With 28 days until the midterms, polling suggests that Democrats have an excellent chance of taking back the House in November. Flipping the Senate, once considered a long shot, is starting to look realistic. Come November, the party may have majorities in both chambers that will give it far more leverage than in the first half of this Donald Trump presidency. 

If voters entrust them with power, though, how will Democrats use it? Their legislative options will be limited, with Trump still in the White House, but party leadership has gestured at a platform focusing on affordability, healthcare, and investigations into the Trump administration. 

Still, many of the particulars are missing — which Puck News congressional correspondent Marianna Sotomayor says is by design. As Sotomayor explains, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the likely next speaker of the House, will want to present a unified front ahead of the election, which means no infighting over the messy details of policy. The real work can start after they take the House.

To break it all down, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Sotomayor about how Democrats are feeling ahead of the midterms, the prospect of a Speaker Jeffries, and the Democratic to-do list.

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 your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What are the vibes in the House around these midterms?

The vibes, if you ask Democrats, are incredibly strong. If anything, it’s mostly Democrats trying to tell each other, “Don’t oversell how amazing of a night we’re going to have.” Genuinely, in the number of conversations that I’ve been having with strategists, lawmakers, those seeking office themselves, the question isn’t, “Will Democrats flip the House majority?” anymore. It’s “Democrats will flip the House majority. How big is that majority going to be?”

They want to play in deep Trump districts, and they’ve been doing that in Trump +5, Trump +10 districts that he won in ’24. Now they’re like, “What about Trump +21 districts?” And some people are like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, let’s not get too overly excited” because everybody kind of has some PTSD from the ’22 midterms — that’s when Republicans ended up taking up the House. 

[In 2022], Republicans were in the same place around this time where they were like, “Oh my gosh, we’re going to flip 30-plus seats.” And then they only gained a five-seat majority. And we saw how difficult that [majority] was for Republicans, and frankly, it continues to be.

You would think that the Democrats would be trying to sell themselves based on, “Here’s what we’re going to do if we flip the House and the Senate.” But I don’t hear a ton of that. What are this party’s priorities if they take back the House?

You’re totally spot-on. It’s more or less vague. I’m sure Democrats would argue, no, we’re being really specific. And sure, we do know that if they take the majority, there’s three planks, and this is what Jeffries outlined even a year ago, and [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer, to some extent, has also adopted these planks. They want to tackle affordability, healthcare, and corruption.

Affordability means a number of different things. And the way that Jeffries is looking at it is you have your first 100 hours, your 100 days, and then your first year. And we don’t really know what is going to come up in those 100 days and in the first year, but within those 100 hours, he’s starting to give us some hints. 

There are some issues where they could easily, probably very quickly, pass. Those Medicaid tax credits that are going to expire just in the next couple of months because of the one Big Beautiful Bill, [for example].

You also have the corruption part of this where a number of committee Democrats have been taking notes. It’s like, oh, the Trump admin did that? Okay, going to write that down so I can remember to circle back when we have the majority. 

I’ve been told to expect subpoenas to start being sent out to administration officials, to Cabinet officials, to potential corporations that have cozied up too close to the Trump administration, pretty much after the House majority is declared.

Is it all but certain that Hakeem Jeffries will be Speaker if the Democrats win?

From inside of the Capitol, all that I’ve heard is that he is going to be speaker.

That being said, a number of progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Delia Ramirez, a number of those members are already talking to a number of the progressives who are coming in, who are kind of being a little coy with whether they’re going to vote for Jeffries. 

Their message has been, look, Democrats need to stay united. We have differences of opinions on a number of fronts, but we need to be united, we need to govern, and we can’t get to any of that until we elect a speaker.

I remember Nancy Pelosi didn’t really want to spend the years of Trump’s first term investigating and impeaching, but the nature of Trump forced her to ultimately do that. Do you think Jeffries has learned anything from how his predecessor approached the president? 

To your question about impeachment, it is fascinating to see where House Democrats are right now versus where they were back then. I do not hear “let’s impeach Trump” that much from the 200 and something Democrats that are currently in office. And the reason why is because, one, there is the thinking that, okay, the Constitution says he can only be a two-term president, and probably the Supreme Court’s going to rule that he can’t run again [if he tries]. So let’s not get into that. 

But because Democrats are already thinking, planning, strategizing all of their investigations, I think we should expect possible impeachments against Cabinet officials. [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth is a name I keep hearing a lot, because there’s a number of Republicans who are incredibly upset with him. 

Democrats are thinking a little bit more strategically in terms of if we are going to impeach, or if we’re really going to try to subpoena or hold people in contempt of Congress, will we have Republicans backing us up in those certain cases? 

These three planks — affordability, healthcare, and holding the crooks accountable — those could have been the planks in month one or month two of the second Trump term. 

I wonder how much motivation there is in the caucus to take on some of the issues that have come up in the last year or so. ICE comes to mind, Iran, spending billions of dollars on vanity projects around DC, making billions of dollars off of his own name and brand while in office. How much are Democrats pushing for the issues that maybe have struck a chord more recently?

Behind the scenes, actually, they’ve been pushing those things a lot. But my understanding is that Jeffries doesn’t necessarily want to broadcast anything that could show any divisions among Democrats right now. He really just wants to project that Democrats are united on these three issues. 

Everybody else is like, okay, but there’s so many more things that we have to prove, and we should get done and we should show contrast with Republicans moving forward. And my understanding is his idea of it is we will get to those issues after the election. They’re not even worth debating pre-election because first we have to win.

No one is trying to sugarcoat how hard it is going to be to tackle a number of these issues where Democrats aren’t united. And there’s conversations about how the size of the majority affects that, right? Because if you have a bigger majority, that means Democrats flip seats in districts that Trump won by a whole lot. So you’re going to get a lot more centrist Democrats in the caucus. If it’s a smaller majority, that’s really going to help a number of those Democratic socialist candidates coming in have a much stronger voice. 

All of those dynamics are going to be on full display and it all, again, is determinative on what happens in November.

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: Donald Trump is trying to bribe his way out of a midterm disaster. 

What’s happening? Over the weekend, Trump announced a plan to send $90 payments to more than 20 million Americans 65 years and older, drawing from a pool of money called the Medicare Improvement Fund. 

Trump, in a post, described the payments as part of a strategy to “substantially LOWER costs for our Seniors” — but the money, a single nonrecurring payment set to go out this month, was reportedly already earmarked for other programs before Trump decided to redirect it. 

Why now? Trump, facing a potentially catastrophic midterms for his party, has been looking for any way to turn out (Republican) voters — up to and including offering them cash, either implicitly or explicitly, in return for their support. 

In the implicit category: these $90 payments and a smaller number of $500 Affordable Care Act refunds (fewer than 1 million) that began going out last week. 

Much more explicitly, however, he’s also promising Americans $5,000 if they reelect Republicans in the midterms.

Trump has directly linked Medicare payments with the promised checks: “Because I delivered on this very important issue for the American People,” he wrote in a post, “they can also rest assured the highly popular $5,000 Trump Dividend will be distributed to every U.S. Citizen if, and when, the Republicans win the Midterm Elections!”

Will it work? It’s hard to say for sure, but it feels unlikely: The Medicare payments are relatively small, while the ACA payments are going out to relatively few voters. Polling suggests that voters are not fans of the promised $5,000 checks, and even fewer believe that they’re going to happen (they’re almost certainly correct). 

What else should I know? Direct payments to Americans — real or promised — are not the only way Trump is trying to sway the midterms in his favor. He’s also continuing to spend taxpayer dollars on a propagandistic ad campaign, which he personally directed.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Vox’s Unexplainable podcast team is back with a deeply controversial new question: What color are tennis balls? Personally, I think yellow, but whatever your opinion, it’s a fascinating conversation. You can listen here, or read a partial transcript here.

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

Inside Chief Justice John Roberts are two wolves.

The first wolf is a staunch conservative who spent much of his career litigating on behalf of corporate interests. This wolf looks at a series of climate change lawsuits that could potentially cost the oil industry billions of dollars or more, and recoils in horror.

The second wolf is a judge tasked with following the law wherever it leads. And that wolf seemed baffled by the oil industry’s arguments in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a Supreme Court case where two oil companies are asking the justices to shut down dozens of climate change lawsuits.

The Court’s decision in Suncor is likely to shape the future of climate litigation in the United States. If the oil industry prevails, that will probably shut down climate change-related suits in state courts — and it may shut them down entirely because it is unclear whether federal law allows these suits to proceed in federal court. If the oil industry loses, by contrast, it could face dozens of suits in state courts across the country seeking billions of dollars or more.

And the outcome in Suncor is likely to turn on which wolf shows up to the justices’ conference on how to decide the case. Roberts, who asked the most ambiguous questions at Monday’s oral argument in Suncor, clearly wants these lawsuits to disappear. But he also appeared doubtful that the oil companies’ weak legal arguments will allow him to make that disappearing act happen.

Notably, Justice Samuel Alito, who owns stock in oil and gas companies, is recused from hearing the case. So, in the likely event that all three of the Court’s Democrats hold together against the oil companies, Roberts would split the Court 4-4 if he decides to join them. That would leave the Court unable to render a decision, and a lower court opinion, which rejected the oil companies’ bid for lawsuit immunity, would remain in effect.

That said, at least two other justices asked questions suggesting that their votes may potentially be in play. Justice Clarence Thomas, who otherwise appeared sympathetic to the oil companies, repeatedly asked whether his Court has jurisdiction to hear Suncor in the first place. Meanwhile, while most of Democratic Justice Elena Kagan’s questions seemed to favor allowing the climate change lawsuits to proceed, she did ask some questions at the end that indicated that she may be looking for a narrow reason to hand the oil companies a win.

The bottom line is that it is difficult to predict how this case will turn out, as more than one justice asked questions that suggest that their vote is, at least, in play. But the outcome is likely to hinge upon the tension within Roberts — who both signaled that he wants the oil companies to win, but who also expressed deep skepticism of their primary legal argument.

So what is Suncor actually about?

Suncor is one of many lawsuits brought by state or local governments (in this case, the plaintiff is Boulder, Colorado) who’ve sued oil companies claiming that those companies should be liable for the harms caused by climate change within those governments’ jurisdictions. In this particular case, the defendants are Exxon Mobil and Suncor, a company that operates two oil refineries in Colorado. 

The lawyer for these two companies, Kannon Shanmugam, told the justices that there are about 60 similar cases brought by municipal governments throughout the country. And, in one of his more pro-oil moments during Monday’s oral argument, Roberts predicted that if Boulder wins in the Supreme Court, there will be numerous other copycat lawsuits filed by other municipalities.

The question in Suncor is whether state courts, including Colorado’s own courts, are forbidden from hearing these sorts of climate change lawsuits.

As Roberts pointed out in one of his less pro-oil moments during Monday’s argument, “there are a lot of familiar situations where conduct outside of a state has broad effects on other states…and yet we allow the state courts in a particular state to bring litigation.” He pointed to “mass tort” suits and “complaints about operations of the internet” as two examples where state courts hear lawsuits involving harms that arise across state borders.

The oil companies’ primary argument is that suits involving air and water pollution are special. But their evidence supporting this argument is confusing and difficult to parse. 

Briefly, the oil companies point to several cases, many of which were decided more than a century ago. These cases held that, before Congress enacted the Clean Air Act in 1963, states could sometimes sue other states for cross-border pollution, even though no federal law forbade such pollution. The Supreme Court created “federal common law” permitting these suits, and the oil companies claim that this federal common law preempted any state lawsuits that covered a similar subject matter.

This federal common law, they now argue, has itself been displaced by the Clear Air Act and its partner statute, the Clean Water Act, but the principle that state suits involving air and water pollution are preempted is somehow still in effect. Although there is no provision in the text of the Constitution that supports this argument by the oil companies, those companies claim that their argument is implicit in the “structure of the Constitution.”

The oil companies’ primary legal argument is difficult to understand

If you are confused by all the arcane history and logical leaps contained in the oil companies’ argument, don’t worry. So were most of the justices. Only Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who repeatedly claimed that his Court’s precedents bar Boulder’s lawsuit, seemed to buy what the oil companies are saying without reservation. Most of the other justices expressed at least some reservations.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, for example, argued that even under the older “federal common law” regime, states still retained some authority over environmental lawsuits, although she noted that the Court’s previous decisions do not really define the scope of that authority. Kagan pointed out that the many suits challenging climate change are similar to past litigation against tobacco and opioid manufacturers. But those suits were heard by state courts.

Many of the justices appear bothered that these lawsuits exist, but the most skeptical justices couldn’t agree on a legal theory they could use to shut them down.

It seems unlikely, in other words, that there are five votes for the oil companies’ convoluted claim that the “structure of the Constitution” somehow bars state courts from hearing climate change lawsuits. But several of the justices did appear troubled by what could happen if dozens of state courts reach conflicting judgments on who is responsible for climate change and who should receive compensation because of it. And some of these justices floated alternative theories for how to hand the oil companies a win. 

At one point, for example, Barrett floated the possibility that, if the plaintiffs lose in Suncor, they might file a new suit under the now-defunct federal common law that existed prior to the Clean Air Act. Kagan, meanwhile, suggested that perhaps the Clean Air Act could be read to preempt these suits like Suncor. According to Kagan, that law “sets up an extremely complicated scheme about how regulations of emissions should operate,” and allowing states to hear lawsuits like Suncor would “get in the way of how Congress decided to regulate greenhouse gases.”

And Roberts didn’t so much offer a legal argument in favor of the oil companies’ position as express incredulity of what would happen if those companies lose. “Presumably if you prevail,” before the Supreme Court, Roberts told Kevin Russell, the lawyer for Boulder, “the next day a municipality in every single state will file a lawsuit, copy your pleadings, and then there will be at least 50…how do you think that will work out on the ground?”

All of which is a long way of saying that the outcome in Suncor is uncertain. The oil companies led with a weak legal argument, and only Kavanaugh seemed to fully embrace that argument. Many of the justices appear bothered that these lawsuits exist, but the most skeptical justices couldn’t agree on a legal theory they could use to shut them down.

For what it is worth, the oil companies actually do make a strong policy argument that it is a bad idea to allow state courts to do so. As they argue, climate change is a global problem caused by many polluters (and companies like Exxon that supply the oil burned by polluters) throughout the world. It could be impossible to determine which specific companies caused the specific problems caused by climate change in Boulder, Colorado. And even if this obstacle can be overcome, there are many thorny questions about which state’s law should apply when pollution from one state crosses over into another, not to mention the difficult diplomatic issues that could arise if a state court orders a foreign company to pay a large sum of money.

But under our Constitution, the proper solution if the oil companies want federal law to preempt state court suits like Suncor is that they can lobby Congress, and Congress could then draft a statute that balances these companies’ interest in avoiding many conflicting legal decisions with the interests of plaintiffs like Boulder who say they are experiencing real harms from climate change. Congress has the power, for example, to combine all of these state lawsuits into one grand federal lawsuit, where a single proceeding could determine how to portion out the costs of climate change to various energy companies, and how to divide whatever these companies are ordered to pay among the various plaintiffs.

But that solution would undoubtedly require compromises that companies like Exxon will not like. So, instead, they’ve asked the Supreme Court to give them the legal regime that they want, despite the fact that they could not articulate a persuasive legal argument for that outcome. It remains to be seen whether this Court will give the oil companies a win anyway.

Tories promise to scrap Labour’s mansion tax

There’s no place like Kansas, a state whose howling winds are so fierce that in the 1800s, the roaring soundscape drove local farmers into madness. It is so windy in Kansas that every so often, trains get swept off their tracks or trampolines get hurled into the air and flung into neighbors’ trees. 

