national conversation.
She has covered major national crises, including the L.A. wildfires, Potomac and Hudson River aviation disasters, Boulder terror attack, and Texas Hill Country floods.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle were in agreement that political discourse in the United States has reached a startling level following the assassination of Charlie Kirk and other recent acts of political violence.
Kirk’s assassination is the latest in a string of political violence that has left several high-profile figures dead or injured since July 2024, when President Donald Trump was shot while campaigning for his second term in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump was targeted again by a would-be assassin just months later. In April, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was the victim of an arson attack. And in June, two Minnesota lawmakers and their families were attacked, leaving two dead.
The political violence has had a chilling effect on the nation, with some lawmakers going so far as to cancel public appearances amid fears of physical violence.
“We have a climate right now where people who are frankly unhinged … like the two guys who tried to shoot President Trump, one who did shoot him, the person – whoever it is – who killed Charlie, the person who went after the Minnesota lawmakers – these people are nuts,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told Fox News Digital. “But they are egged on by a climate that says, ‘Hey, you know, it’s okay basically to go out and shoot your opponents because they’re really Hitler.’”
Charlie Kirk appears alongside an image of President Donald Trump after he was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania.(Getty Images)
The sentiment was echoed by Democratic lawmakers on the Hill as well.
“It’s really sad and just scary, you know, honestly, just how dire things have gotten in this country in terms of our political discourse,” said Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J. “I was actually just remarking the other day how, in a survey, over 50% of Americans surveyed said that they would call people in the other political party ‘the enemy.’ I just think that’s terrifying, that’s so dangerous of a place for our country to be.”
Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon added that in order for this Republic to work, people must be able to “passionately share [their] viewpoints and do so knowing that we resolve our differences through advocacy and voting, not through violence.”
New Jersey Democratic Sen. Andy Kim speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill.(J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“I don’t know what it says about political discourse, but it certainly says something about violence, and it has no business in political discourse. You can have a robust disagreement with people, but when it turns to violence, something’s gone badly wrong,” responded Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., when asked about what Kirk’s death said about the current state of political discourse.
Kirk was known for engaging passionately, but also respectfully, with students of all political stripes on college campuses as part of Turning Point USA, the grassroots organization he co-founded in 2012. He would regularly visit college campuses all around the country and debate with students from different perspectives on various issues of the day. Oftentimes, Kirk would hold “Prove Me Wrong” events, where he would give students a chance to do just that – prove him wrong.
“I mean, that’s the shame of this. Charlie Kirk was polite, he had a message, and he spread that message, and he engaged people to speak and debate, and then he lost his life for that,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. “That’s the thing about this country, we have freedom of speech. Nobody should ever take out violence based on something somebody said.”
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., is seen outside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2024(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“I would hope that all people would take a moment, reflect, and bring down this political rhetoric,” Rep. Jonathan Jackson, D-Ill., told Fox News Digital. “These violent words precede violent actions.”
Hawley, meanwhile, suggested a tactic to help solve the issue.
“I’ll just say again, part of the way we stop it, is we realize that there’s stuff in life that’s more important than politics,” he told reporters.
Anna Commander is a Newsweek Editor and writer based in Florida. Her focus is reporting on crime, weather and breaking news. She has covered weather, and major breaking news events in South Florida. Anna joined Newsweek in 2022 from The National Desk in Washington, D.C. and had previously worked at CBS12 News in West Palm Beach. She is a graduate of Florida Atlantic University. You can get in touch with Anna by emailing a.commander@newsweek.com.
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Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, spoke in a live video stream on Turning Point USA‘s account for the first time since her husband’s assassination on Wednesday.
Why It Matters
The deadly shooting two days ago targeted a high-profile conservative organizer speaking at a college campus, raising concerns of university safety protocols, political violence and security at public events.
Charlie Kirk, 31, was a staunch ally of President Donald Trump and a notable younger voice and advocate of MAGA, with a large following on social media.
What To Know
On X Friday night, Erika spoke from Charlie’s studio, thanking people who have shown her and her family love in the days after his stunning death.
“I want to thank my husband’s dear friend, Vice President [JD] Vance and his phenomenal wife Usha for their love and support. You guys honored my husband so well bringing him home,” Erika said.
Kirk’s widow also touched on Charlie’s love for America, Trump and his passion for Turning Point USA. She vowed that his mission will continue and that the campus tour scheduled for the fall will go on.
“You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife, the cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry,” Erika said.
“The movement my husband built will not die,” she added.
This is a developing story that will be updated with additional information.
Charlie Kirk, right, and his wife Erika Lane Frantzve take the stage during the Turning Point USA Inaugural-Eve Ball on January 19 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images) Charlie Kirk, right, and his wife Erika Lane Frantzve take the stage during the Turning Point USA Inaugural-Eve Ball on January 19 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
In this deeply divided nation, the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk has brought two young men who are on opposite sides of the aisle together. Nicole Sganga reports on how they are joining forces to fight political violence.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump suggested Republicans should walk away from spending negotiations with Democrats, arguing the majority party will rely on itself to avoid a shutdown later this month — despite the math indicating otherwise.
In an appearance on “Fox and Friends” on Friday morning, Trump balked at top Democrats’ demands to include some health care policies in whatever stopgap funding measure Congress passes later this month. Trump pushed back against any requirements from Democrats in Congress, claiming that nothing would be enough to satisfy the other party.
“If you gave them every dream, they would not vote for it,” Trump said. “Don’t even bother dealing with them. We will get it through because the Republicans are sticking together for the first time in a long time.”
Instead, Trump suggested that Republicans would keep the government open themselves, claiming GOP leaders “have to get Republican votes. That’s all.”
However, any spending deal will be subject to the 60-vote filibuster requirement in the Senate, meaning at least seven Democrats will need to side with Republicans to advance the measure. But Trump brushed off that math — without explaining how he could avoid a shutdown absent the needed Democratic support.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to a joint meeting of Congress at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, July 24, 2024, as House Speaker Mike Johnson of La., and Senate Foreign Relations Chair Ben Cardin, D-Md., watch. | Manuel Balce Ceneta
“No. We’re gonna do a — probably a continuing resolution, or we’re gonna do something. So we’re gonna do something,” he said. “Here is the problem. The Democrats have — they’re sick. There is something wrong with them. Schumer is at the end of the rope.”
The government is scheduled to shut down at midnight on Oct. 1, after which funding will lapse for a slew of federal agencies. Top appropriators are still negotiating how to avoid the spending freeze, although it’s likely they will take a two-pronged approach to pass three of the 12 annual appropriations bills in one package known as a “minibus” and then temporarily extend the deadline for the remaining nine bills.
Details of the temporary extension, known as a continuing resolution, are not yet finalized, sources familiar with talks told the Deseret News. Appropriators have floated punting the deadline until mid-November to keep the pressure on, but White House officials confirmed to the Deseret News that Trump has suggested a Jan. 31 deadline.
Also unclear is whether the continuing resolution will be “clean,” meaning it extends current government funding levels with no other policies or spending attached. Republicans are pushing for such a measure, but Democrats are demanding that the measure either includes extensions for expiring Obamacare subsidies or increased spending for Medicaid after the program experienced cuts in Trump’s massive tax bill.
Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has indicated he is willing to risk a shutdown if neither of those demands are met — raising the risk of a funding lapse later this month.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., accompanied by other members of congress, including Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif, left, speaks during a rally against Elon Musk outside the Treasury Department in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025. | Jose Luis Magana
That prompted top Republicans such as Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., to accuse Democrats of politicizing the appropriations process, which has, except in recent years, been a typically bipartisan process.
“But they don’t have a good reason to do it,” Thune told Punchbowl News. “And I don’t intend to give them a good reason to do it.”
The House could move forward with voting on a continuing resolution as early as next week, according to House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla. The House and Senate are also expected to conference to hash out the final details on the minibus legislation as early as next week.
Rep. Celeste Maloy, R-Utah, will be on the 19-member panel to work with the Senate, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., announced on Friday.
The event quickly spiraled after a request to pray for Kirk from Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado led to objections from Democrats and a partisan shouting match.
Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, a close friend of Kirk’s, told Democrats on the floor that they “caused this” — a comment she later said she stood by, arguing that “their hateful rhetoric” against Republicans contributed to Kirk’s killing.
Johnson banged on the gavel, demanding order as the commotion continued.
“The House will be in order!” he yelled to no avail.
The incident underscored the deep-seated partisan tensions on Capitol Hill as the assassination of Kirk revives the debate over gun violence and acts of political violence in a divided nation. As Congress reacted to the news, lawmakers of both parties publicly denounced the assassination of Kirk and called it an unacceptable act of violence.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said he was “deeply disturbed about the threat of violence that has entered our political life.”
“I pray that we will remember that every person, no matter how vehement our disagreement with them, is a human being and a fellow American deserving of respect and protection,” Thune said.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), whose husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer three years ago, also denounced the fatal shooting.
A few hours after the commotion on the House floor, the White House released a four-minute video of President Trump in which he said Kirk’s assassination marked a “dark moment for America.” He also blamed the violent act on the “radical left.”
“My administration will find each and every one of those that contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” Trump said as he grieved the loss of his close ally.
In the hours immediately after the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in front of a large crowd of students at a Utah university on Wednesday, there was no word on who had actually done it and no explanation for why it had happened. But, in Washington, those who profess certainty no longer need much in the way of facts: partisans come equipped with preëxisting truths, and events are slotted into narratives that existed long before the events occurred. Even before Kirk’s death had been confirmed, Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, spoke to reporters outside the Capitol. “Democrats own what happened today,” she told them. When Ryan Nobles, the chief Capitol Hill correspondent for NBC News, asked her if, by that logic, Republicans would own the shooting this summer of two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers, she replied, “Are you kidding me? . . . Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck and you want to talk about Republicans right now? No. . . . Democrats own this a hundred per cent.”
In a different time, it might have been easier to dismiss Mace as just playing to the cameras, and to take heart instead from the many statements rejecting political violence and expressing shock, horror, and solidarity that were already rolling in from Democrats and Republicans alike. Vice-President J.D. Vance offered a heartfelt eulogy on X, calling the thirty-one-year-old political provocateur, who had been his close friend, an exemplar of “a foundational virtue of our Republic: the willingness to speak openly and debate ideas.” But the visceral rage channelled by Mace was not an outlier. On the House floor, when Speaker Mike Johnson called for a moment of silent prayer for Kirk, members from both parties rose from their seats and the brief hush suggested that at least some of the old habits of ritual bipartisanship in a crisis might still be intact. Then a shouting match erupted, with Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, loudly demanding more than a silent prayer and various Democrats objecting that there had been no prayer offered for students in a mass shooting that same day in Colorado. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, shouted back at the Democrats, “You all caused this.”
A few hours later, Donald Trump reacted to Kirk’s death, in a four-minute Oval Office video that he posted on his social-media feed. There would be no Joe Biden-esque lectures about “the need for us to lower the temperature in our politics,” or about how, while “we may disagree, we are not enemies.” (Which was what Biden actually said when Trump was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet in the summer of 2024.) Instead, Trump explicitly laid blame for what he called a “heinous assassination” on his and Kirk’s political opponents. He neither cited any evidence nor seemed to think that any was necessary. He made no mention of any of the political attacks in recent years that have claimed Democratic victims, including, earlier this summer, the shooting of two Minnesota state legislators, one of whom died.
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we are seeing in the country today, and it must stop right now,” Trump said, before offering a list of other victims of “radical-left political violence,” including himself. He promised swift action to take down the perpetrators of such violence as well as “organizations” that fund and promote it. Trump’s remarkable threat somehow did not get much attention. It should have. Not only was the President not even trying to unite the country but he seemed to be blaming the large chunk of the nation that reviles his racially divisive policies and those promoted by Kirk as surely as if they had pulled the trigger.
Some of Trump’s most influential allies and advisers were clarifying what this could mean by explicitly calling for a crackdown on the American left—hardly consistent with the spirit of free expression that Kirk used as his rallying cry for recruiting a new generation of young conservatives. “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist who has successfully pushed Trump to fire a number of senior national-security officials, wrote on X. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.” Christopher Rufo, another influential Trumpist, who led the move against diversity initiatives that eventually became a core tenet of the second Trump Administration, invoked the political convulsions of the nineteen-sixties. “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” he wrote. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”
And in case there was any mistaking the official view of such pronouncements, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller on Thursday joined in from the West Wing, promising in a lengthy post on X to wage war on the “wicked ideology” that had killed Kirk and the proponents of it who, he claimed, were online cheering Kirk’s death. “The fate of our children, our society, our civilization hinges on it,” Miller added. Dialing it down, they were not.
It was purely a sad coincidence that Kirk’s killing happened to fall just a day before September 11th, when Trump would be marking the twenty-fourth anniversary of the attacks on the United States. The destruction of the Twin Towers in New York by Osama bin Laden and his band of Islamic extremists brought forth the George W. Bush Administration’s “global war on terror”—another war against an ism that first motivated Miller and many other young conservatives to become politically active in the early two-thousands. Back in his student days, Miller launched a project to warn against the threat of “Islamofascism,” and portrayed the United States as having been forced into a worldwide conflict with radical Islamic jihadist ideology.
How striking it is, then, to read Miller’s manifesto about what he considers to be today’s chief threat, which, like much of Trump and his MAGA movement’s current rhetoric, is focussed not against external adversaries such as Russia and China but on the scary prospect of a violent enemy within, “an ideology that has been steadily growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved,” as Miller called it.
Although it’s fair to point out that much of what Miller wrote about today’s leftists in response to Kirk’s death is similar to what he might have said about Islamic terrorists a couple of decades ago, it’s not Miller’s lack of creativity that stands out, so much as the speed and explicitness with which he—and Trump—chose to exploit the shooting of one of their most important allies in service of a sweeping attack on the American political left.
While others were praying for a sane conversation around how to end the rapidly escalating problem of violence across the political spectrum, the President and his close adviser defined the crisis differently: it was about the American right under siege—and what Trump was going to do about it. The point here was clear for those who chose to listen: the President doesn’t care one bit about all those sanctimonious calls for healing. It is not a dialogue about the crisis of political violence in America that he wants right now but an aggressive new policy of political vengeance. ♦
Vice President JD Vance shared a deeply personal remembrance of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot Wednesday while speaking at Utah Valley University. In a lengthy post on X, Vance honored his late friend as a man of “courage,” “faith” and profound loyalty.
Kirk, the co-founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, was a close confidant of Vance’s both personally and politically. Their friendship stretched from early skepticism about Donald Trump in 2016 to the heights of the 2024 campaign trail.
