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A decade ago, insulin became the poster child for America’s out-of-control drug prices. The 2017 death of Alec Smith, who was rationing his insulin before he died, and repeated price hikes for a 100-year-old medication (the patent for which was originally sold for $1 to a university to prevent it from being exploited commercially) sparked widespread outrage that a lifesaving medication could be unaffordable to the people who depend on it to survive.

And then politicians actually acted. Starting with a Colorado law passed in 2019, states began passing laws capping the out-of-pocket costs for many people who take insulin; 27 states (plus Washington, DC) now have such a policy. Then in 2022, Congress included a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that established a $35 per month cap on insulin prescriptions for people on Medicare. Given the national response — drugmakers also made splashy public announcements about reducing the cash price that uninsured people pay — you would be forgiven if you thought this was the one health care cost crisis that the US had genuinely managed to solve.

But the diabetes community has a dire warning: It’s not over. Millions of people continue to struggle to pay for their insulin and having their long-term health put at risk because of, in the words of one advocate who put it bluntly, pharmaceutical greed.

“There has been so much attention and promise to action around the insulin price crisis. … There has been so much action,” said Shaina Kasper, executive director of T1 International, a global nonprofit that advocates for people with diabetes. “And shockingly, frustratingly, critically, the data from our 2024 survey showed that the rationing rates were worse than ever. Ultimately we’re facing such immense and monstrous corporate greed. … When we put a Band-Aid on one hole, another one’s going to find a way to pop out and keep profits high.”

Fixing the insulin crisis will require a multifaceted approach: drug pricing reform, insurance mandates, and possibly even public manufacturing. Out-of-pocket caps, Kasper said, were always a temporary fix for a very broken system. There is still a lot more work to do.

Why so many Americans still struggle to afford insulin

Both national and local surveys indicate that the policy changes of the past decade have not had the desired effect.

A study published last year from researchers at the Yale Diabetes Center found that people treated there were rationing insulin at the same rate in 2024 as they were in 2017; about one in four people reported some rationing due to the cost of the drug in both years. When you added in the people who rationed because of insurance delays or supply limits, more than one in three people — 38 percent — were still having trouble keeping this lifesaving medication on hand in 2024. A 2024 T1 International survey likewise found that nationwide, 34 percent of the Americans who use insulin reported rationing the medicine. (About 8.4 million people in the US rely on insulin to survive.)

Dr. Kasia Lipska, an endocrinologist and researcher who treats patients at the Yale Diabetes Center and who co-authored that study, was surprised by their findings.

“I was surprised because I’ve been looking at the policy and advocating for policy change; you think things are moving, they should be really improving,” Lipska said. “But if I talked to the nurses and our staff at the Yale Diabetes Center, they told me, ‘Of course they haven’t changed. We’re still hearing these stories.’”

How could this be? The explanation is multifaceted, according to Lipska and Kasper. 

“There’s just still a lot of holes in one who is covered by various protections and then how they’re covered and how they access this,” Lipska said. “It’s not as simple as just showing up at the pharmacy and asking for your insulin, and the sticker price is there, and that’s what you pay. It’s extremely complicated.”

For starters, millions of Americans remain uninsured and have to pay the cash price for drugs. While drugmakers make flashy announcements about helping those people, the process of enrolling for savings cards to get those lower prices can be a nightmare; one congressional investigation found in 2023 that uninsured patients were still paying an average of nearly $100 for insulin despite Eli Lilly’s pledge that its generic product would be available for $25 per vial. Even if you manage to get your discount card, the same investigation found that Lilly introduced several restrictions based on geography and needs, and that the specific insulins that are subject to these voluntary price caps are often out of stock at the pharmacy when people go to fill a prescription (while the more expensive brand name version is consistently available).

And then there are the loopholes in those existing federal and state laws. The federal $35 cap applies only to Medicare; the private insurance that covers half the country is excluded. (There have been bills proposed to extend the cap to private coverage, but they have not gone very far in Congress.) The state laws that do exist typically apply only to small-group and individual plans that are subject to state regulations; larger self-funded plans are exempt from state mandates and currently have no enforced limit on out-of-pocket insulin costs. One national estimate found that around 775,000 people who use insulin and had private insurance were protected in 2025 by the caps in states where they’d become law. But more than 1 million people in those states were not, nor were the 2.1 million commercially insured insulin users in states without a cap.

Even for people who benefit from the mandatory out-of-pocket caps instituted by Medicare and state laws, some of them still struggle to come up with $35 a month, given all of the other price hikes Americans have faced since the pandemic. They may have to navigate a complex process in order to actually receive the promised discount. And while a $35-per-month cap sounds straightforward, in practice, people can still face higher costs. Each individual person requires a unique amount of insulin and, for some of them, they might need two different kinds; the pharmacy may not have the right version and will make substitutions that lead to higher costs. That’s how one of Lipska’s patients ended up paying $140 per month for his insulin — despite being on Medicare.

“These things really add up…and frustrate people,” she said, “because what seems like a great idea is not actually how things work on the ground.”

The consequence is that, despite all the legislative activity and self-congratulations, millions of Americans are still at risk of serious health problems because they can’t get insulin.

The worst-case scenario is what happened to Alec Smith: Somebody is forced to spread their insulin so thin that they put their life is in danger. When diabetics have their blood sugar spike without insulin on hand, they can go into diabetic ketoacidosis, “which literally means your blood is turning into acid,” Kasper said. “I can speak from experience: it feels like you’re dying.”

To recover from an episode, they may have to go to the emergency room and end up taking even more insulin while eating in order to get their body back to equilibrium. But even short of an emergency, Kasper said, people who resort to rationing insulin can experience significant side effects. Prolonged high blood sugar due to rationing could lead to serious vision and nerve problems that were supposed to be a thing of the past once insulin became available.

