Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday defended the Justice Department’s lawsuit — filed at President Donald Trump’s request — seeking to block Alaska from certifying its election results if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses.

In a contentious interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” he denied the president is laying the groundwork to contest the outcome of the midterm elections in just over one week.

“President Trump is not trying to take over a state election in any way, shape or form,” Blanche insisted.

But when pressed on what crime the administration alleges is being committed the attorney general said, “Well, it depends.”

“There could be a crime,” Blanche said. “But the real wrong here is that Alaskans are going to be confused and will not have their vote heard.”

With a little over one week to go before Election Day, Trump administration officials have set their sights on the key Senate seat, where Sullivan is facing a surprisingly competitive challenge from former Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola. The lawsuit has heightened Democrats’ fears that Trump could try to undermine the integrity of the midterm elections.

Sullivan, the incumbent, is also being challenged by a retired elementary school teacher who shares his name.

“There is no dispute that the only reason the second Dan Sullivan is running is to pull votes away in a confusing and inappropriate manner from the Dan Sullivan incumbent,” Blanche said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Host Margaret Brennan pushed back, explaining that “Dan S. Sullivan” is clearly listed on the ballot as the incumbent while his opponent is listed without a party affiliation as “Dan J. Sullivan.” She also pointed out that early voting began in the state on Oct. 19.

The Alaska Supreme Court had already settled the issue in June, ordering that both Sullivans be placed on the August primary ballot.

Alaska’s senior Republican senator, Lisa Murkowsi, who frequently breaks with Trump, criticized his administration on Friday for filing the lawsuit. “Alaskans don’t need any help voting for their preferred candidates, and the State of Alaska has already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year’s ballot,” she said.

Peltola, who narrowly leads Sullivan, according to MS NOW polling partner FiftyPlusOne, told MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace over the weekend that “this is exactly the kind of corruption that Alaskans are sick and tired of.”

The post ‘Could be a crime’: Todd Blanche doubles down on Alaska lawsuit appeared first on MS NOW.

JERUSALEM — He serves a mostly ceremonial role. But in a matter of days, Israeli President Isaac Herzog will wield significant power as he decides which political party will have the first chance to build a government — a move that could determine the fate of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In an exclusive interview with MS NOW, Herzog said he would not bow to pressure from President Donald Trump to benefit his friend Netanyahu, whom Trump endorsed last week.

“I don’t think the president of the United States or anybody else can intervene in my discretion — the discretion has to be based on certain facts, and we will see what the facts are,” said Herzog. “There will be a lot of pressure, though, regardless.”

Herzog said he has “huge respect” for Trump and welcomes any dialogue, but the decision will be his, and his alone.

“I know how to deliberate with him or any other world leader,” he said. “It’s Israel’s democracy and Israel’s constitution, and that’s what counts for me.”

On Sunday, Trump re-upped his endorsement of the Israeli prime minister on Truth Social, writing, “As everyone is aware, including the enemy, Bibi and I have a great relationship in winning together.”

“We have to finish the job that we started!” Trump concluded.

With final election polling showing neither Netanyahu’s Likud party nor challenger Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party likely to win outright, an initial round of coalition building will likely ensue to reach the 61-seat majority threshold of the Knesset, Israel’s 120-seat Parliament.

The decision of who gets the first crack at that is one that weighs on Herzog.

“It’s going to be very delicate,” Herzog said, noting the leading candidates’ public commitments not to align with certain factions. “So it’s really an open game, especially if the results are going to be close.”

With a diverse set of parties in the anti-Netanyahu bloc, Eisenkot faces an uphill battle to solve the math problem of reaching a majority: He has ruled out including both the Arab and ultra-Orthodox parties in any government he leads.

Arab Israelis make up about 21% of the country’s population, but politicians vying to become prime minister have long excluded them from being part of the ruling government.

Though he noted Arab parties are “part and parcel of Israeli democracy,” Herzog wouldn’t say whether they belong in Israeli leadership.

“There’s a question about what happens if you have to take decisions now about war and peace, and this is the issue at stake in the political discussion and the decisions of the voters,” he said.

Herzog repeatedly said he would do whatever is within his power to avoid sending Israeli voters back to the polls for more rounds of elections — including pushing for a national unity government that would include both Netanyahu and Eisenkot, while excluding leaders from extremist parties.

“I don’t know if it’s feasible,” he conceded, noting the overall process could take long, drawn-out weeks. What that could mean for the Iran war, which Trump has hinted at restarting after the U.S. midterms, is unclear.

“I hope now there’s either negotiations or again a flaring up of the military escalation,” Herzog said, adding the decision is up to the negotiators, militaries and the U.S. president.

In the closing days of the election, the devolving situation in the West Bank has been at the forefront, highlighting the contrast between Netanyahu, who has repeatedly ignored violence against Palestinians, and Eisenkot, who has pledged to get tough on rising attacks, which have led to international condemnation and threats of sanctions.

But Herzog took exception with blaming Israeli settlers for violence in the West Bank, instead insisting the recent increase is the result of a small group of violent people “that everybody has to crack down on.”

“I can attest to the fact that strict decisions were taken by all relevant authorities, including the Israeli Security Cabinet, to that effect to crack down on this phenomena, and you will see more and more results, I hope, in the near future,” Herzog said, adding, “It’s despicable, it’s outrageous. We should take all necessary steps to arrest all of them.”

Herzog condemned a terror attack on Friday in which two Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded three others in Hebron, prompting Netanyahu’s office to instruct security forces to immediately cordon off Hebron and prepare for a full closure of the West Bank.

“We have to fight terror without any limitations, subject of course to the law, and we have to crack down on all this violence so that we contain it fully,” he said.

Given his pivotal role in the outcome of Israel’s elections, Herzog has refused to wade into key electoral issues, including — and especially — holding Netanyahu accountable.

Last November, Trump wrote to Herzog urging him to “fully pardon” Netanyahu, who was indicted in 2019 on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

At the time, Herzog’s office responded that he held Trump in the highest regard but that anyone seeking a pardon had to submit a formal request.

Herzog, the eleventh president of Israel and who has been in office since July 2021, is predicting “huge turnout” and is confident in the integrity of Israel’s elections, which he says will determine the course of the country’s debate over the independence of the judicial system and Israel’s borders.

“Israel is an incredible democracy,” Herzog said. “It’s a source of dignity and pride to all those who love to bash at us and criticize us and attack us day in, day out without knowing that we are the only democracy in this region and we protect the free world.”

The post Herzog reaffirms independence of Israeli elections amid Trump push for Netanyahu appeared first on MS NOW.

CLEVELAND — When asked about President Donald Trump’s strong defense of a GOP attack ad featuring her estranged mother calling her a liar, Amy Acton exercised prudence.

“I’ve worked with the president before,” the Democratic gubernatorial nominee told MS NOW, “but I think he needs to learn the facts of this case. They’re irrefutable.”

During an interview following a rally with former President Barack Obama on Saturday, Acton declined to attack Trump. Instead, the childhood sexual assault survivor praised Republican leaders in her state who have condemned the spot, including former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft and Mike DeWine, the current governor, who called it “deeply troubling.”

“All of our living governors have spoken in Ohio and condemned this ad, and that means the world to me,” Acton said in an interview. “What I am focused on is what these governors know: that the people of Ohio are struggling. They’re ready for change.”

Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s decision to release and amplify the advertisement in his exceedingly tight race against Acton has divided Republicans ahead of the midterms. But Trump has remained firmly in his corner, advising Ramaswamy to “leave it up” and suggested it could clear the way for a Republican victory in the state.

“I told him, leave it up and look upstairs and say, ‘Thank you God, very much,’” Trump said at a rally in Sioux City, Iowa, on Thursday. “I only wish I could have had an ad like that against somebody.”

When pressed by a reporter on his defense of a GOP attack that touches on the Democratic candidate’s childhood trauma, Trump doubled down, asserting the ad was not tied to the criminal histories of Acton’s mother or her late husband.

“You’re trying to take a horrible situation for a Democrat and make it look better. The mother said really bad things about a person that wants to be the Democrat governor of Ohio,” Trump said on Friday. “This has nothing to do with a stepfather or anything else.”

Acton’s decision to withhold criticism of Trump — while thrashing Ramaswamy — speaks to the fine line she has walked in her pursuit to become the first woman to lead Ohio, a state Trump won three times.

Her emergence as a viable Democratic contender for governor came after she broke from Democrats on a number of policy positions, including issues relating to federal immigration enforcement, transgender athletes and voter ID laws.

The controversial 60-second clip released by Ramaswamy’s campaign features Acton’s estranged mother, 82-year-old Donna Arthur, who calls her daughter a “liar.”

“She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true,” Arthur says in the ad. “Don’t vote for people who lie.”

Acton told MS NOW she has not spoken to her mother in nearly 50 years. She has long been vocal about the challenges she and her brother faced as children, one she alleges was rife with physical and sexual abuse, poverty and a period of homelessness.

Court records obtained by news outlets show Acton’s stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was charged with rape of a minor under the age of 13 before he fled the state and later died. Acton has identified herself as the victim. Her brother has said their mother remained married to Arthur until his death.

“The last time I saw my birth mother, I was 12 years old in a courthouse after a grand jury hearing, where my stepfather was indicted, and then he was a fugitive. They skipped on bail and left,” Acton told MS NOW.

Additional records obtained by NBC News show that both Donna and Cledith Arthur faced additional criminal financial charges over the course of several decades.

“I’m learning things that even I don’t remember, obviously, as a 12-year-old child,” Acton told MS NOW. “We’re learning more about the kinds of things he did to other children. We’re learning more about the troubled life of my mother, who was not well then, since I was probably three years old, and is not well now.”

Citing the negative reception to the Ramaswamy ad, The Cook Political Report on Friday shifted its rating of the race from “toss up” to “lean Democrat.” Acton told MS NOW that trend lines were already pointing in that direction.

”My opponent has spent $110 million and counting in the most abhorrent, lying, made up ads, and it never moved the needle one inch. We have started tied or ahead in every single polls in this race. We’re up double digits with independents and we have tons of Republicans crossing over,” Acton said.

For Ohio voters at Acton’s rally in Cleveland, alongside Obama and Democratic Senate nominee Sherrod Brown, the move by Ramaswamy to release the ad was a sign of “desperation.”

”I thought it was just so underhanded and I thought it was just such a bad choice for Vivek to do that,” 70-year-old Ken Salzbrenner said. “To bring up the situation that she was in, that she had no control over as a 12-year-old, I think was just outrageous, and it shows his lack of leadership that he would make that choice.”

During his remarks at the event, Obama hammered Ramaswamy as “thirsty” and framed his release of the ad as a desperate attempt to “get attention”

“There is no line he will not cross, there is no low he won’t sink to, to try to get in the limelight,” Obama said. “There’s got to be something inside you where you just say, you know, no office is worth stooping that low because, you know what, character matters.”

The post ‘Learn the facts’: Amy Acton schools Trump on her childhood trauma appeared first on MS NOW.

On Aug. 26, 2024, in Fort Myers, Florida, I answered a knock at my door to find a police officer waiting to arrest me. My first thought was my 12-year-old daughter, whose room was nearby. “Can she hear this?” I wondered. “Does she know what’s going on?” I had answered the door in my flip-flops, T-shirt and shorts, not realizing it would be all I had to keep me warm as I was thrown into an ice-cold jail cell, then into a steel cage in the back of a police van and finally locked up in a second jail. They told me I was being arrested for attempting to lure a child — roughly the same age as my daughter — from a McDonald’s in Jacksonville Beach, a town 300 miles away that I had never been to.

The whole time, I couldn’t stop thinking about when I would see my wife and daughter again. How would I explain why I was under arrest for a crime I didn’t commit in a city far across the state? Especially when I didn’t even understand what was going on myself.

