Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. Let’s get into it. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: Latinos didn’t come home. They’re just in motion.

In the last presidential election, President Donald Trump’s strong support with Latino voters ended up one of the biggest stories of the night. After years of Democrats telling themselves that the growing number of Hispanic Americans would help lead to a permanent liberal majority, their dreams were first dashed in 2016 (when many of those voters stayed home) and then buried in 2024 (when they, and other nonwhite voters, swung toward Trump).

But just as Democrats have at times been too confident that minority voters would fall in line, it now seems Republicans have replicated their mistake. Poll after poll shows a historic reversal among Latino voters in Trump’s second term, and these days even Republican members of Congress are beginning to call Trump out on his deportation efforts. 

Why? It comes back to the numbers.

As Nate Cohn observed in the New York Times this week, Democrats now lead Republicans among Hispanic likely voters by 35 percentage points on the generic congressional ballot, 64-29 — a 28-point swing from 2024, when Kamala Harris carried Hispanic voters by just 7 points. The shift is a big reason the polling has Democrats in “blue wave” territory this November.

Last week on America, Actually I explored this shift in detail — by talking to Stephanie Valencia, co-founder and president of Equis, the research firm that has spent a decade digging into the Latino electorate. And the first thing she wanted us all to know: Get rid of the idea that Latinos will ever be permanently Democratic or permanently Republican. Part of the electoral power is that a larger section of the electorate defines itself more independently.

“Latinos often get given the title, the sleeping giant, which I just want to rid that out of everybody’s vocabulary. We should be called the swinging giant based on how much shift we have seen election to election. A third of Latinos consider themselves kind of independent or apolitical nonpartisan, and that’s that swinging middle that really is deciding every single election.”

Here are three more trends Valencia pointed out, which help explain why this all-important voting group has done such a drastic 180 on Trump in his second term.

1. It’s the economy (again)

As with all things in Trump’s second term, it starts with the fundamental problem of his second term: He has not delivered on lower prices. Equis found that Trump’s net approval with Latinos on cost of living sits at -52 — and his number on the economy (-45) is worse than his overall approval with the group (-31). Both are dramatically worse than where he sits with non-Latinos, who put him at -39 on cost of living and -25 on the economy. Among Latino men 18 to 39, cost of living hits a stunning -63.

Here’s what Valencia said:

“Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other racial subgroup. And so what that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more. We have less savings. We have less rates of home ownership. So the kind of safety nets that other people might have, we just don’t have.”

She also pointed this out:

“In Trump 1.0, his approval on the economy and the cost of living was actually better than his everyday approval… And he has been underwater with Latinos almost this entire term so far on the cost of living and the economy. It’s almost been a complete and total reversal.”

One of the arguments Trump made to Hispanic communities (and other groups also) was that he’d economically empower them, and that this was more important than prioritizing social causes that didn’t have a material benefit. That’s also been his fundamental flaw. From tariffs to rising gas prices, he has not only not delivered — people also feel worse off than before.

2. The immigration backlash

Valencia’s data was undeniable: More and more Latinos turned on Trump as he broadened his deportation efforts, which were broadly unpopular. But what I didn’t understand is why it took until Trump’s second term for people to realize those threats were legitimate, considering they were so front and center during his campaign. (They held up “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at the Republican National Convention!)

Here’s what Valencia said:

“I think this is really important for us as avid news consumers to understand what it is that the average voter, and especially that voter who’s coming in and out of elections, the kind of news they’re consuming. What they were seeing on mainstream media, perhaps even Fox News at the time, was a focus on Trump surrogates who said he’s gonna focus on serious criminals, securing the border, and violent criminals. And so that’s what people bought.”

“Fast-forward to 2026, the people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there. Like, they were told he was gonna focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was gonna focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that.”

There’s also an element of disbelief. When Trump said he would deport “bad people,” a lot of people thought he was only talking about people in other communities — or immigrants with criminal legal histories — not the more far-reaching immigration sweeps we’ve seen since he’s been in office. A striking ad from Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) this week where she directly criticizes Trump’s immigration policy explicitly made this distinction. 

The Equis numbers track that shift almost perfectly. In December 2024, 65 percent of Latino Trump voters believed he would target only criminals and recent arrivals. Today, 62 percent of Latinos overall say he’s going after undocumented immigrants broadly — and among his own Latino voters, the share who say that has jumped from 26 percent to 37 percent. That perception is the whole ballgame: Latino Trump voters who still believe he’s targeting only criminals give him +84 net approval. Among those who’ve concluded he’s targeting everyone, it collapses to +31.

The backlash isn’t about the border. It’s about what’s happening in the interior — the raids, the family separations, the citizens and legal residents swept up. 

Equis finds 68 percent of Latinos say Republicans promised to deport criminals and deported hardworking people instead — and 67 percent say Democrats promise immigration reform and never deliver. Forty-two percent say both parties broke their promises.

“I think it is a huge mistake for Democrats to assume or to rest on their laurels and think that because of what people are feeling around Trump and Republicans and the sense of disappointment and broken promises, that that is automatically going to translate to them as a party and as a brand. Right now, the Democratic brand has suffered a repeated set of blows among Latino voters. 20 years of comprehensive immigration reform that hasn’t been delivered. It’s a thing that comes up in almost every focus group.”

3. Meeting voters where they are

The third trend isn’t about persuasion at all. It’s about the fact that a lot of campaigns are still bad at the mechanics of reaching this electorate — and Valencia’s examples were almost comically basic.

Their testing found that more than 70 percent of Latinos who see an ad in Spanish come away thinking that candidate or party cares more about Latinos. That’s not a persuasion effect. That’s a respect effect, and it’s enormous for the price of one ad buy.

So how do campaigns blow it? Some examples, according to Valencia: translating English ads directly into Spanish, rather than tailoring them to the language and culture; and assuming English speakers and Spanish speakers are separate categories when voters often shift between media in both languages. 

The deeper error is the monolith problem — the group is still treated as a voting bloc that moves in unison, rather than a diverse set of people from varying countries of origin and contexts. And the fastest-moving division isn’t the country of origin at all. It’s age — an electorate replenishing itself faster than either party’s model of it.

