By the same time in 2022, 10 million fewer ballots had been cast. The president is pressing on with his campaign blitz in key Republican states, including Florida this evening
James Talarico, the Democratic nominee in Texas, attacked his Republican opponent Ken Paxton for cancelling some of his final rallies before the midterm election.
“No one’s going to Ken Paxton’s rallies, so he’s canceling them and hoping Elon Musk will buy his seat for him,” Talarico wrote, referencing the donations Paxton has received from the world’s richest man.
Endorsement not always full-throated but party backing marks major turn after bitter split over nomination
Facing a barrage of extreme attacks from Donald Trump and his allies, the Democratic establishment is finally rallying around progressive Abdul El-Sayed, the party’s candidate in the closely watched US Senate election in Michigan. But the endorsement is not always full-throated, and often even omits his name.
At a rally in Port Huron on Sunday, the US president launched the latest in a wave of Islamophobic rants against El-Sayed, erroneously branding him a “jihadist” and “Muslim Brotherhood member” while invoking 9/11.
US citizen Leo, who has clashed with Donald Trump over several issues, submits his vote by post in Chicago
Pope Leo has voted in the US midterm elections – the first time a sitting pontiff is known to have cast a ballot in any political election at any time in history.
Leo, who has clashed with the US president, Donald Trump, over several issues, submitted his vote by post in Chicago, where he was born, the Vatican said on Friday. Leo became the first American leader of the Catholic church last year after the death of Pope Francis.
Independent candidate Bill Hill is threatening to unseat Trump ally Nick Begich with a message of affordability
As Republicans fight to maintain their narrow majority in Congress, they face a unique challenge in Alaska – not from a Democrat, but from an independent commercial fisher and first-time candidate running to flip the state’s lone House seat.
Bill Hill, who is an Alaska Native and has worked in education and construction, has positioned himself as a working-class candidate who will fight to make life more affordable for people like himself and his family.
The president cancelled the events in favor of tele-rallies, as Republicans face a fight to retain control of Congress
Donald Trump cancelled, and then promptly uncancelled, two in-person rallies in Kansas and Iowa this weekend as polls suggest US midterm election races in the previous Republican strongholds could go down to the wire.
On Thursday, just five days before election day, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced the president would no longer host the Kansas and Iowa rallies and instead participate in “a large number of tele-rallies”. The RNC claimed it felt it was in a “strong position” in Kansas and Iowa.
Mary Peltola has denied that she knew anything about an effort to put another candidate on the Alaska ballot with the same name as the Republican incumbent, as the US justice department escalated a criminal investigation this week with new grand jury subpoenas.
“I just want to clear the air,” the Democratic Senate candidate said on Thursday at the top of a speech in a downtown bar in Juneau, Alaska’s capital. “I knew nothing about any other candidate on the ballot except for me and the incumbent. That is all I have ever known about. I am not interested in tricking voters.”
There are 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 in the Senate and 39 governorships up for grabs in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Jonathan Freedland is joined by Carrie Dann, of the Cook Political Report, to run through some of the races to watch before the final weekend of campaigning
A Get Out the Vote rally hosted by the Republican Party of Kentucky took place on October 24, 2026. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Less than a week out from the 2026 midterms, Republicans across the country are feeling the heat from their party’s vote last year to shrink Medicaid by roughly $1 trillion over the next decade. The cuts, driven largely by new work requirements and eligibility checks, are expected to leave more than 7 million Americans without insurance by 2034. They’ll also hit hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes that everyone uses, whether or not they’re on Medicaid.
These cuts weren’t supposed to be noticeable to voters just yet. Republicans designed them to take effect in 2027, after the midterms.
But some of the damage is already showing up. Paired with a reduction in tax credits to help buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act, and rising employee premiums, the cuts are colliding with a broader voter revolt against the high cost of living — and have turned healthcare into a top midterm issue.
A slew of recent polling shows healthcare costs sitting at the top of voters’ economic worries as the campaign season winds down. A KFF poll from earlier this month found healthcare outranked food, housing, and utilities as a top concern, with nearly half of voters saying it was “extremely important” for candidates to be talking about. And in late September, an Associated Press and KFF survey of rural voters found that twice as many said the Trump administration’s healthcare policies had hurt the health of people in their community as said they’d helped.
Key takeaways
Healthcare costs top the list of voters’ economic concerns
The GOP’s new $50 billion rural fund doesn’t offset $137 billion in rural Medicaid cuts, and the savings come mostly from people losing coverage.
Work requirements hit nationwide in 2027, so the first wave of coverage losses lands as the 2028 campaign begins.
Republicans have tried to rebrand the One Big Beautiful Bill Act as the “Working Families Tax Cuts,” but Politico found voters largely unmoved by the new name, and Fox News recently gave Democrats a 22-point lead on who voters trust to handle healthcare.
They’ll have even more to work with next year. The new Medicaid work requirements and the six-month eligibility checks that Republicans delayed past the midterms will all take effect in 2027, which means the first wave of people losing health insurance coverage will hit right as the 2028 campaign begins.
Republicans’ defenses aren’t holding up
Reducing Medicaid spending became a critical part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in order to help offset the multitrillion-dollar cost of extending President Donald Trump’s first-term tax cuts, adding some new ones, and funding ICE.
Mindful of the potential for political backlash, Republicans took steps to ward off attacks.
