Trump and Vance Just Gave Maine Democrat Troy Jackson Two Big Gifts

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Inside Washington

In the past few days, the Trump administration has handed Troy Jackson not just one political gift, but two. And it could prove critical to his campaign to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins—a necessary result if the Democrats are to stand any chance of flipping the upper chamber in the November midterm elections.

Vice President JD Vance traveled to Maine on Monday to campaign for former Governor Paul LePage, who is running in the state’s 2nd congressional district, and made several rhetorical mistakes. One was his comment on a fatal Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting in the state last month. To Mainers who are “so worried about that situation,” Vance said about the killing of 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, they ought to “have a little bit of perspective.” 

Jackson was quick to respond in a video posted to X. “JD Vance is a dirtbag,” he said. “There’s a young man that had a Social Security number, he had a job, I mean, he had a life, he had a family. To come in here and say, ‘Have some perspective,’ you ought to have some damn perspective. You don’t even know what the hell is going on.”

Jackson senses, perhaps rightly, that defending immigrants and criticizing an unpopular White House is a winning strategy in the blue state. Even before Guerrero’s death, Collins had come under fire for her vote to fund ICE. And she was notably absent from Vance’s appearance on Monday, though he apparently missed the memo about her distancing herself from the administration. He praised her—”Let’s give a shout-out to Susan Collins, who’s doing a great job!”—and mentioned that she has been to his house about six times.

The other gift to Jackson’s campaign arrived over the weekend, when Trump announced a 50 percent tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian imports, pushing Canada to strike back with retaliatory tariffs announced Tuesday. While Collins called the tariffs a “mistake,” Jackson is working to tie Collins to that policy. 

“Troy spent most of his life working along the Canadian border, so he knows how important this relationship is to Maine’s economy, and he sees Trump’s tariffs for what they are: a tax on Maine families and small businesses,” said Jackson campaign spokesperson Dan Gottlieb. “When Susan Collins was given the chance to stop Trump’s tariffs from raising the cost of groceries and everyday goods, she voted ‘no’—that’s why Mainers say she votes too much with Trump.”

Gottlieb was referring to a recent Fox News poll that found Mainers think Collins votes in line with Trump too often. That must be disheartening for the longtime senator, who has spent the past decade trying to thread the needle of garnering Republican support without associating too closely with Trump’s agenda. For example, she voted against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill last year. But this election could be different, given that Trump is more unpopular than he’s ever been; nearly 60 percent of Mainers disapprove of Trump.

“If she could snap her fingers and make the last ten years of American politics, especially Donald Trump, go away, I’m sure she would for a whole variety of reasons,” said Mark Brewer, a professor of political science at the University of Maine.

When Collins does have to comment on the Trump administration’s policies, Brewer said, “she tries to carefully point out how she’s different than Trump on these issues, how she’s tried to push back.” When speaking about ICE in recent months, she’s emphasized her push for agents to wear body cameras. But even talking about that can hurt her. “She has to do it carefully, because when she talks about those things, it reminds people that they exist,” Brewer noted.

That applies to tariffs, as well. The issue is of particular importance in Maine, which is literally connected to its northern neighbor: Some Mainers receive their electricity from the Canadian grid, and on Monday Ontario Premier Doug Ford suggested that Canada could cut off its electricity exports to the United States in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs. Beyond that, the new tariffs will simply make goods more expensive for consumers, at a time when prices are already high.

The race appears to be tight. The Cook Political Report lists it as a toss-up, and the most recent polls—if we can even trust state-level polls these days—show Jackson with a slight lead, though within the margin of error. We’ll see if the next polls show any bounce for Jackson in the wake of these in-kind gifts from the Trump administration.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Pennsylvania has its own “Trump czar.” Earlier this spring, Josh Shapiro, the state’s Democratic governor, quietly hired Jennifer Higgins, who had served as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, during President Biden’s term, as a senior adviser with an unconventional role: to help him manage his relationship with the Trump administration.

Higgins has experience with Trump. She served as associate director of the Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations Directorate at USCIS during Trump’s first term—experience that has been “highlighted” by “some rights groups” in the state, per Spotlight PA, which dug into the unconventional role in an elucidating piece on Tuesday. If that role has led to some raised eyebrows, it’s worth noting that Higgins also served as chief of staff to Biden’s director of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and was made acting director of USCIS until February of last year, when she was replaced by Trump.

Although Higgins’s work in immigration policy and with the Trump administration in particular has led to some criticism—particularly her role overseeing the first Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy—you can see why it makes sense for Shapiro, especially given that Pennsylvania has sued the federal government several times over the last year and a half over immigration policy and loss of federal funding. As other blue states struggle to fight back—and as the administration attempts to fulfill a goal of one million deportations per year—”Trump czar” is a position you may see more and more.