Those were the scenarios that lawmakers wanted to prevent as they tried to make insulin more affordable. But they remain a very real threat for too many people.

The big idea that could make insulin truly affordable

If there’s good news to be found, it’s that the advocacy community is not giving up. They are sounding the alarm about the ongoing affordability crisis and urging Congress to act. But they do worry that the issue has become less urgent: The truly comprehensive mandate for insulin out-of-pocket caps, which is typically introduced every Congress, was delayed this time. “This year, neither bill was introduced for over a year, and it was very concerning,” Kasper said.

But they are also placing bets on something much more profound than a price cap: the government itself procuring or even producing insulin and making it available to people at the lowest possible cost. 

“This idea that medicines should be for people and not for profit I feel like is really catching,” Kasper said. 

Some states are taking baby steps in that direction: Oklahoma passed a bill this year that would offer government funding for private companies that pledge to produce insulin and sell it at a low price. 

Others are going bigger. As I reported in 2023, California has launched a program that is eventually intended to lead to government-owned facilities producing insulin to be sold on the cheap, though it will take years until publicly owned production begins. The New York state Senate approved a similar plan this year, although funding for it didn’t make it into the state’s budget. Kasper said that she is optimistic the project will make it into next year’s spending plan, and says a lot of work is currently being done to ensure it happens.

In the future, public manufacturing could also help to address the supply problems that continue to pop up. There are only three insulin manufacturers in the US right now. As those for-profit pharmaceutical companies place more emphasis on GLP-1 production — which often takes place in the same facilities as insulin production — nonprofit initiatives could fill in the gaps.

“In this time of tariffs even, with these concerns around shortages and rising prices and the corporations having this monopoly and price gouging ordinary Americans for decades now, as we’ve seen on insulin, let’s just make it ourselves,” Kasper said.

This is a long-term vision; if you need help right now, T1 International has resources to help people get health insurance, access discount programs, and even find emergency insulin. But a more affordable future for insulin will only be possible if lawmakers feel compelled to act. Public outrage created one round of reform, but the risk of political complacency is real. So if you care about this issue and want to get involved, T1 International also has a tool kit for people who want to advocate for policy changes, including around public pharma.

“The general communication that we’ve been hearing is that the insulin price crisis is over,” Kasper said. “Everyone should have access to a $35 copay for insurance. As the data shows, as we’ve been talking about, that is just not true.”

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

Diesel hit a record $6.40 per gallon this morning, up 73 percent from a year ago. “Not really my problem,” you might be thinking. “I don’t drive a semi or excavator.”

But you know who does drive semis and excavators and all the other machines that rely on diesel fuel? The people who farm your food, ferry your online orders, and repave the streets in your neighborhood. All that means the price of diesel trickles down into virtually every segment of the economy. (We’ll get into that a bit more shortly.)

Like gas prices, diesel has been rising since the US war with Iran began more than six months ago. But this particular surge was also driven by two incidents in particular: an attack on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, which has made it costlier and more time-consuming to get oil out, and a Ukrainian drone campaign against Russian oil infrastructure, which has forced major refineries to scale back production.

In the aftermath of those attacks, President Donald Trump implored Ukraine to stop targeting refineries. His administration has also relaxed some labor rules for fuel-truck drivers in the hopes of getting more gas and diesel moving.

There’s reportedly also talk of invoking the Defense Production Act to scale up America’s refining capacity, or even restricting diesel exports to help drop domestic prices. Not on the solution list, notably: winding down the war in Iran, which kickstarted this whole thing. 

Go a little deeper

The cost of diesel quietly raises the price of many other goods and services. This is difficult to quantify, but researchers at Brown University estimate that the extra cost paid for diesel between the start of the Iran War and the time I’m drafting this newsletter works out to roughly $374 per US household. 

Part of that cost springs from the fact that so many commercial, agricultural, and industrial machines run on diesel fuel. At the risk of sounding like one of my toddler’s “things that go” books, the list includes semis, tractors, excavators, freight trains, buses, cargo ships, and garbage trucks — to say nothing of other machines, like heavy industrial equipment and backup generators.

But part of the cost also springs from the fact that demand for diesel fuel is, compared to other goods, pretty inelastic. When the price of regular gas goes up, consumers can cut back on road trips, opt for public transit, or even contemplate an EV purchase.

Diesel-dependent industries frequently lack those options, however. As one fuel industry analyst put it in a recent column for the trade publication Oil & Gas 360, a farmer halfway through the harvest — as many are right now — can’t just stop running a combine or tractor because diesel gets pricey. 

In other words, it’s difficult for businesses to avoid or offset the higher cost of fuel. And that makes it more likely that they’ll pass on the cost to consumers, even if they’re able to absorb it for a little while.

Where will you likely see those added costs first? Your grocery bill, for one. Look for price increases on highly perishable products that travel long distances, like milk, meat, fruits, and vegetables.

One link for later

➨ Gossip more ethically. Talking about other people is interesting, common, and — often! — quite fun. But it’s neither very kind, nor particularly moral, to reduce your acquaintances to conversational trading cards. So when you gossip, consider whether your story affords its subject “the concern and respect” you’d expect yourself. If not, try a safer conversational topic: stories about your own experiences. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that “money dysmorphia” is a real (and common!) cognitive bias? It describes the irrational feeling that money is tight, when you’re actually — on paper — doing just fine. 
• Today’s trivia: What is the name of the nursery rhyme character referenced in the movie Shrek’s interrogation scene? (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 a large marine mammal that recently died at a US aquarium. That would be the whale — specifically, the beluga. Three beluga whales died in an eight-day span at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium in August.

Ahead of the meeting, rhetoric from Washington and Beijing has underscored only deepening acrimony and distrust over their rush to dominate the technological frontier.