Vance’s candid social media reflection gave a rare glimpse into Kirk’s influence not only on the conservative movement but also on the very formation of the Trump-Vance team.
“Charlie was fascinated by ideas and always willing to learn and change his mind,” wrote the vice president. “Like me, he was skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016. Like me, he came to see President Trump as the only figure capable of moving American politics away from the globalism that had dominated for our entire lives.”
Charlie Kirk and JD Vance greet supporters at the end of a campaign rally on May 1, 2022, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.(Drew Angerer)
“Charlie was one of the first people I called when I thought about running for senate in early 2021. We talked through everything, from the strategy to the fundraising to the grassroots of the movement he knew so well. He introduced me to some of the people who would run my campaign and also to Donald Trump Jr.”
Kirk, a longtime advocate for young people in the conservative movement, was described by Vance as pivotal to President Trump’s decision-making process in his selection as running mate in 2024.
“When I became the VP nominee—something Charlie advocated for both in public and private—Charlie was there for me… Charlie was constantly calling and texting, checking on our family and offering guidance and prayers,” Vance added.
Charile Kirk and his wife, Erika Lane Frantzve and their two children at Christmas in December 2024.(Charlie Kirk via Facebook)
He also highlighted the father-of-two’s strong faith in Christ, saying, “Charlie genuinely believed in and loved Jesus Christ. He had a profound faith. We used to argue about Catholicism and Protestantism and who was right about minor doctrinal questions. Because he loved God, he wanted to understand him.”
His “true” friendship and loyalty were valued by Vance, with the vice president recalling Kirk as “a true friend. The kind of guy you could say something to and know it would always stay with him.”
Vance also credited Kirk with helping power the Trump movement in 2024, noting that “so much of the success we’ve had in this administration traces directly to Charlie’s ability to organize and convene.”
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk speaks during a campaign rally for then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at Desert Diamond Arena on August 23, 2024, in Glendale, Arizona.(Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
After reports came out Wednesday afternoon, the vice president said he spoke with President Trump about Kirk candidly.
“I was talking to President Trump in the Oval Office today, and he said, ‘I know he was a very good friend of yours.’ I nodded silently, and President Trump observed that Charlie really loved his family,” said Vance. “The president was right.”
“I was in a meeting in the West Wing when those group chats started lighting up with people telling Charlie they were praying for him. And that’s how I learned the news that my friend had been shot,” recalled Vance.
“God didn’t answer those prayers, and that’s OK. He had other plans. And now that Charlie is in heaven, I’ll ask him to talk to big man directly on behalf of his family, his friends, and the country he loved so dearly.”
“You ran a good race, my friend. We’ve got it from here,” Vance concluded.
In a resurfaced video, Kirk once said he wanted to be remembered “for courage, for my faith.” For those now mourning, that legacy is exactly how he will be remembered.
Jasmine Baehr is a Breaking News Writer for Fox News Digital, where she covers politics, the military, faith and culture.
Republicans are looking to expand the federal government’s power over the nation’s capital city — and use the District of Columbia as a testing ground for tough-on-crime policies the GOP could seek to implement around the country.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee advanced about a dozen bills Wednesday designed to chip away at Washington’s autonomy, including its ability to control its own law enforcement activities.
The more than 10-hour markup of the measures, which Democrats nearly uniformly opposed, came the same day President Donald Trump’s 30-day emergency order assuming control of the city’s police department was due to expire.
“This is an assault on the self-determination of the residents of Washington, D.C., and they deserve better than this,” said Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.). “It is one thing to have the burden of living here without active representation. It is quite another to have Congress intervene on the basic functions of daily life that the people of D.C. endure.”
The bills on the committee agenda Wednesday would, among other things, expand the universe of city laws Congress can formally veto; allow Washington’s locally elected attorney general to be replaced with an official selected by the president; and invalidate legislation passed by the Council of the District of Columbia.
In an apparent response to the Trump administration’s desire to combat Washington’s leniency for younger offenders, one bill would limit individuals who qualify as “youth” to those 18 years old or younger. Another measure would allow those 14 years of age and older to be tried as adults for certain offenses.
“You are living in a city filled with crime,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to her colleagues. “And we have witnessed it as members of Congress.”
House GOP leadership plans to bring at least some of the bills for a vote on the floor in the coming weeks, but it’s unlikely that any of them will become law: Even if passed by the House, each measure would face an uphill battle in the Senate to gain the necessary Democratic support to overcome a filibuster.
Still, any further action on the bills would likely further inflame the ongoing partisan clash around Washington’s right to self-governance. This tension is also likely to be on display next week when a trio of top Washington elected officials — Mayor Muriel Bowser, Council Chair Phil Mendelson and Attorney General Brian Schwalb — is scheduled to testify before the Oversight committee.
Committee ranking member Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) maligned Republicans on Wednesday for “pushing a blatant power grab by hijacking authority from local Washington, D.C., leaders and residents.”
“Quite frankly,” Garcia added, “if the president is so obsessed with governing D.C., he should step down as president and run for mayor.”
At the center of this debate is a belief among Republicans that Washington officials are all too soft on crime. Although the city reported a 30-year low in violent offenses last year, Trump claimed Washington was rife with crime to justify his monthlong takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department. He also deployed the National Guard, which will remain in Washington indefinitely.
Congressional Republicans, in turn, have pointed to a number of high-profile violent episodes in Washington, including the recent killing of a congressional intern and the assault of a prominent Trump administration staffer.
“You should be able to walk down any street in America with your little girl or little boy and be safe,” said Rep. John McGuire (R-Va.) during the markup. “Bottom line is, people are dying. So this is not extreme. This is required. We must keep the American people safe.”
In their approach to Washington, Republicans are also modeling what tough-on-crime policies they could seek to enforce on other urban cities run by Democrats. The seemingly random murder last month of a Ukrainian refugee on transit in Charlotte, North Carolina, is being leveraged by Republicans as the latest evidence of Democrats’ inability to conduct proper law enforcement.
Republicans, for instance, have targeted so-called cashless bail policies in Democratic-led jurisdictions that allow individuals to be released from custody without a monetary payment. One measure considered by the Oversight panel would require mandatory cash bail for individuals charged with certain offenses and mandate pretrial or post-conviction detention for some offenders.
“What you all are attempting to do in D.C. right now is just a forecast for what they actually want for the entire country,” said Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Summer Lee.
Anna Commander is a Newsweek Editor and writer based in Florida. Her focus is reporting on crime, weather and breaking news. She has covered weather, and major breaking news events in South Florida. Anna joined Newsweek in 2022 from The National Desk in Washington, D.C. and had previously worked at CBS12 News in West Palm Beach. She is a graduate of Florida Atlantic University. You can get in touch with Anna by emailing a.commander@newsweek.com.
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The Democratic National Committee (DNC) reacted to the special-election win of James Walkinshaw to replace late U.S. Representative Gerald Connolly’s seat in Virginia.
The victory Tuesday night further shrinks the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.
Why It Matters
The outcome whittles Speaker Mike Johnson‘s already narrow margin in the House, shrinking the GOP’s effective working majority and complicating the path for party-line votes ahead of a looming government funding deadline at the end of September.
Before the election, the House stood with 219 Republicans and 212 Democrats; Walkinshaw’s win moves the balance closer and limits Johnson’s margin for defections.
