Americans are furious about the state of our healthcare system. 

A recent KFF poll found 60 percent of US adults worry about the cost of medical care — more than gasoline, food and groceries, or their rent or mortgage. One in three Americans say they worry every day or almost every day about their ability to afford healthcare, per a new survey from the Pew Research Center. There seems to be a growing appetite for reform, too: More than 65 percent of Americans say they support the government spending more tax dollars to lower healthcare costs. 

Democrats are trying to weaponize those frustrations against the Republicans who currently hold Congress and the White House. By a 2-to-1 margin, voters say they trust Democrats over Republicans on healthcare. That could mean single-payer Medicare-for-all or a new public insurance option or maybe something else. What all this energy leads to will depend on what happens in November. The candidates themselves are framing the stakes in those existential terms. 

“Medicare for all is where we need to go,” Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate in the Michigan Senate race whose support for the policy has been widely covered, said during an August interview with CNN. “And my hope is, both coming out of the 2026 midterms and then out of 2028, that we’re going to be on our way to a Senate majority to be able to get this done.”

Real change will have to wait for the 2028 presidential election and a new occupant in the White House. But this year’s midterms are still a make-or-break moment: The candidates who get elected this year, and how they shape the upcoming presidential primary debate and actions in Congress, will determine whether healthcare reform happens at all. 

If you’re fed up with the state of American healthcare, and you want to see a change, you should show up for the midterms on Tuesday, November 3.

Big midterm wins can beget big healthcare wins 

The classic pattern in American elections is that more voters go to the polls during presidential campaigns than during the midterm elections when only House and Senate seats are on the ballot. Turnout has started to tick up for the midterms in recent years, but it still trails behind presidential years. Midterms suffer from the perception that there’s not as much at stake if the White House is not on the line.

But that’s never been strictly true. 

Midterm elections are extraordinarily important in shaping the future of policymaking, even if the payoff is delayed. They help determine both the character of the Congress that could eventually pass a major bill after the next presidential election, and the kind of ideas and policies that are going to be prioritized.

“Voters should see 2026 and 2028 as the elections that will guide the next big change in our healthcare system,” said Natalie Davis, CEO and co-founder of the advocacy group United States of Care, in a statement to Vox. “These elections will be how voters’ demands are heard — and will tell us whether the next real window for change will come with serious reforms or missed opportunity.”

A walk through the recent history of healthcare reform should help make the stakes of the 2026 elections clear.

In 2006, the national mood looked similar to what we’re seeing today. A very unpopular Republican president was in office, and the country had soured on his agenda. George W. Bush’s foreign wars and his misguided attempt to overhaul Social Security gave Democrats an opportunity to win big in the 2006 midterms — and they did. Dems won more than 30 seats and secured a comfortable majority in the House. In the Senate, they won six seats and narrowly took control of that chamber too.

It was a resounding rejection of the Bush administration, and it set up the next decade of Democratic policymaking. At the highest level, the midterms gave energy to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, united as they were around their opposition to the Iraq War, and that energy carried over to the presidential primary. Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton and won the presidency, springboarding off of the excitement that started with the 2006 elections.

Dems’ success in the midterms also helped put lowering healthcare costs at the forefront of the Democratic agenda. That encouraged both Obama and Clinton to develop detailed healthcare policy proposals during their primary campaigns and ultimately set the stage for the Democrats to pursue the Affordable Care Act once they had full control of the government in 2009.

And then there is the literal size of the congressional majorities that parties need to pass their agenda. Voters may not spend much time thinking about whip counts, but one or two elections in a midterm year can ultimately decide the fate of the next president’s agenda. 

Part of the reason Democrats were able to pass the ACA was that they built on their huge wins in 2006 with more wins in 2008 and held massive congressional majorities once Obama was sworn in. And once the debate over healthcare reform really got started, they needed every single vote. It was especially important in the Senate: Democrats had exactly 60 votes in 2009. That meant if all of them united together, they could pass filibuster-proof legislation — so long as nobody defected. That was only possible because in 2006 Mark Pryor won a Senate seat in Arkansas, Sherrod Brown triumphed in a Senate race in Ohio, and Jon Tester beat an incumbent Republican in Montana. 

Without those wins in 2006, the Democratic legislative agenda in 2009 would probably have looked different. They might’ve had to pursue a more limited healthcare reform plan; maybe the ACA wouldn’t have passed at all.

What kind of Democrats will be on the rise in 2028?

The 2006 midterms both created the opportunity for the ACA — and set the limits on what the legislation could actually achieve. Democrats had that 60-seat Senate majority, but within it were many more moderate members. Policies like the public option (which would have authorized the government to create its own health insurance plan to sell alongside private insurance) couldn’t get sufficient support. That is the dilemma of policymaking: You need those swing-seat members to win, which often means tacking to the center, but you also can’t pass anything they won’t get on board with. 

Nevertheless, that is a good kind of political problem to have, one which Democrats would be thrilled to face in January 2029. All of which brings us to 2026. What are we going to do now?

It all starts with the vote count. Most projections expect the Democrats to win between 10 and 20 House seats. But the difference between 10 and 20 could be substantial. The cushier the majority, the further you can push the policy agenda. More than 30 House Democrats actually voted against the ACA, but they could still narrowly pass the bill because of the huge majority that they had started building in 2006. 

If you live in one of the districts — like Arizona’s Sixth or Colorado’s Eighth or Florida’s 22nd, to name just a couple of the 21 toss-up races identified by the Cook Political Report this year — that forecasters say is competitive this year, you could have an outsized say in what the future of policymaking looks like. But even in safe districts, you should vote: Elections are the most reliable way we have to gauge public opinion, and strong victories for the candidates who prioritize healthcare send a message.

The same goes for the Senate. If Democrats sweep all of the competitive races, they could have up to 55 seats in the Senate in 2027 — with a chance to build on it in 2028. If you are a voter in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, Alaska, Maine, New Hampshire, or Iowa, your ballot carries extra weight for the next steps in US healthcare reform. If the Democrats can reach 60 votes again in 2029, they would have much more flexibility about what to pass. Even if they fall short of that magic number, the more of a cushion they have above 50, the more likely that their Senate leaders can find support for altering Senate rules for the filibuster and get an ambitious bill approved.

The results of this year’s midterms will also set the terms of the debate among Democrats. We are likely to see “show” bills advanced by Dems next year that may have no chance of being signed by President Donald Trump, but that will give us a sense of what kind of policies the party wants to pursue and how much support there is for them. Believe it or not, the first Medicare prescription drug negotiations bill passed the House in 2007 after Democrats’ big wins in 2006 — even though the policy didn’t become law for another 15 years. The broader public may not pay much attention to this kind of doomed-to-fail legislation, but it is often a window into the future.

“One challenge for Democrats is finding the next big health care idea beyond the Affordable Care Act that will resonate with voters and respond to their affordability concerns,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF. “One big difference between now and 2006 is that back then there was already a lot of coalescing around ideas that ultimately led to the ACA. All the major Democratic candidates for president in 2008 supported something like that. I’m not sure that’s true now, at least not yet.”

Democrats are already aligning on a wide range of healthcare ideas, from reviving the public option to free primary care to the full-blown Medicare-for-all supported by progressive candidates, some of whom are in competitive elections. If El-Sayed wins the Senate race in Michigan, for example, that could supercharge a debate around Medicare-for-all. It could also provide momentum to any progressives who run for president — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to name one obvious example — and decide to make Medicare-for-all a pillar of their platform.

But if El-Sayed and other progressives were to fall short, that could make Democrats more timid about being ambitious in the 2028 campaign and afterward. Still, he’s far from the only candidate in a crucial race to put their support behind Medicare-for-all. There is Randy Villegas in an important California House race. Troy Jackson has bet on it as part of his bid to topple Sen. Susan Collins in Maine. All of these races will send a signal to the party about what the public wants and is willing to turn out for.

In some ways, winning elections is the easy part. Legislating is hard, and any eventual healthcare law will surely involve compromises and unexpected surprises. Who knows what will be happening in the world in 2029? 

“The bottom line is: 2026 is a healthcare election,” the leaders of the advocacy group Protect Our Care wrote in a campaign memo this month. “After November, it’s up to Democrats to keep up the fight to deliver relief to families and make healthcare affordable and accessible for every American.”

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

One thing I’m thinking about: Electability and identity are intertwined 

On Sunday, former President Barack Obama did something most others seemed to avoid: He called out the Trump administration’s targeting of Rep. Ilhan Omar.

The administration, Obama wrote, is “actively trying to deport Congresswoman Omar” over a theory he called unsubstantiated: that she was 18, not 17, when her father was naturalized. The effort, he said, “should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views.” 

The statement stands in contrast to the mixed response of Democrats on the campaign trail and the relative silence of the mainstream press. House leadership put out a statement condemning the raid — but there’s been nothing from Senate Democratic leadership and little from the crop of elected officials expected to run for president in 2028. 

As The Intercept’s Adam Johnson pointed out, the August 2025 raid on former Trump adviser John Bolton drew scathing editorials from the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal within days. The same goes for other ways Trump has weaponized the federal government against his political enemies, from the cases against James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James to the pursuit of Federal Reserve officials (Obama named all three in his statement). Omar’s raid has drawn much less intense coverage. Last week, I got three requests from cable outlets to discuss “news of the day” — each mentioned fired White House press secretary Katie Zacharia, new midterms polling, and some combination of Pete Hegseth and the war with Iran. None mentioned Omar.  

The entire episode has reminded me of Trump’s targeting of Black journalists like Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. Earlier this year, they were indicted after covering an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, and both have pleaded not guilty. In that case, there was also a muted reaction from the establishment press, possibly because of mixed feelings about Lemon personally or the lack of solidarity with independent Black media. Still, that silence was shortsighted, as the Trump administration used the incident as a stepping stone to target the wider media apparatus (See: Trump’s September attempt to bar CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House).

With that in mind, I don’t think it’s hard to guess why Omar hasn’t received the fulsome backing of her party. I don’t think it’s the merits of the case: She hasn’t been charged with a crime, and the theory depends on a decades-old immigration filing by a father who died in 2020. It’s likely the fact that the Minnesota progressive has herself had a tense relationship with the Democratic establishment. That dates back to the 2019 fight over comments Omar made about the influence of the pro-Israel lobby in Congress, which some took to be antisemitic. In recent weeks, Minnesota Democrats, including Rep. Angie Craig and Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s office, criticized Omar’s plans to appear at an October 26 event hosted by state Sen. Omar Fateh with Hasan Piker, the controversial leftist Twitch streamer who has become a lightning rod in this year’s primaries.

