This is the state of the ugly governor’s race in the Buckeye State, where the mudslinging is off the charts and out-of-power Democrats are feeling hopeful that their gubernatorial nominee’s anti-corruption, anti-corporate messaging is giving them a boost in a race that should be a cakewalk for the GOP. Aggressive negative campaigning is defining this year’s midterms, even by historic standards. You can witness it in Texas, where Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico held an event with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims to insinuate that his GOP opponent, Ken Paxton, is complicit in a cover-up, while Paxton has repeatedly questioned Talarico’s sexuality. And things look nearly as bad in Maine, where GOP senator Susan Collins has pointed out that her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, fathered children by his second cousin, and Jackson later told Collins to “shut up” on a debate stage after she joked that a heckler was one of his supporters.

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If the Ohio polls have it right (and they may very well be wrong), Acton has a narrow lead, and Republicans could be in for a shellacking downballot too. Surveys show tight races across the board, and a particularly competitive and expensive race for U.S. Senate between incumbent Republican Jon Husted, the former lieutenant governor tapped by Governor Mike DeWine to fill Vice President J.D. Vance’s seat, and Sherrod Brown, the former long-serving Democratic senator who lost to Republican Bernie Moreno by 3.6 points in 2024. Ohio isn’t an outlier: Tight surveys in a host of Senate battlegrounds have Republicans worried about the possibility of a blue wave nationwide.

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Heath Shuler, the former NFL quarterback, won a North Carolina House seat as a pro-life, pro-gun Democrat. Jim Webb, the former Reagan Navy Secretary and tribune of the Scots-Irish, won a Senate seat in a then–more Republican Virginia. A young politician named Kirsten Gillibrand captured an upstate New York House seat with an “A” rating from the NRA.

If the Democrats win the Senate next Tuesday, it will reflect the success of a modified and limited version of that strategy. Yes, the 2026 campaign has featured big progressive bets, like Abdul El-Sayed’s candidacy in Michigan, and big progressive fiascos, like the process that yielded Graham Platner and then Troy Jackson in Maine. But in the end, the expectation that angry Democratic primary voters would turn this into a progressive Tea Party year, with a hyper-ideological cast of candidates, hasn’t matched the reality of the Senate races. Instead, Democrats are competing in swing states and reddish states because they mostly turned to nominees who could present as moderates.

Those presentations are not the same thing as an authentic ideological independence. A lot of the Democratic candidates are tap-dancing around issues like immigration and transgender sports and surgeries rather than staking out clear differences with the base. There are no notable pro-life Democrats anymore. Mary Peltola, the Democratic Senate candidate in Alaska, and Josh Turek, her counterpart in Iowa, are the only prominent contenders who would qualify as anything close to pro-gun by 2006 standards. Figures like James Talarico in Texas and Adam Johnson in Kansas are leaning hard on a religious identity, and Talarico has done his best to disavow his past woker-than-thou litanies. But their worldviews are still well to the left of the typical religious voter in those states. Ohio’s Sherrod Brown is trying to reclaim his Senate seat based on a long-standing reputation as a blue-collar populist, but as a senator he never meaningfully challenged his party’s leftward shift on immigration.

Then again, the Republican Party in 2026 is hardly a bastion of moderation. And when polarized conditions create an unmet public appetite for centrist candidates, it can be satisfied even by politicians who merely talk as though they aren’t prisoners of the party line. (This is something Trump himself demonstrated in both his winning presidential campaigns, which featured various moments of symbolic separation from GOP orthodoxy.)

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For months, the Alaska Senate race has smelled fishy to anyone without a cold. In May, Daniel J. Sullivan, who had never before sought office and has donated to Democrats, chose to register as a Republican and run against GOP incumbent Dan S. Sullivan, with both names set to appear on the general election ballot alongside Democratic challenger Mary Peltola. The upstart Sullivan—widely known as Decoy Dan—surely knew he might siphon away votes meant for the senator, and thereby give Peltola an edge.

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In partnership with Populace, an opinion-research think tank, we developed surveys designed to uncover respondents’ “private” opinions—the beliefs they consider too sensitive to express openly. We want to get past the biases that can distort polling and prompt people to give less-than-candid answers, and learn more about aspects of American life people don’t feel comfortable discussing freely. (Click to learn more about the initiative and methodology.)