The police ran my two vehicles through a database of license plate readers, which didn’t show my car anywhere in the entire county, much less near the restaurant. Yet based on the say-so of glitchy AI, they ruined my life.

After pledging the title to my truck for bond, I left the police station completely traumatized. I later learned that the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office uploaded a picture of the McDonald’s security footage into an artificial intelligence facial recognition system, which erroneously flagged me as a possible match. Jacksonville Beach Police then conducted a photo lineup not with the victim, but with a McDonald’s employee who was not an eyewitness.

Meanwhile, the officer leading the investigation ignored a mountain of evidence of my innocence. I have a prominent scar on my face that the suspect didn’t have. The same employee who picked me out of the photo lineup also said the suspect was a “regular customer,” but I live more than five hours away. The police ran my two vehicles through a database of license plate readers, which didn’t show my car anywhere in the entire county, much less near the restaurant.

Yet based on the say-so of glitchy AI, they ruined my life.

Until I was arrested for a crime I did not commit, I was a successful commercial crabber. I’ve loved crabbing since I first tried it as an 8-year-old kid hanging out on the Maryland docks. In the 40 years since, I’d built a beautiful life. I had a fulfilling career on the water, and an incredible wife and daughter and great friends. Anyone who knew me would tell you that I was a family guy. I was happy. All that changed after the police hauled me to jail and posted my mugshot online.

Weeks later, the Florida state attorney’s office dropped all charges. Now, I’m suing the officers, the city of Jacksonville Beach and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. In addition to damages, I am asking the court to order the city and the sheriff’s office to overhaul their procedures for using facial recognition technology.

It had taken two months to prove my innocence and my mugshot stayed on a police department website for nearly a year. At first, I could barely leave the house, terrified that someone would confront me for this revolting crime or see me with my daughter and call the police. Even when I was with people who knew I had been falsely accused, I couldn’t stand them looking at me and wondering even for a second, “Maybe he actually did it.”

I fell behind on rent, and when I was finally able to get back out on the water, it was too late. My seafood buyers had moved on. I was hemorrhaging cash. I had to turn my back on the ocean and start doing lawn care to provide for my family. Even harder than finding the money to rebuild my business is rebuilding the trust and credibility I lost because of the government’s colossal screw-up.

if there is one thing I am not, it’s a quitter. I will not quit until I get justice and the government makes amends.

When I told my daughter about the reason for the arrest, something I’d waited to do until after I had proven my innocence, she couldn’t stop laughing. To her, the accusation was that outrageous. While she laughed, I cried, just grateful to know that she was still in my corner and saw me for the person I was: her loving, caring, happy-go-lucky dad.

I am the first to admit that I am no angel. I’ve done stupid stuff in my past — gotten in some fights, spent some nights in jail. Any of my friends would agree that if there’s a loudmouth at the bar, I’m the one to tell him off. But I would never hurt a child. Ever.

When I’ve gotten in trouble, I’ve paid my debt to society. But the government doesn’t want to pay theirs. When I got into a bar fight, within a day I was hauled in front of a judge. Yet more than two years after my wrongful arrest, no one has even apologized, much less been held accountable in any court of law. And nothing has changed. I am still suffering. All because some cops used shoddy AI facial recognition, ignored contradictory evidence and, instead of protecting little girls in Jacksonville Beach, arrested an innocent guy in Fort Myers.

The government keeps trying to sweep what they did to me under the rug, hoping that I will give up and move on. But if there is one thing I am not, it’s a quitter. I will not quit until I get justice and the government makes amends. That’s why I have turned to the courts. They must hold the police accountable for altering my life forever. The record is clear. Justice should not take years to impose.

(Editor’s note: The Jacksonville County sheriff’s department told Wired Magazine, “Due to pending litigation, we would be unable to comment further on the incident.”)

The post Florida police ruined my life with a false AI match. Now I’m demanding justice. appeared first on MS NOW.

Caro is a city of about 4,000 people in central Michigan and the seat of Tuscola County, which Donald Trump won by more than 40 percentage points in 2024. On a brisk Saturday afternoon, just more than two weeks before Election Day, I drove there in a rental car to see progressive firebrand Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate for U.S. Senate, hold a town hall. When I flipped on the radio en route to Caro, I immediately heard the hosts of a right-wing talk show lavishing praise on Elon Musk. After many miles of driving alongside corn fields and wind turbines, while listening queasily to admiration for the reactionary tech tycoon, I was surprised at what I saw upon my arrival: hundreds of people lined up outside a community center waiting to hear what a Bernie Sanders-backed Democrat had to say. El-Sayed, who has never held elected office, has a narrow lead in the polls against former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers for a seat left open by a retiring Democrat.

El-Sayed took to the stage in his signature tightly fitting black shirt and jeans. After joking that he had come to Caro because it was one letter off from Cairo — a nod to his Egyptian ancestry — he immediately worked the crowd up by listing things that “shouldn’t be this hard” in America: buying a tank of gas, buying a second bag of groceries, seeing a doctor. When he ended the list by declaring, “Shouldn’t be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money’s going to be spent on you and your kids instead of dropping bombs on somebody else and their kids,” the crowd roared.

Then came a call-and-response from El-Sayed and the Caro crowd that hammered home his core campaign themes:

“Money out of?”

“Politics!” they shouted.

“Money in your?”

“Pockets!”

“Medicare for?”

“All!”

Many in the Caro crowd nodded as El-Sayed said, “Donald Trump is not himself the disease of our politics. He’s the worst symptom of the disease of our politics. The disease is the system that allows big corporations and billionaires and special interests to buy and sell politicians in ways that leave them rigging the system against us.” His language frequently draws attention to his training as a doctor. He never practiced medicine after finishing medical school at Columbia, but he earned a doctorate in public health from Oxford, and he has served as a health director for Wayne County, which is home to Detroit.

It was after El-Sayed said he’d answer questions that the mood darkened. In what may be the most viral moment of the 2026 midterm elections, a man in the audience who identified himself as Tommy stood up and asked El-Sayed if he would “disavow the Muslim Brotherhood,” an Islamist organization that Tommy called a “terrorist group.” El-Sayed said he’d have no problem disavowing the Muslim Brotherhood and did so. He then rejected the bigoted basis for Tommy’s question, and lectured him on the Constitution and freedom of religion.

There has been no indication that El-Sayed, or anyone else in the room, knew that Tommy was Thomas Teepell, a GOP operative who most notably worked as a former aide to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. But watching their exchange from inside the room, I was struck by El-Sayed’s antagonistic, even scornful, tone with him. Most politicians find a way to brush off the substance of what their hecklers say, if they don’t have them escorted out altogether. As Teepell began to leave, a woman yelled, “Bye, Tommy!” All of a sudden, a whole chorus of “Bye, Tommy! Bye, Tommy!” rang out as he walked out the door. “Tommy” might have thought his Islamophobic attack would do well in Caro, but El-Sayed beat him back, and he walked out being jeered, with his tail between his legs.

The Caro town hall dramatized the exhilarating possibilities of El-Sayed’s campaign — and the dark reactionary forces arrayed against him.

El-Sayed is not a socialist, but he is backed by many of them, and his demands for government-backed health insurance, hostility toward corporate power, and willingness to call Israel’s war a “genocide” represents a break from standard American liberalism. His campaign embodies a belief — contra the Democratic establishment — that the political system must change and that the left can plausibly build a base for that effort in heartland America. In that Caro town hall, that change felt like a possibility.

But “Tommy” represents the right’s counter to this vision. Not with rebuttal, but by fostering bigotry and smearing progressive politics as an alien import. Michigan State University political scientist Matt Grossmann told me Muslims are “one of the few demographics that voters are willing to express that they dislike.” Nearly 40% of voters in Michigan have admitted they’re less likely to support a Muslim candidate, and the GOP’s attacks on El-Sayed have mostly focused on him being a Muslim born to Egyptian immigrants to imply he’s a “risky” extremist.

Some politicians might react to such a political environment by affecting an air of amicability, but El-Sayed doesn’t. For some Michiganders, that makes him all the more appealing. I spoke to dozens of voters that week as I followed El-Sayed criss-crossing the state. Nearly every town hall attendee I spoke to described El-Sayed’s fierce speaking style — which routinely includes cutting down his opponents with harsh language — as a reason they were drawn to him.

“I like how he’s almost abrasive, like how honest and how raw he is, and the things that he’s honest and raw about,” Trevana, a 36-year-old customer service professional who lives in Midland, told me.

Alexus-Jo, a university financial aid office staffer who lives in rural Bay County, said she has in the past voted Republican and third party, and wasn’t planning to vote at all this time — but then she was moved by his tough persona: “I feel like establishment Democrats underestimate how volatile the general political climate is, and I feel like he’s not being stepped all over,” she said.

She added, “Seeing my Republican family members or people that aren’t Democrats say, ‘I don’t love the idea, but he’s got some things where I’m like, “OK, I’m listening,”’ that has really made me energized to get more into politics.”

My goal in Michigan was to see how a candidate aligned with the Bernie Sanders left connects with and persuades voters far from the deep-blue cities and districts where the movement has thrived — and how that candidate withstands right-wing attacks. El-Sayed is connecting with voters in a thoroughly purple state, it seems, by disregarding colors and labels.

“There’s no such thing called ‘progressive’ versus ‘conservative’ ideas, we make that up,” El- Sayed told me after a packed 500-person town hall at a theater in Bay City, a small urban center in a Trump-friendly county which, to his point, voted twice for President Barack Obama. “Red and blue are not real, those are not real things. What’s real is people are locked out of their politics by a system that allows big corporations and special interests to buy their politicians.”

The far left has long believed that appealing to people’s shared class interests can cut across cultural differences and pre-existing ideological barriers. El-Sayed’s race against Rogers will be the most consequential test of that theory in recent memory.

***

El-Sayed’s potential strength with swing voters can be placed in three buckets: his specific mode of charisma as a fighter; his focus on — and slightly misleading framing of — Medicare for All; and his ability to frame issues including foreign aid and crime in ways that can appeal to voters on the right and left.

In our era, anger at the status quo is a way to reach across the aisle. El-Sayed’s persona as a scrapper, enhanced by his conspicuously muscular physique, allows him to radiate populist energy at a time of bipartisan demand for it. A new TV ad campaign of his emphasizes his credibility going up against the “corrupt swamp” and the “elites” in Washington to highlight where MAGA Republicans might find something in common with his worldview.

When El-Sayed fired back at “Tommy,” in Caro, I agreed with his argument, but I also winced — condescension toward a town hall participant is usually gaffe territory. But that’s an old-school rhetorical norm, and it is precisely because El-Sayed responded so forcefully that he was effective. He kicked off a news cycle about Islamophobia and his campaign, brought broadly positive attention to himself in the mainstream press and on social media, and used the moment of confrontation to raise money.

Still, there are obvious potential downsides to such pugilism. El-Sayed was repeatedly panned for being patronizing toward his opponents during a primary he won by a narrow margin, and he might miss out on voters who prefer conciliatory or unity-focused orators.

When I asked El-Sayed, while riding on his campaign bus between Flint and Detroit, if he ever second-guessed his abrasive style, he answered, “I just am who I am.” He continued, “I like to build stuff. I rebuilt a health department, led another one, built programs. But too often, when you look at why we are not building for working people in America, it’s because of the insane politics from folks like Donald Trump and Mike Rogers and JD Vance. So if you’re coming to break the things that we want to build, yeah, I’m going to stand up to you.”

Virtually every voter I interviewed cited El-Sayed’s support for Medicare for All as a key point of interest. KFF, a health research group, found in September that 66% of Americans, including nearly 40% of Republicans, support “a national health plan, sometimes called Medicare-for-all, in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan” — the highest share since they started asking the question about a decade ago. A top pollster in Michigan found support for Medicare for All in Michigan is at 62%.