Workers allege involuntary labor and other abuses on Taiwan-flagged fishing boats that supply the U.S. brand, according to a report by Global Labor Justice.

Interest rate increase ‘likely’, warns Bank of England

It is the second consecutive year the State Department has prevented key Palestinian officials from attending the U.N. meeting in New York.

Nearly two decades ago, a group of researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory ran a secret experiment, known as the Aurora Generator Test, on a massive emerald green diesel generator. Using 30 lines of code, they hacked into the generator’s virtual backroom, corrupting safeguards and flipping switches that left it out of sync with the rest of the power grid.

Before an audience of electrical utility executives and energy department officials watching from a nearby room, the 27-ton generator jolted violently, sputtering out a dark smoke as its rubber innards rapidly tore themselves apart. 

“The implication was that with just a few lines of code, you can create conditions that were physically going to be very damaging to the machines we rely on,” lead researcher Michael Assante later told the journalist Andy Greenberg for his book Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers. “I had a very real pit in my stomach. It was like a glimpse of the future.”

That future seems to have creeped much closer this week, with leading AI developers and executives casually admitting that they believe their creation is, to paraphrase one winking X post, as likely to end humanity as the New York Jets are to make the playoffs this season. Now, exactly how AI would pull off killing everyone is far murkier territory. But as Assante sensed all those years ago, AI may not need to be all-powerful to leap from its virtual cage and into the critical infrastructure that powers our hospitals, flushes our toilets, and pumps water to our faucets. It just needs to fall into the wrong hands. 

Almost any AI doomsday scenario you can think of begins with a swarm of shadowy bots slithering through cyberspace, poking their noses behind the scenes of power plants, toaster ovens, traffic lights, or even, in an utterly extreme case, our nuclear weapons arsenal. If destroying the Aurora generator, at the very least, required a human hacker to write the code, AI has since completely torn down the barrier to entry for wreaking havoc, as the Hugging Face incident demonstrated earlier this year. 

But AI need not go rogue to threaten the power grid or mess with your tap water. A new age of AI-powered, but human-directed hacking is already upon us, experts say. With some of the nation’s most sensitive infrastructure startlingly vulnerable to attack, the most likely AI apocalypse could in fact start with the water tower or generator idling in your backyard. In a worst-case scenario, this could lead to a cascade of scary failures in the systems we rely on to live comfortably modern lives, from running our AC in blazingly hot summers to geolocating our ships and planes.

“Before, you needed to have highly skilled technical expertise,” to pull off some version of a real-life Aurora Generator Test, said Alvaro Cardenas, a computer science professor at UC Santa Cruz. “And now, you just have to have a general idea of what’s possible.”

AI is making an old threat much worse

Not long after the Idaho National Laboratory hacked that poor generator into combustion, the federal government mandated that electrical utilities engage in basic cybersecurity hygiene. 

And yet much of America’s critical infrastructure — like gas pipelines, water desalination plants, or cargo terminals — remains woefully unprepared for even conventional cyber attacks, much less the coming onslaught of AI. 

That’s in part because cyberattacks like the one simulated in the Aurora Generator Test have long been — and still are, to some extent — exceedingly rare, unappealing to most criminal hackers because they’re optimized for disruption rather than financial gain. But in the process of making it extremely easy for anyone to code, AI has also made it extremely easy for almost anyone to vibe hack their way into your online bank account, or, in theory, a local reservoir or the power grid. AI agents can also vastly widen the scope on easy targets because, as Andy Bochman, an expert in infrastructure resilience at West Yost, put it — “they don’t sleep; they don’t get tired; and they don’t get sick.” 

In the past, even those who did want to launch large-scale attacks on infrastructure probably weren’t savvy enough to do so. And while other nations such as China, Iran, and Russia have indeed already breached many of our infrastructure systems (as we have theirs), they haven’t opted to make much of a ruckus once inside. 

“Geopolitics is eroding the idea that those with capability lack the intent, and AI is eroding the other part of it, that those with the intent lack the capability.”

Jason Healey, Columbia University cybersecurity scholar

But that norm is now changing, said Jason Healey, a cybersecurity scholar at Columbia University. “Geopolitics is eroding the idea that those with capability lack the intent, and AI is eroding the other part of it, that those with the intent lack the capability,” he told me. So, on the one hand, a nation like Russia might be much more inclined to actually disrupt our power grid now than it used to be. And, on the other hand, a nihilistic lone wolf or terrorist group could use AI to do much more damage than they ever could before. 

Just last month, we saw a glimpse of what this could look like when dozens of water and wastewater systems in small towns across the nation were attacked by a group of hackers most likely associated with Iran, leading to temporary water stoppages and flooding. These attacks have not been definitively linked to AI, but the National Security Agency warned soon afterward that hackers have been actively using AI to target US infrastructure like it. A few weeks later, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency over foreign interference in the power grid, which referenced the growing threat of cybersecurity.  

Preparing for the worst

Most of the nation’s water systems are extremely local and absurdly exposed to such attacks, so much so that “it’s almost like having a welcome mat” for a would-be hacker, said Bochman, mostly because these utilities are too small and underfunded to do much to stop them. “You have a million other problems to take care of, like aging infrastructure — your stuff’s falling apart because it’s been in the ground for 100 years,” he said. Addressing that deferred maintenance often feels far more urgent than doing “something more on cybersecurity.”

Whether it’s a rogue cluster of agents or a hostile nation-state trying to mess with our electricity, we should prepare our most important infrastructure for the worst. In Bochman’s view, that may mean rejecting the pressure to digitize everything in the first place and moving toward something that resembles the days when “people manned things like substations, communicated by a landline telephone, and read gauges, the analog things,” he said. “The screen is the thing that is infinitely manipulatable.”