But there’s another factor that we should also name in this episode: Islamophobia. As I discussed with Mehdi Hasan on Substack Live a couple weeks ago, the rise of the progressive left cannot be untangled from Muslim elected officials who have become its face: Omar in Minnesota, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Zohran Mamdani in New York City. And in each case, these candidates have faced attacks that explicitly seek to frame their religion and identity as inherently anti-American, a threat not only to our national values but our democracy itself.

Asked on CBS whether he believed El-Sayed was a terrorist, Republican Mike Rogers said to “look at the data — it’s pretty clear.” In a recent television ad (a seven-figure buy titled “Threat”) launched by Rogers and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, its narrator says, “Abdul raises money from dangerous people who finance terrorist networks,” tying the candidate to the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda. The NRSC’s ads also notably use his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.

But importantly, it’s not just Republicans engaging in overt bigotry. They have also been aided by moderate Democrats and the press, who have used the guise of “electability” to beat the same drum. Think back to the New York City mayoral race, where (Democrat!) Andrew Cuomo spent the final weeks running a campaign virtually indistinguishable from the tactics of the MAGA right. On a radio show, host Sid Rosenberg said Mamdani would cheer if another 9/11 happened, and Cuomo laughed, seeming to agree. Cuomo’s X account even posted, then deleted, an AI-generated ad called “Criminals for Zohran Mamdani,” which opens with a fake Mamdani eating rice with his hands. The campaign blamed a “junior staffer.”

The worst part: In following Republicans down the road of interrogating the Scary Muslims, we perpetrate a form of hate that has real costs. Just this May, two teenagers opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego, killing three people, and left behind a manifesto invoking the Christchurch mosque shooter. Analysts at the Anti-Defamation League found it expressed sweeping hatred of Muslims, Jews, Black and Hispanic people, and the LGBTQ+ community.

And journalistically, we avoid a more nuanced conversation that is the one worth having: the connection between identity and electability.

And journalistically, we avoid a more nuanced conversation that is the one worth having: the connection between identity and electability. The discussion about candidates El-Sayed and Mamdani, to this point, has focused on whether their progressive policy stances can play well in a general election. However, research shows that while candidates of marginalized backgrounds (women, Black and Latinos, Arabs, etc.) face an electoral penalty from voters regardless of ideology or political party, that’s especially true for Muslim candidates. A study of state legislative races in Politics and Religion this year found Muslim candidates were roughly 16 percentage points less likely to win general elections than non-Muslim candidates, and 10–15 points behind other racial minorities. Experiments by the political scientist Nazita Lajevardi, cited in that paper, found voters about 10 percent less likely to pick a Muslim candidate over a white one, with religion rather than race as the trigger.

This would seem to explain some of the reason El-Sayed seems to be running behind other Senate Democrats (if we believe the polling). But you rarely hear that reasoning given by the electability crowd, who more than often cites his progressive beliefs, and are we just supposed to nominate Christian white guys forever?

Here’s what is undeniable: Republicans have become quite adept at putting minority communities against each other in the Trump era, and they’re running that playbook in Michigan. Whether it’s telling Black communities that emerging immigrant populations are taking their jobs or telling immigrant communities that Democrats are too focused on Black issues, the strategy has been to exploit the racial tension at the heart of the Democratic base. And to some degree — it’s working.

In an August interview with Clay Cane at The Grio, a Black-focused outlet, El-Sayed said “mistrust among Black folk in Metro Detroit is well-founded,” pointing to what he described as tensions between some Arab and Muslim business owners. And the skepticism runs the other way too — as part of the difficulty El-Sayed has faced in Black communities is tied to the Islamophobia among that voting block. One example: At a July campaign event for Haley Stevens, a Farmington school board trustee told a Michigan Chronicle reporter, “Don’t just come in here speaking Arabic,” remarks the Council on American Islamic Relations condemned as anti-Arab racism and many read as aimed at El-Sayed. At an August 19 press conference, an older Black man in Detroit shouted at El-Sayed, “He’s an Arab — he don’t care nothing about Black folks.”

The layered nature of this issue should not be hard to grasp. Ask liberals about the 2024 election, and they are quick to point out the racism and sexism faced by candidates like Kamala Harris, and rightly argue that impacted her “electability” just as much as her refusal to break from President Joe Biden or embrace a clear ideological lane. But they conveniently leave out the importance of identity when it comes to Omar, El-Sayed, Mamdani, or even candidates like Francesca Hong in Wisconsin or Angie Nixon in Florida. As Zaid Jilani wrote recently, establishment Democrats are “effectively denying that prejudice exists in the United States if they’re really going to argue that Abdul El-Sayed will perform a few points behind other Democrats because of his PolIcY ViEwS rather than the GOP hating Muslims for 25 years.”

But we should be clear: “Hating Muslims” is not a prejudice that’s limited to the GOP, just as issues like racism, sexism, or antisemitism aren’t housed on one side of the aisle either. And in selectively ignoring the central role that prejudice plays in electoral politics — yes, even with progressive candidates — electability-focused Democrats aid the GOP’s desire to sow discord among their base.

The main reason for Democrats to stand up for Omar or El-Sayed is because it’s right, and they, too, have a place in American democracy. But at minimum, Democrats should see that in ignoring explicit Islamophobia — on the campaign trail or in the White House — they are being rather shortsighted. Trump’s campaign of retribution is unlikely to spare any enemy. Muslims may be the focus right now. But there’s no telling who’s next. You’re either for a multiracial, multifaith coalition — or you’re not.

One thing I’m hearing 

This week, we talked to Christian Paz, a Vox correspondent covering national politics and American religion. He’s been reporting from Kansas for an upcoming story on pastor and Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton, whose race has emerged as a major campaign battleground in the final stretch. I wanted to ask him how Hamilton’s faith is shaping his campaign, what he is hearing from voters, and what the race could tell us about the Democrats’ ability to compete in long held Republican states. 

How is Adam Hamilton’s background as a pastor shaping his pitch, and what is he doing differently from other Democrats?

Watching Hamilton on the trail, it was remarkable to me how much his Methodist faith was at the heart of everything he talked about: about healthcare, climate, immigration, and foreign policy, about how his personal views either conflict with or bolster his policy stance, about how Trump and the GOP have failed Kansans, and about why he even decided to run (after he spent time dwelling on the Sermon on the Mount). He tailors his stump speech to different audiences, of course: At a progressive book shop, he leaned into a more anti-Trump speech; at a senior center he talked up his more conservative viewpoints on immigration and climate; at a Republicans for Hamilton rally he talked about the political center and why he wants to build a big tent; at a chapel, he led the audience in singing a hymn and quoted extensively from the Gospels as he shared his personally “pro-life” views — but it was all not just tinged, but immersed in Christianity.

“The race already tells us a few things, regardless of who wins or loses: Democrats should be creating opportunities to elevate religious people or clergy who want to run for office.”

It’s something I’ve only seen people like Rev. Raphael Warnock do, when speaking at churches on the campaign trail in 2020 and 2021. And it was different from James Talarico too — this guy leads a megachurch, and at times can slip into a kind of evangelical tone. That’s all pretty different than any other Democrat I’ve watched this cycle.

Hamilton needs to win over Kansans outside his party to have a shot. What were you hearing on the ground talking to voters?

The faith pitch is a huge part of why it does seem like he has a shot at winning: It doesn’t seem like he’s adopting or borrowing the language of the faithful, or their aesthetics, to talk politics, or just pitching the political center as a way to persuade voters. It’s that he’s adopting the tone and language of politics to talk about his faith — not the other way around. And the result is that when he talks about building a big tent, holding heterodox views, coexisting with people you disagree with — people trust and believe him.

I think I talked to more actual independents and Republicans who are backing Hamilton than actual die-hard Democrats over the days I was in Kansas. Some of these folks have voted at the local level for Democrats before, but tended to vote Republican at the national level. What unified those conversations was the sense that they think Hamilton is authentic, is a moral man with good character, and seems to be truly independent.

Others, including Democrats, said they appreciated how much time Hamilton spent talking about freedom of religion and diversity of thought — they liked that he would preface his religious talk with assurances that he wasn’t trying to convert anyone or force religion into people’s lives, but would also say he wasn’t going to compromise on it because of how genuinely he believes those things.

What could this race tell us about Democrats’ ability to reach religious voters in other Republican states?

The race already tells us a few things, regardless of who wins or loses: Democrats should be creating opportunities to elevate religious people or clergy who want to run for office. Those who aspire to run for office should also feel more comfortable talking about their faith if it’s actually a part of their lives. And Democrats shouldn’t feel beholden to the secular/atheist/none of the above/nothing in particular segment of their base because that isn’t big enough to actually win elections.

A host of election-denying candidates are running for attorney general in states across the country.

The harrowing allegations of rape at a Cornell University fraternity have been rippling out in both New York state and national politics.

Democrats have tended to voice sympathy with the accuser, saying that they stand with her and other victims. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said there was “a culture of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia” in elite institutions across the country. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said Cornell “protected her abusers, letting them off with a slap on the wrist.” 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the accuser was “failed” by local police and county prosecutors who did not bring charges, so Hochul appointed state Attorney General Letitia James to take over the investigation. Days before that appointment, James posted on social media that “what this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable,” adding: “To her, and to all survivors: you’re not alone. We stand with you.” 

Some Republicans, meanwhile, are accusing Democrats of rushing to judgment. Saritha Komatireddy, who is running for attorney general of New York against James, said in a debate that James had “screwed this one up by prejudging it.” The investigation, Komatireddy said, “requires someone who approaches the case with fairness, impartiality and integrity.” And right-wing commentators like Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro have questioned the accuser’s story.

But beyond the procedural fight over this particular investigation, many Democrats have also called for changing the law to make cases like it that involve drugs or alcohol easier to prosecute in general. 

This might seem like a clean issue for the party, in line with prior progressive efforts to crack down on sexual assault via Title IX and expanding statute of limitations laws. 

However, it’s not so simple: According to my conversations with experts and advocates involved in these reform conversations, this is where the Democratic unity begins to fray, because of a divide between two key parts of the progressive coalition. 

The impulse to create stronger protections for victims has crashed into the left’s longstanding suspicion of the criminal justice system. And as a result, a coherent policy response has been hard to craft — and may end up being impossible to get agreement on.