What To Know
In a statement sent to Newsweek via email, DNC Chair Ken Martin reacted to the party’s win, saying, “Virginians are seeing Republicans for who they are: self-serving liars who will throw their constituents under the bus to rubber stamp Donald Trump‘s disastrous agenda — and they’re ready for change.
“Rep-elect Walkinshaw’s victory continues the dominant trend we’re seeing so far this year – Democrats are massively overperforming in nearly every race. With elections in less than two months in the Commonwealth, Virginians are fired up and ready to hold Trump and Virginia Republicans accountable for their billionaire-first agenda.”
Walkinshaw, 42, member of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and former chief of staff to Connolly, ran to succeed Connolly after his death in May, The New York Times reports.
The seat is in a heavily Democratic district in northern Virginia.
The Associated Press called the race for Walkinshaw at 7:36 p.m. ET.
This is a developing story that will be updated with additional information.
Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, speaks at a news conference with Texas Democrats at the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades union hall on August 5 in Aurora, Illinois. (Photo by… Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, speaks at a news conference with Texas Democrats at the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades union hall on August 5 in Aurora, Illinois. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Only one-third of Texas voters approve of the GOP-led effort to redraw the state’s congressional map, according to a recent statewide poll, which found that independent and Democratic voters overwhelmingly opposed the mid-decade redistricting and would rather give control of Texas’ political maps to an appointed commission.
Just 13% of independent voters approve of state lawmakers redrawing the congressional map, while 41% are against it, according to the survey released Tuesday by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Overall, 34% of voters said they approved and 41% said they disapproved of the effort, with nearly two-thirds of Republicans voicing support.
The new map, signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott on Aug. 29, aims to net five GOP seats in the 2026 midterms. The poll surveyed 1,200 voters across Texas between Aug. 22 and Sept. 1, going into the field just before lawmakers sent the map to Abbott’s desk.
Attitudes on Trump’s megabill
The Texas Politics Project poll also measured where Texas voters stand on a range of other issues, including the GOP’s tax and spending megabill approved earlier this summer. The majority of Democrats and independents have decidedly negative opinions about the legislation, fueling its underwater rating — 32% approval vs. 45% disapproval — among statewide voters.
Republicans polled had more favorable views. Sixty-five percent of GOP voters approve of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with 28% expressing strong approval.
Few voters expect the megabill to actually lower their taxes and health care costs. Democrats and independents think the bill will increase how much they pay, according to the poll. Almost half of Republicans expect the bill to lower taxes, but just 21% said they anticipated lower health care costs.
Texans are also concerned about the rising prices of food and consumer goods, especially as the impacts of Trump’s tariffs loom, the poll found. Only about a quarter of voters said their economic circumstances are better off now than they were a year ago.
Attitudes on THC and state marijuana laws
Voters said regulating THC products was the least important of the nine policy areas considered by the Texas Legislature this summer that were surveyed in the poll. More than 30% of voters said “comprehensively regulating hemp-derived products without banning them” is not important or not very important. Lawmakers gaveled out last week without banning or regulating most THC products.
Almost half of voters want the state’s current marijuana laws to be made less strict and another 16% of voters want the laws to be left alone. The majority of Republicans also want current laws left alone or made less strict, according to the poll, finding that most GOP voters remain at odds with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s push to outlaw products containing any amounts of the psychoactive compound in marijuana known as tetrahydrocannabinol.
Favorability and approval of Senate candidates
The poll also assessed the favorability of candidates in next year’s high-profile U.S. Senate race, which has attracted nationwide attention over Attorney General Ken Paxton’s primary challenge against incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
Paxton won the highest marks among Republican voters, with 55% saying they held a favorable view of the three-term attorney general, while 42% think favorably of Cornyn. Multiple polls last month showed Paxton and Cornyn in a close race, with Cornyn narrowing Paxton’s early lead.
Half of Republicans said they did not know enough to form an opinion of Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Houston, who has been testing the waters of a Senate bid this summer. The National Republican Senate Committee — a powerful GOP fundraising group — urged Hunt last week to stop teasing a primary run.
On the Democratic side, former Dallas congressman and NFL linebacker Colin Allred heads into his second straight Senate bid with 63% of his party’s voters viewing him favorably, compared to 12% who held the opposite view. Thirty-one percent of Democratic voters said they have a favorable view of state Rep. James Talarico, who launched his Senate bid Tuesday, but more than 60% of polled Democrats did not know enough to have an opinion.
Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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Republican members of Louisville’s Metro Council have unveiled a broad package of public safety proposals they say will help make the city one of the safest in the country.
The “Safer Louisville” agenda includes more than a dozen legislative and policy proposals. Many of them require coordination with Gov. Andy Beshear’s office and the Kentucky State Police. Council members said during a Sept. 9 press conference at City Hall they intend to discuss and advance the proposals over the next year.
Key items in the plan include:
Requesting Beshear’s support to assign state troopers to traffic enforcement on interstates and in construction zones
Amending local ordinances to ban the exchange of money, food or other items between people in vehicles and individuals outside the vehicle
Launching two pilot programs to increase street lighting in high-crime areas identified by police
Seeking additional funding from the state and other agencies for the construction of a new first responder training facility
Strengthening local laws against illegal ATV use on public land.
Republican council members also renewed calls for the construction of a new jail, arguing that the current facility is outdated and unsafe. Originally converted from an office building in 1990, the existing jail was not designed for correctional use and lacks adequate sightlines for corrections officers to monitor housing units, according to a 2023 city-commissioned report.
Anthony Piagentini, Metro Council member for District 19 and minority caucus chair, also said he had spoken to judges who told him that they feel pressure not to place people in the facility because of overcrowding concerns.
“Whether somebody should go to jail or not should have nothing to do with whether or not it’s overcrowded,” Piagentini said. “It should have to do with whether or not it’s the right place for them at the right time, given the crimes they’ve committed.”
As of Sept. 9, the jail population had reached 1,530 — approximately 11% above its rated capacity and the highest level in nearly four years.
Focus on transparency and judicial accountability
The GOP caucus is also proposing the creation of a third-party “judicial scorecard” to monitor release rates, shock probation and other key metrics.
Anthony Piagentini spoke to the media as he and other Louisville Metro Council Republicans gathered at City Hall to discuss legislative and policy proposals for improving safety in Louisville. September 9, 2025.
The call for the tool follows a recent case in which a man, while on shock probation, was accused of abducting a mother and her two children en route to a bank robbery. It would be developed in collaboration with the mayor’s office, the Jefferson County Circuit Court Clerk, the Fraternal Order of Police and other stakeholders.
In addition, Republicans are calling for greater transparency in the work of prosecutors.
“The public should know how many deals are being cut, how many charges are being dropped, who is making these decisions and why these decisions are being made,” Piagentini said. “LMPD is going to have this level of scrutiny; we should be scrutinizing those who are taking the charges from LMPD and what decisions they are making before it gets to the judiciary.”
Mental health, youth crime and juvenile justice
The GOP proposal also recommends giving local officials more tools to work with people in need of clinical care, along with increased authority for police and judges to intervene in cases where parental neglect contributes to youth crime.
Council Republicans are urging state leaders to prioritize the reopening of the city’s youth detention center, which closed in 2019. Juveniles arrested in Louisville are currently transported to facilities outside Jefferson County.
Councilmember Kevin Bratcher, a former state representative with nearly 30 years in the legislature, described the situation as urgent.
