Apple will reportedly launch an innovative new MacBook next week, which means existing options have their largest discount yet.

Your feelings are understandable. Exploring and accepting them may help you move on

I was with my ex-partner for more than 20 years. We were mostly happy and I expected us to be together for life. For well over half the relationship, I was the sole breadwinner and, at my ex’s request, managed our finances. We were reasonably well off, with savings and without a mortgage. We even had a holiday home, albeit a static caravan.

I retired early, and the problems we had in our relationship grew. We had both loved travel, but I was repeatedly told we couldn’t afford it, which I knew was nonsense. I went back to work in a demanding new field, but my ex showed no interest. I spent more time away from home and began therapy (my suggestion of couples’ therapy was rejected). After a year of therapy, I said I was leaving.

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© Illustration: Alex Mellon/The Guardian

© Illustration: Alex Mellon/The Guardian

© Illustration: Alex Mellon/The Guardian

A complaint I hear a lot from my millennial peers is that our parents didn’t teach us enough about money. I can say that personal finance wasn’t dinner table conversation in my house, and even as I went off to college and started fending for myself, it was almost a taboo subject. When it came to money, people either had it or they didn’t, and you definitely didn’t talk about it. 

Maybe this is why the average American isn’t exactly fluent in personal finance, and the situation is getting worse. Americans can only answer about 50 percent of basic questions about borrowing, savings, and risk on a financial literacy survey, according to a 2026 study by TIAA, a retirement services company. About a third of those surveyed said they have a hard time making ends meet and are debt-constrained. These figures have remained relatively unchanged for nearly a decade, but dropped to their lowest level in this year’s study. 

It makes sense: It’s hard to learn about money when it’s not taught in schools, and it’s such an intensely private topic. It’s also hard to make good financial decisions when you’re one of the growing number of American households struggling to pay bills, repay debts, and save for the future — and feeling very stressed about it.

In a perfect world, each of us could sit down with a financial adviser to get help — but most of us can’t afford that. Instead, average Americans tend to find personal finance tips on TikTok, in Reddit threads, by watching Suze Orman on YouTube or How to Get Rich on Netflix, or by Googling their questions. 

Now we have AI tools, too. 

With access to an internet’s worth of information and financial advice, ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI chatbots can answer any question you ask. They can help you put together a basic budget or, armed with your bank statements and the details of your student loans and your retirement accounts, tailor solutions to your specific situation. Or, at least, that’s the promise.

AI could create a more utopian, more equitable future, where reliable, hyper-personalized advice is just a prompt or two away for people who can’t afford to meet with an expert in real life. But machines are built by people, and there’s good reason to be concerned that these machines will simply replicate the biases and disparities built into our current system.

Here’s what experts say about how to make the most of these tools — and how to think about all of the inherent risks of uploading a lot of personal financial information to a chatbot or, worse, giving an AI agent the keys to your bank account.

The steep rise, risks, and rewards of AI financial advisers

Nearly 20 percent of Americans have used AI tools like ChatGPT for financial advice, and close to 25 percent for Gen Z adults and millennials have tried it, according to an August Gallup poll. These numbers could tick up too: In October, OpenAI started rolling out a dedicated personal finance tool to its ChatGPT Free and Go users in the United States, which effectively means anyone can try it. ChatGPT Finances lets you securely connect your bank account to the tool using a platform called Plaid, and then you can basically have a conversation with the chatbot about your real-time finances down to the penny. It’s like an AI-powered Mint (RIP) that you can talk to directly.

Regardless of where you encounter a chatbot or how much data you give it, experts say these tools could genuinely help improve financial literacy. You can talk to them about money problems you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family, or ask questions and receive actionable, personalized information. There are real upsides to using AI this way.

Taha Choukhmane, an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been studying outcomes when people turn to chatbots for financial advice. In general, these AI tools give pretty good advice, and that advice gets better as people become more practiced in asking the right question, according to research he published earlier this year. 

“We were actually quite surprised that relative to the status quo, the average American would be better off if they were to follow the advice,” Choukhmane told me. But he added a caveat: “Just following the advice without understanding the advice puts you at risk of not fully understanding the risk.”

But you shouldn’t trust everything a chatbot tells you and should verify everything before making any decisions. 

Chatbot advice has some significant limitations. First, it’s not impartial. The finance industry has a vested interest in steering you toward certain ways of managing your money, and that typically means selling you products, like loans. If you’ve ever searched for personal finance tips on Google, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of the top results come from banks and other financial institutions. This is by design, according to John Campbell, an economics professor at Harvard. But because AI is aggregating all of that advice, the specific influences and possible bias is less obvious. 

“AI is very promising for providing low-cost financial advice in plain English that will arguably be better than what many people would be able to do on their own,” said Campbell, who’s also the co-author of Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone. “One caveat is that chatbot advice is quite likely — unless a model has been carefully trained — to reflect the average of whatever’s being posted on the internet, and that may or may not be first-rate advice.”

An example Campbell gives is the question of when to start taking Social Security benefits. While you’re eligible at age 62, many economists agree that you should delay your benefits, which, based on the way the government calculates your monthly payouts, will allow you to enjoy much higher benefits later in life. But paid financial advisers can recommend starting as early as possible, since waiting longer reduces the amount of money that needs to be managed, which reduces the adviser’s fees. That means there’s a lot of conflicting advice online, much of it supplied by the finance industry. And that’s the information used to train AI models.

“The advice is much more mixed,” Campbell said. “And so if a chatbot is learning from that, it may not actually give the best advice.”

It can be hard to recognize bad advice anywhere in life, but especially when you’re talking to a machine that’s programmed to please you. A chatbot could encourage you to consider a balance transfer, to lean in on credit card rewards, or to refinance your mortgage — all decisions with upsides and downsides for you, but definite upsides for banks — without you realizing how much of its training data comes from the finance industry selling these products. What’s worse is that if you do end up taking bad advice, it might be years before you realize it. You won’t know that you refinanced a mortgage at a bad time until a better time comes along.