—Alex Shephard

The Ideas Factory

Public school teachers are still woefully underpaid, earning about a quarter less than comparable college graduates working in other professions. So find the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Economic Policy Institute in a review of 2025 federal data. The “teacher pay penalty,” as they call this income gap, was an estimated 25.2 percent last year. That’s actually an improvement from 2024, when it hit a record high of 26.9 percent—but a far cry from the early 1990s, when it hovered in the single digits before steadily plunging after the turn of the century. Teachers, being unionized, tend to receive better benefits packages than private-sector professionals, but even accounting for that, teachers’ “total compensation penalty” was 14.5 percent. The pay penalty varied from state to state, ranging from 10.4 percent in Rhode Island to a whopping 40.7 percent in Colorado. “It would be willful blindness to ignore the toll that the decades-long teacher pay penalty has had on the quality of public education,” writes Sylvia Allegretto, a senior economist at CEPR. “Regrettably, policymakers have failed to deliver sustained and effective interventions capable of mitigating—let alone substantially improving—the trends outlined in this long-running series.”

The pandemic-era expansion of the Child Tax Credit was even more important than we realized. The 2021 expansion increased the per-child credit for low- and middle-income families and helped bring poverty to a record-low 5.2 percent. But the expansion expired at year’s end, sending poverty soaring to 12.4 percent. Now a report from Brookings shows how the loss of the expansion deepened the public’s economic pessimism, which persists to this day. The University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment shows a notable mood decline in the first quarter of 2022 among families with incomes below $100,000—and that the more children people had, the more pessimistic they were. “The broader lesson extends beyond the CTC,” writes Jacob Bastian, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings. “The effects of temporary benefits may not end when payments do.… For policymakers, that means evaluating temporary programs should include not only what they provide while in place, but also what happens when they disappear.”

—Ryan Kearney

In Closing

Book of the Week: Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America, by Rozina Ali

THE GIST: Seasons of Fury examines the rise of persecution, bigotry, and hate in the wake of 9/11 and the rise of Donald Trump through four disparate families. Ali’s deeply personal approach illuminates how we got to this dire moment. It also means that Seasons of Fury doubles as a kind of history of Muslim life in the U.S. 

PRAISE: Jonathan Blitzer, the New Yorker writer and author of the excellent Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, says that Seasons of Fury is “a book about immigration, race, and persecution, told in stellar reportorial detail. But it’s also a mirror that Rozina Ali skillfully holds up to force a reckoning about the kind of country we really are.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: Although most of the book is focused on the last three decades of Muslim life in America, it stretches back nearly a century in vivid, personal detail, telling the stories of how and why many Muslim immigrants came to America. It covers the rise of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security after September 11, and the emergence of several right-wing, openly Islamophobic think tanks in the twenty-first century, many of which pushed culture-war battles like the one over the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” to demonize Muslims. 

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: The rise of Islamophobia is one of the most troubling problems in the U.S. today, and Seasons of Fury captures it in all of its ugliness and danger. But it also points to a number of other trends that have helped create this poisonous moment, all of which are deftly captured by Ali: the rise of the security state, the post-9/11 mutation of America’s long-standing paranoia and racism, and the growing obsession with immigration on the right. These trends underlie the rise of Trump and predate him (at least politically). They will likely outlast him, continuing to play a pivotal role in shaping our politics.

—By Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

In honor of Dolly Parton, even if it’s admittedly something of a bank shot: You may remember that two Black members of the Tennessee legislature were expelled in 2023 because of protests they held on the floor over gun control—and won their seats back in special elections. What were their names? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Thursday’s newsletter.)

You’re reading The TNR Blue Book. Get daily scoops, strategy, and developments inside the liberal ideas factory delivered right to your inbox. Sign up for free.

Inside Washington

The nationwide backlash to data centers has become so widespread that it’s even hard to find Republican politicians who openly embrace them—with the exception of President Trump, of course. So why is the Democratic nominee for governor in Wisconsin touting their benefits? It’s a question many puzzled Democrats are asking, given that the governor’s mansion is a crucial bulwark against the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.

Wisconsin has the opportunity to become “an AI and a data hub not only for the entire country, but for the entire globe,” David Crowley, who defeated progressive Francesca Hong earlier this month, said in a 2025 candidate forum. His opponent, GOP Representative Tom Tiffany, has pounced, dropping an ad last week with that quote and calling Crowley “Data Center David Crowley.” “My priority is protecting Wisconsin families, taxpayers, farmland, and water, not turning our state into a data center hub for the ‘entire globe,’” Tiffany said in a recent statement to WisPolitics.

