Is This District the Key to the 2026 Midterms?

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Inside Washington

Is this district the key to the 2026 midterms?

The closely watched rematch in Virginia’s 2nd congressional district between former Democratic Representative Elaine Luria and the Republican who defeated her in 2022 is shaping up to be a doozy. The famously swingy district in southeastern Virginia has close ties with the military. President Donald Trump’s war in Iran and commensurate hikes in energy costs—and the extent to which sitting Republican Representative Jen Kiggans gets tagged with them—will define the election.

“Usually, foreign conflicts engender a rally round the flag sentiment in military communities. But in this case, the handling of the Iran war has caused well-publicized hardships for the military, especially sailors. This creates a challenge for Republicans in the 2nd district,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who has worked on several Virginia races.

In 2022, Kiggans successfully tied Luria to unpopular President Joe Biden. Now the situation is reversed. Trump’s national approval rating is consistently hovering below 40 percent, and he is presiding over an economy that Americans view unfavorably.

“Although Republican voters are notable for their loyalty, the combination of the war going badly and high gas prices will weaken the reflexive support of some GOP voters. The effect will be amplified among independent voters,” Ferguson continued.

Luria has focused on Trump before, including as a member of the select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol—and has acknowledged that her service on that panel may have cost her reelection. But she’s concentrating her campaign on Kiggans’s support for the current Trump administration, not the previous one.

“She’s not a moderate. She can’t separate herself from Trump,” Luria said of Kiggans on MS NOW’s Morning Joe this week, pointing to Kiggans’s vote in favor of legislation that cut Medicaid and other government benefits, and her vote against renewing expired Affordable Care Act subsidies. Luria has also hammered Kiggans over her positions on the Iran war: Kiggans voted seven times against resolutions that would have directed Trump to end the war or seek congressional approval.

Kiggans said in August that she would “like to see that conflict wrap up so we can bring our military men and women home.” But Luria has criticized Kiggans for previously dismissing reports of bleak conditions on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which is now headed home after a nine-month deployment. “It really shows a lack of care and concern for our military, our military families,” Luria said on Morning Joe. Both Kiggans and Luria are Navy veterans.

The district is uncommonly purple, with voters hopping between narrow support for candidates of both parties in federal and state elections. Although Kiggans flipped the seat in 2022, Trump’s margin of victory in the district was only 0.2 percent in 2024, and Democrat Abigail Spanberger earned just over 53 percent of the vote in the 2025 gubernatorial race. There’s consensus among political analysts on the unpredictability of the contest between Luria and Kiggans: The Cook Political Report, Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, and Inside Elections have all rated the seat as a “toss-up.”

Carolyn Fiddler, a left-leaning state elections expert based in Virginia, told The New Republic that the district has a strong politically independent streak. When she first ran, Kiggans was able to cast herself as more moderate, but now she has a record of supporting Trump’s policies.

“She’s doing nothing to really distance herself from Trump, and I think that’s going to cut against her,” Fiddler continued. Virginia Beach, one of the district’s hubs, is also a key site for wind farm construction—which Trump has opposed. Hampton Roads, the district’s other main city, is also prone to flooding, meaning that climate change could be a concern in the election. “These environmental concerns provide another whole avenue of opportunities for Luria to set herself apart,” said Fiddler.

The race is being closely monitored by House leadership, with Speaker Mike Johnson saying during a visit to the district in August that it “will determine the fate of the country because this will be a close election.” He isn’t being hyperbolic. J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, told The New Republic by email that the fate of the 2nd district would be an indicator of Democrats’ overall chances of taking the House.

“Since the 2008 elections, the party that has won VA-2 has also won the House overall; so Democrats could capture the House without it, but it would be a bit of a curiosity if they didn’t,” Coleman wrote. “If Democrats fail to win VA-2, the majority could still be within reach for Republicans. If Democrats flip VA-2, they probably have at least a majority in the 220s.”

—Grace Segers

Outside Washington

It probably won’t get the attention it deserves—climate fatigue is real—but amid devastating news of flash floods on multiple continents, unprecedented heat waves and revised estimates of heat-related deaths, widespread wildfires, and plummeting harvests, the United Nations has released another climate report, and it’s a doozy. The longtime goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures is toast, dozens of climate scientists say: Earth will pass that point in a few years. The urgent task now is to reduce emissions with extreme speed, and “aggressively pursue measures that pull heat-trapping gases out of the atmosphere, so global temperatures will start to decline,” The Washington Post reports. “In a best-case scenario, this pathway will limit the planet’s time above 1.5 degrees to a few decades.” The bad news is that carbon removal at scale so far remains highly hypothetical, and even if that changes, “it will not restore the world we once knew.” The Post’s Sarah Kaplan reviews some of the details, and attempts to end on a hopeful—or at least agency-promoting—note: “The report’s authors urged people to stay focused on what scientists do know: That every fraction of a degree matters. That the sooner humanity acts, the safer our future will be.”