On one side are advocacy groups for women and for victims of rape or sexual assault. They argue that current law — in New York and other states — makes it far too difficult to successfully prosecute perpetrators, and that it should be changed. They’ve advocated for closing what they call the “voluntary intoxication loophole,” which they say makes it harder to prosecute abusers of victims who have willingly consumed drugs or alcohol.

On the other side are various progressive or left constituencies that are deeply skeptical of the criminal justice system. These constituencies — which include key figures in New York’s Black political establishment, public defenders, supporters of criminal justice reform, and members of the Democratic Socialists of America — are united by a shared antipathy to mass incarceration and what they see as disproportionate police targeting of minority communities. 

The former camp argues that false rape and sexual assault allegations are vanishingly rare, that these crimes are hugely underpunished, and that the law needs to be updated to make these prosecutions easier. But the latter camp argues that Black and other nonwhite men are often falsely accused, and that it would be unwise to hand prosecutors another tool they could use to put men in jail in cases where ascertaining consent is more difficult.

It’s a fraught debate. Modern-day progressives have strongly backed the Me Too movement as well as campaigns for racial justice and criminal justice reform. Progressives want to be on the side of victims against the privileged and powerful — but sometimes, they have different ideas about who falls into which category.

The legal issues around “voluntary intoxication” and rape charges, explained

The current controversy in New York focuses on efforts to close what advocates call the “voluntary intoxication loophole” in rape and sexual assault law.

Every state says rape is a crime. Every state says it’s a crime to have sex with someone who is unconscious. And every state says it’s a crime to have sex with someone who is incapacitated due to unknowingly being dosed with drugs.

But what about someone who chooses to drink or take drugs, who remains conscious, and who doesn’t outright refuse consent? Should there be a standard by which the law deems that person incapable of meaningfully consenting, because they are too intoxicated? 

Many states have long had laws on the books saying yes — that someone who voluntarily drinks or does drugs can reach a state where they are too mentally impaired to consent to sex, even if they’re conscious and capable of communicating. But about half of states don’t have such a law, according to the Associated Press. And this hasn’t been an especially partisan issue to this point, with a mix of red and blue states adopting each standard.

The push to change the law in New York predates the Cornell case, and goes back to the late 2010s. At that time, the Me Too movement had put Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. in the hot seat, with advocates criticizing him for not initially prosecuting Harvey Weinstein and arguing he was soft on rape and sex crimes generally. 

In the midst of pivoting on the issue (he had Weinstein indicted in 2018), Vance claimed that, in certain of these cases, his office was hamstrung by what he called a “loophole” in New York law involving intoxication. “Prosecutors cannot bring sex crime charges in cases where the victim became voluntarily intoxicated and was unable to consent,” he wrote in a letter. So really, Vance said, it was on the legislature to change the law.

Quickly, critics argued that Vance had misstated the law, saying it was not actually true that a loophole allowed people to rape voluntarily intoxicated New Yorkers with impunity. Vance’s office later acknowledged that his initial comments were “inartfully put.” 

The problematic cases, Vance’s team argued, were about victims who were “too intoxicated to consent” but who were also at least partially conscious and didn’t outright express their unwillingness — this, they said, was the “gap in the law.” “There’s a real problem that we have with people getting drunk and then being taken advantage of,” Vance said. 

So some Democrats and groups advocating for victims of sexual assault and rape kicked off an effort to change that law, in New York and elsewhere. Their favored bill says that lack of consent can be established if an alleged victim is “temporarily incapable of appraising or controlling their conduct” — and if the accused knew or reasonably should have known that.

Critics argue, though, that such bills go too far, and could make it easier to prosecute sexual encounters that, to the accused, seemed consensual. 

“The proposed legislation fails to provide any objective guidance about when a partner is too intoxicated to legally agree to engage in sexual conduct,” the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said in an emailed statement.

Skeptics of the bill outlined several scenarios that concerned them, including scenarios where one person seems to consent but later decides that, in retrospect, they were too intoxicated for it to have truly been consensual. 

“You get all these scenarios where two people meet up at a bar and they both become voluntarily intoxicated,” said Yung-Mi Lee, a public defender and a former president of New York’s criminal defense lawyers association. “So then, if someone later says, ‘I was voluntarily incapable of appraising my conduct, I lost my inhibitions,’ they could say, ‘You committed a rape against me.’”

To advocates for victims’ rights, these concerns are overstated. “The burden that’s placed on a victim of sexual violence is such a large burden to bear in the first place that these changes to the law are really just slightly opening the door,” Rebecca Zipkin of the advocacy group World Without Exploitation told me.

“The current situation is not working to provide justice for survivors,” Stefan Turkheimer of RAINN, a network for rape and abuse survivors, told me. “The status quo is not okay.”

Why it hasn’t passed in New York

Versions of the voluntary intoxication bill have been signed into law in recent years in Minnesota, Michigan, and Texas. The bill has also repeatedly passed the New York state Senate by overwhelming margins. But it has never been brought to a vote in the lower chamber, the New York state Assembly.

That’s because, advocates for the bill told me, they’ve faced resistance from some influential parts of the Democratic Party and progressive coalition. 

Indeed, the skeptics are said to include two factions that are often at odds: New York’s Black political establishment and the Democratic Socialists of America. 

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie controls which bills come to a vote in his chamber. He was an architect of the state’s sweeping bail reform law, a critic of what he called the existing “racist and classist system,” and has said he would be “a failure as a Black man” if he did not pass criminal justice reform. 

“It is generally known that Speaker Heastie does not believe in creating new crimes because he believes New York suffers from overincarceration,” Lizzie Asher, an advocate for changing the law and a co-founder of the Justice Without Exclusion Coalition, told me. (Heastie has said that he did not bring the bill to a vote because it lacked enough support among his chamber’s Democrats.)

Assembly member Latrice Walker is another champion of criminal justice reform; she even did a hunger strike in 2023 to protest rollbacks to the bail reform law. She spoke out about her concerns about the voluntary intoxication bill earlier this year, telling the New York Times that while she wanted survivors to get justice, she was “cautious about the creation of new laws and our duty to preserve due process protections.”

Zipkin and other advocates have also pointed to the six DSA-affiliated members of the assembly, who are associated with a general skepticism about the criminal justice system and incarceration, as a potential obstacle. None are currently listed as cosponsors of the bill. Back when Zohran Mamdani was in the assembly, he too declined to sign on, advocates noted. 

The DSA as an organization is very critical toward the police and prison system; many DSA members have called for defunding or abolishing the police in the past, and the DSA’s national platform still holds out “fully abolishing the police and prison system” as a long-term goal.

These objections may be harder to maintain amidst a wave of outrage around the Cornell case. Speaker Heastie announced he was creating a working group to reexamine the voluntary intoxication issue. The group includes Walker, whose office told Vox she would not comment on the law while “they undertake their important work.” Heastie told the group to give him recommendations by the end of the year, for consideration in New York’s 2027 legislative session. 

Is this a bigger divide among progressives?

The divide is coming into public view due to national attention on the Cornell case — but it’s long predated the current moment. 

Back in 2016, a California judge gave Brock Turner, a Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, a six-month jail sentence. Advocates for victims’ rights were furious at what they deemed an inexcusably lenient punishment; nationwide outrage and an ultimately successful campaign to recall the judge ensued. 

But some progressive supporters of criminal justice reform felt queasy about the idea of punishing a judge for not locking up a defendant long enough. Skeptical of the criminal justice system and the value of incarceration, they worried this public fury would incentivize judges to be harsher across the board.

“What ultimately will happen is that the people that we represent — people of color, minorities, the disenfranchised, the poor in our communities that make up the people ensnared in our criminal justice system — they’re the ones that are going to bear the cost of this recall,” Sajid Khan, a public defender in Santa Clara County, California, said in 2018.

In practice, these two groups of advocates have generally managed to coexist in the progressive coalition. That’s in part because the Me Too cases that get the most attention have tended to be from white-collar work environments or college campuses, rather than in the dispossessed or marginalized populations that criminal justice reformers are more typically focused on.

But some argue that there’s a more fundamental tension here. Aya Gruber, a professor at the USC Gould School of Law, has written a book arguing that feminists’ efforts to ensure rape and domestic violence are punished more severely have, in practice, ended up contributing to racist mass incarceration. 

“I just think it is a really dangerous thing to start expanding the criminal law in ways that grant all this power to prosecutors,” Gruber told me. “This idea that somehow all this cultural power is going to be used against already privileged people and thus have some sort of egalitarian aspect to it makes it very tempting. But we can identify populations that are more heavily policed, and they are generally not privileged populations.”

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: President Donald Trump is cozying up to Russia again. 

What’s happening? On Wednesday, Russia released an American prisoner, 74-year-old retired teacher Stephen Hubbard, back to the US. The US, Trump said in a social media post, “out of respect for President Trump, was not required to give anything in return.” 

Hubbard’s release is unquestionably good news. But Trump is wrong: In just the last month, his administration has delivered for Russia in more ways than one, often inexplicably and despite bipartisan condemnation. 

What is Trump doing for Russia? Late last week, he waived upcoming economic sanctions on Russia that he had only recently signed into law after they passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support. He also: 

• Struck a diesel deal with Russia, temporarily lifting fuel sanctions on the country in exchange for Russia releasing a trivial amount of diesel into the global market; 
• Announced — seemingly without talking to either party — a Russia-Ukraine “energy ceasefire” favorable to Russia (which has since fallen apart); 
• Temporarily interrupted US intel sharing with Ukraine and played a role in interfering with Ukraine’s access to Starlink, which helps power the country’s drone warfare against Russia; and 
• Called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to be replaced.

Last month, Trump also invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to the annual G20 summit later this year, which would mark Putin’s first appearance since 2019.

What does Trump get out of all of this? There’s Hubbard’s release, but taking that on Trump’s own terms (muddled though they are), the US didn’t give anything to secure it — which means that all of those favors have amounted to not much at all, other than papering over Russia’s role as an international bad actor and breaking with US allies in Europe. 

Why does this matter? Trump’s Russia embrace comes at an awful time for Ukraine, which, as the New York Times reported earlier this month, is facing a Russian campaign to “freeze Ukrainians into submission” as winter approaches. Nevertheless, on Wednesday, Trump envoy Steve Witkoff called Putin a “humanitarian.”