Painting Crowley as pro–data center is a no-brainer for Tiffany, given voter sentiment on the issue. Polling suggests that voters are increasingly negative about data centers. In October, 55 percent of those asked in a Marquette Law School Poll survey of Wisconsin registered voters said that the costs of data centers outweigh the benefits. But in a poll from July, that number jumped to 76 percent. No wonder even the most pro-business Republicans, like Senate candidate Ken Paxton and Governor Greg Abbott in Texas, have come out in favor of strict regulations on data centers.

But as much as Tiffany would like voters to believe he opposes data centers while his Democratic opponent supports them, the reality is a lot more complicated.

Ultimately, the two candidates have similar policy views on data centers, as a piece in Vox laid out last week. Neither one has called for a moratorium on building them, as Hong did. Tiffany has called for rolling back a state subsidy on data centers, which Crowley hasn’t matched, but otherwise the candidates are aligned on the issue, calling for local control over construction and environmental standards to protect natural resources.

Joe Zepecki, a Democratic political strategist who lives in Wisconsin, sees Tiffany’s portrayal of Crowley’s position as an act of desperation from a weaker candidate. “Tiffany is running uphill with an 800 pound anchor on his back,” he said. “I think the fact that the Tiffany campaign chose to engage on data centers right out of the gate is because they know he has vulnerabilities.”

But the race seems to be tight: The latest polls, from mid-August, show Crowley up by three or four percentage points with over two months to go until Election Day. Crucially, the governor’s race could also affect downballot races for the state Senate and Assembly, which have been in Republican control since 2011. During that time, Republicans gerrymandered the state to their advantage. Now Democrats have the best chance they’ve had in years to take back the legislature and try to undo some of the damage the GOP has done, like a 2011 law abolishing collective bargaining for public workers. “If we don’t nominate someone who can win statewide and bring legislative majorities with them, so much of the work of the last eight to ten years is for naught, and so the stakes are enormous,” Zepecki said.

Charles Franklin, a professor of law and public policy who directs the Marquette Law School Poll, said that Tiffany’s focus on data centers could help him appeal to independents who, as his polling suggests, are against data centers at higher rates than Republicans are. He also sees Tiffany’s rhetoric as a way to connect with rural conservative voters, who make up a large part of his base, and rally them. “He just did an event yesterday in western Wisconsin, saying he was, as governor, not going to let data centers take over farmland in this lovely rural area of western Wisconsin,” Franklin said on Monday. “He’s doing it in a way that speaks to the rural parts of the state, which [are] his natural electoral constituents, even if there’s not, in fact, bulldozers coming to bulldoze your farmland.”

In response to Tiffany’s attacks, Crowley is reminding voters that Tiffany hasn’t introduced legislation restricting data centers during his time in Congress. Meanwhile, Tiffany has said that Crowley takes money from data center proponents, which is likely a reference to donations from union interests. Some unions are in favor of data centers since their members would build the infrastructure, but Zepecki cautioned against characterizing all Wisconsin labor interests as pro–data center.

The stakes of this debate feel incredibly high in Wisconsin, explained Amy Barrilleaux, the communications director at Clean Wisconsin, an environmental organization that has called for a pause on data center development. “This is not normal times,” she said. “If we don’t take a minute and understand and prepare and ask questions and get some transparency, we’re going to be looking at a state that’s really different than the state our kids grew up in.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Nearly two weeks after massive storms with 100 mph winds tore through Indiana, nearly 30,000 residents are still without power, with roughly a third of them in the predominantly Black city of Gary. “We’re at day twelve, and twelve days is too long for families to be without power,” the city’s mayor, Eddie Melton, said in a video posted on Facebook. “Twelve days is too long for parents to worry about their children and for businesses to lose revenue and for families to wonder when the relief is finally going to come. I want you to know I share that frustration.”

“We’re always in survival mode in Gary,” hairstylist Shatiya Hardin told the Associated Press. “And I think that’s probably why it wasn’t so much of an uproar because the first few days, it was like, ‘OK, we’re used to this.... but this is the second week now. It’s not OK for us to continually be in survival mode, doing the best that we can.”

Gary has faced decades of neglect since the collapse of its steel industry in the 1970s and ’80s, a fact many residents and outsiders believe is directly related to its status as Indiana’s only majority-Black city. Its poverty rate is roughly 30 percent, and the energy grid that failed during the early-August storm was left vulnerable in part due to a failure to do routine tree maintenance by NIPSCO, northern Indiana’s power monopoly. Indiana is one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, with only two of its nine districts viable for Democratic candidates. The state’s 1st congressional district includes Gary—and currently “leans” toward incumbent Democrat Frank Mrvan, who won his primary last week and who welcomed FEMA’s recent federal emergency declaration.