Earlier this summer, Inside Climate News analyzed congressional press releases, finding that Democrats’ mentions of climate change had fallen precipitously in recent years, even though there’s little evidence to support this strategy of retreat. A few Democrats, including Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Ro Khanna, have sharply criticized this trend within the party and urged politicians to talk more about the climate crisis.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Thursday at 9:30 a.m. the Center for Strategic and International Studies will release a live webcast in which the organization’s Energy Security and Climate Change Program director Joseph Majkut and senior adviser Kevin Brook discuss “the new U.S.-Venezuela oil agreement and what it signals about the growing role of energy in geopolitical competition.”

Public Citizen released a new report alleging that “many” of the companies involved in President Trump’s $3 billion critical minerals initiative “are examples of potential cronyism or are still in the early stages of development.” The watchdog lists examples of firms that “are only nine months old, connected to the administration’s family members or donors, associated with past fraud or fraud allegations, or whose financial backers remain largely hidden from public view.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.

Why is JD Vance talking about the end of the world with a 22-year-old podcaster? Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted get into this mess of a story.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

With so many eyes on the Texas Senate race, two questions: Who was the last elected Democratic senator from Texas, and who was the last actually liberal Democratic senator from Texas? The former beat the latter in the 1970 Democratic primary, pounding him from the right over his opposition to the Vietnam War. (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

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Inside Washington

The Ukraine bill that House Dems have no intention of passing

For years, Democrats in both chambers of Congress could reliably agree on support for Ukraine. But now, House Democrats are pushing back against a Russia sanctions bill that sailed through the Senate in July, frustrating their colleagues in the upper chamber. The issue? House Democrats say it gives too much power to President Trump.

Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, thinks, in lieu of this particular sanctions bill, the Senate should pass a bipartisan bill that the House approved in June. That legislation provides more aid to Ukraine and expands sanctions on Russia but does not include sweeping tariff authorities for President Donald Trump.

“The Senate is not superior to the House. We both pass bills, so we should be discussing both bills and making a determination what would be the best bill to support Ukraine,” Meeks told reporters on Tuesday.

The Senate legislation—named for the late GOP Senator Lindsey Graham—passed in the upper chamber with a final tally of 86–11, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the chamber for the vote. The measure allows Trump to impose new tariffs on countries that import Russian oil, and imposes punishing sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials and institutions.

The legislation was introduced after roughly a year of negotiations with Trump to get to a point both he and a bipartisan majority in Congress could accept. Senator Richard Blumenthal, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and co-sponsor of the bill, has urged his colleagues in the House to support the measure.

“It is a moment of extreme urgency, for the reason that Putin may try to escalate, but also because Putin is on his heels economically,” Blumenthal told CBS News on Sunday.

But key House Democrats say giving Trump further tariff authority could be unwise, given the president’s retributive trade wars with U.S. allies. They argue that Trump only agreed to the bill because it included a provision that allows him to waive any sanctions, as long as he justifies it as in the “national interest.” Given that Trump has expressed an affinity for Putin, some Democrats worry that Trump might remove sanctions on Russia instead of adding to them.

Representative Don Beyer of Virginia told The New Republic on Tuesday that Russia has enough “kompromat” on Trump that even if the measure did pass, the president wouldn’t actually take action against Putin. “He’ll just break the law and wait for someone to sue him,” Beyer said.

Blumenthal has said that, while the bill allows for sanctions on Russia’s trading partners, it would not affect European allies, because it carves out certain exceptions. Senator Raphael Warnock, who had initially held up the bill in the upper chamber, was assuaged by Trump trade representative Jamieson Greer’s promise to lift tariffs once countries are no longer purchasing Russian oil and gas.

“If you give [Trump] an inch, he will take a mile. We don’t have to imagine. We are seeing it in real time,” said Warnock in a speech on the Senate floor in August. “But this commitment that we were able to get from Ambassador Greer is meaningful, because if the president ignores the law, if he oversteps his power, we will see him in court.”