That leads me to the other major issue with using chatbots for money advice: People who lack financial literacy are the most likely to fall for bad advice, because they simply don’t recognize it as such. They also tend to be less wealthy, which means they can’t afford big mistakes. 

One way to mitigate risk, oddly enough, is to give the AI chatbot more personal information. The more details about your situation it has to consider, the more it can offer personalized advice. More context also means better advice, according to Choukhmane. 

“There’s a trade-off there,” Choukhmane said. “There’s real risk around privacy, and so I think everyone needs to find their level of control.”

Don’t assume your data is safe

Any time you’re talking to a chatbot, you’re putting a lot of trust in tech companies to take care of the personal details you’re sharing. Sending sensitive financial data is an especially risky proposition. While tech companies, including OpenAI, promise to keep your data secure, there’s already a long list of breaches, leaks, and privacy violations that serve as cautionary tales.  

It’s also impossible to know what tech companies might do with your data in the future. Most of them will use it to train their models, unless you tell them not to. Some of them will use the data to serve you personalized ads. 

Then there’s the risk of bad actors getting into your ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini account. If you’ve been using a chatbot for financial advice and uploading your bank statements, a hacker could gain access to a stunning amount of information that could enable them to do all kinds of terrible things to your life. 

“They could steal your identity and open accounts and then quickly bankrupt a person,” said Delicia Reynolds Hand, a senior director at Consumer Reports. “It’s not even so much the primary underlying accounts that could be at risk, it’s more just access to this information.”

The steady march of AI progress is making this situation even more complicated. The previous era of chatbots offering financial advice is quickly bleeding into a new phase of AI agents logging into bank accounts on users’ behalf. If you’re using a tool like Claude Cowork or even an AI assistant like Muse, you can give an agent the login credentials to your bank account, and because the agent is operating its own computer, it can actually make transfers, apply for loans, or really do anything in your account. This is reportedly driving major banks wild, since they don’t know which logins are coming from humans and which are agents. And because we know that AI agents are unpredictable, it’s hard to know how that access might go wrong.

Beyond data security and privacy, you should also be aware of the simple fact that nobody’s really at fault if you end up losing money using these tools. Chatbots are not regulated in the way that human financial advisers, who have a fiduciary duty to act in your best interest, are. 

“If I get bad tax advice from H&R Block or a tax adviser, there are a clear set of rules and guardrails in place to manage what I can expect in that relationship and where the service they use has liability and where that liability ends,” Hand said. “Currently, that’s not the case for these tools.”

Trust but verify — and then delete your data

In the final years of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan popularized an old Russian proverb: Trust, but verify. The phrase is somewhat nonsensical, since trusting someone implies that you don’t need to verify what they’re saying, and verifying what’s said implies you didn’t trust them in the first place. But if you are willing to shoulder a bit of risk, consider approaching AI this way, especially when your life savings are on the line. I’d also suggest adding a coda to the phrase: And then delete your data.

Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you.

The great paradox with tools like ChatGPT and Claude is that they’re very good at generating truthy text. It sounds authoritative and looks correct — and usually is. Except when it isn’t. AI is famously unpredictable and prone to hallucinations. You can ask the same question twice and get two different answers. That doesn’t mean these tools are useless. It just means you have to approach them with caution. You have to interrogate these chatbots, challenge whatever advice they give you, and then crosscheck that with other, more reputable, sources. 

“If you’ve never used these tools, I would not encourage you to just change all your financial plans based on your first conversation,” Choukhmane said. “You want to be quite careful. Start using these tools, start understanding, ask a lot of follow-up questions.”

When it comes to mitigating risk, consider giving ballpark figures for your income or spending when you’re talking to a chatbot about your finances. Uploading financial documents, even if they’re redacted, is inevitably filling a tech company’s vault with your sensitive information without necessarily knowing what will happen to it next. You should also dig into your privacy and security settings to make sure you’ve turned on multi-factor authentication and that your personal data is not being used to train AI models and gets deleted after 30 days. 

Ethan Bloch, the product lead for ChatGPT for Financial Services, made a similar set of recommendations when I talked to him recently. Chatbots are not stand-ins for licensed financial advisers, he said, and you shouldn’t let them make decisions for you. They’re designed to inform and help you think through complex topics.

“You should liken it to just talking to a friend who has some very informed opinions about finance,” Bloch told me. “But if you’re actually making some large financial decision — your portfolio or retirement — you still need to seek out the help.”

Regardless of how experienced you are with chatbots or how much data you’re prepared to hand over, remember what Campbell, the Harvard professor, said. If your financial literacy isn’t great, AI chatbots can be trouble. And if you’re like most Americans, you could probably stand to learn a little bit more about things like mortgages and interest rates. 

Yes, Chatbots can be a good way to brush up on financial literacy. You can ask them the money questions you’re too embarrassed to discuss with friends and family. But you can also learn about money the old-fashioned way: Reading books and websites written by reputable, independent sources. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has a portal of financial education resources, including games and quizzes. Khan Academy has a course that covers everything from credit scores to college savings. There’s a personal finance subreddit that I joined years ago and read almost daily. There are budgeting apps, like YNAB which has its own huge Reddit presence. 

Whatever you do to learn more about personal finance, simply doing something is progress. Talking about personal finance isn’t the taboo it once was in the US, and it’s even a required course in the vast majority of American high schools now. And while AI won’t magically solve your money problems, it can help get you started. Just be careful. Your livelihood could be on the line.

Wall Street is sending the public a dire warning: President Donald Trump has become a threat to the very foundation of American freedom — your frequent flier miles.

Okay, America’s big banks haven’t been using rhetoric quite that grandiose. But they are accusing Trump of imperiling Americans’ credit card rewards. 

The feud between Wall Street and the White House centers on the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA). Long stalled in Congress, that legislation aims to drive down the “swipe fees” that merchants pay to banks when customers use credit cards. In theory, if those fees fall, retailers might pass on some of the savings to consumers, in the form of lower prices.