—Alex Shephard

The Ideas Factory

In an issue brief for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth—the first in a three-part series—visiting fellow Mary Beech explores how weaknesses in federal data collection make it difficult to know how broadly artificial intelligence is being adopted by workers—and to what degree it is changing the labor market. “How does the adoption of AI by firms affect worker employment and unemployment, compensation, jobs lost, and job opportunities?” she writes. “As this brief demonstrates, no single data source can answer this question, federal or otherwise.” As Beech notes, there are several efforts in Congress to rectify this problem, in the form of two bipartisan bills—one sponsored by Virginia Senator Mark Warner, and one introduced by New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan.

Over at the Institute for Policy Studies, associate fellow Christine Ahn argues in favor of Trump’s order for the U.S. to “substantially reduce” its military drills with South Korea. “While any diplomatic overture from this administration should be viewed with skepticism,” she writes, “progressives shouldn’t miss an opportunity to take a principled position that advances peace, a reduced U.S. military footprint, and the security of the American and Korean people.” Ahn says that instead of “parroting the political establishment that benefits from forever wars, progressives should challenge … the belief that military superiority produces security, that militaristic ‘deterrence’ is stabilizing, and that allies exist for the U.S. to position them. This is not producing peace.”

—Ryan Kearney

In Closing: Four Questions For

Debru Carthan, executive vice president of Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West

Q: Who are you, and what are you working on right now?

Q: What is the most difficult thing about your line of work?

Q: What was your biggest success in the last year or two?

Q: What keeps you going in these stressful times?

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Democratic candidates are pretty well positioned to win governor’s races in both Ohio and Georgia, two states that haven’t had a Democratic governor in a while. Who were the last Democratic governors of those two states? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Wednesday’s newsletter.)

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Inside Washington

Do Democrats have a chance to flip a Senate seat in Arkansas? One poll this week suggested they might—stunningly finding that Republican Senator Tom Cotton is trailing his Democratic opponent in the deep red state. Experts say not to take it too seriously: The poll is almost certainly an outlier. But, they add, there might be some useful lessons in it.

This week, Talk Business & Politics and Hendrix College released a survey of 1,217 likely Arkansas voters, finding that Democrat Hallie Shoffner, a farmer and businesswoman, was narrowly ahead of Cotton in the race for Senate. 47.4 percent of respondents said they would vote for Shoffner, and 44 percent backed Cotton. That’s a shocking result; the Cook Political Report considers the Arkansas race a “Solid Republican,” and another poll of likely voters found Cotton ahead by 16 points. Arkansas has been solidly red for around 15 years, and the last time the state elected a Democratic senator was in 2008.

So why does it look like a Democrat has a chance? One answer can be found in the nature of polling itself. “People like to sometimes call polling a prediction. It’s not a prediction, it’s a measurement,” said Robert Coon, managing partner with Impact Management Group, who helped craft the questions for the poll. The poll doesn’t necessarily reflect how Arkansans will vote on November 3, but instead captures how they feel in the present, before spending and advertising has kicked into high gear.

“There’s a ton of time between now and the general election,” said Jay Barth, a professor of politics at Hendrix College who helped design the poll. “Tom Cotton has dramatically more resources than Shoffner.”

Cotton ended June with nearly $10 million in cash on hand. Shoffner had just $864,000. In the 45 to 60 days before the election, both campaigns will likely start spending their money in earnest, putting up more TV ads and sending out mailers. According to Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of government at Harvard University, most voters don’t start paying full attention to the candidates until at least September; it’s not unusual for earlier polls to yield some bizarre results.

So far in 2026, polls have already proven to be bad predictors of how voters actually behave in the ballot box. In Michigan’s Senate primary, polls predicted that Abdul El-Sayed would defeat Haley Stevens in a blowout. Instead, he won by just one percentage point. A similar phenomenon happened in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary, where Francesca Hong was widely expected to beat David Crowley by double digits according to polling; she ultimately lost by less than one percentage point.

“People definitely shouldn’t overweight what one poll says, and there will obviously be more outside polls [and] inside polls that are done,” said Coon. “Really, it’s about a trend line.”

Still, the poll suggests that independents in Arkansas are increasingly frustrated with President Donald Trump and the war in Iran. “Over the last eight election cycles, independent voters have traditionally [leaned] two to one with Republicans,” Coon explained. In this poll though, independents supported the Democratic candidate at a roughly two to one margin.

Even if Shoffner isn’t headed to a shocking win in a solidly red state, the poll still offers some useful guidance for the campaigns as they hurtle toward November. Cotton seems to be underperforming in the fast-growing Northwest Arkansas region, Barth explained. Shoffner has spent time in that part of the state, which could be paying off. But as spending increases, Cotton may put more resources into that area. Shoffner was also doing better with voters in suburbs around Little Rock than Democrats have done in past cycles. That could be because those areas are becoming more and more racially diverse and thus more Democratic, he suggested. Unsurprisingly, Cotton did well among voters 65 and older, a reliably Republican demographic in the state.