House Democrats aren’t convinced. Meeks noted that the provision to allow Trump to impose up to 100 percent tariffs on the largest importers of Russian oil could include the European Union.

“I’ve heard Mr. Blumenthal and others say, ‘Oh, it won’t affect our allies.’ He says, ‘It won’t affect our European allies,’ but it’ll affect the EU. Who’s the EU? Our European allies,” argued Meeks. He believes the Senate measure looks good on paper but would allow Trump to waive sanctions on Russia rather than impose them.

“You look at the mess we have with Canada, and how many allies we’ve pissed off because of stupid tariffs, and the impact on consumers—he just can’t be trusted,” said Representative Linda Sánchez of California. Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts has also expressed opposition to the Senate bill.

Zelenskiy’s top aide on sanctions, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, is meeting with House Democrats this week in an effort to sway their opinion on the measure. Meeks said Tuesday he was looking forward to speaking with him but that he believed his own legislation would be better for supporting Ukraine.

This entire disagreement may be moot: The House’s major priority this week is passing a continuing resolution to keep the government funded through mid-December. The House will be out next week for the Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah recess. It’s possible that they’ll decide not to return to Capitol Hill at all until after the November elections; Congress is already skipping town for the month of October to campaign.

Beyer said that even if the House did return the week after next, he wasn’t sure there would be time for any action, although he’d heard talk of a potential amendment to limit Trump’s tariff authority. A similar amendment failed in the Senate.

“The person who was telling me about writing the amendment also thought that Trump would still hate it, because he and [White House trade adviser Peter] Navarro want carte blanche tariff authority,” he said.

Despite the disagreement between Senate and House Democrats, Beyer said he hasn’t gotten too much guff from his Senate colleagues about opposing the bill.

“No one’s beating me up on it,” he said. “People are asking about it, they’re asking why, but nobody’s pressuring me to change my mind.”

—Grace Segers

Outside Washington

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that “more than two dozen immigrants, mostly green-card holders with past arrests, have been held at San Francisco International Airport this year without access to dedicated medical care, attorneys, or even beds for more than three days,” turning the airport into a “de facto immigration detention center.” Among other examples detailed in the Chronicle’s lengthy investigative report, staff writers Sara DiNatale and Christian Leonard recount the case of a “67-year-old diabetic” who has “been legally in the country for 50 years” but was pulled off a flight by immigration agents and “detained for eight days earlier this year without a way to check his blood sugar.” Democratic Representative Kevin Mullin, whose district includes SFO, reportedly demanded access to the Customs and Border Patrol facility at the airport after learning of the Chronicle’s investigation and was first (illegally) turned away before being admitted, six days later, to find five people in the “holding room.” He told the Chronicle that agents on-site “were not hiding from the fact this is a definitive policy shift from the Trump administration.”

The most quietly, boringly goofy story of impropriety this year has come to a close: Rhode Island State Representative Julie Casimiro has resigned her seat, following outcry at her continuing to draw a salary despite having moved to South Carolina in July. “Although state lawmakers only meet for the first six months of the year,” the Rhode Island Current’s Nancy Lavin explains, “their taxpayer-funded salary is spread across the entire calendar year.” That $20,922 salary amounts to “$800 every two weeks, plus health insurance.” Would that every political scandal these days could end so anticlimactically. Rhode Island’s primaries, which will include three candidates competing for Casimiro’s seat, take place September 9.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Thursday at noon, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication hosts a live webinar on “how public opinion is affecting data center development.” YPCCC director Anthony Leiserowitz will moderate a discussion with George Mason University Ph.D. candidate Neha Gour and Rewiring America’s Kristin Eberhard. RSVP here.

In case you missed it: Graham Steele has a blog post at the Roosevelt Institute explaining in layman’s terms why Treasury yields and interest rates are up, what it means for the broader economy, and why the Trump administration’s responses so far haven’t worked. The bottom line: “At this point, there are no easy answers for how the U.S. government can pull itself out of the recurring cycle of market stress followed by chaotic policy responses,” writes Steele. But “a good place to start would be restoring the U.S. government’s reputation as a reliable and respected domestic and international actor committed to the rule of law and financial stability.” Continuing on the current course, he concludes, risks broad economic collapse.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week