On the cusp of next week’s midterm elections, we asked Americans what they think about the overall direction of the country.

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Later that day, I’d see its pastor, Reverend Adam Hamilton, host a town hall in nearby Lenexa as part of his surprisingly competitive bid to become Kansas’s first Democratic senator since the Great Depression.

Or so I thought at the time. We’ll get back to that.

Hamilton is one of a number of former and current Christian clergy running as Democrats this midterm cycle. There are safe bets like Reverend Dr. Frederick Douglass Haynes III, a Baptist pastor who’s running to replace Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett in Texas; long shots like Anna Golladay, a former Methodist pastor who was fired in 2018 for officiating a gay wedding, who is running in Tennessee’s deep-red Third Congressional District; and others somewhere in between, like Sarah Trone Garriott, a state senator and Lutheran minister who’s running in Iowa’s Third Congressional District against GOP incumbent Zach Nunn in a race the Cook Political Report says is leaning toward the Democrat. Then, of course, there’s James Talarico, the Presbyterian seminarian running a competitive race for Senate against Texas attorney general Ken Paxton.

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Later in the ad, after the wife explains that it costs $161 per person to drop bombs on Gaza, the husband asks “Don’t they get universal healthcare too?” She replies: “Yeah, they do. We’re paying for that too, probably.” Get it? U.S. aid to Israel is why you can’t feed your family.

Antisemitism is said to be the socialism of fools. Well, it turns out that it’s also the populism of the innumerate. U.S. military aid to Israel comprises at most a half a percentage point of the U.S. federal government budget. The overwhelming majority of that money is poured back into the American economy because Israel is required to spend the aid on U.S. weapons systems. Also—not that it needs stating—the U.S. does not pay for Israel’s health insurance system. Claiming that aid to Israel is responsible for high grocery prices is a grotesque lie that resurrects an ancient and sinister trope that blames international Jewry for economic misery.

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These fears are common from the Democrats’ far-left fringe to the top tier of the party establishment. Asked whether the Trump administration would meddle with the midterm results, former attorney general Eric Holder responded with certainty: “Yeah, they’re going to try things. We’re prepared to meet what it is they’re going to do.” That was on a recent episode of Pod Save America, a flagship program of the Democratic elite.

Some apprehension is understandable. Whatever one’s personal or political view of Donald Trump, his decade of dominance on our national stage has not engendered a sense of calm or confidence that he will play fair. His effort to challenge results in the 2020 presidential race, and his extraordinary push to block the electoral count, are not the sort of thing his opponents can be expected to get over.

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That was, as far as the nation’s 44th president could make out, common sense. If you believe in healthcare for all, good jobs, and hope and change—all the things Democrats supposedly believe in—well, El-Sayed was your only choice.

Referring to “those at the top” opposing the would-be senator (a strange way of putting things for a former president with a 29-acre waterfront estate on Martha’s Vineyard), Obama said: “They will use division, and they may even use your name or your faith to somehow suggest that you are dangerous and less than trustworthy and less patriotic and less American than they are.”

That elicited a few chuckles.

And then: “We have seen this movie before. I starred in it. I’ve got a long-form birth certificate to prove it.”

The crowd liked that.

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And then: “This stuff didn’t work on me, not in Michigan. It’s not going to work on Abdul.”

And they loved that.

The subtext of all this was: There’s nothing radical about this guy. He’s like me.

The subtext of the subtext was: And anyone who falls for anyone who says otherwise is a racist.

Except, of course, El-Sayed is not an old-school liberal like Obama, but an apologist for antisemites and Islamists and terrorists—and voting against that doesn’t make you Islamophobic.

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I’m about to use some bad words. Some of you will be offended by what I’m going to say. But in writing these emails now for the last number of years, I have rarely thought I should avoid saying what I really think, even at cost. Here I go again. So be prepared.

I’ve had enough.

