Donald Trump’s seemingly endless quest to isolate the U.S. on the world stage continued last week when his secretary of state openly promoted the CIA as a tool for destabilizing foreign governments.
Here’s Marco Rubio in a post on X from Friday, encouraging Cubans — whose suffering the Trump administration has compounded with sanctions designed to fuel a national uprising — to “create the change you desire” by partnering with the CIA.
To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba – now is the time.
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) October 23, 2026
The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA.
That sure sounds like “Come work with the CIA to help us topple your government,” which explains why the negative replies were replete with Bay of Pigs references and other “coup” talk.
It’s not exactly a secret that the CIA has been used by U.S. governments to undermine foreign governments and activist groups. But there’s a kind of brazen idiocy in thinking it was a good idea to offer such partnerships in such a public fashion.
Think about it: Even Cubans who might be open to such an offer would be wise to question the judgment of an administration that would so willingly broadcast it for all to see on Elon Musk’s pornography- and racism-filled platform.
And anyone not legally in the U.S. who agrees to help the administration topple Cuba’s government will need to acknowledge the harsh reality that aiding Trump’s CIA wouldn’t necessarily stop the president’s immigration officials from targeting them down the line.
And as former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul noted, Trump’s support for authoritarian figures elsewhere should give pause to any Cubans considering Rubio’s offer.
Your decision to back autocrats and oligarchs in Venezuela instead of democracy should give pause to anyone hoping you are committed to democracy in Cuba.
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) October 24, 2026
No better way to inspire Cuban democrats than to support democracy in Venezuela. https://t.co/zATr8OAVqa
Trump does not care about upholding democratic principles in the Western Hemisphere, or anywhere for that matter. His administration has aligned itself with authoritarian-style leaders across Central America and South America. Now, it’s eyeing regime change in Cuba — and looking to draft confederates in one of the most glaring ways possible.
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The Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling for Donald Trump is one of the precedents the Justice Department has relied on in defense of firing Maurene Comey as a federal prosecutor. That defense failed Monday, at least at the trial court level, when U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ordered retroactive reinstatement and back pay for the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey.
Maurene Comey had alleged that she was fired last year because of her relation to her father, whom Trump fired during his first presidential term and who then became a prominent Trump critic and a serial target of federal prosecution in Trump’s second term.
Backing her civil lawsuit on Monday, Furman said that neither the high court’s 2024 immunity ruling in Trump v. United States nor its ruling on presidential firing power last term in Trump v. Slaughter supported the government’s “sweeping and unprecedented theory of executive authority.”
The Obama-appointed judge in the Southern District of New York noted that unlike the Slaughter case, the immunity ruling wasn’t even about the president’s removal power but rather immunity from criminal prosecution. Still, the Department of Justice cited language from the immunity case to argue that assistant U.S. attorneys like Maurene Comey exercise “core executive power” under the Constitution and are therefore removable at will because, the government argued, a contrary rule would impede the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” power.
Furman conceded that the immunity ruling’s sweeping language made the government’s claim “at least colorable.” But he cautioned that the high court itself had said to read its opinions in context. In light of that admonition, Furman said there were “several good reasons” not to rely on the immunity ruling here.
“At most,” the judge wrote, “the language in Trump v. United States upon which [government] Defendants rely should be read to mean that Congress may not regulate the removal of an Executive Branch official at the behest of the President himself and may not interfere directly with investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking.”
Against that backdrop, Furman wrote, the immunity case is irrelevant to this one, because government officials insisted that Comey’s firing wasn’t ordered by Trump. “To the contrary,” the judge wrote, “they assert that it was the then-Attorney General [Pam Bondi] who ‘authorized and directed’ Comey’s removal.”
The judge concluded that he had to reject what he deemed the government’s bid to upend longstanding limits on executive firing power that are still intact even after recent Supreme Court rulings. He said that endorsing the DOJ’s argument would disrupt the constitutional order and “risk a return to the spoils system that Congress has sought to end since the nineteenth century.”
He said the government violated the separation of powers, federal law and the plaintiff’s Fifth Amendment due process and statutory rights.
The DOJ said it would appeal Furman’s ruling “in due course.” If the case reaches the justices, then the GOP-appointed court majority that issued the immunity and Slaughter rulings can decide whether and how they apply here.