“There are a million Latinos who turn 18 every single year, and an 18-year-old who turns 18 this year and will vote in this year’s election was born the year Barack Obama was elected president. … The era of politics for an 18-year-old today is chaos, Covid, and corruption. They do not remember the hopium of Obama and the beautiful coalition that we built. That is all ancient history to them.”

A million new voters a year, completely up for grabs. Nobody is inheriting these voters. Neither party owns them. Because as Valencia put it: Demographics have proven not to be destiny — effort and intention matter more.

What I’m hearing

This week I called Matthew Eadie, a reporter at Evanston Now, who has been covering an ICE stop in Evanston, Illinois that has since attracted national attention. On the morning of Sunday, September 20, federal agents stopped a man walking on Howard Street. He turned out to be a US citizen, and not the person they were looking for. Agents reportedly left him on the ground with injuries to his head, neck, and teeth. DHS says he “refused to identify himself. Now the community is demanding answers.”

What’s the community reaction been?

People are really furious. If you remember the fall here — Operation Midway Blitz, the heightened Border Patrol enforcement across the Chicago area, Gregory Bovino parading around the streets with camera crews, the protests at the Broadview processing center — people here were very aware of how impactful it was. It was also happening around the elections, so it was prominent news everywhere and everybody was talking about it.

Over the summer it really died down, and I don’t think people have paid much attention since. ICE has been around all year, but they haven’t been as flashy about it, which has been talked about nationally too. This was a flare-up, and it’s a reminder that it’s still going on even after Bovino left. There have been protests at Broadview this week unrelated to the Evanston incident. So either people are starting to pay more attention as the election gets closer, or the incidents are actually picking up again.

What are the unanswered questions you’re still chasing?

Who were they looking for? Were they actually looking for somebody? That’s been their story — a specific individual — and a lot of people I’ve talked to are really skeptical that’s the case. One witness at the scene told me he felt like they just picked him and drove up on him. Essentially what’s been called a “Kavanaugh stop” — if they’re suspicious of you, they can pretty much find a reason to detain you. And then they dropped it once they realized either that he was a US citizen, which he says he is, or that there were too many people around taking videos for it to be worth their time.

So: What happened in the lead-up, and who specifically were they looking for? 

Afterward, the agents talked to Evanston police — that’s an Evanston police policy; they’re supposed to try to get information from ICE officers. I’ve FOIAed all the body cam footage. I want to see what those conversations were like, and what exactly the agents told police officers when they talked privately.

Part of what we’re trying to do is see the issues that play out from the bottom up rather than the way they get framed nationally. Beyond immigration, is there anything in your coverage that’s shaping local politics more than the national conversation reflects?

The national issues matter to everybody, but they hit communities in completely different ways. Evanston is affluent — college town, Northwestern, wealthier than most suburbs. Affordability is a buzzword that comes up everywhere, but people here talk about it differently.

This is an overwhelmingly progressive Democratic city. Some people in Evanston certainly need it to be more affordable for themselves. But you also have progressive voters saying we want to make Evanston more affordable and more inclusive for other people. Sometimes the affordability conversation gets framed as “life is too expensive for me and we need to make it cheaper for me,” which is true in a lot of places. In somewhere like Evanston, where there are a lot of affluent people who are also very progressive voters, it’s more: If we actually want to say we’re a progressive community, we have to show it. And showing it maybe means building affordable housing.

It’s also a city that passed reparations, which the federal government is challenging right now. That’s going to be a federal court case through the end of this year and probably into next year — the feds challenging the city’s reparations program. That’s something the city prides itself on. Those are big issues here that come out of the national conversation but sound different than how we hear them in national media.

With the midterms just under six weeks away, more Republican candidates are coming to the belated realization that, if they want to save their seats, they could perhaps use some distance from the very unpopular president whose approval is reaching new lows.

Now, after a decade in which President Donald Trump has demanded — and increasingly received — near-total loyalty from his parties’ candidates and congressional delegation, and used his bully pulpit to launch harsh personal attacks on Republicans who don’t provide it, such distancing attempts remain cautious and limited.

But they are growing more common. And this isn’t just in the toughest blue territory — even Republicans in states or districts Trump won overwhelmingly are now rushing to emphasize how they don’t agree with the president on some of his most controversial and unpopular agenda items. 

“It’s only natural that candidates would seek to create distance from Trump, especially on issues — like the Iran war — that are unpopular,” GOP strategist Douglas Heye told me. “That doesn’t guarantee success, and can be a hard needle to thread, but it’s the natural play.”

For now, the primary motivator is political. But today’s election-year cracks could be signs of larger breaks later, especially as Republicans look toward life without the singular figure who’s dominated the last decade-plus of party politics. 

A party running away from major parts of the lame-duck president’s agenda today might be repudiating parts of his legacy tomorrow — with potentially major implications for governance. And if Trump’s record is truly deemed a failure by Republicans, the GOP’s future will be wide open.

Where the general election cracks are starting to show

The boldest break in recent weeks has been from Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida, who represents a heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County district that Trump won solidly in 2024. 

Last week, Salazar released a campaign ad in which she spoke directly to the camera and addressed Trump, saying: “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.” She added: “The same Hispanics that helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”

The ad was the most dramatic sign yet that Trump’s ongoing polling collapse with Latino voters — a critical component of his 2024 coalition — is showing up for Republican campaigns as well. As Salazar’s ad suggested, many swing voters interpreted Trump’s “mass deportation” talk as a promise to clamp down on border crossings and remove dangerous criminals — not to patrol the streets with militarized operations going after otherwise law-abiding migrants, many of whom have established ties to the community. If the backlash proves real in places like Florida and Texas, it could affect how future Republicans approach the issue.

That same week, two incumbent House members in Iowa in tough races decided to let their votes tell the tale. Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn both voted for a resolution to end Trump’s war in Iran, and each posted on social media that they opposed an “open-ended war.”  

Vice President JD Vance, who reports suggest was privately opposed to the decision to launch the military operation, mentioned at the Republican convention in Dallas that slain conservative activists Charlie Kirk “hated war,” but stuck with Trump even when he disagreed — an apparent plea to wavering Trump voters to do the same.