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Here’s what’s happening. In the Alaska Senate race, incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan is running neck-and-neck against Democratic challenger Mary Peltola. As with every close Senate race this year, the stakes go far beyond a single seat. Republicans currently hold a three-seat majority, but Democrats are favored to gain, so the result in Alaska may well decide control of the Senate. But there’s another candidate on the ballot who could prove to be the spoiler, and his name just happens to be—Dan Sullivan.

Mark your calendars. The Free Press and 2WAY are teaming up for a real-time interactive election night special, November 3 from 8 p.m. ET until late. See you there.

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Yes, there are two Dan Sullivans on the ballot. The second one is a retired schoolteacher who allegedly has never run for office before, has donated to Peltola in the past, switched his party registration to Republican days before filing to run in the primary, and worked with a Democratic strategist on his campaign. In other words, while there is no proof, it is highly plausible that schoolteacher Dan Sullivan entered the race to steal votes from people mistakenly believing they’re voting for Senator Dan Sullivan.

Back in June, the director of Alaska’s elections division disqualified schoolteacher Sullivan, finding that he had not filed his candidacy in good faith and that including him on the ballot could be “confusing or misleading to voters.” But state judges reversed that decision, holding that there is no requirement under Alaska law that candidates file in good faith.

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“Our top-of-the-ticket candidate doesn’t inspire as much enthusiasm as I would like, and so I want to do what I can to stir up more enthusiasm to get people to come out and vote,” he told me from the convention floor on September 10. I asked him whether the Republican voters he speaks to are planning to split their tickets in this year’s elections, choosing to back GOP governor Greg Abbott’s reelection but swinging Democratic for the Senate race.

“No, it’s not that they’re going to split the ticket,” Berry explained. “They’re just not going to vote.”

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Berry is one of many Texas Republicans who have spent recent weeks panicking over the ultra-competitive Senate race in what should be reliably red Texas, where 37-year-old state representative and 2026 Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico has spent the past few months out-hustling, out-fundraising, and out-polling his 63-year-old GOP opponent. Republicans are now sweating over polls that have shown Talarico with a consistent lead for weeks—currently just over two points in the Real Clear Politics average, which suggests that the race is at best a jump ball for Republicans. Fear is setting in that Paxton’s many personal scandals, and voters’ frustrations with high gas prices, will depress Republican turnout in a Senate race that is crucial to protecting the GOP’s current 53-seat majority.

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Or so he said. Soon, rumors began flying in the MAGA-sphere. Something wasn’t adding up here; it couldn’t just be the flu, could it? Talarico was next seen in public at the Austin City Limits (ACL) Music Festival on Friday, October 9. The next night, he was at a Kacey Musgraves concert. Wasn’t a nine-day absence a bit much for the flu? (It’s worth noting that Talarico has type I diabetes, which can exacerbate flu symptoms.)

Internet sleuths got to sleuthing. Influencers got to influencing. In short order, they discovered the truth, as they saw it: Talarico had been spirited away to Ohio and admitted to the Lindner Center of Hope, a psychiatric clinic outside Cincinnati. Surely this revelation would implode his campaign and hand the race to Talarico’s Republican opponent, Ken Paxton. There was much rejoicing.

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That’s why Scaramucci didn’t join the dogpile criticizing Katie Zacharia, the new White House press secretary whose debut on Tuesday lasted for only 14 minutes and included a nervous cadence as she stumbled over her words and read from a script. Trump said she did an excellent job, as speculation swirled that Zacharia’s days in her job are already numbered.

But are they? I asked Scaramucci how long he thinks Zacharia will last, what advice he would give her, and why he believes his record as the shortest-serving spokesperson in White House history is still safe. His responses have been edited lightly for length and clarity.

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First, consider that the U.S. is likely to draw proportionately fewer newcomers from more familiar regions in the near future. Immigration to the United States has come from all over historically, most recently from Mexico, as America now has up to 40 million ethnic Mexicans. Yet that migration pattern is unlikely to continue, if only because Mexico has such low fertility rates, 1.2 children per woman according to one very recent measurement. Latin American nations now frequently have, on a nation-to-nation basis, lower fertility rates than the United States. So peak Latino migration likely lies behind us.