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I was delighted to learn about the US’s new national park yesterday, its 64th. Chiricahua National Park — until Tuesday, only a national monument — is the first new park in six years. Located in southeastern Arizona, it’s also called the “Wonderland of Rocks,” according to the Washington Post; you can read more about it here with a gift link. 

Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

As the White House contemplates losing Congress, there has been an unusually early effort to find a Republican scapegoat.

The 2026 midterms are less than two weeks away, which means we’ll soon have a better idea of what the next two years of American politics could look like. If Democrats win at least one chamber of Congress — and they’re comfortable favorites to control the House — they’ll enter 2027 with oversight power for the first time in Donald Trump’s second term. If they win the Senate, too, they’ll have even more power. 

Whatever the outcome, Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin wants her party to hit the ground running. In an interview with Vox’s Astead Herndon at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, she explained that the key divide in the Democratic Party is no longer “moderate versus progressive.” 

“Particularly in the era of Trump, I think it is fight versus flight,” she said. “Regardless of your persuasion, do you believe that we need to think differently about how we exercise power and oversight in the era of Trump and if we don’t, we’re at risk of losing our country as we know it?” 

Slotkin, who says she’s on “Team Fight,” discusses what that Day 1 Democratic agenda should look like, how she plans to hold the Trump administration accountable, whether she’s considering a presidential bid, and more.

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

How does Congress reassert its role so that people believe in the kind of checks and balances that Trump has washed away?

When I think about, hopefully, Democrats doing well in a few short weeks here, the election is the end of one phase, but a much more important phase then comes into focus, and that’s what you do with the power that you’ve won.

If we manage to win the House and especially the House and the Senate, there’s three things that we need to do. One, we need to pick two or three big pieces of legislation that speak directly to people’s pocketbooks and go hard on those — I would say housing and healthcare. 

Number two, we do have to have accountability for the unbelievable corruption that we are living under right now. But you can’t just make that your whole personality. You have to pick signature cases, and you have to go after people and projects that are super egregious. 

Everyone knows the East Wing of the White House, and people feel that in a way that’s different from a nameless contract at the Pentagon or whatever. So you need to pick those signature cases and go hard on accountability, not just Trump. Because of course, there will be moments of, “Let’s go after Trump himself.” As someone who voted to impeach him twice, he’s still there, right?

But the people around Donald Trump who are doing his bidding and enabling this have no such immunity. They have no immunity the way the president does. And to me, he couldn’t do any of this stuff without all of those people saluting and supporting it. So you go after the people who do his bidding. 

Third, we have to Trump-proof the government going forward so that no president of any party can ever abuse the system the way he did, because we figured out under Trump that a lot of the stuff that we thought were laws were actually just norms, standards, habits, expectations, good citizens.

And shame was required.

Shame was required. And when you have a president who has no shame, they just walk all over that. And then even for things that were laws, the penalties, the teeth are not there. So you make an ad that plays during a football game, a political ad paid for by US taxpayer dollars, your dollars. The penalty is like, you have to pay a fine.

Well, if they have the money and they have all the keys to the government, they’re going to pay that fine and not worry about it. So how do we get teeth in the things that were laws and strengthen those other laws going forward?

You mentioned Trump-proofing the government. At this point, he has stacked the courts with a lot of favorable folks. He controls the Republican Party, has installed people who do his bidding on each of those levels.

Is that possible? It does seem a little hard to figure out how the government becomes Trump-proof when it’s beyond an individual at this point.

One of the things I think is changing about politics is that there is a groundswell of energy around certain issues that is not partisan. The groundswell going on in the Midwest about data centers or Flock cameras or AI in general is not like, “I’m a Democrat, I’m a Republican.” It is organized and grassroots. 

Data centers went zero to 60 faster than any issue I’ve seen out there. And I think harnessing that outrage — and that outrage also, I think, is growing on the corruption side — so how do you harness that for an ethics package? 

And look, I don’t agree with Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri on almost anything, but he has a bill to get rid of corporate PACs and money in politics. Working with strange bedfellows, I think there is still a lot we can do because of that upward pressure.

The other piece I was going to ask about — you mentioned the impeachment efforts, and I feel like one of the things that came from those was a lack of belief from the public about the effectiveness of those efforts.

Let’s say Democrats were to take back the House and possibly the Senate. Should impeachment be a focus of a potentially incoming Democratic House?

I will say, because I still see him on the floor, that if Sen. Mitch McConnell had done the right thing, then Donald Trump would have been impeached after January 6, but he did not. And his legacy, along with his health issues, will be how he is remembered.

I am into effectiveness, and if we have the House but not the Senate, I don’t have a ton of faith that my Republican colleagues are going to have any more strength. I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him. 

I want young people coming out of school to say, “Should I go work for the Trump administration? That sounds fun. I might get an opportunity.” I want them to be like, “Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.” I want that deterrence message sent.

I have to ask about [2028]. A number of Democrats have said already that they’re thinking about running for president. Is that something you’re thinking about?

I have been open that I’m looking at it. It does not need to be me. I just need someone who understands the mission. And if that person comes out of the big process, I will be the first gal to get on whatever team they’re on and help them win in the parts of the country that I know well.

But I think what is clear to me is that the American public is looking for something different — that generational shift. And I think that there’s hopefully going to be lots of opportunities for lots of people who you might not be thinking of who haven’t been sitting waiting their turn who are going to get in the mix. And I think that’s a good thing.

I wanted to ask about something on the 2028 front. One thing that we have heard consistently over the last year, and I think this is a consequence of Democratic trauma from 2024 and also 2016 — people’s fears about sexism when women run. I’ve heard so many people, including women voters, tell me they think it needs to be a white guy.

I find it to be a kind of depressing takeaway of those elections. It’s wrong, and I know it’s wrong because this very question is what we’ve been digging into as I’ve traveled around the country. What I think is happening is right now, is the public is so in search of something different from the traditional. If you’re a good communicator, if you’re exciting, if you’ve got big ideas, you can surmount what are thought of as traditional deficiencies or traditional weaknesses.

So if you’re a woman, if you’re African American, if you’re Muslim American, if you’re whatever, those things forever have been thought of as negatives. But if you’re the right person with the right energy, you can surmount that. I think we’re seeing that around the country already.

With two weeks until the midterm elections, Democrats are comfortably favored to take the House. Their path to Senate control, though, is harder — and it could run through Maine, where longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins is in a tight race against former state Senate president Troy Jackson, a Democrat.

When Collins first ran for Senate in 1996, she pledged to serve only two terms in the Senate. But 30 years later, she’s still in office despite the odds, as Maine has grown more blue around her. 

One secret to her political durability is her success in “bringing in the bacon” for Mainers: Her official Senate website features a map of projects that she says she helped fund as chair of the Senate Appropriations committee, including hospitals, bridges, affordable housing, public transportation, and water systems.

This year, though, all of that money might not be enough for Mainers to look past their frustration with another Republican: President Donald Trump.

To learn more about what Maine voters are thinking as they prepare to head to the polls, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Washington Post reporter Dan Merica, who’s on the ground reporting from Maine, about why some Mainers who backed Collins before are now reconsidering their support.

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. 

Tell me how this race got to be so fascinating.

Maine this cycle was going to be interesting no matter what. Susan Collins is the only Republican senator who is running for reelection in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024 this cycle.

But since the outset, it has really defined, I think, these midterm elections. The rise of Graham Platner, the oysterman turned politician, really hinted at the populist anti-establishment fervor that was in the Democratic base. That fervor was so strong that it prevented the sitting incumbent Democratic governor from winning the primary here in Maine to challenge Susan Collins. I think that said a lot about the Democratic Party. 

Obviously Graham Platner’s campaign then flamed out and he ended his campaign because of the allegations of sexual assault against him. 

But then you have the Collins angle of it, and she is really the poster candidate for a Republican who, in this election where Donald Trump’s approval rating is so low, is having to basically suspend political gravity in a state that really does not approve of the job that he’s done as president.

I want to ground this conversation in how voters in Maine feel about him right now because I know you’ve been talking to voters. What is the vibe out there? Are people mad? 

There’s a lot of anger for the president here. Maine is in a unique position where it’s been on the receiving end of a lot of what those people who are mad at Trump would say is harm that he has caused. 

It’s a border state. It borders Canada. There’s a ton of cross-border relationships. And so his attacks on Canada, his suggestion that it’s going to be the 51st state, has really hurt the state of Maine because it’s hurt tourism in the state. Many Canadians come down south to vacation in Maine. And there’s been a drop in tourism because of that fight with Canada.

The tariffs have hurt Maine because so much of the wood and the lumber that is grown and cut here in Maine is actually shipped up north to Canada to be processed, and then what it is processed as is shipped back across the United States. The tariffs have been incredibly harmful for the state. 

And then you have ICE. I’m in Biddeford. There was a shooting of an individual here in Biddeford. That has been an issue in this race as well. 

So there’s a lot of anger at the president, and it’s very easy to feel that when you’re talking to voters. I actually just spoke with a voter who voted for Troy Jackson, dropped his ballot in an early voting box. And I just asked him, “What did you vote for? Who’d you vote for? Why did you vote?” And he got visibly emotional when he started talking about the Trump administration and how scared he was for the future of democracy and that was why he was voting for Troy Jackson.

I’ve also talked to voters who supported Susan Collins just six years ago at the end of the first Trump administration. They voted for her back then and they feel like the last six years have made it impossible for them to vote for her again. And then on the other side, you have people who are hardcore die-hard Trump supporters and they actually think that Susan Collins has been too hard on the president. 

She’s in a really tough spot politically where on her left, there are a lot of voters, including some who have voted for her recently, who are furious with her, who don’t think she stands up to the president enough. And then on her right, there are voters who think that she stands up to the president too much.

It’s funny to think about these two figures representing the same political party because while they might agree on a few issues here and there, they couldn’t represent more different brands of Republicanism. What’s the truth of how much Susan Collins sides with Donald Trump?

She has sided with the president at times. She has voted against the president at times. I was struck that, in the debate on Thursday, she said, “I have been a senator under five different presidents.” I don’t exactly remember what her number was, but she noted that she had only endorsed one Republican president and that was George W. Bush.

I was just in Kennebunk, which is right next to Kennebunkport, which is a historical location for the Bush family. They have a large home at Walker Point. There is some relationship between the Bush family and Maine, [and it] makes sense that Susan Collins really does kind of line up more with the Bush-style Republican Party than she does the Trump-style Republican Party.

What’s her actual relationship with the president like? And surely he’s well aware that she was one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach him over the January 6 insurrection. Does that get in the way of their relationship?