Mark Brewer, a 65-year-old independent voter and retired construction worker who lives near the village of Mayville, told me he thought El-Sayed’s support for Medicare for All was a good idea. He has voted for libertarian candidates in the past, and told me he’s “financially conservative,” but was frustrated that the vast amount of money he spent on health insurance never guaranteed him care.

“I worked construction for 40 years. I paid $375,000 into health insurance during that time. The day I retired, it stopped,” he said. He said he was unhappy he had to go three years without insurance until he qualified for Medicare.

Tad Sumner, a 61-year-old Midland resident who works in banking and IT, said in 2016, he was for Hillary Clinton, not Bernie Sanders, but he has slowly moved to the left and toward El-Sayed’s healthcare views because “health care has become more and more profitized.”

People skeptical about Medicare for All are often afraid of losing the insurance they do have, as flawed as it is. How does El-Sayed put them at ease? “People are frustrated by the current system,” he told me. “I’m not interested in taking anything away. I’m interested in offering you a guarantee for health insurance, cradle to grave, without worrying about a network, or out of network, without worrying about a premium, copay or deductible.”

Unlike some advocates for Medicare for All, El-Sayed says his plan would not entail prohibiting duplicative private insurance. But as People’s Policy Project founder Matt Bruenig has pointed out in Jacobin, that’s effectively a sleight of hand. After a public plan emerges and many employers drop coverage of health insurance, it’s unlikely that people will be able to, or inclined to, purchase expensive private policies that duplicate coverage they’re already guaranteed. Moreover, private insurance would likely look quite different, if it still existed, Bruenig notes. Whether El-Sayed’s plan would formally allow private insurance is not really the issue — but his position that he doesn’t want to take anything away must make the idea go down easier for the skeptics.

El-Sayed has garnered a lot of attention for confidently characterizing Israel’s treatment of Gazans as a “genocide” and opposing unconditional aid to Israel. But the bulk of his foreign policy messaging during town halls and press interviews hasn’t focused on Israel. In those contexts, he has more generally called out militarism and argued that the U.S. should focus on spending at home.

The remark he made in Caro — “Shouldn’t be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money’s going to be spent on you and your kids instead of dropping bombs on somebody else and their kids” — has cross-partisan appeal. With it, El-Sayed simultaneously connected foreign policy adventurism to depleted social services at home; issued a moral judgment by directing attention to the killing of innocents; and, because he didn’t name any countries, he condemned the U.S. backing Israel and the U.S. war with Iran simultaneously. There was something there for war-averse people across the political spectrum. That framing seemed to resonate with many voters I spoke to, some of whom approved of his position on Iran or Gaza, while many others said they approved of how El-Sayed’s foreign policy “put Michigan first.”

El-Sayed is running TV ads featuring a quote from the Detroit Free Press noting that he “Views foreign policy through an America First lens.” And he has found an unlikely supporter in right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, who has described his outlook on foreign policy as “Trumpian.”

I asked El-Sayed if he wanted to be associated with an America First position, or if he would say other values inform his foreign policy worldview. “I definitely am America first,” El-Sayed said. “But my real value is I believe in international law, and I believe we need to be the first among equals to enforce international law.”

That poses some vexing questions and contradictions. Enforcing international law would seem to cut against the idea of focusing exclusively on American affairs. And he insisted on a “responsibility to support Ukraine.” That’s not what MAGA America First advocates want. But this part of El-Sayed’s worldview doesn’t feature in his messaging and doesn’t seem to be trickling through as much to voters, based on my conversations.

When crime came up at the town halls, El-Sayed positioned himself as an advocate for both the status quo and reform. Like socialist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, El-Sayed has flipped on his previous support of “defund the police.” At Bay City, a voter asked about criminal justice reform in light of an unsolved murder of her peers. El-sayed emphasized “everybody should get to come home safely” — community members and police — and he spoke about funding the police in order to protect “recruitment, retention, and retirement.” He added that there should also be investment in community violence intervention and mental health response services. In other words: Fund the police and alternatives to policing.

When I asked if he took issue with “defund the police” as rhetoric or policy, he said, “It was a dumb idea and dumb rhetoric.”

While some proponents of criminal justice reform on the progressive left will take issue with El-Sayed’s turn to full-throated support for policing, his additive approach to reform has the potential to appeal to progressives and nonprogressives alike.

***

Will all of this come together for a winning ticket? El-Sayed’s calibration of progressive politics to the Rust Belt seem to be resonating enough with voters that he’s been able to maintain a lead, but his lead is narrower than the Democratic gubernatorial candidate’s lead over her Republican opponent in this state. He is massively outraising his opponent, but Rogers is a former seven-term U.S. representative with Trump’s backing and significant name recognition. El-Sayed has labored to make his campaign appealing to people across the political spectrum, but that doesn’t mean that they will overlook his party affiliation or discard racial prejudice. He could easily lose.

The Democratic base is not entirely a lock for him. El-Sayed was weak with Black voters in the primary, and whether they will turn out in large numbers for him is an open question that could decide the race. Tensions between the Arab and Black community in Michigan have been cited by strategists and reporters as an issue for El-Sayed. But the main issue may have less to do with race than with ideology. “A lot of his issues with Black voters are not necessarily specific to Black voters,” Grossmann, the Michigan State political scientist, told me. “Within the Democratic Party, Black voters are actually more likely to identify as moderate or conservative, and more likely to be skeptical of the Bernie wing of the party.”

The stakes of this race are exceptionally high. The outcome will not only be crucial in determining who controls the Senate, but will also shape conversations about 2028. According to a recording obtained by The New York Times, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., who is considering a presidential run, said at a New York fundraiser in October that El-Sayed is part of a “generational project” for the progressive movement that could help “break the map.” She added, “If Abdul can win in Michigan, anybody can win anywhere.”

Undoubtedly, the outcome of El-Sayed’s race will be used to make the case that a democratic socialist like Ocasio-Cortez has a real chance at winning the White House — or shatter the argument. But a major confounding variable in this contest is that El-Sayed faces unique obstacles due to his identity.

Given that polls in Michigan detect real bias against Muslims and that Trump has won the state twice, I asked El-Sayed whether running as a progressive Muslim in an environment of rampant Islamophobia was asking too much. Had he been tempted to move toward the center?

“I don’t lie to people,” he said. “I tell them what I believe. I’m not willing to check my ideals at the door because of my identity. That’s what people hate about politics. I am who I am. I’ll tell you what I believe. If you agree with me, vote for me.”

He added, “Even if they might never want to vote for me because of my name, maybe by the end of my public service, they’ll think a little bit differently about what America is. Because America’s always been a place where people come together despite our differences to build together what we can’t alone. I believe in that.”

The post How Abdul El-Sayed is trying to pull off the impossible in the Rust Belt appeared first on MS NOW.

At a recent town hall in Detroit, Vice President JD Vance faced a question that went to the heart of the Catholic faith he says guides him: How can he reconcile the treatment of families by Immigration and Customs Enforcement with the Gospel?

Sister Nancy Sylvester of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, described her group’s work at the southern border and the trauma children endure when they come home to find their parents gone. Then she asked Vance how he could justify ICE officers’ conduct “in terms of the kind of values we want to live by.”

Vance praised ICE agents as patriots. He offered only a passing acknowledgment that officers who “screw up” should be investigated and prosecuted, without grappling with the Americans killed by ICE agents or the detainees who have died in ICE custody.

The town hall drew more attention for the way in which Vance stumbled over questions about Trump’s corruption and the deaths of service members in the war in Iran. But his answer to Sister Sylvester was especially revealing: When the administration’s actions collide with the Catholic teachings he frequently invokes, Vance is willing to set those teachings aside.

As a former seminarian, I found the gap between her question and his answer deeply troubling.

As an American and as a former seminarian, I found the gap between her question and his answer deeply troubling.

First of all, Vance has frequently centered his Catholic faith throughout his political career. Just this year, he published his second memoir, “Communion,” detailing his conversion to Catholicism and how it informs his worldview. And yet earlier this year, when Trump was inexplicably feuding with the first American pope, the vice president had the gall to say that “it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality,” and “let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”

That’s despite this administration repeatedly presenting matters of faith and matters of government as irrevocably entwined. Just months earlier, Vance lamented the Supreme Court upholding the separation of church and state, saying at a Turning Point USA event, “I think it was a terrible mistake, and we’re still paying for the consequences of it today.”

For all its bluster about protecting religious freedom, this administration has actually targeted faithful servants like Sister Sylvester. The haste of this White House to extrajudicially purge the country of undocumented immigrants has put it in direct confrontation with people of faith.

Which brings to mind another book Vance should have spent a bit more time with. In Matthew 25, Jesus says that on Judgment Day, those who welcomed the stranger will be welcomed into the kingdom of God. He identifies Himself with people who need food, shelter, care and companionship. Our response to their vulnerability becomes a measure of our response to Him.

Last year in Chicago, Catholic groups sued the administration for the right to minister to detainees at a Broadview ICE facility. In New Jersey, elderly Catholic nuns have organized protests outside of Delaney Hall against the deaths of ICE detainees. Nuns have also been protesting in Vance’s home state of Ohio, as Haitian immigrants repeatedly dehumanized by this White House see their legal status ripped away.

These protests are so widespread because the Catholic Church is unequivocal in its teachings about hospitality for the immigrant, charity for the poor and embrace of the stranger.

Trump’s immigration actions have put the administration in direct conflict with people of faith who take these teachings seriously. In some cases, it has even suppressed their ability to worship.

Human dignity does not depend on citizenship. A person’s immigration status can determine whether that person has a legal right to remain in this country. It cannot determine whether that person deserves to be treated with compassion.

Compassion is not separate from Catholic teaching; it is a demand of it. Church leaders have made that clear in response to the raids.

Last year, the Diocese of San Bernardino lifted the obligation to attend mass after immigration agents carried out detentions on two of its properties, noting that Trump’s thugs were “seizing brothers and sisters indiscriminately, without respect for their right to due process and their dignity as children of God.”

Just months later, U.S. Catholic bishops blasted the Trump White House after its raids completely upended church life, “destabilizing the life of the particular immigrant, but whole families, businesses, the life of children, whole communities, neighborhoods.”

Just a matter of months ago, immigration agents arrested a Nigerian nun in McAllen, Texas, as she was walking to Mass in her habit. They took her rosary and detained and imprisoned her.

Vance’s response to Sister Sylvester was especially galling when he added the comment about an obligation to prosecute agents who abuse their position.

The Trump administration didn’t just refuse to pursue federal charges against agents who killed Americans like Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They actively rejected calls to do so, betraying the small-government principles of conservatism for 30 pieces of silver to say that masked federal agents can kill Americans with no recourse.

And once again, the administration’s actions defied the ways Vance said his faith informed his worldview. Months before Vance found himself defending the extrajudicial killing of Americans in the streets by their own government, he said, “You can’t just have compassion for the criminal. You also have to have justice, too. Which is why I think that a properly rooted Christian moral order is such an important part of the future of our country.”

There is an uncomfortable demand here for anyone in politics. The person whose suffering complicates your preferred policy remains a person to whom you owe a moral duty. Winning an election does not relieve you of it. Neither does inheriting a broken immigration system.

Catholic teaching recognizes the legitimate responsibilities of government. Paragraph 2241 of the Catechism allows nations to regulate immigration for the common good and recognizes immigrants’ obligations to obey the laws of their receiving country. It also obliges prosperous nations, within their capacity, to welcome people seeking safety and a livelihood unavailable at home. Those responsibilities belong together.

The same teaching requires public authorities to respect fundamental human rights and administer justice humanely, with particular concern for families and the disadvantaged. A government’s authority to enforce the law therefore carries moral limits on how it does so.

There is no reconciliation between the Trump administration’s wanton targeting of immigrants and thousands of years of Catholic teachings. Vance knows this. Vance’s conscience is his own. But his exercise of public power is subject to public scrutiny. As a fellow Catholic, I expect him to explain how the policies he supports honor the dignity his church teaches that every person possesses. Perhaps then he may be able to answer Sister Sylvester’s question.