The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It

By Annie Lowrey

THE GIST: Want a government benefit you are entitled to—at least theoretically? To get it, you will probably have to go through expensive and confusing paperwork, bureaucratic delays, meetings, and more. In The Time Tax, Lowrey explains how we got here and what we can do about it.PRAISE: Tim Wu writes in The New York Times that “Lowrey’s book joins what is a growing push to tackle the hassles and frictions that make people hate government. We’ve seen what’s possible. We just need the collective will to use the tools we already have.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: Lowrey traces the “time tax” back to the Civil War, when bureaucratic hurdles were put in place out of anxiety that the wrong sorts of people—often racial minorities—would gain access to benefits they didn’t “deserve.” Bureaucracy may be utopian in theory, promising “order, fairness, impartiality, and predictability,” Lowrey writes. But the experience of it is more like Dante’s hell: “a rigid, insuperable hierarchy: spendthrifts pitted against heavyweights, alchemists afflicted with sores, flatterers immersed in shit, and traitors encased in ice.”

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: Combining incisive history with empathetic, wide-ranging reporting, one of the best policy writers in the country pinpoints a problem all of us face too often—and outlines how we can finally fix it.

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Aside from the Roosevelts, what other presidents were related to each other? Three pairs shared a last name. The fourth connection is considerably more obscure (hint: One was a Founding Father, and the other was one of our few Whig presidents). (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

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Inside Washington

The media are paying attention to the wrong Massachusetts Dem primary

As Massachusetts voters head to the polls for the primary election on Tuesday, the race between incumbent Senator Ed Markey and his younger, more moderate challenger Representative Seth Moulton continues to receive the most attention, even though 80-year-old Markey is nearly certain to win. The race to replace Moulton in the 6th congressional district, on the other hand, is wide open, serving as a microcosm of some of the issues troubling Democrats across the country.

The two front-runners in the five-candidate MA-6 race are Tram Nguyen and Dan Koh. John Beccia, who is self-funding his campaign, could have a chance but appears to be decidedly behind the former two candidates.

In some ways, the race seems a classic matchup between an insurgent progressive and an establishment moderate. Nguyen “is the more progressive, the more grassroots, the more walking the streets, knocking on doors” candidate, said Erin O’Brien, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “That’s the easy frame to understand her.” Meanwhile, Koh is “a good Democrat,” she said, “more or less a moderate, lots of D.C. connections.”

But perhaps more importantly, the MA-6 race showcases the nationwide split between anti-Trump resistance Democrats (like Koh) and affordability-focused candidates (like Nguyen) who want to create a message that moves beyond Trump. That divide has already played out this primary season, notably in Alex Vindman’s loss to state Representative Angie Nixon in the Florida Senate primary. Vindman gained a national profile for his testimony during the 2019 Trump impeachment inquiry, and made this a focus of his campaign. Other impeachment leaders, like Representatives Diana DeGette and Dan Goldman, lost their races to progressive challengers.

Koh, who served as deputy assistant to former President Joe Biden and deputy director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, has earned the endorsement of both Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris. Nguyen has been a state representative since 2019 and has earned endorsements from state progressives like Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Lori Trahan, as well as state House Speaker Ronald Mariano and state Speaker Pro Tempore Kate Hogan. Her endorsements aren’t just the typical progressive names, which could give her an edge.

“There aren’t necessarily a ton of places in America where people are breaking out the Biden name-drop,” said David Hopkins, a professor of political science at Boston College. But given the more moderate makeup of the 6th district, Koh’s “calculation” to emphasize the Biden connection “may be a correct one,” Hopkins added.

The district includes the northern suburbs of Boston, and is rated D+11 by the Cook Partisan Voter Index. It’s clearly a Democrat-dominated district, and the winner of today’s election is expected to win the general election against Republican Micah Jones. But the district is a far cry from the progressive urban strongholds of Boston and Cambridge. It’s an older, suburban, more middle-income district, which elected the decidedly moderate Moulton six times.

Koh’s strategy seems to be, “I want to be the champion of normie Democrats who still think Joe Biden did a good job and still think Trump is the enemy,” said Hopkins. That strategy is evident as soon as you open Koh’s campaign website, which centers the slogan: “Fight Trump. Lower Costs.” The first three issues on his issues page are Fighting Trump’s Corruption, Protecting Democracy, and Abolish Trump’s ICE. Meanwhile, none of the policy points on Nguyen’s website mention Trump, and she focuses instead on economic justice issues.