“The Department of Juvenile Justice needs to be up here and pretend like it’s a dam getting ready to break and flood the whole city,” Bratcher said.
A Deliberate Rollout
Piagentini said the unveiling of the proposals was not tied to a specific event but was the result of eight months of brainstorming. He added that the caucus intentionally timed the announcement to coincide with Law Enforcement Appreciation Month.
Following Republican gains in last November’s election, the party now holds 12 of the 26 seats on Metro Council, its most significant representation since 2003.
Piagentini said the caucus will release regular public updates to track the progress of their agenda.
“It’s time for everybody to be all in on reducing crime and making Louisville a safe city,” Piagentini said. “Louisville should be one of the safest large cities in the country, and we can get there. But it’s going to take everybody working together at every level of government to accomplish that.”
At a separate press conference held about an hour after Republicans unveiled their public safety agenda, Mayor Craig Greenberg said his administration is already working to implement many of the same initiatives. He said he would need more time to review the GOP proposals in detail before responding to each item individually.
“We’re proud of the progress we’ve made to improve public safety,” Greenberg said. “We know we can and must do more and do it faster, and that’s exactly what we’re working on every day.”
In a statement, District 1 Councilmember and Majority Caucus Chair Tammy Hawkins said much of the GOP agenda aligns with the mayor’s existing public safety plan.
“At the same time, lasting safety means more than enforcement — it requires investment in housing, mental health services, youth, and good jobs,” the statement read. “Though the Metro Council has no authority over judges and prosecutors, we have the responsibility to ensure new policies build prevention, accountability, and community trust.”
Former Iowa state Rep. Joe Mitchell, who less than two months ago was announced as the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Great Plains Regional Administrator, is now running for U.S. Congress in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District.
“Iowa needs fighters in Congress who will have President Trump’s back. As a trusted voice in the MAGA movement, I will always fight alongside hardworking Iowans who have made their support for President Trump loud and clear,” Mitchell noted in a post on X.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst is not running for re-election in 2026, and GOP Rep. Ashley Hinson, who currently represents the state’s 2nd Congressional District, is pursuing the Senate seat.
Left: Joe Mitchell; Right: U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) plays a fiddle with the band Kickin’ Country during her annual Ashley’s BBQ Bash fundraiser on August 23, 2025 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (Left: hud.gov; Right: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
“I know Ashley well, and she is a WINNER!” he declared in a Truth Social post. “Ashley Hinson will be an outstanding Senator, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement – SHE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!”
“Joe Mitchell will be a strong voice for fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, and economic growth. He will fight tirelessly for family farmers, ethanol, and small businesses, defend the right to life and the Second Amendment, and stand with President Trump in protecting our freedoms,” the site declares.
I think the upshot is that if the next wave of states goes as expected, the Republicans will build a modest advantage in the House of Representatives. I would say that the Democrats will have to win the popular vote by at least two or three points in order to be clearly favored to win the House, as opposed to today where if they win the popular vote, you should presume they’re likely to prevail.
When you look at the total number of seats that a party has targeted, it does not necessarily mean they will win all of those seats. And because the Republicans are mostly on offense, that tends to mean that the Democrats have it a little bit easier than some of the reporting makes it sound. Texas is a great example.
What do you mean by that?
Republicans have targeted five seats, but two of those seats they’ve made a little bit redder but not so red that they’re no longer competitive. That is not to say that the Republicans haven’t hurt Democratic chances in those districts, but the maps aren’t quite as challenging for Democrats as it appears when you hear that the Republicans have “added five seats.”
You said that, if these changes go through, the Democrats will need to win the House popular vote by a few points. I imagine you don’t consider that result unlikely given that it’s an off-year election with a Republican President.
Yeah, I think that if Democrats fail to win the popular vote by two or three points next November, that would be surprising and very disappointing for the Party. It would be very hard for them to turn around and blame redistricting for their woes. Strictly speaking, that would be true. They could have won. But I think they would have reasonably expected given that it’s an off-year election and given that Donald Trump’s approval ratings are as bad as they are, that they should be positioned to do even better than that. Democrats are up about four points right now on generic-ballot polls. So, if the election were held today, the Democrats would still be considered a favorite.
Do generic-ballot polls generally move toward or away from the incumbent party in the second year of off-year cycles?
They tend to move toward the party out of power. But Donald Trump is already pretty unpopular. So that would give me at least a little bit of pause of whether the Democrats have as much room to improve their standing as, say, Republicans did in the summer of 2009 when Barack Obama’s approval ratings were still in the mid-fifties and there was still a whole nine months worth of fighting over the Affordable Care Act to come. But, generally speaking, as the President takes more actions, the public slowly becomes more inclined to vote for a check against him.
There is a Voting Rights Act case that’s going to come before the Supreme Court next month. My understanding is that this could have even more of an effect on the House than the redistricting wars that have taken place these last few months. Is that your understanding, too?
That is absolutely correct. The Voting Rights Act case could potentially put in peril just as many seats or more across the South where the Republicans have full control of the redistricting process and the only reason that Democrats have seats at all is because those seats are protected under the Voting Rights Act. If you add another eight seats to the Republican tally in the South—and it’s worth noting that those will be safely Republican seats, not seats that are potentially competitive—then we’re talking about the Democrats needing to win the popular vote by five or six points. And that’s the point where there’s a real chance that the Democrats could claim a pretty decisive electoral victory and yet fail to retake the House, or only barely retake it.
At issue in this case is whether the Voting Rights Act requires states to draw so-called minority-majority districts where there’s a racially polarized voting pattern and where a minority group exists in a compact place. So, in a place like Tennessee, for instance, the only Democratic seat is the one based in Memphis, where there’s a large Black population and where there’s a high amount of racially polarized voting. If the Tennessee state legislature had the freedom to do so, they could easily split Memphis up into a number of Republican-leaning districts, just like they have in Nashville. But they cannot do so, because of the Voting Rights Act.
Why are they able to do it in Nashville?
The Black population is smaller. If the Court does what Democrats fear, the amount of representation for Black voters in the Deep South would plunge and the Republicans would obtain a much more sizable structural advantage in the House of Representatives.
Let’s turn to Trump. In the 2024 election, Trump showed political strength that he did not show in 2020, and certainly not in 2016. He had more support among nonwhite groups, and his control of the Party seemed more complete. But looking at his approval rating, which the Times currently has at forty-three per cent, it seems that we are back in the situation that we were in for much of his first term. Is that your sense, too?
Battle lines are emerging on Capitol Hill in the fight to avert a government shutdown in three weeks — and it’s not just Republicans vs. Democrats.
On one side, fiscal hawks are joining with the White House to keep federal agencies running on static funding levels, ideally into January or longer. On the other, Democrats and some top Republicans want to punt no further than November to buy congressional negotiators more time to cut a cross-party compromise on fresh funding totals for federal programs.
In the end, the standoff could hinge on Speaker Mike Johnson’s appetite for trying to pass a funding package backed by President Donald Trump but not Democrats, as he did in the spring — and whether Senate Democrats once again capitulate rather than see government operations grind to a halt on Oct. 1.
“They jammed us last time,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), a top appropriator, said in an interview. “And I am encouraging my Republican friends who want to do appropriations to understand that that won’t work this time.”
Even more irate after Trump’s latest move to unilaterally cancel almost $5 billion in foreign aid through a so-called pocket rescission, Democrats are warning there will be a funding lapse if Republicans don’t negotiate with them. And while they’re being cautious not to box themselves in with ultimatums on funding totals or specific policy demands, they’re starting to flex their muscles by floating concessions Republicans could make in exchange for support across the aisle.