But today, the same gusts that whisked away Dorothy’s home have made Kansas the third-most wind-powered place in the country, its great plains dotted with thousands of twirling turbines responsible for generating over half of the state’s energy. 

And for years, Kansas has been trying to share. 

But that’s easier said than done in the US, where building power lines across state borders can be an onerous, litigious, and bureaucratic slog. The Grain Belt Express, a proposed 800-mile high-voltage line carrying Kansas’s windy riches across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, has been trying to get built for the past 16 years. When completed, it will allow Kansas to pump five times as much wind power into Missouri as it does now. But though the project received its first approval in 2013, it will likely not open until 2029 at the earliest, beset by regulatory hurdles across multiple jurisdictions and an endless stream of legal challenges that immediately halt progress every time a new injunction is filed. Alas, the express — which only broke ground this year — was forced to run oh so local. 

But other projects like it might soon enjoy far more reasonable timelines. On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of Senators announced a deal called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or BAAJA — an acronym that’s led to a slew of cringeworthy euphoric Baja Blast references from abundance Democrats, clean energy advocates, and oil industry lobbyists alike. If passed, it would significantly curtail Americans’ ability to endlessly litigate against energy projects they don’t like, and empower the federal government to push critical multistate projects forward even if one state or municipality drags its feet. That could remake the way the nation’s energy infrastructure gets built, including its interstate transmission lines, for decades to come. 

But the bill also suggests that easing the way for clean energy in the US may require simultaneously creating the conditions for more oil and gas infrastructure in a country that already has a lot of it. It would also mean defanging some of the landmark regulatory norms that for decades have, for example, given Americans a say over developments that could contaminate their drinking water and helped tribes protect sacred heritage sites. These laws were necessary in the first place because prior to the 1970s, American communities frequently found themselves both literally and figuratively steamrolled  by developers singularly focused on building things quickly with little regard for the oil spills, river fires, and bifurcated neighborhoods they left in their wake.

And yet today, half a century later, that same dilemma has, in some ways, turned on its head. America builds things too slowly, and in particular, it builds the kind of infrastructure desperately needed to usher in a transition to clean energy with little of the urgency you’d expect from a world in the throes of climate change-related disaster. Exasperatingly, some of the same protections that have played a critical role in making this nation safer may also be standing in the way of building a nation that is more affordable and sustainable in the long run.

There are still plenty of reasons to feel hopeful about the world’s transition away from fossil fuels, even in the US, which has lagged behind our peers while still building an extraordinary number of solar and wind farms, particularly in Republican-led states like Kansas and Texas. And yet, many of these projects have languished in never-ending Ticketmaster-esque queues to connect to the nation’s decrepit power grid, a direct result of the permitting hellscape that prevents much-needed high-voltage cables like the Grain Belt Express from coming online.      

This new bill aims to ease many of the bottlenecks that stymie clean energy, but it also throws a bone to fossil fuels, which, like renewables, would benefit from less onerous environmental reviews and quicker permissions. This is, after all, a bipartisan bill in a Congress that, at least for now, remains Republican-led, under the tutelage of an aggrieved president who has sabotaged some of the nation’s most promising clean energy projects with an often petty and relentless fervor. Some Democrats in Congress, along with other environmentalists, have raised serious concerns about the bill. Those initial objections may prophesize an uphill battle for it when it comes to a vote, likely after the November midterms. 

Even so, with American electricity bills spiking to frightening new heights, and a data center buildout that could all but snap the power grid in half, this ambitious deal is, at the very least, an indication that some of the nation’s representatives are finally listening. And if it passes into law in the months to come, it could very well remake how Americans get their energy for a generation. 

So why are environmentalists mad?

By most accounts, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act almost didn’t happen. 

For months, the proposed permitting deal has been stalled by the Trump administration’s failure to assure Democrats that the president would lay off his attacks on “windmills” and other clean energy projects. But in recent days, lawmakers appear to have come close to a fragile détente on the back of a “very reasonable opening proposal” from the White House, according to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. 

If the BAAJA is passed, it will codify new protections that legally prevent presidents like Trump from meddling with already-permitted energy projects or singling out specific forms of energy, a prohibition that will also apply if a Democratic president attempts to halt an approved gas line or a petroleum refinery. The Biden administration’s freeze on approvals for new natural gas export plants, for example, would not be allowed. 

It’s this element of the proposed bill that worries many environmentalists most. According to a transcript obtained by Punchbowl News, during a coalition call on Thursday, dozens of advocates from prominent environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Environmental Law & Policy Center — expressed their misgivings about the bill and strategized about how to lobby Democrats against it.

Most environmentalists acknowledge, however, that we need to spruce up the power grid and fix how permitting works for clean energy projects and transmission lines. As clean energy advocates know all too well, the projects they support are, paradoxically, more likely to be hampered by environmental reviews than fossil fuel projects are, because renewables usually require more space and represent the bulk of new energy developments. But many advocates understandably take issue with the idea that reforming this overcomplicated process may require weakening the right to challenge other projects, a right affirmed by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. 

The bill’s fate may ultimately depend on whether this trade-off is worth it. The BAAJA still does leave some room for court challenges if they’re filed within 150 days of an approval. But it will still place a much larger burden for determining these damage thresholds on federal agencies, which are, of course, currently controlled by Trump.

“The question’s not whether that would be a good idea — it’s one of the basic building blocks for converting more of our energy system to renewables,” the environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote of grid expansion and permitting reform on his Substack this week. “It’s how many pounds of flesh the fossil fuel industry would demand in return, and how close to vital organs that flesh would be located.”

The problem is, no matter how many Congressional seats Democrats seem poised to scoop up in November, they will still need to get Republicans on board if they want Americans to be able to really see the benefits of solar, the cheapest energy source of all time, reflected on their power bill. And for most of the nation, if not Earth itself, that transition can’t come soon enough. 

Socialism is breaking through to the mainstream this year, with surveys showing most Democrats, and plenty of independents, now view the term positively. 

The shift is being led by young people in particular, who have also helped left-populist candidates win high-stakes primaries this year. A Cato Institute poll from June found that over half of Gen Z are more supportive of socialism (53 percent) than capitalism (45 percent). And more than half (57 percent) of people ages 18 to 34 have a positive view of socialism, according to a Gallup poll from August — versus just 34 percent of people over 55. 

Figures like these are inspiring socialist organizers and frightening Republicans, who are accusing Democrats of sliding into “communism” in their midterm messaging.

But here’s a little secret I’ve been hearing in the focus groups I run through my research, media, and strategy company focused on Gen Z — it’s not “socialism” that’s attractive to young voters. In fact, there’s little agreement on what the word really means. 

Instead, it’s the social policies these candidates are running on that resonate — things like affordable housing, healthcare, education, a higher minimum wage, and higher taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals.

All summer long, I asked Gen Z voters to define socialism. There was no consensus answer, but much less talk of “workers controlling the means of production,” as one 22-year-old woman from New Jersey referenced, and much more of a focus on what a 21-year-old man from Florida described as a “social safety net.” 

Understanding where they’re coming from is important to both critics and supporters: Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike who think young people are signing up for a specific ideology are misreading the moment. When it comes to the rise of “socialism,” young people want what they’ve always wanted: to be heard, and to be helped.  

Why socialism is resonating with Gen Z

Gen Z’s interest in the term was closely tied to the myriad ways their economic outlook has deteriorated in the past year. 

“I feel like over the last year things definitely have changed. You see it generally even with gas prices. … A lot of it has to do with the fact that our country has involved itself in a lot of different conflicts around the world at this point,” the 21-year-old from Florida said. 

“During the school year I am relying on my refunds from school to pay my rent, to pay my car payment and car insurance, phone bill, internet, stuff like that,” said another 21-year-old man from Pennsylvania. 

“I haven’t been able to financially plan for my education in the way I thought I was going to and have been needing to save more of my own money from jobs I’m working to help account for those differences,” said a 21-year-old woman from North Carolina. 

As economic anxiety reshapes Gen Z’s politics and life feels harder and harder to afford, young people are looking for the government to provide social support. 

Consistently, I asked groups of young people this summer what they’re looking for in an ideal political candidate — and the government more broadly. Overwhelmingly, they told me they’re in favor of politicians who understand everyday people and a government that provides social services for its constituents.

“A political candidate who understands the common person. Someone that’s not financially out of touch, who doesn’t take money from different corporations. Someone who understands the struggles of an everyday American and knows what’s going on with the economy and can understand the struggles of students, children, families,” said a 21-year-old woman from Michigan.

“Providing a higher safety net with welfare, especially with hospitals because of the ‘big, beautiful bill’ and its effects,” said a 19-year-old from New York City, citing the impact of the Trump administration’s recent tax bill that slashed healthcare spending.

“A candidate who isn’t afraid to say that we deserve more as citizens,” said another 19-year-old woman from Michigan.  

According to many of the young voters I spoke to, in their eyes, this is what socialism means: a more ambitious, generous, and equality-minded government. And when I asked them to tell me about the policies they associate with democratic socialists, they said things like “Medicare-for-all,” “help with college tuition,” and “social safety nets like healthcare, public education, public housing.” 

Where young people see socialism working

In pushing back against socialism’s rising popularity, critics often invoke history, pointing to Marxist governments where equality was instituted by force and coercion and associated with poverty and deprivation. 

“They’ve gone communist, but we’re not going to let that happen,” President Donald Trump said at a South Carolina rally in August. “It’s never worked in 1,000 years with different names, lots of different names. It’s never worked once.”

Just as Gen Z was presumed to be “woke” Democrats four years ago and then swung hard to Trump and MAGA in 2024, the socialist turn is just as conditional.

On the whole, however, young people I spoke to were less likely to tie socialism to “communism” or to places like Cuba, Venezuela, or Soviet Russia. Instead, they gave examples where they perceive socialism to work well, often mentioning wealthy Western countries and the social support systems associated with these kinds of governments.  

“I think Scandinavian countries and those countries have had socialist policies in place and people end up having universal healthcare and people are able to live more comfortably and receive more money from the government to support them,” said a 21-year-old woman from Massachusetts. “I know in Canada there’s some socialist policies that I think have benefited people in regards to healthcare and welfare and social security.” 

This shouldn’t be surprising. With years of distance from the Marxist governments that our parents and grandparents may think back to (even the oldest Gen Z were born well after the Cold War ended) young people are more focused on social policies than the core tenets of socialism. 

“The first thing that comes to mind is the government’s involvement in making sure that everybody is cared for and everyone’s health remains a priority despite their income,” said that 21-year-old woman from Massachusetts. “And I think that is something that makes me view socialism in more of a positive light because some people obviously don’t have the same financial situations as others. That doesn’t mean that they should be undervalued in society.”

Liking socialism doesn’t mean identifying as a socialist

But just as socialism’s detractors are misunderstanding its appeal among young voters, its supporters should be just as wary of assuming voters are signing up for their movement. 

I’ve heard anecdotes like the ones above shared over and over again. And yet, very few young people I’ve spoken to in the past few months have been willing to call themselves a socialist.

This is consistent with a broader Gen Z skepticism toward political parties. While they’re leaning into the policies associated with “socialism,” they still largely reject labels — whether that label is Republican, Democrat, or…socialist. 

Asked if she would consider herself a democratic socialist or a socialist, the 21-year-old from Massachusetts said she “would definitely lean that way.” A 19-year-old woman from Colorado said, “I would say I lean towards it, but I haven’t completely been with that party.” 

And a 23-year-old woman from Arizona said: “I would say I’m in between democrat and democratic socialist.” 

And while a 19-year-old from Michigan said she appreciates that democratic socialists are “going to help get baseline needs for people across America met in ways that aren’t going to happen if we have someone who is taking money from PACs and corporations making money off of people going into medical debt and things like that,” but asked if she would label herself that way, she said, “I feel like I don’t know enough about it.”

This isn’t universal. Polls suggest a sizable number of young Democrats identify as democratic socialist when asked. But when it comes to organized political behavior, the Democratic Socialists of America only recently passed 120,000 official members, even as they’ve had unprecedented success in raising their profile and nominating candidates this cycle.

Just as Gen Z was presumed to be “woke” Democrats four years ago and then swung hard to Trump and MAGA in 2024, the socialist turn is just as conditional. They’re looking for concrete solutions, not dogma, and if they don’t see results, they’ll look elsewhere.

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: Donald Trump is once again selling access to the highest bidder(s). 

What’s happening? On Thursday, the Washington Sun’s Jeff Stein reported that Trump will reprise his 2025 “crypto dinner” later this year, hosting some of the top investors in the $TRUMP memecoin at his Virginia golf club. 

The top 185 holders of $TRUMP will receive an invite to the event, which the website describes as the “Most EXCLUSIVE DINNER IN THE WORLD.” The top 29 $TRUMP holders will also be eligible for a “special VIP reception.” 

What is $TRUMP? As my colleague Adam Clark Estes explained last year, memecoins like $TRUMP are “all but make-believe.” The coin is a crypto token, or “a type of digital asset that’s built on a cryptocurrency’s blockchain, but it is not a full featured cryptocurrency, like bitcoin.” 

In other words, buying it doesn’t get you very much — the value of the coin has collapsed since early last year when Trump took office — but it will get you a chance to have dinner with the president. 

What’s the context? This will be the third major event Trump has hosted for buyers of $TRUMP, following a May 2025 dinner at his Virginia club and a “crypto and business conference” earlier this year at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump gave a keynote speech. 

But it’s just one of the many, many ways that Trump and his family have found to enrich themselves through crypto: There’s also another memecoin, $MELANIA, and his lucrative crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, which received a $500 million investment from a member of the United Arab Emirates royal family last year.

Strictly speaking, as Stein points out, Trump himself does not own the company minting $TRUMP, though he still profits handsomely, to the tune of $636 million last year, from transaction fees and other revenue. And he’s made even more off World Liberty Financial, which he and his sons do own, along with others: $799 million in 2025 alone, according to financial disclosure forms filed earlier this year.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Don’t miss this story about “junk journaling” from my colleague Rachel Miller, a hobby that she describes as “a great way to cope with digital malaise and existential dread.” (Needed!) You can read it with a gift link here.

Plus: It’s a big day for Denali National Park’s sled dog puppies, of whom I’m a big fan.

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

Depending on your political appetite and your geographic location, you absolutely do not need me to remind you of the upcoming midterm elections. But for those of you unencumbered by an unhealthy attachment to political news, and unassaulted by the onslaught of ever-more-brazen political ads, consider this your official notice that the midterms are approaching. Fast.

In less than six weeks, Americans will head to the polls to decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. The stakes are arguably unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical norms and limits. 

So starting this evening, I’m partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s Midterms, Actually team for five weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the 2026 midterms. Together with outside experts, we’ll break down one issue each week and suggest further reading and races to watch in November.

Up first, and without further ado: the profound shift that both parties have experienced since the 2024 election. These are not your mother’s Democrats. Or Republicans.

Go a little deeper

To kick this series off, I asked Astead to imagine a hypothetical world in which he hadn’t followed politics since 2024. (An outlandish counterfactual: Astead is acutely plugged into politics.) But in this alternate universe, I asked, what would surprise him most about 2026?

Easy, he said. The GOP’s disillusionment with President Donald Trump, who remade the party in his image. 

Let’s put some numbers on that phenomenon, to start. Trump’s approval rating has dipped to record lows, even among Republicans. According to an NBC poll conducted in mid-September, just four in 10 Republicans strongly approve of Trump’s performance, down 11 percentage points from the spring.

