midterm

Voting from home

California’s mail-in voting system has also become a particular target for Trump.

Voting by mail surged during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, California passed a law to automatically mail a ballot to every registered voter.

More than 80 percent of the state’s voters cast a mail-in ballot in 2024 alone.

Moreles, the Santa Clara registrar, said his county has an even higher rate. More than 90 percent of voters in his jurisdiction use mail-in ballots to vote.

His county processed more mail-in ballots in the last general election than the entire state of Texas did. While Texas accepted roughly 342,000 mail-in votes, Santa Clara County sent out more than a million.

That widespread use suggests that voters do not share Trump’s scepticism of the mail-in system, according to Moreles. “They like the accessibility of it. They must believe it’s secure as well,” he said.

But mail-in ballots can continue to trickle in after the election ends, causing vote tallies to fluctuate in the days and weeks after polling stations close. In California, all mailed ballots are valid so long as they are postmarked by election day, and must also be received no later than seven days after.

Trump has pointed to those long vote counts and shifting tallies as evidence of fraud.

Even some Democrats have pushed for the process to be faster. By law, elections must be certified within 30 days of the election. But Moreles argued that not rushing can have its virtues, too.

“For the folks who are living here and are used to it, it makes sense and, to a lot of people, is reassuring,” Moreles said. “Taking the time to get it right is something that intuitively makes sense to people.”

Still, on August 24, the Supreme Court opened the door to additional uncertainty surrounding mail-in ballots.

In a six-to-three ruling, the court’s conservative majority allowed the Trump administration to begin implementing a March executive order that would impose new restrictions on mail-in voting.

The order could impact both the design of mail-in ballots and who is eligible to receive one.

But state officials have questioned the feasibility of redesigning and reprinting ballots with so little time before the midterm elections. Early voting in some states starts as early as September.

Others have speculated about whether the legal wrangling with cause confusion or discourage voters who rely on mail-in ballots.

On Wednesday, California announced it was co-leading a group of 24 state attorneys general in filing a new lawsuit to see the executive order blocked.

“Donald Trump does not run elections. States do. And his latest attack on democracy is proof of how weak he has become,” the state’s Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement accompanying the suit.

“California will continue to lead the way in defending democracy — using every tool at our disposal and every minute in our day. This perilous moment in history demands no less from us.”

A second court order pausing part of Trump’s plan for mail-in ballots remains in effect.

A federal judge on Wednesday lifted a major obstacle to President Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting, even as Democratic state officials filed a new court challenge with the midterm elections fast approaching.

The fresh round of legal wrangling comes just two days after the Supreme Court handed down a procedural ruling in Trump’s favor, and could mean the issue lands before the high court again before the pivotal contests for control of Congress. The first mailed ballots are set to be sent out next week.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston agreed to lift an order prohibiting the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out Trump’s order for November’s elections. She wrote that she was “compelled” to do so after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that a similar injunction she granted in a separate case was premature.

Talwani nevertheless said the executive order could unleash “chaos” and referred to it as “likely unconstitutional.”

The administration can now move forward and implement a Postal Service rule published late Friday. It would require states to follow a uniform envelope style for mail ballots and to give the Postal Service a list of voters eligible to receive them. Talwani found on Tuesday that the rule’s issuance technically violated her injunction, but she declined to penalize the administration.

The new lawsuit, filed by about two dozen Democratically controlled states against the U.S. Postal Service, marked a new phase in the high-stakes litigation creating confusion around the midterm elections.

It came after the Supreme Court ruled against them in a separate case, but did not say Trump’s order was legal.

The high court majority found the initial Democratic lawsuit was premature, but that was before the Republican administration issued a rule governing Postal Service delivery of mail ballots. Election officials warn it will be impossible to implement before the first wave of mail ballots are sent out next week.

“Across the country, states are already deep into preparations for the 2026 elections. Now, at the last moment, the federal government is attempting to meddle in those preparations and potentially threaten countless Americans’ right to vote,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of 25 Democratic attorneys general filing the lawsuit, said in a statement. “USPS has no authority to decide who can and cannot vote by mail.”

The Trump administration plan faces a third lawsuit originally filed in May in the nation’s capital, though judges there have so far declined to block it.

All previous challenges were filed before the administration published its mail ballot rule Friday night.

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis on Wednesday said the Postal Service’s proposals were “commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots” and that the administration would continue to work to implement them to boost “the safety and security of our elections.”

The Postal Service said it would not comment because of the pending lawsuit.

National Democrats on Tuesday cited the rule in asking the federal judge in the Washington case to block Trump’s order after he declined to do so last spring, saying the administration at the time had not taken concrete action. In Boston, Talwani also found that the administration had violated a separate injunction she had placed on the Postal Service in drafting the new rule, although she did not take any action against the government.

Talwani had issued the injunction against Trump’s executive order in the prior Democratic state case, which is the one the Supreme Court overturned on Monday. She also issued a second injunction Aug. 11 in a case filed by the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, while the Supreme Court was considering the administration’s appeal of the judge’s first order.

Trump has long targeted mail voting, which he falsely blames for his 2020 election loss and is disproportionately used by Democrats as a result of Trump’s condemnations. Since returning to power, Trump has tried to claim authority over election rules, saying he thinks Republicans should “take over” vote counting in Democratic areas.

He issued his first election executive order just months after retaking office, attempting to require documentary proof of citizenship to vote, among other changes. He has also been pushing a sweeping election bill that has stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Democrats and even some within his own party.

Riccardi and Whitehurst write for the Associated Press.

The amended law was an attempt by state Republicans to crack down on unproven claims of voting by noncitizens.

A United States federal court has temporarily blocked an Ohio law that required proof of US citizenship from residents who wanted to register to vote while they obtained a driver’s license.

In his ruling on Tuesday, US District Judge Solomon Oliver Jr granted a preliminary injunction against the law, saying it likely violates the US National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) because it requires more information than necessary to determine a resident’s eligibility to vote.

“Election officials do not need documentary proof of citizenship to assess a voter registration applicant’s citizenship because signed attestation of citizenship is enough,” Oliver wrote.

The judge also pointed to a clause in the act that says each US state’s driver’s license application “shall serve as an application for voter registration with respect to election for Federal office unless the applicant fails to sign the voter registration application”.

Oliver said that Ohio must offer applicants the opportunity to register once they’ve submitted their driver’s license application, not after it’s been approved by the state’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV).

“To interpret this section of the NVRA otherwise would allow States to make registering to vote at the BMV more onerous, and could result in fewer voter registrations because the opportunity to apply was not proactively offered to otherwise eligible citizens,” Oliver added.

In 1995, Ohio passed a so-called “motor-voter” law that allowed residents the opportunity to register to vote when they applied for a driver’s license

But that law was amended last year by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature in an attempt to crack down on unproven claims, pushed in part by US President Donald Trump, that noncitizens were voting in the state’s election. US law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections.

The ruling marks a victory for voting rights advocates like Red Wine & Blue, which sued Ohio’s secretary of state, Frank LaRose, over claims that the law disenfranchised eligible voters and violated the NVRA.

One of the group’s lawyers, Ben Stafford, praised the ruling, calling it “a win for Ohio voters.”

“With the registration deadline just weeks away, eligible Ohioans will now have the opportunity to register to vote at the BMV without having to produce unnecessary paperwork that is not required by federal law,” Stafford, an attorney at Elias Law Group, said in a statement.

LaRose said his office disagrees with the decision and will appeal.

The high desert is not typically a place you look for a wave. But in the vast expanse between the Sierra Nevada and Utah border, a not-exactly-wide-open race for Congress is testing whether a blue wave, should one come November, is ankle-high or something more akin to a political tsunami.

Nevada’s 2nd District has been represented by just four lawmakers since its creation more than 40 years ago. All those representatives have been Republicans.

November’s contest should be another shoo-in for the GOP and its nominee, David Flippo. The district, which takes in northern Nevada, is overwhelmingly white and rural, which makes it solidly conservative. In 2024, Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by a decisive 56% to 42%; only Washoe County, home to Reno, kept things that close. Trump won other portions of the district by 50 percentage points or more.

But inflation, Trump’s sagging approval rating and other factors — northern resentment toward southern Nevada, where Flippo lived until fairly recently, the refusal of the incumbent to support his party’s nominee — offer Democrats the not-entirely-far-fetched hope of a major upset.

“It will be an interesting summer and fall,” Mark Amodei, who has represented the district for 15 years, wrote on social media after the June primary. “But I believe it’s fair to say that CD-2, for the first time in its history, isn’t a Republican guarantee.”

That’s just about the kindest thing the congressman has had to say about his would-be successor.

All of which make the sprawling district in Nevada’s rough and rocky Great Basin an improbable political bellwether. A win on such forbidding terrain would almost certainly mean a nationwide Democratic gain of 30 or more seats in November; they need to flip just three to take control of the House.

Flippo, 63, a 25-year Air Force veteran and Trump stalwart, arrived in the district from Las Vegas. He ran for Congress there in 2024, losing in the Republican primary. He was preparing for a second try in the Democratic-leaning 4th District when Amodei unexpectedly announced his retirement in February. So Flippo hightailed it north to run in the far more hospitable 2nd District.

He took on the favored candidate of Amodei and others in the GOP establishment, James Settelmeyer, a former minority leader of the state Senate. Backed by a constellation of MAGA celebrities, Flippo waged a fiercely negative campaign, accusing “Tampon Jim” of voting to put menstrual products in boys’ bathrooms and coddling undocumented immigrants, among other distortions. With Trump’s endorsement, Flippo handily defeated Settelmeyer and 11 other primary opponents.

“”Absolutely scurrilous campaign against … one of the nicest guys around,” Amodei said afterward, on the program “Nevada Newsmakers.” “The voters are never wrong. But guess what? Mark Amodei’s not endorsing [Flippo.] I wish him all the best. No way. No, thank you.”

Apart from his exceedingly short-term residency in the district, questions have also been raised about Flippo’s opaque finances. He has lent his campaign more than $1.6 million and failed to provide the personal disclosure information required of federal candidates. There is also no record of Flippo filing the required statement during his 2024 campaign, according to the Washington news outlet NOTUS.

In addition, it reported that Flippo was fired from a job in the financial services industry after his company accused him of violating policies and regulations.

So, a carpetbagger with a sketchy history.

Flippo’s main opponent is Teresa Benitez-Thompson, 48, a longtime Reno resident, former member of the state Assembly and a relatively moderate Democrat. Those credentials also buoy Democratic hopes. The party’s congressional campaign committee has, for the first time in decades, added Nevada’s 2nd District to its target list, though it remains to be seen how much time and money national Democrats commit to the race.

To prevail, Benitez-Thompson would have to defy political gravity, which is to say overcome the reflexive partisanship that has typified politics in this age of deep voter polarization.

In the last two midterm elections, according to the Pew Research Center, more than 90% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters supported GOP candidates for the House. In other words, the kind of crossover voters that Benitez-Thompson needs to win have become rare indeed.

““Trump is a huge liability for Republicans; there is no question that the GOP is going to have huge turnout problems, meaning that in a lot of races, Democrats are going to greatly exceed expectations,” the veteran election handicapper Charlie Cook wrote in a recent midterm analysis. “But converting Republican voters to actually back a Democrat — even for a day — is so much harder now.”

Jon Ralston, one of Nevada’s leading political savants, agreed.

“Some of those rural Nevada voters would rather commit hara-kiri than vote for a Democrat,” Ralston said. (No, Japan’s ancient suicide ritual is not particularly associated with honor or custom in the cow counties, as Nevada’s lightly populated stretches are known. But you get the point.)

“I don’t think it’s impossible,” Ralston, founder and chief executive of the Nevada Independent news site, said of a Democratic upset. “But I remain skeptical.”

Here’s the thing, though, about wave elections — and, to be clear, your friendly political columnist is offering no predictions ahead of November. Like a massive ocean swell, which can bear all kinds of flotsam and jetsam ashore, a political wave that is big enough, broad enough and strong enough can carry all manner of unlikely candidates to victory.