Polls show strong opposition to the war among the public, and if it continues to be a drag on GOP candidates, that could strengthen the currently embattled faction of the GOP that urges caution about foreign entanglements. On Tuesday, two more Republicans — Rep. Tom Tiffany, running for governor of Wisconsin, and Sen. Jon Husted, running for Senate in Ohio — publicly said it was time to bring the war to an end. (Husted caveated this by saying that ending the conflict would require a deal with Iran, and that he wouldn’t vote for the congressional resolution to end the war.)

Wisconsin GOP candidate for governor Rep. Tom Tiffany today on rising gas prices and Iran: "I just believe we should be exiting Iran, that it's time to move on … Time to come home, take care of business here in America." pic.twitter.com/oHo1QjiGDr

— Matt Smith (@mattsmith_news) September 22, 2026

Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is the GOP’s Senate nominee in Iowa, has also been cautiously seeking a bit more distance from Trump by, for instance, opposing his plan to cut tariffs on foreign beef imports since it would increase competition for local cattle ranchers, the New York Times recently reported.

Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, facing a reelection race that polls suggest is surprisingly competitive, has publicly criticized Trump’s tariffs on aluminum and steel, saying they hurt businesses in his state.

Even two members of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus who are both running for governor — Tiffany in Wisconsin and Rep. Byron Donalds in Florida — are making similar rhetorical adjustments. 

Tiffany disagreed with Trump renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America,” an action taken as part of Trump’s overwhelmingly unpopular trade war with Canada. And Donalds removed many mentions and pictures of the president from his website this week, the Miami Herald reported (replacing a pledge to “Enact the Trump Agenda” with one to focus on “affordability”).

This isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. Some Republicans in blue states or districts — like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania — have long tried to play up their disagreements with Trump, to position themselves as independent voices. 

But many other candidates are still clinging tightly to Trump. “I am still with that guy,” Michael Whatley, the GOP Senate nominee in North Carolina, said at a rally with Trump last week. Ken Paxton, running for Senate in Texas, is similarly sticking by Trump (despite Trump’s constant digs at how Paxton dresses). It doesn’t hurt that Trump’s super PAC could be a critical player in theirs, and others’, races.

And when GOP candidates do try to stress their independence, it typically comes in the form of saying they disagree with the president on a particular issue that’s going over poorly in their state or district — most often either tariffs, the Iran war, or immigration.

The GOP candidates’ double bind

Through much of the Trump era, Republicans have faced a powerful incentive to minimize openly breaking with the president — because they feared Trump would be vindictive enough to use his bully pulpit against them, as he has against his GOP critics in the past.

Strategically, candidates face a double bind, as stressing their independence from Trump can theoretically help with swing voters who have soured on the president, but it also could hurt turnout among the Trump-loyal base.

“It’s a fine line to walk,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres told me. “You don’t want to look like you’re being disloyal to a Republican president, because you could end up with a Truth Social tweet that would destroy the support of Republicans who like Donald Trump for your campaign.”

For Republicans in redder states or districts, Trump’s engagement could still be their candidates’ greatest asset — he could help spur them to go to the polls and help frame the midterm contest in purely partisan terms.

“Motivation in midterm cycles matters a lot,” Patrick Ruffini, a pollster at Echelon Insights, recently posted on X. Ruffini’s argument is that, due to the Senate map and gerrymandering in the House, many more competitive seats this cycle are in states Trump won big. So, he argued, “raising Republicans’ motivation to vote will go further than it did in 2018 because of the political terrain this election is being fought on.”

But if Trump’s approval is reaching new lows, that calculus could change — even in redder areas. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Monday found Trump’s approval at 32 percent, the worst result in that poll since Trump entered politics.

That could explain the new round of distancing we’ve been seeing in recent weeks. And if the polling bears out and the party does end up suffering substantial losses, it could potentially hasten that trend, as Republicans grow more wary of tying themselves tightly to an 80-year-old who won’t be on the ballot again. 

Should Democrats regain control of the House, Senate, or both, there would be no shortage of votes they could call to test just how far Republicans are willing to break with Trump on issues like immigration, tariffs, and the war. It could also create a difficult position for the next Republican presidential nominee — especially if it’s Trump’s own vice president — as they seek to incorporate lessons from the backlash without offending Trump.

For his part, Trump has been relatively restrained in response to all this, perhaps recognizing what a difficult political situation his party is in. Asked by reporters about Salazar’s ad Friday, he called her “a nice person” but “a little bit softer on the border.” 

But he couldn’t resist adding: “Without me, she wouldn’t have gotten elected.”

Nationally, abortion has faded as a campaign issue. Four years after it helped Democrats stave off a red wave, candidates in battleground races are focusing their attention on cost-of-living issues, immigration, and policing. As of mid-August, abortion was mentioned in less than 5 percent of Democratic Senate ads, a key difference from the past two cycles, according to the Wesleyan Media Project.

Maine is different. As of September 16, Democratic advertisers had spent roughly 15 percent of their $40.8 million broadcast TV and streaming dollars on ads focused on abortion rights, according to Nate Schwartz from AdImpact. It’s one of the biggest topics there, he told me, after ads about President Donald Trump and healthcare. Planned Parenthood’s political arm is also making its biggest ad buy of 2026 against Susan Collins, at $600,000, and WinSenate, a super PAC aligned with Senate Democratic leadership, has spent 70 percent of its TV, streaming, and digital money in Maine on abortion-focused ads.

The target is Collins, the only Republican senator up for reelection in a state Trump lost in 2024, and one of Democrats’ best chances to flip a seat. Seeking her sixth term, Collins is running in a year when Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by about 9 points. It’s also the first time she will face voters since Roe v. Wade was overturned — a decision Justice Brett Kavanaugh helped deliver after Collins, who has long described herself as “pro-choice,” cast the pivotal vote to confirm him in 2018. 