Republicans have soured on Trump over his handling of the economy and attacks on Iran, which violated his promise to keep America out of foreign wars. Trump’s delayed release of the Epstein files also fueled distrust in his base by exposing his own ties to the dreaded “elite insiders.”

In response, some Republican candidates have worked to distance themselves from Trump, even defying him in campaign ads. But it’s unclear whether that tactic will win over disillusioned or disengaged Republicans. If enough stay home, Astead said — especially with Democrats eager to vote — Democrats could flip the House and/or Senate and make Trump’s last years in office far more difficult.

And speaking of Democrats…they’re also undergoing a major transformation after their 2024 presidential defeat. That loss disproved their previous theory of Trump-era politics: namely, that Trump’s rise was an aberration that competence, decency, and normalcy would eventually overcome.

By contrast, today’s Democrats want a party that “fights,” Astead told me. “The open question is who they’re fighting: The oligarchy? Big Tech? The Billionaire/Epstein class? Trump’s Republican Party?” 

Democrats face ideological questions, too. Since 2024, voters have lost trust in the establishment and in party leaders’ ability to pick the best candidates; left-wing candidates have thrived in that vacuum. It’s pretty wild, when you think about it, that a Muslim democratic socialist in New York ranks among America’s most popular Democrats.

For both parties, then, November 3 is a test of their respective visions for America. Not just between the parties — as in, Republicans vs. Democrats — but within them, as well. That, in turn, will help determine the rest of Trump’s presidency…and the 2028 presidential election. 

But it’s only October 1. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. 

➨  Races to watch: Michigan’s Senate race, where progressive Democrat Abdul El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers; Florida’s 27th District, where Republican María Elvira Salazar publicly broke with Trump; and the Nebraska, Idaho, and South Dakota’s Senate races, where independent candidates will test both sides’ exhaustion with the two-party system. 

➨  More from Vox: 

• It’s not the left rising. It’s the center falling.
• More Republicans are breaking from Trump. Is it too little, too late?
• What Democrats are still getting wrong about voters

One link for later

➨ “Decant” your berries and asparagus. They’ll last longer with more space and air. It’s one of several gloriously simple ways you can reduce food waste without resorting to complex cooking projects or pricey “storage systems.” 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that octopuses’ arms are individually intelligent? When cut off, they can crawl away, grab food, and lift it to where an octopus’s mouth would be if it were still connected.
• Today’s trivia: What constellation contains the North Star and Little Dipper? (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 where Napoleon was exiled after his forced abdication. That was a bit of a trick question, since he was exiled twice: first to Elba, in the Mediterranean Sea, and then to Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic.

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. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: Democrats’ Laken Riley vote is aging badly

Two things happened this week that reveal how quickly the politics of immigration enforcement are shifting.

First, Republican Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, urged the administration to dial back its enforcement push. “Before you know it, you get people that get carried away in their job and whatever it may be, and all of a sudden, then you’re dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years,” Justice told Politico this week. “I don’t know that we need to be doing that stuff.” And he’s not the only red-state Republican who’s been pushing back on ICE lately, including some facing voters in tough races next month.

The second thing flew under the radar: Sen. Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat running for reelection who has also been floated as a 2028 presidential candidate, struggled to explain himself when a reporter confronted him on camera about his vote for the Laken Riley Act in January 2025. Passed within days of Trump’s inauguration and signed nine days into his second term, the law requires ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who are merely arrested for or charged with theft-related crimes, before any conviction.

In the exchange with a reporter from Drop Site News, Ossoff talked about his Senate work investigating alleged ICE abuses, but didn’t directly address his vote after being asked if he regretted it. “Laken Riley was my constituent and what happened to her should happen to no American, to no person in this world,” Ossoff said. “I think that immigration enforcement should be focused on those who are convicted or charged with serious crimes.” He excused himself to walk into a meeting as the reporter pressed him on whether the law undermined due process. 

In both cases, you see changing winds of electoral politics. Back in 2025, when Ossoff and 11 other Senate Democrats joined Republicans in supporting Trump’s immigration bill, they implicitly validated Trump’s premise on immigration enforcement: that not only was the border out of control, but that there also needed to be new efforts to step up interior enforcement through expanding agencies like ICE. In the year-plus since that vote, Trump has hired more ICE officers, launched sweeping raids in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and fueled a cauldron of chaos that’s led to shootings across the country. Politically, it has now put Democrats like Ossoff in a pickle, one that will matter more the closer we get to 2028.

How do you explain giving more immigration powers to a Stephen Miller-led White House? How can one argue you couldn’t have seen this coming?

In some ways, you can understand the political logic of the time. Ossoff, who is running in a state Trump carried, and many of the congressional Democrats who supported the Laken Riley law were in competitive races, and Democrats left the 2024 election thinking they had misread the electorate on the issue, particularly after Latino voters swung hard toward the right. But given what’s happened since, it’s clear many congressional Democrats made a familiar mistake: prioritizing political triangulation over standing on their values of protecting marginalized communities.

Take a look at some of the Democrats who have already had to walk back their votes. In the Democratic primary for Minnesota’s open Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan made US Rep. Angie Craig’s vote for the law a key focus of her campaign, calling it “disqualifying.” The attacks were so effective that Craig eventually expressed remorse, saying, “I wanted to be honest with the people of Minnesota. I will tell you when I get it wrong, and I got that one wrong.” Craig lost the August 11 primary to Flanagan.

Maryland’s April McClain Delaney, another congressional Democrat, also said she regretted her vote: “I will say that this was in the beginning of my term. And I never thought that ICE immigration and the horror of what has happened would happen.” (She survived her primary, defeating David Trone by 6 points.)

It’s easy to see where the buyer’s remorse is emanating from. Trump’s ICE is broadly unpopular. And as we’ve talked about on this Substack and in our reporting on America, Actually, Trump is doing worse and worse with Latino voters, with both prices and immigration enforcement driving the slide. A Hart Research poll for TelevisaUnivision of 1,500 Latino registered voters in battleground House districts (August 6–17) found 63 percent disapprove of Trump’s job performance and 62 percent disapprove of his handling of immigration enforcement and deportations. Sixty-four percent view ICE unfavorably. 

When I recently talked to Stephanie Valencia of Equis Research, she said this: 

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.

But while the shift in public opinion helps explain the elected officials’ political logic, it doesn’t change the material harm of their votes. Just this week, ICE announced plans to hire 5,000 more employees, most of them deportation officers, by the end of the year as enforcement continues to ramp up.

And these raids have a lasting effect on targeted communities, like in Maine, the Chicago area, and Texas. It’s the No. 1 issue that has come up in my conversations with local reporters. The chief architect of this chaos is the president, but make no mistake: Trump had help from shortsighted Democrats.

One thing I’m hearing 

Maya Miller is a Report for America corps member covering democracy and government for the Gulf States Newsroom, a public radio collaboration that includes Louisiana’s WWNO and WRKF. She’s been reporting on Mississippi’s redistricting fight and what residents are saying about their representation and the upcoming midterms.

You’ve been reporting from redistricting hearings in Mississippi. What are residents most concerned about, and is there a conversation or moment that captures the mood?

Residents are most concerned about their representation. In Mississippi in particular, race and party are strongly intertwined, and Black residents worry that by being drawn into new districts, voters may elect a Republican candidate. There was a bit of secrecy around redistricting earlier this summer, with Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, canceling a special session to redraw judicial lines. So advocates created the People’s Hearings, a series of meetings held across the state to voice concerns and create a public record of testimonies from Mississippians. Quickly after, lawmakers decided to host their own public hearings, and at these hearings, hundreds of residents showed up, mostly to urge them not to redistrict.

“It seems to me that the threat of losing representation has made people more aware of the moving parts.”

At one hearing, I spoke to Joyce Arceneaux-Mathis, president of the Natchez NAACP. She’s frustrated that the state is going to spend millions on new maps when people are struggling with day to day expenses. And Ramona Sanders of Meridian, Mississippi, has a lot of concerns on whether mid-decade redistricting is illegal. While it’s not, she says that lawmakers are opening themselves up to legal action. I haven’t heard anything from voter advocacy groups that points to future lawsuits, but only time will tell, if and when lawmakers redraw the maps, if these maps are constitutional or not.

Redistricting is often covered as a fight over which party wins more seats. What would these changes mean for the communities you cover and their ability to have a voice in Congress?

One change that could happen is that residents who are Democrats might lose the state’s only Democrat leader. Out of four congressmen, there’s only one Democrat, Bennie Thompson, who represents District 2. His district spans much of the west, from the capital city of Jackson to most of the Mississippi Delta and southwest Mississippi. It’s a heavily Black district, somewhere around 63 percent Black. He’s held this seat for 33 years and has brought millions to the district for health care, infrastructure, and agriculture. 

So residents are worried that Republicans are trying to edge him out and replace him with a more conservative leader who may not have the same concerns as the community. 

How are these fights affecting people’s interest in the midterms? Are you hearing more determination to vote, more doubt that voting matters, or something else?

People are fired up. They’re incredibly engaged. I’m hearing from a lot of people who are more determined to vote in November than when I covered redistricting in Alabama in 2024. It seems to me that the threat of losing representation has made people more aware of the moving parts. So they’re attending hearings, participating in rallies, registering to vote and checking their registration, phoning a friend and making plans to be at the polls on November 3.

What is the national conversation about redistricting missing that becomes clear when you spend time in these communities?

I think the national conversation is missing the voice of the community. It’s one thing to report on the politics of redistricting, but there’s a layer of real concern from residents that shouldn’t be ignored. They’re worried about hospitals closing. They’re worried about public schools losing funding. They’re worried about the rising cost of groceries and gas. I find that talking to and listening to residents helps me understand a community more than calling up a lawmaker and asking them their thoughts. There’s a place for that side of the conversation, of course, but I’ve always tried to center people who will be most impacted in my reporting, and I feel that leads to a better story for our listeners.

Is the best shot Democrats have at defeating safe-seat Republican senators…not running candidates at all?

That’s the theory behind the party’s approach to several Senate races in deep red territory this year — races in which they hope independent candidates might manage to take down Republican incumbents, if only the Democratic Party would get out of the way.

In Nebraska, South Dakota, and Idaho, the candidate who won the Democratic primary has since quit the race — often with some “urging” from the party establishment — to pave the way for a two-way matchup between a Republican incumbent and an independent. (Democrats tried to similarly clear the way for an independent in Montana, but the party’s nominee refused to quit the race.)

The theory is that the Democratic brand is so toxic to so many voters in these states that it’s impossible for a Democrat to win there nowadays — but that there’s no great love for the Republican establishment either, and dissatisfaction with the political status quo more generally. So perhaps a fresh-faced independent could capture essentially all of a red state’s Democratic voters and peel away enough Republicans and independents to win.

It’s a bold bet and, most believe, unlikely to succeed — but polls do show surprisingly close races in some of these contests. And it’s not an entirely new strategy. In several red-state Senate contests dating back to 2014, Democrats concluded that the only way to win is not to play, even as all the independents they cleared the way for have lost.

But this year’s crop of independents stands out. For one, they’re running in a national environment that seems much more hostile to the GOP, making it more plausible that one or more makes it to Washington. For another, they’ve formed a loose alliance over group text, and they have something of a shared platform — a focus on economic populism and taking on corporate power, while downplaying cultural issues. 

Brian Bengs, the independent running in South Dakota, told me: “I think I can speak for the others when I say our collective efforts are based on the idea that the left-right social issues are what is being used to keep us at each other’s throats. The real fight that we need to have is big money versus little folks — the regular folks.”

They also have some specific plans for how, if elected, they’d get together to shake up how the Senate works.

“If a couple of us, maybe just as few as two independents, get across the line, we can deny a majority to either party. We can create a Fulcrum Caucus,” Todd Achilles, the independent in Idaho, told me. “Both parties would have to negotiate with us to get stuff done.”

Whether these candidates win or lose, their stronger-than-expected candidacies have made Republican incumbents take notice, and are an intriguing model of how to bring at least some competition to states that seem very solidly red — or even, potentially, very solidly blue. Should they perform well in November, their shared message could end up influencing candidates across the partisan spectrum. 

Furthermore, if they do reach critical mass in the Senate, it could mean the rise of an informal third party, one that can advance its own agenda in Washington. Yet it should also be noted that the more of them win, the harder the math for a Republican majority specifically gets, since they’d be knocking Republican incumbents — and only Republican incumbents — out of power.

Amidst rising dissatisfaction with both parties, there would seem to be an opening for a different approach. But busting up the two-party system is easier said than done — particularly when all these candidates have past ties or present coziness with Democrats that, their opponents argue, call their supposed independence into question.

The Dan Osborn model

Democrats have tried this strategy of clearing the field for independents in red-state Senate races before — in 2014, when entrepreneur Greg Orman (I) challenged Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS); in 2020, when orthopedic surgeon and commercial fisher Al Gross (I) challenged Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK); and in 2022, when former CIA officer Evan McMullin (I) challenged Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT). Yet all those independents lost by double digits.

But the current model of an independent challenger was inspired by a different candidate — Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, who came surprisingly close to unseating Sen. Deb Fischer (R) in 2024, and is now challenging the state’s other GOP senator, Pete Ricketts, this cycle.

Osborn has a background as an industrial mechanic, labor leader, and Navy veteran with a plain-spoken affect. He did not graduate from college, he’s said he didn’t own a suit, and he has forearm tattoos. He had led a strike at a Kellogg’s plant in 2021 that won concessions in the company, but he was later fired. 

Union figures helped recruit him to challenge Fischer; the consultant Daniel Moraff (who later coaxed Graham Platner to run for office in Maine) also became involved in Osborn’s campaign. Osborn’s admaker Tommy McDonald later co-founded the consulting firm Fight Agency, which is now semi-famous for challenging the Democratic Party establishment by backing Zohran Mamdani and Platner’s campaigns.

Dating back to his initial campaign launch, Osborn’s messaging focused heavily on criticizing “monopolistic corporations,” aligning him with a faction on the left that believes the Democratic Party doesn’t do enough to challenge big money and concentrated corporate power. Osborn also took moderate or conservative stances on some cultural issues, supporting gun rights and President Donald Trump’s border wall. (“If Trump needs help building a wall, well, I’m pretty handy,” he said in one ad.) The Democratic Party stood aside; no Democrats filed to run in the primary.

The result was that in 2024, when Trump won Nebraska by 20 points, Osborn lost his race by just 6.7 percentage points. That closer-than-expected outcome in a disappointing cycle for Democrats made many in the political world take notice, spurring polls and research projects about whether it could be replicated elsewhere — and whether, amidst more favorable national conditions, it could actually succeed.

A squad of independents?

So this cycle, in addition to Osborn himself running again, there are several other candidates trying their luck as independents with similar platforms. 

In South Dakota, Brian Bengs, a Navy and Air Force veteran, had previously run for Senate as a Democrat in 2022 and lost in a landslide. Working as a park ranger in 2025, Bengs told me that he became dispirited by DOGE cuts to the National Park Service, and got in touch with Osborn to discuss whether he should run again — this time as an independent against South Dakota’s other GOP senator, Mike Rounds. 

“Our economic system and our political system have the same problem, which is too much concentration of money and not enough competition,” Bengs told me. “And it is producing poor results for regular folks in both systems for the same reason.” 

The winner of South Dakota’s Democratic primary, Julian Beaudion, quit the race in August, saying he’d faced “intimidating threats to drop out,” setting up a two-way face-off between Bengs and Rounds.