Healey, who advised the Biden administration heavily on cybersecurity and infrastructure, believes that the nation desperately needs a coordinated response, between the federal government and AI companies, but also between the US and other countries like China, where similarly powerful models are being developed. And utility systems need to assume they will be a target and improve their cybersecurity practices accordingly, Healey says, ideally with funding from the federal government or, perhaps more appropriately, AI companies. 

Nobody knows precisely how vulnerable America’s infrastructure is to AI right now, in part because policymakers — and perhaps more disturbingly, AI’s creators themselves — seem woefully unsure of how to stop the technology from acting badly (or obeying bad orders) in the first place. For now at least, the solution might be, as Bochman suggests, to pull as many of our critical systems offline as possible, the better to hide it from AI and those who would misuse it.

“When bad things start to happen, no one will know what to do or why because they’re black boxes; the people that make them don’t know what’s going on inside,” Bochman said. “And the poor utility people who ultimately own the risk when someone gets hurt from a system” won’t understand what went wrong either, “and they’ll wish to God they’d never taken it on board.”

The Trump administration seized control of Venezuelan oil after capturing President Nicolás Maduro in January.

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

One big idea: It’s decision time for Kamala Harris

On Wednesday, LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic Party megadonor Reid Hoffman threw cold water on the prospect of a 2028 presidential campaign from former Vice President Kamala Harris. “I think it would be a very challenging path for her and it’s going to be a very noisy field,” Hoffman said when asked at a Politico event in Washington, DC, whether Harris should run again.

His statement comes the same week CNN aired an interview with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who told Jake Tapper (while fly-fishing?) that he would not run for president if Harris did so — a curious move from someone who swung through South Carolina barely two weeks ago, and who has long been treated as a presumed frontrunner for 2028.

Taken together — and thinking back to our America, Actually episode on the question of whether Harris will run — I think you’re seeing the early stages of what I’d call a light public pressure campaign.

Let me explain: Harris has been curiously mum on most things politics since 2024, but it’s clear she wants to be taken seriously as an option for 2028 and has weighed in from time to time on issues (this week it was AI safety). When we recorded our episode in June, her allies emphasized two political points over and over: She’s leading the early 2028 polls, and nobody has supplanted her with the two groups that anchor the Democratic base, Black voters, and women. But they stressed something else, too. Her former communications director Jamal Simmons told me Harris “should do what makes her happy,” and that “she’s earned the place to run, earned the right to run.” Harris surrogate Erin Wilson put it more sharply: “The idea that she does not deserve the opportunity to make that decision — or that she does not deserve the opportunity to put an infrastructure in place beyond the construct of 107 days — I think is incredibly unfair.”

To me, it seemed the group was less interested in making the case that Harris should run in 2028, and more interested in pushing back against an emerging elite consensus that she shouldn’t. They were fighting for the right for her to choose for herself, without Washington input or pressure from the media. And it came with an implicit acknowledgment: They understood that the party’s biggest donors, whose money and access shape much of the early stages of a presidential race, had moved on from Team Harris.

Hoffman’s statement is particularly notable because of the ideological lane he occupies. He’s not just any rich Democrat — he’s bankrolled several of the party’s newest post-2024 ventures, from the abundance-adjacent WelcomeFest crowd to the $10 million he put behind a super PAC boosting James Talarico’s Senate bid in Texas this summer. If Hoffman’s asking Harris to move on, that’s likely representative of the larger left-of-center apparatus, which is looking for a unifying contender who can fend off a challenge from the activist left in 2028.

Here’s what John Morgan, another big Democratic donor, told me about Harris over the summer:

I do not [want her to run]. I think that everything associated with the Biden administration needs to be put to the side and moved on. … I just think that everything that happened has left a bad taste, and we need a fresh start on that side of the aisle.

As Morgan also pointed out, this was once a group that backed Harris — or at least was initially open to her, even dating back to her first presidential run. Now, he says, the math doesn’t work:

I don’t think the money would come to her and the votes wouldn’t come. … Her natural base is gonna be California, and she’s gonna be competing heavily with Gavin Newsom in California. So they’re gonna be kind of cannibalizing each other’s donors.

Which brings us to Newsom, another left-of-center Bay Area Democrat with a long history of friendly rivalry with Harris who surely knows these donors have had a change of heart. He knows the Reid Hoffmans and John Morgans want a fresh face. He also knows Harris’s allies are right: Just as we heard in South Carolina, Harris maintains favorability among Southern Black voters specifically, and they’re likely the most important voting bloc of any Democratic presidential primary. 

And remember, candidate timing matters: A former vice president with universal name recognition like Harris could take a playbook from Joe Biden, who let Democrat after Democrat announce before he finally entered the 2020 race in April 2019. (And I imagine Newsom also watched Harris freeze the California governor’s race for months — leaving state Democrats in the dark as she decided whether or not to enter.)

So what’s a governor to do? 

Here’s what I think is happening this week: Newsom is putting pressure on Harris to make a decision early. And in doing so, he gives donors an incentive to make clear what they’re saying privately: They don’t want Kamala Harris to run.

It’s cynical, but that’s politics — and I think it’s a much more likely scenario than the one where Newsom earnestly gives up his agency to a longtime political rival. And notably, while the headlines focused on his pledge not to run if Harris gets in the race, I think the setup to it was even more telling. Before making the pledge, Newsom volunteered his own doubt that there will be anything to defer to: “I don’t know if she runs, but we’ll see. But I wouldn’t run if she ran.”

Democrats know Harris’s decision will have a big domino effect on the rest of the race — so much so that it’s worth getting answered early (meaning: as soon after the midterms as possible). But the comments from Newsom, Hoffman, and others should be instructive to Team Harris — and anyone who wants her to mount another presidential campaign. 

This would not be 2020, or even 2024; if Harris were to run, she would likely do so without much support from the major liberal institutions or the left-of-center donors.