That includes making a deal by the end of the year to head off the expiration of enhanced health insurance subsidies that would result in premium hikes come January for millions of Americans.
There are glimmers of bipartisan talks happening behind the scenes: Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries recently discussed passing a short-term spending patch until November or December, though no decisions were made.
And top House and Senate appropriators are gelling behind a hybrid approach: attempting a bill with a full year of updated funding levels for the USDA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and congressional operations, tied to a short-term extension for other agencies, to allow for more negotiations.
But there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about a bipartisan funding deal coming together, with Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a senior appropriator, putting the odds of a shutdown at “50-50, perhaps higher.”
As of late last week, the top Senate leaders — Republican John Thune and Democrat Chuck Schumer — haven’t yet spoken about the upcoming funding deadline, in a further sign that cross-party talks are still nascent.
Meanwhile, House hard-liners, backed by some of their conservative Senate counterparts, appear to be digging in to demand a lengthy stopgap bill, rather than a short-term patch meant to facilitate a more comprehensive bipartisan funding measure down the road. One Republican, granted anonymity to share the conservative strategy, said fiscal hawks want a funding patch “to 2026” or for the entirety of the coming fiscal year “if we can get it.”
Continually running the government on stopgaps is part of White House budget director Russ Vought’s strategy to shrink federal spending as he roots for the government funding process to be “less bipartisan.”
Those kick-the-can funding bills give the White House more leeway to shift cash while depriving Democrats of any increases in non-defense funding and GOP defense hawks the military budget increases they seek. Then, using party-line measures like the domestic-policy megabill and the $9 billion clawbacks package Congress cleared this summer, Republicans can add or subtract funding without needing to rely on the votes of Senate Democrats.
The White House predicts that Trump’s more recent, unilateral cancellation of $4.9 billion will only help build support among GOP fiscal hawks for a “clean” continuing resolution, or CR, that simply drags out current funding levels for weeks or months more. In this scenario, Democrats will have to fall in line, a White House official told reporters late last month after Trump nixed the foreign aid funding.
“It’s very hard for me to believe that they’re going to oppose a clean CR that would cause them to be responsible for a government shutdown,” said the official, granted anonymity to speak candidly.
The Senate’s top Democratic appropriator, Patty Murray of Washington, warned it won’t work for Republicans to blame Democrats: If the GOP goes it alone, she said last week, “well, then, that is a Republican shutdown.”
Democrats are also still grappling with how the pocket rescission will factor into their government funding demands. Schatz called it a “point of friction” but added, “I’m not prepared to articulate any red lines to you.”
Notwithstanding the administration’s latest attempt to revoke funding, setting static spending levels through next September would be a nonstarter for many members of both parties. For Democrats, going into next year with a stopgap bill would force them to give up their biggest point of leverage — another end-of-the-year government funding deadline — to try to get a deal on extending the enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits that will expire Dec. 31.
On the GOP side, some conservatives view a full-year stopgap bill as locking in spending levels set under President Joe Biden, while defense hawks warn that it undermines the military. Those GOP divisions would make it harder, if not impossible, for Johnson and the White House to try to repeat their go-it-alone playbook from the spring.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he didn’t think a full-year, flat-funded spending bill would come to fruition: “We can talk about it all we want, we always do. Same plot, different actors.”
Passage of a lengthy funding patch would especially sting for Republicans appropriators, who are quietly trying to retain relevance amid Trump’s escalating assault on Congress’ power through tactics to shift, freeze and cancel funding that lawmakers previously approved.
House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, who consistently refrains from criticizing the president, told his underlings last week that the best way for lawmakers to protect Congress’ power of the purse is to negotiate a bipartisan funding agreement now, rather than fall back on a continuing resolution.
“The way to be successful is, get a deal done. That’s what we need to do,” the Oklahoma Republican told fellow appropriators during a recent markup. “But please don’t have any illusions that we’re cavalierly surrendering our power.”
Still, Cole hasn’t received the blessing of his leadership to begin cross-party negotiations.
“We are in discussions now with the administration, with the Senate, about how to proceed,” he said. “We don’t have any final goal or deadline. But I would prefer to get this done sooner rather than later, and I don’t want another CR.”
Vice President JD Vance stopped short of confirming a 2028 White House run during an appearance on My View with Lara Trump Saturday night, but he acknowledged the possibility—noting if he does his job well, “the politics will figure itself out.”
Vance, whose resilience amid an upbringing marked with family turmoil and economic hardship won over the nation, said he “doesn’t like thinking about” a potential presidential bid and insisted his attention remains on his current role.
“If we do a good job in 2025 and 2026, then we can talk about the politics in 2027,” Vance said. “I really think the American people are so fed up with folks who are already running for the next job, seven months into the current one.”
Vice President JD Vance discussed the importance of remaining focused on his role.(Fox News / Hannity)
The second-in-command added if he ends up running, he knows he will have to work for it.
“There are a lot of great people,” Vance said. “If I do end up running, it’s not going to be given to me—either on the Republican side or on the national side. I’m just going to keep on working hard. … [This] may be the most important job I ever had, outside of being a father to those three beautiful kids. So I’m going to try to do my best job, and I think if I do that, the politics will figure itself out.”
When asked specifically about potential 2028 Democratic candidates, he noted most of them “obviously have very bad records.”
Vice President JD Vance said he is focusing on his role as second-in-command, and being a good father to his children.(KENNY HOLSTON/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Vance mainly focused on discussing his own ticket, praising President Donald Trump’s relentless work ethic and trusting leadership style and explaining the president “doesn’t have an off switch.”
Vice President JD Vance praised President Donald Trump’s leadership style and work ethic during the interview.(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“Sometimes, the president will call you at 12:30 or 2 a.m., and then call you at 6 a.m. about a totally different topic,” Vance said. “It’s like, ‘Mr. president, did you go to sleep last night.’ … What’s made this so much fun is the president, all the time, just saying, ‘JD you go and do this,’ or ‘JD you go and talk to these leaders about this particular issue.’ That ability to delegate and trust his people has been really amazing.”
Alexandra Koch is a Fox News Digital journalist who covers breaking news, with a focus on high-impact events that shape national conversation.
She has covered major national crises, including the L.A. wildfires, Potomac and Hudson River aviation disasters, Boulder terror attack, and Texas Hill Country floods.
As Zohran Mamdani greeted supporters following his upset victory over Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary in June, the chants erupting around him weren’t about pragmatism or compromise—they were about housing, justice and revenge against a system he said had failed ordinary people.
“This wasn’t just a primary,” Mamdani told the crowd. “This was a referendum on a crumbling status quo.”
The 33-year-old democratic socialist’s victory wasn’t just a local surprise; it symbolizes a broader political shift. Across the nation, more voters—urban and rural, working-class and professional—are rejecting technocratic centrism in favor of leaders who promise to fight, not finesse.
For decades, “moderation” in U.S. politics was synonymous with stability. The Reagan era’s embrace of supply-side economics in the 1980s set a conservative template; the Clinton years extended it through “Third Way” centrism—balanced budgets, free trade, welfare reform. The pitch: a steady hand at the wheel.