In contrast, most African nations still have above-replacement fertility rates, even though rates are mostly falling. In populous Nigeria, for instance, the total fertility rate is estimated at 4.4 per woman. Africa is also a relatively poor part of the world, which can translate into a desire for migrants to leave for wealthier and also more democratic countries.

At some point the world’s wealthier countries will have to decide: Do we shrink in population, or do we admit sizable numbers of migrants from Africa?

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Nearly 90 years later, the federal government is preparing one. On December 3, Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who murdered 14 people at Fort Hood in 2009, will be executed by firing squad at the same base. And, the Pentagon says, the world will be able to watch online.

On November 5, 2009, Hasan, then an Army major, entered the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas, bowed his head in prayer, shouted “Allahu Akbar,” and then opened fire with a semiautomatic pistol. Among the dead were a pregnant woman and her unborn child. Another 32 were wounded. Hasan was apprehended after a firefight that left him paralyzed from the waist down. At his court martial, he admitted to the murders, saying that before the attack, he had been “on the wrong side [of] America’s war on Islam,” and that he was “an imperfect Muslim trying to establish the perfect religion of Almighty God as supreme on the land despite the disbeliever’s hatred for it.” On August 28, 2013, he was sentenced to death, a sentence stalled for 13 years by appeals and the need for presidential approval.

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During a press gaggle last Thursday afternoon in Grand Rapids, I asked him whether he regrets comments he made on a private campaign strategy call in March. That’s when he said, according to The Washington Free Beacon, that “I just don’t want to comment” on the assassination of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today” about his death.

Before I finished my question, he cut in to insist that the topic is completely “irrelevant” to the Senate race. The leaked audio, he explained, is “not relevant to people’s lives,” and he’s “just not interested in this dog and pony show” solely intended to create media “clicks.”

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Then, in a mock-serious tone, Lovett, a co-founder of Crooked Media, which produces the podcast, declared: “I do want to get this out of the way: I denounce you.”

That elicited a chuckle from Piker, who replied: “I denounce myself as well.”

The hard-to-miss point was: All the controversy around Piker—the streamer has declared that “America deserved 9/11,” that accusations of Hamas committing sexual violence on October 7, 2023, are “rape fantasies,” that he would pick Hamas over Israel “every single time,” that the collapse of the Soviet Union “was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century,” that “pound for pound” the U.S. is worse than Al Qaeda—was overblown.

Meaning it’s permissible—desirable—for Democrats to make room for Piker in their “big tent.”

“My view is: I am part of a pro-democracy coalition in the fight against fascism,” Lovett said, addressing Piker, “and it includes everyone from former Republicans like Nicolle Wallace and Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell, it includes establishment politicians, it includes Neera Tanden, it includes Shannon Watts, it includes AOC and Bernie, and it includes voices on the left like you.”

When I asked Watts, an anti-gun violence activist, how she feels about being lumped together with a streamer best known for his misogyny and antisemitism, she said: “What concerns me is the suggestion that, because the stakes are so high, we must overlook rhetoric or behavior we would otherwise reject.”

The deeper problem, Ravi Gupta, a Democratic podcaster, told me, is that Lovett and the rest of the Crooked team portrays themselves as a bunch of friends still in their post-adolescence just sitting around talking about politics, when, in fact, they are making huge decisions with long-term implications for the Democratic Party—like who belongs in the “pro-democracy coalition,” which candidates they’re leaning toward, which candidates they’re leaning against, what’s in, what’s out.

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Among those rattled by the incident is Frank Thompson, the former super…

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All hell broke loose. The post has since been viewed more than 170 million times; it prompted some AI leaders to endorse a slowdown in development; and it pushed AI doomerism into mainstream political and media debate.

We are two United States senators from different parties, but we agree that a social media–driven meltdown and partisan posturing will solve nothing. We can’t govern by X post.

Instead, what is required is a clear, bipartisan, country-over-party assessment of the risks of AI, informed by three inescapable realities: the inevitability of the AI revolution; the existential stakes of the AI race with China; and the limits of our understanding of the technology.

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The call lasted less than two minutes. It has never before been transcribed in full, cross-referenced with related conversations. Now, thanks to a project we are launching this week with the Hoover Institution, it’s one of thousands that can be.

Listen to the audio of the conversation here:

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