In Idaho, meanwhile, Army veteran, former corporate executive, and former Democratic state legislator Todd Achilles is running as an independent against 83-year-old Sen. Jim Risch.

Before running for office, Achilles had written for the American Economic Liberties Project, the left’s leading anti-monopoly think tank. He told me that “toxic concentrated corporate power,” brought on by “wave after wave of mergers and consolidation,” was destroying free markets in the US, as well as corrupting the political system. 

“You can’t tell the difference between a corporatist Republican and a corporatist Democrat anymore,” Achilles said. “They’re both checks from the same organizations, the same special interests.” 

In the Idaho race, too, the winner of the Democratic primary dropped out after state party leaders withheld their support.

Finally, in Montana, Seth Bodnar, an army veteran and former president of the University of Montana, is running as an independent for an open seat contest against Republican Kurt Alme. But Democrats’ high hopes that Bodnar could take on Alme untrammeled went awry when the winner of the Democratic primary, Alani Bankhead, refused the entreaties of practically the entire state party establishment to drop out. As a result, polls suggest, Bodnar and Bankhead will split the anti-Republican vote and likely let Alme cruise to victory.

The independents’ big plans for exercising leverage in the Senate

These various independents running have a lot in common — they all have military backgrounds and roughly similar platforms. They’re also all on a group text, per the New York Times — and they’ve started to think about how they could shake up the Senate if they win.

The few independents elected to the Senate in recent decades — centrist Joe Lieberman in Connecticut (after he lost the 2006 Democratic primary), socialist Bernie Sanders in Vermont, and center-left Angus King in Maine — had little in common with each other, but all ended up deciding to caucus with the Democratic Party after they won, believing that’s the best way to score their preferred committee assignments and help advance their priorities.

But Bengs, Achilles, and Bodnar have vowed that they would not do this. They’ve all said they wouldn’t caucus with either party if they win, and that they’d instead caucus with any other independents, making what Achilles calls the “Fulcrum Caucus.”

Achilles told me that, if these independents stick together, they could demand major reforms to the political system such as term limits and age limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, restrictions on dark money spending on elections, and bans on gerrymandering. “I think we’re all aligned on this,” he said. (Several of these ideas would likely be shot down by the current Supreme Court as unconstitutional.)

“The goal is to deny the majority,” Bengs told me. “So neither Team Red or Team Blue gets to impose their will on the other side, without either going through us or working together — which would be a win unto itself, if they would work together.”

With the Senate growing more fiercely partisan in recent years, many have wondered why centrists on both sides don’t get together and try to seize control of the agenda. 

Yet the unity of this hypothetical new independent bloc already seems a bit shaky — in part because Osborn hasn’t committed to this strategy. In fact, Osborn has recently begun offering a new answer to the “caucus question” that has dogged him throughout two campaign cycles.

“I’ve given that a lot of thought and completely done a 180 on that,” Osborn told me. “Caucusing with nobody, you wouldn’t get anything done. I’m gonna caucus with everybody.” 

That meant, he said, he’d try to caucus with both parties at once. When I asked him whether that was possible and how it would work in practice, he told me, “Nobody really knows, and nobody’s been able to tell me that I can or can’t.”

While Osborn is an underdog, he is generally believed to be the independent candidate with the best shot at winning — several recent polls have shown his race to be tight. Since he has a shot of actually being in the Senate and having to follow through on his promises, he may feel less eager to box himself in.

But are they actually just Democrats?

When I asked the independents why they weren’t Democrats, they offered varying answers. Osborn said that “Biden and Harris failed on our border,” and that “if we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country.” He also said Democrats weren’t fighting hard enough for guardrails on the artificial intelligence industry, and complained that “Chuck Schumer’s daughter just got a job at OpenAI.”

Bengs said “the open borders of Biden” were disastrous, called defunding the police and abolishing the police “stupid ideas,” and said he condemned socialism. Achilles criticized “the dangerous decision to put President Biden forward for a second term” and the “corporatist” lean of the party generally.

But the reality is that prominent Democrats have implicitly or explicitly backed all their candidacies — and some of the candidates themselves were registered Democrats very recently.

Bengs told me he was a registered independent for his entire life, until he wanted to run for Senate in the 2022 cycle, to prevent Sen. John Thune from winning reelection unopposed. When it was too difficult for him to get on the ballot as an independent, he sought the Democratic nomination instead. And when he learned that state law required a party nominee to be a member of that party, he registered as a Democrat. When he lost, he swiftly became an independent again.

“My biggest weakness in this race is the fact that I ran as a Democrat in 2022, and that I was a registered Democrat for 13 months,” Bengs said.

Achilles, for his part, said he was a registered Republican for most of his life — but that, in 2024, state Democrats wanted to appoint him to an open state legislature seat, so he joined the party.

Then, in June 2025, he resigned from the legislature, announced he had switched his party registration to unaffiliated, and launched his Senate campaign against Risch, saying “the two-party system is just fundamentally broken right now.”

“It makes it a lot easier to tag you as a secret Democrat if you’re a former Democratic officeholder or a former Democratic Senate candidate,” Jacob Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, told me.

Osborn’s version of the problem is a series of leaks that have come out in recent weeks, in which he addressed Democrats privately and struck a very different tone than he typically does in public.

The Trump border wall he’d publicly backed was “a symbol of racism,” Osborn privately told a group of Latino and Black Democrats last year. “It’s a joke,” he added. “It does nothing, you know.”

Another recording, from a private campaign-related event, featured Osborn discussing how “Billy Bob in fucking Red Cloud, Nebraska” waves the Trump flag because he wants to be “on the winning team.” He added: “That’s all they care about because their lives probably suck.” (Osborn apologized for those comments after they were leaked, and said: “My life sucks too.”)

“When you’re funded by Democrats, hold the same policies as Democrats, and let your campaigns be run by Democrat consultants with ties to Chuck Schumer and Zohran Mamdani, you’re a Democrat,” Bernadette Breslin, press secretary for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told me in a statement.

That’s the message that Republicans will be broadcasting to voters in these red states. Whether it will work will depend on each particular state and matchup. In Montana, Bodnar has the additional problem of the Democratic candidate staying in the race to split the vote.

But Rubashkin, the deputy editor of Inside Elections, argued to me that Bengs and Achilles have the toughest road — in 2024 Trump won their states, South Dakota and Idaho, by the overwhelming margins of 30 and 36 points, respectively. “It is just hard to find the votes in those states,” he said. But he pointed out that Rounds is up on the airwaves in South Dakota, and said Risch appears to be “taking the race seriously” and “running a real campaign” — so, at the very least, these runs mean the incumbents won’t take another term totally for granted.

Osborn, in contrast, has “the proof point” of coming within 7 points of winning in 2024, Rubashkin said, and this is now a more unfavorable national environment for the GOP. The question is whether his own behavior and comments will have damaged his prior reputation for independence, particularly once they’re amplified by millions in spending from his opponent Pete Ricketts, the self-funding scion of a billionaire family, and the super PAC backing Ricketts.

Still, if Osborn pulls it off, it will be seismic — as the candidate himself mused on one leaked recording. 

“If I beat Pete Ricketts, if a shop floor mechanic — independent mechanic — beats an entrenched Republican billionaire in a state like Nebraska, I will be one of the most popular politicians overnight, right?” he said. “And people are going to want to listen to what I have to say.”

With the 2026 midterm elections fast approaching, polling increasingly suggests that the GOP is in for a bad time. As the Iran war drives up inflation and fuel prices, Republicans are on the back foot not just in swing states like Michigan, but in redder parts of the map: Iowa, Texas, and maybe even Kansas, among others. (Not to mention Georgia and North Carolina.) 

It’s shaping up to be a Democratic wave, in other words, and a major repudiation of President Donald Trump. According to Sarah Longwell, the publisher of political news site the Bulwark, there’s a clear reason why this is the cycle that things seem to be falling apart for Trump, who has dodged scandals and bad poll numbers before. “The average person is often voting on instinctual things,” she explains, “and those instincts are a lot of your animalistic desires for things to be okay materially.” And for many voters right now, things are not okay materially.

Longwell would know: She regularly speaks with voters for her podcast, The Focus Group, and she’s the author of the new book How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time. 

Longwell talked with Vox’s Astead Herndon for a special live recording of the America, Actually podcast at the Texas Tribune Festival earlier this month about why voters are both more and less complicated than punditry sometimes suggests, what the future holds for the Republican Party post-Trump, and the lesson Democrats need to learn to capitalize on their wins.

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Longwell, 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.

One of the themes in the book is to talk to voters like real adults. What does that mean? 

There was a long period of time in our history where the artifice of politics was part of the performance of politics.

You could give a good speech. You’d do a debate. Those are not the rules of politics in this communications environment anymore. Every single one of you, if you’re a Bulwark person, you interact with me. I am in your ear, and we’re having a conversation.

We have a parasocial relationship. I walked in here and met a bunch of people, and they were like, “I feel like I know you.” And people want to feel like that about their political leaders now. And so they want to know what makes you tick. Are you a real person? And so the artifice of a debate on CNN is starting to feel really stupid, no offense to CNN.

People demand more now. And a lot of it is just that artifice is falling away for voters. Donald Trump understood that as a person who had been in people’s living rooms as a performer. Democratic politicians still have not figured it out. 

One of the things that comes through in both the book and I think the work that we both do is how voters don’t always fit into those neat ideological boxes.

I always tell the story about when I was at the Iowa caucuses, and I remember in 2019 in the Democratic primary, someone telling me they were stuck between Bernie [Sanders] and [former New York City Mayor Michael] Bloomberg, and asking, “How did you get there?”

And what was the answer? 

I think the short answer was they liked a strong guy where they knew what he believed in. And they did not care which side of that coin that was, as long as it felt consistent and something they could put their hands around.

If ideology is not the controlling paradigm for voters, how should we think about the different ways people are sorting themselves right now? 

My answer is genuinely not to sort them as much. This is the reason people say things like, “It’s the economy, stupid,” and then everybody gets bored with that answer, and they want to talk about 10 other things because they’re like, “Well, that’s so straightforward.”

But I try in the book to say it really is about improving people’s material well-being and ensuring their safety. So you go back to: What are the most human things that people want? They want to be able to afford gas. They want a job. They want a job [where] they think that they can go up the ladder. 

They want their kids to get a good education. Then they want to be safe. They want to know that they’re safe in their community. They want to know they’re safe in the places that they go. And Donald Trump and Republicans really do understand: People vote with weird animal instincts. 

Now, I bet a lot of the people in this room are college-educated suburban voters, but the average voter in a general election is a 55-year-old white guy without a college degree.

The average person is often voting on instinctual things, and those instincts are a lot of your animalistic desires for things to be okay materially — your cost of health care, and then for you to be safe. And so if you think about those base-level desires and then think about what Democrats spend most of their time talking about, you’re like, “Is that the thing that captures all these people?”

When I watch Democrats as somebody who’s an immigrant into the Democratic ecosystem, there’s a lot of, like, “And you get a policy, and you get a policy, and you get a policy.” And I don’t really understand that because everybody needs cheaper gas.

Everybody needs groceries that they can afford. And so talking about the things that unite us or that everybody needs, to me, is the secret sauce for how Democrats should think about policy. 

Three years ago, Democrats thought that being against January 6th was a thing that united everybody. There was a belief that pro-democracy arguments were going to unite people across ideology. Why did that fail in 2024? 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as Trump gets terrible poll after terrible poll, and this is my point.

The coup, all of the horrible things he said about women, all of the lawsuits — I mean, he told everybody an election was stolen. Why is he underwater right now? Because of gas prices, because of a war in Iran, because the negative personal consequences of his policies are hitting people.

I know that it frustrates people. I’m so aware of the frustration where people are like, “Why are people so selfish? Why don’t they think about the bigger picture of democracy?” And one of the things I try not to do is magic words — consultant stuff, because a lot of consultants do that. They’re like, “Say freedom,” and “Say affordability.”

There’s nothing to back it up. But the one magic word I do think that Democrats should start using is “America,” and swap it in for “democracy.” And the reason is, voters practice democracy in America by its individual things.

They practice free speech. They like rule of law. They like checks and balances. So they like the elements of democracy, but they don’t think about them up here as democracy. And also the word democracy now is very polarized, right? Republicans think that Democrats are a threat to democracy because they stole the 2020 election. And Democrats think Republicans are a threat to democracy because they lied about the election being stolen and then tried to overturn the entire government.

I think one side of that equation is more right than the other. But I think that’s why it didn’t work. 

I want to look ahead. Our show focuses on building a roadmap for American politics without Trump, and part of that question has been about Republicans.

They have made themselves into a new kind of America First-esque party. But what does that mean without Trump at the center of it? When you’re in your focus groups, is it clear what values or principles Republicans believe in besides what Donald Trump says to them?

Absolutely not. They don’t have anything. This is why I wrote the book. I wrote the book because we have 2026, we have 2028, and we have 2032. 

By 2032, there’s going to be a new census, and things are going to get worse for Democrats. Hear me on this. People are not grokking this yet. The map — people are leaving California for Texas, people are leaving New York for Florida, and it’s just going to get harder for Democrats to win if this same trajectory that we’re currently on holds.

But there is a generational opportunity right now, and it’s why I desperately wanted to bring this book and get it out there. The Republican Party at this moment is as hollowed out as … Donald Trump is going to leave it in shambles. There is no Trump heir who can do what Trump does, who has the longstanding parasocial relationship with voters where they give him this blank check that other people don’t get.

But my concern is that 2026 will go really well and that Democrats will say, “See? It’s fine. Everybody likes us.” They don’t.

This was the big mistake in 2022. The midterms were extrapolated [to signal] Biden’s re-election, and those were not the same thing.

They are not the same thing. And again, the average voter is a 55-year-old white man without a college degree. And you can just hold that in your head and picture that guy and say, “Do we have candidates who can appeal to that guy?” 

I was being annoying when I was flying here, tweeting things, and there’s a new poll out for [Pennsylvania Gov.] Josh Shapiro. He is beating his Republican opponent by 21 points in the poll right now. This is the largest swing state in the country, and Democrats hate Josh Shapiro.

Hate feels a little strong. I think the left doesn’t like Josh Shapiro. I don’t think that’s the whole party.

That’s a good point.

I’ll just say, as a slight Josh Shapiro stan, perhaps I feel more than most people’s antipathy to the idea of Josh Shapiro running. I get a lot of people just being like, “Absolutely not. He’s a corporate centrist. We would never consider him. And also he’s Jewish slash Zionist.”

And a lot of this is Twitter discourse, but it feels like he doesn’t get the same buzz or interest, which seems insane to me when you’ve got somebody that popular in such a big, important state that Trump was able to win twice. 

The electoral argument for the Josh Shapiros of the world is clear.

Twenty-one points in Pennsylvania at any rate is impressive, but let’s use him as an example, because I do think it speaks to where some Democrats have gone in the last couple years. The polling will tell you that the majority of Democrats want to see their party reshift its relationship with Israel and want to see things like an arms embargo.

Polling would tell you that the majority of Democrats believe that they shouldn’t be taking corporate money, or that things like AIPAC money are bad. How does a Josh Shapiro — let’s use him as an avatar. … Is that compatible with where the Democratic base is right now, even if it’s clearly compatible with Pennsylvania?

The way that you just said it doesn’t sound compatible. But I don’t think that it’s incompatible. 

This is a book about what the voters think, and the voters want a new relationship with Israel, hands down. Without question. They want America to reevaluate our relationship with Israel. And the next Democratic presidential candidate is going to have to do that.