At the end of the day, noted Ray La Raja, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the two candidates would likely support the same legislation in Congress on most issues. “She’s trying to run in the lane to the left because she thinks that’s where the energy is,” he said. “He interprets this race as people looking for a fighter.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The National Park Service confirmed a second death on Monday in the Grand Canyon flash flood in Arizona that occurred over the weekend. As of Tuesday morning, one person remains missing, with some 80 people rescued in the past few days. The Park Service has said there is “no estimated reopening date” for the affected areas. The Washington Post’s Ben Knoll reports that while this is part of the expected monsoon season in Arizona, “a record-breaking El Niño and a marine heat wave in the Pacific Ocean have combined to load the atmosphere with moisture.… On the backdrop of climate change, these factors have driven atmospheric moisture levels 5 to 15 percent higher than average.” Meanwhile, the death toll from flash floods in Nepal and Tibet following a glacier collapse has climbed to over a thousand. Faced with billions of dollars of repairs, Nepal has reportedly appealed to the United Nations’ climate-disaster recovery fund for help.

The Ohio Capital Journal warns that after nearly a third of Affordable Care Act enrollees in the state dropped their marketplace plans following the GOP’s decision to let subsidies expire, the “smaller, sicker clientele” that remains will see their premiums rise an average of 14.7 percent for 2027. Ohio saw the “biggest enrollment drop of any state” following the subsidy expiration. Democrats are hoping to flip the governor’s mansion, a U.S. Senate seat, three U.S. House seats, and at least six Statehouse seats in Ohio.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

“Stop Doomscrolling. Do Something,” Democracy Forward president Skye Perryman urges New York Times readers. “Many of us confuse consuming political news, engaging on social media and participating in group chats with doing the things that we, as individuals, can do to help change our country’s trajectory,” Perryman writes in the paper’s opinion section. But twentieth-century political history, she argues, shows that “ordinary Americans” were the ones who pushed through major reforms. “We can organize our neighbors, work at local polling places or join community groups. We must not be satisfied with watching the decline of American democracy from our phones.”

In case you missed it: Public Citizen condemned the Trump administration’s announcement late last week that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would be reversing an Obama-era rule establishing fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy-duty truck engines. “This latest attempted rollback by Trump is yet another giveaway to the oil and gas industry, the effects of which will increase fuel costs for truckers and in turn, raise the cost of consumer goods,” said Public Citizen electric vehicle policy advocate Will Anderson in the organization’s statement.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Political Trivia Question of the Day

What two presidents (1) ordered the construction of the East and West Wings of the White House and (2) ordered and oversaw the East Wing’s significant expansion? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

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Inside Washington

Kendall Scudder has his work cut out for him. He became chair of the Texas Democratic Party in March 2025, inheriting a party in debt that just five months later had to contend with state Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting, which aimed to net the party five more House seats in the 2026 midterms. He has also had to navigate a contentious Senate primary between U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett and State Representative James Talarico, which the latter won. 

In addition to those headaches, Scudder created one of his own by restructuring the party’s operations. Rather than being centralized in Austin, staff are now distributed across Austin, Dallas, Houston, Eagle Pass, and Amarillo. Some staff quit as a result. But the shake-up apparently was popular with the party’s delegates, who overwhelmingly reelected Scudder as chair in June.

We spoke Thursday about the state of the Texas Democratic Party today and what the future—near and far—holds.

Is it mostly rural areas where you’re trying to expand the map? Are you focusing on suburbs? What does that expansion look like?

What a lot of people from outside of Texas don’t quite realize is, yes, we are geographically very large. We have some of the largest cities in America, many of them here in Texas. They are mega-metros, and so what that means is that you end up with what we consider midsize cities that, in other states, are considered their population centers. Lubbock, Texas, has more people in it than Richmond, Virginia. If I have to prioritize out, [I would focus] on those midsize city population centers that often have never been worked, may not have even had county chairs, precinct chairs, and [would start] to build the party out. So we have to walk and chew gum in a state like Texas. 

When I became chairman, we were up to our eyeballs in debt. Only a third of our precinct chairs were full. About 20 percent of our county chair spots were vacant. We left 27 seats uncontested on the last ballot, and the last coordinated campaign was only $2 million. And if you flash-forward 18 months, we’re a debt-free party that has a $30 million coordinated campaign. We’ve recruited and trained more than 1,000 precinct chairs. We’ve recruited Democrats in every state and federal office.

You are trying to build something that’s going to last beyond this year. Do you have a timeline in your head?

You can’t flip a state the size of Texas overnight. But I think that the deadlines are set for us. Redistricting comes in 2030. We all know the population allocation that’s happening after that—Texas is going to gain a bunch of members of Congress. A lot of blue states are losing some members of Congress. If Texas is not competitive and in play by 2032 for a presidential election, then you won’t have a Democratic president. It’s that simple.