For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Symone Sanders Townsend and Luke Russert, watch “The Weeknight” every Monday to Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MS NOW.

The post JD Vance’s remarks to a Catholic nun unraveled the White House’s claims about religious freedom appeared first on MS NOW.

Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor whose childhood sexual abuse became fodder for an attack ad by her Republican rival, Vivek Ramaswamy, directly addressed the widely-criticized video on Saturday.

“As you’ve probably heard by now, as a young child, my brother and I experienced a lot of child abuse and neglect. We moved countless times as kids, and even wound up living in a tent in the middle of the winter,” Acton said at a rally in Cleveland, alongside former President Barack Obama and former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is making a comeback bid to oust Republican Sen. Jon Husted.

“And now, my opponent has chosen to exploit, intentionally, my childhood to save to save his struggling campaign, but it’s not going to work,” Acton said to cheers from the crowd. “It’s not going to work because compassion and decency still matter.”

The former president took his star power to Cleveland to help carry his party across the finish line just 10 days before Election Day. He criticized Ramaswamy by name.

“There’s a decency we should expect from our public officials where the standards of behavior have gotten so low that somebody can run an ad like that,” Obama said. “There’s got to be something inside you where you just say, ‘You know, no office is worth stooping that low.’ Because you know what, character matters.”

Acton and Obama’s comments referred to a 60-second video released by Ramaswamy’s campaign last week that featured her estranged mother, Donna Arthur. In the clip, Arthur calls her daughter a “liar.”

“She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true,” Arthur says in the ad.

Acton has spoken about her and her brother’s difficult shared childhood even before entering politics. She said they were homeless for a time and lived in a tent one winter. She accused her mother’s husband of sexual abuse, and court records obtained by news outlets show Acton’s stepfather was arrested and charged with raping her when she was 12, before he fled the state and later died.

Arthur disputed Acton’s allegations against her husband in a interview with a conservative website in 2020, but said she stood by her husband. She and Acton have separately said they have not spoken since a last encounter in court over Arthur’s husband’s charges.

Ramaswamy’s ad was met with a wave of condemnation from Democrats and some Republicans almost as soon as it began circulating on the internet. The Ohio governor’s race is very tight, according to MS NOW polling. On Friday, the Cook Political Report moved the race from “toss up” to “lean Democrat,” pointing to the ad negative’s consequences of “perhaps creating some collateral damage.”

But Ramaswamy has stood by the video, saying it “had nothing to do with childhood abuse.” President Donald Trump also backed the Republican candidate and accused the media of engaging in a “well-coordinated attack” to get the ad taken down.

In her remarks Saturday, Acton said her difficult childhood experiences shaped who she is today.

“I know that I am not the only one in this room who saw a thing or two in their childhood, but our stories, Ohio’s stories, is one of resilience, of grit, of grace, and, yes, of hope,” she said.

“Hope is a very powerful thing. It’s what got me through living in a cold, dark basement when I wasn’t sure where my next meal was coming from,” Acton continued. “Hope is what got me through sexual abuse, living through cold nights, where all I could think about was how to keep my brother safe and warm.”

She called Ramaswamy “out of touch” and “a danger to my state.”

“Apparently, there is no low to which you won’t stoop,” she said. “But look, I am a scrappy kid from Youngstown. Scrappy kids from Youngstown, we never back down from a fight.”

The post Obama and Ohio Democrat Amy Acton slam Ramaswamy attack ad appeared first on MS NOW.

Alaska Senate Democratic nominee Mary Peltola and national Democrats have filed a legal motion to fight the Trump administration’s lawsuit over the Alaska Senate race, asking a judge to grant a motion to intervene and ultimately dismiss the case.

Marc Elias, the lawyer representing both Peltola’s campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said Saturday that his firm “has filed to fight DOJ’s lawsuit to rig the Alaska Senate election.”

BREAKING: On behalf of Mary Peltola's campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Elias Law Group has filed to fight DOJ's lawsuit to rig the Alaska Senate election.

We will win this case, Mary will win this election, she will be certified and seated.

— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) October 24, 2026

Filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for Alaska, Peltola’s Senate campaign committee and the DSCC asked the court to grant their motion to intervene “to defend against the Justice Department’s extraordinary assault.”

“This case directly threatens both Proposed Intervenors’ interests by demanding that defendants refuse to certify the election if, and only if, Peltola wins,” the motion states. “It is part of a nationwide attack on free elections by the federal government, which the DSCC has fought at every turn.”

At President Donald Trump’s behest, the Justice Department on Friday filed a lawsuit to block the certification of Alaska’s Senate election results if Peltola narrowly beats Republican incumbent Sen. Dan S. Sullivan. The DOJ argued that another candidate on the ballot, a retired teacher named Daniel J. Sullivan, could confuse voters — despite the ballots clearly stating the senator’s title and his status as an incumbent.

The lawsuit was met with outrage from Democrats and some Republicans. In an exclusive interview with MS NOW’s Nicole Wallace, Peltola described it as a “desperate attempt to cling to power” on Trump’s part, as Republicans brace for a blow to their majority in Congress.

The Friday motion to intervene argued similarly.

“Alaskans, apparently, must elect Senator Dan S. Sullivan or the President will not let them elect anyone at all,” the motion states, later adding, “And the Department of Justice’s assumption that every voter who casts a vote for Daniel J. Sullivan really meant to vote for Senator Sullivan is insulting to voters and irreconcilable with Alaska’s ranked-choice voting procedures and the ballot’s clear differentiation between the two candidates.”

The Alaska Senate race is rated a toss-up. Peltola has proven herself capable of flipping a Republican-controlled seat when she won the 2022 special election for the U.S. House. Voters in Alaska appear to have soured on Trump — who won the state in 2024 by double digits — but the Republican senator has continued to align himself with the president and his unpopular policies.

Alaskan Republicans had tried to boot Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot during the primary race, accusing him of being in cahoots with Democrats to sabotage the senator’s chances. In June, the Alaska Supreme Court ordered the state’s Division of Elections to include his name on the primary ballot after election officials removed him.

The retired teacher has said he is running a genuine campaign for Senate.

“My intention is not to trick people,” he told The New York Times in August. “I would hope people are informed enough to know the difference between an incumbent senator and a teacher.”

Lisa Rubin contributed to this report.

The post Democrats take legal action against Trump bid ‘to rig’ Alaska Senate race appeared first on MS NOW.

The Justice Department sent threatening letters to California election officials on Friday demanding local registrars immediately sequester ballots from voters the Trump administration alleges are noncitizens.

The letters were hand-delivered to counties across the state in a move that some clerks viewed as an attempt to intimidate state election officials despite ongoing litigation.

In the letter to Contra Costa County Clerk-Recorder Kristin Connelly, a copy of which was obtained by MS NOW, U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian warned Connelly that she will face prosecution if she fails to “segregate” ballots from the suspected noncitizens on the department’s list.

“It’s an unenforceable 48-hour deadline delivered late on a Friday,” Connelly told MS NOW. “There’s nothing about this that is actionable for me at this moment, because I need to follow the state and federal laws.”

The move by the Justice Department marks the latest escalation by the administration as President Donald Trump repeats false claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens. Voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, and data from nonpartisan organizations and state audits have shown that those isolated incidents have not changed the outcome of an election.

The Justice Department sent Connelly a list of 407 suspected noncitizens registered to vote in Contra Costa County. That number is a subset of the 20,000 alleged noncitizens the department sent to California’s secretary of state and Los Angeles County last week.

“I write to make unmistakably clear the legal implications of continuing to send vote-by- mail ballots to those people on the list or tabulating ballots cast by them until citizenship can be verified,” DOJ attorney Missakian wrote to Connelly. The DOJ told Connelly to “temporarily set aside” but “not cancel” the mail ballots until “citizenship status can be determined.”

They gave Connelly and other clerks “48 hours” to work with the DOJ and DHS “to identify who on the accompanying list is a citizen and who is not.” The counties must provide social security numbers, a copy of state IDs, a copy of voter registration applications for people on its list, the DOJ ordered in the letter.

“The legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring federal crimes are significant,” the letter to Connelly and other clerks state.

Asked if she’d afraid of prosecution, Connelly said “no.”

“Because I’m not doing anything wrong. I protect our voter rolls, we’re very meticulous about it,” Connelly said. “We follow the law. Do I want a target on my back? No, I do not. Do I want to get prosecuted? No, I do not.”

The Justice Department directly contacted every county in California, DOJ spokesperson, Kiersten Pels, told MS NOW.

“We are asking each county election official to commit to working with us by providing the necessary information for DHS to quickly verify citizenship status,” Pels said. “With their help, we can ensure the most secure election in California history.”

The latest threats to election officials come after the Justice Department sent similar orders to LA County and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber on Oct. 13, after counties had already begun to mail ballots to voters across the state.

In a message to fellow California clerks and election officials Friday, LA County Registrar Dean Logan said the new letter from the DOJ “misrepresents the facts of their own actions” and “threatens local election officials twelve days before the election.”

“To have them threaten me with prosecution at this hour is not what’s helpful for democracy,” Connelly told MS NOW. “I want to make sure that the voters know that we have safe and secure elections.”

The escalation comes after the Justice Department sued California, asking a judge to block the state from counting roughly 20,000 ballots from people the administration claims are “likely noncitizens.” A hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled for next week, but the DOJ is asking an appeals court to make a decision this weekend.

In Los Angeles County, a preliminary sampling of the suspected noncitizen names sent by the Justice Department found that “approximately 43% had canceled voter registrations, and more than 70% had no voting history,” Logan said in a prior statement. And in a court filing, LA County said some 25.8 percent of the sampled voters listed a “place of birth in the United States, a strong indicator of citizenship status.”

Those findings fit a pattern. In Nevada, state officials reviewed suspected noncitizen lists provided by the Trump administration, only to find zero were noncitizens, according to email exchanges between state and federal officials obtained by MS NOW. And in other states, local officials have told MS NOW that the lists of alleged noncitizens are unreliable and risk disenfranchising eligible voters.

The post DOJ demands California counties separate alleged noncitizen ballots within 48 hours appeared first on MS NOW.

Democrats are hoping Barack Obama — their “closer in chief” — still has the magic.

The former president certainly still had his magic with words on Saturday when he rallied with the Democrats’ Senate and gubernatorial candidates in Cleveland before another in Detroit.

“There’s gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold?” Obama said as he eviscerated President Donald Trump on everything from the Iran war and soaring costs of living to his penchant for taxpayer-funded home remodeling.

“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory,” Obama said, electrifying the crowd at the Cleveland rally.

Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief, welcoming the blitz just 10 days before Election Day, with everything seemingly at stake.

“Obama’s our most potent weapon for sure,” said one House Democratic lawmaker, adding, “He remains the biggest star in our party. I think it’s a perfect time to send him on the road and activate him.”

Obama’s arrival on the campaign trail comes as Democrats make their closing messages on affordability and the economy and compete for voters in closely contested races. The Michigan and Ohio Senate races are currently rated as “toss ups” by MS NOW. Georgia’s Senate race is in the “lean Democrat” category.

“President Obama understands the stakes of this election could not be any higher, and that is why he’s doing everything he can to help Democrats up and down the ballot win on November 3,” Eric Schultz, a senior advisor to Obama, told MS NOW. “Our strategy is focused on maximizing his impact, especially where his voice can help move the needle in support of the next generation of leaders currently stepping up to lead.”

For candidates, his appeal goes beyond drawing a crowd: Democrats say Obama can deliver a closing argument that connects the high stakes of the election to voters’ everyday concerns, while drawing a sharp contrast with Republicans.

Plus, they say Obama is the closest thing Democrats have to match the magnetism Trump once had at the height of his packed MAGA rallies.