For the abortion rights movement, this is the race that has to work. Groups are pouring their biggest investments of the cycle into a state where fewer than half a percent of voters call abortion their top issue, in a year when Democrats have opportunities to win nearly everywhere. If a blue wave arrives and lifts every Democrat except the one running to avenge Roe v. Wade and remove the senator who famously sealed its fate, the organizations will have a harder time telling donors the issue still moves voters, and a harder time arguing that Republicans will pay a political price — even in blue states — for votes that restrict access to abortion.

“We know that abortion is the number one negative in Maine voters’ mind,” Lisa Margulies, a Maine spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Votes, told me. “It’s really the No. 1 dealbreaker.”

The first job for Democrats and abortion rights advocates is convincing Mainers the issue is still a pressing one. Seventy-two percent of Maine adults say abortion should be legal “in all or most” circumstances, and since Democrats took control of Maine’s government in 2018, the state has expanded who can provide abortions, required and subsidized insurance coverage for the procedure, eliminated most patient cost-sharing, loosened restrictions on care after viability, and shielded patients and providers from prosecution and lawsuits.

Collins has made that her defense. The Dobbs v. Jackson decision, she said in June, “has not had an impact on the state of Maine in that Maine actually expanded its law.” Advocates call that the central misunderstanding. 

“There’s this perception — and Sen. Collins herself has said it — that somehow Maine is immune, and that’s just not true,” Margulies said, pointing to their state-level efforts to keep access intact and to federal Medicaid cuts that have already hit Maine providers.

Also muddying the waters is the senator’s Democratic opponent. Collins is facing off against Troy Jackson, a longtime fixture in Maine politics who rose from the state House to the Senate presidency but fell short in bids for Congress in 2014 and governor this year. Early in his career, Jackson said that abortion “should never be legal” and that women should be required to view an ultrasound if they want to end a pregnancy. He has since renounced those positions and has earned 100 percent ratings from Planned Parenthood since 2017. (Jackson replaced Graham Platner, the original Democratic Party nominee, who quit the race after being accused of rape, an allegation he denies.)

While Collins prevailed for reelection in 2020 despite voting to confirm Kavanaugh, Democrats say her decision is much more salient for voters now that Americans live in a post-Roe world, one where more than 15 states have near-total abortion bans. 

If Collins loses, Democrats and abortion rights groups will say her Kavanaugh vote is no doubt partly why. A win for Collins would be harder to read, though the explanations that leave out abortion are already being prepared, including a messy nomination process that produced a candidate fewer voters were excited about, and a “unicorn” incumbent with decades of personal relationships across a small state and a long record of bringing federal money back home.

The abortion rights bet hinges on two things: that the Kavanaugh vote cost Collins something on top of what an unpopular president and rising gas prices already have, and that voters will judge Jackson by the positions he’s renounced rather than the ones he once held. 

The vote Collins won’t apologize for

When Collins voted to confirm Kavanaugh, she said she believed his assurances that he considered Roe v. Wade settled precedent. She had previously said that she would not vote for any nominee who expressed “hostility” toward the 1973 decision that established the constitutional right to an abortion.

As many observed at the time, Kavanaugh’s record gave strong signals that he would in fact vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. In her floor speech announcing her vote, Collins dismissed those warnings, suggesting opponents had been whipped into a “frenzy” by advocacy groups. When he ultimately did side with the conservative majority in Dobbs, Collins issued a statement calling the ruling “ill-considered.”

Four years later, though, Collins is doubling down on her vote for Kavanaugh, telling local media this summer that she does “not regret” it. “Given what subsequently happened to Roe, I don’t think that simply fades into the background,” Robert Glover, a political scientist at the University of Maine, told me.

Democrats are zeroing in on the fact that Collins has continued to confirm anti-abortion federal judges, even as recently as this month. Last fall she voted to confirm Joshua Dunlap, a Maine attorney, to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit over objections from 20 Maine organizations citing his record on abortion and marriage equality. 

“Susan Collins says she has no regrets about confirming the judges who overturned Roe v. Wade, and has proved it by continuing to vote for Trump’s right-wing judges,” Maine Democratic Party spokesperson Misha Linnehan told me in an emailed statement. “Now, her approvals are underwater, and she’s trailing with women voters because Maine women have had enough of being betrayed.” 

George Hill, the president and CEO of Maine Family Planning, told me Collins “defied” them with her vote for Kavanaugh, causing “irreparable harm” across the country. He emphasized how vulnerable Mainers are if Republicans retake control of state government.

Blake Kernen, a spokesperson for Collins’s campaign, dismissed the criticism about anti-abortion judges, emphasizing that her pro-choice boss also voted for 188 judges nominated by President Joe Biden, including Julie Rikelman, who served as litigation director of the Center for Reproductive Rights. Collins, she noted, is the only Republican who voted to confirm all three of the court’s liberal justices, and she voted against Amy Coney Barrett.

Margulies rejects this accounting. “We deserve better than, ‘Well, she’s not as bad,’” she said. “When it comes to reproductive rights, she’s not a moderate anymore.”

While her judicial votes are facing scrutiny, Collins has also spent decades building up a brand as a Republican willing to buck her party on abortion when the issue comes up in the Senate. 

In May 2025, Planned Parenthood Maine Action Fund published a memo online titled, “Senator Susan Collins’ long history of supporting Planned Parenthood and access to essential health care.” Among other things, the memo highlighted Collins for speaking out against proposed Medicaid cuts, for co-sponsoring a bill in 2022 to codify Roe v. Wade, and for opposing a 20-week abortion ban bill in the Senate. This past summer, the memo was quietly taken down from their website.

Asked about the removed page, Margulies didn’t say when or why it was taken down, but pointed to what she described as a sharp shift in Collins’s record over the past year, particularly on judicial confirmations. “There are times when she’s been true to her word and put Mainers ahead of politics, but she closed that chapter this year,” she told me.

“Because she is a Republican, the national groups continue to twist themselves into a pretzel to support these male candidates with terrible records,” Kernen said, referring to Platner and Jackson. 

So far, Mainers appear to have split Collins in two in their minds: There’s the dedicated public servant who puts her state first on one side, and the partisan Republican who sometimes disappoints them on the other. A University of New Hampshire poll over the summer found Collins rated far better on bringing federal dollars home to Maine than on her Supreme Court confirmation votes. Maine voters, Glover said, “have historically been willing to separate Collins from the national Republican Party and evaluate her through a broader lens of incumbency, independence, and constituent service.” 