I want to talk about the Senate race. Beto O’Rourke came really close in 2018, but he didn’t ultimately win. What does Talarico have to get over that last little hump that Beto didn’t?

Beto had to do it all on his own. Not to harp on how important a state party is, but Beto didn’t have one, really. He literally didn’t even operate on our voter file because he couldn’t trust the voter file. What Talarico has is an apparatus now that, while it is not perfect and it is certainly underfunded, it is one that sets reasonable expectations, meets them, understands its role, and builds a coordinated campaign and raises resources to accomplish that. 

The demographics are constantly shifting in this state. I think a lot of Hispanic Texans feel like they were lied to, because they were, and that is a real ticket to flipping Texas: the Mexican American vote, and no one has really been able to tap into that. 

Some people are still saying that Jasmine Crockett, even though she endorsed Talarico, hasn’t really put her full support behind him. Do you think she needs to get more enthusiastically behind him?

I’m not one to tell anybody what they need to do. What I will say is that it is the responsibility of James Talarico to earn every vote in this state that he can, and I think he’s up to the challenge to do that. And do you remember the last time we had a raucous primary in Texas?

You tell me.

It was 1990, the year I was born. It was Ann Richards, the state treasurer, running against Mark White, a former governor, running against Jim Mattox, the attorney general—they were all running against each other for governor in the [Democratic] primary. They went around the state literally calling each other crackheads. It was one of the nastiest primaries in American history. Do you know what happened that November? Democrats won because Democrats spent tons of money in their primary, mobilizing their base, making sure they were conscious, paying attention to what was happening and turning them out to vote. 

Democrats had really led the message on data centers, and then all of a sudden, we’ve seen Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott come out against data centers. Have they neutralized the Democratic advantage here?

Let’s be clear about where Abbott stood on data centers. He did not come out against data centers. He came out in favor of not making a decision on them until after the election. And you’re talking about a governor that’s already given them $1 billion of your taxpayer dollars to come here and build. He can try to run, but he can’t hide. 

What’s happening is they’re understanding how much those types of issues impact the willingness of rural Texans to support them. Data centers are an issue in rural Texas. If [the Republicans] don’t have large turnout in rural Texas, they lose. 

They’re full of shit. Everyone knows it. I know it. Voters know it.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The Michigan Senate race, and progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in particular, is getting the lion’s share of attention right now, but there are other important midterm elections in the Midwest. Big seats in Ohio are up for grabs: In the governor’s race, most polls show that Democrat Amy Acton, who served as the state’s health director at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, has a narrow lead over Vivek Ramaswamy, the billionaire failed presidential candidate. And former Senator Sherrod Brown is ahead in his bid to defeat Senator Jon Husted, who filled JD Vance’s vacated seat.

But polls show both races tightening, and Acton in particular has responded by repeatedly breaking with progressives, either as a bid to shore up her lead or to anticipate lines of attack from the well-funded Ramaswamy campaign. Late last month, she angered many on the left and in the LGBTQ community by saying she would uphold Ohio’s ban on transgender women competing in women’s sports. This month, her focus has turned to other areas. On August 10, Acton announced her support for a ballot measure that would enshrine the state’s voter ID requirement in its Constitution. And on Tuesday, she said she would cooperate with ICE as governor. “We always work with the federal law enforcement, and we will do so—whatever it takes to keep Ohioans safe,” Acton said. The comments go further than Brown’s efforts to assure voters he is not an “Abolish ICE” Democrat. (“I think for sure we need rules around ICE,” he said in a statement earlier this year, disavowing the “Abolish” wing without making his position entirely clear.)

So much of the media’s focus is on the rise of progressive left, but Brown and Acton show where most of the party still stands: attempting to triangulate and win over conservatives and Republicans, particularly in states like Ohio that lean red.

—Alex Shephard

The Ideas Factory

Inflation has eased, and real wages are growing again. So why do Americans remain pessimistic about the economy? Erik Hurst and Christina Patterson, economics professors at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, posit one theory at VoxEU, the policy site of the Centre for Economic Policy Research: Workers haven’t regained what they lost when inflation was rampant. Analyzing payroll records from 2016 to 2025, they found that “many workers have experienced a lasting reduction in their purchasing power.” When inflation was high, companies nonetheless gave workers standard raises of 2 percent–4 percent, rather than higher raises that accounted for inflation, so workers’ purchasing power fell and caused “a lasting hole in real pay.” That’s why workers are still sour, even though inflation peaked in 2022. The solution? Businesses should systematically index wages to inflation.