Even in the bone-dry desert.

Big-city mayors are giving poll workers panic buttons in case election skeptics question their work. County and state officials are gaming out responses to immigration raids near voting centers.

Lawyers for Democratic states and civic groups are pre-writing legal challenges to ballot seizures. And Democratic aides in Washington are preparing members of Congress to push back in the court of public opinion against any baseless claims of voter fraud in competitive districts.

Across California and the nation, civic organizations, voting rights advocates and Democratic leaders are preparing for a raft of potential actions by the Trump administration to interfere in, subvert or deny November’s midterm vote.

President Trump, an election denier for years, has without evidence described the U.S. election system as badly corrupted by fraud and dangerously vulnerable to both domestic and foreign interference.

He has said he would do “anything necessary” to have “honest elections,” and has tried since returning to office to unilaterally rewrite the rules for voting nationwide and wrest control of elections from the states through executive orders and other administrative measures.

Now, he has declined to rule out additional and unprecedented steps to force his will on the November election, including through emergency declarations and military deployments, and in February suggested Republicans should simply take over voting in blue states.

Election experts say there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in American elections, despite Trump’s allies searching for years.

A worker looks through ballots at a Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center on Monday, June 8, 2026 in City of Industry, CA. Counting continues on ballots cast for the state’s primary election held June 2.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

Much of the work to resist any Trump interference or power grab is being done quietly to avoid revealing too much of the strategy to the Trump administration or stoking unnecessary fear among voters.

It is designed to match what Trump’s opponents see as his three-part “interference playbook” — to “deceive” voters before the election, “disrupt” the vote itself and “deny” any unfavorable results after, said Justin Vail of Protect Democracy, a prominent litigant against the administration.

“The threats are real,” Vail said, “but the preparation is larger and more coordinated than ever before.”

The scenarios being planned for include the president deploying troops or immigration agents to polling sites to intimidate voters, fomenting unrest as a pretext to declare a national emergency, claiming fraud in the ballot counts of key congressional races or commanding the U.S. Postal Service to intervene in mail ballot delivery.

All told, the efforts amount to an unprecedented exercise to ensure the nation’s elections are safe from its own federal government.

They also reflect a deterioration in trust between states and counties overseeing elections, voting rights and pro-democracy advocates and a federal administration that has denigrated their work and tried to take control of voting away from states.

As public frustration with the economy mounts and Trump’s approval rating sinks, Democrats have become hopeful their party will retake power in Congress. Trump, meanwhile, has suggested that alleged election integrity problems will be the culprit if Republicans lose.

In California, 61% of voters recently identified federal inference in November as a “major concern,” according to a UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by The Times.

“We are taking this threat really seriously,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who helped form a Senate task force to prepare. “Politically, I’m very optimistic about the midterms. But I’m also deeply concerned with the president’s willingness to interfere with them — and the fact that, unlike even in 2020, where there were at least some people around him to try to constrain what he was doing, all those people are gone.”

President Donald Trump is seen on a screen as his supporters cheer during a rally on the National Mall on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Trump supporters gathered in the nation’s capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election.

(Samuel Corum / Getty Images)

Much of the work is legal preparation among Democratic state attorneys general and lawyers with leading civic organizations. Nothing is being ruled out after Trump’s supporters, at his goading, violently attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, following his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

Other preparation is political, as members of Congress, mayors and other elected officials position themselves to use their bully pulpits and legislative powers to punch back. And grassroots campaigns are also unfolding, as community leaders recruit voters to defend their local elections, including online.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck task,” said Skye Perryman, president of the nonpartisan legal organization Democracy Forward. “We’re anticipating scenarios we haven’t seen before in the United States.”

Trump, who has never accepted his 2020 loss to Biden despite scores of reviews and audits confirming the result, has consistently sought to undermine Americans’ trust in elections, telling the nation in a prime-time speech last month that the voting system was “broken” and claiming that the SAVE America Act, a strict Republican-proposed voter ID and citizenship measure, is necessary to fix it.

The White House said it wouldn’t respond to hypothetical questions about the midterm election, but said anyone who breaks voting laws will be held accountable. Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, blamed “extreme liberal Democrats” for undermining U.S. confidence in elections by blocking the SAVE America Act, which Trump has failed to push through Congress.

Bis claimed voters support such changes, and said “President Trump is absolutely right: We fix this now, or we lose our country.”

Causes for concern

The fears of interference are driven by Trump’s long record of election denial; his recent insistence that the midterms are vulnerable to both domestic fraud and foreign interference; his success installing loyalists and fellow election deniers in powerful positions throughout his government; and his current administration’s many attempts to usurp control over state voting processes, including through executive orders, lawsuits and legislation.

Trump and his allies have sued to compel blue states to turn over voter rolls; seized ballots in Georgia; tried to limit mail voting via new U.S. Postal Service rules; pushed stricter citizenship and voter ID requirements via executive order and in Congress; diminished independent agencies tasking with helping states secure elections; kicked off a nationwide gerrymandering effort to boost Republican chances in the House; and threatened to imprison Democratic leaders who stand in their way.

Sen. Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) (C) departs after a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump and Republican senators at the U.S. Capitol on June 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. President Trump is visiting Capitol Hill to attend a closed-door luncheon with the Republican Senate Steering Committee to push his SAVE America Act, which would impose strict voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements in federal elections.

(Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

Some analysts saw Trump’s speech last month as laying the groundwork for greater intervention in November, and he raised further alarm this month by entertaining a suggestion from conservative radio host and election conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root that the president has “the right to declare a national security emergency” to unilaterally enforce new voting restrictions.

“Stranger things have happened,” Trump responded.

The White House has previously downplayed the likelihood of immigration agents being deployed to polling locations, but Trump has refused to rule it out. Legal experts say such a move would probably be swiftly blocked by courts, as would any unlawful deployment of military troops to polls.

Some voting experts said Trump’s efforts shouldn’t be blown out of proportion, particularly given federal courts’ dim view of them to date.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, noted Trump’s executive orders on elections were blocked, the Justice Department is 0 for 23 in cases demanding state voter rolls, and the primaries have run smoothly with high turnout — showing the president is “having very little effect.”

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, said it is “important that people be aware that there are threats, but to not let those threats be debilitating” or prevent them from voting.

Civic experts are urging regular voters to help debunk misinformation about voting within their communities. Democracy Forward has asked people to take one civic-minded action per day leading up to the election, while Indivisible, a progressive grassroots organization, is training volunteers nationwide to mount public push-back to any interference.

Coordination in Congress

A Senate aide who spoke with The Times on condition of anonymity said members of the Senate task force meet regularly to plan for as many potential forms of interference as possible — and that there is “no bottom” to what they’re considering.

Task force members are studying nuanced local election laws to understand how Congress members should respond to any federal interference in their home states, and working on “coordinated messaging” that all members can use in response to immigration raids or other broad interference, the aide said.

National Guard troops stand in the shade at The Park at LeDroit in Northwest on August 12, 2026 in Washington, DC. U.S. President Donald Trump is claiming credit for Washington’s dramatic crime decline a year after Trump sent thousands of National Guard troops to the nation’s Capitol, but the evidence shows crime was already falling before his federal intervention and the extent to which his policies accelerated that decline remains disputed.

(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

They are also reading “line by line” through recent legal decisions limiting National Guard deployments and other federal actions to identify any “loopholes” the administration might exploit.

They are paying particular attention to districts with competitive congressional races and where past problems have arisen. In California, they’ve studied the recent seizure of ballots by Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and the criticism of slow ballot counting statewide, the aide said.

Schiff said the scenario he is “most concerned” about is one in which the president or his allies “seed” unrest in big cities to “give the president a pretext, Reichstag fire-like, to call out the military or invoke the Insurrection Act or call out ICE or Border Patrol.”

The Reichstag fire erupted in the German parliament four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor in 1933, and was used to justify a sweeping crackdown on political opponents and the suspension of civil liberties — ushering in Nazi rule.

Schiff said lawsuits will be a necessary but “very imperfect remedy” in such a scenario, and Democrats will need to develop a more robust response combining “litigation with mobilization” and legislative oversight.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which has election oversight, is helping to create an election observer program for hotly contested races, and has warned his colleagues that he will call a vote on any election-related emergency Trump declares, so that they must co-sign or resist it.

Separately in the House, staffers have been building their own “road map” for how to deal with a laundry list of “terrible things that bad-faith actors who seek to subvert the election could do,” with a principal focus on any ways they might disrupt the Jan. 3 swearing in of new Congress members, said a House aide involved in the preparations there, who spoke with The Times on the condition of anonymity.

The U.S. Capitol, on July 20, 2026 in Washington, DC.

(Tom Brenner / Getty Images)

House staffers are also looking at how court imposed limits on Trump’s emergency powers might be “exploited, weaponized [or] ignored” by the administration, including the Justice Department.

A Justice Department spokesperson said the department is “working diligently” to fulfill the demands of Trump’s election-related executive order purporting to “strengthen the integrity of our elections,” which courts have blocked, and has “statutory authority to enforce our nation’s election laws, including through requesting state voter rolls,” which courts have also blocked.

Assistant Atty. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the department’s civil rights division and has threatened local elections officials with legal consequences if they don’t comply with her voter roll demands, said her division “has a statutory mandate to enforce our federal voting rights laws, and ensuring the voting public’s confidence in the integrity of our elections is a top priority of this administration.”

State and local preparations

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said attorneys from his office and similar Democratic ones across the country are “hard at work planning, preparing, strategizing, researching, getting ready for all the different ways the Trump administration can break the law.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, right, holds a press conference at the Ronald Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday, May 14, 2026.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

That includes any attempts to seize ballots, deploy federal law enforcement or the military, or command the U.S. Postal Service to interfere with mail ballots, he said. “The right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow. It’s fundamental. We need to protect it.”

Dean Logan, registrar-recorder and county clerk for Los Angeles County, said he has a responsibility to ensure that “election operations remain secure and uninterrupted” no matter the threat, and is taking steps to do so, though he declined to address potential acts by Trump. Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson said big cities are also preparing, including to prevent harassment of voters or election workers.

“Cities are where we host vote centers. It’s where the volunteers come from, where people go with their questions,” Richardson said. “We have to pay attention to national rhetoric. We have to be aware of anxiety that might — tensions that may — arise.”

For the first time since becoming vice president of the United States, JD Vance has returned to his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, with a goal of rallying Republican voters ahead of November’s pivotal midterm elections.

Vance delivered Friday’s speech at a symbolic location: the steel plant where his late grandfather once worked.

He used the appearance to tout a $1bn investment from the steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs that was supported by $500m in government awards.

That funding, he said, illustrated his party’s commitment to the manufacturing sector and reinvigorating the US economy overall.

“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy – or it’s all going to happen overnight – but in just 18 months, we have seen an explosion of rebuilding in the American heartland,” Vance said, crediting the growth to policies under President Donald Trump.

Vance’s speech comes at a critical time for the Republican Party and Trump in particular.

November’s midterm races will decide whether Republicans are able to maintain control over both chambers of Congress. Should their hold on the legislature slip, Democrats could stymie Trump’s policy priorities for the last two years of his presidency — or even impeach him, as Trump himself has suggested.

Polls have shown that the state of the economy remains the top issue ahead of the midterms.

But how voters perceive each party’s ability to address economic strain has shifted. Before the start of Trump’s second term, the Pew Research Center found that voters were more likely to favour Republican policies on the economy.

In July, however, the dynamic had switched: Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed backed the Democratic approach to the economy, compared with 36 percent for Republicans.

Another poll this month from the news agency Reuters and the firm Ipsos likewise found slightly more respondents siding with the Democrats on economic policy than Republicans, upending a longtime trend that stretched back to 2017.

Trump, for his part, has publicly appeared to dismiss cost-of-living issues as a partisan invention, calling questions of affordability a “hoax” and a “con job” engineered by Democrats.