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Over the course of Donald Trump’s second term, there have only been a handful of prominent officials who have resigned in frustration and expressed public concerns about the president and his administration. One of them is Marc Rosenblum.
Rosenblum served as the executive director of the Department of Homeland Security’s statistics office. When he resigned over the summer, he declared in a LinkedIn post, “I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration. … Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.”
Luis Miranda, a top DHS spokesperson during the Biden administration, told Wired, “Marc was exactly what every American should want in a career public servant. The Trump administration has governed by silencing or ignoring facts and information they believe doesn’t line up with their extreme rhetoric, and that has damaging implications, so it’s no surprise career officials whose job is transparency are unable to do those jobs.”
All of this came to mind last week when Rosenblum made headlines for a new and related reason. The Washington Sun reported:
A former top statistics official who resigned from the Department of Homeland Security this summer says the government is overstating how many unauthorized immigrants have left the country during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Marc Rosenblum, whose blistering resignation letter from a decade-long career at DHS garnered national attention, is behind a new estimate published Thursday that says between 790,000 and 1.9 million immigrants departed the U.S. from Jan. 20, 2025, to July 31, 2026.
According to the Republican administration’s official line, Trump and his team have pushed out more than 3 million undocumented immigrants during that period. According to the official who directly oversaw the Department of Homeland Security’s statistics office, that number simply isn’t believable.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin could help shed additional light on what’s true by releasing detailed information to bolster the administration’s claims, but so far he has refused to do so. In fact, last month, when pressed by CNN’s Dana Bash on the lack of data transparency, Mullin said, “Every time we give numbers out … you guys want to go in there and pick it apart.”
In other words, according to the DHS chief, the administration could provide the public with information, but then people might scrutinize the information — and that’s just not a door that Team Trump is prepared to open.
The problem, however, isn’t limited to DHS. At the FBI, Director Kash Patel and his team have faced accusations for months about manipulating statistics for political purposes. And just two weeks ago, MS NOW reported that the Patel-led bureau had padded its total number of arrests by including ones that were made by state and local police forces.
Making matters worse, when the administration isn’t inflating data, it’s hiding. In fact, Politico reported two weeks ago that the IRS was supposed to have released detailed data on the impact of the Republicans’ 2025 package of tax breaks, but Team Trump decided to delay the release for reasons it did not want to talk about.
This came on the heels of Trump’s Commerce Department announcing sweeping new changes to the proposed 2030 census, including plans to exclude undocumented immigrants and immigrants who are in the United States legally but have yet to secure green cards or citizenship.
What we’re dealing with, in other words, is a Republican administration that lies about data, inflates data, hides data, fires those responsible for compiling data and in some instances even makes up data.
The public, here and around the world, has long been able to rely on the integrity of statistics from the United States government. Less than two years into Trump’s second term, that confidence is evaporating.
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For those concerned about Donald Trump trying to derail election results he doesn’t like, Friday was an unsettling day: The Justice Department filed a preemptive lawsuit aimed at blocking certification of Alaska’s U.S. Senate race — but only if the Republican incumbent, Sen. Dan Sullivan, loses while his rival with the similar name remains on the ballot.
Usually, Trump waits until after Election Day to try to overturn the will of the voters. As of late last week, he took a step toward doing so before the votes are tallied.
Legal experts from the left, right and center took a good look at the litigation, and the reaction was universal amazement at how ridiculous the case is. Richard Pildes, a New York University law professor who specializes in election issues, went so far as to say, “It is one of the weakest election lawsuits I’ve ever seen.”
The question then became why in the world the Justice Department would embarrass itself with such an absurdity. We didn’t have to wait too long for an answer.
On Monday afternoon, the president boasted to reporters that the case was filed at his behest. “I’m the one that said, ‘Do it,’” Trump declared. On Saturday and Sunday, he continued to not only defend the lawsuit — his argument was rooted in part on the idea that Alaskan voters might not know what “incumbent” means — but also claimed that he was directly responsible for the case’s existence.