Newsweek Illustration/Getty Images
But the underlying economy didn’t support that narrative for long. From 1980 to 2020, the top 1 percent went from controlling 25 percent of national wealth to nearly 40 percent, according to Federal Reserve data. Over the same period, wage growth for middle- and lower-income workers stagnated.
Housing costs also jumped 300 percent in urban areas, far outpacing income. By 2024, Gallup reported just 34 percent of Americans identified as moderate—down from over 40 percent in the early 1990s—while self-identified conservatives and liberals reached historic highs.
“Moderation meant compromise—not excitement. People lost faith that those deals ever made a difference at their own dining table,” Mike Madrid, a political consultant and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, told Newsweek. “When rent and tuition cost more than your paycheck, a handshake won’t help.”
As the 2024 election made clear, politics is now filtered through the realities of inflation and affordability. Inflation peaked above 9 percent in 2022 and remains stubbornly elevated; nearly 40 percent of Americans say the cost of groceries is their biggest concern, a July AP-NORC poll found.
Mamdani’s win in New York was the clearest sign of this mood on the left: a candidate who spoke bluntly about rent, wages and fairness defeating a seasoned moderate with a long career in public service, even if it ended in disgrace. Democrats have often hesitated to fully embrace that message, but Republicans have done the opposite with Donald Trump—rallying quickly and decisively around a single figure who steadily pushed moderates out of his party.
MAGA: The First Rebellion
The first real test of this shift came from the right. Donald Trump’s rise in 2016 marked a direct challenge to Republican orthodoxy, promising to fight for those left behind by globalization while mocking the party’s traditional leadership.
By 2025, the transformation was complete. A mid-2025 Gallup survey found that 77 percent of Republicans identified as conservative, while moderates dropped to a historic low of 18 percent. And even as the president’s overall popularity has slipped in his second term, more than 85 percent of Republicans still approve of Trump’s leadership.
Mitt Romney and John McCain talk on Romney’s campaign bus on January 4, 2012. Mitt Romney and John McCain talk on Romney’s campaign bus on January 4, 2012. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
“Republicans have near unanimity in supporting Donald Trump, and he is exhibiting strong leadership,” Republican strategist Matt Klink told Newsweek. “Contrast this sharply with Mitt Romney‘s loss in the 2012 presidential election and the Republican Party being rudderless.”
It was a hostile takeover of a party that once valued calm stewardship and corporate-friendly conservatism. Mitt Romney was sidelined. John McCain fought Trump until his death in 2018. George W. Bush‘s brand of “compassionate conservatism” was shelved before he even left office. Liz Cheney was cast out of House leadership and lost her Wyoming seat after defying Trump on January 6. Paul Ryan walked away from Congress as Trump’s grip tightened. Marco Rubio fell in line and now serves as his secretary of state. One by one, the party’s old guard was replaced, leaving the GOP remade in Trump’s image.
But Trump’s consolidation of the GOP is only half the story. His political rise has also reordered the map of American politics in ways that continue to haunt Democrats. According to a New York Times analysis, Trump improved Republican margins in nearly half of U.S. counties across his three presidential campaigns—1,433 in all—while Democrats gained ground in just 57.
The Democrats’ Mamdani Dilemma
Mamdani’s primary upset in New York reflects a similar shift on the left. His platform—rent freezes, city-owned grocer stores, free bus service, steep taxes on the wealthy—was more blueprint than compromise. His backers are not looking for a manager; they want a revolution.
And the numbers show their enthusiasm. In the June primary, Mamdani defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo by 12 percentage points, earning 56.4 percent of the final round of ranked-choice votes to Cuomo’s 43.6 percent—a decisive victory for an underdog few expected to win.
But the Democratic establishment has kept him at arm’s length, despite polls showing Mamdani likely to win the general election in November. Weeks after his win, half of the state’s top Democrats still hadn’t endorsed him. Governor Kathy Hochul, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have all stayed silent—often mumbling through media appearances when pressed on the subject.
At “Brooklyn Against Trump” Event, Zohran Mamdani and Brooklyn Leaders Call Out Trump and Cuomo as Architects of Housing CrisisBrooklyn Against Trump At “Brooklyn Against Trump” Event, Zohran Mamdani and Brooklyn Leaders Call Out Trump and Cuomo as Architects of Housing CrisisBrooklyn Against Trump Zohran Mamdani for NYC/YouTube
“It is pathetic,” said former Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau during a recent episode of Pod Save America, the popular liberal podcast. “Donald Trump’s going to try to get Eric Adams out of the race so that he can help Andrew Cuomo. Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer have not yet endorsed the candidate who won the Democratic primary in New York City—the choice of Democratic voters,” he added.
For some on the left, dissatisfaction with Democratic leadership has reignited a longstanding debate about the party’s future. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has even suggested that progressives consider running as independents rather than as Democrats.
“If there’s any hope for the Democratic Party, it is that they’re going to have to reach out—open the doors and let working-class people in,” Sanders said during his “Stopping Oligarchy” tour, a five-city rally alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aimed at mobilizing resistance to Trump, Elon Musk, and what they describe as a billionaire-led assault on American government.
“If not, people will be running as independents, I think, all over this country.”
“We’re seeing Democrats in New York who want to flip the tables over, much like Republicans did in their Tea Party moment,” Madrid, the political analyst, told Newsweek. “Voters seem to be asking their politicians to take a stand and adopt clear positions, and I think one of the reasons the Democratic campaign lost last year was because the positions weren’t clear enough.”
Can the Center Hold?
Not all centrists are fading. But they no longer sell themselves. Survival now depends less on policy and more on posture. Candidates who look like fighters—even if their actual politics are relatively moderate—are the ones breaking through.
In Arizona, Senator Ruben Gallego offered a glimpse of what that looks like. Running in a state Donald Trump carried, Gallego didn’t try to tiptoe around culture wars or triangulate. He leaned into toughness, telling voters he would fight for wages, affordability, and border security while refusing to get pulled into debates over “masculinity” that have roiled both parties.
Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., arrives for a vote in the Capitol on Tuesday, May 13, 2025. Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., arrives for a vote in the Capitol on Tuesday, May 13, 2025. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
“A lot of times we forget that we still need men to vote for us. That’s how we still win elections. But we don’t really talk about making the lives of men better, working to make sure that they have wages so they can support their families,” Gallego said in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times Magazine.
“He’s not playing both sides,” Madrid told Newsweek. “He’s saying: I’ll go fight and I’ll come home with results. People see that. They want that posture. His win showed that even in red states, a Democrat could compete if they looked like someone ready to brawl for ordinary people.”
The same instinct is showing up elsewhere. California Governor Gavin Newsom, once accused of hedging or “fence sitting,” on divisive issues, has adopted a more aggressive style in his battles with Trump, boosting his standing in Democratic primaries. Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders still draw crowds because they fight visibly.
“The lesson for Democrats is to stop talking only to their base,” Madrid said. “You can have politicians in the very center of the party like Gallego or on the far left like Mamdani, and both are succeeding right now.”
Klink, the veteran GOP strategist, also warned that moderation without fire simply doesn’t cut through anymore. “Generally, Democrats fare better when they nominate a moderate candidate,” he said. “But the base decides the pace. Moderates decide the margin. Without base energy—without fight and authenticity—you’re invisible.”