I think he’s very well aware when somebody breaks with him. I would have to imagine he’s aware of that. 

“It was a fascinating comment that there are rules for Republicans who are running across the country, but that maybe Susan Collins doesn’t exactly have to adhere to those rules.”

I was actually told by a Republican early in the campaign that President Trump demands loyalty from people that he supports, but this person actually said that there are rules for Republicans and that there are rules for Susan Collins and that Republicans were willing to kind of give her some leeway, which is actually an acknowledgement that they know the bind that she is in. 

They know that she’s running for reelection in a blue state, in a state that the president lost, in a state that is very hostile right now to the president. It was a fascinating comment that there are rules for Republicans who are running across the country, but that maybe Susan Collins doesn’t exactly have to adhere to those rules.

Affordability is a huge issue in Maine, right? And Donald Trump hasn’t exactly helped…

That has really heightened the competitiveness of this race. The same race is always going to be competitive, but the fact that gas prices are where it’s at, the fact that we’re going into winter, it’s starting to get cold up here. Home heating oil prices are above $6 a gallon. 

I think about 80 percent of homes that are heated by home heating oil are in the Northeast, a large portion of them probably in Maine and New Hampshire, two states with Senate races in November. It’s been a huge issue up here. 

The Trump administration has actually tried to get rid of a low-income program to help with home heating oil that helps a lot of folks in Maine. You’ve seen Republicans, from the gubernatorial candidate to congressional candidates, break with the president on that because they know it’s a huge issue. 

So when you talk about affordability, yes, we’re talking about the price of beef, the price of groceries, the price of gas, but there’s also these localized issues in a state like Maine, in particular. And I think home heating oil actually could be a really fascinating, underappreciated issue in this race. If you grew up or live in Arizona or Nevada or California, you’re not thinking about the oil that you need to heat your home. That could be a real issue here in a state like Maine.

Collins is a political survivor. For all of it to come crashing down because of, essentially, who the president was — is that a bit of a sad ending to this political story for her? Do you think she’d maybe have regrets about how she approached Donald Trump?

It’s certainly possible. And you’ve seen other senators who have bucked the president and have then retired and not run for reelection. I’m thinking of Thom Tillis, for example, in North Carolina. There is this fascinating case study in how the Republican Party has changed when you look at Susan Collins and you look at Donald Trump. 

Someone like Susan Collins in an earlier iteration of the Republican Party would’ve had a lot of success and would’ve probably stayed onside the Republican Party in a way that she just hasn’t done under Trump. She represents a different kind of era of the Republican Party. 

I think there was a time when bringing home the bacon to a small state really worked politically. I’m thinking about Harry Reid, for example — he represented Nevada. In 2010, he faced a really difficult reelection campaign and his entire campaign was bringing home the bacon to Nevada, a similarly small state, and he won reelection in 2010.

I think if Susan Collins wins reelection in 2026, it’ll prove that there’s still a lot of goodwill for politicians who can deliver funding projects for states like Maine, states like Nevada, smaller states that maybe don’t get the kind of national attention that others do. 

If she does lose, a lot of it will be put at the feet of President Trump. I’ll be fascinated to talk to her if she does lose, because I do think she will have a lot to say that she probably hasn’t said yet, but I think that’s an if, and I think we have two more weeks to find that out.

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

You can’t quite say that President Donald Trump is “turning” on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because he never truly seemed to have Zelenskyy’s back. 

There was that time Trump panned Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian.” Or that excruciating meeting where Trump and Vice President JD Vance harangued Zelenskyy for inadequately “thanking” them.

But over the past week, Trump has dropped even the meager niceties he sort of faked before. On Monday, he blamed Zelenskyy for failing to end Russia’s invasion…and suggested it was time for “somebody else” to take over negotiations. 

Three days earlier, he delayed a package of tariffs and other sanctions designed to pressure Russia to end its four-year onslaught in Ukraine. And a week before that, Trump announced — after an apparently chummy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin — that the US would reopen its market to Russian diesel, reversing a ban imposed shortly after the invasion. 

Go a little deeper

All this diplomatic whiplash comes as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine with drone and missile strikes, killing hundreds of civilians in September alone and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. The first two weeks of October ranked among the deadliest periods for civilians in the country since 2022, according to UN monitors. 

But while those escalating strikes threaten both human lives and long-standing international norms around territory and sovereignty — norms that actually matter quite a lot to American security, long-term — there’s another issue that Trump is more concerned with right now: Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. 

Those strikes drive up the cost of gas, and those prices are, of course, of profound concern to American voters, who are paying near- record highs for gasoline and diesel fuel (…primarily due to the war in Iran, I am obliged to note). More than any other issue, high living costs threaten to hamstring the GOP in next month’s midterm elections. 

Trump has, perhaps predictably, pursued a Russia policy that he says could ease prices at home. In addition to allowing imports of Russian diesel, Trump has demanded that Ukraine stop targeting Russian oil refineries and ramped up pressure on Zelenskyy to negotiate an end to the war.

According to Ukrainian officials, that campaign has lately involved disruptions to both intelligence-sharing and the US-based satellite internet service Ukraine uses to intercept Russian attacks. (On Tuesday afternoon, Zelenskyy said intel sharing — if not satellite service — had been restored again.) 

In either case, it will likely take more than arm-twisting to make the whole situation go away for good. As Vox’s Josh Keating laid out earlier this year, the US does have quite a lot of leverage over Ukraine — and Trump could very well pressure Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal with no real assurance that Russia won’t just invade again. 

But we’ve all seen this movie before, as recently as 2014: Without credible guarantees, Putin could catch his breath, regroup, and return to Ukraine in a few months or years to take even more land. 

The real, long-term threat there is that a stronger Russia would be even better positioned to menace the rest of Europe. And America’s power could suffer as its allies look elsewhere for less fair-weather friends. 

But uh…diesel might be a bit cheaper? Thank God for small mercies, I guess. 

One link for later

➨ May we suggest a truly miserable read? My colleague Marina Bolotnikova calls The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us “a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive.” The recent book, by the noted economist George Loewenstein, examines the (necessary!) role of negative emotions in our lives and civilization…and suggests, albeit indirectly, some paths for making peace with them. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Turkey is the world capital of hair transplants? There are at least 500 clinics for that purpose in Istanbul alone, beloved by medical tourists. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the currency of Poland? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the mass-market beer named after a Dutch river. That would be Amstel. The city of Amsterdam is also named for a dam on the same river.

One of the last decade’s most consequential changes to how the Supreme Court operates is the growth of the so-called shadow docket — a process that allows the justices to decide cases unusually quickly, and often without full briefing or oral argument.

Historically, the Court would typically allow contentious legal issues to percolate in the lower courts for months or even years before the justices agreed to decide one of those issues. Then they’d spend months reading briefs, hearing arguments, and debating the case amongst themselves before they finally issued an opinion. This slow process existed because the Supreme Court is the final word on many legal questions — the Court can even override Congress if it claims a law is unconstitutional — and so it should be cautious before it hands down a decision that cannot easily be displaced.

A new case, which recently arrived on the Court’s shadow docket, embodies all the reasons why America’s highest Court should act carefully and slowly. K.M.K. v. Washington Interscholastic Activities Association involves a highly contentious issue — the plaintiffs in the case effectively want the Supreme Court to bar transgender women from women’s sports teams at high schools and universities, even in states that support trans inclusion in sports.

It also involves an appalling sexual assault allegation. One of the plaintiffs in the case is a high school women’s team wrestler who is identified only by her initials because she is a minor. She claims that one of her wrestling opponents, who is transgender, “forcefully” penetrated the plaintiff’s vagina with her fingers during a match.

As a memo from the local prosecutor’s office points out, if these allegations are true then K.M.K. is the victim of a very serious crime — rape in the third degree. The prosecutor’s office, however, decided not to prosecute because it concluded that it could not prove that a sex crime was committed beyond a reasonable doubt. Among other things, prosecutors spoke to the referee who officiated the match, and he said that “nothing stood out to him during the match” and that “after watching the video of the match, he could not say that the suspect’s hand placement was ‘anything out of the ordinary.’”

The school district, meanwhile, says that it has reviewed video of the match, interviewed both competitors, and that its investigation into the allegation is “still ongoing.”

K.M.K., in other words, is exactly the sort of case that the justices should step away from, sending it back down to the lower courts to gather more information and to fully think through the difficult legal issues presented by the case. Setting aside the horrifying allegations against her one-time opponent, K.M.K.’s lawyers — most of whom work for a Christian right law firm, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — make novel legal arguments that ask the Court to make broad pronouncements that go far beyond its previous precedents. 

One of their arguments, if taken seriously by the justices, could potentially make it impossible for any school athletes, whether cis or trans, to participate in competitive sports of any kind.

There is a very real risk, in other words, that the Supreme Court will, if it moves too quickly in this case, harm millions of school athletes throughout the country. The factual question of whether a particular wrestler committed a crime is separate from the legal question of whether federal law strips states of their authority over trans participation in women’s sports. And this legal question deserves more deliberation than the Court can give it if it decides this case on the shadow docket.

So what are the actual legal issues in K.M.K.?

In West Virginia v. B.P.J. (2026), the Supreme Court warned that judges should not be given the power to decide which athletes may compete on a women’s sports team. “The legislatures and the schools are better equipped — and under the Constitution, are the more appropriate entities,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for his Court, “to assess the competing medical and scientific considerations and draw appropriate lines.”

B.P.J., of course, was a loss for transgender rights. The Court rejected a constitutional challenge to state laws that forbid trans women from playing on school sports teams within that state. But the legal question in B.P.J. was whether laws barring trans women from women’s sports are allowed — a question that the Court’s Republican majority answered in the affirmative. A victory for the plaintiffs in K.M.K., by contrast, would likely establish that no state may permit trans women to compete on women’s sports teams, regardless of what the people of that state want.

This Court is often skeptical of claims by trans rights advocates, and it almost always resolves disputes between cultural liberals and religious conservatives in favor of the religious right. That said, this Court has thus far respected states’ rights on another contentious issue that is a high priority for the religious right: abortion. Although the Court’s Republican majority overruled Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, it has rejected some attempts to restrict abortion in blue states — including by repeatedly ruling against litigants who seek to ban the abortion medication mifepristone.

So it is, at least, possible that this Court will follow a similar path in K.M.K. and conclude that the question of which team trans women should play on should be answered by the states and not the Supreme Court.