On the trail, the former president will focus on the high cost of living, including housing and energy prices. But he’s also highlighting corruption and abuse of power in Washington and the implications of artificial intelligence, according to a person familiar with Obama’s thinking.

The same person said Obama’s team worked with Democratic House, Senate and gubernatorial leadership to identify where his presence could be most beneficial in the most competitive Senate and gubernatorial races. The former Democratic president has raised over $15 million for his party, the person close to Obama said, through events, emails and mail campaigns.

His strategy has gone beyond rallies, filming more than two dozen endorsement videos to support Democratic candidates. Among those receiving the boosts are Iowa senate nominee Josh Turek and Troy Jackson, the nominee in Maine. He also made an appearance in Austin, Texas in May with the state’s Senate nominee James Talarico and gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa.

For candidates on the trail, Obama brings an unmatched enthusiasm that other Democrats can’t replicate.

“He does a really good job making closing arguments: why this moment is so important, why the election is so consequential, why everyone’s vote matters as much as it does,” Rep. Greg Landsman, an Ohio Democrat, said. “There’s very few that do it better than he does.”

Obama joined Senate Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown and the state’s gubernatorial nominee, Amy Acton, at the rally in Cleveland Saturday afternoon before wooing voters for Michigan’s Senate Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, and gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson in the evening. He’s set to head south to Atlanta on Wednesday.

In an election cycle dominated by concerns about affordability and the economy, Landsman said Obama can draw a contrast between Democrats’ approach to the economy and health care and the policies Republicans have pursued over the past two years.

“He has the ability to talk about what you have to do to build a strong economy, which he did, versus what’s happened over the last two years,” Landsman said.

Trump will also campaign in the Great Lakes State this weekend, rallying voters in Port Huron, Michigan, on Sunday afternoon. He’s embarked on a more than 15 state campaign blitz in the month leading up to Election Day, hitting red states like Kentucky, Montana and Alabama while also hosting multiple rallies in battleground states like Texas, Ohio, Georgia and Iowa.

Obama’s role on the trail extends beyond energizing the party faithful.

Democratic Governors Association Communication Director Sam Newton said his presence can bring attention to races, including those for the governor’s mansion, that receive less national attention than contests for Congress.

His ability to reach voters who might otherwise tune out politics is another reason his appearances matter in the final stretch before Election Day, Newton said.

“Part of why President Obama is the closer in chief is because he’s always had a special and unique ability to draw attention from voters who are otherwise apathetic or not necessarily paying attention,” Newton said. “Having him on the trail at this critical time when you’re trying to reach every possible voter is really important.”

And although Obama may be their “most potent weapon,” he may have some competition.

“He’s just a rockstar,” said another House Democratic member. “The only more powerful closer we could possibly have is Michelle Obama.”

Mychael Schnell contributed to this report.

The post ‘Most potent weapon’: Obama arrives to boost Democrats in battlegrounds appeared first on MS NOW.

Sixteen days before Election Day, Abdul El-Sayed is sitting at the dinette of a bus that has his face plastered all over it.

I had just played him a clip on my iPad. It was of Tashawna Gill, a Detroit organizer he knows well and who was one of his earliest supporters, describing an alarming trend in what she and her canvassers were hearing from Black voters in the city’s retirement communities.

“They’re skipping that part of the ballot,” Gill said. “We do the senior home tour, and they’re not interested. They skipped that on the ballot. They have returned their absentees, and some of them have shared that they’ve returned their absentees without checking the box for anything for the Senate race.”

In the tight space on the bus, the clip finishes, and El-Sayed says: “I hope more folks will fill out that part of the ballot. This one’s for all the marbles.”

How did it feel, I asked? Hearing that his story, his message isn’t landing with people in a community he has long served, people he needs if he wants to become Michigan’s next senator?

El-Sayed has a reputation of being pretty sure of himself. Unflappable, quick on his feet, someone who leans into the “don’t let ’em see you sweat” brand of politics.

For a second, that drops.

”Obviously, it’s heartbreaking. I’ve spent most of my career serving exactly those communities,” he says. “But I also get that campaigns are complicated.”

He blames the tens of millions of dollars in PAC money for the tepidness within the Black community toward his attempt to hold Michigan’s open Senate seat for Democrats, and for “destroying trust” he built with the Black community in his time as a public health official in Detroit.

“Rebuilding it takes a long time, so I’ve got work to do to rebuild trust, but I’ve been serving those communities for a long time,” he said. “I’m confident in the work I have done and confident in the work that I will do. And I hope I get the opportunity to do it.”

He notes that he’s not sure, either, just how widespread the sentiment Gill related is among his would-be constituents.

And just like that, the self-assuredness is back.

It’s clear, though, that he’s hurt that the work he has done in Detroit is being misconstrued or discounted, or that folks just don’t know about it. And he’s running out of time to spread the word.

Empty yards

The clip that I had El-Sayed respond to was from a walk I took with Gill on a quiet street back in Detroit.

She wanted me to see the lawns on Greenview Avenue in North Rosedale Park. It’s a neighborhood of brick houses on Detroit’s northwest side that she calls one of the most educated, highest-turnout precincts in the city. And she would know — her office is one block over.

Gill is a well-known organizer who chairs the Michigan Democratic Party’s Grassroots caucus, founded the African American Leadership Institute, helped get Gretchen Whitmer elected governor and was an early endorser of El-Sayed’s Senate campaign when most of the party establishment — including Whitmer — was behind U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens. Every day, Gill’s office sends out about 70 canvassers across Wayne County.

She knows of what she speaks, especially when it comes to Black voters.

“If you look down here, do you see any yard signs? Look left and right,” she says. I do, and it’s … empty. “It doesn’t even look like it’s an election going on anywhere,” she said.

Typically, Gill said, the streets are pretty lined with them. That they aren’t now, so close to the election, “is scary to me.”

Yard signs are not votes, but they are a sign of enthusiasm and of a campaign that is working hard to get those signs stuck in lawns.

Detroit is 75% Black, according to census data, the largest majority-Black big city in the country. And the Democratic playbook for winning statewide has not changed in a lifetime: run up the score in Wayne and Genesee counties, then hang on everywhere else.

When Detroit doesn’t turn out, Democrats lose. Two years ago, when Elissa Slotkin narrowly held Michigan’s other Senate seat, she won 86% of the Black vote compared with Republican Mike Rogers’ 12%. Recent polling shows El-Sayed hovering below 80% of the Black vote.

The concerns aren’t new. Back in the primary in August, El-Sayed eked out a 1-point win against Stevens. He won the college towns and progressive strongholds. He lost Detroit by 28 points.

El-Sayed seems well aware that the tepidness exists. The campaign says it and party entities have spent nearly $14.3 million in paid media specifically for the Detroit and Flint markets.

They’ve invited the equivalent of the Black political Avengers to endorse and campaign with him in the state, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock and Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. Former President Barack Obama is stumping with El-Sayed in Detroit this weekend.

The campaign says it has been to 45 Black churches and had more than 125 meetings and roundtables with Black elected officials, faith leaders and community organizations.

It’s not something that’s been lost on his opponent either; they see an opening. The Rogers campaign opened a storefront office on Livernois Avenue in Detroit while we were there, and a group calling itself Democrats for Mike Rogers has been campaigning for him. A recent ad features Black voters saying they felt El-Sayed cared more about Palestine than Detroit.

“If you’re from Detroit, you know no Republican will be going through Detroit like they’re going through Detroit. They are in places a Republican would never be,” Gill said. “So I’m scared that a slice of that, just a little bit, will go to them.”

A Rogers campaign spokesperson touted their outreach, saying they are the first Republican to open a Detroit office, have visited a dozen Black churches and visited Flint and Pontiac “multiple times.” And multiple Democrats in Michigan have told me that Rogers is showing up in places in Detroit that haven’t seen a statewide GOP candidate in years.

Nearly every person I talked to on the ground in Detroit pointed to three reasons why El-Sayed is underperforming with Black voters.

Community conflict

The first one is uncomfortable to talk about: historic tensions between Black and Arab Michiganders. Dearborn sits right on the edge of Detroit, and today Arab Americans are estimated to make up the majority of that city’s 105,000 residents. Older Black voters know the long, violent history between the two communities. In 1980 an Iraqi immigrant store owner shot a Black customer he suspected of stealing soda. In 2023 a clerk at a gas station locked customers inside with an armed man after a card used to purchase less than $4 was declined. One of them was killed. A crash this fall reignited the fight.

Gill puts it in plain terms: “African Americans, especially seniors, feel like they were treated disrespectful, targeted, kicked out of the stores in Dearborn. So our seniors and our parents, when they see Abdul, they blame him for all of that.”

He wasn’t there, I point out. She knows that but says that trauma is unfairly being taken out on his candidacy.

Former Obama administration official Portia Roberson is CEO of Focus: HOPE, a civil rights organization in Detroit founded in 1968. She put those tensions this way:

“It has seemingly been that Arab people have been able to move to Detroit in this area and find ways to be successful, whether that is owning gas stations, whether that is owning party stores, and that Blacks who have been here have been locked out of those places,” she said.

I asked El-Sayed about the tension.

“I’ll be honest with you, I understand. I’ve worked in the city of Detroit. You walk into one of these party stores, you walk into a gas station and you’ve got somebody that looks like me behind bulletproof glass, and you look at the way that they’re treating customers. The number of times that people have been denied a bathroom or their kid gets sold a loosie cigarette out of the back or they’re catcalling a woman in the community. That’s deeply inappropriate. It’s wrong and I’ve never been one of those guys,” he said, “even if I look like one of those guys.”

While he was health director in Wayne County, he said, he led a conversation with “those guys” about why that behavior was inappropriate, adding, “You can’t just take money out and not invest in the local community. You can’t just deny local contractors opportunities to service your business and think that’s OK.”

A fateful stance

That second reason? The Uncommitted movement in 2024. In February of that year, more than 101,000 Michigan Democrats, about 13%, voted “uncommitted” in the presidential primary to protest President Joe Biden’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza. El-Sayed publicly announced that he was one of them. Nine months later, Harris lost the state as Black voters watched a party they had carried for decades fail to show up for the first Black woman at the top of the presidential ticket.

When it comes to the Black community, El-Sayed leans hard on his track record. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s mandate to him when he hired him back in 2015 to run a health department that had been gutted: “rebuild it.” In his first year, the department restarted lead screenings for children and helped pay for them in Detroit schools. The department also partnered with a nonprofit to offer free eye exams and glasses to thousands of students. After his failed run for governor in 2018, El-Sayed became director of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services.

His stance on Uncommitted is overshadowing all of that.

Roberson has voted consistently her entire adult life, and that movement still stings.

“As a Black woman, I’ve never had the luxury of voting on one issue. I’ve never had that luxury. I’ve never been able to walk into a polling booth and say, this is my one issue and if it doesn’t correlate with my one issue, I’m willing to throw the rest of it away,” she said. “We knew all of the things that have now happened to us, and you still decided to be uncommitted because of your issue.”

El-Sayed endorsed Harris the day after she became the nominee; Uncommitted largely was about the primary for him. And Harris came to Detroit just last month to endorse and campaign with El-Sayed. She has gotten over his criticism of the Biden-Harris policies.

“But a lot of folks haven’t,” Roberson said, laying out the very kind of single-issue objections she had just disavowed. “And I have friends who are very politically astute, and they have said, ‘I will never forgive that.’ It got so big so quickly that they couldn’t pull it back when it was time to coalesce around Kamala Harris, and now we are here.”

At the doors Gill’s team knocks on, the version that seniors are sharing is harsher than what actually happened and full of wrong information, she said.

They tell her teams, “‘He didn’t vote for Kamala. He didn’t help her get in.’ That’s the No. 1 thing,” she said. So the message from his campaign to set the record straight “needs to be louder.”