The president’s public comments helped shed light on the unfortunate origins of this foolish case, and why it’s a bad idea for federal law enforcement to file lawsuits based on the whims of a former television personality whose only legal background is being charged with dozens of felonies. But Trump also offered a timely reminder about who’s pulling the strings at Main Justice. The New York Times reported:
Mr. Trump has grown increasingly agitated about the dueling Sullivans, among other election-related grievances. He has demanded the department take legal action, even as some department officials raised concerns about the merits and constitutionality of the case, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general during the Biden administration, told the Times, “The department is taking commands from the president and throwing spaghetti at the wall to file meritless lawsuits. The ultimate goal is undermining faith in the election, intimidating voters and discrediting results the administration doesn’t like.”
It has long been obvious that the West Wing effectively controls this Justice Department, but to the extent that any pretense existed, it’s now gone. Indeed, it wasn’t long ago when the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington abandoned Reflecting Pool prosecutions, drawing outrage from the president who expected to be personally consulted about developments in a baseless vandalism case.
“From the moment President Trump was re-elected, he has muscled his way into the driver’s seat at the Justice Department, leaving tread marks on its time-honored independence from the White House by demanding, and sometimes directing, investigations into his enemies,” the Times reported in August. “But his tight grip on the steering wheel has often threatened to lead the department off a cliff.”
Two months later, the problem appears to be intensifying.
During Blanche’s confirmation process, Blanche made it clear that he, unlike Trump’s first-term attorneys general, envisioned his role as that of an instrument of the president’s will. Indeed, while Trump has ended up clashing with all of his other attorneys general, Blanche was positioned to succeed where others failed because he willingly accepted the idea that his office is an extension of the West Wing.
But recent events have brought into sharp relief the fact that Blanche’s goal is to serve one American, not 340 million Americans. It’s precisely what makes Trump’s former defense lawyer the AGINO — the Attorney General in Name Only.
The post Who runs the Justice Department? Blanche and Trump aren’t bothering to hide the answer. appeared first on MS NOW.
Attorney General Todd Blanche said on social media over the weekend that the Department of Justice does not seek “to stop the certification of Alaska’s election.”
The Department of Justice does not seek to stop any ballot from being cast or to stop the certification of Alaska's election. This litigation seeks to ensure that after Alaskans cast their ballots, they are preserved in a manner so that only Alaska's governing officials have the…
— Attorney General Todd Blanche (@AGToddBlanche) October 24, 2026
That statement is tough to square with the lawsuit the DOJ filed days earlier against Alaska’s election officials, as the department seeks to intervene there and in California amid GOP fears of losing congressional control in next week’s midterm elections.
The federal government’s Alaska complaint stems from its concern that Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan could lose a close race to Democratic challenger Mary Peltola due to the presence of a candidate on the ballot named Daniel J. Sullivan, who the DOJ said is running “with the intention of misleading supporters of Senator Sullivan into voting for him.”
But even if that claim about the other Sullivan’s intention is true, the legal question is: What can a federal court do for the federal government about it?
In the part of its complaint in which the DOJ makes its case for having legal standing to bring the suit, it said that its asserted legal injuries would be solved by a court order “declaring a certification of an election result prejudiced by Daniel J. Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot unlawful and enjoining defendants [Alaska officials] from allowing such a certification to occur.”
Putting the merits of the DOJ’s argument aside — election law experts have deemed it incredibly weak — its complaint expresses an interest, contra Blanche’s post, in stopping the certification of Alaska’s election. To “enjoin” something is to stop it from happening. At least, according to the complaint, the DOJ wants to halt Alaska’s certification if the result is “prejudiced” by the other Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot, At least, according to the complaint, the DOJ wants to halt Alaska’s certification if the result is “prejudiced” by the other Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot — a claim that would be difficult to demonstrate in a timely manner, if ever.
Furthermore, in the complaint’s “prayer for relief,” which is the standard section where a plaintiff tells a court what it wants, the DOJ lists two specific things.
First, it asks the court to: “Declare that certification of any result that may be impacted by voter confusion, as defined above, would violate Defendants’ duties under the NVRA [National Voter Registration Act] to ‘protect the integrity of the electoral process.’”
Second, it asks the court: “Defendants from certifying any result that may be impacted by voter confusion, as defined above, pending an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan and any further procedures or relief this Court deems necessary and appropriate to determine what the result would have been absent Daniel J. Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot.”
That second request for relief reads as if it is missing a word at the beginning. If so, then based on the rest of the complaint, the word “Enjoin” would seem to fit well. As in: Enjoin defendants from certifying … (I asked the DOJ press office whether a word is missing there, and if so, what that word is, but I did not immediately hear back.)