And I have a theory about this. I do think that the 2028 nominee is very likely to be a Jewish person who is highly critical of Israel, because I think that it helps to heal the deep divide right now on this issue within the Democratic Party.

Now, do I think it’s more likely that that is the very handsome Jon Ossoff? I kind of do. But I just … a big part of this book is, “Don’t you want to win? Don’t you guys want to win?” Like, do you want to win more than you want to be right about everything?

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 last US troops in Iraq formally withdrew today, 23 years after the United States first invaded Iraq and 12 years after it returned to take on the Islamic State. It’s a historic occasion, by many accounts — but also a pretty low-key one: The US has steadily scaled back its presence in Iraq for years as part of a phased drawdown inked by the Biden administration. 

That drawdown represents the end of a long (and often, ugly) chapter in US military history. The US and its allies deployed tens of thousands of troops to Iraq as part of the larger war on terror that started in 2003. 

Those troops left Iraq in 2011. But a smaller contingent returned three years later to stamp out the Islamic State, a violent jihadist group that had gained a major foothold after Western forces left the country. 

Neither campaign was particularly popular with the American public in the end, and more than 4,500 Americans have died in Iraq in the past 20 years. Large numbers of civilian casualties, as well as drone strikes that were seen as violations of Iraq’s sovereignty, have also fueled periodic Iraqi protests against American intervention. 

As the US withdraws, however, it’s leaving behind some very loose ends. Loose ends that, as we’ll see in a minute, ultimately benefit…Iran.

Go a little deeper

Don’t quite believe me? Just look at how Iran’s allies are celebrating today’s news. The commander of one Iranian-backed militia in Iraq called the withdrawal “a crushing defeat for the American project.”

Both Iran and the United States have spent the past 23 years attempting to shape the new Iraq. Historically, Iran and Iraq were bitter rivals — an enmity probably best demonstrated by Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion of Iran. 

After the US toppled Hussein in 2003, however, Tehran redoubled its efforts to build political and military clout in the new Iraqi state. It strengthened ties with figures like Hadi al-Amiri, whose Iran-backed Badr Organization has become a major force in Iraqi politics. It poured hundreds of millions of dollars into soft-power projects, like expanding Shiite pilgrimage sites in Iraq. And it funded, equipped, and trained a number of powerful paramilitary groups.

Some analysts have warned that the final withdrawal of US troops could embolden Iranian-linked groups in Iraq. That also seems to be a concern on the ground, where ordinary Iraqis have told reporters they fear their country “could be swallowed up” by groups linked to Iran.  

Already, the Iraqi government has pushed back the deadline for Iranian-backed militia groups to disarm. It was originally supposed to happen on the official date of the US withdrawal — today.

It’s an inglorious ending, all told — and a sobering lesson on the limits of American power. The US may have the resources to handily win any military spat it gets itself into. But securing a desired political outcome is a different and more time-consuming project altogether.

It doesn’t help that US rivals like Iran seem very willing to play the long game. By dipping in and out of places like Iraq, the US may risk giving Tehran more openings. 

One link for later

➨ Don’t throw out that old receipt! It — along with the political mailers, ticket stubs, business cards, product packaging, and other printed ephemera you encounter in your day — is perfectly suited to the newly viral hobby of junk journaling. It can be a powerful creative practice and the ideal antidote to doomscrolling.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that your sense of touch peaks in your late teenage years, and declines gradually from there? It might be one of the reasons that elderly people are prone to falls.
• Today’s trivia: Where was Napoleon exiled to after his forced abdication? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked you for the origin story of civil rights icon Ruby Bridges. She was the first Black child in the American South to attend an all-white elementary school, and she went on to start a foundation devoted to tolerance. 

Everyone knows how much gasoline prices matter. The recent spike in gas prices triggered by the war with Iran has fueled deep pessimism about the economy and weighed heavily on President Donald Trump’s approval ratings.

But diesel fuel — the lifeblood of shipping, agriculture, and heavy industry — usually flies under the radar. Its price has surged too, and while truckers and farmers are feeling the initial blow, the rest of the country won’t be far behind.

“Most products in America are shipped along the road via trucks,” Nathan Bomey, a business reporter at Axios, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. Diesel prices “directly affect their cost of doing business, which then eventually trickles down and affects the consumer.”

On the podcast, Bomey discusses what’s driving the price spike, how quickly it’s going to become a problem for everyday consumers, and whether electric semi trucks could offer a way out.

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

What is happening with diesel?

There was one major geopolitical event this year that disrupted the entire energy economy, which is the US and Israel attacking Iran. Iran is at the center of the oil economy in some ways, but primarily you have to look at the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the jockeying over it that has happened in the months since.

Once they closed the strait, it disrupted the entire global energy economy because it handles a substantial portion of the shipping bringing supplies out of the Middle East. That affected diesel prices, gasoline prices, jet fuel prices, and effectively everything based on crude oil.

Who are the people right now that are profoundly freaked out about the cost of diesel?

First off, truckers are freaked out because their cost of doing business is going much higher. Farmers are also freaked out because they’re already facing real pressures from trade wars and things that are out of control, like climate issues, that have caused their costs to go higher. 

The price of diesel affecting farmers eventually affects the price they charge, which ultimately gets to the consumer because it ends up costing more to pay for things like an ear of corn.

How stark do you think this might be? In a month or two, do you think I could go down to Walmart and see that something I buy all the time is now a dollar more expensive? 

I think the impact is imminent. This flows through very quickly. We’re not talking about months; we’re talking about weeks, if not days, before people will start to notice increases, especially in the grocery aisle. That’s the first place people will notice it because fresh food has to be shipped on a weekly basis. Diesel prices are going to have a big effect on food inflation. This is coming off of several years of food price increases that we experienced in the wake of the pandemic.

We’re also barreling toward the holiday shopping season, which is going to be affected by this as well. If a toy, for example, is made with a resin affected by the cost of crude oil, which also affects the cost of diesel, and then it’s shipped over the road to Walmart in a truck that uses diesel, all of these things add up and will probably lead to higher prices.

We’ve also got an issue with heating oil, which is a fuel used primarily by households in the Northeast to heat their homes. Heating oil, diesel, and all of these oil-based products are caught up in this vortex right now. Ultimately, it is not something the ordinary person can do much about.

Do the industries that rely on diesel have any other options?

There are definitely alternatives to diesel, but in many cases, they cannot be switched to quickly. If you think about the trucking industry, they are invested heavily in big rigs that take products from place A to place B. If you are invested in a truck, yes, you could theoretically switch, but you would be scrapping this huge investment you’ve made. Diesel trucks are not really going anywhere immediately. A lot of times, they’re simply still the best way to get somewhere.

You can switch to rail; railroads are definitely a competitor to trucking, but really only best for certain types of products. There are other types of trucks you can buy. Compressed natural gas or liquid natural gas is an alternative fuel for some trucks, and biodiesel can actually be good. Hydrogen is more of a futuristic thing down the road.

In the short term, there is the possibility of using electric trucks. That is starting to become more realistic. In fact, in recent days, Tesla began major production of the Tesla Semi, an electric semitruck we’ve been waiting for for years. I remember covering this in 2018 when Tesla debuted the semi, and we all thought it was going to be coming out soon.

It has taken nearly a decade for this to finally become a reality in large proportions, but the Tesla Semi is an electric truck that could be an alternative for some. There are other companies making electric trucks too, so that could be viable. But the problem with electric trucks is that the battery is so heavy, making it tough to compete with diesel on shipping heavy items.

It was often joked that when the Tesla Semi first debuted, the very first thing it shipped was a bunch of bags of Cheetos because they were so light and the truck couldn’t handle extra weight. They had a deal with PepsiCo, and it wasn’t ready at the time to ship anything heavy. 

It’s a lot better now, but the issue is still how heavy electric truck batteries are, which will make them somewhat limited in capacity. However, we are seeing some demand for the Tesla Semi that indicates it might become more competitive because of the price of diesel.

So when prices are high, generally somebody somewhere is benefiting. Who is it, in this case?

The people benefiting from diesel prices being so high are the refineries, which a lot of people don’t think about much because they’re the middle person in this entire process. They take the crude oil and turn it into usable diesel for a pickup truck, a semi truck, or farming equipment. 

The refinery business is experiencing high demand right now, and there’s limited capacity to do this because of issues in Russia, Iran, and other places throughout the world. There’s really nowhere else to do this, and therefore they can charge higher prices. That means higher profits for the refineries.

All of this is shaping up to potentially mean a really ugly winter. One thing I think about a lot is that American consumers will accept a lot of pain. We had Covid — the inflation, and shortages of literally everything. Then we had the war in Ukraine, and prices went up again. 

People still keep spending money, even as we predict this one’s going to get bad. People go to the store and spend money, and maybe they gripe, but it’s not like we’re out in the streets. Do you think this coming diesel shock — imminent, in your words — is going to be different?

I’m not an economist, but there is an interesting phenomenon emerging in the economy where consumer sentiment is at rock bottom, but consumer spending is actually really strong. There’s a gap emerging between what people say they feel and what they’re actually doing — in this case, they’re still spending. 

Maybe it’s YOLO spending. They’re thinking they don’t have much going for them, so they’re just going to keep spending. I’ve experienced that a little bit, so I don’t blame anybody.

At the end of the day, the numbers matter a little bit more than what people say they feel. But I do think people are going to hit a breaking point because they simply cannot continue this level of spending if the underlying fundamentals of the economy start to collapse.

On most fronts, President Donald Trump has shown little concern for reducing Americans’ cost of living ahead of November’s midterms. 

Trump has refused to accept Iran’s ceasefire proposals, even as the conflict pushes fuel costs to new heights. And he’s declined to abandon his trade wars — with US adversaries and allies alike — even as tariffs nudge up Americans’ expenses. 

Yet there is one area where Trump has recently tried to lower consumer prices in an economically coherent way, and it’s been a political disaster.

In late August, the president lowered tariffs on up to 661 million pounds of imported lean beef trimmings, a key ingredient in hamburger meat.

This policy directly addressed a genuine problem facing US consumers: Ground beef prices were roughly 8 percent higher last month than they had been one year earlier. And unlike many of the White House’s other ideas for increasing affordability, the meat imports proposal comported with conventional economic logic: If you reduce input costs for meat processors, they’ll be able to sell beef at lower prices. 

By endorsing this reasoning, the Trump administration was implicitly rebuking its own theory of trade economics (which holds that tariffs increase costs for foreign companies, not American consumers). In doing so, Trump also put voters’ material interests — and economists’ conventional wisdom — above his ideological hangups.

And he’s paying dearly for it. 

Instead of appeasing cash-strapped shoppers, the beef imports policy has mostly just aggravated (already aggrieved) agricultural firms. All across the farm belt, cattle ranchers are incensed by Trump aiding their foreign competition — after the president had already depressed their sales through tariffs and increased their costs via his Iran war and immigration policies. 

Cowpokes aren’t alone in resenting the White House’s affronts to agricultural interests. In dark red states like Kansas and Iowa, Democratic candidates have become highly competitive, while Republicans are racing to distance themselves from the president, in part by going after his beef plan directly.

Which raises the question: How and why did Trump’s plan for cheaper hamburgers go so wrong?

The answer partly concerns that measure’s particular flaws. But it also reflects broader problems with the administration’s governance, which now threaten to cost Republicans badly: A persistent failure to account for its policies’ economic consequences, a reliance on symbolic, last-minute fixes instead of far-sighted planning, and inattention to the material concerns of voters — even those as deeply conservative as cattle ranchers.

Trump’s cheap beef policy is small potatoes

As a political matter, the fundamental flaw with Trump’s beef import policy is simple: Its benefits to individual consumers are minuscule while its costs to certain cattle ranchers are substantial.

Trump’s tariff exemption has a tiny impact on consumer prices for two reasons. First, it just doesn’t affect that much meat. Although 661 million pounds may sound like a lot, that adds up to only about 6.8 percent of America’s annual ground beef supply. And most of these imports go to restaurants and fast-food joints, since grocers tend to prefer fresh, domestic ground beef. 

Second, only a small fraction of beef importers’ savings is likely to pass through to consumers. When a meat processor sees the costs of imported beef fall, it will generally try to pocket as much of its savings as it can, perhaps passing a small chunk along to the distributors it contracts with.

The distributors will then try to retain as much of that small chunk as they can before passing a slimmer fraction of the initial savings along to retailers or restaurants, who will then try to do much the same before selling to customers. In this way, past USDA research has suggested that only about 19 percent of any decline in wholesale beef prices reaches consumers.

Combine this reality with the narrow scale of Trump’s tariff relief, and the consumer benefit becomes microscopic. According to the Purdue University economists Ken Foster and Bernhard Dalheimer, Trump’s policy will reduce wholesale ground beef prices by at most 1.41 percent. If only 19 percent of that decline passes through to consumers, as the USDA’s research suggests, then shoppers will pay just 0.27 percent less for ground beef. In other words, in the best-case scenario, Trump’s policy would knock about two cents off the price of a pound of hamburger meat. 

For context, that price has risen by $1.32 cents — or 23 percent — since Trump took office.

Why cattle country is beefing with the White House

Looking at these numbers, one might ask: So what are these ranchers complaining about? If Trump’s policy only lets in enough cheap foreign beef to cut prices by a couple cents, how much could it really hurt domestic cattle producers?

It is true that the president’s tariff relief has not condemned cattle ranchers to penury. But it does hurt farmers more than it helps individual consumers for two reasons.

First, the impact is highly concentrated on certain cattle operations. The new imports soften demand for domestic cull cows — breeding females who’ve gotten old enough to be worth more dead than alive — because their meat tends to be low-fat. No ranch specializes in producing such cattle. But ranchers who happen to have older herds at the moment are more reliant on cull cow sales. 

Second, from the perspective of all ranchers, Trump’s policy sets a disconcerting precedent. To build a herd, ranchers must hold back young female cows today — passing up immediate earnings from selling their meat — so as to breed more future cattle, which won’t come to market for years. 

In effect, this means that ranchers must perennially sink money into bets on the trajectory of future beef prices. If there happens to be a hamburger glut when today’s calves become ripe for slaughter, then their investments could produce a shabby return. But this downside risk is typically offset by the potential for outsize gains: If beef prices soar three years from now, ranchers who rebuild their herds today will reap large profits.

Yet Trump policy threatens this upside: If the government makes a habit of letting in cheap foreign beef every time hamburger prices spike, then it will effectively lower the ceiling on domestic ranchers’ future profits. 

As Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, and dozens of other farm-state members of Congress put the point in a letter to Trump, “Cattle markets are cyclical, and ranchers use the upswings to prepare for the inevitable downturn.” The lawmakers therefore urge Trump to abandon any “intervention in the natural system” that might depress those upswings, so as not to “undermine the long-term viability of family-owned cattle operations throughout the supply chain.”

Trump’s unintentional war on agriculture

For these reasons, Trump’s beef tariff exemption was inevitably going to attract more complaints from ranchers than applause for consumers. What’s made it especially politically toxic, however, is the broader policy context it emerged from. 

Simply put, when your foreign policy costs the average US household more than $500 in excess gasoline expenses — while your tariffs cost them $1,100 in elevated consumer prices — they’re probably not going to thank you for making a pound of ground beef two cents cheaper.

Meanwhile, ranchers may have been a bit less apoplectic about heightened foreign competition if Trump hadn’t already been squeezing them with his broader agenda.

Thanks largely to the president’s trade war with China, American beef exports fell 12 percent in 2025, as Beijing erected retaliatory barriers to US meat. This year, Trump’s trade war with Canada has further cut American farmers’ sales.