In a time of anti-elite backlash and grassroots anger at things like the rise of artificial intelligence and corporate consolidation, that could be an opportunity to embrace a more populist, bottom-up message. There’s just one problem: Is that who Kamala Harris is?

What I’m hearing

This week I talked to Sean Scott, a reporter following faith, immigration, and politics for the Maine Monitor. I wanted to ask him about how the Senate race is playing out from a local perspective — and specifically about how issues like immigration have manifested on the campaign trail.

There’s been so much focus on the candidates in the Maine Senate race — but you’ve been tracking some of the issues that have locally shaped the race. What’s one that has come up in Maine? And how has it played out? 

Immigration policy has been a big issue in Maine this year, and it came to a head this summer after ICE agents shot and killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford. The shooting occurred shortly after former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner had dropped out of the race because of sexual assault allegations, and many of the Democrats vying to replace him went to Biddeford to speak out against the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement. This included the eventual nominee, Troy Jackson, who said ICE should be dismantled.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins, meanwhile, has drawn scrutiny for her role in negotiating funding for DHS. Protesters stormed her Biddeford office the day of the shooting, calling for her to be voted out. Collins has said she’s pushing for reforms within the immigration agency, and said she asked ICE officials to prioritize Maine as they rolled out body cameras. But the investigation into the fatal shooting is still ongoing, and I think many Mainers are waiting to see if the agency will be held accountable.

Donald Trump’s push for hardline immigration enforcement has been deeply unpopular. Are there any surprising coalitions that have developed in Maine in response?

I cover religion, and one thing that has been really interesting to me this year is the way coalitions of progressive faith leaders have responded to the administration’s mass deportation efforts. This was especially visible during the federal immigration enforcement surge Maine saw in late January. Faith leaders formed a “human wall” outside a business with an immigrant workforce to try and protect them. Nine faith leaders were arrested for trespassing during a pray-in at Sen. Collins’s Portland office, calling for her to vote against any DHS spending bill that would maintain funding for ICE. Faith leaders were instrumental in coordinating mutual aid efforts to help families who were afraid to leave their homes — one minister told me she collected rugs for an immigrant family with young children living in an apartment, worried that a noise complaint could lead to their detention. And a multifaith coalition held a weekly vigil at the jail in Portland for months while immigration detainees were being held there. That jail ended its contract with ICE in April. Just last week, a coalition of clergy from different faiths in Bangor came together to demand that a landlord terminate a lease with ICE.

You’ve been following the rise of Turning Point USA in Maine and the network of evangelical churches that has been central to that rise. How intertwined is the conservative faith community with Republican politics in Maine? 

Maine is one of the least religious states in the country, so it isn’t always front of mind for people. But I reported this spring on one network of evangelical churches that has taken an increasingly active role in politics in recent years, and on how we’ve seen some Republican lawmakers in Maine become more explicit about tying their faith to their politics since Trump took office. The state Senate minority leader started a weekly men’s Bible study for legislators last year. That Bible study, plus increased public outreach by a Christian lobbying group and an expanded prayer caucus at the statehouse, show how conservative Christianity has become more visible in Augusta over the past two years. And Charlie Kirk’s death has certainly spurred greater interest. As of May, Maine had at least 28 church-based Turning Point Faith chapters, twice as many as any other state in New England. The debate over transgender student athletes has been a big one this year, and conservative faith communities have certainly played a role there.

From a national perspective, it feels like the Maine Senate race has maybe gone under the radar since the fallout over Graham Platner, the previous Democratic candidate. Is there still a lot of energy and focus on the race in Maine?

I can’t speak to why the national interest has dwindled, but people are certainly still paying attention here! There’s lots of national money flowing in, and the ads are nonstop.

Throughout the Trump era, Democrats have wrung their hands about how they can win over working-class voters.

Why not ask the Democrats who’ve actually done it?

That’s what Robin Johnson — a political consultant based in rural Illinois, and a part-time political science professor at Monmouth College — set out to do after Donald Trump first won the presidency, asking Democratic state legislators who won tough districts how they pulled it off.

But after Trump’s shocking second win in 2024 revived concern about Democrats’ working-class woes, the time seemed ripe to ask legislators about how they’ve managed to cope with the challenges of a new decade.

So, working with the center-left Progressive Policy Institute and co-authors Stuart Malec and Jolie Libert, Johnson interviewed 28 state legislators who won in heavily working-class areas in the seven main presidential battleground states. 

They include Nevada state Assemblymember Max Carter, a retired union electrician; Michigan state Rep. Tullio Liberati, a construction small business owner; Arizona state Rep. Lorena Austin, a self-described “five-time college dropout” with sleeve tattoos; and Wisconsin state Rep. Karen DeSanto, a nonprofit executive and former professional circus clown.

The report, which Vox reviewed exclusively ahead of its publication, comes amid a factional debate within the party between rising left-wing and socialist candidates who have argued for more far-reaching policy proposals, and more moderate Democrats who have pushed for concessions to working-class cultural sensibilities. In the report, the authors said that lawmakers they focused on “could hardly be more different from the left-wing populists who’ve captivated the national media this summer.” 

Generally, the legislators in the report focused on pocketbook issues, though in different ways — some embraced populist causes, while others positioned themselves as business-friendly. And they broadly agreed that cultural issues were Democrats’ biggest challenge in reaching the working class.

“It’s really interesting how common the themes and the challenges are from rural Georgia, right down to the border of Arizona, to Las Vegas, northern North Carolina, and then up in the ‘Blue Wall’ states,” Johnson told me. 

I spoke to Johnson last week about his findings, and about what these state legislators’ experience has to tell us about the debate over the Democratic Party’s future. Our conversation, which has been condensed and edited, is below.