At Friday’s speech, Vance took a different approach, trying to assuage concerns about the administration’s handling of the economy.

“We got a lot of work to do, but we’re making progress on all the things that matter the most,” Vance said, citing efforts to make homeownership more affordable.

The speech is part of an intensifying campaign under Trump to boost the prospects of Republican candidates ahead of the midterms, with the president and other top officials holding rallies for their party’s candidates.

Ohio, part of a historic manufacturing region known as the Rust Belt, has become increasingly conservative since Trump’s first White House victory in 2016.

But amid rising dissatisfaction with Republican leadership, Democrats see a chance to win back the state’s governor’s office, as well as the US Senate seat left vacant when Vance became vice president.

Whoever wins the special election in November will serve the remainder of Vance’s Senate term, which would have ended in January 2029.

The Republican nominee in the race, Senator Jon Husted, joined Vance on stage at the Middletown rally on Friday. Husted was appointed to fill Vance’s Senate seat until a special election could be held.

Vance, for his part, dedicated part of his speech to attacking Husted’s Democratic rival, former Senator Sherrod Brown, who lost his re-election race to Republican Bernie Moreno two years ago.

He accused Brown of being among the politicians “who pretend to be friends of the workers in this facility”, while instead advancing their own priorities.

“It’s hard to understand what these modern Democrats actually stand for,” Vance said, characterising the party as having strayed from its ideals.

He pointed to Brown’s record of siding with the policies of former Democratic President Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential race.

“[Brown] was a man who claimed to represent this state but never once raised his voice against Joe Biden’s border crisis or against the inflation that was brought on by Joe Biden underinvesting and trying to destroy American industry,” Vance said.

The vice president also singled out Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, repeating a false claim that the Democratic Senate candidate called for “Sharia law” in the US.

“I’d love to go back in time and tell my papaw that there’s a man who claims to stand for working people, who says not only should we have Sharia law, but if you criticise it, you are a white supremacist,” Vance said about El-Sayed.

Trump’s approval rating currently sits at 33 percent, according to Reuters-Ipsos polling from this month.

Californians are more concerned about the Trump administration interfering in the state’s midterm elections than they are about voter fraud, noncitizens voting illegally or foreign interference, according to a new poll.

A majority of voters — 61% — identified potential federal interference as a “major concern” heading into November, slightly more than the 59% who cited possible foreign interference as such, according to the poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times.

By comparison, 41% of California voters identified voter fraud and 37% identified noncitizens voting as major concerns, the poll found.

The polling reflects the liberal leanings of the state, where registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, as well as the nation’s hyperpartisan divide on voting issues and vulnerabilities.

That divide has been driven for years by President Trump’s relentless criticism of U.S. elections, particularly in large blue states such as California, and recently by his administration’s attempts to wrest control over voting processes from the states based on unverified claims of widespread fraud and the fierce pushback against those claims from California Democrats and other liberal leaders around the country.

The White House has dismissed concerns about interference and accused Democrats of obstructing its efforts to protect American elections from fraud, including through the proposed SAVE America Act — which would enforce strict new ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements for voters nationwide.

While 80% of Democratic respondents to the poll said potential federal interference in the state’s elections was a major concern, just 28% of Republican respondents identified it as such.

Voter fraud was identified as a major concern by 84% of Republican voters but just 21% of Democratic voters, the poll found. Noncitizens voting illegally also was identified as a major concern by 85% of Republicans but just 12% of Democrats.

Republicans also have substantial concerns about the security of mail ballots and how slowly California counts its vote, while Democrats were far less concerned about those issues, the poll found.

Mark DiCamillo, the poll’s director, said it clearly reflects the partisan divide around election issues and “shows that in this state, federal interference is a big deal — more so than in other places around the country.”

He called that a “big finding” in line with previous polls that found “Californians are very concerned about prioritizing efforts to defend democracy and to protect election systems,” including in the face of threats from Trump — who routinely has focused on the state in his regular attacks on election integrity.

“For 61% of Californians to say that’s a major concern to them in terms of the threats to the election system, I think that’s very newsworthy,” DiCamillo said.

He also noted the particularly stark difference between state Democrats and Republicans on the issue of noncitizens voting.

“Nearly 90% of Democrats say that’s not a concern, whereas 85% of Republicans feel it is,” he said. “Californians have a lot of noncitizens in the state, but Democrats don’t think they’re infecting the voter rolls, so they’re not concerned about it.”

That was striking, DiCamillo said, given how much Trump has pointed to California to claim that noncitizens are voting.

“Obviously, the Democrats are very strongly opposed to the president, what he’s trying to do, and the Republicans are supportive,” DiCamillo said.

Other findings in the poll also support that conclusion.

For instance, while Trump has claimed without evidence that mail ballots are a major source of fraud and their use should be reined in, the poll found that 72% of Californians approve of mail ballots as a primary method for voting in the state — with 58% saying they strongly approve.

California law requires every registered voter in the state to be sent a mail ballot, and more than 80% of voters have used such ballots in recent elections.

Trump also repeatedly has accused California officials of failing to secure state elections against fraud and of cheating as they count later-arriving mail ballots. But the poll found that Californians by greater than a 2-to-1 margin — 65% to 31% — are confident local election officials are accurately and fairly counting ballots. However, the poll did find that more than half of respondents, 53%, had concerns about delays in California’s vote-counting process.

Overall, 64% of respondents were confident in the integrity of the state’s election system, compared to 34% who were not.

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, downplayed the threats of voter fraud and noncitizens voting in the state, but acknowledged they are real concerns for some voters — which is a problem in itself.

“I see election security as both a matter of actual security and perceived security. And the truth is that we have a great deal of actual security in California elections, but, unfortunately, that security is not being perceived by some voters,” she said. She attributed that in part to the “constant drumbeat that we’ve had now for a decade, coming from the occupant of the White House, that our elections are rigged.”

Alexander said California law requires registering voters to prove and attest to their identity and has multiple verification measures to ensure people casting ballots are who they say they are. She said there are “common sense” reasons why noncitizens do not try to vote — including that it requires them to turn over personal information and could be grounds for criminal charges and deportation, which is “a huge disincentive.”

Alexander also said Trump administration interference in the midterms is a real concern, but so is overhyping the threat to the point it discourages voters from casting ballots.

“Not to dismiss the threats — the threats are real — but the more we talk about them, the more we scare voters,” Alexander said. “I’ve encountered voters who’ve said this to me: ‘What’s the point in voting when they’re just gonna cheat?’ Or, you know: ‘It’s all rigged.’ And that’s part of the play here — is to scare people into thinking that voting doesn’t matter.”

To counter that, Alexander said it is “really important that people be aware that there are threats, but to not let those threats be debilitating or to allow them to dissuade people from wanting to participate.”

The poll surveyed 4,207 registered voters in California from Aug. 3 to 9, online in English and Spanish, and has an estimated margin of error of about 2.5 percentage points in either direction.

Though I don’t regularly attend Mass, I fondly remember the two years in high school when I prepared for the sacrament of Communion.

In the basement of St. Boniface Church in Anaheim on weekday afternoons and weekend mornings in the mid-1990s, my sister, about 20 other teenagers and I learned about the tenets of our faith.

We were inculcated with the importance of charity, love toward all, good works and humility, and urged to carry those virtues into adulthood. I didn’t agree with everything our lay teachers espoused — why abortion should be outlawed, why necking was bad, why only men could become priests — but I learned enough important moral lessons that I still proudly call myself Catholic.

Confirmation is meant to bring recipients closer to God and “imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual mark,” according to the Vatican’s official guide to its doctrine. What especially stayed with my classmates and me was, well, us.

We were white, Filipino, Vietnamese and Latino, children of working-class parents and equals in the eyes of God. Church fairs were as likely to serve pancit and spring rolls as hamburgers and tacos. When we finally received confirmation at a special Mass at St. Boniface attended by then-Bishop Norman McFarland, we exemplified not just the future of the church but also the promise of a better tomorrow for the United States.

Our parish lived and practiced American Catholicism’s long tradition of welcoming the stranger, the outcast, the refugee — following the example and words of the Gospel we read every Sunday. But even as we committed ourselves to the path of Christ, politicians in California waged a war against illegal immigrants and anything that suggested diversity — a xenophobia that would culminate decades later with President Trump’s election.

Trump is a walking manifestation of the seven deadly sins, to the point that he has depicted himself as Jesus and a pope on social media. Nevertheless, a majority of Catholics — thankfully no one in my immediate family — voted for him in each of his three presidential elections, with support topping out at 55% in 2024, per the Pew Research Center.

Catholics were a key constituency in every sector Trump needed for his historic victory against Kamala Harris. Swing states with old-line communities like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Boom states like Nevada and Florida. And especially Latinos, who voted for Trump in numbers never before seen for a Republican presidential candidate. Latino Catholics went even harder for Trump: The Public Religion Research Institute found their support for him increased by 17 percentage points from 2016 to 2024, even as his white Catholic support dropped from 64% to 59%.

Issues from abortion to the economy to transgender rights spurred Catholics to side with Trump, but his hard-line stance against immigration was especially popular. As immigrant Catholics were being demonized, echoing previous eras of American history, too many Catholics sided with the demonizers.

Maria Marin and her husband, Martin Marin, pose with a cardboard cutout of Pope Leo XIV during the Archdiocese of Chicago’s celebration of Leo at Rate Field on June 14, 2025.

(Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times via Associated Press)

A June 2024 survey by Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which tracks American Catholic life, showed that 43% of respondents supported lower levels of immigration. A month into Trump’s second term, 41% of American Catholics thought that increased immigration in recent years had changed the U.S. “for the worse,” compared with 33% who felt it made life better, according to a Pew Research Center poll.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, I argued about the dignity of Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants with people from my parents’ native ranchos in Mexico, who came to this country without papers and are regular churchgoers. I sighed in disappointment as former confirmation classmates whose refugee parents fled tyrannical rulers, just like the Holy Family, posted approvingly on social media about Trump’s vow to build a bigger, nastier border wall.

Catholics have frequently exemplified the best and worst tendencies of American society. We’ve been brutal conquistadors and the huddled masses yearning to be free, trailblazing politicians and the millions who stood silently during our church’s sex abuse scandals. Trump’s support among Catholics represented a new low. But by some miracle of God, more and more of those supporters are finally seeing him for who he is.

On Aug. 12 — the feast day of Jane Frances de Chantal, the patron saint of forgotten people — the Public Religion Research Institute released a survey showing that 62% of Catholics think unfavorably of Trump, while 57% oppose his handling of immigration, both legal and illegal. If this repentance transforms into votes against MAGA in the midterms, the rest of Trump’s presidency is doomed.

The poll offers no insight into why Catholic support for Trump has cratered. The easy explanation would be the president’s enmity toward Pope Leo XIV, who has preached a gospel of kindness toward the undocumented and spoken out against the quagmire in Iran. When the Trump administration invited the native-born Chicagoan to visit the U.S. for America’s 250th anniversary, Leo instead decided to spend his Fourth of July on Lampedusa, the Ellis Island of the Mediterranean.

But the poll noted that Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, had higher favorability ratings among American Catholics during the same time in their respective reigns — 90% to Leo’s 75%.

Trump’s popularity is also collapsing among Americans as a whole. Only about a third support him, according to an a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll — the poorest showing of his second term, matching the lowest numbers of his first term. But for Catholics, it’s not just high prices, the Iran War and Trump’s drift toward despotism that makes him so onerous.

The Catholics in his government, from Supreme Court justices to Cabinet members to Vice President JD Vance, are acting as a rubber stamp for an imperious ruler, instead of imitations of Christ. Trump’s immigration sweeps are hitting American Catholicism so hard that bishops have allowed the faithful to stay home instead of attending Mass.

What reason is there left for good Catholics to support Trump? If ever a group needed to break away from him, it’s us.

What’s been especially galling about Trump’s second term, from a Catholic perspective, is his gleeful cruelty.