The biggest loser of the midterm elections this year is clear: pollsters. In one state after another—notably in Democratic primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan—the polls have largely failed to forecast the eventual vote. Part of the reason can be traced to the rise in recent years of so-called online opt-in polls. These are much easier and cheaper to produce than traditional phone polls but are rife with issues—in particular “bogus respondents,” as the Pew Research Center calls “survey-takers who make no effort to answer questions truthfully and instead are just looking to finish surveys quickly and collect rewards.” In a report released Thursday, the organization details how pollsters try to correct for this problem but concludes, alas, that there is no easy (read: cheap) fix.

—Ryan Kearney

In Closing

Good week: Everton Blair  

Blair, a 34-year-old former teacher, made history in a number of ways by winning a special election Tuesday in Georgia’s 13th congressional district. He will be the third openly gay Black person ever elected to Congress—and the first from a Southern state. He’s also the first gay person ever elected to Congress from Georgia. His time in office will be short, sadly, as he’s only serving out the rest of the late Representative David Scott’s term this year. (A different Democrat won the primary to serve the 13th next year.)

Bad week: Pete Hegseth

Actually, Trump’s secretary of defense has had two really bad weeks. Last week, he covered up the real reason the beleaguered USS Lincoln wasn’t resupplied. This week, The Washington Post reported that he may have fired the Army’s chief of staff over the probe into the flyby at Kid Rock’s estate, while The New York Times revealed the massive leadership vacuum at the Pentagon as a result of Hegseth’s firing spree against anyone competent in his midst.

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

On this March on Washington anniversary: Who were the two civil rights and labor leaders who organized the rally? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Tuesday’s newsletter.)

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Inside Washington

Kamala Harris has been flexing her political power in the South this year, most recently with her general election endorsement of a long-shot House candidate in Arkansas, raising the question of whether the former vice president’s goal is to rack up wins in 2026—or lay the groundwork for another White House bid in 2028.

Harris on Wednesday endorsed Democratic nominee Chris Jones, an MIT-trained physicist and minister running in Arkansas’s 2nd congressional district, which includes parts of Little Rock. It’s considered by far the most likely Arkansas district to flip blue this year, as evidenced by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s decision to add the race to its “Districts in Play” program. But that’s not saying a lot: The district is R+8, or “Solid Republican,” according to the Cook Political Report. 

The district is represented by GOP Congressman French Hill, who has held the seat since 2015. In past elections, Hill has tried to damage his Democratic opponents by linking them to women party leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton. It’s no far stretch of the imagination that he could seize on the Harris endorsement to tie Jones to any of her past statements or policies that don’t play well in Arkansas.

Jones isn’t worried. “We’re not scared, we’re prepared,” he told me on Wednesday. Hill, he predicts, “is gonna send out mailers that darken my skin, as if people don’t already realize that I’m Black.”

But why is Harris wading into an under-the-radar House race where the odds are heavily stacked against the Democratic challenger? That’s unclear for now, but Jones is not the first candidate she has endorsed in the 2026 cycle. She has endorsed at least seven other candidates for Congress. She has backed two former Biden White House officials in their primary campaigns: James Martin won the Democratic nomination last week in Florida’s 21st congressional district, and Dan Koh is vying for it in Massachusetts’s 6th next week. And last week, Harris endorsed House candidate Richard Pan in his general election campaign against Republican turned independent Representative Kevin Kiley in California’s 6th congressional district. The Cook Political Report rates the district “Solid D,” and Pan is a member of the DCCC’s Red to Blue program. 

Harris’s only primary endorsement for Senate was Texas’s Jasmine Crockett, who lost, but she has given general election endorsements to Abdul El-Sayed, James Talarico, Roy Cooper, and Troy Jackson. She also hit a bump earlier this month when her Fight for the People PAC encouraged voters to donate to Mary Peltola’s Senate campaign in Alaska. The National Republican Senatorial Committee immediately used the endorsement to attack Peltola, whose campaign then rebuffed the endorsement (Harris lost Alaska to President Donald Trump by 13 percentage points in 2024). Rob Sand, a Democrat running for governor in Iowa, also said he wouldn’t want Harris’s help on the campaign trail.

A person familiar with Harris’s strategy told The New Republic that more endorsements are slated to come out as early as next week.

Karen Finney, a Democratic political commentator who worked on Clinton’s 2016 campaign, doesn’t see this as evidence that Harris, specifically, is seen as potentially toxic. “I think that’s less about her and more about a broader environment,” in which ties to the Democratic establishment can harm some candidates, she said.