What’s changed in 10 years of interviewing legislators facing tough races

Walk me through where the idea for this project came from.

I’ve been working on this for 10 years. It started at a conversation at a little diner in Maquoketa, Iowa — a little “choke and puke,” as we call those places. I was with a former state senator from Iowa named Jeff Danielson, and it was right after Trump won. Most of the focus was on what happened at the congressional or presidential level, and we thought, why not take a look at state legislators competing in these tough districts?

I approached my friend and my congresswoman, Cheri Bustos, who I’ve known really well and helped on her campaigns, and said, would you be interested in working with us and sponsoring it? She said, absolutely, because her district, the 17th in Illinois, is rural working-class. And she was able to win these voters.

We talked to probably 75 current and former legislators for that first report. We did another one in 2021, focused on members of Congress and state legislators who win Trump districts. Then we did a third one last year, on Democrats in working-class districts in the heartland. Then she retired from Congress and I went to a PPI conference this past February, and PPI agreed to partner on this with a different focus, slightly — on the seven battleground states, on districts that are really close and have more working-class voters than the national average.

So, having done this several times before, what’s new in the latest version? What are people saying now that they weren’t, necessarily, in previous rounds of this?

In the past, when we focused on the Midwest, it was mostly all white, mostly men, some women. Now, we went to North Carolina and Georgia, and there were African American legislators, men and women. And we went to the West, and there were Latinos.

But what was interesting to me was: Nobody brought up their identity in these interviews. I had to bring it up to one woman from Nevada, mentioning, “Well, you’re Native American.” “Yeah, but I don’t really talk about that much,” was the response. 

That was one big takeaway: Nobody talked about identity. Their focus was totally on their constituents, their working-class constituents. 

What were some of the common themes you saw in the responses?

There’s no secret sauce. They’re deeply rooted in their communities, they know the people that live there, they know the language, they work hard.

But they focus on economic issues. If somebody asks them about cultural issues, they’ll respond, but they try to get back to economic issues, because that’s what they’re hearing about from voters, mostly.

These folks are from a variety of backgrounds. Some are true working-class, they don’t have college degrees. One guy near Detroit runs a construction company, didn’t get a degree. Another woman we focused on from Arizona had tattoos all over and took 14 years to get her BA. Some are the traditional route — attorneys, some small business people.

But it’s a lot of different backgrounds, and we want to contrast that with the consultants who tried to make the perfect Frankenstein candidate out of [former Maine Senate candidate Graham] Platner. These people are out there — you don’t need to create it. They’re out there.

Cultural issues

On how politics has changed over the years, there’s a particularly vivid quote in the report from state Assemblymember Elaine Marzola from Nevada.  

She tells you: “My campaign’s biggest adjustment in 2024 was shifting away from leading with social and cultural issues and instead focusing more directly on affordability and economic concerns.” And she adds, “While I remain progressive on many social issues, voters across backgrounds increasingly want leaders focused on affordability, education, and public safety rather than endless culture war debates.”

How widespread was that sentiment?

It’s very widespread. Their focus is on the issues that matter, that they’re picking up from their constituents. A lot of times they reported that some of the people in their campaigns told them they should talk more about abortion or other social issues — mainly abortion — and they refused to do it. 

A lot of them talked about a major problem in the party being these litmus tests that groups have, that you can vote with them on nine out of 10 issues, but on the tenth issue, if you’re not with them, you’re an enemy. 

If you’re going to have a true big-tent party, you’ve got to have some room for disagreements on some of these issues that reflect the local voters that people have in their districts. Several in Georgia told me pointedly that their leadership understood and would give them passes on votes that they knew they couldn’t be with them on. But in other cases, I heard a lot of pointed comments about these groups demanding 100 percent allegiance, that it’s all or nothing.

In a lot of districts down South, I heard from a couple gentlemen; it’s the Bible Belt. People go to church regularly. African Americans, the older generations of African Americans, are more middle-of-the-road, if not conservative on some of these cultural issues. So there’s got to be room for people to vote their districts on some of these cultural issues.

But on the economic issues, they’re there. They’re unified with the rest of the party. 

Economic issues

Well, it’s interesting on economic issues, because there’s unity on focusing on affordability and pocketbook issues in some form. But you also describe how some people take a more populist approach, and others have a more business-friendly approach. Is there tension there?

We asked people, how would they describe themselves? And most of them describe themselves as moderate. But the range of issues you have at the state level may differ some compared to the federal issues. A true populist approach at the state level may not have the same meaning as a populist at the federal level.

In fact, some of the folks with business backgrounds were pretty aggressive in some of their policy ideas. I think [Assemblymember] Joe Dalia from Nevada is one, he actually combined with [Rep.] Ro Khanna on a policy idea, the congressman from Silicon Valley who’s definitely a progressive. Dalia’s background is in business entrepreneurship.

Is all politics local?

The dynamics are a little different in state legislative races, even tough competitive ones, because there’s just so much less national money, national interest, group interest, virality, all of the dynamics that are so important to national politics. These are truly local races. So do you think these lessons can apply to national politics?

These state legislators are easy to overlook. They’re close enough to the people that they’re in, they can knock doors more than like a member of Congress. You can’t really knock doors in a congressional race — you can do some and have volunteers do it, but these people are out doing it individually. 

But they still get hit on national issues. Some of them didn’t do much TV — Georgia’s got smaller districts — but they’re on TV in Wisconsin. And they’ve got to raise money and then have the party help them out. They’re used to getting hit on national issues because the Republicans try to tie them to some of the more far-left ideas. 

They also feel that the deep roots they have in the community help overcome that because they’re better known, they’re battle-tested in that regard. A lot of times, especially with social media, you think you’re going to come up with some neat little line to put on social media that’s going to carry you to a victory, or some pithy slogan or whatever. It’s really not. For these folks anyway, it just comes down to doing the hard work. 