Proverbs 21:13 states, “Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.” Conservatives who have criticized Pope Leo for taking on Trump over his nastiness toward the meek don’t get that his motive isn’t political — this has been standard Vatican doctrine going back to his namesake, Leo XIII. In an influential 1891 encyclical urging the world to stand by the working class, Leo XIII pointed out that sacrificing oneself “for the benefit of others, is man’s surest antidote against the insolence of the world and immoderate love of self.”

Is there any statement more contrary to MAGA than that?

Cardinals Robert McElroy, Christophe Pierre and Joseph Tobin and Archbishop Bernard Hebda speak to reporters after a Mass in solidarity with migrants at the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas on Feb. 27, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn.

(Mark Vancleave/Associated Press)

The Catholics who supported Trump may have forgotten Leo XIII’s words as they repeatedly voted for him. But that’s the beauty of our faith. We can admit our errors and seek to right them through another sacrament — confession.

“Through such an admission man looks squarely at the sins he is guilty of,” reads the catechism of the Catholic Church. That way, people can “take responsibility” for their faults and reconcile with God “in order to make a new future possible.” And the way to do that is by “doing something more to make amends for the sin.”

Catholics are supposed to confess our sins privately. But we must repent of Trump publicly and loudly at the ballot box this November and urge others to follow.

We helped usher in Trump. We must now lead in exorcising him from American society once and for all.

Primary races across the country have offered an early read on where voters want their parties to head before November’s consequential midterms in the United States.

With only a handful of US states remaining in the congressional primary calendar, voters in Alaska and Wyoming — two reliably Republican strongholds — head to the polls on Tuesday, with races that could send ripples well beyond their small electorates.

Although the state has long been safe Republican territory in federal elections, this year marks the third consecutive election cycle in which Alaska finds itself among a handful of states at the centre of the fight for control of Congress.

Wyoming offers a different kind of race: a rare wholesale turnover of Republican leadership. Wyomingites have a glut of new leaders to choose from at the statehouse, in the governor’s mansion and in the US Capitol. Contests that could further consolidate the state’s ultraconservative politics or begin to push them to the centre.

Here’s what’s on our radar.

Alaska

When do polls open and close?

Polls open at 7am (15:00 GMT) and close at 8pm local time (04:00 on Wednesday GMT), although Alaska’s two time zones stagger poll closings across the state.

What makes Alaska’s primary different?

Unlike most states, Alaska uses a single primary rather than separate Republican and Democratic contests. This comes after Alaska voters approved Ballot Measure 2 back in 2020, which effectively eliminated the state’s traditional party-primary system for most offices. Instead, all candidates appear on a single, nonpartisan primary ballot. The top four vote-getters advance.

What are the key races to watch in Alaska?

The US Senate race carries the clearest national stakes because it could tip control of the chamber. The governor’s race is worth watching because of its exceptionally crowded and competitive field.

Seventeen candidates are running to replace Alaska’s staunchly pro-Trump Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy, who is barred by term limits from seeking a third term. Among them is former Governor Bill Walker, who is running as an independent. Republican candidates include former state Senators Click Bishop, Shelley Hughes and Lesil McGuire, former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson, former state revenue Commissioner Adam Crum, Matanuska-Susitna Borough Mayor Edna DeVries, former state Attorney General Treg Taylor and business owner and conservative activist Bernadette Wilson.

Former state Senator Tom Begich and former state Representative Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins are the two Democrats in the race.

Meanwhile, sixteen candidates are running for Alaska’s US Senate seat, but the race has two chief frontrunners: incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan and former Democratic Representative Mary Peltola. The Cook Political Report ranks the race among the country’s most competitive Senate contests.

Why the Senate race matters nationally

Though Alaska has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, former Representative Peltola, who represented Alaska in the US House from 2022 to 2025, demonstrated that a Democrat can win statewide there.

The race has drawn millions in campaign spending, including money being spent to elevate political unknowns who are unlikely to win the seat, but could materially alter the November field.

Super PACs have spent more than $2m trying to boost candidates who are not considered serious contenders for the seat, according to Alaska Public Media.

An Alaska Survey Research poll conducted in March found Peltola ahead of Sullivan among primary voters, 46.4 percent to 40.9 percent. In a simulated general-election matchup using Alaska’s ranked-choice system, Peltola also polled ahead of Sullivan.

A tale of two Dan Sullivans

There is an unusual Senate subplot: two Republicans named Dan Sullivan are on the ballot. One is the incumbent senator; the other, Dan J Sullivan Jr is a retired teacher from Petersburg. The state’s Division of Elections initially removed him from the ballot after determining that his candidacy appeared intended to confuse voters, but the Alaska Supreme Court later ordered officials to restore him to the primary ballot.

That creates a problem that is particularly acute in Alaska’s primary. Unlike the November election, the primary is not ranked-choice: voters select a single candidate, and the four highest vote-getters prevail in the general election. With two Dan Sullivans vying for the same electoral spot, even a relatively small number of mistaken votes could influence which candidate clears the hurdle.

Senator Sullivan will appear on the ballot as “Dan S. Sullivan” alongside the labels of “Registered Republican” and “Incumbent”. Challenger Sullivan will be listed as “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.” without any party affiliation listed, although he filed for office as a Republican.

On Israel, Sullivan and Peltola find common ground

Much of the attention around incumbent Dan Sullivan’s fundraising reflects the issues that have defined his Senate career, including his strong support for Israel and his hawkish approach to Iran.

The 61-year-old has repeatedly backed military aid and closer US-Israel defence ties while vehemently opposing efforts by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute Israeli officials. His congressional record includes repeated efforts to maintain or strengthen sanctions on Iran.

Sullivan’s reelection run has attracted substantial backing from high-profile political organisations, including the Republican Senate Leadership Fund, which has committed at least $15m towards his campaign. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC ) has also helped funnel about $250,000 in individual contributions to Sullivan during the first quarter of 2026.

Peltola has also championed Israel-related legislation during her time in the House, and sometimes even broke with fellow Democrats on Israel-related votes. The Jewish Democratic Council of America, which describes itself as advocating for a strong US-Israel relationship, endorsed her Senate campaign back in March.

Wyoming

When do polls in Wyoming open and close?

Voting begins at 7am local time (13:00 GMT) and ends at 7pm local time (01:00 GMT the following day).

What’s one big race to watch?

The Senate Republican primary.

In deep-red Wyoming, the Senate primary is less a contest about whether the GOP will hold the seat than about which Republican candidate will win it.

The Cowboy State has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1964, with the exception of 1976, when Jimmy Carter carried Wyoming. The Senate race is also interesting because it is an open-seat succession fight.

What are the important races in the Wyoming primary election?

The US’s least populated state is in for a political makeover, with a shake-up at nearly every level. With incumbent Senator Cynthia Lummis declining to seek re-election and Representative Harriet Hageman relinquishing her House post to try to succeed her in the Senate, Wyoming is poised for an unusually broad reshuffling in elected officeholders.

Wyoming’s Republican Party is divided between a hard-right bloc that already controls the state House and more traditional conservatives who retain greater influence in the Senate.

Hageman, the Trump-backed hard-lined congresswoman who rose to national prominence after unseating Liz Cheney in the 2022 Republican primary, is the clear favourite to succeed retiring Senator Cynthia Lummis. Among the other Republicans running to replace Lummis in the US Senate are former Kirby Mayor Sam Mead and former environmental services business owner Jimmy Skovgard.

In an April interview with Jackson Hole Community Radio (KHOL), Mead said that the endorsements Hageman received from Trump, Lummis and Barrasso come with an expectation that she will support the administration “no matter what.” While Mead has promised that he would push back against Trump on public lands, tariffs and foreign wars when he believes the administration’s policies run counter to Wyoming’s interests.

Nine active candidates are competing for the Republican nomination to replace Hageman in the US House in what’s shaping up to be the most expensive contest on Tuesday’s ballot. The field includes former state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow, state Senate President Bo Biteman, businessmen Steve Friess and Reid Rasner, and Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray.

Democrats in the United States have approved a shakeup to their 2028 presidential primary calendar as the party looks to take back the White House.

During a meeting on Saturday in Austin, Texas, Democratic National Committee (DNC) members voted to overhaul which states have the first say in picking the party’s presidential nominee.

South Carolina will once again take centre stage as the party’s first official nominating contest, with its Democratic primary scheduled for January 22, 2028.

Nevada will go second on February 1, followed by New Hampshire on February 8. New Mexico, Michigan and Virginia will round out the early states over the course of that month.

The new calendar formalises a change that began during the last presidential election cycle in 2024, when the national Democratic Party similarly put South Carolina at the front of its primary lineup.

The 2028 primaries set up a more competitive calendar for Democrats, giving greater influence to states with more racial diversity, in an effort to better represent the party’s key constituencies.

Debate over primary calendar

But plans to reshape the primary calendar have been met with controversy in the past.

In 2024, for instance, local leaders in New Hampshire defied party leaders by holding a state-run primary ahead of the first party-led vote in South Carolina. As justification, New Hampshire officials cited a state law requiring their primary to be the first in the nation.

There was also pushback in Iowa, whose state caucus had ushered in the primary season for decades.

Iowa Democrats warned that moving the state lower in the party’s calendar could send the wrong signal to rural voters, who often feel overlooked in national politics and tend to lean rightward.

Still, proponents of the calendar change argue that it will help the Democratic primaries better mirror the overall population of the US.

South Carolina has normally been Democrats’ first contest in the southern US, and it has a significant population of Black voters. Roughly a quarter of the state identifies as Black, according to census estimates.

Nevada and New Mexico, meanwhile, have large Latino or Hispanic populations, with 31 percent and 49 percent of their residents identifying as such, respectively. All three states will be at the forefront of the primary calendar, come 2028.

DNC Chairman Ken Martin took to social media on Saturday to tout the changes as capturing the demographic shifts in the country.

“These states reflect the diversity of America and will help ensure our nominee is best positioned to take back the White House in 2028,” Martin wrote on X.

Ongoing party feud

Iowa and New Hampshire both have overwhelmingly white electorates, and critics have long argued the two states have played outsized roles in shaping presidential elections.

Notching early victories in the party primaries can help a candidate build momentum, and that, in turn, can help presidential hopefuls secure party nominations.

Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who led the DNC from 2005 to 2009, told The Associated Press (AP) news agency that the calendar changes will make for a more representative nominating process.

“These states look more like the country,” Dean said, pointing to places like South Carolina and Nevada, “whereas Iowa and New Hampshire don’t”.

But it remains uncertain how the new calendar could affect the growing intra-party feud between progressive and more moderate, establishment candidates.

Democrats in Michigan, one of the states given a boost in the calendar shakeup, narrowly voted earlier this month to select progressive Abdul El-Sayed as their Senate nominee.

Given that Michigan will now have an earlier say in the voting process, some experts have speculated that the swing state could help progressives assert greater influence over the party overall.

But other states given more prominence in the 2028 lineup have a more moderate streak.

South Carolina, for instance, favoured then-candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries over his more progressive opponents, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

“I think our primary voters up north are probably a little different than primary voters in South Carolina,” Boyd Brown, a former DNC member from South Carolina, told AP.

Here is the full list of the six states that will have the first say in Democrats’ 2028 presidential primaries:

• South Carolina: January 22, 2028
• Nevada: February 1, 2028
• New Hampshire: February 8, 2028
• New Mexico: February 15, 2028
• Michigan: February 22, 2028
• Virginia: February 29, 2028

A spate of recent polls signals that Democrats are gaining traction in both the races for United States Senate and the governor’s mansion in Texas, turning a reliably Republican state into a battleground ahead of the November midterm elections.

On Friday, the nonpartisan research initiative Texas Pulse, helmed in part by the Texas A&M Bush School of Government and Public Service, released its latest public opinion survey into the state’s midterm races.

It found that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee, is now leading the US Senate race by four points, with 47 percent support. His Republican rival, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, trailed at 43 percent.