Trump first endorsed the bill in January. But he’s ramped up his advocacy for it recently, amid a broader (belated) push to address voters’ affordability concerns ahead of November’s midterms. Last week, the White House urged Congress to “put Main Street over Wall Street” by enacting the law. On Monday, Trump praised Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall for “working tirelessly to pass the Credit Card Competition Act, in order to stop the out of control Swipe Fee ripoff!”

The financial industry is used to taking fire from Trump right before Election Day, then receiving favorable treatment from him thereafter. But in this case, Trump’s threat is not entirely idle. Large retailers are lobbying hard to get the Credit Card Competition Act passed during December’s lame-duck congressional session. Banks have responded by issuing a “code red,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal. In recent days, their lobbyists have warned policymakers that, if swipe fees fall, credit cardholders’ cash rewards and travel points will go down with them.

In truth, the consequences of the Credit Card Competition Act are uncertain. But if the banks’ big-picture story is right — and the law cuts both swipe fees and credit card rewards — that would probably benefit the average American.

Poor people pay for your travel points

To see why, we need to first examine how the credit card system currently works — and whom it does and doesn’t benefit. 

Whenever you use a credit card to purchase a banana from Aldi, or volleyball from Dick’s, or an adult-sized Grape Fanta Can Halloween costume from Party City, the retailer must pay a fee to the bank that issued your card. The bank then uses that revenue to fund your rewards.

Critically, merchants don’t just eat the costs of swipe fees. Rather, they pass on part of the expense to consumers, in the form of higher prices. Some businesses concentrate these price hikes on card users (for example, barbershops often charge less if you pay with cash). But most retailers charge every customer the same price, regardless of their payment method. 

For this reason, shoppers who pay with cash or debit effectively subsidize those who pay with cards: The former face higher prices than they would in a world without credit cards, yet they receive no “cash back” or travel points in recompense. 

This arrangement seems unfair on its face. But it is especially troubling when one considers class disparities in the use of credit cards and receipt of rewards.

As a general rule, the higher a person’s income, the more they use credit cards. In 2024, US households who earned less than $25,000 a year put just 17 percent of their payments on credit cards; among households earning more than $150,000, that figure was 51 percent, according to Federal Reserve data.

What’s more, the rich are also more likely to qualify for premium cards that charge merchants exceptionally high fees, in order to fund extraordinarily lavish benefits. 

As a result of all this, swipe fees effectively redistribute money from poor and working-class people to affluent and wealthy ones. According to a 2026 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the credit card system takes, on average, $88 a year from households with annual incomes below $150,000, while delivering an average yearly benefit of $390 to households with incomes above that threshold.

American swipe fees are too damn high

To be sure, this does not mean that lower-income Americans would be better off in a world where credit cards didn’t exist. Such cards serve a variety of valuable economic purposes, from helping households weather unexpected expenses and irregular incomes to facilitating online commerce. And maintaining a credit card system costs money: Banks need to finance the loans they extend, while payment networks must maintain vast computer systems to process transactions and detect fraud. 

Yet America’s credit card system is needlessly expensive. Our nation’s merchants — and thus, consumers — pay far higher swipe fees than their counterparts in other rich countries. 

To take one illustrative example: When an American buys $100 worth of groceries using a standard Visa card, the supermarket must pay the issuing bank a minimum of $1.23. Some disfavored stores must pay as much as $1.57 on such a purchase. If a customer uses a premium “Visa Infinite” card, meanwhile, the grocer’s fee can run as high as $2.07.

By contrast, in Canada, a grocery purchase worth $100 US dollars would incur a fee worth 95 cents if the customer used a standard Visa card. 

In Australia and the European Union, meanwhile, government regulations would cap that fee at 30 cents (or .3 percent), no matter what kind of card was used. 

Suffice to say, Australia and the EU manage to sustain functional credit card systems, despite charging merchants a tiny fraction of the swipe fees absorbed by US businesses. And although retailers have pocketed some of these savings, research suggests that fee caps have also lowered consumer prices. 

This affordability gain does come at a cost; American cardholders do tend to reap higher rewards than Australian or European ones. But this is not a good trade from the standpoint of economic justice; few think it is fair to take money from the poor to give to the rich.

The Credit Card Competition Act might not work

All this said, whether the Credit Card Competition Act would actually yield those outcomes is uncertain. The bill does not directly regulate swipe fees. Instead, as the name suggests, it aims to give credit card companies greater competition. 

Today, each time you buy an adult-size Grape Fanta Can Halloween costume with a Visa, Party City is required to process your purchase using Visa’s network. Which means it needs to pay whatever swipe fee Visa decrees. The store can protest an exorbitant rate by refusing to accept Visa cards. But this would send a large number of customers into the hands of Spirit Halloween. So its leverage is limited.

Under the CCCA, however, Party City would be able to accept Visa on a transaction — without necessarily using Visa to process the payment. Instead, the bank that issued the customer’s Visa would need to provide Party City with at least one alternative payment processor — a different network that has no relationship with Visa and which might offer lower fees. 

The law’s authors hope — and the banking industry fears — that this mandatory competition will force down swipe fees. But it’s not clear how much of a difference the CCCA would actually make. 

After all, under the law, banks would still get to choose the alternative payment network available to retailers when their customers pay with Visa (or Mastercard, or American Express, etc.). Party City would no longer need to pony up whatever Visa asks when a shopper pays with a Visa-Bank of America card. But if the store did decline to use Visa’s network, it would then need to partner with Bank of America’s hand-selected alternative. And since banks benefit from high swipe fees, BofA would have an incentive to pick an expensive backup option.

Nevertheless, the banks and retailers both seem to believe that the CCCA will sharply reduce swipe fees. If they’re right, then Congress shouldn’t vote down the bill, merely to protect affluent Americans’ travel points. 