Democrats’ dilemma

The third reason is largely ideology, and in some ways reflects the maneuvering between progressives and mainstream Democrats within the larger party. Older Black voters in Detroit are more likely to be politically moderate. El-Sayed is running on Medicare for All, and Rogers has spent the fall telling anyone who will listen that Detroit is about to elect a socialist. For the record, El-Sayed says he is a capitalist.

The campaign’s answer to older Black voters has largely been to head to the Black church, the Old Faithful of politics. His team says he has been to 45 Black churches during this election season.

Last Sunday he visited two churches in Flint. His message was, yes, political and full of references to a shared God between his Muslim and their Christian faith. But one of his biggest applause lines was his promise to be back as Sen. El-Sayed.

“This is not my first time in communities like these,” he said from the front of the stage. “I’ve been showing up to do this work for the better part of a decade, and I hope that I can show up for you in the United States Senate. If you give me that honor, I promise you this will not be the last time you see me, and the next time I come, God willing, I’m bringing resources and I’m taking your pain and your purpose with me to the halls of power.”

The bridge he’s trying to build is a difficult one. A 2024 poll from AARP found that among Black Michaganders, only 29% called themselves “liberal.”

El-Sayed’s bet is that a different Black voter can come and make up the difference. “There’s a generational divide, and even if there are some seniors who might say, ‘You know what, we’re going to leave this blank because we’ve seen all the ads,’ there are a lot of young Black voters who are like, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever voted,’” he said.

The candidate isn’t blind to the tensions. On the contrary, he seems very aware of them and how hard they may be to overcome. But he’s also running out of time.

I asked Roberson if she thinks he has done enough in the short period he has been the nominee to get the Black vote where it really needs to be.

“That’s tough. Probably not,” she said. “I think there’s more he could have done. And listen, I’m giving grace to the fact that he had a contentious primary. But I do think there were more voters out there, and there are still more voters out there that he could be talking to.”

Her larger point is that it’s less about effort and more about translation. That in a lot of his ads, his platform sound great to the voters who follow politics closely, and who maybe aren’t affected by those three points of tension.

She’s also pretty hopeful. That when Detroit’s most reliable voters wake up on Election Day, they will do what they’ve always done.

”We know what we’re going to get if he doesn’t win,” she said. “So what are we so afraid of that we’re going to get if he does win?”

Nobody on Greenview Avenue has answered that yet. The lawns are still empty.

“Detroit just needs to be waking up. It needs to be waking up because it is asleep,” Gill said. “That is my fear, that Detroit has not woken up.”

El-Sayed says he’ll keep coming back either way.

“At the end of the day, whether folks vote for me or they don’t vote for me, I intend to serve in the same way that I showed up to serve back in 2015 when I came to Detroit to rebuild the health department.”

MS NOW producer Alexander Trowbridge contributed to this report.

The post The signs for El-Sayed in Detroit — and the lack of them — are setting off alarm bells appeared first on MS NOW.

I will join my fellow Gulf War veterans in Washington on Saturday for the dedication of the Desert Shield and Desert Storm Memorial. Our journey began Sunday, Aug. 5, 1990, three days after Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, when President George H.W. Bush stood on the White House lawn and declared, “This will not stand — this aggression against Kuwait.”

I was privileged to have been a battalion commander then and, soon after Bush’s speech, led roughly 700 soldiers from Germany to the Middle East. At the end of the ground campaign, my unit was astride the so-called Highway of Death that connects Kuwait City to Basra following the famous “left hook” into Iraq. This weekend, I am looking forward to seeing many of my men — some of whom I have not seen for more than 30 years — but I fear my pride in my soldiers’ bravery and accomplishments will be tempered by what I believe the nation has lost since that conflict.

We deployed to liberate a sovereign nation from a totalitarian government. Our approach was the same as our parents’ in World War II, when American soldiers freed Europe from fascist occupation.

I told my soldiers in 1990 that American interests as well as our values — democracy, freedom, justice and respect for international law — were the basis for our deployment. We deployed to defend and liberate a sovereign nation from aggression by a totalitarian Iraqi government. Our approach was the same as our parents’ in World War II, when American soldiers helped free Europe from fascist occupation.

But based on how President Donald Trump has approached Ukraine and its ongoing efforts to resist Russian aggression, it appears that the democratic values that have long guided our national security policy are no longer relevant, and the use of U.S. military power is now based solely on the cold calculation of economic gain. The United States no longer supports nations, even fledgling democracies, that are the victims of aggression, but aligns itself with totalitarian states.

Recent decisions by the Trump administration are not only contrary to American values but a watershed for the future of U.S. national security policy. Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed in September that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been invited to attend December’s Group of 20 summit in Miami. The Trump administration has also proposed unfreezing Russian assets in Europe to encourage Moscow to participate in peace talks. European and Asian leaders were surprised, shocked, upset and deeply critical of these decisions, which effectively seek to normalize economic relations with Russia.

Trump said on Oct. 9 that he and Putin had talked on the phone and reached an agreement for Russia to supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel fuel to U.S. and global markets. This translates into $4 billion for the Russian war machine. The president said this deal would lower diesel prices — and he blamed Ukraine for the rise in fuel costs here — but it is brutally clear that Trump is simply trying to appeal to American voters in the final days before the midterm elections. Energy experts are nearly unanimous that this agreement will have a limited impact on the cost of fuel and that the overwhelming driver for skyrocketing fuel costs is the president’s war with Iran. The agreement has been condemned by U.S. allies as well as congressional leaders on both side of the aisle.

On Oct. 11, Trump announced a unilateral “energy ceasefire” on his social media platform. He said that the truce between Russia and Ukraine was “effective immediately” and that both parties had agreed to halt strikes on energy infrastructure. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy subsequently noted that Kyiv learned of the purported truce through media reports, and Russian forces continued striking Ukrainian power facilities immediately following Trump’s announcement.

The president subsequently declared that Russia “has been fine on Ukraine,” argued that Ukraine was largely responsible for the continuation of the war, accused Zelenskyy of ingratitude and called for him to be replaced.

The president subsequently declared that Russia “has been fine on Ukraine,” argued that Ukraine was largely responsible for the continuation of the war, accused Zelenskyy of ingratitude and called for him to be replaced. At the same time, his administration hasn’t explained the disruption of Ukraine’s use of SpaceX’s Starshield, which provides Kyiv with critical intelligence on both incoming Russian ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones as well as command and control. An increase in Ukrainian civilian casualties followed as Russia continued its relentless bombardment. The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. officials, reported Thursday that the president had called SpaceX chief Elon Musk to have those restrictions lifted.

Trump has waived the imposition of new sanctions against the Russian government, oligarchs and companies as well as nations purchasing Russian energy consistent with the so-called Graham Act, named in memory of the South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham. The president argued that negotiations with Russia were ongoing, and he did not “want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.” As Bush told the nation from the Oval Office on Aug. 8, 1990, “Appeasement does not work.” History bears him out.

It is true that the Bush administration was also pursuing economic interests in thwarting Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait. Secretary of State James Baker argued that allowing Iraq to control the crucial economic lifeline of the Persian Gulf would trigger a worldwide recession and subsequent American job losses. Yet the Bush administration didn’t seek to avoid war by pursuing an agreement with Saddam for American economic advantage, like Trump is doing with Putin.

Trump has shown a problematic lack of support for Ukraine since the outset of his second term, and he is likely frustrated by his failure to deliver on his campaign promise to end the war in 24 hours. The Trump administration is no longer treating Ukraine as a victim of aggression but as an obstacle to the president’s admiration for Putin and desire for closer economic cooperation with Russia. Trump seems to believe this would be an economic bonanza. American national security policy is now transactional and bereft of values.

Oddly, as of Friday morning, there had been no announcement about who would speak at the dedication of the Gulf War memorial on Saturday. I suspect the president and senior members of his administration are too busy campaigning. In some ways, I hope they are too busy, because I fear the president would attempt to turn a day set aside to honor Desert Storm veterans into a campaign rally. But if he shows up, it may do him some good. We’ll gather a short distance from memorials dedicated to World War II, Vietnam and Korea, and not far from the Lincoln Memorial. To stand in that space is to reflect on the values our nation holds dear.

The post May the new Desert Storm Memorial inspire President Trump to forcefully defend Ukraine appeared first on MS NOW.

A new report by the Federal Reserve Board says that from 2022 to 2025, the median net worth in the United States rose for families of all racial and ethnic groups — except Black people, whose median net worth fell a stunning 25%. During 2019-2022, by contrast, the median net worth for Black families increased by 60%. The median wealth of white families last year was nine times that of Black families. That is the largest gap since 2016.

“It’s the economy, stupid” was James Carville’s blunt, and effective, slogan during Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign.

Today, it is the economy that’s stupid — especially for Black Americans.

The median wealth of white families last year was nine times that of Black families. That is the largest gap since 2016.

While President Donald Trump’s fatuous war against Iran makes prices soar for everybody, African Americans are being subjected to a unique level of economic pain, providing them another reason to scorn Trump’s Republican Party this Election Day.

Factors in the African American economy’s turnaround are complex and varied. At the macro-level, Trump has convinced much of America, including corporations and colleges, that promoting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts to redress a long legacy of racism is taboo, if not illegal.

Black workers saw his harsh, overzealous firing of federal employees as a community affront because the government, especially in the Post Office decades ago, was a place where Black people could more reliably get jobs, even if at the lower levels, when other employers didn’t hire them.

Other factors include African Americans holding more money in houses and cars, which don’t gain ground like stocks and bonds. Also the Covid-19 financial assistance that was especially helpful for lower-income Black households during the pandemic expired in 2021.

And the bad economic news — especially for Black families — keeps coming.

The Black unemployment rate rose to 7% in September, a full percentage point over August. As usual, the Black unemployment rate is about twice the rate for white people, which is now 3.6%. (The Hispanic unemployment rate is in between, at 4.7%.)

Meanwhile, the social safety net is in tatters as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps) participation has dropped to it lowest level in 17 years, even while “affordability” campaigns crowd the political landscape.

This administration has defunded and dismantled policies and economic safeguards for Black people to gain and maintain generational wealth in this country. We must fight to restore and expand the pathways that allow Black families to build, protect and pass down that wealth.

NAACP PRESIDENT AND CEO DERRICK JOHNSON

Last month, not long before the Federal Reserve released its consumer survey, the NAACP published its Roadmap to Generational Wealth, an initiative to dismantle “the systemic barriers that fuel the widening racial wealth gap in America.” The document focuses on crucial pillars that could help close the racial gap.

“This administration has defunded and dismantled policies and economic safeguards for Black people to gain and maintain generational wealth in this country,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson wrote. “We must fight to restore and expand the pathways that allow Black families to build, protect, and pass down that wealth.”

As usual, Trump sees what he wants to see and makes up the rest. This month, he told reporters that “we’re doing great” when asked about the economy.

NEW: Federal Reserve data shows the median net worth of Black households fell 25% from 2022 to 2025, dropping from $49,100 to $36,800. Every other major racial group gained wealth over the same period, so the racial wealth gap grew even wider.

— Center for Economic and Policy Research (@ceprdc.bsky.social) 2026-10-20T12:45:46.959175643Z

People don’t believe that. If they did, then the economy wouldn’t be the highest ranked issue for voters, including African Americans.

Eighty-seven percent of Black voters, more than any other group surveyed,  listed the economy as their top concern in a Pew Research Center poll conducted Sept. 28-Oct. 4. With the alarming data about falling net worth, rising unemployment and sliding SNAP rates, it’s no wonder why. African Americans see more danger ahead.

Politics play a major role in the economy and the “future of democracy” also is a high-rated concern, cited by 72% of Black people. Voting is the fundamental function of democracy, and African Americans know that Republicans from state houses to the Supreme Court have used every tool to diminish the Black vote. Other major issues, including Washington’s unchecked corruption, the vanquishing of DEI and draconian immigration enforcement also drew substantial attention from African Americans in the survey.