In November, independent voters will be the most important group to watch. Barth wonders whether the shifting attitudes among independents could be an early sign of the state becoming less red. “As there starts to be partisan change in a state or in a place, one of the first things we see is those independents start to kind of lean towards one party or the other,” he said. “And I think we are maybe seeing with younger voters some enhanced Democratic lean in response to frustrations with the Republican administration.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Xavier Becerra’s senior slump of a “campaign” for California governor continues, to sporadic outbursts of frustration from commentators. Reviewing the Democrat’s almost comically vague statements on everything from AI to gas cars to housing, CalMatters’s Jeanne Kuang notes that Becerra is practically guaranteed to “win based on Democrats’ voter registration advantage in California alone.” Political science professor Melissa Michelson tells Kuang that Becerra “doesn’t have an incentive to go out on a limb,” since the only thing he can do is “mess up.” It’s possible Becerra has taken that message a little too seriously: The Sacramento Bee’s Ben Paviour notes that Becerra has clocked “almost no public appearances” since his June primary win. Despite that, Capitol Weekly’s Dan Morain calculates that Becerra’s campaign raised $1.9 million “in the first 15 days of August” alone. While Becerra has said he’ll debate his Republican opponent, Steve Hilton, they have yet to set a date. “I still don’t really know why Becerra is running and have no expectation that I’ll get an answer before he becomes governor, or even after,” Californian policy analyst Ned Resnikoff recently wrote on Bluesky. “This is a campaign for governor. Not a coronation,” griped Mark Z. Barabak at the Los Angeles Times.

“Cities are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to address one of the most persistent sources of housing permitting delays: incomplete applications,” reports Robbie Sequeira at Stateline. Baltimore, Denver, and Los Angeles are some of the recent converts, joining many others who have already adopted or are exploring the option. Honolulu and Seattle have both reportedly reviewed the accuracy of the permitting tool CivCheck, finding it somewhere between 87 percent and 92 percent accurate while shortening review time—but no one seems to think it can fully replace human review.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

In a new report for the Roosevelt Institute, Diana Hernandez and Lauren Ross argue that energy insecurity is no longer an issue just for low-income households, but is in fact a growing “mainstream crisis” driven not just by “rising utility rates, inflation, stagnant wages,” but also “outdated” housing stock and heating and cooling systems. Not much remains of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, they acknowledge, but some lessons can be pulled from the wreckage. Among them: Cross-agency cooperation between bodies like the Department of Energy and Department of Housing and Urban Development better facilitates “whole-home retrofits,” which are likely to be the most effective in achieving “lasting reductions in energy consumption and improv[ing] overall housing quality.”

Damian Murphy, Allison McManus, and Andrew Miller pen an article for the Center for American Progress evaluating the Iran war at the half-year mark. The bottom line: “Six months in, Iran has emerged as the strategic victor, and the longer the Trump administration fails to reach a durable conclusion to the conflict, the more the United States stands to lose.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: Angie Nixon

Florida Representative Angie Nixon’s win in the U.S. Senate Democratic primary in Florida was very surprising. Her opponent, Eugene Vindman, had a massive fundraising advantage. Nixon is a Democratic Socialists of America member and Vindman from the center-left Resistance wing of the party, so this is being covered as an ideological result, another win for the surging left. That’s true. But another explanation is that Nixon is fairly rooted in Florida and the political scene there, while Vindman is more of a national, D.C., MSNBC figure.

Bad Week: Natalie Harp

It’s not just that Jon Ossoff made a quip about her that turned into days of news coverage. It’s that many of the salacious, unflattering details that emerged about Harp must have come from other people inside the Trump White House. Her enemies are not only Democrats! That said, she truly seems to have an audience of one and there is little evidence that the president wants Harp to leave his side.

—Perry Bacon

Political Trivia Question of the Day

On this date in 1858, the first of seven of these historic events took place. What events were these? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

You’re reading The TNR Blue Book. Get daily scoops, strategy, and developments inside the liberal ideas factory delivered right to your inbox. Sign up for free.

Inside Washington

This could be Dems’ best chance to flip a House seat in Iowa

Sarah Trone Garriott might be Democrats’ best chance to flip a House seat in Iowa this year. But to do that, she’ll have to get past a barrage of culture war attacks from the GOP.

This week, four Iowa races were among the ten total races that Inside Elections reclassified based on recent polling, shifting them toward Democrats. The nonpartisan group reclassified the governor’s race between GOP businessman Zach Lahn and Democratic state auditor Rob Sand from “Toss-up” to “Tilt Democratic,” and switched the Senate race between GOP Representative Ashley Hinson and State Representative Josh Turek from “Lean Republican” to “Tilt Republican.” The 2nd congressional district moved from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican,” and the 3rd congressional district, where Trone Garriott, a Lutheran pastor and member of the state Senate faces incumbent Representative Zach Nunn, is now considered a “Toss-up.”