Whatever’s happening with that line, the government’s opponents are reading the complaint as seeking to block certification. Peltola’s campaign committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which are attempting to join in the case to get it dismissed, said in a Sunday filing that the “DOJ seeks an unprecedented order precluding certification of the U.S. Senate election if the candidate the President favors loses narrowly.”
Calling the government’s claims “utterly without legal basis,” they said the Alaska district court “should not allow this lawsuit to hang like the Sword of Damocles over the ongoing election, lending false legitimacy to the President’s and the Attorney General’s ongoing efforts to spread false narratives about Alaska’s elections as voting continues and as results begin to be tabulated next week.”
The post Blanche says the DOJ doesn’t want to block Alaska’s election. The DOJ’s lawsuit says otherwise. appeared first on MS NOW.
Last week a judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security to release the Rev. Edward Nalwamba, a Ugandan priest who had lived in Colorado for more than 25 years before being sent to an immigrant detention center 13 months ago. The priest’s health deteriorated during his detention, to the point that he now relies on a wheelchair.
After a court set him free, the private prison company that operates the detention center for Immigration and Customs Enforcement reportedly wouldn’t provide Nalwamba with a wheelchair, so fellow detainees literally carried him from the facility.
Days earlier, a federal judge blocked DHS from carrying out a variety of field operations focused on uncovering alleged voter fraud in nine states as part of a broader push to identify noncitizen voters. The New York Times report on the developments noted:
[Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin], who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., wrote that the scope of the operations also raised concerns about voter intimidation. She noted that according to agency memos, the Homeland Security Department “surveils, covertly infiltrates and interrogates the staff of nonprofits and churches conducting voter engagement” and had targeted nearly 150 such nonprofit groups as of July.
The Trump administration, in other words, was found to have conducted covert surveillance inside houses of worship, in addition to conducting interrogations of the churches’ staff.
This was not the first time the Republican administration was found to have spied on churches.
A few months into Donald Trump’s second term, the president’s team launched a task force that was intended, according to the White House, to eradicate “anti-Christian bias” within the federal government. At a launch event in April 2025, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi began by attacking Joe Biden, whom Bondi said had “abused and targeted Christians.”
The slander was baseless. What’s more, when the task force tried to bolster its accusations with a lengthy written report, the allegations against the former president and his Democratic administration largely fell apart.
But more than a year after Team Trump started making a concerted effort to convince Americans that Biden and his White House “abused and targeted Christians,” it’s the incumbent president and his Republican administration that continue to clash with faith communities — up to and including surveillance of churches.
It’s hard not to forget the incident from July, when ICE agents hauled off a nun who was wearing her habit and walking down a public sidewalk en route to Sunday Mass (she was released from federal detention after a backlash from members of Congress), but such examples keep cropping up.
Indeed, there have been related controversies surrounding Team Trump suing a Catholic diocese in New Mexico to seize 14 acres of land for additional border barriers; the Pentagon’s narrowed list of officially recognized religions; Trump picking fights with Pope Leo XIV; the administration stripping funding from Catholic charities; a White House offensive against the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde for her defense of marginalized communities; and instances in which federal agents have shot faith leaders with pepper balls.
If these developments had unfolded during a Democratic administration, is there any doubt Republicans and conservative media outlets would have launched hysterical campaigns about the “Democratic war on religion”?
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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One of the recurring themes this election cycle is a sense of betrayal: There are a growing number of constituencies that backed Republicans two years ago, only to feel abandoned by Donald Trump and his party.
Farmers, for example, voted for the president by lopsided margins in the 2024 race, and many have been let down by an administration that’s repeatedly made matters worse for the agricultural industry. Latino voters also shifted to Republicans in large numbers two years ago, confident that Trump would focus his deportation agenda on violent criminals. They now know better.
Similarly, many Muslim voters also took at enormous risk in 2024, moving toward a GOP nominee who championed a Muslim ban in his first term. Two years later, it’s a community that feels used and betrayed by a party that has seized on Islamophobia as the foundation for its closing message in the midterm elections.
