The midterm elections are just days away, and while anything can happen, the broad consensus among pollsters suggests a bad night for Republicans.

Hoping to shore up a victory for his party, President Donald Trump seized upon an idea: bribe the voters.

"If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them," Trump pledged in September, "I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000."

According to Vice President J.D. Vance, this "dividend"—which would cost more than $1.3 trillion—would come from the "extraordinary amount of revenue" generated by Trump's tariffs. Of course, that math doesn't work: According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the U.S. took in just under $300 billion in tariff revenue between January 2025 and July 2026, not counting the amount it has had to refund after the Supreme Court found they were illegally imposed.

At that rate, it would take years of tariffs just to pay for Trump's dividend. Adding insult to injury, of course, is the fact that tariffs are paid by Americans, meaning we would be taxing ourselves to pay for our own disbursement.

But in the campaign season's closing days, Trump has made a number of other threats and offers, contingent on his party's success—a completely risible use of government power.

In September, three Ohio Republicans—Rep. Mike Turner and Sens. Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted—petitioned the president to build a planned Space Force training academy in their state.

"Every other state wants it," Trump said this month at an Ohio campaign rally. "If we win the midterms, Ohio will be very, very strongly considered."

Some of his pledges have been much more explicitly transactional.

On October 17, the Department of Defense—which Trump calls by its original name, the Department of War—announced a conditional $80 billion loan to pharmaceutical manufacturer Antheia. That same day, at a campaign rally in Kentucky, Trump made a pledge to the state's voters.

"If the Republicans win, the Department of War will be investing $100 million in the pharmaceutical company Antheia to revitalize a gigantic drug manufacturing facility in Winchester, Kentucky," he said. But he prefaced it by telling Rep. Andy Barr, the Republican running for the state's open Senate seat, "you have to win, Andy. Otherwise, forget it."

Days later in both Kansas and Iowa, Trump brought up E15, a gasoline blend that contains up to 15 percent ethanol derived from corn. It has advantages and disadvantages as an alternative to traditional gasoline, but it's a boon for corn-growing states.

"Normally, E15 is not allowed during the summer because warmer temperatures increase fuel evaporation and thus the formulation of ground ozone ('smog')," writes Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute.

The government can waive that restriction to address disruptions in the fuel supply, which it did in March amid gas price shocks related to Trump's war in Iran. The House passed a bill in May to make the waiver permanent and allow E15 to be sold year-round, which Trump backed in June; the Senate version of the Farm Bill includes a year-round E15 amendment, but Democrats have held up its passage.

"With Roger Marshall in the Senate," Trump told Kansans last week, "we will make year-round E15 permanent. But if [Democratic candidate] Adam Hamilton is in, I'm not doing it."

He then made the same pledge in Iowa, where Rep. Ashley Hinson is the Republican Senate nominee. "With Ashley in the Senate, we will make it year-round E15," Trump said. "We'll make it permanent."

Of course, it's nothing new for politicians to make big promises in exchange for your votes. Typically, they're all hollow to at least some degree.

And Trump's pledges do reflect some version of reality: Keeping the Senate in Republican hands will make it easier for him to do certain things. But some of his others have been downright indefensible, less like typical political bribery than outright extortion.

At a rally in North Carolina last month, he tied hurricane disaster aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to Senate candidate Michael Whatley's election.

"We spent more than $2 billion [in] FEMA funding," he told attendees. "You're waiting for some additional money…and I'm gonna get that to you, Michael. Now if Michael loses, I'm not sending it." He added right after, "I'm only kidding, you're gonna get it."

Other times, he didn't take it back: Trump appeared at a campaign rally in Georgia this week, stumping for Rep. Mike Collins to unseat Sen. Jon Ossoff, and part of his sales pitch was that if Ossoff wins, he may just ignore the state.

"President has a lot of power," he said, and there's "a big difference when he likes the people representing a state. Collins could call me anytime he wants." But if Ossoff wins, he added, he won't take the call, and he even narrated a hypothetical conversation to make his point: "'Tell him I'm not in.' 'But he needs money for Georgia.' 'I don't give a damn what he wants!'"

Also this week, Trump railed about the Senate race in Alaska, where Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan faces not only former Rep. Mary Peltola but a retired teacher also named Dan Sullivan. The New York Times reported this week that the Peltola campaign actively recruited the second Sullivan to run explicitly as a spoiler, to siphon votes away from the senator.

"I have delivered for Alaska at Historic Levels," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "The Democrats are trying to steal this important Republican Seat and, if that happens, everything we've done for Alaska will come to an immediate hault [sic]."