These kinds of prospects for Democrats would have seemed unthinkable in the red state even a few years ago. And the excitement from polling alone—the reinvigorating effect it might have on the state’s Democrats—could help down-ballot candidates like Trone Garriott, said Karen Kedrowski, a professor of political science at Iowa State University. “If the Democrats are showing up to vote because it’s an exciting year and they think they can flip some steep seats, and the Republicans don’t share that same enthusiasm, I think that she has a real shot.”

To win, Trone Garriott will have to take on both Nunn and a flood of attack ads against her. Nunn is endorsed by President Trump, but his advertising has instead been emphasizing his track record of bipartisan cooperation on the campaign trail, Kedrowski explained, which could help him appeal to the district’s swingy voters. That strategy changed somewhat on Monday, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth joined Nunn at the Iowa State Fair, offering remarks wherein he justified the war in Iran and used an anti-trans slur.

Republicans have been attacking Trone Garriott over her support for trans people during her time in the state senate. As a lawmaker, she voted against a bill to prohibit elementary and secondary schools from letting someone use a bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity (the bill ultimately passed), and voted against a bill that based school and college sports eligibility on sex assigned at birth (that bill was signed into law in 2022).

Trone Garriott has also faced attacks claiming that she officiated a satanic wedding in 2006—despite the fact that she wasn’t an ordained minister at the time, and thus couldn’t actually officiate weddings. The attacks stem from a story she told publicly in 2023 with the Des Moines Register Storytellers Project. In 2006, she was an intern pastor at a Lutheran church in West Virginia, when the pastor training her officiated a wedding between a couple that identified as Satanists, and it fell to her to read a passage—she chose 1 Corinthians 13—for the ceremony. “I believe my calling as a minister is to share the word of God with everyone, even the most unlikely people,” she said at the storytelling event. “And I saw the power of scripture in that moment. And I do believe it made an impact on them. And it reminded me of my calling to love my neighbor, including the neighbor I don’t agree with and I don’t share the same values with, and I certainly did not have the same beliefs as these people.”

Though Trone Garriott’s campaign has been mostly positive, she’s found ways to hit Nunn. “She’s calling for mandatory town meetings. And with the exception of [Senator] Chuck Grassley, nobody has been holding town meetings because defending the Republican agenda right now is really pretty difficult,” Kedrowski said. In May, Trone Garriott held a town hall in each of the district’s 21 counties.

In recent weeks, she’s also criticized Nunn over his donations from Chinese-owned companies, arguing that he’s not “tough on China.” Between 2022 and 2026, Nunn’s campaign and leadership PAC accepted $18,750 from Syngenta Corporation and Smithfield Foods.

“I’m hearing from voters across the district who are very concerned about rising costs and the corruption in Washington. Zach Nunn is a career politician who has been in office since 2014. Instead of making Iowa more affordable during his time in Congress, he’s voted to increase costs for the rest of us. He’s desperate to distract from the fact that he has taken thousands of dollars from Chinese companies, and then voted to allow China to buy Iowa farmland,” she said in a statement to The New Republic.

Nunn’s campaign has been pushing back against her characterizations, citing legislation he’s supported “confronting” the Chinese Communist Party.

Electorally, Nunn has proved resilient, defeating a Democratic incumbent for the seat in 2022 and winning reelection in 2024. The district voted for Trump in all three of his elections. But Democrats are hopeful that Trone Garriott is the right person to unseat Nunn, and that 2026 is the right year. She won her elections to the state senate in 2020, ran in a new district in 2022 after redistricting, and won that seat again in 2024. In 2024, the district went for Trump, yet also reelected Trone Garriott.

“Nationally, we’re seeing a lot more enthusiasm on the part of Democratic voters in terms of turnout than Republican voters, and we’re seeing that in Iowa too,” Kedrowski said. “I think Iowa has a longer history of being a swing state than it has of being a solidly Republican state.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The backlash to data centers has been very bipartisan, but Democratic candidates have typically been more aggressive on the topic than Republicans. As Molly Beck notes in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Wisconsin governor’s race may prove an exception. Once upon a time, it looked like the Democratic nominee was going to be championing a full data center moratorium—but that was because a lot of people expected the Democratic nominee to be Francesca Hong. Then moderate David Crowley pulled off an eleventh-hour upset of Hong in the primary. Now, in the general election, while both Crowley and Republican Tom Tiffany are eager to portray themselves as tough on big tech, Crowley appears to be less aggressive than Tiffany on perhaps the biggest issue under debate, which is the state’s tax subsidies. Tiffany “is calling to end tax incentives outright,” Beck writes, “while Crowley said he would make it harder to get them”—specifically by requiring, in Crowley’s words, “100 percent clean power, no secret deals, real money back to the community, and no increase on consumer rates.” (Worth tossing into the conversation: Depending on how all this is measured, the benchmarks Crowley outlines may be tough for companies to meet, especially at the speed the industry is currently moving—so the difference between his position and outright canceling the subsidies may prove to be somewhat theoretical.)