And while their foreign markets have been shrinking, US agricultural firms’ expenses have been skyrocketing due to the Iran War.

Farmers in general — and ranchers in particular — rely heavily on diesel fuel to power tractors, trucks, trailers, and myriad other agricultural machines. Thus, as the Iran War has throttled the global energy supply and triggered a record-breaking surge in diesel prices, US farmers have been hammered. 

In July 2026, American farms were paying 22 percent more for fuel than when Trump took office. Over the same period, fertilizer costs have risen by 8 percent, due to the Iran War’s impact on natural gas prices. 

If this weren’t enough cause for farmbelt consternation, Trump’s immigration enforcement surge has provided an additional source of pain. Ranchers, like other farmers, rely heavily on the labor of immigrants, some of whom are undocumented. For this reason, US agricultural businesses have been wary of Trump’s approach to interior enforcement, despite their deeply conservative bent. 

Bizarrely, even as the administration has tried to placate rancher anger in recent weeks, it also launched a series of ICE raids targeted at beef-producing areas. These actions have triggered “work force disruptions” at feed yards and dairies — as immigrant workers were intimidated into staying home — according to a joint statement from the Cattlemen Associations for Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. The groups allege that thousands of cattle shipments have been delayed as a result, saddling producers with millions in lost revenue and unexpected costs.

Ironically, by engineering these ICE-induced disruptions, the White House also plausibly raised beef prices for consumers, undermining its own politically costly push for hamburger affordability.

Republicans are losing ground in the countryside

The political fallout from Trump’s beef policies — and broader affronts to agricultural interests — has been profound. 

Trump won Kansas in 2024 by more than 16 points. Yet Democratic minister Adam Hamilton is polling just 1.5 points behind sitting Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, according to a RealClearPolitics polling average. 

By itself, this could be chalked up to some peculiar, race-specific factor. But in Iowa, a farm belt state that went for Trump by 13 points in 2024, Democrats are also mounting improbably competitive campaigns. Democratic state representative Josh Turek leads Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson (who is publicly concerned about the beef issue) by half a point in polls of Iowa’s Senate race, while Democratic state lawmaker Lindsay James narrowly leads the House race in Iowa’s Second District, which Trump won by 10 points in 2024.

Meanwhile, in heavily agricultural Nebraska — where Trump beat Kamala Harris by more than 20 points — Democrat-aligned independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn is attacking Trump’s beef imports policy and running neck-and-neck with incumbent Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts. And in the Cornhusker State’s First District, which backed Trump by 13 points two years ago, Democrat Chris Backenmeyer is polling about two points behind the Republican incumbent Mike Flood.

Critically, Democrats’ gains in these jurisdictions don’t merely reflect the nationwide backlash against Trump and his party. The Democratic Party margin over Republicans in the national generic ballot is now about 9 points — a 10.5-point improvement over Harris’s showing in 2024. In the Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska Senate races, Democrats are outperforming Harris’s showing by 13 points or more. 

Now, it’s conceivable that Democrats’ apparent strength in the farm belt could reflect some kind of systematic polling error. For example, if pollsters were undersampling less-educated rural white voters, then that might inflate Democratic candidates’ numbers more in agricultural states than in the country as a whole. 

But Republicans in the farm belt seem to think the rural backlash is real — and driven, at least partly, by Trump’s unintentional assaults on the agricultural sector.

A little bit of free trade goes a short way

Ultimately, the lesson of Trump’s ground beef fiasco isn’t that the president should have just ignored voters’ demands for cheaper meat — or economists’ warnings about tariffs’ negative impacts on affordability.

Had Trump prioritized low prices — and heeded basic economics — from day one, ranchers might still have ended up bitter about facing heightened foreign competition. But in a world without Trump’s trade conflicts or Iran War, such cattle producers would enjoy lower costs and larger foreign markets — and might therefore be more willing to take higher beef imports in stride. 

Meanwhile, if the prices of fuel and consumer goods were broadly lower, shoppers might be more appreciative of Trump’s economic governance. To be sure, even in that scenario, Americans probably wouldn’t notice the impact of loosening constraints on foreign lean beef trimmings. But if the administration were replicating such affordability measures across all policy fronts, the consequent savings could eventually add up to something large enough to attract voters’ notice and approval. 

In our world, however, Trump’s half-hearted embrace of ground-beef globalism was too little, too late. And in November, his party’s farm-belt candidates might pay the price.

The national conversation about AI in the US is full of fear: fear about AI’s potential to end humanity, fear of data centers moving in, fear that government officials will do absolutely nothing even as the industry pleads for regulation, you name it.

But the AI conversation looks remarkably different across the Pacific.

In China, driven by public enthusiasm and a state-backed push for AI dominance, the country is in the midst of a large-scale AI integration into all facets of its society, driven by Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s support for the technology.

“He’s super AI-pilled,“ said Kyle Chan, an expert on China’s technology development and industrial policy at the Brookings Institution. “When you look at his speeches, when you look at Chinese policy documents, everything is about rolling AI out to as many domains as possible: manufacturing, services, education, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and of course the military. Everything is about trying to integrate AI.”

Beneath this push for a high-speed AI adoption across Chinese society lies a regulatory framework designed to safeguard political stability and keep boundaries on the kind of information AI models are able to share.

Chan joined Vox’s Today, Explained podcast to speak with co-host Sean Rameswaram about the different AI anxieties in the US and China, and whether joint regulations on AI safety are possible while the two countries are engaged in an AI arms race.

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.

One thing that really struck me about the way the Chinese government is approaching AI is that China has this explicit goal, right?

China has some concrete plans to boost AI adoption through the country, including its recent AI-plus initiative. And their goal is to try to boost the penetration of AI in so-called terminal devices, everything from computers to smartphones, to 90 percent or more by 2030. 

It’s going really fast and it is, in part, a state mobilization effort. There are state-owned companies, there are government agencies that are trying to integrate AI, but also there’s just an enthusiasm from the general population.

If you look at surveys like the latest Gallup poll, people in China are much more enthusiastic and positive about how AI might help them and help the country. It’s quite a striking contrast with what you see in the US in terms of attitudes towards AI.

Because people here are worried about AI as an existential threat. People here are worried about AI taking their jobs, people here are worried about AI data centers in their backyards. Is that not the vibe in China?

Not so much. There is some concern about AI and jobs. But in general, China’s not worried about AI wiping out humanity. You really don’t hear that from the Chinese policymakers. There’s no talk about a P(doom), the probability that AI will wipe out humanity. So this is just a different approach to AI risk in general.

And why not the existential risk? 

You know, one factor, I think, is sci-fi and the culture. 

Huh. We’ve watched too many movies?

It seems like every major sci-fi book or film involves machines trying to kill us all, and I think that that idea has become very prevalent. 

When you imagine a future with AI, that is one of the primary futures that people imagine, versus in China, I think a lot of the attitude towards technology in general, not just AI, is about using this edge to keep up and to become more competitive. 

For a lot of people in China, technology was something that they saw transform their lives in real time. And Chinese leaders think it’s the key to China’s future modernization and transformation to a global superpower.

Let’s talk about what concerns there are.

One of the biggest concerns that Chinese political leaders have when it comes to AI is political and social instability. They don’t want AI-generated content to act the way that social media or the internet broadly could, which is to disseminate information, maybe deepfakes, maybe viral news that could threaten the [Chinese Communist Party’s] hold on power.

For AI-generated content, it was about making sure that the models didn’t say the wrong things about sensitive topics. A lot of this is about social and political risk rather than about existential technological risk per se. 

From pretty early on, China has been developing a model registration system where basically AI services have to be vetted in advance and go through a battery of tests where they’re asked sensitive political questions and they’re supposed to either not answer them or say the “right thing” before they are officially registered. And once they’re registered, then they can be released to the public. So it’s a pretty tight regulatory framework for controlling things like political content.

We know that there’s a high unemployment rate in China, especially among young people, which is also a great concern of the government. Are people worried that this bullish approach to AI could affect employment numbers?

Yes and no. On the one hand, China is actually facing this demographic problem with a shrinking labor force. Fewer people want to go into, say, factory jobs, but China still wants to make everything the world wants to buy. 

They see AI as a partial solution to that, a way to automate things like manufacturing. On the other hand, though, there are growing concerns in China about job loss. And you see also some recent court cases in China where they basically are telling employers, you cannot use AI as a reason to fire workers. 

But I think overall, what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to find this balance between the diffusion of the technology and trying to prevent any kind of large-scale protest movement that might arise from sudden mass unemployment of, say, factory workers or food delivery drivers.

And President Xi was of course here in Washington last week. From the limited photos we have of the state dinner or of President Trump and President Xi on the tarmac, everything looks so chummy, even though we are so clearly in a cold war with China over AI. The president’s always talking about how he wants to win. 

Was there tension in his visit to Washington last week? Did you notice any?

The weird thing is that just between these two men, there seems to be this kind of romance where Trump really fawns over Xi Jinping. 

I think he has tremendous respect, even admiration, for Xi Jinping’s grip on power and control over the government apparatus in general. 

What is happening under the surface, though, is continuing tensions and a deep competitive structural relationship. That involves especially competition in AI. AI has emerged as a new fault line of competition between the US and China, one that could come to define the relationship going forward. 

I think that on the one hand, they’re talking about cooperation on things like AI safety and AI risk. On the other hand, there’s a whole bunch of issues where the US wants to lead. China wants to also get ahead. And when it comes to things like distillation or cyber capabilities, it’s as zero-sum as it’s ever been.

Who’s winning?

It depends on what you’re looking at and how you define winning. If you’re talking about the best models, for sure the US. And virtually everyone in China would agree, right? In fact, Anthropic’s Claude is very popular in China, even though technically Anthropic bans its use in China.

But aren’t their open-source models kind of popular here?

Yes, exactly. Chinese open-source models are getting more popular in the US, especially at a time when some of the capabilities are so incredible that most normal people don’t really need them, and they also don’t want to pay for the most advanced and most expensive models. Ultimately it’s this weird sort of cooperation and competition at the same time.

American models are popular in China. Chinese models are popular in America. We’re at each other’s throats, but quietly, politely.

Does the cold war make it all but certain that safety isn’t going to really be a chief priority for either country until something terrible happens?

The fierce level of competition and the very, very deep distrust between the two countries makes any kind of cooperation on AI safety very, very difficult. Even just talking to each other, having the US and China establish an official AI dialogue, which apparently they’ve agreed to, is seen as a huge first step, even though they’re just talking. 

There’s a long, long road to go before we can even think about something like an arms control treaty or a broader international agreement about AI and AI safety. But I think that’s what some people, especially in Silicon Valley, are trying to jump to.

The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election. This decision should surprise no one because, about two weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election.

That second decision, moreover, followed an even earlier one by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which ruled that Missouri may not use a newly drawn Republican gerrymander during the 2026 congressional election. In that matter, Kavanaugh acted alone under a process that allows a single justice to dispose of a case — a process that the justices rarely invoke unless they view a case as so one-sided that there’s no need to formally refer it to their colleagues.

So, for those keeping track at home, that’s three times that the Supreme Court needed to decide the same exact question in less than three weeks. 

This happened because of an extraordinary round of defiance by Republican judges in the lower courts. Just minutes after Kavanaugh determined (for the first time) that Missouri cannot use the Republican gerrymander, a Trump-appointed judge in Missouri tried to countermand Kavanaugh’s decision. Then, after the full Court reaffirmed Kavanaugh’s decision, a panel of three Republican appellate judges again tried to reinstate the new maps that the Supreme Court had already twice rejected.

These judges’ behavior is disturbing. But it is also potentially a window into the future of the Supreme Court — at least if Republicans keep winning elections that allow them to fill seats on the federal judiciary.

The lower federal courts are gravid with ambitious Republican judges who reach conclusions that are either too extreme or too partisan for the current Supreme Court — such as the ones they reached in this case. These courts are also full of plausible candidates for a Supreme Court nomination who have shown unwavering loyalty to Trump, the MAGA movement, or the Republican Party — regardless of whether there are legal arguments supporting the GOP’s preferred outcomes.

Indeed, one lower court, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, now functions as a kind of think tank for MAGA legal theories that less partisan judges would scoff at in disgust. This is the same court, for example, that attempted to pull the abortion medication mifepristone from the market. It’s a court that declares entire federal agencies unconstitutional. Or that orders thousands of lawfully cast ballots thrown in the trash after the Republican Party asks them to do so. The Fifth Circuit is also frequently reversed from the left by the Supreme Court.

That means that, if Republicans hold onto the Senate after the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, Trump will be able to easily identify and confirm Supreme Court nominees who make Justice Samuel Alito, the most partisan member of the current Court, look like an icon of disinterested fairness. And many of these ultra-partisan judges are young enough that they will remain viable Supreme Court candidates in future Republican administrations.

Eliminating judicial filibusters transformed who gets nominated to federal judgeships

About 13 years ago, the Senate fundamentally changed how federal judges are confirmed. Prior to late 2013, senators in the minority party could use the filibuster to block any judicial nominee who couldn’t find 60 senators who would support their confirmation. But the Senate voted in November of 2013 to allow judges to be confirmed by a simple majority vote.

Both parties have their own narratives blaming the other for this development. Republicans often claim that Democrats’ decision to filibuster a handful of President George W. Bush’s lower court nominees — before the second Bush administration, judicial filibusters were rare — was a major escalation in the partisan war over judicial confirmations. Democrats, meanwhile, blame Republicans for a significant uptick in judicial filibusters under President Barack Obama.

In any event, Senate Democrats eventually decided to allow judges to be confirmed by a majority vote after Republicans filibustered all of Obama’s nominees to three vacant seats on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. That broke a logjam that otherwise would have prevented Obama from filling any of these seats, but it also created a new world where lawyers who wished to become federal judges or justices no longer needed to worry about winning votes from senators in the other party.

This new world was apparent immediately after Trump took office the first time in 2017. There was a vacant seat on the Supreme Court, largely because Senate Republicans had held it open for a year until Trump could fill it. 

During his first term, Trump largely delegated the task of picking judges to the Federalist Society, a kind of bar association for right-wing lawyers. And the Federalist Society was obsessively focused on weakening the power of federal agencies to regulate private business. 

Trump’s eventual nominee for the open seat, now-Justice Neil Gorsuch, secured his new job by advertising his eagerness to advance the conservative legal movement’s top priority. Shortly before his nomination, Gorsuch wrote a pair of opinions laying out his plan to make federal agencies subservient to the judges. And one of these opinions, according to the journalist David Kaplan, “proved decisive in clinching” the nomination for Gorsuch.

In the pre-2013 world, judges with Supreme Court ambitions often avoided making their most controversial views public out of fear that doing so would antagonize other-party senators who they might need to support their confirmation to a higher court. In 2011, for example, Kavanaugh, then a judge, was assigned to a panel considering the constitutionality of Obamacare. But he dodged the key issue in the case, instead claiming that he lacked jurisdiction to rule on whether Obamacare is lawful.

After Gorsuch’s anti-regulatory opinions scored him a Supreme Court seat, however, lower court judges took notice. And the most ambitious Republican judges started looking for opportunities to prove their conservative bona fides to the Trump White House. Before 2017, for example, Kavanaugh had avoided taking a public position on abortion. Months after Gorsuch’s confirmation, however, Kavanaugh gave a speech to a conservative think tank signaling that he would be a vote to overrule Roe v. Wade if he were given a promotion.