It's one thing to say the federal government shouldn't provide aid to states—and since taking office, the administration has cut or paused such disbursements by $177 billion. Last week, the FEMA administrator indicated that going forward, states should expect to shoulder more of their own disaster aid.

But this goes much further, with the president explicitly conditioning aid on whether or not the state's voters have displeased him.

Perhaps, as in North Carolina, Trump was simply joking; the White House did not respond to Reason's request for clarification.

But there's certainly precedent to suggest he was serious.

"Last September, the Department of Energy (DOE) recommended cancellation of 624 grants for clean energy projects that had been approved by the Biden administration," Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote in July. The government then "winnowed it down to 284 grants, all but one of which had been awarded to projects in states that were represented by Democrats in the U.S. Senate and had voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election."

In March, Politico reported that Trump had approved 89 percent of disaster aid requests from states with a Republican governor and two Republican senators but only 23 percent of requests from states with Democrats in those offices.

According to the Idle Rambling Substack, the trend continues: Trump has rejected nearly half of aid requests from Democrat-led states in this term while only rejecting 18 percent from Republican-led states.

But perhaps worst of all, he threatened not to pay out damages to people who suffered harm.

Between 1953 and 1987, the water at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina was contaminated by leaks of fuel and dry cleaning chemicals. The government estimates that as many as 1 million people, both service members and their families, were exposed to toxic chemicals. The Department of Veterans Affairs officially recognizes eight diseases stemming from exposure, including multiple cancers and Parkinson's disease.

In 2022, Congress passed the Camp Lejeune Justice Act, which waived any federal government claims of immunity and allowed veterans to sue over exposure to tainted water. As of September 2026, the Department of Justice says it has paid out more than $879 million, out of more than $1.1 billion in settlement offers.

"We're also fighting for our great veterans, and taking care of those veterans who brought claims related to water contamination at Camp Lejeune," Trump told North Carolina rallygoers last week. "And if we win the House and the Senate, I am directing the Department of Justice to settle all remaining legitimate claims as soon as possible." But "if we don't win, there's no money. If we do win, you're getting it."

It should be clear by now that Trump values personal loyalty over all else. To that end, there is nothing he finds more disreputable than failing to do what he says.

In the closing days of this campaign season, he is making that more explicit than ever, tying his party's success in a state to whether the state is entitled to equal treatment under the law.

Trump was right that presidents have "a lot of power." He's also a living example of why they shouldn't.

The post Trump's Latest Attempt To Salvage the Midterms: Bribe and Extort the Voters appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Alaska's U.S. Senate race features four candidates. Two are named Dan Sullivan: the Republican incumbent, and a political neophyte.

Republicans say the presence of two Dan Sullivans on the ballot is an illegal act of election interference. The federal government is now suing to keep Alaska from certifying the election results, but only if their guy loses.

"One of the biggest election scandals in history has been the Democrats' installation of a fake Dan Sullivan (not the US Senator) to deceive voters in Alaska," White House advisor Stephen Miller wrote on X. President Donald Trump called it "a disgrace."

"Democrats pulled a dirty trick by enlisting a decoy, Daniel J. Sullivan, to run against Republican Alaska Sen. Dan S. Sullivan," The Wall Street Journal editorialized. "Please spare us the lectures about election interference."

Last week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued the state of Alaska and its election authorities.

"Should Alaska certify any electoral results tainted by the inclusion on the
ballot of Daniel J. Sullivan," the filing warns, "the State and its officers will fail in its obligation to protect the integrity of its election. The United States accordingly brings this lawsuit to protect the integrity of the 2026 Senate election in Alaska."

Alaska uses a ranked choice ballot, in which voters are given four candidates and rank each one in order of preference. Along with the Sullivans, the candidates are Mary Peltola, a Democrat who is polling narrowly ahead, and Gerald Heikes.

The Justice Department lawsuit says Republican voters would be too confused by the presence of two Dan Sullivans to properly fill out their ballot: "Some supporters of Senator Sullivan likely will inadvertently vote for Daniel J. Sullivan. Other supporters of Senator Sullivan likely will be confused as to how to rank the three Republican candidates as to defeat Peltola."

Given this, "there is a substantial likelihood that a certification of the election will reflect an electoral process that lacked integrity," the lawsuit proclaims. "To guard against this danger, it is vital that [Alaska] not certify any election result" in which "(1) Senator Sullivan does not win the election; and (2) had all votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan been cast instead for Senator Sullivan and Alaska's rank-choice process played out accordingly, Senator Sullivan would have won the election."