The main defense Republicans have relied on is to point to a $50 billion rural health fund that was also included in the bill. The GOP is touting it as “the single largest investment” in rural healthcare in over 20 years.
But fact-checkers and health analysts have been clear that this temporary infusion of funds, spread out over five years, doesn’t offset the $137 billion in permanent cuts projected to hit rural areas over the same decade.
Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who voted to let the One Big Beautiful Bill Act reach the Senate floor but against final passage, leaned on this rural healthcare fund in a debate earlier this month. “If I had not allowed the bill to go to the floor, I would never have been able to author the $50 billion fund to help rural healthcare,” she said. Troy Jackson, her Democratic challenger, emphasized that the fund comes nowhere close to covering what Mainers stand to lose. “Senator Collins is like an arsonist who helped set the fire, and then she wants credit for bringing a cup of water to put it out,” he said.
Voters don’t need a fact-check to notice when a hospital shuts down or reduces service. In some cases, medical institutions aren’t waiting for the cuts to arrive, and are making decisions based on the federal funding they expect to lose. In Iowa, for example, MercyOne Clinton Medical Center ended labor and delivery services earlier this year, citing decreased Medicaid funding as part of the reason.
“The public’s not stupid, and we’re all already absorbing a lot of additional costs that we shouldn’t have to because of Republican decision-making in Washington, DC,” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told Politico recently.
The second is to deny there is reduced spending at all. “It’s not an actual cut,” as GOP Rep. David Valadao of California said in a debate several weeks ago — the savings, Republicans argue, come from cracking down on waste, fraud, and abuse.
This distinction is an important one in certain campaigns. Medicaid covers over 60 percent of Valadao’s California district, and he voted for the bill. Valadao also led a letter, signed by 12 other Republicans from battleground districts, declaring that “we cannot and will not support a final reconciliation bill that includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations.” Every one of them ultimately voted for it.
Loss of coverage is already happening in Nebraska, the only state to start enforcing its new Medicaid work requirements ahead of the deadline.
The “no actual cuts” claim rests on a technicality that the law doesn’t reduce benefits for anyone who stays enrolled. But the roughly $1 trillion in savings the Congressional Budget Office scored comes almost entirely from people losing coverage. When Arkansas tried the same 80-hour-a-month work requirement in 2018, more than 18,000 people lost their health insurance within months. This happened mostly because people didn’t know about the changes or couldn’t handle the new paperwork.
Loss of coverage is already happening in Nebraska, the only state to start enforcing its new Medicaid work requirements ahead of the deadline. Millions more across the country are getting notices in the mail that they could lose their insurance next year.
The problems driving voter anger are about to get worse
Nebraska offers the clearest preview of what’s coming. The state began enforcing its Medicaid work requirements in July, well ahead of the federal deadline, and more than 1,000 residents have already lost coverage, according to the Washington Sun. Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, who voted for the bill, is tied with Dan Osborn, an independent, in a state that Trump carried easily.
“One out of two Republicans either are, have been or have a family member that is or has been on Medicaid,” Bob Ward, a pollster with the GOP firm Fabrizio Ward, told the Washington Sun. “It’s not like a theoretical thing.”
The rest of the country will experience these new administrative burdens beginning in January. Adults covered under the Medicaid expansion will have to prove every six months that they’re working, volunteering, or attending classes at least 80 hours per month, or demonstrate that they qualify for an exception.
There were Republicans, including some who ultimately voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, who warned in 2025 that voters would not respond well to billions of dollars in Medicaid cuts. Polling at the time found that 71 percent of voters who backed Trump also said they’d oppose cutting the federal health insurance program.
Several months before voting for the bill Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley warned that cutting Medicaid would be “both morally wrong and politically suicidal.” Trump himself told his fellow “cost-cutting Republicans” to avoid going “too crazy” and “REMEMBER, you still have to get reelected.”
Leaders working in healthcare say these changes will drive up costs for all patients, irrespective of whether they use other forms of insurance. For example, if there are fewer people able to access primary care through Medicaid, then more patients will need to utilize hospital emergency rooms for care, and hospitals are required to provide treatment there regardless of whether they’ll be reimbursed. To cover that lost Medicaid revenue, experts expect that some hospitals will need to cut staff, services, or close clinics. They’ll also likely shift costs onto everyone else, through longer ER wait times and higher premiums for patients still on insurance.
Workers who get insurance through their employers are bracing for hikes, too. KFF’s annual employer survey found the average worker is paying more than $600 more toward a family plan this year than in 2025, and the cost-shifting that follows Medicaid cuts is expected to push premiums higher still. One August survey of employers found average plans are projected to rise next year by more than 8 percent. Roughly 160 million Americans get coverage this way.
Republicans have made a bet that higher costs won’t hurt them next week or in two years. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who announced his retirement days before voting against final passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, warned that voters would come to understand who took away their health insurance coverage.
“If you’re a competent Democrat, you’re going to figure out how to communicate to them how it affects their lives,” he said that summer. “And it almost certainly will.”
Endorsement not always full-throated but party backing marks major turn after bitter split over nomination
Facing a barrage of extreme attacks from Donald Trump and his allies, the Democratic establishment is finally rallying around progressive Abdul El-Sayed, the party’s candidate in the closely watched US Senate election in Michigan. But the endorsement is not always full-throated, and often even omits his name.