The confirmation process, in other words, now favors candidates who audition for judicial jobs by demonstrating that they are dependable votes on issues that drive their political party. This is especially true for Republican judicial candidates, because the Trump White House has shown such favor toward candidates who are personally loyal to Trump. But Democrats who want a judicial appointment also have similar incentives. 

Gorsuch got his seat because Republicans, who controlled the Senate in 2016 when Justice Antonin Scalia’s death opened a vacancy on the Supreme Court, refused to confirm anyone that Obama nominated to fill this seat. It now appears, in other words, that no Democrat can get confirmed to the Supreme Court unless their party controls the Senate. So Democrats with Supreme Court ambitions also have no incentive to make nice with Republicans.

The way to get a high-powered judgeship is to convince your own political party that you will use that judgeship to advance its goals.

Republican judges are openly auditioning for the Supreme Court

Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are hardly the only judges who started advertising their ideological and partisan loyalty in an apparent effort to get ahead. The lower courts are now full of judges who write extreme and often needlessly provocative opinions that seem designed to catch the eye of someone in the White House.

The Ninth Circuit’s Lawrence VanDyke, for example, is a particularly vulgar judge who was reportedly on Trump’s short list for the Supreme Court during his first term. He’s best known for opinions mocking his colleagues and left-leaning litigants in a tone more often found on MAGA podcasts than in judicial opinions. VanDyke began an opinion about transgender women last March, for example, with the line “this is a case about swinging dicks.”

Or consider Andrew Oldham, a Fifth Circuit judge known for his opinions undercutting the First Amendment, attacking voting by mail, and standing up for vaping companies’ ability to sell bubblegum-flavored nicotine products — among other things. Oldham’s chambers is a factory pumping out decisions that even cause many of the Supreme Court’s Republicans to cringe — his vaping opinion was tossed out in a unanimous decision by Alito — but that also align perfectly with the Trump administration’s preferred policy outcomes.

The federal judiciary has become a partisan institution. And that means that the future of the courts is on the ballot every two years.

Or take Judge James Ho, Oldham’s colleague on the Fifth Circuit, who is also known for his trolly opinions attacking liberal shibboleths. Rather than attempt to summarize Ho’s jurisprudence, I will simply refer readers to my 2023 profile of him: “The edgelord of the federal judiciary.”

I could name more judges who behave similarly — I bring up these three largely because they’ve been discussed in the national media as potential Supreme Court candidates if Trump gets to appoint another justice. But there’s no need to belabor the point. The bottom line is that, if a vacancy does open up on the Supreme Court, Trump will have no shortage of judges who appear to have spent their judicial careers looking for opportunities to demonstrate just how eager they are to advance a MAGA agenda, even when that means moving several steps to the right of a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans.

Indeed, the Missouri incident reveals just how widespread these sorts of judicial partisans are within the lower courts. None of the Republican judges who tried to reinstate the Missouri gerrymander after it was rejected by the Supreme Court, for example, have received the same attention that VanDyke, Oldham, and Ho have received as possible Supreme Court candidates. One of them, Judge James Loken, is an 86-year-old George H.W. Bush nominee with no prospects whatsoever of getting promoted.

But the culture in the lower courts has grown so open to partisan decisionmaking that he, along with two younger colleagues, literally tried to give the Republican Party an extra US House seat after the Supreme Court had told them not to do it twice.

Which isn’t to say that every Republican federal judge, or even every Trump appointee, is a partisan hack. One of the most pointed opinions rejecting Trump’s attempt to overthrow former President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, for example, was authored by Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee. But, while Bibas’s opinion in Donald J. Trump for President v. Secretary (2020) was excellent, it also almost certainly guaranteed that he will never become a justice. And it absolutely guaranteed that he will never be nominated by Trump.

There’s no good solution to this problem

The biggest reason why America is stuck in this mess is that its two major parties have polarized on the proper role of judges. Even setting aside the youngest generation of hyperpartisan judges, it’s long been the case that any Republican nominated to the Supreme Court will be a reliable vote against causes like abortion rights, affirmative action, and the Voting Rights Act, and an equally reliable vote in favor of the “unitary executive” and for religious conservatives who seek exemptions from state and federal laws. Any Democrat, meanwhile, will take the opposite position on these, and a whole array of other issues where the two parties have consistent positions.

This is why restoring the old filibuster rules that existed prior to 2013 will not succeed in moderating the judiciary. If anything, allowing the minority party to filibuster judges again would mean that no one would ever be confirmed to the Supreme Court, because any nominee who is acceptable to one party would be radioactive in the other party.

Ultimately, the only effective way to keep people like Oldham, Ho, or VanDyke off the Supreme Court is to elect senators and presidents who do not want them on the Supreme Court. The federal judiciary has become a partisan institution. And that means that the future of the courts is on the ballot every two years.

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: Donald Trump is spending taxpayer money on propaganda ads. 

What’s happening? Over the weekend, the Trump administration aired a 30-second spot of Trump promising to “demolish the deep state, expel the warmongers from our government,” and “cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists,” paired with black-and-white footage of the president walking down a hallway. 

For the final 10 seconds of the ad, a line of white text appears on the screen: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.”

What’s the context? This is the third such Trump-centric ad in the last week to air with that text, and so far the most prominent: It played during Saturday Night Live, Fox News Sunday, and multiple college and pro football games over the weekend, according to the New York Times. 

The other two ads also promote Trump, one with clips from a speech he gave over the summer and the other declaring “America will never be a communist country” over flashing photos of Trump as the song “Love Me” plays in the background. All of them are likely illegal, according to several ethics experts who spoke with the Times.

How much has Trump spent? It’s a moving target, but many hundreds of thousands. The Associated Press reported on Monday that the most recent third ad has at least $319,000 behind it, while the “Love Me” ad had cost taxpayers at least $443,000 as of Friday.

How is the administration responding? The White House has defended the ads as “public service announcements,” pointing out that Trump is not currently on the ballot. 

The black-and-white spot, however, is almost a 1:1 duplicate of a 2024 Trump campaign ad — and the others are no less Trump-heavy and substance-light.

Contra the administration line, Trump has also spent the months leading up to the midterms asking voters to “pretend I’m on the ticket” — including, now, by using their own money to put himself on air.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Now for a change of pace before we log off: Easily my favorite story from the weekend was from the cycling World Championships in Montreal, where Brandon McNulty, in stunning fashion, became the first American to win in 33 years (it’s a gift link).

As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you 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.

I have good news and bad news for the holiday shoppers in the audience.

The good news is that the US and China announced this morning — in the wake of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s three-day visit to DC — that the two countries are suspending tariffs on $60 billion of goods, including Christmas ornaments, toys and other tchotchkes.

The bad news is that, because retailers ship goods for the winter holidays well in advance, these reductions might come a bit too late to affect this year’s bills. But there’s always 2027, right? Barring another unforeseen trade altercation. 

The tariff rollback represents a real and continued de-escalation in the trade war between China and the US, which — at one point last year — was slapping Chinese goods with a whopping 145 percent tariff. 

But it’s not a conclusive truce, either. The new agreement doesn’t address the touchiest products for either country, like rare earth minerals (which are used in electronics and clean energy tech) and advanced chips (which are critical to AI development). China also didn’t lower its tariffs on soybeans, which have hit some American farmers so hard they’re thinking of voting for Democrats.

Go a little deeper

There’s a certain irony to President Donald Trump’s about-face on the Chinese tariffs, incomplete though it may be. For years, the president made confrontation with China central to his political identity and reaped the benefits in votes. Now he appears to be circling back to what was, for decades, the mainstream, default Republican position: Namely, that more and freer trade with China is ultimately good for American consumers and businesses. 

President Richard Nixon first set that tone 54 years ago, when he famously became the first US president to visit Beijing. Subsequent GOP leaders leaned further into free trade with China, even as they railed against the evils of communism. Greater trade will bring “great benefits…to all our peoples,” George W. Bush said in a 2001 statement celebrating China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. 

But those “great benefits” were a mixed bag for some Americans, history suggests. The price of US consumer goods did fall in the early 2000s as trade between the US and China exploded. At the same time, US manufacturing towns suffered job losses so severe and concentrated that some still haven’t recovered.

Those job losses may have helped propel Trump to the White House, at least in his first term. Researchers have found that communities hit hardest by Chinese competition elected more extreme Congressional candidates in 2010, and then swung hardest to Trump in the 2016 election. 

One 2016 paper by a highly regarded team of economists actually calculated that — in an alternate reality where US-China trade grew half as quickly between 2001 and 2016 — Hillary Clinton would have won North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan…and thus, the presidency.

In other words, Trump tapped into real harms and anxieties when he veered from the GOP’s usual stance on China 10 years ago. And he might be attempting to address new economic anxieties about inflation and living costs by reversing his course on China again now. 

Call it Trump’s Nixon-to-China moment. The question, of course, is whether voters will give Trump credit for (partially) solving a problem that he himself created. 

One link for later

➨ “Microdose” movement. As the weather gradually and inexorably gets colder, many of us will see our daily step counts fall off. You could do as the Swedes do and load up on layers…or you could stay safely indoors and try microdosing movement. Just five minutes every half hour can help reduce the health impacts of extended sitting. Try tying little walks to a specific cue, like the need to refill your water bottle or the end of a meeting.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that scientists believe roughly 90 percent of species on Earth still haven’t been identified or discovered? These unknown species are generally unglamorous: Think insects, mites, and crustaceans.
• Today’s trivia: What is the name of Quasimodo’s (unrequited) love interest in Victor Hugo’s classic novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the film that won Best Picture at the 85th Academy Awards. That would be Argo, a political thriller about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis.

To no small extent, Americans have grown accustomed to being watched.

For more than a decade, CCTV cameras have recorded a hefty portion of many people’s public movements, while ubiquitous smartphones have made us all perpetually vulnerable to unsolicited documentation (if not, social media notoriety).

Until recently, however, technical limitations constrained the reach of government surveillance (at least, in the physical realm). Police may have been swimming in CCTV footage. But using such videos to track any given person’s movements was an extremely time-intensive endeavor. To do so, an officer would need to sift through hours of footage captured on many different cameras.

Yet AI is now making it possible for the government to trace ordinary citizens’ movements with unprecedented ease and precision. Or at least, this is what the security firm Flock Safety has effectively promised — and the company’s critics have loudly warned. 

Flock provides police departments with networks of surveillance cameras — primarily, automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that photograph each vehicle that passes them. 

The firm’s main selling point is also its chief political liability: Its ALPRs log not only license plate numbers, but also generate textual descriptions of all vehicles they detect and store this information in a nationally integrated, searchable database. This makes it technically feasible for police to monitor the travels of most any driver with a few keystrokes. 

Alas, some cops cannot be trusted with that power. In August, the Washington Post reported that at least 50 law enforcement officers had been charged or accused of using license-plate readers for illegitimate purposes, often to stalk their exes or romantic interests. Even more alarmingly, some police departments appear to have used ALPR data to surveil their own critics and protesters. 

These revelations fortified an already growing movement against license plate readers. In August alone, more than 90 cities and counties canceled contracts with Flock. And this backlash has been remarkably bipartisan. Deep blue cities like Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have backed out of partnerships with Flock, while Republicans in Florida have barred local police from installing ALPRs on state highways, and the Texas GOP has paused funding for Flock cameras.

The anti-ALPR movement is responding to real problems with how that technology has been deployed. And yet, according to Flock and many police departments, these cameras are also helping to nab car thieves and locate missing persons.

All this raises the questions: Do ALPRs really have significant public safety benefits? And if so, is there a way to have our license plate surveillance and civil liberties too? 

To find out, I reviewed the latest academic research, dug through the worst horror stories in the news, and reached out to criminologists about the risks and rewards of ALPRs. Although the available evidence is limited, the technology appears to have modest — but genuine — crime-fighting benefits. And while the ALPR databases have been badly misused, this is in part because the tech has gone largely unregulated. With stringent safeguards, there may be a way to make it much harder for creeps and authoritarians to monitor law-abiding citizens’ comings and goings without forfeiting a useful law-enforcement tool.

The case for ALPRs

On a late summer day in Chamblee, Georgia, Leslie Barrera was pushing her 1-year-old son Mateo in a stroller when a car pulled up next to her. A man sprung out of the vehicle, pointed a gun at Barrera, and tried to grab the baby from his carriage. But he’d chosen his victim poorly: Barrera charged him, wrested away his gun, and tried to shoot the kidnapper, only for the firearm to jam. A woman (oddly, disguised as a man) then emerged from the car and snatched the child. The baby-nabbers proceeded to pile back into their vehicle and speed away.

With the aid of surveillance cameras, police quickly identified the car as a maroon Acura SUV. Unfortunately, the abductors had swapped out its valid license plate with a paper dealer tag. Decades earlier, that might have delayed, if not thwarted, the recovery effort. But this was 2020 — and Chamblee police had access to a Flock ALPR system. By searching through its database of vehicle photos, the cops discovered a shot of the same Acura with its registered metal license plate from days earlier. The plate led them to the suspect’s name and address — and thus, within just five hours of his abduction — to Mateo.

Flock has a lot of stories like this. The company boasts that their cameras “supported more than 1 million criminal investigations” and helped locate “more than 10,000 missing persons” last year. 

“Every single day, law enforcement across this country is using FLOCK technology to solve crime and find missing people faster,” Paris Lewbel, a spokesperson for Flock, told me. 

The limited evidence suggests that Flock’s claims about its cameras’ public safety benefits are overhyped.

But Flock’s colorful anecdotes and raw tallies tell us only so much. A Flock camera can be used in an investigation without making a decisive difference in its outcome. Without ALPR photos, Chamblee police may still have been able to tie the maroon Acura to Mateo’s kidnappers. 

To gauge Flock’s actual impact on public safety, we need (at a minimum) some quasi-experiments: When jurisdictions deploy advanced ALPR systems, do they see lower crime or higher clearance rates — both compared to their own past record and to simultaneous trends in Flock-less places?

There has been remarkably little research into these questions. But a recent study from the University of South Carolina’s Ian Adams and Scott Mourtgos sheds some light into them. 

Drawing on Flock’s installation records, the criminologists identified the month that 216 law enforcement agencies activated their first camera. They found that during the first year after Flock deployment, these areas saw an 11 percent decline in motor vehicle theft, relative to similar places that remained un-Flocked. Jurisdictions that put up the ALPRs also saw the success rate of their car theft investigations rise by 16 percent. 

These findings should be taken with a few grains of salt. For one thing, police departments will be more likely to invest in an ALPR system if they’ve got a serious stolen vehicle problem. And if car thefts in an area spike, they are liable to regress back toward historically typical levels, no matter what the local police department does. 

What’s more, agencies will often install ALPRs as part of broader anti-vehicle theft efforts, which may include deploying more officers to high-crime areas, among other things. Adams and Mourtgos’s data suggests that such simultaneous actions may be responsible for a portion of their results: Although Flock adopters solved stolen car cases at a higher rate after putting up the cameras, this rise tended to begin before the ALPRs were installed.

Nevertheless, the working paper indicates that Flock cameras do make some difference. “We’re not talking huge numbers here,” Mourtgos told me, “but it’s not nothing either.”

And there is reason to think that ALPRs have greater potential to deter and solve crimes than existing results suggest, as police departments may be deploying them in suboptimal ways. 

Consider a 2025 study of Atlantic City’s ALPR rollout. On paper, the municipality was an ideal candidate for the technology: As a barrier island, Atlantic City has only eight access points, so an ALPR network could easily capture every car entering and exiting the city. 