It doubtlessly feels nice to receive a free flight or hotel stay, as a reward for spending a lot of money on yourself. But the poor probably should not have to pay higher prices, just so the affluent can enjoy such satisfactions.

Polls and pundits alike are widely — if sometimes cautiously — predicting a blue wave in the midterm elections on November 3. But there’s an important caveat to predictions of a Democratic triumph: Republicans have far more cash at their disposal.

President Donald Trump’s super PAC alone had around $400 million on hand earlier this fall, and Elon Musk has personally pumped hundreds of millions into critical races, including $158 million for Texas alone. 

Democrats, by contrast, have lagged far behind, especially relative to their performance in past cycles, with the party’s candidates propped up more by small-money donors than deep-pocketed institutional players.

Shane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for the New York Times, has extensively covered the role of money in American electoral politics. He spoke with America, Actually host Astead Herndon about where that money is coming from, how the GOP is spending it, and the effect that it might have on the coming elections. 

They also discuss the races that aren’t getting funded — and what current fundraising patterns might tell us about the candidates who could be in the mix in the next presidential campaign cycle. 

Below is an excerpt of their 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.

A couple of weeks ago we asked, “What is the GOP strategy to try to win?” And one of the answers we got is they simply have more dollars than Democrats. Everyone’s talking about this GOP money advantage, but how big is it really, and where is it coming from?

It’s bigger than I’ve basically seen in the last 20 years, and it’s almost entirely coming from big donors. President Trump has a super PAC. It had about $400 million in it at the beginning of September, and there was no Democratic counterpart.

And then the Republican National Committee, which is functionally controlled by Trump, had another $130 million. More than Democrats, because the DNC has literally more debts than cash. That’s a half a billion dollars.

You’re saying this is a historic edge.

In 2024, Kamala Harris outspent Donald Trump significantly in the general election. In 2020, Joe Biden significantly outspent Donald Trump in the general. In 2016, Hillary Clinton. And in the midterms along the way, same story. 

This is a switch, and when you talk about how many seats can the Democrats gain, given how unpopular Trump is, the Republican money is seen as a real limiter on Democratic chances.

Do we know anything specific about the people putting in money to the Trump super PAC and the RNC to give them such a lead?

Most of these folks are disclosed. And Trump has been pretty open about raising money from the very moment that he won. He’s been pretty clear that he is in business to help people who are helping him. And so there are big crypto industries that are giving money that are expecting or hoping for favorable regulation from the administration.

So it’s a lot of big businesses. It’s a lot of wealthy Republicans who generally support him anyway, and there are industry groups that see benefit to being in favor.

I will never forget, obviously, the scene from Trump’s second inauguration when he had the Zuckerbergs and the Bezoses and Elon Musk behind him. Is that how I should think about the people funding this donor advantage? Is it tech oligarchs? Is it tech forward?

There’s a lot of tech. I wouldn’t say it’s exclusively [tech]. And Musk, by the way, is like an extra pot of money. Musk, the world’s richest person, is said to be spending at least $200 million. So that’s a bigger chunk. He has given some money directly to the Trump super PAC. He’s given some money to these congressional super PACs. 

Is this just quid pro quo? Is this just a group of businesses who think, “Hey, no matter how unpopular this guy is, it is worth investing in him and his party because they’re gonna, regulate or not regulate in a way that’s favorable for us”?

It’s not quite just that. He raised a ton of this money when he was not so unpopular. If you want to say something smart that he did, it was that. Throughout 2025 he was raising all of this money.

And I don’t want to overstate the Republican advantage. A lot of these Democratic candidates are raising a ton of money. James Talarico stands out as maybe the peak example of this.

The Texas Senate race is the most expensive race in the country right now, and Republicans are pouring $200 million to save the nominee there. So a big chunk of that advantage is going to Texas. And the Democrats have put very little money from outside groups into Texas. 

Talarico has captured the imagination of these small Democratic donors, and he’s raised tens and tens of millions of dollars. I would be shocked if he doesn’t hit $100 million by the end of the cycle. 

You reported that the GOP’s pulling back in North Carolina. What should we take from that in terms of how the GOP sees its own landscape when it comes to the federal races?

Where have Republicans put that money? They put it into South Carolina right next door to protect a seat that was once thought, on the Senate front, to be safe for Republicans. This is the former Lindsey Graham seat that his sister is now running in. And then even more of it has gone to Kansas. This is a state that has not elected a [Democrat] to the Senate for nearly 100 years. 

If you’re the Republican Party and you’re pulling money out of a state like North Carolina that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 2008, and then putting it into a place that hasn’t elected one since 1932, that tells you where the, the bar is moving.

I think the concern for Democrats right now is there might be a wave, but Kansas has a big red wall. It’s hard to beat that kind of institutional advantage for the Republican Party.

Considering how close we are to Election Day, like, what are they actually spending this money on? Is it just more ads? Is it just more mailers?

I was in Pennsylvania this month, and I was trying to watch political ads on YouTube for various races. And I was getting pre-roll of three political ads before I watched the political ad I was trying to watch. So much about our elections is being decided now by people who are actively trying not to consume political news. It costs more money to reach people who are avoiding it on purpose.

There are some organizing things that happen, but most of the money is various versions of advertising.

On the Democratic side, considering this GOP edge, what are the races that you currently describe as underfunded? Where do the Democrats wish they had more money?

Number one is governors’ races, actually. When you look at where Democratic donors swoon, it’s Senate races. There are no candidates for governor who have made people swoon like this in recent years. 

[James] Talarico is raising all this money, but in Texas also, Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, does not have that kind of money, and she’s running against Greg Abbott, who had $100 million.

What should we ascribe that to?

I think there’s actually a pretty simple answer, which is, if you don’t live in the state, it doesn’t impact you. If you’re a small donor and you live in California, you can be excited about a Senate candidate because you want Democrats to control the Senate. Are you as excited about a Democratic governor of Georgia?

It’s hard to argue that the governors of these key presidential battlegrounds aren’t some of the most important races on the ballot this year.