Broadly speaking, ADF raises two legal arguments against Washington state’s policy allowing trans women to play on women’s sports teams. It claims that Title IX, a federal law that bars “sex” discrimination by most schools, implicitly requires those schools to have sports teams that only cisgender women may play on. It also claims that the Court’s recent decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026), which requires public schools to out trans students to their parents even if the students wish to keep their gender identity secret, also requires those schools to exclude trans women from women’s sports.

There’s no reason for the Supreme Court to decide either of these questions now, however. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Lux v. Rodrigues (2010), when a party that lost in the lower courts seeks an injunction from a Supreme Court justice before their case is fully litigated in those lower courts, they must demonstrate that “the legal rights at issue are ‘indisputably clear.’” This rule, like many old rules disfavoring shadow docket decisions, exists to prevent the justices from rushing into a decision that may later prove unwise.

There is no plausible argument that Title IX “indisputably” bars trans women from women’s sports. That’s because, just a few months ago in B.P.J., the Court held that it was not deciding the question of “whether, under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, schools may allow biological males who identify as female to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams.” So that’s a recent Supreme Court precedent holding that the answer to this legal question remains open.

Mirabelli, meanwhile, is an unusually thinly reasoned decision. The Court’s Republican majority held that schools must out trans students because of a judicially created doctrine saying that parents have “primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children.’” But the Court’s analysis of this issue was just a single paragraph long, it relied on the most malleable doctrine in all of US constitutional law, and it had nothing to say about sports. 

Moreover, as the school district points out in its brief, the Court has never held that a parent’s right to direct the upbringing of their child includes a right to dictate which rules will be used by school sports teams. If such a right existed, a parent might insist that a school bar players of a particular race. Or they might demand that their child be allowed to play football without being tackled.

Competitive team sports simply cannot exist if one player’s mother is allowed to demand changes to the rules that neither the league nor the other players support.

In any event, at this stage in the litigation it should be enough for the Court to say that the unique right claimed by K.M.K.’s mother — the right to dictate which rules a multischool competitive sports league will use — is not “indisputably clear” under current law. 

What should happen when the Court eventually decides whether blue states may allow trans women to play on women’s teams?

It is, to borrow from Lux, indisputably clear that the Court should not give the K.M.K. plaintiffs the sweeping policy change that they seek in a shadow docket ruling. But the justices cannot avoid, forever, the question of whether federal law forbids trans women from playing on women’s teams. So how should they resolve this question when it is more properly presented to them?

Let’s dispose of the plaintiffs’ Mirabelli argument first. While the Court has held that parents have some right to direct the education of their children, prior to Mirabelli, this right was construed narrowly. One older case held that states may not forbid parents from sending their children to private schools. Another held that the government may not bar teachers at these schools from teaching the German language.

Prior to the Court’s barely explained decision in Mirabelli, however, the Court had never held that parents may dictate how public schools operate, and the school district’s brief in K.M.K. cites several court decisions warning against giving parents too much authority over public schools. (The Court did hold, in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), that parents who object to a school’s curriculum on religious grounds may opt their children out of certain lessons. But the K.M.K. plaintiffs do not raise a religious objection.) As the Supreme Court said in Prince v. Massachusetts (1944), states may “restrict the parent’s control by requiring school attendance, regulating or prohibiting the child’s labor and in many other ways.” 

It’s clear from Mirabelli that the Court’s Republicans do not share this caution about judicial control over public schools. But, because Mirabelli was so thinly reasoned, it’s also impossible for outside observers to determine why these justices want an unprecedented amount of control over public schooling, or whether they have good reasons for asserting this new power.

I will simply reiterate the school district’s objection that, once the Supreme Court opens the door to parents dictating which rules will be used in school sporting competitions, the lawsuits will not end with parents seeking to kick trans women out of women’s sports. The next parent may object to their child wrestling Black people. Or they may demand that their child be given protective gear that gives them a competitive advantage. Some parents may also demand rules changes that conflict with changes demanded by other parents. And there is no principled way to distinguish these requests from a request to exclude trans women.

There are myriad problems, meanwhile, with the K.M.K. plaintiffs’ Title IX argument. That statute provides that schools that receive “Federal financial assistance” may not exclude individuals from “any education program” on “the basis of sex.” This statute has long been read to require equal treatment of men’s and women’s sports by schools that receive federal funds.

But, as the school district argues in its brief, Washington schools do not discriminate on the basis of “sex” — which the Court has defined to mean sex assigned at birth in this context. Instead, they classify athletes on the basis of gender identity. There is one team for all people who identify as male, whether trans or cis, and another team for all people who identify as female. Social conservatives may object to this arrangement, but it does not classify students based on their sex assigned at birth at all.

The K.M.K. plaintiffs’ argument is also undermined by federal regulations implementing Title IX. Those regulations provide that schools generally should not separate women and men in sports, but that they “may operate or sponsor separate teams for members of each sex where selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill or the activity involved is a contact sport.” It is quite a stretch to read regulations saying that schools “may” have sex-segregated teams to say that schools must ensure that their teams are strictly sex segregated.

Finally, recall that Title IX only applies to schools that accept federal funding — schools have the option of rejecting Title IX’s requirements if they also forego federal grants. This matters because, as the Court recently held in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections (2026), “Congress must clearly and unambiguously alert a grant recipient to any condition on federal funds.”

Thus, if there is any ambiguity about whether Title IX requires schools to exclude trans women from women’s sports, that ambiguity must be resolved against imposing any requirements on public schools. Title IX may only be read to ban trans women from women’s sports if it “clearly and unambiguously” does so.

Again, there’s no reason for the justices to resolve either of these questions because, at this early stage in the litigation, the Supreme Court should simply decline to decide K.M.K. because the plaintiffs’ legal rights are not “indisputably clear.” But this Court is often impatient, especially in cases involving culture war issues. Mirabelli was also a shadow docket case, but that didn’t stop the Court’s Republicans from inventing a new legal rule compelling teachers to out their trans students.

There’s a serious risk, in other words, that this Court will rush to decide K.M.K. before it fully considers the legal arguments on either side, or even learns whether the genuinely shocking allegations raised by the plaintiffs have merit.

Justice Samuel Alito’s new book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, isn’t going to set the world on fire with its bold new ideas. It’s mostly a collection of Alito’s old speeches. 

But if the book treads familiar ground, the reception to it among writers who share Alito’s broad alignment with the political right is quite surprising. Three recent reviews of Alito’s new book —  all by right-leaning authors — sound a lot like the longtime liberal criticisms of Alito.

All three of these reviews accuse Alito of engaging in results-oriented decision-making — meaning that he often seems to start with the outcome that he prefers, and then comes up with a rationale to justify that outcome. This, they argue, is at odds with Alito’s fairly recent decision to label himself an “originalist,” an approach to judging that’s long been sold as a way to keep judges from mistaking “their own predilections for the law.”

Originalism, for the uninitiated, is the idea that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is to ask what its words meant at the time it was ratified. It’s more than just a fashionable idea among many Republican lawyers and judges. Many legal conservatives view originalism as a central part of their professional identity, and powerful conservative organizations like the Federalist Society have long evangelized originalism as the one true way to interpret the Constitution.

Yet, a consistent theme in the critical reviews of So Ordered is that Alito’s actual approach to judging cannot be squared with his decision to label himself an “originalist” in the book’s title. As Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, a conservative who has written critically about originalism in the past, writes in his review of the book: “Alito’s embrace of the originalist label is also likely to come as a surprise to people on the left and the right.”

Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the second Bush administration, writes in his review of the book that early proponents of originalism, including Scalia, often sold it as a more restrained alternative to “a liberal conception of judging called ‘living constitutionalism.’” Goldsmith says that approach, which was ascendant among liberals several decades ago but has since fallen out of favor, read the Constitution as an adaptable document whose meaning could evolve to deal with “current needs.” 

Conservatives needed an intellectually consistent way to put the brakes on that impulse, and originalism was their answer. By treating the Constitution as an inflexible charter whose meaning was fixed at some distant point in the past, Scalia and his fellow travelers hoped to “limit or reverse the progressive transformation of American society set in motion by Supreme Court decisions that had expanded criminal-defense rights, ended prayer in public school, recognized the rights to contraception and abortion, strengthened voting equality, and supported affirmative action and busing.”

Now that movement conservatives control the Supreme Court, however, it’s less clear whether originalism is still useful to conservatism. As Jason Willick, a conservative Washington Post columnist, writes in his review of Alito’s book, “originalism can get in the way of the right’s ambitions.” Sometimes, an honest application of originalism produces liberal results.

Willick interprets Alito’s book as an attempt to “keep the marriage” between conservatives and originalism together. But if that’s true, it is an open marriage. Alito is happy to make originalist arguments when they suit his preferred outcomes. But his greatest value to conservative Republicans is often that he is willing to write non-originalist opinions that reach the result his team desires, but that a more principled originalist would view as beyond the pale.

On the surface, the fact that conservative intellectuals are starting to notice, and criticize, Alito’s weak commitment to one of the conservative legal movement’s core ideas might indicate that a schism is forming between committed originalists and more flexible partisans like Alito. Perhaps the conservative legal movement is becoming a victim of its own success?

In So Ordered, Alito seems to be suggesting the opposite: He’s offering proof that a judge can still identify as an out and proud originalist, even if they enjoy frequent flings with the right-wing version of “living constitutionalism.” 

More broadly, if Democrats hope that the growing tension between Republican judges’ preferred methodology and their ability to reach reliably conservative results will lead to more liberal outcomes, they should expect to be disappointed. Alito, despite his apostasy, is still one of the most celebrated figures in the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative bar association that has long evangelized originalism as the one true way to interpret the Constitution. 

What is Alito’s actual approach to judging?

So Ordered offers a simple way for judges whose originalist and conservative identities are in tension to resolve that tension: They can continue to self-identify as “originalists,” while still reaching whatever result they want in the most important cases.

Alito hasn’t always described himself as an originalist. In fact, at times he’s openly mocked originalism. In a 2011 argument about how the First Amendment applies to violent video games, Alito responded to an originalist question from Justice Antonin Scalia by quipping, “I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?” 

In the past, Alito has, at some points, called himself a “practical originalist,” and at other times expressed doubt about that self-description.

In their reviews, both Goldsmith and Willick highlight Alito’s statement that originalism can only survive as “anything other than a minor academic curiosity” if it is “widely viewed as generally producing good results.” But, as Willick notes, this raises an important question: “Viewed as producing good results by whom?”