But it’s also worth sparing a thought for those who believed Trump when he promised he was committed to “making America healthy again.” An overwhelming body of evidence leaves little doubt that he didn’t mean a word of it. The New York Times reported on the findings of a devastating investigation:
In total, since taking office again, Mr. Trump exempted 202 facilities in 39 states and Puerto Rico from clean-air regulations that were going into effect. Some were among the country’s worst industrial polluters, including chemical manufacturers, copper smelters and coal-burning power plants. About 3.3 million people live within three miles of at least one affected facility.
The exemptions represent the biggest presidential intervention in enforcement of the Clean Air Act in the half-century since President Richard M. Nixon signed the bedrock environmental law. And that is only one of the ways the Trump administration is dismantling a variety of federal environmental protections.
The Times documented in great detail the degree to which the Republican administration has systematically dismantled public safeguards to champion the wishes of polluters and chemical manufacturers, in ways without precedent in American history.
I’m mindful that much of the “MAHA” movement’s base is comprised of activists who are focused almost entirely on opposition to vaccines. But to the extent there are others who are genuinely interested in making America healthy again and who have sincere concerns about the spread of cancer-causing pollution, the Republican White House has gone to stunning lengths to express total indifference to those issues, instead elevating chemical industry lobbyists to leadership roles inside Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
“Donald Trump and [Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] keep treating MAHA activists like disposable political pawns and now wonder why many resent it,” Protect Our Care President Brad Woodhouse recently said in a statement. “There’s not one MAHA promise Trump hasn’t been willing to break once the checks clear from his big chemical, food and tobacco donors. Food, air, water safety and kids’ health have all been compromised to feed profits for makers of addictive fruit flavored vapes, cancer-linked pesticides, and PFAS forever chemicals. And every time RFK Jr. proves himself a phony by making excuses for Trump’s latest MAHA double-cross, like making glyphosate great again.”
Time will tell how many of these constituencies move toward Democrats in the midterms or decide not to cast to ballots at all; but after the dust settles on the election cycle and the president and Republican leaders assess what went wrong, they might want to start by acknowledging the Americans who felt betrayed after counting on the GOP to deliver.
The post As Election Day nears, a growing number of constituencies feel betrayed by Trump appeared first on MS NOW.
As October got underway, Donald Trump threw an online tantrum by way of his social media platform, lashing out at Sen. Tom Cotton because the Arkansas Republican hedged on a daylight saving time proposal supported by the White House. The president, however, didn’t just throw around some juvenile names.
After making the case that Cotton was focused on his “ego” and failing to put “Arkansas first,” Trump publicly released the senator’s cellphone number and encouraged Arkansans to use it.
Nearly two weeks later, as the president expressed fears about Texas’ U.S. Senate race, he threw another online tantrum, this time targeting Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, whom Trump labeled a “WEAK and INEFFECTIVE” political hack who would deserve the blame if state Attorney General Ken Paxton loses.
On Friday, after Trump’s Justice Department filed an outlandish lawsuit targeting Alaska’s U.S. Senate race, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska (who is not up for re-election this year) denounced the radical gambit, declaring in a statement, “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. The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit.”
Naturally, the president who demanded the lawsuit wasn’t pleased. In yet another lengthy online rant published Saturday night, Trump labeled Murkowski “the Republicans’ Worst Senator, by far,” before falsely saying that the senator “only got elected” because of the state’s system of ranked choice balloting, which he falsely described as “corrupt” and a “total Democrat [sic] scam.”
He added that Murkowski “probably wants” Democrats “to steal the Election,” before adding, “Lisa Murkowski is a DISGRACE to Alaska and our Country. You just don’t get any worse!”
Trump concluded that if incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses, “everything we’ve done for Alaska will come to an immediate hault.” (In context, I suspect he meant “halt.”)
For good measure, shortly before midnight, the president kept going, adding in a follow-up tirade, “They’ve been trying to get rid of Lisa Murkowski forever in Alaska, then she came up with the Ranked Choice Voting SCAM.” (Again, it’s not a scam; Murkowski isn’t the one who came up with it; and the system was not responsible for rescuing her career.)
That Trump holds the GOP senator in contempt is not exactly new, but the recent series of harangues directed at senators from his own party is a timely reminder that this guy, 11 years into his political career and nearly six years into his presidency, still has no idea how to deal with Congress.
Evidently, as the president sees it, if he can just harass his ostensible allies enough through online antics, then maybe they’ll succumb to his intimidation efforts and follow his demands.