By the way, a problem with both parties. Republican national donors and these super PACs also don’t fund these governor’s races at the same level. So it’s not just a Democratic issue, but it’s more acute [for them] because Democrats are so well-funded at the small-donor level.

Fundraising is a huge part of what sets the presidential candidates apart from one another. The money game among those candidates has already started. Is there anyone who’s quietly built some donor network that’s worth thinking about? Is there someone who stood out as a particularly effective fundraiser when we think about the 2028 crowd?

Let me give you my favorite stat from the last Democratic primary, which is that Mike Bloomberg spent twice as much as Tom Steyer, who spent twice as much as Bernie Sanders, who spent twice as much as Joe Biden, who became the Democratic nominee. And so money isn’t gonna determine who wins the next Democratic presidential primary.

One person who has unlimited money, functionally, is JB Pritzker. He’s a billionaire, the governor of Illinois, and he is spending his money now to help other Democrats, which is a good way to make friends.

My last question is an open one. What’s an underexplored story that we should be following going forward when it comes to campaign cash or both parties’ relationship with money?

One of my big questions is what happens to Republican small-dollar fundraising in that post-Trump era. Because there have basically not been any other Republicans who have excited donors for a decade.

Not JD Vance? 

I have not seen evidence. JD Vance was not a good fundraiser before he [joined] the ticket with Donald Trump. When he ran for Senate, his primary run was funded chiefly by Peter Thiel through a super PAC.

There are candidates who’ve raised some money, but nothing on the scale of what these Democratic candidates have been able to raise online. When you talk about that Trump era [ending] at some point, are there others who are going to get Republican small donors excited? We don’t know. We haven’t seen it yet.

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

Throughout his second term, President Donald Trump has saddled his party with no shortage of political liabilities — from the mass pardons of January 6 convictions to ICE killings of US citizens to questionable Reflecting Pool redesign choices.

For voters, however, there is one stain on Trump’s record more unsightly than all the rest: his failure to reduce Americans’ cost of living.

As the midterm campaign enters its home stretch, Americans’ expenses are rising — and the GOP’s prospects are consequently dimming.

Last month, consumer prices were 3.7 percent higher than they had been one year earlier, according to a Consumer Price Index report released on Wednesday. That represented an acceleration in the inflation rate, one driven largely by skyrocketing fuel prices: Gasoline was 9.1 percent more expensive in September than it had been in August. As a result, America’s average real wage has fallen by 44 cents since January.

In less than three weeks, Americans will head to the polls to decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices. As we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, this newsletter is partnering with our colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms. We’re breaking down one issue each week and suggesting further reading and races to watch in November.

Last week, we tackled the data center backlash. And this week, we’re digging into affordability.

Go a little deeper

These upward trends in prices aren’t lost on voters. In a recent Pew Research survey, just 21 percent of Americans said economic conditions were “excellent” or “good” — while 65 percent said that Trump’s policies had made the economy worse.

The high cost of living is weighing on Republican candidates in all battleground races. Maine provides just one example of how potent the issue could prove on Election Day.

From one angle, the state’s Senate race might seem like a gimme for Democrats. Kamala Harris won Maine by nearly 7 points in 2024. Thus, in 2026 — when Democrats are poised to win in a national landslide — one might expect the party to easily triumph.

But Republican incumbent Susan Collins is an unusually formidable foe. The race has been a dead heat, with Democratic nominee Troy Jackson leading by just 2 points in a recent Suffolk University poll.

Fortunately for Jackson, Mainers’ energy bills are expected to soar in the campaign’s final weeks, plausibly increasing voters’ appetite for change in the process. 

Maine is America’s second coldest state and unusually reliant on oil for home heat. As autumn advances, its residents will use more heating oil, thereby driving up both their personal bills and market prices. Thanks to the global energy crunch, a gallon of such fuel is already nearly twice as expensive as it was this time last year. 

Jackson has been hitting Collins on the issue relentlessly. That could put a chill in Collins’s reelection odds — and thus, the GOP’s hopes of retaining Senate control.

➨ Other races to watch:

• Similar dynamics are playing out in perennially icy Alaska, where Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola has hammered incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan for his complicity in sky-high diesel prices, which many Alaskans use for home heat.  
• In Ohio’s Senate race, Democrat Sherrod Brown has tried to pin rising electricity bills on Republican Sen. Jon Husted, due to his support for data center development. 
• And in Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico has attacked his Republican rival, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, for supporting “this disastrous war in Iran that’s driving up our costs.” 

In other news

• A brief ceasefire ends: Ukrainian drones attacked a Russian oil refinery early Thursday, days after Trump demanded both Russia and Ukraine halt such attacks.
• Execution livestream canceled: Trump canceled a plan to livestream the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad.
• On the podcast: A recent rash of violence between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthis threatens to destabilize the region — and make the Iran war much larger. Listen to the whole thing here.

One link for later

Rethink confidence. Research shows confidence is good for your job and good for your romantic prospects. Unsurprisingly, then, a whole industry has sprung up teaching people to be more confident. One writer signed up to work with a confidence coach for the first time, and ended up doubting that her self-doubt was all that bad.

Before you go…

• Did you know…there are four state laws regarding real estate and paranormal activity in the US? That’s because purported hauntings are just one of many factors that can affect home prices.
• Today’s trivia: What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked which percussion instrument is famously played by Mississippi State University fans at home football games. That would be the cowbell.

Think about what you’re wearing right now. Did you pick it out? Or was it chosen for you by an algorithm you haven’t even considered? 

You may think it’s the former, but with the state of the fashion industry, it’s likely the latter. There was a time when taste was decided by designers at luxury fashion houses, à la Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, or Anna Wintour-type magazine editors (think of the famous cerulean sweater monologue from The Devil Wears Prada). Now, in the era of fast fashion, our clothing options are often dictated by computers. 