The turnout math

Even if Democrats can win the argument on abortion around Collins, it’s an open question how much it will move votes. “Right now, I feel quite confident that affordability, healthcare, and good jobs trump abortion access by a long shot,” Dan Shea, a political scientist at Colby College, told me.

But abortion rights advocates believe the ranking obscures how the issue actually works. Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, said her group has spent years testing how to talk to voters about abortion, consistently finding that it overperforms as an attack. “If you go to a voter in Maine and you say, what are your top three or five issues, they may not name abortion,” she told me. “But if you say to them, Susan Collins took the following vote — and one of them is Brett Kavanaugh, which led to overturning Roe — it is extremely salient, and it moves that voter.”

The Kavanaugh vote works, she argued, as a character verdict — “an indicator that you’re willing to side with extremism over your own constituents.” That, she said, is the piece that’s missing in the analysis of what voters say they care about. “It is one of the most salient attacks in Maine and in a lot of other parts of the country.”

Ashley Kirzinger, a pollster at KFF based in Maine, said priority rankings are a weak guide anyway, noting “the economy” means different things to different voters, and issues compete with candidate dynamics and party loyalty. What has changed since Roe’s overturn, she told me, is who the single-issue abortion voter is.

“Before the Dobbs decision, abortion was a motivating issue for Republican conservative voters,” Kirzinger said. “Now what we’ve seen is a complete shift.” Those voters are more likely to be Democrats, younger women and women of color, and include more people who don’t reliably show up in midterms.

Abortion messaging, therefore, is doing two jobs. The first is turnout. Kirzinger said the Kavanaugh vote is aimed at Democratic women “who are not as enthusiastic about Jackson as a candidate” and who “may be more motivated to turn out as a vote against Collins’ record on abortion rather than for Jackson.” In a tight race inside the margin of error, a couple of points of turnout could make the difference.

The second job is persuasion, and the target is older women, who reliably vote. Women made up nearly 60 percent of Maine’s turnout in 2020, and Collins won them by 3 points. What Democrats need from them is a switch, which is why many of the abortion ads are built around regret. One Planned Parenthood ad features a woman who voted for Collins and “will not make the same mistake twice”; WinSenate’s features a voter who “felt [Collins] was the better choice” and doesn’t anymore. 

Jackson’s change of heart

Complicating the race is Collins’ opponent, Troy Jackson, who is in some ways a mirror image of her own political persona: a Democrat with a history of culturally right-leaning positions to appeal to voters in the other party.

Jackson, who started his political career in the rural and fairly conservative county of Aroostook, used to earn 100 percent ratings from Maine Right to Life. In 2010, as CNN’s KFILE reported, when he filled out the group’s candidate questionnaire saying he thought abortion should never be legal, he declined to say whether there should be exceptions even to protect the life of the mother, for rape or incest, or because of fetal disability. Maine Right to Life, which has not issued an endorsement in the Senate race, did not return requests for comment.

Jackson told MS NOW he evolved on the issue thanks to “a lot of conversations over time” with women, doctors, and community members. “It became more and more clear to me that abortion access was healthcare,” he said.

In 2023, while serving as Senate president, he co-sponsored a bill allowing abortions after fetal viability when a physician deems them necessary, one of the most expansive such laws in the country. In 2024, he shepherded through the Senate a shield law protecting Maine providers and patients of reproductive and gender-affirming care from other states’ bans, despite bomb threats that emptied the statehouse and a letter from 16 Republican attorneys general threatening to sue. “Troy stood up for and never wavered in his commitment to reproductive rights during some really harrowing moments,” Margulies said, “when it would have been a lot easier to step down.”

“I’m rock solid on this now, and Susan has been the opposite,” Jackson said in an interview with Maine Public Radio this summer. Kernan, Collins’s spokesperson, has charged Jackson with flip-flopping for “political convenience.”

The national environment is looking strong for Democrats, and Jackson has been narrowly ahead in recent polls, though all have been within the margin of error. A CNN poll released this month found nearly two-thirds of Mainers feel negatively about the Dobbs decision, including about half saying it makes them angry. A Fox News poll in August found 55 percent worried Collins votes with Trump too often. 

Whatever happens, the explanations are ready. If Collins loses, abortion rights groups will cast it as proof that the issue still moves voters even where it doesn’t top their lists, and as a warning to all Republicans running in 2028. Timmaraju previewed the argument in our conversation: A loss would signal “a crack in the armor” of so-called moderates, and show that voters “are not going to tolerate” incumbents complicit with an extremist administration. 

If Collins wins, the groups that spent millions on abortion ads are unlikely to conclude that doing so was a mistake. Kirzinger pointed to the turmoil that followed the Democratic primary and the late swap of Platner for Jackson, which she said benefited Collins “in a way that is hard to capture in polls.” Glover, the political scientist, noted the things Mainers have always weighed alongside her votes, including decades of relationships, the Senate Appropriations gavel, and federal money. Even Timmaraju, the abortion rights leader, offered the same hedge in advance: A Collins win, she told me, “says more about Susan Collins and Maine than it does about 2028.”

A win wouldn’t show that judicial votes carry no consequences, Glover added. But if Collins holds substantial support among voters who support abortion rights despite the Kavanaugh vote and the fall of Roe, “that would certainly suggest limits” for retrospective accountability for downstream consequences of Supreme Court confirmations.

Though the race is supposed to clarify whether voters will punish elected officials for taking actions that restrict abortion access, it probably can’t — at least not definitively. It will decide, though, who holds the seat, and reproductive rights leaders have been clear that without a Democratic Senate, nothing they want gets a vote.

In 2024, Donald Trump’s victory was powered in large part by massive gains with Latino voters. He won 48 percent of those voters that year, up from 36 percent in 2020 and 28 percent in 2016. But now, that support is plummeting; Trump’s approval rating among Latinos who voted for him recently fell from 93 percent to 66 percent, where it was at the beginning of his second term.

Why? It has a lot to do, as with everything these days, with the economy. 