In other words, the state of Alaska should only certify the election if Sullivan wins; if Peltola wins, but it's close, then that could suggest it "lacked integrity," and the state must instead conduct "an investigation to determine whether votes cast for Daniel J. Sullivan were meant to be cast for Senator Sullivan."

The lawsuit has a number of problems. First and foremost, it's completely inappropriate to treat an election as fair only if your candidate wins, even if it is what Trump believes.

It's also too late to bring an action of this kind: The state elections division decided in June to bar Daniel J. Sullivan from the ballot, but a state superior court reversed and the Alaska Supreme Court upheld the reversal before the end of that month.

And yet the feds waited until less than two weeks before Election Day—when ballots have been printed and tens of thousands of Alaskans have already voted—to bring this suit.

If the Justice Department was truly concerned about voter confusion, it should have brought a lawsuit months ago. But even then, it's not clear what it could have done: "DOJ has no power to decide which candidates can appear on the ballot," writes UCLA School of Law professor Richard L. Hasen.

Besides, it's not illegal to mislead or even outright lie to voters. "If 'voter confusion' were a legitimate reason to overturn election results, that would imperil a great many election winners, as voter ignorance—and exploitation thereof by candidates—is a widespread and longstanding problem," writes George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin.

It does seem more likely than not that Daniel J. Sullivan is indeed running just to pull votes from the senator with the same name.

But as I pointed out earlier this month, the ranked-choice ballot itself can take care of this problem: Republican voters who wish to reelect Sullivan can simply rank both Dan Sullivans first and second; if and when Daniel J. Sullivan fails to capture more than 50 percent of all votes, he will be eliminated, and his votes will transfer to all their second choices.

The ballot itself makes it clear which Sullivan is which: The sitting senator is labeled as both Registered Republican and incumbent.

Despite Miller's claim that letting two Dan Sullivans on the ballot "reveals pure contempt for voters," it's the objecting Republicans who appear to lack faith in their voters.

"People are totally confused," Trump told reporters. "A lot of people don't know what 'incumbent' means."

When CNN's Dana Bash asked Attorney General Todd Blanche what crime is being alleged, he replied that "it depends." He elaborated: "There could be a crime, but the real wrong here is that Alaskans are going to be confused and will not have their vote heard."

This isn't even Alaska's most complicated election in recent memory. In 2010, after Sen. Lisa Murkowski lost the Republican primary to Joe Miller, she announced that she would still run as a write-in candidate—requiring voters to not just know about her ahead of time but to add her name by hand.

Improbably, Murkowski prevailed, defeating Miller by more than 10,000 votes.

If Trump, Blanche, Miller, and others are truly concerned that the ballot will be too confusing for Alaska Republicans, they could expend some energy showing them how to use the ranked choice ballot.

In fact, Sullivan has done just that, posting a video on X explaining how to rank all candidates except Peltola.

What they can't do is force a state to reject the results if their guy loses.

"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 wrote on X. "The Department of Justice should never have filed this lawsuit."

"I believe that this lawsuit is abusive in its intentions and borders on frivolous in its arguments, and that it is destined for defeat in the courts should it reach the merits," Cato Institute senior fellow Walter Olson noted in a statement. "This lawsuit is an assault on the constitutional design by which states, not the federal government, run elections. The issue in question is one for the Alaska Supreme Court to decide under Alaska law, and the Alaska court did just that."

The post Justice Department Targets Alaska Senate Election appeared first on Reason Magazine.

To many people, but especially libertarians, voting can feel dispiriting: By definition, every person on the ballot wants in some way to exert control over your life.

Perhaps that's why it's refreshing to see a candidate for office who truly seems not to want the job.

Brady Rogers worked as a robotics engineer for four years, but he quit in 2019 after deciding the corporate world wasn't for him.

"It was just a bit unfulfilling," Rogers tells Reason. "I wanted to do something a little more impactful with my skills….So I left to find something else that felt worthwhile."

He started The Rogerie, a retail store in his hometown of Kelowna, British Columbia, a city of about 170,000 people. Rogers and his wife collect shredded plastic waste and extrude it into filament for 3D printers, which they use to create new housewares to sell in the shop.

Then earlier this year, Rogers again got the feeling that he could be doing something beneficial with his talents. This time, it meant running for the Kelowna City Council.

But he had to stand out in a crowded field—he would be one of 37 candidates running, and only the top eight would win a seat.

So, he settled on a strategy: openly admit his lack of qualifications and how little he even wanted the job.

"I guess I'm running for Kelowna city council," read his campaign website. "I don't like meetings, I don't like having to be certain places at certain times, and I'm allergic to stuffy offices. But unfortunately, I happen to like Kelowna, and think I can help do some good."