Amy Odell writes the Back Row newsletter and hosts a podcast with the same name. She told Vox that what’s known as fast fashion has been kicked into hyperdrive by companies like Shein. 

“I’ve also heard it called instant fashion,” she says. “The way it works is that they use algorithms to track trends and what people are interested in, and then they make a few hundred of a very large number of different items and they test demand.” She says this model has allowed companies like Shein to introduce around 4,700 new apparel styles per day. (For comparison, fast-fashion brand Zara produces around 20,000 a year.)

Some are trying to claw back their personal style by hitting the thrift store instead. Traditionally, it’s where people go to find less expensive clothes. But fashion journalist Hannah Marriott says it can be so much more than that. 

“For the last probably a hundred years, [the thrift store] has had lots of moments where it’s been cool within countercultures,” Marriott told Vox. “Whether it’s grunge, or the surrealists in the 1920s, or the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, secondhand clothing was cool because of the stigma.” 

So how did thrifting go from stigmatized to chic? And are thrift stores still thrifty now that they’re more mainstream, especially in an era of ultra-cheap Shein clothing? We find out that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Marriott, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

There’s sometimes this stigma that’s attached to buying secondhand clothes. How has its perception changed over time?

Secondhand clothing used to be something that there was a real sense that if you couldn’t buy new, you would buy secondhand. At the same time, it has had lots of moments where it’s been cool within countercultures. 

People within countercultures — whether it’s grunge, or the surrealists in the 1920s, or the Rolling Stones in the 1960s — secondhand clothing was cool because of the stigma. It’s also been a really important resource for people on lower incomes for a long time. 

I think it was a gradual shift by various things that happened in the pandemic, including this absolute influx of apps [like the RealReal and Depop] that got very, very popular during that time, particularly among younger Gen Z consumers. 

Thrifting became a social currency on social media platforms, especially on TikTok. It’s a vast ecosystem at the moment, and all of them have slightly different business models, slightly different fees that they charge, and slightly different audiences that they’re reaching. The stigma has really gone away, and it’s almost reversed.

What does that ecosystem look like?

There are different layers to it. There are consignment places like the RealReal where they take quite a big cut, but they will promote your items for you. I think those sites tend to work best if you’ve actually got designer clothes that have quite a big margin, particularly handbags. 

“I think maybe this is a reaction to 30 years of fast fashion just getting faster and faster and faster.”

Then there are other sites that are a bit more laid-back: eBay maybe skews a bit older, Depop skews a bit younger and trendier. There’s Vinted, which I know from the UK, but is making inroads into the US now. There’s ThreadUp as well. Poshmark. 

It’s an absolutely vast ecosystem at the moment, and all of them have slightly different business models, slightly different fees that they charge, and slightly different audiences that they’re reaching.

One of the biggest secondhand shops here in the US is still Goodwill. Can you walk me through how Goodwill has adapted and changed to the secondhand boom?

Neighborhood thrift stores of that kind are the sort of stores that people on lower incomes do rely on more. It’s less trend-led than something like Depop. And it is somewhere that people have often been going for decades to get clothes that they can afford. 

Goodwill undeniably has put its prices up. Inflation is such an issue for everyone, so I’m sure that there would be an element of prices going up anyway, but a lot of shoppers feel strongly that they’ve gone up a lot — that you can’t find bargains anymore, that the bargains get sent online to either their website or are bought by resellers who sell them for an inflated price online. 

It’s hard to get to the bottom of exactly how true all of that is, especially because Goodwill is run as 150 autonomous [nonprofits], and each of them set their own prices. But what I would say is you are seeing things like the Goodwill branch in Connecticut charging $75 bucks to go on a thrift tour coach to get early access to a Goodwill store, and then you get to go to another store. You used to be able to buy 10 things in Goodwill for $75.

It’s so interesting that thrifting used to be this edgy original thing, but it’s really gone mainstream. Has it sold out? 

I remember when I was much younger, people would say, “Ooh, you got that secondhand.” I just don’t think anyone would ever say that now because that’s kind of how we shop. 

But I still think it is great if you find something original that you love that no one else has, and I still think you’re more likely to find it secondhand or in certain other under-the-radar brands that aren’t fast fashion. 

I think maybe this is a reaction to 30 years of fast fashion just getting faster and faster and faster. I think we’re all feeling a bit tired of that business model, so we’re trying to find other ways to shop and express ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And with that, it’s time to log off…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is happening with diesel?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you haven’t heard of “live shopping,” you might soon. Livestream shopping is already a staple of e-commerce in China, where consumers log onto apps like Douyin and Taobao to buy products from a livestreamer — think QVC. Now, a new app is trying to bring it to the United States.

The Whatnot app features rolling live auctions that can last from three seconds to a minute. Users can bid on everything from trading cards to clothes to steaks. With about 550,000 hours of streaming per week, the site moves an extraordinary amount of product. 

Using Whatnot is fast-paced, and essentially frictionless. Users swipe at the bottom of their screens to place the highest bit for an object. If they win, the object is sent to their house, no confirmation screen needed. 

The system isn’t without its drawbacks. Hanna Krueger, a retail reporter for the Wall Street Journal, investigated how Whatnot has become an addiction for some users. She tells Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that she spoke to a user who spent over $1 million on the app — and lost everything in the process. 

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

Tell us about this app, Whatnot.

Whatnot is a live shopping app. Imagine the home shopping network had a baby with TikTok and eBay, and it was on your phone and it was running 24 hours a day. 

You open up the app [and] there’s countless numbers of categories. You can get coins. You can get cards. You can get horse tack, plants, goo, lobsters. I mean, the categories are expanding all of the time. And there are sellers live-auctioning off these goods in real time. 

There’s a countdown clock, and it’s counting down and the auctioneer or the seller is hyping up the chat, as they call it. And that chat is commenting like, “Wow, look at this. What a deal.” In the meantime, there’s some music. Sometimes it’s nice mellow music, other times it’s metal or EDM, depending on the personality of the seller. 