But this is the bench that the Democrats need. You want to pick some people down the road that have proven ability to win these tough districts — here they are. 

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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’s Fed gambit has officially failed. 

What happened? On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve voted to raise interest rates by a quarter of a percent, citing ongoing inflation. The rate hike was widely expected, and normally it would be largely unremarkable (at least for this newsletter, which doesn’t generally cover monetary policy). 

In this case, however, it’s also a direct rebuke to Trump, who has spent the last year-and-a-half-plus demanding rate cuts — and plotting a Fed takeover to get them. 

How has Trump gone after the Fed? It’s a long list, but the two most significant episodes are Trump’s efforts to force Fed governor Lisa Cook from her seat to stack the Fed board in his favor (still ongoing) and the Justice Department’s coercive criminal investigation against former Fed chair Jerome Powell (since ended). 

Neither succeeded, but Trump likely thought his goal was in reach when the Senate confirmed his nominee for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, in May. On Wednesday, however, Warsh — several months into a four-year term as Fed chair — bucked Trump’s persistent demands by voting for the rate hike.

Why does this matter? Trump successfully exerting political control over the Fed would be extremely bad news for just about everyone. Lowering interest rates is a great way to juice the economy in the short term — exactly what he might want as his party faces down a potential midterm wipeout. But it could seriously damage the economy’s long-term health too, which is why the Fed is designed — successfully, as it turns out — to be insulated from partisan politics. 

What else should I know? So far, Trump’s response to the hike has been muted, at least by his standards. 

He’s threatened to take more drastic action, however: Earlier this month, he said he would suspend trade relations “WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT” if the Fed went through with its rate hike.

It’s not clear whether he’ll make good on that threat — but one way or another, we likely haven’t heard the last of Trump’s Fed vendetta.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Here’s a small bit of good news from New York: After an announcement by Mayor Zohran Mamdani earlier this year, the city is rolling out new, free public restrooms this week as part of a pilot program to address a longstanding complaint by New Yorkers. 

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

Manchester United hounded off pitch by own fans

Is AI going to kill us all? 

In Silicon Valley, it’s not such a novel question. But after Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon quit his job last week and posted on X that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” a lot more people are asking. 

“This is not a marketing stunt,” Coxon wrote. “If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Coxon is far from alone in his assessment — some current Anthropic employees agree — but his post struck a particular chord. The AI industry quickly weighed in, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI research. Other AI leaders, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, have done the same.

To break down whether we really need to worry about a robot apocalypse, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke to Wired senior writer Maxwell Zeff. According to Zeff, “there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now who are warning that that’s a real possibility.” But not everyone agrees, and they certainly don’t agree on what to do about it. 

Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Zeff, 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.

Are we all going to die at the hands of AI?

There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now who are warning that that’s a real possibility. 

The thing that people have to understand is that Silicon Valley has been calling for added attention on AI safety for years. So when this Anthropic researcher said last week that he was worried that AI could kill humanity in the next few years, that was shocking to many people. My parents, my family called me, and they were worried, understandably. They asked me the same question: “Are we going to die?” 

And I had to tell them, these people have been worried about AI killing all of us for years, and now it seems to be breaking through.

What was it about this statement from Jacob Coxon that broke through?

I interviewed Jacob, and the thing he said to me is that he thinks this is just the right time. Anthropic is about to go public in what could be the biggest IPO ever. The Trump administration is focused on AI in a way that no other presidency has ever been before. And of course, yes, the Hugging Face incident everyone just heard about, you talked about it on your show a few weeks ago. 

People are starting to become aware that these AI systems are getting really good, and the companies that are building them don’t seem to understand how to control them. His tweet got more than 150 million views on X. It was heard around the world. And it also was a big wake-up call to lawmakers and leaders in Silicon Valley and saying, “This is a moment for action.”

Are there people who are pushing back?

One of the most interesting pushbacks that this got was from David Sacks, who is an adviser to the Trump administration on AI. He has called out a lot of this as “doomerism” and said that these calls for AI to slow down are the AI industry warning about the technology that they’re building and advocating for regulatory capture. 

There’s a lot of skeptics in Silicon Valley who think that this is just another person in the AI safety community that is blowing the whistle. The view of a lot of venture capitalists and investors and startup founders in Silicon Valley is that we don’t need some big regulation to protect us from AI risks. We just need to uplift more players in the space.

The skeptics don’t win the day. In fact, it’s the doomers and the fatalists who do, right? Because Jacob’s call only leads to more calls right up to the top of Anthropic.

What this all leads to is [Anthropic CEO] Dario Amodei [posting] a blog saying that we need to “pace the frontier.” This is a call for the entire AI industry, not just Anthropic, not just OpenAI, but also Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, all the big tech companies in America, to get together and slow down their AI development. 

This doesn’t mean they’re going to stop building AI altogether. They’re still going to put their products out into the world. They’re still going to try to improve them, but they just want to make it a little slower than it would be if it was completely uncontained.

Amodei really asks for three specific things: 

• The first thing is, AI companies should have these independent evaluators inside of them. This is a common thing in other industries like the banking industry or the airline industry. People come in to make sure that these companies are doing safe things. 

• The second thing is this collaborative effort from American AI companies [on safety], and that actually will need to involve the US government to allow this to happen. The US government, he says, may need to issue some sort of waiver, some sort of law that says they can go ahead and coordinate on safety. 

• The third thing is this international slowdown, this international agreement between China and the US and Europe to say, “Hey, we recognize that this is akin to a nuclear arms race and it’s too dangerous for all of us to be competing with each other.”

All these guys are responsible for the rapid acceleration of AI models in our lives, collaborations with the Defense Department, God knows what else. And they’re all coming out over the weekend at the exact same time after this whistleblower and saying, “Yeah, dude, slow this thing down. This thing’s crazy.” Should we be skeptical?