At a rally in Port Huron on Sunday, the US president launched the latest in a wave of Islamophobic rants against El-Sayed, erroneously branding him a “jihadist” and “Muslim Brotherhood member” while invoking 9/11.
Harris poll for Guardian finds 76% believe officials care more about self-enrichment than helping everyday Americans
Government corruption has emerged as a top issue in the upcoming US midterm elections, with an overwhelming majority of Americans saying US government officials use their public office for personal financial gain, according to an exclusive Harris poll for the Guardian.
Nearly nine out of 10 Americans said that government corruption, as defined as elected officials putting their own or their donors’ financial interests ahead of the public’s, is a problem, according to the survey.
There’s a campaign moment I can’t stop thinking about. It happened shortly after the campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, released a shocking attack ad featuring the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.
In the ad, as many readers will know by now, Acton’s mother accuses her daughter of lying and tells Ohioans not to vote for her. Acton, 60, says she has not spoken to her mother since she was 12, when she and her brother were removed from their mother’s custody after their stepfather was arrested and charged with raping her. Acton says she last saw her mother at the courthouse, where her mother came to support her husband as her daughter testified against him.
A great deal is at stake in next week’s midterm elections. The partisan makeup of the new Congress will shape future spending bills, congressional investigations, and judicial nominations, among other things.
And yet, the most consequential bill of the next 12 months — and the one that speaks most directly to voters’ concerns about the cost-of-living — might well pass before the new Congress is seated.
The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 (BAAJA) could dramatically reshape America’s energy system. And the bill’s supporters plan to pass it during the House and Senate’s lame-duck session — the months between next week’s elections and the new Congress’s arrival.
That said, the legislation’s fundamental aim is simple: to make building all forms of energy infrastructure easier.
The BAAJA has united fossil fuel companies and green energy firms in its favor — while cleaving the climate movement in two.
Key takeaways
The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act would make it easier to build new power plants and transmission lines.
The bill benefits fossil fuel companies, but it would likely do even more to accelerate the growth of clean energy.
Environmentalists are divided over the bill, with critics warning that it would weaken important environmental protections.
The bill has one potentially serious flaw that Congress should fix. But with that change, it would be a win for the climate and consumers alike.
Some climate hawks contend that the legislation pares back vital environmental regulations, while clearing the way for new gas pipelines and power plants that will drive up America’s emissions. “This is not the permitting deal that we were promised,” Jeremy Symons, president of the Center for Energy and Environmental Analysis, told me, citing its “historic environmental protection rollbacks.”
Others insist that the bill is a net-win for decarbonization. In their account, permitting reforms will do more to facilitate a buildout of green energy than to lock in America’s dependence on fossil fuels.
“Fossil is the incumbent technology and fuel mix,” Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the center-left Searchlight Institute, said. “A system that makes it easier for everyone to build should advantage the nonincumbent.”
I think Flegal’s side has this right. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act will likely help renewables erode fossil fuels’ share of the electricity market. By itself, the legislation will not ensure a timely transition to a green electricity system. But it will get us a little further down that road, while also making energy more affordable for US consumers — which might well be the midterm electorate’s top priority.
This said, the current draft of the bill does contain one potentially major — and seemingly, accidental — flaw. Assuming Congress fixes that issue, climate hawks should join hands with Big Oil and push for the BAAJA’s imminent passage.
A carbon-free electric grid requires a lot of infrastructure
The climate case for permitting reform begins with a simple observation: If you want to decarbonize America’s energy grid, you need to build a metric fudge-ton of new infrastructure.
Today, low-carbon energy sources provide about 43 percent of our nation’s electricity. Thus, even if America embraced “degrowth” — and froze its electricity consumption at current levels — zeroing out the power sector’s carbon emissions would require constructing a gargantuan number of new wind, solar, battery storage, and geothermal (and/or nuclear) projects.
But of course, America is not actually going to freeze its use of electricity. And mainstream climate hawks don’t even want it to. After all, if every SUV owner replaces their gas guzzler with an EV, then demand for electricity will rise. And decarbonizing home heat or heavy industry will have the same effect. Indeed, to an extent, this basic process is already playing out.
“We’re seeing quite rapid demand growth,” Flegal said. “And that is not only — or even primarily — because of data centers. It’s because of broader structural trends toward electrifying our economy and onshoring manufacturing.”
Taking demand growth into account, a study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated that getting to a carbon-free electric grid by 2035 would require generating roughly 2,000 gigawatts of wind and solar energy; today, we generate roughly 396 gigawatts.
The challenge appears even more formidable when measured in land. According to Princeton’s 2021 Net Zero America estimate, in a “high electrification” scenario, the US will need wind and solar developments that collectively span nearly 600,000 square kilometers of land — roughly the size of California and Washington state combined.
And even this may undersell the scale of the task. Achieving net zero does not only require constructing immense quantities of wind turbines and solar panels — complemented by battery storage and firm power sources like nuclear or geothermal — but also a vast network of new transmission lines.
America’s transmission infrastructure is already inadequate to our current electricity needs. But a carbon-free grid would demand far more high-voltage lines than today’s. This is because fossil fuel plants are more geographically flexible than renewable ones. Per unit of power generated, gas plants require a small fraction of the land that wind and solar do. And in regions with mature pipeline networks, gas plants can be located in a wide range of places. For these reasons, it’s not that difficult to site carbon power facilities near major population centers or existing transmission lines.