As one would hope, the research found that car theft declined after the cameras were erected, although the authors could not rule out other explanations. Perhaps more significantly, however, they discovered that the cameras produced vastly more leads than the department was capable of logging or investigating. Between November 2022 and November 2024, the city’s ALPRs issued 12,384 stolen vehicle alerts, virtually all of which went unnoticed or ignored by department personnel; over the studied period, the ALPR system prompted only 72 vehicle stops, of which just 52 concerned stolen cars. 

“In an ideal world, someone would be monitoring the alerts in real time and dispatching an officer, who would successfully make a traffic stop,” the paper’s co-author, Rowan University criminologist John Shjarback, told me. “But yeah, that kind of rarely happened.” 

Shjarback concludes that the department lacked enough patrol officers to respond to a significant portion of alerts, while its civilian surveillance center monitors appeared to simply miss a large proportion of serious hits. “They have a lot to do in that real-time crime center,” Shjarback said. “There’s a relatively high amount of crime and gun violence and whatnot in Atlantic City. One or two retired officers on duty just weren’t enough to do the live monitoring.” 

Similar operational flaws and resource constraints may have limited the efficacy of Flock systems in at least some of the areas analyzed by Adams and Mourtgos. Indeed, Mourtgos noted that many departments in his study lacked enough ALPRs to cover most significant thoroughfares. “Even in jurisdictions that are at the higher end on cameras, you’re still covering an extremely small minority of these roadway structures,” Mourtgos said. “So, that’s probably another reason why we see only modest effects.”

Taken together, the limited evidence suggests that Flock’s claims about its cameras’ public safety benefits are overhyped; its ALPR networks do not appear to be the “single greatest change” in policing tech “since DNA,” as the company touts on its website. But, as common sense might suggest, automatically logging all license plates on major highways and intersections seems to make it at least a bit harder to get away with stealing cars (and perhaps, babies).

Mass surveillance has its downsides

Of course, the fact that ALPRs offer some benefits to public safety does not mean that they’re necessarily worthwhile. Sewing a GPS chip into every American’s forearm would surely make crimes easier to solve and less tempting to commit. But most would regard such trackers as dystopian infringements on privacy and invitations to authoritarian control. 

And Flock’s ALPRS are much the same, in the view of their staunchest critics.

The “DeFlock” movement’s fundamental argument is that the cameras give police departments more information than they can be trusted with. One danger is that wayward cops can exploit the data to stalk their exes. The more profound threat, however, is that police agencies will use ALPR systems to deter or punish lawful dissent. 

And that hazard is not entirely hypothetical. After a writer named Canyen Ashworth published an op-ed criticizing local police in Lenexa, Kansas, that town’s police began tracking his movements with its ALPRs (apparently, because Ashworth’s column led the police chief to conclude, incorrectly, that he must have been the dastardly perp behind a recent spree of…unpermitted poster-hanging incidents).

More broadly, a 2025 investigation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies had run hundreds of searches related to protests or activist groups through Flock’s ALPR system. It’s not clear how many of these queries were motivated by an illiberal desire to monitor dissenters. In theory, a police officer could search for, say, “red sedan at No Kings protest” because a car of that description tried to run over protesters or committed some other criminal offense in the demonstration’s vicinity. And some of the searches tallied by EFF appear to fall into that category. But many others had no discernible purpose beyond the surveillance of activists.

We need to watch the watchmen

All this is unquestionably alarming. And if widespread misuse of ALPR networks were inevitable, then their costs to civil liberties would likely outweigh their modest (and as yet, not wholly certain) benefits for public safety.

But this probably isn’t the case. Rather, governments can likely limit ALPR’s downsides — while preserving their utility to law enforcement — by more stringently regulating the technology.

“In something like half of the states, there is no regulation. Virtually none, in our view, have adequate regulation.”

Barry Friedman, founding director of NYU School of Law’s Policing Project

Until recently, legislatures had placed scant guardrails on ALPRs. As the Congressional Research Service noted in 2024, there is “no specific federal legislative framework” governing law enforcement’s use of such cameras. And most states have no comprehensive ALPR regulations. Thus, if we’re failing to prevent police departments from misusing these cameras, it may be because most state and local governments haven’t actually tried. 

“In something like half of the states, there is no regulation,” Barry Friedman, the founding director of NYU School of Law’s Policing Project, told me. “Virtually none, in our view, have adequate regulation. The police decided to do this on their own. Them and their vendors made the decision and didn’t disclose what was happening.”

Fortunately, there is a long list of ways for policymakers to constrain abuse of ALPR data. To name just a few, governments could:

• Require police departments to delete logged location records after three weeks (or less), unless they are connected to a specific investigation (thereby leaving would-be stalkers and tyrants with less surveillance data to sift through). 
• Permit ALPR searches for only an enumerated set of law enforcement purposes, such as tracking stolen vehicles or suspected violent offenders. 
• Create an audit trail for every query documenting who searched for what, when, and under what justification.
• Mandate the use of software that automatically flags suspicious queries — such as someone searching for the same license plate over and over, without attaching an actual case number — and that temporarily locks out users who appear to be misusing the database. (Flock currently offers software with similar features, but most police departments with ALPRs are not legally required to adopt such systems.)
• Expressly forbid the use of the ALPR system for tracking people on the basis of protected speech.
• Punish intentional, unauthorized searches of the database with jail time.

Virginia’s recently enacted ALPR law includes many of these provisions, while several other states have embraced a subset of these policies.

Some may still want to get de-Flocked

To be sure, for some, even heavily regulated ALPR systems will entail intolerable costs to privacy and unacceptable risks of authoritarian misuse. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) supports efforts to regulate license plate readers, but only as a second-best alternative to banning the technology outright. 

“No guardrails can completely address the chilling effect of mass surveillance,” Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, said. “When people know that they are being surveilled all the time, they may not intellectually dig into the, ‘Well, what exactly is happening with this data? What’s it being collected for? How long is it being stored?’ The average person isn’t going to go through all those steps.” 

Rather, Marlow argues, many will simply see cameras and fear that they’re being watched — and fearful of those doing the watching. 

“Someone who is an alcoholic and wants to go to an AA meeting — but doesn’t want the public or any of their insurance companies or the government knowing they’re an alcoholic — and knows there’s a camera outside of the church that hosts the meeting may just say, ‘You know what? It’s really important for me to keep this struggle private. And so I can’t go to that AA meeting,’” he said. 

These are legitimate concerns, although there is little hard evidence that license-plate readers have a chilling effect on protests or personal behavior. And given how much sensitive information people publicly share on social media — or willingly generate, through their internet activity — there’s some reason to doubt that many will refrain from lawful activity, merely because they spotted an ALPR by the side of the road. In fact, license plate readers have actually been in wide use for more than a decade and, until recently, few seemed to register their existence, much less, reorganize their lives around avoiding the cameras’ gaze. 

Still, reasonable people can disagree about how to weigh ALPRs’ trade-offs. My point here is merely that governments may be able to secure modest but meaningful public safety benefits from the cameras — while greatly reducing their misuse — by giving regulation a chance. Using the ALPRs of 2026 probably doesn’t require accepting the authoritarian nightmares of 1984.

In a 2016 opinion, authored one year before he became a Supreme Court justice, then-Judge Neil Gorsuch warned against lawyers who tempt judges to reach conclusions that aren’t supported by the Constitution’s text. “Ours is the job of interpreting the Constitution,” the future justice wrote. “And that document isn’t some inkblot on which litigants may project their hopes and dreams for a new and perfected tort law, but a carefully drafted text judges are charged with applying according to its original public meaning.”

Gorsuch might have gazed into a crystal ball when he wrote this line, because it could have been written with a case that is now before Gorsuch’s new Court — Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County — in mind. 

In Suncor, city and county officials in Boulder, Colorado sued the oil behemoth Exxon Mobil, along with a company named Suncor that operates two oil refineries in Colorado. They sued in Colorado state court, seeking, in their own words, to require the two companies “to share a portion of the costs [Boulder] taxpayers face in coping with a climate altered” by the oil industry.

That alone makes Suncor, which the justices will hear on October 5, a hugely important case, because it could be the first of many lawsuits ordering oil companies to compensate the public for the costs of climate change. But the stakes in this case are even higher because of the audacity of the oil companies’ argument to the justices. 

Exxon and Suncor claim that their clients should be immune from this suit, not because any particular provision of the Constitution grants them immunity, but because state courts are forbidden from hearing climate change lawsuits under something called the “structure of the Constitution.” The oil companies claim that there’s a rule against many state environmental suits buried somewhere in this “structure,” even though it cannot be found in the Constitution’s text. 

This argument exists in an entirely different universe than the Supreme Court’s precedents governing environmental suits, which explicitly permit — and even sometimes require — state courts to hear lawsuits alleging that a company in another state or country caused pollution that migrated across state or international lines.

But there’s a bigger issue at stake here, too. If you take seriously these justices’ pledged allegiance to textualism — and its close cousin, originalism, which, in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s words, claims that “constitutional text means what it did at the time it was ratified and that this original public meaning is authoritative” — then Suncor should be an easy case. The oil companies’ failure to even articulate an argument rooted in constitutional text should be disqualifying.

But Exxon and Suncor clearly believe they can win the case while thumbing their nose at many of the justices’ purported allegiance to textualism and originalism. It’s not hard to guess why they would believe this. Increasingly, the same justices who evangelize for textualism and originalism ignore the Constitution’s text when necessary to achieve their political goals. 

There is no textual basis, for example, for the Republican justices’ claim that President Donald Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes. Similarly, the Court’s Republican majority recently invented something called the “major questions doctrine,” which allows the justices to veto federal regulations that they deem too ambitious, even though the full Court has never even attempted to justify this doctrine by citing the text of the Constitution or any federal statute.

Now, Suncor will be a test of just how far they will go, with big ramifications not just for climate lawsuits, but potentially for any lawsuit that seeks to declare a state or federal law unconstitutional..

What are the actual legal issues in Suncor?

Many of Boulder’s claims against the oil companies arise out of a tort law theory known as “nuisance,” which often allows someone who uses their property in a way that harms someone else to be sued. If your neighbor lights a trash fire in their yard that fills your house with noxious fumes, they have created a nuisance and you may have a viable lawsuit against them.

Often, these nuisance suits involve major environmental claims, and they also often involve claims that cross state lines or even international borders. In Ohio v. Wyandotte Chemicals (1971), for example, the state of Ohio sued chemical companies located in Michigan and Canada, claiming that they “each dumped mercury into streams whose courses ultimately reach Lake Erie,” thus poisoning Ohio’s waters. The US Supreme Court ruled that Ohio’s state courts should hear this lawsuit.

In Suncor, however, the oil companies claim that lawsuits arising out of climate change are special, and may not be heard by any state’s courts. Broadly speaking, these oil companies raise two arguments, one of which is easily refuted by quoting a statute; the other is their cockamamie claim that the “structure of the Constitution” prevents state courts from hearing Boulder’s lawsuit.

One of the oil companies’ claims is that Boulder’s lawsuit is “preempted” by the federal Clean Air Act. On the surface, this argument is at least plausible, as Congress does have the power to enact federal laws that effectively nullify a state law. The Constitution states that federal laws are “the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” 

But the oil companies’ claim that the Clean Air Act preempts climate change lawsuits in state courts is weak. That law states that “air pollution control at its source is the primary responsibility of States and local governments.” And it states that, at least with respect to stationary polluters like factories, power plants, or Suncor’s refineries, “nothing in this chapter shall preclude or deny the right of” states to adopt or enforce air pollution standards or laws, unless the state’s rule is less stringent than what federal law requires. (The Clean Air Act does sometimes preempt state suits involving pollution caused by mobile sources, such as airplanes.)

So it’s pretty clear that the Clean Air Act does not bar state nuisance suits such as Suncor.

Which brings us to the oil companies’ claim that the Constitution’s “structure” somehow bars this suit. Their brief makes the extraordinary claim that “the Court has long held that interstate pollution is an inherently federal area in which state law cannot govern,” a claim that is easily repudiated by the Wyandotte Chemicals decision, among others.

In the same brief, the oil companies claim that the structural principle that only federal courts can hear climate change lawsuits can somehow be derived from an unusual approach to environmental lawsuits that the Court invented more than 100 years ago, and that it abandoned many decades ago.

In Missouri v. Illinois (1906), the Supreme Court heard a claim that Chicago, Illinois was dumping sewage in a river that eventually flowed into Missouri. Despite the fact that there was no federal law governing water pollution at the time, the Court apparently concluded that there should be some process that states can use to sue other states that do what Illinois was accused of doing. 

The Court’s opinion in Missouri weighed the evidence in the case before ruling in Illinois’s favor. So Missouri seemed to suggest that federal courts have some power to hear environmental suits even in the absence of an act of Congress permitting them to do so.

Based on this and similar older cases that reached similar conclusions, the oil companies claim that Missouri created a “federal common law” that governed interstate environmental lawsuits in the absence of a federal statute. And they also argue that this judicially created “common law” preempted certain state environmental lawsuits. They also argue that this preemption remains in place even though federal laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act have now displaced this federal common law.

Needless to say, that’s a lot of logical leaps. The oil companies’ argument is that an extra-statutory workaround that existed many decades ago still preempts state environmental lawsuits, even though that workaround no longer exists and has been replaced by an act of Congress. They also claim that this rule against state environmental suits can be found somewhere in the “structure” of the Constitution, despite the fact that it is nowhere in the Constitution’s text.

Among other things, this confusing argument is inconsistent with a case the Supreme Court decided as recently as April. As the Court said in Hencely v. Fluor Corp. (2026), “there is no federal pre-emption in vacuo,” a Latin term meaning “in isolation,” “without a constitutional text or a federal statute to assert it.”

So the oil companies’ claim that the “structure of the Constitution,” whatever the hell that means, somehow precludes climate change lawsuits in state courts should be easily dismissed. Further, as the Court said in Hencely, a litigant making a constitutional preemption claim must cite the text of the Constitution — and the oil companies have not done that here. 

The oil companies’ brief actually makes a pretty good policy argument for only allowing federal courts to hear climate change lawsuits

Setting aside the oil companies’ risible legal arguments, they actually make a decent argument that, as a matter of policy, it would be best if climate change cases were heard in one grand federal lawsuit rather than dozens of piecemeal suits brought in state courts.

Many different fossil fuel companies in both the United States and abroad have contributed to climate change. It may be impossible to determine which company is specifically responsible for any climate change-related problems that arise in Boulder, Colorado. And, because some of the responsibility for climate change falls on foreign actors, allowing a state court to adjudicate climate change-related suits raises difficult questions of international diplomacy. 

Additionally, the fact that the Clean Air Act treats pollution from stationary and mobile sources differently complicates this case even further. How is a court supposed to determine to what extent climate change in Boulder was caused by pollution emitted from oil refineries or power plants, rather than cars or airplanes?

But these are arguments that the oil companies should present to Congress, not the Supreme Court. It is Congress’s job to decide when to preempt state law. And there’s no question that Congress could pass a law shutting down lawsuits like Suncor, while simultaneously creating a federal process that will allow Americans who are injured by climate change to seek compensation in federal court.

Passing a federal law, however, requires compromise. It requires lawmakers to weigh the concerns of voters who don’t want the same outcome that Exxon wants. And, especially given the likely outcome of the 2026 midterms, it would require the oil companies to work with Democrats to come up with a legal framework that would actually earn some bipartisan support.

Instead, the oil companies want to bypass all that by getting a Republican Supreme Court to declare lawsuits like Suncor unconstitutional. And they are apparently so confident that they can convince these justices to do so that they barely even managed to articulate a legal argument for their position.