In case you missed it: DeSmog recently published a striking piece about multiple speakers at the annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council—a powerful conservative lobbying group—openly saying how important the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court has been for the oil and gas industry. Paul Watkins—a lawyer famous for fighting environmentally conscious investing practices on behalf of a group backed by conservative court strategy mastermind Leonard Leo—even warned of “catastrophic outcomes” for the oil industry should this majority be disrupted, reports Sarah Hofmann. Watkins and others were reportedly speaking, in particular, about lawsuits seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for climate change.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Tamar Jacoby, director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project, pens a piece in the Washington Monthly about the use of “ground drones,” or unmanned ground vehicles known as UGVs, by Ukrainian forces against Russia. Late last year, Jacoby writes, one Ukrainian strike unit that “emerged early on as a pioneer of ground-based robotic systems … used a single cart mounted with a Browning machine gun to hold a stretch of the front line for 45 days.”

At Pew Research, Drew Desilver asks whether teen summer employment might finally be ticking upward after decades of slump. “A summer job—whether scooping ice cream, busing tables, or teaching campers to make lanyards—once was a rite of passage for American teens,” Desilver writes. “But far fewer teens are working such jobs now than two or three decades ago.” For the summer of 2026, Pew finds, analyzing federal employment data, that 35.5 percent of teens between the ages of 16 and 19 have held a paying job. Hispanic and Black teen employment numbers are significantly lower than white teen employment numbers.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Wednesday was Bill Clinton’s 80th birthday. In what year was Clinton first elected governor of Arkansas, and how old was he? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

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Inside Washington

Dems are looking good in North Carolina—or are they?

If Democrats want to take back the Senate, they need North Carolina—their best chance to pick up a previously Republican-held seat, according to the Cook Political Report. So you think they’d be delighted: For months, polls have consistently put former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper ahead of his opponent, former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley. But Cooper’s campaign is on edge, and experts say it should be—Whatley could still win this race.

In early August, a Harper Polling survey of likely voters found Cooper up by 13 points against Whatley in the race to replace retiring GOP Senator Thom Tillis. A Change Research poll of likely voters from around the same time had Cooper up by seven points: 50 percent of respondents said they’d vote for Cooper, 43 percent for Whatley, and six percent were undecided. Those undecided voters could be where Whatley finds his margin of victory.

“I think that polls at this stage of the race, when we’re still a couple months out from an election in a race that will have very difficult-to-predict turnout, should be taken with a grain of salt,” said Jason Husser, a professor at Elon University and the director of the Elon Poll. “The race is far from over, and we have seen historical precedent of Republicans surging at the last couple weeks in the state.”

In the 2016 Senate race, for example, Republican candidate Richard Burr launched a barrage of effective attack ads against Democrat Deborah Ross toward the end of the campaign, and ultimately won. In the 2014 Senate election, Tillis was trailing Democrat Kay Hagan in the vast majority of polls, only to win by 1.5 percentage points. In Cooper’s run for governor in 2016, polls consistently showed him leading by at least two percentage points, but he won by only 10,000 votes.

The Cooper campaign is particularly concerned that a recent Supreme Court decision on campaign finance spending will help Whatley’s campaign. The decision says that political parties can now coordinate directly with campaigns and raise unlimited funds. Since the RNC has a major cash advantage over the Democratic National Committee (which is actually in the red financially), Republican candidates could get bigger infusions of cash this cycle.

“The RNC has been stockpiling their money because they knew their former chairman Michael Whatley would need to get bailed out,” Jeff Allen, Cooper for North Carolina campaign manager, said in a statement to The New Republic. “Whatley’s elite D.C. connections and party loyalty means he’s first in line for the RNC’s nearly $130 million war chest. The Supreme Court just guaranteed that this race will be among—if not the—most expensive races in the country.”

Despite that, Cooper remains ahead in direct campaign fundraising, having raised $35 million to Whatley’s $16 million. Outside group spending is in full force: In late July, the Senate Leadership Fund, a GOP super PAC, announced that it was spending $17 million on an ad buy attacking Cooper’s record on crime as governor. While Cooper’s campaign is focused on affordability—he’s been touring the state on a “Make Stuff Cost Less” tour—Whatley has been hammering on crime and public safety.

Big ad spends could help Whatley with undecided voters and voters who don’t know who he is. After serving in state government for 38 years, with eight years as governor, 92 percent of voters are familiar with Cooper, while just 69 percent are familiar with Whatley.