By contrast, wind and solar farms need to be located in areas with both favorable weather conditions and a great deal of affordable land. Such sites are often far from the urban areas where electricity is most needed. Therefore, to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, America will need a lot more transmission lines. According to NREL, to achieve a 100 percent clean electric grid by 2035 would require building between 1,400 and 10,000 miles of high-capacity transmission lines annually; in 2024, America built just 888 miles.
Given all this, a permitting system that’s biased toward stasis is one that’s biased toward fossil fuels: The harder it is to build new power plants and transmission lines, the longer our electric grids will need to rely on carbon energy.
This world was built for fossil fuels
Alas, the current permitting regime does, in fact, make building power infrastructure really hard.
There are myriad regulatory obstacles to energy development at the state, local, and federal levels. But one major hurdle is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a law that requires federal agencies to study the ecological consequences of projects before authorizing their construction.
When first enacted, NEPA was not intended to dramatically impede infrastructure development. Indeed, the law does not actually hold proposed projects accountable to any particular environmental standard; it merely requires that a thorough study of the relevant ecological effects be carried out.
But litigators successfully turned NEPA into a tool for obstructing projects — one used by both sincere environmentalists and opportunistic NIMBYs. Such lawyers argued that if the government’s study of a development failed to account for some significant environmental impact, then its authorization was invalid and needed to be redone. When courts started accepting this argument, federal agencies began drafting more and more comprehensive environmental impact statements (EIS), in hopes of preempting legal challenges. In the early 1970s, an EIS could be as short as 10 pages; by the 2010s, the average statement had ballooned to 661.
A Stanford study published in 2023 examining 355 major infrastructure developments found that 28 percent of the projects requiring an EIS ended up facing litigation before construction. And the median NEPA lawsuit takes 19 months to resolve — despite the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, courts ultimately fail to identify any legal flaw requiring a new study, according to an analysis from the Breakthrough Institute. All this doesn’t merely slow projects down; by driving up expected costs, it also prevents many from being pursued in the first place.
A second obstacle to energy development is the exhaustive — yet somewhat anarchic — process for permitting interstate transmission lines. These lines must generally secure approval from authorities in every state whose borders they cross. The federal government already recognizes the impracticality of this arrangement when it comes to natural gas infrastructure: Uncle Sam has claimed the authority to site an interstate natural gas pipeline, in defiance of states’ wishes. But Washington lacks similar powers with respect to transmission projects.
High-voltage lines are further stymied by an absence of procedures for divvying up their costs. Over time, a single transmission project can lower electricity prices across several states. But precisely which jurisdictions will derive the most benefit isn’t always clear ahead of time. And this makes it hard for utilities to agree on how to allocate the lines’ upfront costs, which can nip the developments in the bud.
How the permitting reform bill addresses these problems
The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act tackles both of these barriers to energy deployment (along with many others).
To clear the way for new high-voltage lines, the bill empowers the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to overrule states that reject or obstruct new transmission projects. (Technically, FERC already has this authority in certain designated corridors. But current restrictions on this power are so binding that the agency has never actually sited a transmission line over state opposition in practice.)
As importantly, the legislation requires regional grid planners to adopt a common set of methods for estimating which jurisdictions will benefit most from a new transmission line (and thus, how much their respective utilities should chip in for it). This will hopefully foster greater consensus. But if it doesn’t, the bill opens up an alternative path to approval: Developers can go above the regional planners’ heads and ask the federal government to approve the line and impose a cost-allocation scheme.
Meanwhile, the legislation also constrains the reach of NEPA litigation. Under current law, after an environmental review is completed, plaintiffs can file lawsuits over that review’s purported flaws for up to six years. Under the BAAJA, they’d have only 150 days. Plaintiffs would also be required to demonstrate direct harm and show that they raised their objections during the review’s public comment process. Most consequentially, the law forbids judges from freezing projects solely because their environmental impact statements were inadequate. Instead, construction would be allowed to continue while federal agencies corrected their review’s deficiencies.
Cutting red tape is good for green energy
By reducing our permitting system’s bias toward the status quo, these reforms make the green transition a bit more possible. Renewables are rapidly growing more cost-competitive. And battery technology is steadily advancing. In a world where new energy infrastructure is relatively easy to build, green power has a good chance of dominating grids in the long run.
But there’s also cause for thinking that the BAAJA’s reforms will disproportionately benefit green projects in the near term.
With transmission, the case is simple: When you look at today’s interconnection queue — which is to say, the backlog of projects seeking connection to the grid — you see that wind, solar, and storage (an enabling technology for weather-dependent renewable power) account for nearly 85 percent of pending capacity. Building out transmission infrastructure should reduce such backlogs, primarily benefiting green technologies in the process.
And the NEPA reforms are likely to benefit renewables more than fossil fuels, even in the short run. To see why, consider the following:
As mentioned, solar and wind are extremely land-intensive. The former covers between 10 and 20 times as much ground as a typical gas plant (even when drilling needs are taken into account), in order to generate the same amount of energy; wind farms can require up to 200 times as much.
Many of the areas that are best-suited to renewable generation — those with abundant sunlight, wind, and open space — are in the western United States, where the federal government owns a large share of all undeveloped land.
If an energy project is built on federal land, it must go through the NEPA process.
For these reasons, carbon energy development probably isn’t as burdened by NEPA as the renewable kind. Gas and coal plants just don’t need as much land in general — and less federally owned western acreage in particular.