It was the same in 2024. During that election, voters were experiencing rising costs and stagnant wages — the same trend that has continued until today. In 2024, though, Joe Biden and his administration — which also meant Vice President Kamala Harris — took the blame from all voters, and particularly Latinos. Today, the blame is falling on Trump. 

America, Actually host Astead Herndon caught up with Stephanie Valencia, who co-founded Equis Research, a political research firm that specializes in Latino voters, to unpack some of these recent shifts and explain them. 

“I think one important data point to understand about the Latino voter is Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other part or any other racial subgroup,” she said on the podcast. “And so what that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more.” 

That’s why, when the economy is bad, this group is primed to be a “swinging giant” in US politics, Valencia explains — and right now, it appears to be swinging hard against Trump. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

Equis has called Latinos one of the last great wild cards in American politics. Is that because of some of the double-digit swings that we’ve seen among this voting group over the past few elections?

Yes, it absolutely has to do with that. Latinos often get given the title the “sleeping giant,” which I just want to get rid of from everybody’s vocabulary. 

We should be called the “swinging giant” based on how much shift we have seen election to election. A third of Latinos consider themselves kind of independent or apolitical, and that swinging middle really is deciding every single election.

Your playbook gets into messengers and particularly how we reach folks where they are. It makes a Spanish-Spanglish distinction talking about the different types of media that Latino voters consume. 

I wanted to ask, in that vein, what’s the single biggest mistake campaigns make in terms of not reaching folks where they are?

Oh man, how long do we have so I can tell you how many mistakes? They’re really simple unforced errors. I’m going to give a very concrete and simple example that I think illustrates that. 

Look, I’m Latina. I grew up speaking mostly English, but I listen to Spanish-language radio. I watch a lot of YouTube, and on YouTube I’m watching people like Karol G and Carin León. A lot of people — a lot of Latino swing voters — have the same media consumption habits that I do.

The first problem or challenge that a lot of candidates make is they just simply translate their English ad into Spanish. And that is, to me, one of the biggest mistakes because there are a lot of things that people want to be communicating in Spanish that don’t translate word for word. There are sayings in Spanish that don’t translate directly from English or more direct ways you can communicate.

I’m sure it immediately reads Google Translate rather than an original message for said community.

Exactly. So that’s mistake No. 1. Mistake No. 2 is when they’re deploying that ad digitally, as a proxy for talking to people, they’re going to use Spanish-language browser settings. So they say, “We don’t want people who speak English to see the Spanish-language ad.”

So the way they find that set of voters is just by going to people who have Spanish-language browser settings. 

Like I said, I don’t have a Spanish-language browser setting. Everything I consume online is set in English on Chrome, but I still watch a lot of content in Spanish on YouTube.

So you’re missing a voter like me who’s going to see a Spanish language ad from a James Talarico or a Manny Rutinel and be turned on by it because I’m going to say, “Hey, that candidate’s speaking to our community. That candidate has enough respect to develop a Spanish-language ad.” 

We did some testing a couple of years ago that showed that over 70 percent of Latinos who see an ad in Spanish think that party or candidate cares more about Latinos. It matters that much.

Let’s stay in 2024 for a second longer. Your research found that Project 2025 and Trump’s mass deportation plans were not top of mind for most people, and that they were thinking about the economy. I wanted to ask about that because I remember the RNC signs at the convention saying, “Mass deportations now.” One number says that 62 percent of Latinos now think that Trump wants to deport undocumented immigrants broadly. 

Why did it take till post-election to realize those threats of mass deportation were real considering they were so front and center during his campaign?

I think this is really important for us as avid news consumers to understand the kind of news that the average voter, and especially that voter who’s coming in and out of elections, is consuming.

What they were seeing on mainstream media, perhaps even Fox News at the time, was a focus on people or Trump surrogates who said he was going to focus on serious criminals, securing the border, and violent criminals.

And so that’s what people bought. Fast-forward to 2026; the people who feel most regretful who voted for Trump in 2024 are most regretful because of immigration. They feel like there was a broken promise there. 

They were told he was going to focus on the border, which everybody agreed was chaos, and he was going to focus on violent criminals and serious threats, and at the end of the day, he has not complied with that.

And then add that to the litany of broken promises.

I’m hearing a distinction between a focus on the border, which Republicans did try to prioritize rather than the interior deportations that may have been more attributed to Stephen Miller than Donald Trump. But we have certainly seen that be a focus of the administration once they came back into office.

You mentioned the shift that has happened since 2024, and that’s really important, of course. Trump’s approval rating with Latinos is now worse than with non-Latinos, a stunning reversal in 18 months. 

You mentioned the factors that have contributed there, but is this really just the economy?

It’s the economy, it’s the war, and it’s immigration. It’s those three things. 

One thing that is really interesting to note about Trump’s approval, other than that it’s at basement levels — and he’s very much pulled down the GOP with him broadly and with Latino voters — is that in Trump 1.0, his approval on the economy and the cost of living was actually better than his everyday approval on his total job.

And he has been underwater with Latinos almost this entire term so far on the cost of living and the economy. It’s almost been a complete and total reversal.

Listen, you tell people you’re going to fix egg prices and gas is going to go down, and then you do the opposite, and we’re hearing that story universally across different electorate groups. 

You’re saying that’s still the main story when it comes to Latinos also?

Yes, it’s still the main story. I think one important data point to understand about the Latino voter is Latinos make up more of the wage workforce than any other part or any other racial subgroup. What that means is when wages are down and inflation is high, Latinos feel it more. 

We have less savings. We have lower rates of home ownership. So the safety nets that other people might have, we just don’t have. 

That really has exacerbated the kind of impact that people are feeling right now as they’re trying to make ends meet.

You mentioned the exponential growth in the terms of people who now regret or are disappointed with their vote for Donald Trump. Does that mean a preference for Democrats? How should we think about the binary choice between D and R versus what is a clear story about a backlash to Donald Trump’s actions?

I think it is a huge mistake for Democrats to rest on their laurels and think that because of what people are feeling about Trump and Republicans and the sense of disappointment and promises broken that that is automatically going to translate for them as a party and as a brand.