The answer to this question is that the justice wants to reach results that he personally, as well as other members of the Republican Party’s right flank, view as good. That, as Willick lays out, entails cracking down on broad exercises of executive power during the Obama administration, then letting those reins go slack during Donald Trump’s presidencies. 

The actual approach to judging Alito describes in So Ordered, the libertarian author Damon Root writes, sounds “much more like the results-oriented ‘living constitutionalism’ that originalists are supposed to oppose.”

Goldsmith, Willick and Root are hardly the only right-leaning thinkers to notice Alito’s thin commitment to originalism. There is also Alito’s closest ideological ally on the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas.

The occasion for Thomas’s criticism was Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) v. Community Financial Services (2024), a bizarre lawsuit where a lower federal court claimed that an entire federal agency, the CFPB, violated a provision of the Constitution that had literally never been cited by any other court in all of US history to strike down a federal law. 

That provision says that the Treasury may not pay money unless Congress allows that spending through “Appropriations made by law.” As Thomas explained in the Court’s opinion in CFPB, this constitutional provision merely establishes that Congress must identify a “specified source of public money” that an agency may draw upon when it funds that agency. Because the CFPB cleared this low bar, it is constitutional.

Alito’s dissent, meanwhile, did not really make a legal argument against the CFPB. Instead, he spent the bulk of his dissent discussing centuries-old conflicts between England’s Parliament and its king, which eventually inspired the drafters of the Constitution to place appropriations in Congress’s hands. Yet, as Thomas writes, Alito “never connects its summary of history back to the word ‘Appropriations.’” Alito simply listed a bunch of historical facts that are tangentially related to the legal question before his Court, then leapt to the conclusion that the CFPB is unconstitutional.

Alito, in other words, did not actually practice originalism when he wrote this dissent. As Alito concedes in So Ordered, originalism isn’t simply the idea that judges should rely on historical sources when deciding cases. It is, in Alito’s own words, “the theory that constitutional provisions should be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.” Originalists, in other words, are supposed to use history to determine what the words of the Constitution mean, not to vomit historical anecdotes onto a page before reaching an irrelevant legal conclusion.

So Alito’s CFPB dissent is not originalist, but it is entirely consistent with the results-oriented approach to judging that even his conservative critics have begun to notice. One of Alito’s major projects as a justice appears to be attempting to dismantle anything accomplished by President Barack Obama. The CFPB was created by the financial reform legislation that Obama signed in 2010. Alito has also tried three times to kill Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act.

Yet, as Goldsmith writes in his review of So Ordered, Alito “has supported the Trump administration in every second-term case of importance, including with dissents in every major Trump loss.”

Beyond his unapologetic partisanship, Alito is, as law professor Neil Siegel wrote in a 2017 review of the justice’s career, “the primary judicial voice of the many millions of Americans who appear to be losing the culture wars.”

In So Ordered, for example, Alito repeatedly brings up an argument against same-sex marriage that he first raised in his dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court’s landmark marriage equality decision. Same-sex marriage should remain illegal, Alito claims, because its legalization “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.” Alito feared that, once gay equality became enshrined in the law, Americans who reject that equality “risk being labeled as bigots.”

But this isn’t even a legal argument, much less an originalist one. The First Amendment’s free speech clause protects the right to call someone a bigot, even if Alito believes that the charge is unjustified. And the First Amendment’s guarantee that everyone may freely exercise their religion allows believers in liberal faiths to teach others that God abhors discrimination. The Constitution has never been understood to deny civil rights to a group of people because someone might speak disparagingly about individuals who oppose that right. If it did, constitutional rights could not exist.

All of which is a long way of saying that Alito’s conservative critics are right to label him a results-oriented judge. He has no real commitment to a principled theory of interpretation like originalism. His approach to individual cases often turns on whether the defendant is a Democrat or a Republican. And many of his opinions do not so much make legal arguments as, to borrow the words of Lionel Trilling, rely on “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

Originalists need Alito more than Alito needs originalism

Originalism is a powerful tool in the hands of judges who wish to radically change how the Constitution is understood. In the American legal system, courts typically follow a principle known as stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided” — which holds that judges should almost always follow the legal rules laid down by previous decisions, even if a judge does not like how that earlier case was decided.

Originalism, by contrast, posits that a judicial decision’s legitimacy flows, not from its alignment with prior precedents, but from the judge’s understanding of how the words of the Constitution were originally understood. This allows judges who wish to toss out longstanding legal rules to wrap their opinions in the trappings of America’s founding, and to paint judges who honor stare decisis as betrayers of the Constitution’s true meaning.

Historically, originalism has been used by liberals and conservatives alike to justify dismantling legal rules they despised. Franklin D. Roosevelt-appointed Justice Hugo Black, for example, wielded originalist arguments to attack precedents that undercut the New Deal, or that otherwise interfered with progressive economic legislation.

Similarly, conservatives like Alito use originalist rhetoric to undermine liberal precedents that they abhor. Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which abolished the constitutional right to an abortion, is chock-full of originalist arguments that “until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law.”

But one problem with the Constitution’s early history, at least if you are a results-driven judge, is that it does not map perfectly onto anyone’s modern-day political beliefs. While originalism sometimes gives judges strong arguments that they can use to undermine previous Supreme Court decisions, a results-oriented judge like Alito will inevitably want to reach outcomes that originalist arguments cannot support.

Consider, for example, affirmative action. There is no plausible originalist argument against it. The same Congress that drafted the 14th Amendment, which the Court’s Republican majority used in 2023 to abolish race-conscious admissions programs at most universities, also enacted numerous affirmative action programs — ranging from the 1866 Freedmen’s Bureau Act to a much smaller program providing money “for the relief of freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia.”

But the dearth of originalist arguments against affirmative action has not stopped this Court from implementing its preferred racial policies. As Goldsmith notes, only three members of the current Court — Thomas, plus Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — “regularly try to practice originalism, and they do so very unevenly.” So, when the Republican justices wish to reach a result that cannot be justified by originalist arguments, the opinion is typically authored by one of the Court’s three non-originalist Republicans.

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the decision ending affirmative action on college and university campuses, was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts — who declared during his 2005 confirmation hearing that “I do not have an overarching judicial philosophy that I bring to every case.” The Court’s more recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), which applied the Republican justices’ skepticism of race-conscious laws to voting rights, was authored by Alito.

Republicans, in other words, would be in rough shape if they actually filled the Supreme Court with principled originalists. The conservative legal project depends on flexible, results-focused justices like Alito, who will reach ideologically correct conclusions even when originalism calls for a more liberal result, and who will sign their name to opinions that may make their originalist colleagues quietly cringe.

Does that mean that originalist rhetoric will fade in Republican legal circles? It’s certainly possible. In So Ordered, Alito gives a mixed review of the work of Adrian Vermeule, a Catholic conservative law professor at Harvard who argues that legal conservatives should abandon originalism altogether because it constrains their ability to impose their own vision of the “common good.”

Trump, meanwhile, has had a falling out with the Federalist Society. While the Federalist Society successfully pushed Trump to appoint outspoken proponents of originalism to the bench during his first term, many of his second-term nominees’ primary qualification is their personal loyalty to Trump. At least three of his former criminal defense lawyers are now US Court of Appeals judges.

At the same time, some members of the Court’s Democratic minority appear to be taking a page from Justice Black’s playbook. Liberals who disagree with the current Court’s precedents will often find that constitutional history supports their preferred outcomes. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in particular, often wields originalist arguments to disparage her Republican colleagues’ approach to race.

So it’s certainly possible to imagine a future where Republicans abandon originalism in favor of Trump’s personalism or Vermeule’s unapologetically results-driven approach. Democrats, meanwhile, could become outspoken originalists because originalism gives them a vocabulary they can use to argue against applying stare decisis to the Roberts Court’s most right-wing decisions.

But this future is not inevitable. The most important lesson taught by Alito’s new book is that judges do not need to hold any principled legal views in order to identify as an “originalist.” Regardless of how partisan your rulings are, calling yourself an originalist is enough.

This past January, when the New York Times asked President Donald Trump about concerns he was blatantly intermingling his family’s business interests with the presidency, he had a pithy response. During his first term, Trump said, he learned that “nobody cared.”

But after a seemingly endless set of headlines about influence-peddling and profiteering involving Trump or people close to him, voters care now.

A Fox News poll asked voters how concerned they were about more than a dozen issues, and “corruption in government” ranked at the very top. In Gallup polling, the amount of respondents saying they thought government corruption was widespread reached 89 percent — a record high. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe Trump is using the presidency for personal profit, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, including a substantial minority of Republicans.

Even Trump seems a bit more worried than usual. Earlier this month, he distanced himself from two of his top political advisers’ foreign consulting work and threatened to fire them if it presents a conflict. Vice President JD Vance was questioned in a CBS town hall that aired Saturday about whether he’d witnessed any potential corruption in the White House (he said he hadn’t).

Accordingly, corruption has emerged as one of the key themes in Democrats’ closing midterm message, with candidates of all kinds hammering it in ads, debates, and interviews. And party strategists have landed on a particular argument about it: They want candidates to link it to Democrats’ message about voters’ other top concern, affordability. 

That is, things aren’t just expensive because of government incompetence — it’s actually powerful interests conspiring to rip you off with the help of politicians compromised by campaign donors and personal conflicts.

Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff has been hammering this theme all year, listing eye-popping improprieties among what he calls the “Mar-a-Lago Mafia,” while also arguing that pharmaceutical companies and corporate landlords are corruptly driving up your prices. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, too, regularly argues that “we have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.” In Kentucky’s Sixth District, House candidate Zach Dembo put out a reform plan while warning “corruption has cost our families, driven up our prices and enriched politicians more interested in their own bottom lines than us.”

Indeed, the Washington Post and Politico report that candidates across the country are being egged on by Democratic messaging firms urging them to make that link. One memo from the Democratic group Senate Majority PAC recommended arguing that corruption “drives up the price of everyday goods: gas, groceries, utilities, housing.” Republican strategists have also noticed voters making a connection between corruption and prices in battlegrounds like Ohio, according to CNN, suggesting their efforts may be breaking through.

“Voters care about corruption right now because it explains why their lives keep getting more expensive while the Republicans are creating a separate class of people who act as if the rules don’t apply to them,” Lauren French, a spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC, told me.

This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together?