According to Daniel Palken, an energy expert at the philanthropy Arnold Ventures, NEPA’s suppressive impact on green development is well-illustrated by any map of wind and solar power in the US. (Disclosure: Vox has received a grant from Arnold Ventures. This story was not funded by that grant, and Vox has full discretion over the content of its reporting.)
“If you look at where the wind and solar congregates, it carefully builds in the negative spaces between where all the federal land is out west,” Palken told me. “Most of the West is de facto off-limits because they just don’t want to go through the process.”
“The NEPA provisions are described as Republican asks,” he added. “But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they asymmetrically aid renewables.”
More broadly, the notion that a lax permitting environment can enable a rapid expansion of green energy — and with it, a shift away from carbon power — isn’t just some distant hypothetical. Rather, that scenario has already played out in one of America’s most pro-oil states.
Texas has scant federal or state-owned lands and no NEPA-like environmental review process. “They’re the only state where you don’t need siting permission from either the state or localities to site a large energy project,” Palken said. “And they have had very forward-looking, long-range transmission planning policies.”
Thanks in part to this permitting environment, wind and solar power have flourished in the Lone Star State, rendering its electric grid far less carbon-intensive. In 2003, natural gas and coal generated 86 percent of the power on Texas’s main grid, while wind and solar supplied less than 1 percent. By 2025, renewables’ share had soared to nearly 38 percent, while fossil fuels’ had fallen to 54 percent.
The real problem with the BAAJA
To be sure, Texas is no climate hawk’s idea of utopia. Its permissive regulatory regime has enabled a remarkable green buildout. But by failing to regulate carbon pollution, that regime has also allowed a rise in Texas’s overall emissions, as gains in population, prosperity, and industrial investment have led to higher electricity consumption.
Given this, environmentalists reasonably deem permitting reform inadequate for achieving timely decarbonization.
“Clean energy will not win in the marketplace at the scale and speed needed unless fossil fuels are held accountable for their pollution,” Symons, of the Center for Energy and Environmental Analysis, told me. “Gas and clean energy are growing hand in hand.”
Such concerns animate environmentalists’ objections to the current bill. Two of their complaints warrant attention here — the first because it is widely held but unpersuasive, the second because it is compelling but easily addressed.
Environmentalists’ less convincing objection to the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act goes like this: Democrats have no good reason to accept the current legislation’s trade-offs. After all, the party will almost certainly have more power in the next Congress than it does in today’s. With control of the House — and perhaps also the Senate — Democrats would have more leverage in negotiations. And they could use this clout to secure permitting relief for green energy projects without throwing as many bones to Big Oil.
“A system where you’re allowed to build the most economic energy resources with fewer encumbrances, fewer delays, and fewer restrictions is, almost by definition, a more affordable system.”
Daniel Palken, energy expert
But there are a couple of problems with this reasoning. For one, permitting reform will still require President Donald Trump’s sign-off in 2027, even in Democrats’ rosiest midterm scenario. And it isn’t remotely clear that the White House will feel compelled to offer Democrats a more environmentally friendly permitting reform bill just because the party captured Congress (especially since the Democratic majorities will likely be inundating the administration with subpoenas and corruption investigations).
For another, however imperfect the legislation may be, it still creates a permitting environment that’s more favorable to green development than the status quo. If Congress passes permitting reform now, the green buildout will likely be further along by 2029 — or whenever Democrats next take full control of the government, at which point they can tweak permitting and environmental rules how they see fit.
The more compelling critique of the BAAJA concerns its “project certainty” provisions. Ironically, this part of the bill was actually a Democratic priority. And it was conceived as a response to the Trump administration’s capricious cancellation of renewable energy permits.
Essentially, the “project certainty” section would prohibit federal agencies from revoking or modifying previously issued permits — or “otherwise interfering with the construction or operation” of permitted projects, unless they uncover a violation of existing law.
But some environmental lawyers fear that the bill’s language is vague and broad enough to threaten the EPA’s future rulemaking authorities: If a Democratic administration tightened air pollution standards, that might “interfere with the construction or operation” of a permitted gas plant. Courts might therefore rule that such regulations are unlawful.
This is genuinely concerning. But it would also be easy for legislators to preempt this scenario with a few tweaks to the bill’s wording.
“I think there is a pretty narrow technical fix to be made that ensures the project certainty section is doing what the drafters wanted it to do,” Flegal said, “which was not to prevent future regulatory action but just to make it harder to rescind legally issued permits.”
When in doubt, err on the side of lowering energy costs
Assuming the “project certainty” details are ironed out, the BAAJA should be good for the climate. And it’s all-but guaranteed to be beneficial for consumers.
According to one analysis, the legislation’s transmission provisions alone would save US households well over $1.1 billion annually on their electric bills.
Further, even the bill’s most regrettable consequences from a climate perspective — such as its facilitation of new natural gas pipelines — would likely be positive for affordability. In particular, such infrastructure could help ease high home heating costs in colder, energy-scarce states like Maine — an issue that some Democratic candidates are explicitly running on.
“A system where you’re allowed to build the most economic energy resources with fewer encumbrances, fewer delays, and fewer restrictions is, almost by definition, a more affordable system,” Palken said.
Thus, to green America’s grid — and save Americans’ money — Congress needs to cut red tape. They should waste little time in doing so.