Right now, the Democratic brand has suffered a repeated set of blows among Latino voters. Twenty years of comprehensive immigration reform hasn’t been delivered. It’s a thing that comes up in almost every focus group. 

And part of what the build-up to 2024 was, was not only 20 years of a promise undelivered; it was the chaos at the border, it was feeling like Democrats were focused on everything but Latinos and their families, or everyday Americans and their families, and that they had lost that thread.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: With fewer than 50 days until the midterm elections, President Donald Trump is hitting the campaign trail. 

What’s happening? Trump was in North Carolina last night for his first major post-primary season rally of the 2026 midterms (setting aside the GOP’s unusual midterm convention last week, which wasn’t not a Trump rally). 

Republican Michael Whatley will face former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper in November for an open US Senate seat.

Speaking near Charlotte, Trump urged voters to “pretend I’m on the ticket, because essentially I am.” It’s becoming a familiar refrain for the president, but not necessarily a promising one — polls suggest Trump is deeply unpopular with voters right now, more likely to drag a ticket down than boost it.

How else is Trump getting involved in the midterms? Last week, we noted that Trump was beginning to spend from his vast super PAC account to support Republican candidates. Now, we’re getting a better idea of what that spending looks like: As of earlier this week, Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC and related entities had booked ads to the tune of $138 million, a number that could continue to grow.

MAGA Inc. has around $400 million in the bank, though as the Washington Post reported earlier this month, Trump has a long list of other things he could choose to spend that money on instead of the midterms (such as legal fees, travel, or even his eventual presidential library).

Will it make a difference? It’s a whole lot of money. But with not much time left until voters go to the polls and some mail-in ballots already going out — North Carolina voters began receiving theirs earlier this month — the map is looking fairly dire for Republican hopes. 

Trump, meanwhile, isn’t doing himself any favors. The fuel shortages caused by the Iran war are only getting worse, as my colleague Caitlin Dewey explained today. Polls suggest he’s picked the wrong side of the AI issue. And voters are still extremely mad about inflation.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

It’s not every day we get to write about a new cat — in fact, it’s the first time in more than 100 years. But that’s just what scientists found in the Bolivian Yungas Forest, according to a new study published today. The cat, Leopardus tilcayo, is a type of tiger cat, smaller than your average house cat. It’s also quite cute, and you can see pictures of it here.

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The recent history of mail voting in the United States has more twists and turns than an Emmy-winning drama. But for the cause of democracy, at least, yesterday’s ending is a happy one.

On Monday, the Supreme Court definitively blocked President Donald Trump’s many attempts to sabotage voting by mail — opining, in a three-sentence brief, that Trump can’t implement his new rules for the 2026 midterms. Or for any election, probably. 

Those last-minute rules, you may recall, would have required states to adopt new ballot envelopes and upload absentee voters’ names and envelope barcodes to a still-nonexistent online platform. Many officials argued they couldn’t possibly adopt the new measures before midterm voting starts, which would essentially cancel mail-in voting in their jurisdictions. 

The Supreme Court, of course, has been broadly sympathetic to Trump’s legal antics, even when they appear to clearly flout law or precedent. But shutting down voting just before the midterms? That’s one bridge too far for them.

Go a little deeper

Hobbling vote-by-mail was just one of Trump’s plots to meddle in the midterms, however — and several of the others are still underway. Here’s where some of the president’s most significant election maneuvers stand today: 

How worried should you be going into the midterms? That, my friend, is a question to answer in your own little heart. But I’m taking my cues from Vox’s politics editorial director, Benjy Sarlin, who recently reminded listeners of our America, Actually podcast that there are many, many institutional and logistical barriers to many of Trump’s more concerning legal machinations. 

“We’re taking it very seriously here…and nothing’s guaranteed,” he said. “But it is still a very difficult path [where] so far he has had zero success.”

One link for later

➨ Skip the shrimp. A new analysis by researchers at the University of Bath and Faunalytics, an animal welfare group, attempts to quantify the amount of animal suffering required to produce different factory-farmed foods. They concluded that eating smaller animals = causing greater suffering, simply because you have to eat — and, by extension, farm and kill — so many more of them.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that American founding father Thomas Jefferson was obsessed with mastodons? It’s actually one of the reasons that he sent Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition.
• Today’s trivia: Which English-language remake of an older French film won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2022? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the former pro hockey player who founded a major Canadian restaurant chain. That would be Tim Horton, whose eponymous cafes have occasionally gotten snarled in the trade spat between Canada and the United States.

Anti-Muslim messaging has been on the rise among Republican elected officials for a while, and last week it took center stage at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, where speakers warned that leftists and “Islamists” were joining forces.

“We are witnessing a new and dangerous red-green alliance. Communists and Islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told attendees. “They are united because they share the same enemies. They hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution. And they hate America.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, attempted to link his opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, to the 9/11 attacks: “I never imagined that 25 years after 9/11, I would be running against somebody that campaigns with Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved it,” he said. “Together, they attack America. They excuse extremism. They treat our country like it’s the villain.”

The convention’s rampant Islamophobia isn’t a one-off: It fits a trend of Republican lawmakers attacking Islam and Muslims in the runup to the midterms. 

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) said on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) said “we need more Islamophobia, not less.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said, “No more Muslims.” Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith said that “I hate Islam; it’s a demonic death cult.” 

The attacks have gotten specific: High-profile Muslim figures like El-Sayed, Piker, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have all been targets of anti-Muslim rhetoric, and the GOP is also pushing anti-Muslim legislation.

A new “Sharia Free America Caucus” in the US House now includes dozens of members, all Republicans. Texas Republicans made banning and investigating cases of sharia law an official plank in their party platform. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has called for a federal probe of Muslim washing facilities at Texas airports.

To break down the disturbing uptick in Islamophobia this midterm season, what’s driving it, and where it could be headed, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with journalist Rozina Ali, author of the new book Seasons of Fury. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Do you think that we are partly seeing a rise in Islamophobic rhetoric because this year we have high-profile Muslims like Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker criticizing US foreign policy?