Those statistics suggested growing momentum for Talarico, who was tied with Paxton in an earlier Texas Pulse poll from June.

Texas Pulse’s findings echo another poll, released on Thursday, that showed Talarico leading Paxton 48 percent to 45 percent. Another 6 percent of respondents said they were undecided.

That poll, conducted by the research firms YouGov and 254 Labs, suggested that Talarico had a significant advantage among undecided and independent voters in the Lone Star State.

An estimated 57 percent of independent voters preferred the Democratic candidate over his Republican competitor, although 20 percent said they remained undecided.

A Fox News poll from late July similarly found that 68 percent of independents are getting behind Talarico, a 37-year-old state representative.

While polls can vary dramatically in the months leading up to an election, the latest survey results are likely to serve as a bellwether for Democratic odds in November’s midterms.

The left-leaning party is hoping to wrest both chambers of Congress from Republican control.

Should Democrats succeed in doing so, their majorities could serve as a bulwark against President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda during the final two years of his presidency.

But analysts believe the Senate may be more difficult to flip than the House of Representatives. While all 435 seats in the House are up for grabs in November, only a third of the Senate is on the ballot.

That makes every Senate race critical to either party maintaining — or retaking — control of the upper chamber.

Cost of living concerns

Texas has long-established bona fides as a Republican stronghold. No Democrat has held statewide office in Texas in more than three decades.

But the open Senate seat in Texas has created an unusually competitive race for Democrats.

Paxton, the Trump-endorsed candidate, defeated the incumbent Senator John Cornyn in the Republican primary in May.

But the longtime state attorney general has generated concerns among Republicans about his ability to appeal to centrist voters.

Paxton’s career in politics has been riddled with corruption scandals. During his tenure as the state’s attorney general, he has faced allegations of abuse of office and misconduct involving a political donor, the latter of which resulted in his impeachment — though he was not removed from office.

He also faced a separate, nearly decade-long securities fraud case that was dismissed last year. His support for the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and accusations of adultery have also been sources of criticism.

A Texas Public Opinion Research poll, released last week, found Paxton trailing Talarico by five points, 45 percent to 40 percent.

Notably, that poll suggested that the Democrat leads by 34 percentage points among self-described moderates, with 54 percent support to Paxton’s 20 percent.

Experts like Evan Roth Smith, the lead pollster for Texas Public Opinion Research, credit that upward momentum to a solid campaign pitch.

“Talarico is up because he’s running the race every Democrat in this country should be running. When they go on TV, podcasts and talk to reporters, they should focus on affordability. If we can win on affordability, we can win elections,” Smith told Al Jazeera.

Talarico, a former educator with a seminary background, has largely concentrated his campaign on cost-of-living and economic issues, proposing to raise the federal minimum wage.

He also recently unveiled a plan late last month to end tax breaks for tech companies building data centres.

Paxton’s economic agenda, meanwhile, has focused on tax breaks, including a $25,000 tax deduction for out-of-pocket medical expenses and a $50,000 deduction for first-time homebuyers.

But Texas’s Senate contest is not the only statewide race generating attention for its competitiveness this election cycle.

The gubernatorial race is also getting tighter between Democratic state Representative Gina Hinojosa and Republican incumbent Greg Abbott. That race is neck and neck.

Abbott’s lead has shrunk from six points to a single point, with Abbott at 46 percent and Hinojosa at 45 percent, according to Friday’s Texas Pulse poll.

The Texas Public Opinion Research poll has Abbott leading by three points, with 45 percent support compared with 42 percent for Hinojosa. A wild card, however, remains in the 10 percent of respondents who identify as undecided.

Detroit, Michigan – The sighs in the audience were audible as United States Congresswoman Haley Stevens closed in on Abdul El-Sayed’s lead in the Michigan Democratic primary for the US Senate.

El-Sayed, a public health advocate, took the stage after midnight as uncertainty had dampened the once-celebratory mood among supporters in Detroit early on Wednesday.

“I wish I could tell you that I was declaring victory right about now. It turns out it takes a long time to count some votes in Michigan. It’s a big state,” he joked.

The progressive candidate went on to remind the crowd of what his campaign was up against: tens of millions of dollars in campaign spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other special-interest groups.

“I want you to remind them that if we come through this, when we come through this, inshallah [God willing]”, he said, “that we’ll have taken $70m on the chin and kept fighting back.”

Stevens, a four-term congresswoman, continued to shrink El-Sayed’s lead as the votes came in, bringing the margin between them down to less than 1 percent.

The final results arrived later on Wednesday morning, long after the sun had risen on a new day. El-Sayed had won by a razor-thin margin.

He had fended off not just Stevens but also the pro-Israel groups and Democratic power brokers in Michigan, including top officials from the party, like Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who had endorsed his opponent.

The result appeared to stun the US political system, dealing yet another setback to the pro-Israel Democrats and sparking a response from President Donald Trump, who was quick to label El-Sayed as a “Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel”.

But the message from the vote results was clear: Campaign spending and big-name endorsements may no longer be enough to secure victory within the Democratic Party.

‘It’s not just the status quo anymore’

El-Sayed’s supporters say the delayed celebrations and the smaller-than-expected margin of victory should not diminish the significance of the elections.

Democratic state legislator Alabas Farhat said El-Sayed’s victory sends a message that, if candidates run on an anti-war platform and are willing to take on special interest groups like AIPAC, people will vote for them.

“It’s not just the status quo anymore and these establishment politicians who are used to coasting through these elections,” Farhat told Al Jazeera.

“It’s now folks who want to come in and disrupt and deliver big, bold agendas and relief for the working families of Michigan and anywhere else.”

Stevens had overwhelming support from the Democratic Party establishment. She was backed by Whitmer, former Senator Debbie Stabenow, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and retiring Senator Gary Peters, whose seat she was running for.

Defeating Stevens allows El-Sayed to compete in November’s general elections against former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, who is backed by Trump and will likely receive support from pro-Israel groups.

AIPAC has already indicated it will continue its spending in Michigan to beat El-Sayed in the general election. “Our members remain determined to ensure that voters reject Dr El-Sayed and his radical anti-Israel agenda in November,” the group said in a statement on Wednesday.

The pro-Israel lobby group also downplayed El-Sayed’s victory, highlighting wins by other pro-Israel candidates, including in Missouri, where Congressman Wesley Bell comfortably won against his progressive challenger, former Congresswoman Cori Bush.

“While disappointed that some of our AIPAC-backed candidates did not prevail, our community is proud to support pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans who stand for our values, and we are encouraged that voters in races across this primary season continue to broadly choose leaders who support a strong US-Israel partnership,” AIPAC said.

Even with polls showing that the general election is up for grabs, analysts are emphasising the historic nature of El-Sayed’s primary victory.

Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders called El-Sayed’s win the “most extraordinary victory” in modern US politics.

“Have you ever heard of a candidate in a major race getting outspent nine to one, taking on the entire establishment and winning?” Sanders said on the Pod Save America podcast.

“I cannot recall somebody having done that.”

Left-wing victories

El-Sayed was not alone in security victories in the state’s primary races. The overall result in Michigan is seen as another major achievement for the progressive left in this election cycle.

In Tuesday’s election, progressive state legislator Donavan McKinney defeated pro-Israel incumbent Shri Thanedar in a US House Democratic primary. In a district north of Detroit, left-wing climate organiser William Lawrence also won a Democratic primary for Congress by 15 points.

Across the US, from California to Colorado to Pennsylvania to New Jersey to New York, progressives have won similar races, ousting several incumbents and claiming open seats in safe Democratic districts.

What makes El-Sayed’s win significant is not only the spending and endorsements he faced, but also that he won a state-wide race in a swing state that voted for Trump less than two years ago. Michigan is home to more than 10 million people.

Progressive Pennsylvania State Representative Chris Rabb, who is on his way to Congress after winning a competitive primary for a heavily Democratic seat in May, said left-wing candidates are prevailing because they are able to engage voters with a compassionate and substantive approach.

He said El-Sayed’s victory sends a message to the Democratic establishment: “They’ve got to take a look at the electoral calculus going forward.”

“The things that used to work are old and are arcane and do not reach the types of people that will come out who won’t vote for normal traditional Democrats,” Rabb said. “But he’s bringing out folks who haven’t come out in a long time or ever.”

He added that El-Sayed’s ability to broaden the Democratic base will help him defeat Rogers in November.

El-Sayed’s campaign slogan is, “Money out of politics. Money in your pockets. Medicare for all.”

His platform is focused on affordability and expanding access to healthcare. But AIPAC’s involvement in the race and the polarisation over Israel made the conflict in the Middle East a key issue in the election.

Russell Ellis, the social media commentator known as Jolly Good Ginger, said voters across the US are showing that they are “fed up” with Israel and AIPAC.

“The amount of voters that are drawing a red line at sending bombs to continue a genocide is much larger than people are accepting that it is. It’s massive,” he told Al Jazeera.

“I think most Americans can agree that we can’t support genocide, and that using American taxpayer dollars and American bombs to commit genocide in Gaza, in Sudan, in Congo, anywhere is unacceptable.”

‘We want to fund healthcare, not warfare’

Despite his criticism of Israel, El-Sayed always brought the political conversation back to Michigan.

The US has spent billions of dollars on military support for Israel, its Middle East ally, and even more on the war with Iran – a conflict that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been seeking for decades.

El-Sayed has argued that the money spent on war should go to help communities across the US and Michigan.

His supporters say the progressive wins in Michigan show that this approach is resonating with voters.

“Today’s historic victories in Michigan prove that Palestine will win at the polls again and again,” Iman Abid, the political director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action, said in a statement.

“AIPAC can try dumping millions of dollars into propaganda, but at the end of the day, American voters don’t want our tax dollars to go toward bombing families abroad. We want to fund healthcare, not warfare.”

Sally Howell, a history professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn who pioneered academic research about the Arab community, said El-Sayed’s win represents “genuine change” for Michigan.

“It tells us that voters are very frustrated with the establishment – the establishment in Washington and the establishment in the Democratic Party,” Howell told Al Jazeera.

“They want leaders who are going to bring change, not more of the same.”

BREAKINGBREAKING,

Progressive advocate overcomes more than $60m in spending to defeat pro-Israel Congresswoman Haley Stevens.

Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive public health advocate, has won the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, overcoming more than $60m in campaign spending, mostly from pro-Israel groups, NBC has projected.

The result on Tuesday represents an enormous blow to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which led the way in the effort to defeat the pro-Palestinian El-Sayed, backing his opponent, US Congresswoman Haley Stevens, with more than $30m.

El-Sayed will face former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers in November. The race is considered one of a handful of competitive Senate contests in the November midterms and could determine which party controls the chamber for the rest of President Donald Trump’s term.

If El-Sayed – who is of Egyptian descent – wins in November, he would become the first Muslim senator in US history.

Tuesday’s result in Michigan – a swing state that voted for Trump in 2024 – will have major implications for the Democrats’ policies on conflicts in the Middle East.

El-Sayed recognises Israel’s atrocities in Gaza as a genocide and argues that money spent on conflicts that benefit Israel should be invested in local communities in the US to address healthcare, housing and infrastructure problems.

More to come…

Dearborn, Michigan – Yemeni-American activist Samraa Luqman has no regrets about voting for President Donald Trump in 2024.

While the United States president has been a disappointment to Arab Americans in Michigan with his pro-war and anti-immigration policies, she stressed that it was untenable for the community to vote for Democrats as Israel’s genocide unfolded in Gaza.

“There had to be accountability for the genocide. We’re OK with what we voted for,” Luqman told Al Jazeera.

“I said from the beginning, I’m willing to live through another four years of Trump, that we expected him to be bad on our issues, but it was a pill we were willing to swallow in order to hold the Democratic Party accountable.”

Luqman is not alone.

Despite Trump’s staunchly pro-Israel policies and unpopular war on Iran, many say supporting Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in 2024 was out of the question, and it was the right choice for the community to break with the Democratic Party.