Both US parties scramble to win young voters via influencer operations. The evidence doesn’t support their efforts
In tight races, any group that shifts a few points can be called decisive. In 2024, however, gen Z voters actually earned the spotlight.
Take Michigan, where Donald Trump won by about 1.4 points: he and Kamala Harris evenly split the youth vote, a 24-point collapse in the Democratic edge since 2020. If young voters made up just 15% of the state’s electorate, their swing toward the president would be worth roughly 3.6 points, larger than Trump’s entire margin of victory.
Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York
Voters who backed the US president in the last election are saying they can’t vote for him today: ‘This is an abomination’
Outside the Ukrainian educational and cultural center in a quiet Pennsylvania suburb of Jenkintown, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, a banner expressed unqualified gratitude: “Thank you USA for supporting Ukraine.”
Inside, however, the sentiment was altogether different. Irene Skulsky, a retired teacher in her late 70s, voiced indignation at Donald Trump’s sudden turn against her ancestral homeland, which she believed had come close to killing her son, Darko, and a desire to punish his fellow Republicans at next week’s midterm elections.
Candidate for Ohio governor confirms campaign no longer airing ad that smeared rival and was defended by Trump
Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, confirmed on Thursday that his campaign is no longer airing an attack ad that features the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.
The ad prompted a wave of revulsion since Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, lost custody of her daughter in 1978, when her second husband, Cledith Arthur, was charged with raping her daughter between the ages of 10 and 12.
Candidate for Ohio governor confirms campaign no longer airing ad that smeared rival and was defended by Trump
Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, confirmed on Thursday that his campaign is no longer airing an attack ad that features the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.
The ad prompted a wave of revulsion since Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, lost custody of her daughter in 1978, when her second husband, Cledith Arthur, was charged with raping her daughter between the ages of 10 and 12.
President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a midterm campaign rally in Corpus Christi, Texas on October 27, 2026. | Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
No sooner had early voting started this year than analysts noticed a curious trend: Democratic voters were choosing to vote a lot like…Republicans.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Democrats who cast their ballots early have most commonly done so by mail. But this year, they’re voting in person, and in huge numbers — even narrowing Republicans’ traditional early voting lead in states like Florida and Texas.
The abrupt shift may have something to do with President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine the mail voting process, and it almost definitely reflects the anxiety and vigilance that many Americans feel about the midterms this year. In less than a week, they’ll decide which party controls Congress, along with a slew of state and local offices.
The stakes are arguably unusually high: Voters will choose whether to check the power of a president who has bulldozed over historical norms and limits. So as we count down to that momentous and potentially messy day, I’ve been partnering with my colleague Astead Herndon and Vox’s The Midterms, Actually team for a series of weekly editions on the biggest issues shaping the midterms.
Let me begin with a metaphor that may or may not reassure you: Imagine there’s a serial killer outside your house, and they’re trying to get in and kill you.
That’s pretty terrifying, under any circumstance. But also: Your house is an absolute vault. You have reinforced steel doors. You have good locks on all the windows. And the police are actually on its way now.
“I don’t want to understate the threat” of election interference, Benjy Sarlin, Vox’s editorial director of politics said when he relayed this metaphor on the America, Actually podcast last month. But if Trump is the serial killer trying America’s doors and windows…then understand this house is pretty well-defended.
Take mail voting, the issue that has so (literally) moved Democrats this year. You’ll recall that Trump tried to sabotage the practice by implementing new, last-minute rules that would have effectively canceled mail-in voting in some places.
But the Constitution clearly assigns the power to regulate and administer elections to the states and Congress, and courts blocked the administration’s rules. In mid-September, the Supreme Court declined to let them take effect for this election. So there’s one lock made good.
The Trump administration has also demanded unprecedented access to states’ voter rolls, suing 30 states and Washington, DC, to obtain them. Of those cases, courts have dismissed 27 of them (though many dismissals are being appealed).
Earlier this month, the DOJ went further and demanded that California officials set aside the ballots of some 20,000 registered voters that it alleged were likely noncitizens. In the predictable legal battle that followed, courts sided with the state. A federal judge excoriated the administration in an opinion on Wednesday, ruling that the ballot segregation order “would wreak havoc and disrupt the election.” The Trump administration has already appealed the ruling.
Other forms of meddling are possible. Asked in August about declaring a national emergency to impose new voting requirements, Trump replied — unnervingly — that “stranger things have happened.” And the president and his allies have floated drastic measures like deploying federal agents to polling sites or seizing “suspect” ballots, a threat tangible enough that it’s reportedly unsettled a number of FBI agents.
Just last week, the Trump administration attempted to preemptively contest the results in Alaska’s Senate race, claiming that the presence of two Dan Sullivans on the ballot — the incumbent Republican and an independent newcomer — risked confusing voters. The New York Times has since reported that Democrats enticed Dan Sullivan 2.0 to run for exactly that reason. In some corners, the ensuing scandal has raised concerns that Republicans could refuse to seat Democrat Mary Peltola if she wins.
But even that possibility is fairly remote. While there are mechanisms for both state officials and US lawmakers to challenge election results, those procedures are pretty regimented. And any attempts to disrupt voting, vote-counting, or the certification of results would likely face both a flood of lawsuits (which voting groups have already prepped) and a public outcry that could ultimately and lastingly hurt Republicans.
Trump might not care overmuch about democratic norms or the rule of law, but he does likely care about the risks of a longer-term political backlash. To this day, Benjy said, a lot of Republicans still blame Trump for losing them Georgia’s Senate seats: His election denialism after 2020 helped drive huge numbers of Black Georgians to the polls, where they voted in two Democrats.