It is very fair to be skeptical of this claim. One thing that these AI companies have realized in the last year is that AI is extremely unpopular. Recent polling suggests that a majority of Americans think AI is developing too fast. They’re worried about it. They think it’s going to take their jobs. They are not big fans. Maybe you’ve heard — data centers are not very popular. 

By calling to pace the frontier and saying, “We’re going to slow our own development down,” they notched this up as a public perception win. This is them getting out in front of this and saying, “Hey, we want to be safe. We want to be responsible.”

They’ve seen what’s happened with Meta and what’s happened with social media companies in the last two decades, and they are really cognizant of trying to get out in front of that.

Is there any truth to this major first collective freakout we seem to be having right now?

There’s a fairly large camp of people inside of AI companies who genuinely worry about the safety of these AI models. 

To go back to the Hugging Face incident, this was a case where OpenAI was training thousands of AI systems internally, and the systems escaped the sandbox that OpenAI thought was isolated from the internet and hacked into another company’s production infrastructure. The agents were colluding together on something. They were trying to deceive the humans that were testing them. And this was all happening without OpenAI knowing what was going on. 

It’s hard to understand how much of a wake-up call this is to Silicon Valley, that they don’t have their AI models under control. People worry that while in this case there was not a ton of economic damage [or] damage to real humans’ everyday lives, it’s not unreasonable to think that more capable AI systems could hack into financial infrastructure, modern-day utilities, and more critical services that are based online. 

Dario Amodei says as much in his post, that he thinks that in six to 12 months, an AI system could take down the whole internet. It’s not just that they’re trying to protect their bottom line here. But it’s possible that these calls for safety are beneficial to the companies in more ways than one.

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

I logged onto Slack this morning to find an incredible and indecipherable message from one of my coworkers. I briefly thought he was having a fever dream or I had forgotten how to read English. “Even some pro-Israel folks who hate Macklemore are ripshit at Robert Kraft for Streisand-effecting this guy,” the message read.

…included were several links that eventually helped explain why “Macklemore,” “Robert Kraft” and “Israel” would ever appear in the same sentence.

For those of you who have likewise not been following the fantastic implosion of Ed Sheeran’s ongoing tour, let’s break down this wild yarn. It begins with the washed-up millennial-cringe rapper Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, better known as Macklemore, who has lately a) taken up the cause of Palestinian independence and b) been opening for Sheeran on his blockbuster, 59-date Loop Tour. 

Macklemore’s advocacy has not sat well with many observers, for reasons general (Gaza is one of the hottest buttons on earth) and particular (the rapper has a documented history of apparently antisemitic behavior, which he has since apologized for). Last Friday, the artist Pink published a lengthy criticism of Macklemore’s on-stage polemic, writing that his comments and use of violent wartime imagery had frightened many Jewish people, including her.

Around the same time, Robert Kraft — the sports magnate and Donald Trump ally who owns Gillette Stadium, outside of Boston — also allegedly notified Sheeran that he would not allow Macklemore to play his late-September show. Macklemore was subsequently dropped from the full tour. 

Both he and Sheeran say multiple venues threatened to cancel if he continued to perform. And Kraft, who is Jewish, has also confirmed that he blocked Macklemore from playing at Gillette, citing both his recent advocacy and his “history of antisemitic rhetoric.” 

But this is 2026. The backlash couldn’t simply end there. On Tuesday, the remaining opening acts and Sheeran’s backing band all pulled out of the tour in protest of the decision to boot Macklemore.

Go a little deeper

The whole roiling mess has become a cipher of some of the biggest and most explosive topics in American culture and politics: the specter of antisemitism, the limits of free speech and “cancel culture,” and the stark generational differences in Americans’ views of Israel and Gaza. 

It’s arguably no coincidence that this particular controversy erupted on the tour of two musicians who are iconic among the 30- to 45-year-old set. American millennials, as a generational and political cohort, have grown sharply more critical of the state of Israel in the past 10 years — laying the groundwork for Gen Z’s high-profile pro-Palestinian activism and driving a larger narrative shift in US politics. 

This is, in some ways, an underappreciated dynamic in the debate over American support for Israel. Campus protests, organized by 20-something college students, have come to define young Americans’ growing disillusionment. Speaking on a podcast last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “there’s work to be done” to win over Gen Z, in particular. (Macklemore, who is 43, named his pro-Palestinian protest song “Hind’s Hall” in honor of the protests at Columbia.) 

But the attitudinal shift on Israel, especially on the left, began long before Gen Z became a major political force. Americans under 30 were, for instance, more likely to blame Israel than Hamas for the 2014 Gaza war. And during the mid-2010s, millennial activists sometimes wrapped Palestinian independence into broader social justice and anti-colonialist causes, including the Black Lives Matter movement. Several of the organizations that mobilized pro-Palestinian campus protests in 2024 had similarly been around for a decade or more.

Today, of course, the shift extends beyond progressive millennials: Sympathy for Israel is down among younger Republicans, as well. It has, in fact, declined sharply across generations. 

But over the past two years, the sharpest drop has been among Americans ages 35 to 54. In other words…the exact group of people who might still be jamming to Macklemore.

One link for later

➨ Start your holiday planning now. Extravagant, I know. But advance planning — in this case, incredibly advanced planning — can help you stick to a reasonable budget, reduce holiday stress, and ultimately yield a more meaningful, festive experience. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that there are more than 10,000 SpaceX satellites orbiting Earth? Proposals to put data centers in space would require so many additional satellites that stars would become less visible.
• Today’s trivia: Three of which large marine mammal recently died at a Chicago aquarium? (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 movie that won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2022. That would be CODA — an acronym for “child of deaf adults” — which notably cast Deaf actors to play its Deaf characters.