We have had really prominent Muslim politicians in the last several years. The same year that President Trump was elected, we also elected Ilhan Omar to the Minnesota House of Representatives. And then we had the [2018] election of Rashida Tlaib. These are remarkable because not only were they Muslim politicians, but they were also critical of US foreign policy and the government. 

What’s actually been a turning point has been the post-October 7 period because, one, we had a lot of politicians, especially from the Republican Party, starting to label this entire war as a religious war. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) immediately said, “We’re in a religious war,” which is astonishing, quite frankly, because that’s not even the rhetoric the Bush administration used after 9/11. 

What also happened is that a lot of Muslims — Muslim experts, Muslim scholars, Muslim journalists, and Muslim politicians — started being very vocal about US foreign policy. And that wasn’t necessarily the case after 9/11. A lot of Muslims who did criticize US foreign policy back then were sidelined or monitored or seen as suspicious, but they are so vocal now. The younger generation that has come up — Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and others — they’re so vocal. 

And it’s not just foreign policy. What they say is that the way we conduct US foreign policy actually has direct ties to what’s happening at home. They’re very critical of the inequality they’re seeing at home, the rising costs, inflation — there’s so much to criticize about what’s happening at home. And I think this is one of the reasons we see so much backlash against them — because they’re unapologetic in their criticism.

The US has always had these fights over who gets to criticize the United States of America. I wonder why you think, at this moment, they feel safer launching those criticisms. 

Do they feel more free because the wars were such disasters? What opened the door to allow younger Muslims running for office to run in part on, “The United States is a really imperfect country and we’re not going to stop talking about what we’ve done overseas and at home”?

I think they’re able to do that because so many Americans do that. A lot of politicians and policymakers are openly critiquing what has happened abroad and what is happening here. One of the marked differences between the post-9/11 period and now is that there was widespread support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror” from policymakers on both sides of the aisle, from media, from the public at large. The few scholars and Muslim community members who did critique what the Bush administration was doing were often shunned. 

In later years, it became very clear that we were not winning the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, or even the war on terror. There was a lot to be critical of, not just with the Abu Ghraib scandal and Guantanamo, but also what was happening at home. There was mass surveillance, [and] then we had the rise of the NSA. 

I think, ultimately, we have reached a point in this country that we actually have a society that has deep, profound distrust of its institutions. That larger landscape allows politicians like Zohran Mamdani, like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but also any other politician to critique the government and feel comfortable doing so. 

I would say this is the Democrats’ side. I think what’s so interesting about the Republican Party now is that so much of their rhetoric and their vision is about who loves America. I was listening to clips of JD Vance at the convention and he kept talking about “America belongs to those who love it, not those who hate it.” And I think this is just a fascinating declaration to make when there is such a disconnect between what the public is feeling right now and what the Republican Party is saying.

I’m glad you brought up JD Vance, because one thing that is true of the vice president is that he too is a critic of America. It doesn’t always come out, but it has come out in the past. There are parts of America, including the wars overseas, that JD Vance has been fiercely critical of. 

Mamdani and El-Sayed are also Americans. It seems to me like some of the pushback they’re getting is rooted in the idea that “you don’t have the right to do this, you’re lucky to be in America.”

Do you think there is something going on here where you can criticize America if you look like JD Vance, but you cannot if you look like Zohran Mamdani?

Unfortunately, yes. And I will say, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not just the Republican Party who perpetuated that narrative. Some of the Democrats in earlier years did the same thing. I very clearly remember Bill Clinton on the DNC stage in 2016, saying, “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make the future together.”

“I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.”

It placed a conditionality on the way that Muslims would be accepted in the United States. But that was an absurd statement to make because there was a lot to be critical of with the way that the US was fighting its war on terror. 

And that conditionality — we have continued to see it over and over again, except it has morphed and mutated to the extent that someone like JD Vance can say that “we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.” He blames that squarely on immigrants or foreigners or what he considers un-American values. He can say that, but not anyone else who is, perhaps, brown or Muslim. 

I don’t think it’s just targeted towards Muslims. I actually think the problem and fascinating thing about what the Republican Party is doing is combining all of these labels into one. And there’s this narrative that they’re creating that anyone who is against us will be Muslims, will be leftists, will be immigrants, will be people who don’t look like us. 

It’s really creating this cultural, religious, racial divide, which is quite frightening. 

I wonder if you think this fearmongering is about winning the midterms and then it’ll die down in the same way that a lot of political rhetoric gets very heated in the run-up to contested elections and then dies down, or whether you worry that this talk keeps escalating?

I have been wondering about that because I think there are two things happening. 

One is that anti-Muslim sentiment has become a feature of American politics and seems to come out during election season. And I think what the GOP is doing is actually seeing if this anti-Muslim rhetoric is going to be effective in helping them win. This is what they were trying during the Mamdani campaign and it didn’t work. And I think they’re trying this in Michigan and, let’s see if it works. They’re trying this elsewhere too. 

But the other thing that’s happening, which is a bit more lasting, is the effort to change the very structures and laws regarding Muslim expression and the freedom to practice Islam in the United States. For example, in Texas, we are seeing efforts to frame the entire religion of Islam as a political ideology rather than a religion itself. 

There are efforts to, for example, ban sharia, which still makes very little sense because I don’t know if anyone can quite explain that. There is a very concerted effort to try to block signs of visible Islam at a local level. And if they’re successful, we’re going to see that at a national level.

I was in Michigan last month and I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. There are a lot of things that make him interesting, but one of them is how easy it is to look at a politician like that and call him “all-American,” right? He’s high-achieving, he’s married, he’s handsome, he’s a jock. He’s got two kids. He is all-American. 

Can you conceive of a world where Abdul El-Sayed being Muslim is not the first line of attack when he makes a point about what the US has done wrong? In short, can you see him occupying, at some point in the future, a place like JD Vance occupies: You get to criticize the country because you are American enough?

There was a time when being Catholic was considered a really big deal. John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president and it just kept coming up over and over again. Now, no one even remembers. I bet you half the country doesn’t realize he was Catholic. 

I think that could happen to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but I don’t think it’s going to be in the near future. I think it’s going to take a generational change for that and it’s not going to come organically. I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.

But you think we might?

I think we might, in decades’ time.