The number of Democrats voting early and in-person suggests the possibility that a similar dynamic is at play now. In other words, there is real risk — but lots of people are fighting to keep the proverbial bad guys out.
➨ Turn on the (early morning) lights. It’s getting darker earlier and earlier these days, and it’s often pitch black when my alarm goes off. That means it’s time for an annual tradition: digging out my bulky, 10,000-lux light box. Bright morning light, from a box or the sun, sets your body’s internal clock and helps regulate your sleep. It can also mitigate seasonal affective disorder, which starts plaguing many sufferers around Halloween.
Before you go…
Did you know…that there’s an extremely rare and spooky form of lightning that can appear indoors? It’s called “ball lightning,” and it’s one of the most mysterious weather phenomena in the world.
Today’s trivia: What’s the name of the vast Andean empire that ruled from its capital in Cusco? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you where you might find an arroyo. These seasonally dry streambeds cut through deserts, where they can serve as a “highway” for wild animals.
Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign allegedly collaborated with party operatives to confuse voters in midterms
The US justice department on Thursday is reported to have issued subpoenas in response to a report that the Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola’s campaign collaborated with party operatives to get a challenger with the same name as the Republican senator Dan Sullivan on the midterm ballot.
ABC News and the Associated Press reported the subpoenas, citing sources familiar with the matter. The federal investigation comes a day after the New York Times found that the effort to recruit a second candidate named Dan Sullivan in the Senate race set to be decided on Tuesday was led by Peltola’s campaign, which had for months denied involvement.
Protesters in Minnesota advocate for universal healthcare. | David Berding/Getty Images for People's Action Institute
Americans want changes to their healthcare, and the candidates in this year’s midterms are making bold promises about how they are going to improve it: Medicare-for-all, or a public health insurance option, or free primary care for everyone. If Democrats win big this year, they could build up momentum to control Congress and the White House in 2029, which could leave them well-positioned to take on the thorny problem of how to fix the US health system.
Even though a meaningful attempt at reform is still years away and universal health care in any form might seem like a progressive pipe dream, the industry is not sitting idly by.
As Democrats have started to roll out policy proposals in anticipation of winning back Congress, the industry has been there to start making its case. In some campaigns, that means backing Republicans, but it also means lobbying Democratic Party leaders to hold the line against their more progressive members who want to push for far-reaching changes.
The question now is: Will their old playbook work? Can the industry convince Democrats to scale back their policy ambitions, or is their grip on Congress loosening?
“The next two years are actually quite pivotal, for doing the groundwork and all the necessary socializing, consensus-building,” said Kim Monk, a former congressional healthcare staffer who co-founded the private-sector research firm Capital Alpha Partners. “That’s the work that gets you to a point where either party decides, okay, this will be on our platform — or not.”
That will be the tug-of-war of the next two years: a PR battle waged between health companies with hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal on one side and progressive lawmakers, activists, and patient advocates on the other that will ultimately determine what’s possible in the next phase of American healthcare.
The healthcare industry doesn’t want Democrats to win too big
In the short term, the industry is hedging its bets in the face of a Democratic wave.
Private enterprise has historically backed the Republican Party, but that’s starting to shift. What the healthcare industry values above all else is balance. Democrats operating without any constraints are more likely to impose government regulations on medical companies. But full GOP control comes with its own risks, like the $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which has already led to clinics and hospitals laying off staff or even closing facilities altogether.
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“At least for the short term, I imagine the healthcare industry would welcome control of Congress by Democrats, creating more predictability, forestalling more cuts in Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, and potentially reversing or delaying some of the cuts that have already been made,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF. “The longer-term political calculus for the healthcare industry is more complicated. Many Democrats are pushing for a bigger role for government in health care.”
In other words, while healthcare companies might welcome a Democratic House as a check on President Donald Trump’s unpredictability, they aren’t necessarily hoping for a massive blue wave that could make significant reforms a serious possibility if Democrats were to win the White House in 2028.
The industry’s MO when it looks like a wave election is brewing is to balance the scales: I reported in 2016 how, in what was looking like a good year for Democrats, the drug industry poured money into the campaigns of Republican candidates by a 6-to-1 margin in competitive races, hoping to stifle the agenda of presumed President Hillary Clinton. (Of course they, like the rest of us, are still susceptible to being wrong.)
And that’s how the industry has been approaching the 2026 election: In many of the pivotal House and Senate races, they are backing the GOP.
As healthcare journalist Merrill Goozner reported last week, the American Hospital Association PAC and PhRMA, a drug industry trade group, have given a combined $14,500 to Republican incumbent Jon Husted and none to his Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown in the historically expensive Ohio Senate race. In Maine, Republican Sen. Susan Collins has received donations from all of the major healthcare trade groups — hospitals, pharma, insurers, and doctors — while her opponent, Democrat Troy Jackson, got none. (He also has sworn off corporate PAC money.) Even in an open race without an incumbent, like the Iowa Senate campaign, the Republican candidate has scored donations from hospitals and pharma, but the Democrat has not, Goozner reported.
If Democrats take the House but not the Senate, that would immediately put a damper on their healthcare reform plans — whereas winning a Senate majority would allow them to start drafting and debating bills in both chambers with an eye toward what could actually pass if they win in 2028 too.