While Democrats are still grappling with whether to embrace the party’s more radical flank or hold to the center, the picture inside the GOP is far clearer. Trump has already answered the question for Republicans: the path to power runs through him. Where Democrats debate strategy and identity, Republicans measure their future in degrees of loyalty to the president.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) (L) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) (R) take an elevator just off the Senate floor after the Senate stayed in session throughout the night at the U.S. Capitol Building on July… Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) (L) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) (R) take an elevator just off the Senate floor after the Senate stayed in session throughout the night at the U.S. Capitol Building on July 1, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
A CBS News/YouGov survey found that 65 percent of Republican voters say loyalty to Trump is important, with more than a third calling it “very important.” In practice, that has meant dissenters often retreat when it matters. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has voiced concerns about Trump’s hold on the party but still voted for his signature “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia briefly criticized the package, then fell back in line to support it.
After months of friction with the White House, Senator Thom Tillis and Representative Don Bacon announced their retirements rather than continue testing their luck in a party where deviation is punished and loyalty is prized. In today’s Trumpist party, such departures have become increasingly rare — simply because so few dissenters remain.
Republicans are quickly falling in line behind Ashley Hinson, the Iowa representative running to replace Sen. Joni Ernst in the red-leaning state.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Tim Scott on Friday endorsed Hinson, who announced her campaign earlier this week.
“Having traveled Iowa with Ashley, I know she is the fighter the Hawkeye State needs to deliver President [Donald] Trump’s agenda in 2026 and beyond,” Scott (R-S.C.) said in a statement. “Iowans are all-in for Ashley Hinson, and that’s why the NRSC and I are proud to stand with my friend, a proven conservative and staunch Trump ally.”
Though Iowa is not one of the top pickup opportunities for Democrats this year, the party hopes it could be in play as Democrats need to net four seats to flip the Senate. Avoiding a competitive GOP primary could help stave off the opportunity for a Democratic pickup.
In addition to Thune and Scott, Senate Leadership Fund — the super PAC linked to GOP leadership — also said it would be backing Hinson.
Trump has yet to weigh in on the race, even as Hinson and other Senate Republicans look to closely tie the Iowa hopeful to the president.
Hinson hopped in the race the same day Ernst, who served two terms in the Senate, announced she would retire. Hinson has been viewed as a potential Ernst successor, who despite indicating last year she would run for reelection has faced several setbacks in recent months.
The former TV news anchor is a strong fundraiser and seen as a rising star in the party. She reported $2.8 million in her campaign coffers earlier in the year.
“We need conservative fighters in the Senate — and that’s exactly what we’ll get with Ashley Hinson,” Thune said in a statement. “Ashley has been a fierce advocate of President Trump’s America First agenda and has been instrumental in delivering big wins in the House for Iowans and the American people.”
FIRST ON FOX: The House Budget Committee has begun having early discussions on a second Republican megabill, eyeing more potential reforms to Medicaid, sources told Fox News Digital.
Republicans on the panel are expected to hold closed-door talks in the coming days, as lawmakers return from the August recess, three people familiar with the matter said.
Two sources familiar with discussions said the committee has begun early talk on mapping out further reforms to Medicaid, including revisiting and modifying measures that did not make the Senate’s final version of the bill.
“I think you can kind of put this puzzle together, but I think we were talking about things that last time didn’t go through,” one person said.
President Donald Trump signs sweeping spending and tax legislation, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, during a picnic with military families to mark Independence Day, at the White House in Washington, D.C. on July 4, 2025.(Reuters/Ken Cedeno)
Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., said committee Republicans would meet this week to discuss “Medicaid reform.”
“Same thing we debated before, same thing that we were fighting for,” Norman told Fox News Digital. “I don’t know that the appetite is there right now, but we’ll see.”
Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, chair of the House Budget Committee, confirmed to Fox News Digital that his panel had begun laying the groundwork for a second reconciliation package.
“Reversing the curse is a continuous effort when you’re $36-plus trillion in the hole,” Arrington said, referencing the national debt. “It’s going to take more than one reconciliation bill to get out of it. So that process is underway.”
He added that details remain fluid, with ongoing talks between his committee and leaders of other House panels on what should be included.
When asked about Medicaid specifically, Arrington said he supported proposals potentially blocking federal dollars from covering transgender medical procedures and from going to illegal immigrants.
“I’d be shocked if those don’t go back in, in some form,” he said. “They also happen to be 80-20 issues, like 80% of the American people would expect that that already happens and are shocked that it’s not happening.”
Arrington suggested that more contentious ideas, such as altering the federal-state cost sharing ratio for Medicaid — known as FMAP — would likely not be central to the new bill. Conservative Republicans had pushed for changes to FMAP during the first reconciliation effort, but the proposal divided the party.
House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington speaks at a press conference in the U.S. Capitol on May 22, 2025, after the House’s initial passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.(House Republican Conference)
“I guess the two big ones would be the transgender procedures and then prohibiting states from using federal funding, which is fungible, to support their extending Medicaid services to illegals. Those are absolutely two that should be included,” Arrington said.
“The FMAP is, it’s unfortunately an unfair situation set up by Democrats through the Obamacare expansion, and I think a lot of members feel like it should be addressed. But again, it was debated, and it wasn’t included in the first one, so I don’t know how much time we’ll be spending on it.”
Republicans have long argued that Medicaid is plagued by waste, fraud, and abuse, framing reforms as necessary to protect benefits for the most vulnerable.
Any final decisions on policy related to Medicaid would have to go through the House Energy & Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over federal healthcare programs.
A spokesperson for that committee told Fox News Digital, “Energy and Commerce Republicans have not proposed policies to be considered for a potential second reconciliation effort.”
The first reconciliation bill — signed into law on July 4 — advanced several of President Donald Trump’s campaign priorities, including tax cuts on tipped and overtime wages, increased immigration enforcement, and rollbacks of green energy initiatives.
Trump branded the package his “one big, beautiful bill,” though he later sought to shift that to reflect its middle- and working-class tax relief. The legislation also imposed 20-hour-per-week requirements for some able-bodied adults on Medicaid and strengthened work requirements for federal food benefits.
The White House has not been making a public push for a second bill, however.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries speak at a press conference at the U.S. Capitol on June 11, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Democrats have seized on the GOP’s Medicaid proposals as a political weapon, accusing Republicans of pushing millions off the program to fund tax breaks for the wealthy. GOP lawmakers have pushed back on that charge and even accused Democrats of lying about the bill.
The path forward remains uncertain, however, with skepticism about whether both chambers have the appetite for another reconciliation bill.
The first package, though a major GOP victory, took months of negotiation and internal wrangling.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., declined to directly assess the odds of a second reconciliation bill when asked Tuesday.
“If we’re going to go down the road of a second reconciliation bill, we suggest cancel the healthcare cuts and save our hospitals,” Jeffries said. “That should be the focus of a second reconciliation bill. It’s something that Democrats will broadly support.”
Budget reconciliation allows the party in power to pass vast pieces of policy legislation while sidelining opposition, in this case Democrats, by lowering the Senate’s passage threshold from 60 votes to 51. It can only be used three times in a single congressional term.
Elizabeth Elkind is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital leading coverage of the House of Representatives. Previous digital bylines seen at Daily Mail and CBS News.
Follow on Twitter at @liz_elkind and send tips to elizabeth.elkind@fox.com
Nine former directors of the CDC have written an op-ed published in the New York Times where they condemn Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership, saying Kennedy is “endangering every American’s health.” Dr. Mandy Cohen, one of the op-ed’s co-authors and a CDC director under President Biden, joins CBS News to discuss.