The end result is that the last person to swipe at the bottom of the screen, which is how you bid, gets the item. And once you have swiped and you’re the final person to do that, there’s no real confirmation screen. We’re just onto the next product and you only really find out what you got when it shows up at your door.

It started as a marketplace for Funko Pop figurines, which are these niche, squareheaded figurines in the collectible world, but it quickly expanded. I would say the biggest categories are sports cards and trading cards like Pokémon. And then the other one is women’s fashion and beauty products. 

I spoke to multiple people who found themselves just spiraling into holes of addiction and what they liken to gambling because of that “break format.” 

Tell us about the break format.

Break format typically applies to trading cards. That could be sports cards, Pokémon. It can also happen with rare coins, but the idea is that there is a sealed pack of cards and that sealed pack is pretty expensive to buy outright — say it’s $10,000. Before the show starts, they’ll say, “Okay guys, there are 10 slots that apply to this pack. So I need 10 people to buy in at a price of $1,000.” This is a steal, right? You’re getting a piece of the pie of a $10,000 pie for only $1,000.

The reason that they’re willing to do that is that within that pack, there might be cards that are worth $2,000, $3,000, $10,000. So you recoup quite quickly if you only paid a thousand for that. The other side, the flip side that often does happen is that the cards are worth nothing close to what you bought in for.

People will get a card that’s worth $50, $100, and at the end of it, all you have to show is these small-value cards. And those who have described kind of a cycle of problematic behavior say that when you lose, when you don’t make up the value that you paid, you just buy right into the next one until you get out of the hole. 

It’s this feeling of the high, the thrill, the adrenaline rush, the “Oh my God, look what I just did” when you get a card that’s way over what you thought. And there’s the despondency, this despair, the shame, and that feeling of, “Okay, I need to make my money back on that flip side.”

This is where this app really begins to look like gambling, to look like addiction, to look like a drug. As does the story of Sean Harding, with which you open your piece for the journal. Tell us about Sean.

Sean Harding is a 45-year-old finance manager from Denver. Sean found himself on this app and he wasn’t spending too much in the very beginning, maybe $100 a day. And then within 40 days he was spending over $1,000, $5,000 a day. Just swiping whenever he could get a free moment — when he was doing laundry, sitting on the toilet. 

It was only when his wife confronted him about this odd behavior, about some missing pages on his credit report, that he really looked at what he had spent and that number was crazy. It was $1.3 million in four months. He had borrowed money from a friend, he had taken out personal loans. And finally, when all that was depleted, he had used his employer’s credit card.

You spoke to the founder of Whatnot. What does he say when you tell him a story like Sean’s?

[Whatnot CEO and cofounder Grant] LaFontaine said that addiction does not register as a problem to them in their internal data, which they look at often. When we presented a story like Sean’s, they repeated that addiction does not register as a problem. When you breach the topic of gambling or people accusing this app of having gambling features, that’s where Whatnot definitely buttons up. They’re under pretty intense scrutiny surrounding that allegation.

They categorially reject that and they say they can’t comment on pending litigation. But they do say that they created an app that had the best user experience possible and that they’re new and they’re learning and they’re scaling and they’re assessing the marketplace in real time.

Are they implementing any guardrails to maybe prevent someone like Sean from ruining his life and his family’s life?

While they say that addiction doesn’t register as a significant problem, they also have introduced optional spending limits and watch time caps. They said that’s not because of addiction concerns, but because some users said that they spent more than intended. That was the distinction that they made. 

They said there’s other safeguards coming, such as “velocity of spend” alerts for sudden spending spikes. Some have PIN locking for categories, so you have to type in a PIN to go to a certain category. Some of these are self-policed. A watch time cap, you could presumably change that yourself, even though you’re the one that implemented it. 

They’re also saying that they’re going to develop some type of birthday reconfirmation option so they could catch underage users, which is coincidentally how I came to know about Whatnot. One of my colleagues’ daughters had spent over $5,000 in one night on Pokemon cards. And he only realized that when he looked at his credit card and was like, “What is this?” And he went to sell those cards at a card shop after the fact to try to recoup, and he could only get back like $300.

Is this just a Whatnot thing, or are there other ways kids and adults can be gambling their lives away on these live auction-type of platforms?

Live shopping has been one of the most predominant ways that Chinese shoppers shop for a long time, and the wave has crested over there a long time before it has here. It really started to take off and gain traction in America in the kind of post-pandemic world.

While Whatnot is definitely leading the charge, TikTok has their own thing called TikTok Shop that has a similar kind of setup. eBay is trying out stuff like this. And then for the card-collecting hobby specifically, Fanatics Live is a major source to get your cards and experience breaks and all that.

Do all of these different platforms, be it on TikTok or eBay, have the sort of gamified countdown clock to make it more intense, more exciting, and perhaps more addictive?

Whatnot’s found a way to create a really engaging and easy-to-interact-with atmosphere. They’ve also successfully merged the parasocial media aspect. There are relationships between the seller and the buyer, so if you keep going back to the same seller, they’ll remember your name, the people in the chat will remember. There are some folks who were like, ‘I found friends in here.’ 

Sean said that the night that he used his company credit card, he was reached out to by a seller and they were like, “Hey man, you got to join this. This break’s awesome. I have a great slot for you. I’ll give it to you at a discount.” And he’s like, “I don’t have any money.” And that’s when he realized that he had a little money. It just happened to belong to his employer.

That kind of shows that there’s this social atmosphere. Whatnot is definitely leading the charge, but other companies are seeing how successful this is, and I think it’s only time before they kind of merge all these aspects together in an attempt to take their market share from them.

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk Collaboration.

At a specialized cold lab in Boulder, Colorado, where indoor temperatures hover around minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius), atmospheric researcher Anthony Bernal Ayala slices hailstones with a band saw, revealing layers of icy growth like the rings of a tree. These frozen rings — clear or cloudy, thick or thin — indicate the conditions in which the hail formed: A clear layer signals the water froze slowly, while a cloudy layer means it happened quickly, trapping air bubbles. Bernal Ayala then analyzes the crystalline structures, particles, and isotopes preserved in these layers.