“I could not – with a good heart, good conscience – tell someone to vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump”, but the approach of “lesser of two evils” no longer works to sway Arab voters, Hussein Dabajeh, a prominent political strategist in the Detroit area, home to large Arab and Muslim communities, told Al Jazeera.

Democrats’ popularity amongst Arab Americans nosedived in 2024 as President Joe Biden ignored calls to compel a ceasefire in Gaza and continued to provide Israel with weapons and military aid as it killed tens of thousands in Palestine and Lebanon.

Then, Vice President Harris refused even to consider an arms embargo against Israel.

As a result of these policies, many Arab Americans, who had been reliable Democratic voters for years, ditched the party and refused to support Harris in her presidential bid.

Trump swept in, presented himself as a “peace” candidate, and his campaign forged ties with Arab community advocates.

Trump’s policies

At a rally in Michigan ahead of the 2024 vote, Trump brought local Muslim imams to the stage and praised the community.

The Republican leader also visited the predominantly Arab and Muslim Detroit suburb of Dearborn ahead of the election.

Trump ended up winning Michigan as many Arab voters in the Dearborn area refused to back Harris. Some voted for him, while others voted for a third party, left the top of the ticket blank, or skipped the election altogether.

According to an Al Jazeera analysis of election results in heavily Arab precincts in east Dearborn, about 45 percent of the votes went to Trump, 29 percent to Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and 16 percent to Harris.

As president, Trump allowed Israel to continue its attacks on Gaza and Lebanon and launched an unprovoked war against Iran that has sent petrol prices soaring.

He has also intensified the crackdown on Palestinian rights advocacy at home with a campaign to deport noncitizen student activists critical of Israel.

In February, he also terminated immigration protections for Yemeni nationals, sowing fear and uncertainty in a community where many leaders had endorsed him in 2024.

Asked how Arab Americans feel about Trump now, Dabajeh said: “They hate him. There’s no other way of putting it. I don’t think there is a single person I know that voted for Trump from the Arab and Muslim community specifically that looks at what Trump is doing and is happy with what he’s doing, or what he’s done.”

‘The genocide matured us’

Many Arab Americans stress that withholding support for Harris in 2024 was not out of love for Trump.

“No one understands the horrors of Trump’s policy more than us. We were his first victims in 2017,” said Amer Zahr, a comedian and Dearborn Board of Education trustee.

Shortly after starting his first term in 2017, Trump implemented a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries.

“No one is more aware of the harm that Trump can cause than we are,” Zahr added. “But the genocide matured us in a way that we finally got to the point where we were willing to tell politicians ‘no’.”

As the election season returns to Michigan, Arab Americans once again find themselves at a political crossroads.

The community is rallying behind Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed – who had previously endorsed Harris – but some are keeping their political options open.

Luqman, the Yemeni activist, said she will certainly vote for El-Sayed and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib – who are outspoken critics of Israel – in the Democratic primary on Tuesday and in the general elections in November.

Luqman said Democratic voters’ support for progressive candidates will help the party regain credibility with Arab voters.

“Those are things that do bring the Democratic Party a little bit of relevance and credibility within our community,” Luqman told Al Jazeera.

“It has kind of brought the community back to centre, whereas they were kind of swinging to the right by a large margin.”

Palestine or bust

While some political commentators have been questioning why US support for Israel has become a decisive issue in US politics, particularly Democratic primaries, the answer in the Arab community is clear.

Advocates say domestic policy takes a backseat when their loved ones are being killed, and their hometowns are being wiped out by their own tax dollars via military aid to Israel.

“Gaza and Palestine and Middle Eastern issues have now become the forefront, the top of everybody’s issues, and it’s become a red line for my community,” Luqman said.

“So if you’re a Republican or Democrat and you hate AIPAC and you value Palestinians’ rights to self-determination, then you’re going to be getting our vote, regardless of what party you’re in,” she said, referencing the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby group.

Zahr echoed that message.

“People want us not to be single-issue voters. In other words, they want us to forgo our main issue, get screwed on it, watch our families die because Trump’s bad, and accept all that,” he said.

“Well, we said ‘no’. The blood of the children of Gaza had to mean something.”

Zahr emphasised that Arab Americans are not alone in centring Palestine in their electoral choices, pointing to the defeats that pro-Israel incumbents have suffered across the map in this primary season.

“You’ve gotten to a point where if somebody says, ‘Stop bombing hospitals’, everyone knows you’re talking about Israel. That’s because of Israel. That’s not because of us. That’s because of what Israel did,” he told Al Jazeera.

“And so, people are keying into the truth. And when you learn the truth, something that comes along with that is you learn that you’ve been lied to, and you get angry. A lot of righteous anger is pushing a lot of this.”

Dabajeh, the political strategist, said that while Arab voters care about the economy, affordability and infrastructure – like all Americans – they cannot overlook US policy on Israel.

“Are we supposed to call our family members overseas and be like, ‘Listen, khalto [auntie], this guy over here that’s running for office might kill some of your neighbours, might kill some of your kids, but don’t worry about it, he’s going to take care of the flooding in our homes’?”

“It’s not going to work. We can’t do that.”

Islamophobia and racism

Republicans tried to court Arab and Muslim voters in 2024 and capitalise on the discontent over Gaza policies, but now, many conservatives have returned to demonising the community as an electoral strategy.

Weeks after he was elected, Trump endorsed Randy Fine, a Florida politician with a history of anti-Muslim statements, for Congress. Fine would go on to win and call for the “destruction” of all Muslims.

Meanwhile, Republican governors in Florida and Texas have designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as a “terrorist” group.

In Michigan, Republican Congressman John James, who is running for governor, has also pledged to blacklist the group.

Luqman said James had spoken to community members and promised to engage voters in Dearborn before that announcement.

“There was a really big opportunity for the Republican Party to solidify the swing of the pendulum, if you will, and they lost that option. They really missed that opportunity,” she said.

Democratic socialists face mixed understanding, with 49 percent of Americans saying they grasp their policies, poll shows.

Leftist candidates in the United States aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) movement have been defeating centrist Democrats in primary elections this year. However, large swaths of the country still don’t know what ⁠the movement stands for, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Members of the DSA, an activist organisation whose stated mission is to support workers gaining power through democratic means, feature prominent politicians such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Other Democratic Party DSA members have also won in recent political races across the US.

The three-day Reuters/Ipsos poll, which concluded on Sunday, found that 49 percent ‌of Americans say they understand democratic socialist policies while 47 percent say they do not, underscoring the challenges ahead for America’s anti-establishment left.

Asked if democratic socialists have good ideas or not, some 27 percent of respondents said they have at least some, while 51 percent said there were few, if any, and 20 percent said they weren’t sure.

People have a similar assessment of the ideas of MAGA Republicans, President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” political base. Some 27 percent of poll respondents said MAGA Republicans have at least some good ideas, while 57 percent saw few or no good ideas from ⁠MAGA and 13 percent weren’t sure.

Prominent DSA member Mamdani, who was elected in 2025, endorsed other DSA members in New York City who went on to win their respective primaries in June. Other wins by DSA members include races in Colorado and in California.

Trump has ‌seized on the movement’s rise to try to falsely paint all Democrats – including those unaffiliated with the democratic socialist movement – as “hardcore, godless communists”. The administration released a 100-page report earlier this month tying left-wing advocacy groups in the US to Cuba – often relying on circumstantial and ideological links, rather than direct connections.

Democratic socialists advocate pursuing progressive policies through elections. In contrast, communism seeks to abolish private ownership of property ‌and ‌create a classless society – ideas that the democratic socialists seeking election reject.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was conducted online, surveyed 1,248 US adults nationwide and had a margin of error of three percentage points.

WASHINGTON — President Trump and his allies escalated attacks on U.S. elections on Friday, after the president’s prime-time effort to convince Americans that that the nation’s voting systems are fundamentally flawed, and threatened to punish California and other Democratic states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials with fines and prison if they don’t turn over voter rolls to federal officials seeking to root out purported illegal voting by non-citizens.

“Try us,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X in response to Mullin’s threats. He added that “California has free, fair, and secure elections” and that the state “will fight for them.”

The administration’s threats — made less than four months before the November midterm elections — are a continuation of an aggressive Trump-led campaign to use the federal government to attempt to overhaul the nation’s voting systems and sow public mistrust in elections.

The administration has tried for months to compel Democrat-led states into handing over sensitive voter data to the federal government, but the efforts have run into resistance in courts, in part out of concern for privacy laws. The courts have also reaffirmed in many cases that the Constitution gives states — not the federal government — primary authority over elections.

On Friday, Mullin said his agency has found “as many as” 190,832 possible non-citizens registered to vote in California, along with more in three other Democratic-led states. He said Homeland Security arrived at those numbers by checking the four states’ public voter records.

He vowed to withhold federal election security grants from states until they agree to the administration’s demands, including having their voter registration lists “scrubbed” and their election security systems updated.

“If these states want a grant and they want to be reimbursed to run federal elections, they are going to have to implement security measures,” Mullin said at a news conference. “We need to make sure that individuals who are legally able to vote are voting.”

Newsom said the state had “no idea” where that claim came from. The administration has not made its methodology public, and the system Mullin’s department has used to check for non-citizens in the past has inaccurately flagged some citizens as non-citizens. Past election reviews have found non-citizen voting is rare.

“There is plenty of reason to be suspicious of the claims from the administration,” said Brendan Fisher, director of strategic investigations at the Campaign Legal Center, “and every reason for voters to have confidence in our elections.”

Mullin’s remarks came the day after Trump delivered a prime-time address about vulnerabilities in the election system, claims that largely were not backed up by the evidence he provided. The White House released a trove of declassified documents that fell short of showing that any American election had been affected by fraud or foreign interference.

The White House dug in on the strategy Friday morning, deploying agency heads to continue amplifying the idea of election vulnerabilities, even after fact-checks showed most of his claims were exaggerated and had been previously known, investigated or debunked.

“SAVE OUR ELECTIONS,” the White House said on X.

Trump also used his address to pressure Congress to pass legislation that would tighten voting restrictions and could make it harder for millions to register to vote and cast ballots. While hardline Republicans applauded him, others in the party have rebuffed his request.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Friday that he did not understand why Trump is focusing on a past election when Republicans should focus on what is ahead.

“I think historically the midterms for the party in power are really tough,” Cornyn said. “So, yeah, I am concerned about it. We ought to be talking about things looking forward that our constituents are most concerned about.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said the nation’s electoral systems are safe, and while he thinks election officials need to be “vigilant,” he said he is more concerned about economic issues ahead of the midterms..

Discussing the legislation ahead of the speech Thursday, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said it would be “impossible” to carry out changes to the nation’s voting laws in time for the midterms.

“The only thing that will occur is an undermining of the integrity of our elections right now,” Tillis said on the Senate floor.

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, called Mullin’s threats “laughable.”

“There is no significant pool of federal grant money appropriated, so this threat has no teeth for any state. None of them are expecting any significant federal funds for elections,” Becker said.

Mullin told reporters Friday the federal government plans to use public records requests to try to obtain the voter roll information in order to investigate whether non-citizens have voted. Any member of the public can make a public records request; the move signals that the government has few remaining avenues to force the state to turn over voter data.

But Mullin appeared to acknowledge the limitations, saying: “I obviously can’t force the states.” He later threatened to levy fines, penalties or criminal charges against elections officials in states that don’t comply with the government’s demand.

If their behavior wasn’t criminal, Mullin said he would make sure state and county officials — who do not work for the federal government — would “never work for the federal government again.”

More than a dozen courts have ruled against the Justice Department’s highly unusual demand for state voter rolls. The federal government is not entitled to the data under federal law, Becker said.

He said previous government investigations into non-citizen voting have found that most people flagged against DHS’ database were either citizens or non-citizens who had never registered themselves to vote.

The Trump administration has used a database from an immigration verification system to flag possible non-citizen voters, but election officials have found that method misidentified some voters. Even with citizens mistakenly included in the count, the number of possible ineligible voters was extremely low — in Texas, 0.0001% of voters.