Except, as he probably ought to know by now, his harassment efforts tend not to work. Cotton didn’t change his mind about daylight saving time; Cornyn hasn’t become a Paxton cheerleader; and Murkowski hasn’t backed off her criticisms of an indefensible lawsuit.
What we’re left with is a president who keeps picking pointless fights with intraparty allies, whose support he might yet need in the near future, in the run-up to critically important U.S. elections — which is every bit as foolish as it sounds.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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As last week neared its end, struggling consumers confronted yet another discouraging development: Oil prices reached levels unseen since April. With so little time remaining in the midterm election cycle, and with affordability on the minds of so many Americans, common sense suggested this would be a topic Donald Trump would avoid at his latest campaign rallies.
And yet, the Republican president apparently couldn’t help himself.
Trump: "While oil prices are temporarily high … the United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars"
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-10-25T00:27:47.633Z
Saturday night in Georgia, Trump began by assuring his supporters that gas prices would “be falling dramatically” just as soon as he figured out a way to end the war he launched against Iran. If he had stopped here, it would not have been notable.
But then he kept going.
“The United States’ oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars,” the president said, conceding that he wasn’t sure whether to bring this up, and that members of his own team advised him, “Please don’t mention that, sir.”
He blew off the good advice.
Trump’s own team told him not to celebrate higher energy prices shortly before Election Day, since Americans generally don’t want to be told to be happy about their pain at the pump. He decided not to listen, evidently because he’s delighted to see Big Oil cash in, regardless of the impact on unhappy consumers.
The president first rolled out this talking point just two weeks after launching the war, using his social media platform to argue, “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”
That line proved wildly unpersuasive and was quickly dropped from the White House’s talking points, before making an unexpected comeback at an event in Arizona two weeks ago. “Our country is making more money than it’s ever made because of the fact that oil is so high,” Trump boasted, effectively telling American consumers to be glad they’re paying more at the pump.
As a substantive matter, the problem with Trump’s claim that “we’re making a fortune” is that the word “we” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It’s true that the United States is producing a lot of oil, and it’s also true that higher prices help generate oil industry profits. But since the number of Americans who benefit from oil industry profits is very small, few will likely celebrate the ongoing hit to their wallets.
But as a political matter, it’s remarkable to see the Republican — who has gone out of his way to make the midterms a referendum on himself — execute such a bizarre strategy at the worst possible time.
“I can just see the fake headlines: ‘President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump,’” he said. The trouble is, there’s nothing fake about such headlines: Trump really did talk about all the money Big Oil was making while people were suffering at the pump, which he then promptly followed with, “I don’t give a damn.”
If Republicans are very lucky, voters won’t hear about this.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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After Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat in the 2024 presidential election, Democrats entered a full-blown panic about young voters. Donald Trump won 47% of voters under 30, Republicans’ best performance with that age group in decades. The Democratic Party’s response was to encourage its candidates to appear on podcasts aimed at young men and commissioning consultants to analyze how the left had supposedly lost the internet.
New data shows that young voters are turning on Trump and are expected to support Democratic candidates in large numbers once again this midterm cycle. But a closer look at the numbers shows that Democrats can’t assume young voters are back on their side for good.
The shift from right to left among young voters this midterm cycle is real and it is enormous. In the latest New York Times/Siena poll, voters under 30 now favor the Democratic congressional candidate in their district by 44 percentage points. Two years ago, that margin was just 10 points. In the new Harvard Youth poll, 77% of young Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy — including 48% of young Republicans. That is undoubtedly a collapse of epic proportions for Trump, the MAGA movement and the GOP as a whole.
But Democrats would be mistaken to read too much into these shifts. Among young voters who prefer that Democrats control congress this cycle, 51% say their choice is motivated mostly by opposition to Republicans rather than support for Democrats. Among young Gen Z independents supporting Democrats, the share is even greater: 70% say their motivation is against Republicans.
These numbers make sense. The party in power typically performs worse during the midterms and in this case, Republicans have unified government. As prices soar and the war in Iran rages on, voters across age brackets seem to be ready for change.
Still, as much as Democratic operatives bemoan Americans who see the party as just the “lesser of two evils,” that sentiment seems widely held among young voters. In the Harvard Youth poll, 74% of registered young voters disapprove of congressional Republicans, but Democrats fare little better, with 66% disapproval. Though young voters trust Democrats more on every major issue the poll asked about, from “cost of living” to “free and fair elections” to “involvement in wars and conflicts,” more than two-thirds of under-30 voters are unhappy with the job Democrats are doing in Congress.