None of this bodes well for Trump and his Republican allies if they care about Black votes.

But just as Trump is trying to convince Iran he has defeated it, he is trying to convince Black Americans that they’ve been winning because of him. The White House provided a list of 24 bullet points with “tangible benefits” meant to persuade Black families that he is not the man they know him to be. Lynne Patton, deputy assistant to the president for coalition, policy and engagement, told me in an email, “Even though the media refuses to cover it, I have seen firsthand the incredible impact President Trump has made for Hispanic and Black Americans.” Among other things, Patton cited what she called “the largest middle-class tax cuts in American history,” a drop in violent crime and “an additional $174 million” for historically Black university and colleges.

But with all the bluster, bullet points and whatever impact those points might have, another Pew Poll this month found Black families are not convinced. Only 7% of African American voters back Republicans this election.

The post This shocking new report is bad news for Black Americans — and likely also Donald Trump appeared first on MS NOW.

Hillary Clinton may no longer be the most influential voice in the Democratic Party, but she remains a member in good standing of the party establishment. So when she expresses support for expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court, it tells us that what was once a radical idea has gone mainstream.

“We should seriously look at expanding the court while the Democrats are in power,” Clinton said on a recent podcast. “You know, it used to be that you’d have one justice for each circuit. We now have 13 circuits, we should have 13 justices.”

Adding four justices to the court is just one of the potential reforms that have been suggested as a way of curbing the court’s abuses. Others include 18-year term limits for justices, ethics rules with actual teeth (no more billionaire-funded junkets for you, Justice Thomas) and limits on the court’s ability to strike down any law they don’t like. Whichever particular reforms one prefers, it is no longer acceptable for a Democrat to simply decry the latest awful ruling. They have to be willing to entertain fundamental change to the institution.

This shift in Democrats’ thinking is as remarkable as it is recent. Five years ago, Sen. Ed Markey introduced a bill to do just what Clinton and others now favor, adding four justices to the court; it got only two co-sponsors, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith. Joe Biden responded to demands for court reform with Washington’s favorite way of burying an issue: He appointed a commission to study it. They produced a lengthy white paper, but it wasn’t until July 2024 — after he pulled out of the presidential race — that Biden finally endorsed term limits and an enforceable ethics code.

The situation today is far different. Supreme Court reform will almost certainly be part of the 2028 Democratic platform, and just about every politician considering a presidential bid has already come out for at least some version of reform.

The list of potential contenders who have endorsed court expansion — perhaps the most radical of the proposed reforms — is long and getting longer. It includes Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Rep. Ro Khanna and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Term limits have been endorsed by Sens. Chris Murphy, Cory Booker and Elissa Slotkin, along with Gov. Andy Beshear. Other potential candidates, including Sen. Raphael Warnock and Govs. Josh Shapiro and JB Pritzker, are taking the “everything should be on the table” approach, not saying specifically what they’re for — which suggests they’re waiting to see what the voters demand. Pressure will only keep building.

What changed? The most important factor is the court’s own behavior. There are the monumental decisions: overturning Roe v. Wade, gutting the Voting Rights Act, eliminating any meaningful restrictions on billionaires pouring money into campaigns, outlawing affirmative action in education and giving the president immunity from prosecution for crimes, among other things. Taken together, the court’s conservative majority is so obviously pursuing its own partisan political project: to remake the law and the structure of the federal government in line with their personal preferences. Yet the justices pretend that they and only they are truly committed to the framers’ intentions and the text of the Constitution.

“We are not part of any political movement, and we are not attempting to further any political agenda,” said Samuel Alito, the most partisan justice on the court. “People think we’re making policy decisions,” lamented Chief Justice Roberts earlier this year, when nothing could be further from the truth. So says the man who has steered the court’s stampede to the right, including achieving his lifelong goal of destroying the Voting Rights Act.

Even Elena Kagan, the most conciliatory of the liberal justices, said in a recent speech that the court’s decisions rubber-stamping partisan gerrymandering showed “a lack of the appropriate concern or understanding of the consequences ​of their decisions.” With all due respect, Kagan was mistaken: They know exactly what the consequences of their decisions are. That’s why they rule the way they do.

So thanks to the conservative justices, Democrats are moving toward a consensus on court reform. There is no left versus center division within the party on whether the court’s decisions have or haven’t created a crisis. The only question is what should be done about that crisis. Anyone wanting to lead the party is going to have to be willing to take on this court and rebalance the scales. If they don’t, their constituents won’t stand for it.

The post Hillary Clinton thinks we should have 13 Supreme Court justices. Here’s why that matters. appeared first on MS NOW.

When President Donald Trump encouraged Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to keep running the despicable attack ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother, the message to survivors of sexual abuse was unmistakable. The TV ad shows the Democratic candidate’s mother, who defended Acton’s stepfather after he was accused of sexually abusing Acton starting at 9 years old, and who lost custody of Acton and her brother after her stepfather was indicted for raping her.

Trump called the ad “hitting pay dirt.” Vice President JD Vance dismissed it as “not really my concern.” Ironically, keeping the American public safe from harm — regardless of their political affiliation — is arguably the most important duty of the president and vice presidential offices.

These endorsements take a family’s rejection of a survivor’s testimony and back it with national political power.

Ramaswamy’s campaign committed $4 million to promote the ad. On Thursday, Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said his wife had seen the spot on television that morning, indicating the campaign had moved from defending the ad to actually putting it into people’s homes for anyone to watch. Donald Trump Jr. also urged Ohio voters to watch it.

As a surgeon who has cared for survivors of sexual abuse, I am concerned about the people watching the ad who themselves have experienced sexual abuse, who will never appear on a ballot. What does it tell them when the president and vice president defend the public humiliation of someone who endured childhood sexual abuse, just to score political points? It tells them that the very people elected to protect them will abandon and defame them, just to win. These endorsements take a family’s rejection of a survivor’s testimony and back it with national political power.

For a survivor of sexual abuse, any reminder of abuse can bring the past painfully into the present, forcing them to relive what happened to them. Survivors of childhood sexual abuse especially go through multiple, sometimes lifelong cycles of self-blame and guilt after disclosure, especially given that the majority of children who are sexually abused know their abuser, as in Acton’s case.

A child may blame herself for the upheaval that follows disclosure: leaving home, losing contact with a parent, seeing a sibling’s life disrupted. She may wonder whether staying silent would have kept her family together. That is a devastating burden for a child, and the ensuing adult, to carry. As professionals who work with survivors, we must make clear that telling someone did not make her responsible for the abuse or its consequences. The responsibility belongs to the adults who harmed her and failed to protect her.

Broadcasting Acton’s mother’s words risks reinforcing precisely that misplaced guilt that we work so hard to heal. And when the president and vice president defend and support it, they give a survivor’s deepest self-doubt the authority of the highest offices in the country.

No responsible physician can diagnose Acton from a campaign advertisement, and survivors will respond differently. But for some viewers, hearing a mother denounce her daughter who reported abuse could evoke their own experiences or fears of disclosure, rejection or disbelief. Repeatedly airing the spot creates repeated opportunities for that encounter.

A frightened child could reasonably wonder: If this is what happens to a prominent doctor and political figure, what will happen to me?

The response to disclosure matters. A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis of 51 studies, published in Clinical Psychology Review, found that negative reactions to disclosures of interpersonal violence were associated with worse mental health. That research does not measure this advertisement’s effects. But it does establish why dismissing survivors’ concerns as political oversensitivity, as Vance is doing, is medically irresponsible and morally reprehensible.

Then there is the person who has never told anyone. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network identifies fear of disbelief, retaliation and losing support among the barriers to reporting sexual violence. Imagine weighing those fears while watching a survivor’s estranged mother become a campaign asset, with the president’s encouragement. A frightened child could reasonably wonder: If this is what happens to a prominent doctor and political figure, what will happen to me?

That possibility should trouble every public official. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that at least 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 20 boys in the U.S. experience childhood sexual abuse. The audience for this spectacle includes people carrying experiences their spouses, colleagues or children may know nothing about.

In medicine, our responsibility is to make it safer to ask for help. We should listen without judgment, respect patients’ choices and treat their distress seriously. Needing treatment is not a character defect. Neither is having a parent who failed to protect you.
Nor should survivors have to earn compassion by becoming physicians. Acton’s accomplishments do not make her more deserving of dignity than someone whose trauma interrupted an education, damaged relationships or made holding a job difficult. Recovery is not an audition for public sympathy.

The endorsement matters because it offers permission. A campaign uses a survivor’s family history against her. Powerful allies defend the tactic. Objections become evidence of weakness or disloyalty. I worry about how that example lands with people already reluctant to seek help, and with the people they might turn to.

There is an obvious alternative. Ramaswamy can withdraw the ad. Trump and Vance can say that survivors’ childhood suffering should never become campaign ammunition. They can debate Acton’s public record without elevating the rejection she experienced as a child.

Their responsibility extends to the survivor watching alone at home, wondering whether speaking up will bring support or punishment. That person deserves a better answer than the one these leaders are giving.

Every survivor watching this ad deserves a clear message: What happened to you was not your fault. Your suffering is not a character flaw. Your future does not belong to the people who failed to protect you.

Ramaswamy is spending $4 million amplifying that betrayal, and Trump and Vance are defending his right to do it. Anyone willing to make a survivor’s humiliation the price of political victory has absolutely no business anywhere near the seat of power.

The post I work with survivors of sexual abuse. Ramaswamy’s disturbing attack ad is so much bigger than Amy Acton. appeared first on MS NOW.

Los Angeles (AP) — Federal prosecutors sent letters to county registrars across California on Friday demanding that local officials set aside and verify ballots that the Department of Justice said may belong to noncitizens, according to the Los Angeles County registrar and a letter obtained by The Associated Press.

The letters are the latest escalation in a legal battle between California and President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, which has recently focused on the state in its efforts to root out noncitizen voting ahead of the midterm elections. Data shows illegal voting by people who aren’t U.S. citizens is incredibly rare, difficult to prove and has not been shown to change the outcome of races.

Earlier this month, the federal government targeted Los Angeles County and the California Secretary of State’s office in a lawsuit that aimed to block them from counting the votes of roughly 20,000 people who are “likely” noncitizen voters. A hearing on the case is scheduled for Tuesday.

The Trump administration asked the 9th Circuit court of appeals to rule on the lawsuit barring a decision from the district judge assigned to the case. They set a deadline for Saturday.

Now, according to the LA County registrar’s office, at least 18 counties across the state have received similar letters. They have been given a 48 hour deadline to provide identifying information corresponding with ballots that the federal government believes were sent to noncitizens illegally registered to vote. The letter requests that county officials also sequester any ballots where citizenship cannot be verified.

“Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli.

The Justice Department is asking counties to send information about the voters it suspects are noncitizens including social security numbers, ID information, a copy of their registration and more.

That information can help the government and state quickly assess each person suspected of illegally registering to vote, said the letter sent to San Bernardino County voting officials. The letter says the government’s list of suspected noncitizen voters includes 1,133 people from the inland Southern California county.

California’s secretary of state and the Los Angeles County registrar have opposed the federal government’s demands. In legal filings, lawyers for California say the request threatens to delay the certification of the vote and undermine the legitimacy of the November midterms. They have also argued that the federal government’s data is unreliable and that their demands risk disenfranchisement of citizens.

Voting is underway in California, with the state’s more than 23 million registered voters receiving ballots in the mail earlier this month. The state said in legal filings that over 330,000 mail-in ballots have already been counted.

The letters on Friday came on the heels of statewide sweep by federal authorities earlier in the week, where 28 people from the list of 20,000 were charged with illegally registering to vote. Some were also charged with illegally voting and lying on naturalization paperwork. Those charges could lead to years in prison.