“If we just look at the subset of voters who have high levels of familiarity with Michael Whatley, the race looks pretty competitive,” said Husser, who polled this question earlier this summer. “And so instead of it being a 10-point Cooper blowout, it starts looking like a typical North Carolina nail-biter.”

Husser found that voters’ familiarity with Whatley increased by 15 points over the course of this summer. A July Public Policy Polling, or PPP, survey found the closest margins yet, with 48 percent saying they’d vote for Cooper and 44 saying they’d choose Whatley.

But that poll also found that “Democrats are almost completely lined up behind Cooper, while a lot of Republican voters remain undecided. That gives Whatley much more room for growth,” PPP noted in its press release. That’s exactly the kind of analysis that should worry Cooper’s campaign.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz issued an executive order Tuesday blocking mining near the famous and fragile Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and boy are people worked up about it. Within hours, Republican Representative Tom Emmer had called Walz a “lame duck loser” who “let fraud run rampant while holding hardworking, tax-paying Minnesotans back from the opportunity for better lives,” while his fellow Republican Representative Pete Stauber called it a “spiteful and harmful attack against hardworking people.” The Minnesota Star Tribune’s liveblog of reactions to the news notes that Democratic Representative Betty McCollum, Democratic Senator Tina Smith, and Chair of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa Carlos Hernandez praised the decision, although the Boundary Waters area’s Democratic State Representative Grant Hauschild registered his disapproval. Walz’s term is up in January, and state law dictates that executive orders expire 90 days after the governor leaves office. Democrat Amy Klobuchar currently leads Republican Lisa Demuth in the polls. (As of this writing, neither had weighed in on the decision yet.) This whole thing started when Congress voted last spring to lift a 20-year ban on mining in the area.

While votes are still being counted in Alaska, it’s already clear that Democrat Mary Peltola and Republican Dan Sullivan will advance in the state’s nonpartisan “top-four” primary. Just before Tuesday’s primary, a poll from Data for Progress tried to simulate a general election matchup using Alaska’s ranked-choice program, and found Peltola up six points (47–41) over Republican Sullivan. That would be for the first round of counting. Peltola also led by six (53–47) in its attempt to calculate how a second round might go. You can read The TNR Blue Book’s prior coverage of this race here.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

The Center for Strategic and International Studies holds an “emergency” podcast episode to discuss Trump’s withdrawal from joint military exercises with South Korea. Mark Lippert hosts Andrew Yeo, Sydney Seiler, and Victor Cha. “At a strategic level, I think there’s a lot that’s being risked and a lot that could be lost,” says Yeo. Watch or read the rest here.

Public Citizen accuses Todd Blanche of violating the Hatch Act by attending a campaign rally with Trump in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups have released a statement cheering California’s “first-in-the-nation efficiency standards for replacement tires,” a development that “shows how practical climate policy can deliver meaningful benefits for Californians,” according to NRDC California climate and energy policy director Merrian Borgeson. The statement notes that, according to California Energy Commission calculations, the standards “will save drivers about $180 in gasoline costs over the lifetime of a set of replacement tires” and “will reduce nitrogen oxides and particulate matter pollution and cut annual greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equivalent to those from 400,000 gasoline cars.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week: The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, by Jill Lepore

THE GIST: Emerging from an outstanding 2024 New Yorker piece about the rise of the algorithm and the decline of trust in the state, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State argues that liberal, democratic governance is increasingly being replaced by automation and artificial intelligence. The book covers everything from pesky robocalls and scammy fundraising to what it means to be political in a world run by machines.

PRAISE: It’s an eclectic mix of blurbs—from novelists George Saunders and Philip Pullman to technologist Jaron Lanier and Lepore’s New Yorker colleague Elizabeth Kolbert. Kolbert calls the book “dazzling in its range and totally on target.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: This is a Jill Lepore book, which means it’s a sweeping history, not a polemic—or at least not just a polemic. The Simulmatics Corporation, an early data company founded in the 1950s that promised to predict human behavior—and shape American politics—is one area of focus. Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a supporter of the “Technocracy Movement,” which aspired to replace politicians with scientists (and an avid backer of Apartheid), is another. Lepore’s references are, as always, pleasantly diverse: The introduction features excellent close readings of both Hannah Arendt and poet Richard Brautigan.

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: It’s hard to think of someone better to write a book like this—a history of humanity’s use of technology and data that doubles as a penetrating critique of artificial intelligence, automation, and the increasing tyranny of the algorithm in everyday life. As bleak as Lepore’s diagnosis is, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is also a surprisingly hopeful book. “A wall of mirrors can be smashed with the slightest hammer, the nearest rock,” she writes. “That rock is the right of the people to elect a government by consent and not by automation.”

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day

With Donald Trump now officially in the low 30s in approval ratings: In the modern history of polling, which president had the lowest ever approval ratings, and how low did he go? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)