To treat Democrats’ improvements with young voters as vindication for the post-2024 strategies, then, would be misguided. Democrats haven’t won young voters over — Trump has simply lost them. The medium has changed, but the message is still missing.
Harvard’s polling offers some clues about what a winning message could be. For the first time in the poll’s history, more young Americans expect to be financially worse off than their parents versus better off. Eighty-eight percent of voters say government corruption is important to their midterm vote, the second-most important issue overall. Healthy majorities believe artificial intelligence and corporate power threaten their financial security and support reforming our economy. These are not just partisan priorities. Forty-two percent of young Republicans support a wealth tax and 39% support Medicare for All.
Taken together, these findings suggest a generation increasingly skeptical of the political and economic system, regardless of which party controls Washington. Democrats would be foolish to assume that frustration will continue to work in their favor in the long run without a meaningful reorientation.
I saw some of the challenges of organizing young people firsthand as press secretary for Dream for America, a Gen Z-led organization founded partly in response to Turning Point USA. While Democrats have concentrated much of their recent outreach on digital media, Turning Point claims thousands of chapters across high schools and colleges. And that infrastructure doesn’t disappear when Republicans lose an election — it gives them a way to reach young voters long after the latest viral clip has been forgotten. That is a huge structural advantage that Democrats have failed to match in recent years.
Trump has handed Democrats an opening with Gen Z, but keeping these voters will require more than posting viral clips and opposing a deeply unpopular president. It will require giving young Americans something worth supporting. And it will require breaking free from the typical partisan cycle of winning power and failing to deliver real change. Without both a compelling new message and the infrastructure to consistently communicate and deliver on it, they risk watching the same young voters who abandoned Trump this year abandon Democrats should they regain power.
The post How Democrats could still squander the gift of Trump’s terrible Gen Z polling appeared first on MS NOW.
Kamala Harris is keeping her options open.
The former vice president is spending the final days until Election Day stumping for Democrats in battleground states, including events in Wisconsin on Monday. As she emerges from keeping a relatively low profile, a string of recent public appearances is stirring chatter about her future.
In conversations with people who have known or worked for Harris, several said they were genuinely unsure whether she would ultimately launch another presidential bid in 2028. One person close to Harris said she was taking the pulse of the electorate, as she travels the country, to determine whether she fits the vision that voters want.
Harris is widely known for being cautious about decision-making, the people said, gathering as much information as possible before making a judgment call. A former 2024 campaign staffer described Harris’ moves since leaving the White House as “confusing,” offering little insight into whether she will make another play for the Oval Office.
It’s “the question of the hour,” the former staffer said. “She’s trying to be a figurehead now, but in a very careful way that doesn’t necessarily, in my mind, bode that she is gearing up to run.”
Harris herself says she hasn’t decided whether she will run for president again, and is instead focused on helping Democrats retake control of Congress. The midterms, however, will mark a defining moment for her party, as several progressive candidates — including democratic socialists — fight for seats in Congress. A person familiar with her thinking said Harris believes Americans are looking for aggressive executives after the Trump era.
“Folks are angry, you know, they’re pissed,” Harris said of voters in an August podcast interview with former Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams. “You can see through many of the recent elections, people are done with status quo and are not interested in a defense of status quo.”
As for the future of the Democratic Party, she added, “I think it’s too early to tell.”
The former vice president’s shifting policy positions over the years have created obstacles for her, including in 2024, when voters cited a lack of clarity about what she stood for.
Recently, Harris has advocated expanding the Supreme Court’s bench and called for “revisiting” abolishing the Electoral College. Earlier this month she condemned Israel’s “horrific” actions in Gaza, expressing regret that the Biden administration didn’t seek to restrict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu “sooner and more forcefully.”
A former Harris adviser said that in a presidential primary it’s imperative to “know where you are and have a conviction, and it becomes revealed over the course of the campaign if you don’t have a conviction.”
“It’s tough to run for president not knowing exactly the type of candidate [you want to be] and the positions you want to take,” the former adviser said.
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, who wants to see Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York run in 2028, criticized Harris’ past rhetoric on economic policies, such as her previous support of Medicare for All before backing the expansion of Obamacare instead.