And Hakeem Jeffries, the potential next speaker of the House, said this week that corruption would be at the top of the party’s 2027 agenda alongside affordability and healthcare: “We’re going to hold the crooks accountable who’ve visited unprecedented corruption on the American people — beginning on day one.”

This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together? If you’re already going to attack the other side for cutting taxes for big business while slashing healthcare, it’s not a huge leap to name donors or candidates who might benefit and suggest a connection.

“Voters are asking: ‘Why is life getting harder when I’m doing everything right?’” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me. “The answer is: Because somebody paid to make sure it would.”

The message is clear enough. But what would these candidates actually do about it? 

In practice, the strategy is a consequential victory for the rising progressive wing of the party, which has long argued that Americans’ economic problems are the result of corporations’ and billionaires’ greed and corruption. And it’s leading candidates to embrace many ideas that have long been pushed by progressive advocates — some of which involve “good government” reforms to block conflicts of interest, and others of which involve taking on big business and the ultra-wealthy. 

While enacting some of these ideas may be difficult, there’s little doubt they’ll be a priority in the near future — and some might even draw bipartisan support. Here’s what they’re proposing. 

Democrats’ 3-part anti-corruption agenda

Under the broad umbrella of “corruption,” we can think of three basic categories of ideas that Democrats are embracing.

The first category is: investigating Trump and other people in and around his administration for potential malfeasance. 

Congressional Democrats have said that they want to investigate the Trump family’s crypto investments, their solicitation of foreign business investments, whether Trump granted pardons in exchange for money, corruption in government contracting, the jet gifted to Trump by the government of Qatar, fundraising for the White House ballroom construction, whether Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding was funded by a Russian oligarch, and much more.

In such a target rich environment, one question will be what to prioritize. Another will be: How can these investigations best be designed to achieve actual results? But Democrats are vowing that they will use the powers of congressional majorities to investigate corruption vigorously on many fronts.

The second category: proposing broader ethics or government reforms to the system as a whole.

Progressive advocates have long had a set of favored reforms around this front, such as restricting dark money, super PAC, and corporate spending on elections, as well as requiring greater transparency around donors. Populists on both the left and right have supported banning stock trading by members of Congress. 

Mary Peltola, running for Senate in Alaska, supports term limits for members of Congress; so does Talarico. Trump’s controversial pardons have also sparked interest from some congressional Democrats in limiting the presidential pardon power, an issue that candidates like Kansas Senate nominee Adam Hamilton have also raised.

It would be challenging for a new Democratic Congress to pass any of these reforms into law (for one, they’d need Trump’s signature or a veto-proof two-thirds majority of both chambers). Furthermore, several of these ideas — particularly on campaign finance and term limits — would almost surely be deemed unconstitutional by the current Supreme Court majority. So the path to success on this front is more challenging; unless a particular idea can strike a chord and win broad bipartisan approval.

The third category, then, would be on policies that would actually seek to deliver on that promised link between affordability and corruption — policies that seek to drive down voters’ healthcare costs, utility bills, and grocery prices by challenging malfeasance from corporations or special interests.

The people in the Democratic coalition that have ideas for this are predominantly associated with the progressive wing of the party and specifically the “anti-monopoly” movement. These progressives tend to argue that behind almost every high price is a corporation trying to get one over on consumers, via price fixing or some other monopolistic behavior. 

The new messaging linkage of corruption and affordability boosts these progressives’ credibility inside the party — because it’s exactly what they’ve been saying for years. So expect new Democratic majorities to pursue investigations into and propose legislation about pharmaceutical companies, utilities, tech giants, food conglomerates, and more.

To this end, Talarico has proposed breaking up “healthcare monopolies,” Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has proposed to “break up corporate concentration in agriculture” by challenging “consolidated seed, fertilizer, and chemical market monopolies,” and Peltola wants to block “anti-competitive” mergers of grocery chains that drive up prices.

Still, there’s a debate among Democratic wonks and commentators over whether taking on corporate villains and unwinding mergers is actually likely to succeed in delivering lower prices for consumers. 

Skeptics on the party’s center left argue that broader economy-wide forces are more important than individual cases of corporate wrongdoing. They argue that President Joe Biden already pursued a strategy of “turning to the federal government’s antitrust authorities to try to tame red-hot price increases,” as the New York Times put it in December 2021, and it failed to rein in inflation.

Other policies candidates have sometimes mentioned in their corruption and affordability combo platter could more directly address costs — scrapping tariffs, undoing health care cuts — but also might add to deficits, putting more pressure on inflation, which could in turn keep interest rates higher on mortgages and auto loans. So there may not be any easy choices for Democrats if they gain control of government after 2028, and the most effective message might not necessarily be the most effective policy.

But the momentum for change is there inside the party. Just as the first post-Watergate midterms ushered in a generation of politicians determined to enact new good-government reforms, it’s likely there will be significant energy from Democrats behind both corruption and affordability issues for the foreseeable future. If they win congressional majorities, and especially the presidency in 2028, they’ll get to put their theory to the test.

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 take over a public park. 

What’s happening? On Sunday, Trump announced in a social media post that East Potomac Golf Links, a municipal golf course on the Potomac River in Washington, DC, would close next month for what he described as “restoration work” to transform it from a three-course complex into a single professional-caliber course. 

According to a rendering of the “restoration” shared by Trump, the new course would also eliminate a popular public park and multiuse road around the course, which is currently home to some of DC’s historic cherry trees. 

Why does this matter? Relative to many other Trump decisions (like, say, the Iran war or interfering with Ukraine’s ability to defend itself), the fate of a golf course is not so high-stakes.

But it’s shaping up to be a major legal fight over the administration’s blitzkrieg approach to Washington that saw the East Wing of the White House demolished last year and Trump’s name attached to (and subsequently removed from) the Kennedy Center.

A DC preservation group previously sued over Trump’s plan to transform the course, which has been in the works for months prior to Sunday’s announcement. And the administration was already in hot water with a DC District Court judge over the recent removal of more than 500 trees from the course, which it described at the time as maintenance rather than part of Trump’s renovation scheme. 

Trump, for his part, has said that his administration has “an absolute right” to renovate the course and does not need approval, setting him on a course for a bigger clash with federal courts. 

What’s the big picture? Setting aside everything else about Trump’s golf course push, it’s unlikely — with just 15 days until the midterms — that this is a fight that will endear him or his party to voters, who are broadly fed up with corruption, inflation, and the overall cost of living.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, happy Monday! Early voting is getting underway in some states and while The Logoff officially encourages you not to read too much — or anything, really — into early voting numbers, I do recommend this post from the Substack newsletter Can We Still Govern? by Don Moynihan. He rounded up some of the best “I voted” stickers with art submitted by (mostly) children, ranging from charming to deeply strange. You can find them all here.

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.

French protests have long been the stuff of legend, literature, and Broadway musicals. But even by those storied standards, last weekend’s demonstrations were pretty remarkable.

More than half a million people took to the streets in occasionally violent protests that are posing a mounting political challenge for the French government. The movement began roughly a month ago over concerns about the sorry state of public high schools, which are frequently underfunded and understaffed. 

But in the weeks since, the student protests have rapidly expanded to encompass a wider range of grievances around inequality, high living costs and public services. The ranks of the protesters have also swelled to include some more opportunistic looters and agitators.  

In Paris, masked rioters trashed businesses and set fires, while students blocked the Louvre Museum on Monday, forcing it to close. In Limoges, a city of roughly 130,000 people, the spire of a 19th-century town hall dramatically collapsed in flames.

The national government has responded with curfews for parts of cities including Paris, Nice, and Lille, as well as emphatic condemnations of the violence. In a televised address on Sunday night, French President Emmanuel Macron also promised to partner with students, teachers, trade unions and other groups to identify “joint solutions.”

But it’s unclear what solutions could possibly speak to the whole of this newly expanded movement. The initial student protesters were after concrete educational reforms, like smaller class sizes and less chaotic schedules. The demands now are more diffuse and disjointed, reflecting the sense that — as Macron himself put it — “there is no desirable future” for young people in France. It’s a situation that the French far right is already exploiting, just six months before the country’s next presidential election.

Go a little deeper

If you’re getting a bit of déjà vu here — that’s French for “already seen,” FYI — please know you have good reason. The French also turned out for gigantic mass protests against a proposed retirement age increase three years ago. And a gas-tax hike five years before that. Some historians trace French protest culture all the way back to the 1300s.

While it’s not necessarily true that the French demonstrate more than people in other Western countries, their protests do tend to attract outsize global attention. Youth protests over education, living costs, and government corruption have also recently taken place in Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Albania, for instance. I’d hazard that you’ve heard less about them.

But there’s a twofold explanation for why France’s protests loom so large. First, protest occupies a special place in French history and culture — and the world knows it. As one political scientist explained in a 1994 paper on the history of French protests, the French have an unusual, centuries-long track record of turning demonstrations into actual political change, arguably starting with the French Revolution.

More recently, in 1968, student protests expanded into a larger worker strike that nearly toppled the government. Many of today’s young protesters have specifically referenced that heritage in interviews and slogans.

But that’s not the only reason that French people always seem to be protesting. Conditions in France are also, well … pretty protestable. Consider just the narrow issue of public education, which sparked the current hullabaloo. 

By some estimates, higher-education funding per student has fallen by 20 percent in just the past 10 years. High school classrooms are frequently overcrowded, and a government report cited by The Guardian concluded that the country’s aging schools are in need of billions of dollars of building repairs and climate mitigation.

The government has pointed to France’s strained finances as a constraint on addressing these issues. (And, in fairness, France’s finances are indeed very strained.) There’s a sense, however, that young people are bearing the cost of that crisis more than other populations. Cost-cutting measures that would affect older people — such as raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 — have been delayed in the face of fierce opposition. And by “opposition,” of course, I mean protests. 

One link for later

➨ Make your AI fallback plan. Artificial intelligence will cost many people their jobs; in some places, it already has. But instead of panic-learning the first available trade, first consider where you find meaning in your current occupation. That should help guide you to a fallback career that will still feel valuable, even if it’s…you know. Not your first pick. My colleague Sigal says she’d become a rabbi; I think I’d like to teach again. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that a single episode of Sex and the City is credited with launching the early aughts cupcake craze? Today’s food trends are much shorter-lived, by comparison. And they typically start on TikTok or Instagram. 
• Today’s trivia: What mass-market, imported beer is named for a river in the Netherlands? (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 author of the 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking. That would be Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister who also preached at President Donald Trump’s childhood church and officiated his first wedding.