“If there is actually a blue tsunami next week and Democrats get 51-plus [members] in the Senate, that’s a really big deal,” Monk said. “You can’t just say this doesn’t matter because Trump’s going to veto it, because I think it very much becomes a 2028 issue.”
And even as they work to push the next Congress more to their ideological liking, the healthcare industry is preparing for the fight that comes after.
The industry is prepping its counterattacks on ambitious healthcare proposals
Each subset of the industry has its own versions of this argument: Pharma warns that price controls could stifle innovation, insurers warn that coverage mandates will increase premiums, hospitals warn that constraints on their funding could lead to closures and job losses. (There’s a well-known saying among DC insiders that every congressional district has a hospital, making every member potentially susceptible to the industry’s message that new healthcare legislation could result in their own constituents losing their jobs.)
They’ve started by trying to discredit the more sweeping health policy proposals before new members ever arrive in Washington, DC. In Texas, for instance, Republican groups have leaned on an industry-commissioned study to attack Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico for supporting Medicare-for-all, warning that it would lead to cuts for rural hospitals — at least according to an analysis produced by the Partnership for America’s Future, a coalition of industry groups that exists explicitly to oppose Medicare-for-all or a public option. They ran a similar ad against Democrat Janelle Stelson, who’s trying to topple incumbent Rep. Scott Perry in Pennsylvania.
The industry is trying to plant the idea in voters’ minds that these big, bold proposals may sound superficially appealing, but carry significant risks: You could lose your plan, you could lose your doctor, you could pay higher taxes. (And they often have their own studies to back those arguments, like the one cited in this year’s campaign, to counter the evidence offered by advocates in support of reform.) And it might work exactly like it has in the past. As John McDonough, a former congressional healthcare staffer and author of America’s Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era, put it to me, the history is clear: “Every comprehensive effort, defeat, and every incremental effort succeeds.” That is in part because of the healthcare industry’s influence and its success in framing the debate.
On top of trying to sway the competitive races, the industry is also trying to keep its most important allies within both parties happy ahead of the midterms. As the Center for Health and Democracy’s data shows, the health insurance industry PACs alone have given tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic and Republican leaders, as well as senior members of the healthcare-focused House and Senate committees.
It’s another hedge, an attempt to keep the members who will decide what’s on the agenda next year on their side. The industry supports reversing the GOP’s massive Medicaid cuts and increasing funding for the ACA marketplaces, two top-priority items for Democrats if they win Congress in the midterms. But they are hoping the party’s leaders will steer their members away from some of their more radical ideas for overhauling healthcare. Because while individual sectors within healthcare may squabble over smaller-scale reforms, the entire industry is united against plans to fundamentally change the US health system. (They are also increasingly owned by the same parent company, as consolidation in the medical sector becomes more and more common.)
“The healthcare industry is all for more people having coverage and stable government financing,” Levitt said, “but will circle the wagons to fight Medicare-for-all.”
Already, whenever Democrats start talking about their health policy ideas, the industry is ready with a response. Last month, as some Democrats announced support for a public insurance option, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future argued it would reduce access. “A public option is not the answer to the affordability and access challenges patients and families are facing,” said the group’s executive director, Lauren Crawford Shaver.
Meanwhile, the health insurance lobbying group, AHIP, released a 40-page document in October on how to improve affordability and access, using it in part to argue against a public option because it would “stifle competition and threaten the coverage most Americans want to keep.” Centrist Democratic groups who receive industry support have said they are “preparing for war” against Medicare-for-all, according to the news outlet Sludge.
The industry is not omnipotent, however, and the debate could still change if Americans’ healthcare gets worse over the next few years. The US uninsured rate has been on the rise as pandemic protections expire and the costs of healthcare rise for millions. Unless Democrats succeed in stopping the Republican Medicaid and ACA cuts in the OBBBA, that problem is going to get worse — and that could also force Democrats to think bigger about how to fix it.
“I am not sure anyone has fully absorbed how damaging and disruptive that is going to be — including to hospitals and health systems,” Jonathan Oberlander, professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina and the former editor of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, told me over email. “Large coverage losses will trigger great instability in health politics and perhaps open more of a window to bolder proposals.”
So, will the industry’s arguments still have juice? After the medical industry enjoyed a brief rebound in popularity during the pandemic, 50 percent of Americans say they have a negative view of it, while 37 percent have a positive view, per Gallup. And the appetite for reform is growing: 64 percent of Americans say it is the government’s responsibility to make sure that everyone has healthcare coverage — the highest share at any time, except for the late 2000s, shortly before the ACA became law.
Even the hospital industry, which has long enjoyed more public support than pharma or insurance companies, is seeing its popularity waver: A Families USA poll from August found that an overwhelming 81 percent of Americans thought hospital prices were unreasonable.
“Hospitals have done a great job of pleading poverty on Capitol Hill. ‘We’re probably the only provider who basically has to provide care to whoever shows up. We have no reason to be efficient. Just give us more money,’” Monk said. “I think that argument is wearing a little bit thin.”
A US Senate race in one of the most Republican states in the country is now a dead heat, according to a new poll showing Annie Andrews, a Democrat, tied with Darline Graham, the Republican incumbent senator.
South Carolina has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1998, and Donald Trump won it by nearly 18 points in 2024, but a New York Times/Siena poll this week has the two candidates neck and neck, at 48% each.
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