Jones, for his part, welcomed Harris’s support, saying that it affirms the success of his campaign so far and will direct much-needed resources to his race. The endorsement, Jones told me, “says that this campaign is one of the campaigns in the South that needs attention, resources—and by resources I mean media attention and dollars. Not to change what we’re doing, but to scale what we’re doing.”

Harris has been paying attention to the South lately, as has the Democratic Party more broadly. She swung through the region this summer, joining a back-to-school rally in New Orleans and, earlier, in Tennessee, criticizing the state’s redistricting effort as “backdoored racism.” Meanwhile, the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee last month voted to recommend that South Carolina come first in the 2028 primary schedule, shifting power to the state’s Black voters. 

“The South gets overlooked, and particularly Arkansas gets overlooked,” Jones said. “I’m hopeful that national Democrats have learned a lesson that you cannot ignore the South.”

Black voters, particularly in the South, have lost some of their political power as a result of the Supreme Court’s voting rights decision in April, which gave GOP-led states the green light to eliminate majority-Black districts. At the same time, the decision has galvanized Black voters, who are turning out in increased numbers this midterm season. The person familiar with Harris’s strategy said that she has been very focused on areas impacted by the Supreme Court’s decision.

Finney said Harris’s endorsements in the South could further motivate voters to show up at the ballot box. “This is an area of focus for the party, and [we’re] making it clear that we are not turning our back on the South,” she said. “In fact, we are reengaging.”

Harris is popular among Democrats in the South, and broadly; she leads some very early 2028 polls. “Whether that transfers into a 2028 campaign, who knows?” Finney said. “It’s clear that she is still someone who is popular, who people want to hear from, and care what she says and care who she endorses.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

What’s in a name? Alaska voters may ask themselves that question in November, when faced with choosing between Democrat Mary Peltola and two Republicans, both named Dan Sullivan, to represent the state in the U.S. Senate.

The top four vote-getters in Alaska’s nonpartisan primaries make it to the general election. The fourth is yet to be determined. But what we already know about the race is likely causing headaches in the campaign headquarters of incumbent Senator Dan S. Sullivan. Election officials confirmed this week that Dan J. Sullivan, a fellow Republican and retired teacher, had qualified for the general election. Peltola, who would be the first Democrat to represent Alaska in the Senate since Dan Begich lost a reelection bid in 2015, holds a narrow lead in most polls, so the last thing that Dan S. Sullivan needs is confusion over his identity in November. He’s got bigger problems than a doppelgänger, after all—like Trump’s trade war with Canada, which shares a 1,500-mile border with Alaska. But Sullivan did get a boost last weekend with an endorsement from a former Anchorage mayor. His name? Dan A. Sullivan.

—Alex Shephard

The Ideas Factory

One of Democrats’ top bogeymen this century is back in the news: The Center for Media and Democracy’s Don Wiener reports that the Koch Industries, which you may recall from such hits as spearheading climate denialism, waging war on organized labor, and drowning our politics in dark money, is “also a major player in the data center building boom, with a $15-billion stake in the industry.” Edged Energy, a firm launched by Koch Real Estate Investments, reportedly owns seven data centers across the U.S. and has six more in the proposal or development stage, prompting opposition groups from Texas to Pennsylvania. 

The Center for Law and Social Policy is out with a new report, “Access Denied: The Public Health Costs of Restricting Immigrant Benefits,” exploring how President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill has cut or restricted benefits to 1.4 million lawful immigrants, while his deportation machine has created an “increasingly hostile environment” that scares immigrants from seeking the benefits that are still rightfully theirs. The report shows how this not only harms health and economic outcomes in immigrant communities across the country but affects everyone in myriad ways—weakening herd immunity, reducing SNAP dollars, increasing demands on medical providers and food banks, and so on.

—Ryan Kearney

In Closing

Here’s Why That’s B.S.  

Is it true that Dolly Parton “really liked” Trump? 

That’s what the president claims, anyway. Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted explain how Trump’s sinking approval rating has him reaching new lows of slimy—in this case, by trying to capitalize on the tragedy of the country legend’s death this week. (This egomaniac truly makes every story about him.)

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

South Carolina GOP Senator Darline Graham just won her primary, and if she wins the general, will go from being an appointed senator to an elected one. Question(s): How many current senators were originally appointed to their seats, and who is the most recent Democrat to fit this description? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Friday’s newsletter.)