Affordability remains voters’ biggest priority in polling. “Economic populism is not in her gut,” Green said, recalling her 2024 debate with President Donald Trump. “She had beautiful answers on abortion. She had some pretty good answers on democracy. She threw not one punch on economic issues.”
A Harris fundraiser, who recently spoke with Harris by phone and requested anonymity to speak freely, expressed doubt that her donors would bankroll another presidential bid. Harris and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, another potential 2028 hopeful, also share overlapping donor networks, putting their fundraisers in a tough position if they both choose to enter the fray.
“I know her base of supporters. I know her friends. The Zen diagram on that is just pure crossover,” Newsom told CNN last month, denying that he would run if Harris jumped into the race. “I wouldn’t do that to people.”
Another Harris presidential run also risks reminding Democrats of a painful memory: Trump won both the popular vote and all seven swing states in the 2024 election.
“Part of her brand has been that she represented the future; she now really represents the past history, and that’s just a really big adjustment,” the former Harris adviser said.
Harris’ allies, though, caution party insiders not to count her out, given her high name recognition and favorability with voters. Harris remains a front-runner among potential 2028 contenders, according to early national polling gathered by MS NOW’s partner, FiftyPlusOne. Her sway with Black voters in particular would give her an outsize advantage, especially in states like South Carolina, the party’s first-in-the-nation primary.
Kevin Harris, a political consultant who served as chief of staff for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign in Georgia, noted that the previous two Democratic presidential nominees — Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — both started and ended their primary cycles as the front-runner.
“It’s not uncommon in recent history where the people who ultimately got the presidency ran a few times before they got there,” said Harris, a Democratic strategist with no relation to the vice president. “She still is going to be the only person in that field that has ever gotten a significant amount of votes in every state. Nobody else starting out is going to even have that.”
If Harris eventually decides not to run, she maintains significant influence in the party. Several Democratic politicians have continued to seek out Harris for political advice by phone since her 2024 loss, according to a person familiar with the matter. She is also the third most popular Democrat in the country, behind former President Barack Obama and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, YouGov rankings show.
Because of that status, some Democrats advise possible 2028 rivals to tread lightly. Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, seen as another likely candidate, recently said in an interview that Harris should not run again. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was considered as her running mate in 2024, blasted Harris’ descriptions of him as overtly ambitious in her memoir as “blatant lies.”
Elsewhere, a handful of Democratic candidates in red states, including Kansas’ Adam Hamilton, Iowa’s Rob Sand and Alaska’s Mary Peltola, have also rebuffed questions about whether they would welcome Harris to campaign in their state. Harris told MS NOW’s Peter Alexander that she supports “them in doing whatever they need to do to win.”
Kevin Harris, the political consultant based in the South, says Black voters, a core constituency, “are very protective of her, and want to see proper respect given for what she has accomplished and what she symbolizes, her historical significance to the community.”
Former Vice President Harris will head to Georgia on Thursday to campaign for Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is drawing his own 2028 buzz. She will also deliver the keynote address at the Fulton County Democratic Party’s annual dinner and join a get-out-the-vote effort with the NAACP in Atlanta. First, she is slated to headline Monday’s NAACP town hall in Wisconsin.
In recent days, she has appeared with candidates in Nevada and New Hampshire, two other early states on the Democratic National Committee’s primary calendar, as well as in Mississippi. Florida Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon, a progressive firebrand, will also join Harris on a virtual organizing call later this week.
Other names in the 2028 mix are making moves of their own.
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is spending the final days before the midterms on the campaign trail, including stops in Georgia with Ossoff and Wisconsin with gubernatorial candidate David Crowley, with whom Harris is also campaigning. In recent months, Buttigieg has hired more staffers at his political organization, known as Win the Era, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly reiterated on Friday that he was weighing a presidential campaign after the midterms. Meanwhile, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore recently dodged a question during his gubernatorial debate about whether he would serve out a full second term. Asked again during an interview with ABC News on Sunday if he was committed to fulfilling the term, he said, “Yeah, I wouldn’t be running for re-election if I was thinking about anything else, to be clear,” Moore said.
The 2028 countdown starts as soon as midterm election results are in.
The post ‘Question of the hour’: Harris assesses her next move as 2028 looms appeared first on MS NOW.
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