“All that information can tell you a wonderful story of how the hailstone was growing, but nobody — not until now — was able to tap into that history,” said Bernal Ayala, who works for Atmospheric and Environmental Research, part of the JANUS Research Group.

Bernal Ayala’s research, conducted at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is part of a historic effort to study one of the costliest weather hazards. Researchers hope their findings will help protect lives and property from the stones that careen to Earth, battering roofs, pummeling crops, and pockmarking cars.

From 2023 to 2025, annual severe thunderstorm losses exceeded $50 billion nationwide, according to the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety — more than double the losses seen just a decade earlier. Hail accounted for 60 percent to 80 percent of the damage.

In Colorado, one of the country’s most hail-prone states, hail — not wildfire — is the main factor driving up insurance premiums. And researchers expect larger, more damaging hailstones to become more common with climate change.

“It’s going to just keep getting costlier and costlier,” Bernal Ayala said.

Even basic questions about hail have been notoriously hard to study. But a long-awaited resurgence in research, including the first major US field campaign to study hail in more than 40 years, could help change that. 

ICECHIP — the “In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail In the Plains” — aims to improve forecasts, make warnings more precise and help communities better prepare. It received $11 million in funding from the National Science Foundation in 2024, just before deep cuts hit the foundation in 2025. 

For six weeks in spring 2025, about 100 scientists and university students chased hailstorms across the Central Plains and Front Range, from the Canadian to the Mexican border, using radar trucks to track storms and drones to take aerial footage. Researchers photographed hail with high-speed cameras, measured its impact with a tool called a disdrometer, recorded hail’s distribution and size based on its imprints on foam pads, captured it in specialized funnels, and crushed it to test its strength. 

Scientists from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology also used balloons to release golf ball-sized sensors into storms. Once aloft, each hail-like probe collected data on how fast it was traveling and whether ice was growing on it; a microphone even recorded water droplets and hailstones hitting it.

“This has really been the first time where we’ve been able to do a real comprehensive look at hail on the ground, hail aloft, the storm itself, the environment around the storm — just everything all at once,” said Becky Adams-Selin, ICECHIP’s lead investigator and a principal scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, JANUS Research Group. 

ICECHIP’s samples were packed into 26 cooler-sized boxes and brought to NCAR. This internationally renowned hub for weather and climate research has been used to study hail for decades. In one of its last major campaigns, in the 1970s, the US investigated Soviet claims that it could suppress hail. 

Researchers say there’s no other US lab like it; the backup plan to store ICECHIP’s samples involved using a walk-in freezer from a fast-food restaurant.

Now NCAR’s own future is uncertain: In late 2025, the Trump administration said it would dissolve the center and transfer its work out of state. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NCAR, sued the administration in March, alleging that it’s targeting NCAR to punish Colorado for retaining its mail-in voting system and because Gov. Jared Polis initially refused to release former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters, a 2020 election denier imprisoned for breaching election security and undermining election integrity.

In June, a federal judge temporarily blocked the White House from dismantling NCAR. The government has until Sept. 30 to respond to the lawsuit.

“I can’t even quantify the impact that it would have to our community if we lost NCAR,” Victor Gensini, professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University, told HCN. “They are the beating heart.”

Previous research has predicted climate change’s effects on hail, noting that warmer temperatures could melt smaller hailstones before they land but also fuel stronger updrafts, keeping hailstones airborne longer and allowing them to grow bigger, enabling the most damaging hail to become more common. 

A record-setting stone recovered in Yuma County, Colorado, in 2023 measured more than 5 inches across. That year, the state logged 176 reports of hail 2 inches or greater, surpassing the previous record of 91 reports in 2018, according to the Colorado Climate Center.

Scientists say it’s difficult to know how much of the rise in damage is due to the increase in large hail versus the increased development in hail hotspots. The connection between a rapidly growing human footprint and higher insured losses has been dubbed the “expanding bull’s-eye effect.”

Gensini, a principal ICECHIP investigator, cites the development boom east of the Front Range, along Colorado’s Interstate 25 corridor, which has grown explosively in recent decades. The population of the Fort Collins metro area alone has doubled since 1990 to around 375,000 residents, according to the US Census Bureau.

This is happening across the Western US, as previously rural or open areas become densely populated, increasingly expensive targets for hail.

“Colorado is the poster child for what I expect the next 25 years to look like for hail,” Gensini said.

In 2019, Fort Collins became one of the first cities to adopt hail-specific roofing requirements for new builds and remodels. Marcus Coldiron, the city’s chief building official, said it was partly in response to all the shingles and roofing materials taken to the landfill after a catastrophic hailstorm in 2018.

It’s still unclear how well the requirements are working: Coldiron said fewer permits were being issued for roof replacements and fewer shingles were going to the dump. However, Fort Collins also hasn’t experienced a hailstorm as devastating as the one that hit in 2018.

A growing number of Front Range communities now require impact-resistant shingles in their building codes, and Colorado legislators recently passed a law offering grants to residents who install more resilient roofing.

ICECHIP’s researchers are also investigating how they can improve building materials as billion-dollar losses from single storms become more common.

“The dollars are simply piling up so fast,” said Ian Giammanco, a lead research meteorologist at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, one of ICECHIP’s key partners. “We’re still trying to understand how do we get the best materials onto roofs, onto people’s homes, onto businesses to actually start shaving off these losses.”   

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

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

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

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

Why? It comes back to the numbers.

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

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

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

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

1. It’s the economy (again)

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

Here’s what Valencia said:

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

She also pointed this out:

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

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

2. The immigration backlash

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

Here’s what Valencia said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Meeting voters where they are

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I’m hearing

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

What’s the community reaction been?

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

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

What are the unanswered questions you’re still chasing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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