The post DOJ orders some California counties to verify ballots in 48 hours appeared first on MS NOW.

METULA, Israel — Even amid a ceasefire, the sounds of war still reverberate through the countryside along the Israel-Lebanon border.

Few places have felt the ripple effects of the Iran war and the brunt of Hezbollah more than Metula, the northernmost community in Israel. Surrounded by Lebanon on three sides, the scenic town is uniquely exposed to attacks by the Iranian proxy group.

Until recently, an American flag flew beside Israeli flags in Metula’s town center. Then Mayor David Azoulay took it down.

He is that offended by President Donald Trump.

“I have massive gratitude to him because he really seriously helped release all the hostages” held by Hamas, Azoulay told MS NOW. “And he supports Israel in a lot of ways.”

“But we are not a banana republic, let us vote for whoever we want and don’t interfere with that,” Azoulay said.

Azoulay said Trump’s failure to finish the job in Iran and interference in Israeli elections with his eleventh-hour endorsement of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu soured him on the American president.

“You have to understand that this regime in Iran sends its tentacles all over: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis,” Azoulay said. “I fully support the fact that this regime has to go.”

“We started this campaign together and regrettably, Trump is talking a lot and doing less,” he said.

Both Trump and Netanyahu have threatened to escalate attacks on Iran in recent weeks, with the U.S. leader hesitant to take action that could negatively impact his political party in the midterms.

After the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, most of Metula’s 2,500 residents were evacuated amid frequent missile and rocket bombardment from Hezbollah in northern Israel. Ninety percent of its homes have been destroyed or damaged.

In March, following the joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, the Israeli military invaded Lebanon and pushed the threat from Hezbollah away from the border — causing extensive damage to infrastructure and civilian casualties in Lebanon in the process.

Over the past year and a half, the locals of Metula have returned, bringing life — and hope — back to the community. But the longer the Iran war drags on and U.S.-led peace talks between Israel and Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah remain precarious, the longer it will take for Metula to fully rebuild.

“We are still at war. … We try to lead a normal town life,” Azoulay said just steps away from a bustling cafe filled with families and kids running around.

Hagai Rosenbaum, a fruit farmer whose family has lived in Metula for generations, said the Netanyahu government should be doing more to help, especially when it comes to clearing remnants of rockets and unexploded ordnance from his farmland.

“A lot of cluster bombs were falling in Metula, and actually, I’m afraid,” he said, standing in his kiwi orchard amid peak harvest season. “Every time I walk, I look down more than before.”

Rosenbaum said locals encounter debris and parts of Iranian rockets “all the time.” Minutes later, he pointed out a mangled, charred piece of an exploded projectile.

As he walked through the rows of kiwi plants, the sound of a mortar round cracked throughout the valley.

“This is normal,” Rosenbaum reassured reporters with him, adding the jarring sound came from the Israeli military firing toward Lebanon, where destroyed structures were visible on the distant hills surrounding the harvest.

The post No love for Trump or Netanyahu in Israeli town battered by Hezbollah appeared first on MS NOW.

The Trump administration plans to lift 50% tariffs on certain Canadian goods critical to Maine’s agricultural industry less than two weeks before Election Day, while also imposing new duties on other imports.

The move, announced Friday, hands Republican Sen. Susan Collins a political boost as she fights to retain her seat in one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races.

President Donald Trump signed a proclamation exempting certain Canadian products, including seaweed, packaging materials, plywood, refrigeration equipment and agricultural machinery, from the steep tariffs.

While the exemptions, set to take effect Oct. 30, ease some trade restrictions, the proclamation also imposes 50% tariffs on other Canadian imports, including certain cocoa powders, carpets and floor coverings.

Trump’s latest ease on tariffs marks another shift in his administration’s contentious trade relationship with Canada. The president has repeatedly imposed and modified tariffs on Canadian imports, prompting concerns among U.S. businesses and lawmakers about rising costs and disruptions to cross-border trade.

Tensions between Trump and the U.S.’ northern neighbor appeared to reach a boiling point earlier this year after Trump announced a round of tariffs of up to 50% on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods. In response, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney threatened to match those tariffs “dollar for dollar.” Days later, Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario, which forms part of the U.S.-Canada border, “Lake America” in the U.S.

Collins, who has sought tariff relief for Maine businesses amid Trump’s escalating trade tensions with Canada, celebrated the exemptions Friday, saying she had repeatedly pressed senior administration officials to ease the financial burden on farmers and growers.

“I am pleased to have secured additional tariff exemptions [for] products crucial to Maine’s agricultural industries, including blueberry, potato, apple, and seaweed producers,” Collins wrote on X.

The senator said she had raised the issue in repeated conversations with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other administration officials. She also pledged to continue seeking additional exemptions and a broader trade agreement with Canada, which she described as Maine’s “largest trading partner.”

The announcement comes as Collins faces a competitive re-election challenge from Democrat Troy Jackson in a race that could help determine control of the Senate.

Collins has sought to distance herself from some of Trump’s policies, particularly his tariffs on Canada, while emphasizing her ability to secure concessions from his administration for Maine residents.

The tariff relief gives Collins a tangible policy achievement to highlight in the final days before the Nov. 3 election, as voters remain concerned about rising costs and the economy.

The post Trump rolls back some Canadian tariffs with Maine Senate race on the line appeared first on MS NOW.

Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola on Friday blasted the Trump administration’s lawsuit seeking to block Alaska from certifying the results of its Senate race under certain circumstances, calling it a “desperate attempt to silence Alaskans.”

“This is exactly the kind of corruption that Alaskans are sick and tired of,” Peltola told MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace. “This is clearly a very desperate attempt to cling to power, using his allies in Washington, D.C., to rig the system even further.”

The remarks came after President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice filed an extraordinary preemptive lawsuit seeking to prevent Alaska from certifying the Senate election results if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses to Peltola by a narrow margin.

The lawsuit centers on another candidate named Daniel Sullivan, a retired teacher who shares the incumbent senator’s name. The administration argues that the presence of both candidates on the ballot could confuse voters and potentially affect the outcome of the election.

Trump said Friday that he directed the Justice Department to pursue the lawsuit, an unusual intervention in a Senate contest that could help determine control of the chamber. The legal challenge comes as polling averages show Peltola narrowly leading Sullivan with 11 days until Election Day. Peltola holds a 2-point lead over Sullivan, 49.7% to 47.7%, in MS NOW polling partner FiftyPlusOne’s weighted average.

Sen. Lisa Murkowsi, Alaska’s Republican senator who frequently bucks Trump, also blasted the lawsuit on Friday night.

“Alaskans don’t need any help voting for their preferred candidates, and the State of Alaska has already handled this by clearly distinguishing the candidates on this year’s ballot,” Murkowski said on X. “The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit.”

In her interview with Wallace, Peltola rejected the suggestion that voters could mistake the two candidates, noting that the ballot identifies the incumbent senator.

“It is not playing well with Alaskans at all, and it’s sending a message that Dan Sullivan does not believe that Alaskans are sophisticated enough to know exactly who they’re voting for,” she said.

Peltola also argued that the lawsuit was an effort to distract voters from affordability concerns and Sullivan’s record.

“It’s such a distraction,” she said. “The only thing Alaskans want to talk about right now is affordability and the high cost of living, and just the concerns about making it through this upcoming winter, being able to afford to heat your home and feed your family.”

The Alaska Supreme Court has already considered the question of whether the other Daniel Sullivan could appear on the ballot, ordering the state’s Division of Elections in June to include his name on the primary ballot.

Asked whether she was confident that a win would ultimately be certified, Peltola said she is “worried about the level of desperation,” adding that she hoped for a decisive enough margin to avoid a prolonged dispute.

Peltola said her campaign had set a $60 million fundraising goal even before the prospect of costly litigation over the election results, citing the high cost of advertising and reaching voters across Alaska’s remote communities.

“We are worried about the implications of the cost of a legal battle,” she said.

She also warned that intervention from Washington could backfire in a state where voters prize their independence.

“Alaskans know exactly who they’re voting for,” Peltola said. “We have safe and secure elections, and this is just more distraction, more diversion and another red herring.”

The post ‘Corruption’ and ‘desperation’: Peltola slams Trump DOJ lawsuit over Alaska Senate race appeared first on MS NOW.

A former Florida congressional candidate is facing two felony counts for allegedly making death threats on social media against two women if they did not support Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon.

Two days after Elijah Manley came in third place in the hotly contested August Democratic primary in Florida’s 20th Congressional District, he allegedly told two women on Facebook he would “make your life a living hell” and “cut your fucking head off” if they did not vote for Nixon, according to an arrest affidavit reviewed by MS NOW.

The person who filed the police report did so a day after the alleged posts, on Aug. 21. In one of the posts, Manley, 27, allegedly wrote: “I’m talking to y’all. I saw y’all comments earlier. I’m already pissed off, do not piss me off more. I swear to god, take me to war over this black woman and I promise y’all I will burn y’all mf castle to the ground and everyone else in my way.”

Nixon, who is Black, is facing off against incumbent Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, who is white, in the critical Senate race.

In another post, Manley allegedly wrote: “This the kind of shii that will make me snap. Any of you that don’t support [redacted] I promise I will make your life a living hell to the very end. You better lineup behind the Democratic nominee like we always do.”

He also allegedly wrote: “Every democrat needs to get behind the democratic nominee for Senate. Anybody not doing that, I promise you I’m going to cut your fucking head off.”

It is unclear what comments or messages Manley was responding to. Both Facebook representatives and Manley confirmed to authorities that he wrote the comments, according to the affidavit.

Manley earned the support of progressives, including Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., in his campaign for the Democratic nomination in the South Florida district, which was represented by a Black lawmaker for more than 30 years. Manley, who is Black, and much of the local Black Democratic establishment criticized Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is white, for opting to run in the district after her neighboring district was redrawn to lean more Republican. But Wasserman Schultz ultimately triumphed in the primary, earning about 46% of the vote, ahead of second-place finisher Dale Holness, who received about 23%, and Manley, who received 14% of the vote.

Two days later, Manley allegedly made the Facebook threats.

Manley told police he and one of the recipients “were having a political disagreement over a party candidate and the comments made did not have any actual intention of harm, but a challenge to their political views,” adding that he did not intend to perpetrate any harm. He also told authorities he had previously had “casual and polite” encounters with the women “despite having differing political opinions.”

The women who received the messages told authorities they were “concerned for their safety” and interpreted the term “castle” to refer to their homes, according to the affidavit. They also reported the posts to Meta, the company that operates Facebook, but according to the affidavit, the company’s response was that the posts “failed to meet their safety guidelines” for removal.

After other commenters told Manley to tone down his rhetoric, he allegedly replied: “I’m not toning anything down. I’m tired of being told tone my voice while white people get away with destroying everything. I want all white people to vote for the Democratic nominee.”

Manley turned himself in to police in Fort Lauderdale last Friday, three days after a warrant was issued for his arrest, according to court records reviewed by MS NOW. He was released on $40,000 bond and ordered not to possess weapons, contact the victims or use social media.

Manley directed a request for comment to his attorney, Khurrum Wahid, who said in a statement that his client denies the allegations and characterized the comments in question as part of a “political discussion.”

“We are confident that a trier of fact will see there is no intent to carry out any act of violence,” Wahid said. “It is unfortunate that our political differences have led some to weaponizing the police instead of using dialogue.”

Spokespeople for Nixon’s and Wasserman Schultz’s campaigns did not respond to requests for comment from MS NOW.

A spokesperson for the Broward State Attorney’s Office said the office will not prosecute Manley’s case because of a conflict of interest: The people who reported the alleged threats have participated in charity drives organized by the office over the years. Officials requested Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office assign the case to another office, the spokesperson said. The governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If convicted, Manley could face up to 15 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000 on each count.

The post Former Florida congressional candidate faces felony charges over online threats appeared first on MS NOW.