Data indicate that voting by non-citizens is rare. A study of the 2016 election by the Brennan Center for Justice found that officials referred about 30 cases of suspected non-citizen voting for investigation or prosecution. A 2024 review by the American Immigration Council of the right-wing Heritage Foundation‘s database turned up 68 cases of noncitizen voting since the 1980s.

While Trump’s speech prompted warnings from his critics that he could be laying the groundwork to take further steps to interfere with or tighten restrictions on elections, experts said he was running out of moves.

Becker predicted that Trump would not actually attempt to cancel elections or send officers to the polls and that courts would block the president if he declared a national emergency to exert control over elections.

“But I think there are people in the administration, including the president himself, who would like us all to think this is possible,” he said.

Fisher said Trump may be trying to lay the groundwork to dispute the midterm results if he doesn’t like the outcome, but said his powers to do so are limited.

“There’s safeguards and laws in place to protect the freedom to vote,” Fisher said, “and voters should tune out the noise and continue to participate in our democracy.”

WASHINGTON — Democrats are making a growing effort to adopt a pragmatic focus as they campaign on affordability in the midterms, as some within the party push for moving away from ideological arguments.

Across the country, Democratic candidates are trying to win over voters by talking about real-life scenarios, framing other platform issues in economic terms and, strategists say, aiming to shift a perception that Democrats deal in the abstract.

They see an opening created by voters’ focus on the economy and their ability as the party not in power to leverage affordability as the key midterms issue as Trump’s economic approval remains low. Trump has dismissed the issue, calling affordability a “hoax” by Democrats while also promising economic improvements.

“There has been a learning process in being able to take what Trump and the Republicans are doing and make sure that [candidates] are coming back to the real-world economic implications of whatever that might be,” Democratic strategist Alex Jacquez, who served in the Biden White House. “That’s where maybe [Democrats] haven’t always, in the recent past, made the full connection all the way through.”

Now, “the moment is ripe,” he suggested, for the party to shift its image.

The Democrats’ concentration on affordability and the economy has defined their midterm messaging, playing off elevated inflation, the effects of Trump’s tariffs and high gas prices caused by the war in Iran. The party is attempting to capture enough swing voters to win a House majority in November, and some believe the Senate could also be within reach.

Polling shows pessimism about the economy has increased among all Americans and most believe the country is in an affordability crisis. Americans most frequently mention government leadership and economic issues as the country’s most important problems in Gallup polling.

Voters also increasingly disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, including working-class white voters who make up a key part of his base. In an NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll last month, Americans gave the president his lowest-ever approval rating on the economy at 33%.

Speaking in Pennsylvania on Thursday, Trump said of affordability: “That’s a fake word that they use. They caused the affordability problem. It’s called high prices.”

Rep. Adam Gray, a Democrat who represents a purple Central Valley district and is a member of the center-left Blue Dog Coalition in Congress, said he believes voters have grown frustrated by the failure of Washington lawmakers to pay attention to what the people want out from government.

He pointed to Central Valley growers whose business has been affected, he said, by the rising price of fuel and fertilizer, the squeeze on the labor market caused by immigration enforcement and changes to federal programs.

“How regular people experience politics, it’s not the kind of ideological debates we have in Washington,” Gray said. “It’s the experience of doing something, whether that’s shopping for groceries or going to the lake to go boating with your family and realizing the price of gas is through the roof or the road to the lake is in disrepair.”

At a time when Democrats have debated how to embrace a party identity beyond opposing Trump and intra-party fights between progressive and moderate candidates have drawn attention, some believe the “practical” tactic may offer one key to the party’s path forward.

In Texas, Democratic candidates are pointing to the impact of data centers on water supply or the consequences of the state’s abortion ban, said Matt Angle, director of Lone Star Project, a political research organization that works to help get Democrats elected.

“The fact that Corpus Christi is running out of water … [or] you have women who have died because they were denied abortion services,” Angle said. “It’s very important that those things not be talked about in ideological terms but in practical terms. I think Democrats are doing a better job of that than ever before.”

“Real life is happening on the ground,” Angle added. “I think Democrats see that.”

Republicans pursued a similar strategy successfully in 2024, and their attacks on Democrats for focusing on cultural issues may have been successful in pushing Democrats away from that messaging, said Republican strategist Brittany Martinez.

“They have made it clear that’s the direction in which they’re trying to go,” she said of Democrats. “I also think you have outliers of the party that sometimes suck all the oxygen out of the room and maybe derail that message.”

National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Christian Martinez said Democrats’ economic record, including in California under Gov. Gavin Newsom, demonstrates a failure to prioritize working families.

“It’s laughable that Democrats are trying to make kitchen-table issues their brand,” he said. “It only proves their political brand is broken, while Californians continue living every day with the receipts from Democrats’ failed agenda.”

Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters said Thursday at a summit convened by the Washington-based news outlet the Hill that he was confident the party would retain the House and Senate and projected optimism about the economy.

“He’s going to bat for the American worker every single day,” Gruters said of Trump. “He’s going to continue to do everything he can to get the nose of the economy in this country up and to get prices down.”

But as Trump appears to prioritize other issues, Martinez said, Republicans are facing their own uphill battle to win over swing voters.

“When the president has mocked affordability, said it’s not a crisis, I don’t think that helps [Republicans],” Martinez said. “Democrats have an opportunity to capitalize on that right now.”

Both moderate and progressive Democrats see the moment as a chance to define what the party stands for beyond opposing Trump, and both have seized on real-life arguments, though the approaches differ.

Progressives have long framed a spectrum of issues in economic terms, said Usamah Andrabi, spokesperson for the progressive caucus Justice Democrats.

“That has always been the progressive economic playbook, and I think it’s about time that the other wings of the Democratic Party catch up to us,” Andrabi said.

That also means, he said, not backing away from other issues, such as abortion, foreign wars and healthcare.

“It has always been the right that has sought to divide our communities on these so-called culture war issues,” Andrabi said. “Our vision forward should be one that includes everyone… That does not mean simply ignoring some people’s most urgent crises to focus on something else, because these are interconnected.”

Climate advocates, for instance, are “effectively connecting” climate to top midterm issues, including including gas and utility costs, AI data centers and the Iran war, said Jamie Henn, executive director of nonprofit communications lab Fossil Fuel Media, and have encouraged Democratic candidates to do the same.

“Climate, like many issues, doesn’t win itself on its own merits. It’s in the ways that you talk about it and connect it to kitchen-table issues,” Henn said. “Do it in the right way – it’s not a science lecture on global warming, it’s a story about how clean energy can reduce your bills.”

Still, getting more candidates to pick up those messages can be a steep climb, he said. Advocates in some spaces, including climate, have worried about their issues being sidelined.

“There are Democrats that could be threading this needle who aren’t,” Henn said. “We know the issues that climate needs to be connected to, but [politicians] need… to do a better job to clearly articulate the messages.”

NEW YORK — Former President Biden will publish a memoir, “Promise Me, America,” which he says will touch upon everything from the economy to his decision to drop his bid for reelection.

The memoir is scheduled to come out Nov. 17, publisher Little, Brown and Company told The Associated Press. The timing of the book — two weeks after midterm elections in which Democrats seek to regain control of Congress — could raise concerns within Biden’s party by putting him back into the spotlight.

Democrats remain divided on Biden’s legacy, with many blaming his ill-fated determination to seek a second term for Republican President Trump’s return to the White House. Leaders hope to keep the fall campaign focused on Trump and his record, and any leaks or promotional efforts before votes are cast could draw frustration.

“‘Promise Me, America’ is about the challenges we faced as a nation. It’s about the decisions I made and why I made them,” Biden said in a video statement accompanying Wednesday’s announcement. “It’s about why I chose to run for reelection and why I chose to step aside.”

Reports of Biden’s book have circulated for more than a year, and the former president himself has referred to it during public remarks, appearing to suggest it would be released before November’s election.

Biden, who will turn 84 three days after the publication of “Promise Me, America,” has long presented himself as an upholder of standards and traditions; presidential memoirs are one of them. With a handful of exceptions, modern presidents since Harry Truman in the 1950s have published books about their White House years. Little, Brown declined to release financial details for ”Promise Me, America,” although presidents have usually reached deals worth at least seven figures.

The book’s title echoes a 2017 memoir by Biden, “Promise Me, Dad,” which centered on the death of his son, Beau Biden.

Vowing as a candidate to “restore the soul” of his country, Biden was sworn into office in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to stop his certification as president. Biden’s term was defined by a wide range of conflicts and achievements, from his handling of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to the passage of ambitious infrastructure and economic aid bills. But many readers will likely want to know more about his health while president, including the disastrous debate in June 2024 against Trump that led to his giving up his reelection bid. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who ran instead, lost decisively to Trump.

Former first lady Jill Biden wrote in her own book that her husband seemed so weak and disoriented during the debate that she feared he was having a stroke. In “View from the East Wing,” published in June, she noted that the White House had initially said he was suffering from a cold.

“The biggest lesson for us, I think, was that if you don’t explain something well enough then the question won’t go away,” she wrote. “There was never a satisfying enough explanation offered for Joe’s debate performance, and a lot of people never got over it.”

Biden was the oldest man to serve as president and his health was a source of speculation for much of his term; Biden and his White House advisers have faced intense criticism from Democrats and Republicans for allegedly concealing the extent of his problems. A notable book release from 2025, Jake Tapper’s and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin,” was subtitled “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”

That year, Biden announced he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Biden’s previous books also include “Promises to Keep,” a campaign work published to boost his run for president in 2008, when Barack Obama was the eventual nominee and Biden his running mate. ”Promise Me, America” comes out during a year when nonfiction sales have declined and few political books have caught on, although recent bestsellers have included Vice President JD Vance’s “Communion” and an inside account of Trump’s second term, by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, “Regime Change.”

A Little, Brown spokesperson said that Biden plans to tour on behalf of the book and give interviews. In his video announcement, Biden said that many people had been asking him how he was doing.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time with my family. I’m dealing with a cancer diagnosis, been getting treatment, and it’s going really well,” he said. “I want to thank all those who have offered their prayers and support and well-wishes. It’s meant the world to me and to Jill.”

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

The dismissals leave the federal election body vacant as Trump presses for broader changes to US voting rules.

President Donald Trump has removed the last remaining members of an independent federal commission that helps support United States elections, leaving the bipartisan body with no sitting commissioners.

The White House confirmed the news on Friday, with only months to spare before November’s midterm elections.

“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections,” the White House said in a statement.

It added that the administration had been “working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse” in the run-up to the midterms.

The decision concerns the Election Assistance Commission (ECA), an independence office created by Congress in 2002 to support state and local election officials. Among its duties are creating non-binding election guidelines, certifying voting systems and maintaining the national mail voter registration form.

Four commissioners typically helm the agency. But on Thursday, the two Democratic appointees — Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland — were fired by email, according to the news agency Reuters.

The lone remaining Republican, Christy McCormick, resigned. A fourth commissioner, Republican appointee Donald Palmer, had already left in April.

The commission is required by law to be made up evenly of Democrats and Republicans, and it was put in place to help after the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Trump’s decision to fire the remaining commissioners has further raised concerns that he may seek to intervene in the upcoming midterm elections, which will decide control of Congress for the rest of his term.

Under the US Constitution, election administration is the responsibility of the state, not the federal government.

The Election Assistance Commission had previously declined to implement part of Trump’s March 2025 executive order that called upon it to require proof of citizenship on the national mail voter registration form.

A federal judge later blocked that part of that executive order, ruling the president had exceeded his authority. Trump has appealed the ruling.

Voters are already required to affirm their citizenship before voting, as non-citizen voting is illegal in the US. Instances of non-citizen voting are rare.

The firings are the latest in a broader effort by the president to reshape how elections are conducted.

The Trump administration has pushed to tighten vote-by-mail rules and threatened to withhold some federal funding from states that refuse to adopt new election requirements. Many of those efforts have been challenged in court.

Earlier this week, the administration also sent out letters warning election officials that they could face prosecution if they fail to remove noncitizens from voter rolls.

Trump has defended the actions as necessary to protect election integrity. He has repeatedly claimed that his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election was the result of fraud, a claim not backed by evidence.

The latest firings come after the US Supreme Court last month expanded the president’s power to fire members of independent agencies, even without cause.

The court ruled six to three in Trump’s favour, arguing that “neither Congress nor the courts may saddle” the president with executive-branch leaders he does not approve of.

The president is allowed by law to appoint replacements to the commission. It is not yet clear whether Trump plans to nominate replacements or leave the seats vacant.

WASHINGTON — President Trump dismissed all remaining members of the bipartisan U.S. Elections Assistance Commission this week, his latest move to assert control over national elections in the final months before midterm voting.

The White House defended the move as justified by a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision handing the president greater authority to reshape independent government agencies, including by replacing appointed leaders.

Democrats and some independent elections experts blasted it as politically motivated, counter to the interests of voters and foolhardy with the November election so close.

“Purging commissioners just months before the midterm elections and further gutting support for our state and local elections officials is a blatant part of his plan to politicize our elections and enable more unlawful and dangerous election interference,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, which oversees federal elections.

Padilla alleged the dismissals are an attempt by Trump “to dismantle yet another independent guardrail of our democracy designed to keep elections fair and secure.”

A White House official framed the dismissals in starkly different terms, saying the departing commissioners were “not totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.” It did not say when the president planned to appoint new commissioners.

The four-member commission was created by Congress in 2002 as part of the Help America Vote Act to help states improve their voting systems and voter access. By law, no more than two commissioners may belong to the same political party.

Historically, it has provided voluntary guidance and best practices for voting systems, and served as a sort of clearinghouse for election performance around the country — so that states and localities can learn from each other.

Since 2018, the panel has also disbursed more than $1 billion in election security grants, according to a report by the Bipartisan Policy Center. Those grants are then used to protect IT systems from foreign and domestic cyberattacks, update voting systems, ensure the accuracy of voter rolls and protect the integrity of ballots after they are cast.

Without leadership, the panel cannot take any official action until new members are nominated and confirmed by the Senate.

Benjamin W. Hovland, one of the Democratic commissioners removed by Trump, told NBC News that taking away a key federal agency designed to help state and local election administrators will have a negative effect on already strained elections officials.

“When you’re asking more and more of people without giving them the necessary resources, you know, mistakes happen,” he said.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, in a statement to The Times, said Trump was “injecting unnecessary chaos, confusion and instability into the very systems that Americans rely on to make their voices heard,” but that California “will not be intimidated or deterred” from maintaining elections “in which everyone can fairly and securely participate.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said on X that “Newsom’s election protection efforts become more important by the day” — a reference to his recent push for state legislation that would make it a felony in California for anyone to seize ballots before a vote has been certified.

Newsom had said Thursday that Trump’s efforts to seize control over elections represented a “five-alarm fire” that must be confronted.

“We will lose this country unless we are vigilant about what’s going on in terms of election security,” he said.

Trump’s dismantling of the commission comes as he wages a much broader campaign to rewrite voting rules. He has sought to place new restrictions on mail ballots, to enhance voter ID and proof of citizenship requirements for voters, to subject state voter rolls to federal oversight and purges, and to assert federal control over how and whether the U.S. Postal Service delivers mail ballots.

Much of that agenda, pushed through executive orders and other administrative actions, has been stymied by the courts, while stalling out in Congress, where it lacks support.

Whether Trump’s move to dismantle and reconstitute the commission will prove an effective path to instituting his election agenda — or will face its own court challenges — remains unclear, experts said.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, wrote that Trump could try to illegally direct the commission to “do his bidding” by amending the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship.

“If he tries anything like this, it will be high profile and very important litigation that will end up at the Supreme Court on the emergency docket over the summer,” Hasen wrote.

Michael Waldman, president and chief executive of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, said in a statement that Trump’s terminations were “deeply concerning” in light of his “relentless efforts to try to interfere in elections.”

But he also said that the “guardrails” Congress put on the commission remain intact, require it to be made up of a bipartisan group and preclude Trump from directing it to enforce his voting agenda.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said Trump’s firing of the commissioners was part of a broader effort by the president to “sow distrust in our voting system so he can contest the results if they are not to his liking.”

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, said the very name of the commission makes it clear that it was “designed to assist states and localities, not dictate what states and localities must do” with elections. She said California has “the most robust standards” for elections in the country, which won’t change with the removal of the commissioners.

Still, she said word of the firings rocketed around a conference of county elections officials in San Diego on Thursday — with some wondering whether the dismissals would threaten federal funding for election administration moving forward, and others lamenting the loss of the current commissioners’ deep experience.

Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, said in a statement to The Times that “any sudden change to the support structure for elections in the middle of an election cycle is concerning,” but that California “has a strong local and state foundation for election administration and voting systems support, and that will minimize any potential disruption caused by this action.”

In recent months, Trump has leveraged federal agencies to overhaul the nation’s voting rules in ways no previous president has attempted. He has repeatedly pressured Republican lawmakers to pass a federal law that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship when they register, show identification when casting a ballot and force states to send voter data to the Department of Homeland Security.

Republican leaders have said the proposed SAVE America Act does not have enough votes to pass in the Senate. The GOP resistance has angered Trump, who on Friday said he was refusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill in protest.

The housing bill, which Trump called a “yawn” this month, would become law at midnight Friday without Trump’s signature.

Monday’s accusations are the latest in a long string of controversies surrounding the Maine Democratic Senate candidate.

Leading US Democrats are withdrawing their support from Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner after a former girlfriend accused the politician of sexual assault.

In an exclusive interview with media outlet Politico published on Monday, Jenny Racicot alleged that Platner forced her to have nonconsensual sex in late 2021. She alleged that Platner had entered her Maine home uninvited while intoxicated and forced himself on her, despite her repeatedly telling him to stop.

Platner, whose status as a progressive outsider has gained him popularity, has denied the allegations.

Following Politico’s interview, top US Democrats and Democratic-leaning political groups have pulled their endorsements of Platner.

“I’ve been very clear that sexual assault or violence against women is a red line,” California Democrat Ro Khanna, a member of the US House of Representatives, said. “These allegations are very serious and credible. Graham Platner should drop out from the race. I am withdrawing my endorsement.”

Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego also announced he was pulling his endorsement, while the Maine Democratic Party called on Platner to withdraw his candidacy.

Democratic-leaning political group End Citizens United pulled its endorsement as well, calling the allegations “profoundly disturbing and disqualifying”.

“The conduct described is fundamentally inconsistent with the standards we expect from the candidates we support,” End Citizens United said in its statement.

Hasan Piker, a leftist commentator and streamer who has backed Platner, seemed to reverse his position on Monday following the Politico report. “If new evidence presents itself, I’m going to change my perspective – it’s that simple,” Piker said during a livestream on Twitch.

“This is a clear-cut instance of verifiable sexual assault allegations. It’s completely irredeemable,” he added.

Platner won Maine’s Democratic primary in April, defeating a centrist Democrat from the party’s establishment wing. The race is a must-win for Democrats, facing off against incumbent Republican Susan Collins. Maine state law allows Platner to be replaced on the ballot if he withdraws by July 13. The replacement candidate must be named by July 27.

In a video released on social media, Platner denied the latest allegations but said he was rethinking his campaign.

“Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we’re taking the time to reflect on the best path forward,” he said in the video.

Racicot’s accusations are the latest in the long string of controversies surrounding Platner. A Marine veteran who also worked for a private security contractor, he has a chest tattoo resembling a Nazi symbol – which he denied knowledge of and later had covered up. He has also had a history of controversial statements on social media, as well as reportedly sexting with other women shortly after getting married.

Over the past year, it may have appeared that the pro-Palestine protest movement in the United States has lost momentum in the face of smears, crackdowns, indifference and fatigue.

But a string of electoral wins by critics of Israeli abuses appears to indicate that activism’s success can only be measured in the long term.

In New York, Darializa Avila Chevalier, an activist who participated in the pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, won a Democratic congressional primary against a five-term incumbent.

“It’s just so satisfying to feel like the tide is finally turning,” said Maryam Alwan, who participated in the Columbia protest in 2024.

“Public opinion has shifted to a point where it’s unavoidable and undeniable, and I think we’re finally starting to see the ripple effects of movements like the encampment that happened two years ago.”

Avila Chevalier’s win was one of several victories for pro-Palestine candidates in New York last week.

Last year, Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, in part thanks to the efforts of young pro-Palestine activists who powered his campaign.

In Colorado on Tuesday, Melat Kiros, who was fired from her law firm in 2023 for a letter defending Palestinian rights supporters from accusations of anti-Semitism, ousted a House member who had been in Congress for nearly 30 years.

Candidates backed by supporters of Palestinian rights also won key races in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Columbia case

Avila Chevalier’s victory especially stands out in the context of the long-term impact of the student protests.

The democratic socialist nominee, who is likely to cruise to victory in a safe Democratic district in November, will represent large parts of Columbia University’s campus, where it all started.

Witnessing horrific atrocities in Gaza that were partly funded by their own government, students at Columbia set up the first encampment in support of Palestinians, kick-starting a national movement.

Students nationwide then turned their campuses into a front line for political activism against Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians.

Dozens of encampments sprang up on campuses across the country in 2024 and chants of “free Palestine” rang out in schools from Seattle to Miami.

The students demanded an end to their own schools’ complicity in Israel’s abuses. They called for divestment from Israeli companies and weapons manufacturers.

A security crackdown soon ensued, leading to the arrest of hundreds of students and the removal of encampments.

Avila Chevalier herself was arrested in 2024 as an alumna taking part in the protests.

Many students faced academic disciplinary action and others were charged with alleged crimes related to the protests as politicians from both major parties portrayed the movement as anti-Semitic.

Then, Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025 and went after student activists who were not US citizens, pushing to deport them.

With the encampments removed, the protests getting quieter and the activists going on the defensive to preserve their own personal reputations, safety and freedom, it appeared that the pro-Israel camp successfully suffocated the student movement.

‘New wave of hope’

But the story is not over yet, activists say, and the recent elections show it.

“There’s no words to describe the joy and satisfaction that comes from seeing Darializa, a former leader and organiser of the encampment, represent the school that arrested her,” Alwan said.

She added that while students may not have succeeded in securing divestment despite rallying and suffering personal costs, change is proving to be a “gradual process”, and public opinion is now more aligned with the protesters.

“We’re experiencing a new wave of hope,” Alwan told Al Jazeera.

Cameron Jones, who participated in the protests at Columbia, said Avila Chevalier was always supportive of younger activists and unafraid to speak up for Palestinian rights, even when it wasn’t popular.

“It’s really inspiring to see how, even though we have faced such immense repression and have been organising in such a hostile environment, the power of the people is still able to overcome all the barriers that are being set by the federal government, Columbia, the media,” Jones said of Avila Chevalier’s win.

The Columbia protests were part of Avila Chevalier’s political identity as she launched her campaign last year.

One of her criticisms of her now-defeated opponent, Congressman Adriano Espaillat, is that he did not adequately support Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil as he was targeted for deportation by the Trump administration.

Heba Gowayed, a sociology professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), said the recent electoral wins for pro-Palestine candidates would not have been possible without the student protests of 2024.

“When we think about social movements, we think about them as bursts of action, as temporally limited things,” Gowayed told Al Jazeera.

“And when the students are dispersed and the students are expelled and the university doesn’t divest, we see that as the loss of a movement.”

She added that there have been many articles declaring the defeat of student protests and claiming they have petered out and questioning the lack of campus activism in the Trump era after the crackdown.

“But here we have Darializa’s win, Mamdani’s win and the win of the entire socialist slate,” she said. “This does not happen if those students don’t encamp; it just doesn’t happen.”