"Do I enjoy politics? No," he adds. "Do I know what I'm doing? No. But am I qualified? Also no."

That lackadaisical attitude carried over into his campaign signage: Yard signs featured pictures of Rogers with sullen, shrugging expressions, alongside slogans like "I barely want to do this" and "Let's see what happens?" In a winking reference to political gerontocracy, one sign even bragged that he was "Under 60!"

The ploy worked, and the campaign went viral.

"I certainly thought it was clever. I thought it would work, but it was really just how I honestly felt when I started," Rogers admits. "I was pretty conflicted about committing to a four-year thing that I didn't even really fully understand the ins and outs of, but at the same time I saw the opportunity to have a bigger impact. So, I was conflicted, and I figured that's a good, honest place to start a campaign."

Ultimately, he won a seat: He placed fourth out of 37 total candidates and even beat three incumbents, one of whom lost her seat.

The irony of Rogers' outwardly indifferent attitude is that he actually does have a policy platform: On his website, he advocates finding solutions to homelessness not necessarily by spending more money but by making better use of the resources that the city and province already provide. He also notes that Kelowna taxes land and improvements at the same rate, which "means we tax someone for improving their property while relatively rewarding someone who sits on valuable, underused land." Writing this week at Reason, J.D. Tuccille made a similar point.

Of course, Rogers' underqualified and disinterested campaign persona is only partially true—he did, after all, want the job, or at least he saw it as a viable means of improving his city.

Still, it's refreshing for a candidate to treat public office as something less than a higher calling.

Ultimately, Rogers thinks that authenticity is why his campaign caught on and was ultimately successful with voters, when many campaigns struggle to create viral moments or capitalize on social media trends. Perhaps other people could even learn from him.

"I think why mine worked so profoundly is that it is a little bit of humor, but immediately behind it was a legitimate platform and me as a real person with the skills and a real desire to do something," Rogers says. "And I think that resonated. I think people [have] an appetite for a new kind of politics."

The post He Won a City Council Seat by Openly Admitting How Little He Wants the Job appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Once again, a member of President Donald Trump's administration is threatening to punish private citizens for their speech using the power of the government.

Specifically, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) threatened broadcasters who dare to report on polls the president doesn't approve of. Even if the complaint were valid, it would be difficult to enforce without violating the First Amendment.

"During this election season, there has been a significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls designed to do nothing more than interfere with the regular functioning of the electoral process and alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm," FCC Chairman Brendan Carr wrote on X. "Many journalists and broadcasters have been amplifying or airing these Polls without regard to basic journalistic ethics and without informing the public that those Polls lack a scientific, accurate, or even real basis."

Carr is directly adopting Trump's terminology, in addition to his erratic capitalization: The president often uses the term suppression polls to describe surveys that don't reflect in his favor. The implication is that these polls are manufactured to conceal or downplay enthusiasm for Trump or his preferred candidates, making it less likely that his supporters will turn out if they think it's a lost cause.

Carr doesn't single out any offenders, though there are some likely examples. This week, purported pollster Wedgewood Polls revealed that as part of an "experimental project," it had released surveys with "fabricated numbers" that were printed by outlets like FiftyPlusOne (which sussed out the fraud) and The New York Times.

Similarly, in August, Median Strategies withdrew two polls, then revealed that it had fabricated the results for a "social experiment."

Each scenario is deplorable. And depending on what promises were made, it's possible one firm or the other could face legal consequences.

But it's hard to see how a news outlet could face legal reprisal for just reporting the results of a survey it thought was conducted accurately.

"The FCC takes these issues seriously," Carr added. "Broadcasters are prohibited by the terms of their federal licenses from engaging in News Distortion or promoting Broadcast Hoaxes. It is important that broadcasters comply with their public interest obligations."

There are indeed rules against news distortion and broadcast hoaxes, but they're narrowly tailored to avoid conflicting with the First Amendment.

"News distortion 'must involve a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report,'" according to the FCC. In addition, "broadcasters are only subject to enforcement if it can be proven that they have deliberately distorted a factual news report. Expressions of opinion or errors stemming from mistakes are not actionable."

The hoax rule, on the other hand, is even less applicable: It involves "broadcasting false information concerning a crime or a catastrophe," where the broadcaster "knows this information is false" and can foreseeably "cause substantial public harm" but airs it anyway, and the broadcast then "does in fact directly cause substantial public harm."

In other words, neither standard applies to a broadcaster that covered an inaccurate poll, especially without knowing at the time that it was wrong.

"Pollsters who intentionally mislead the public should answer for it, but broadcasters who report publicly available polling data should never be punished when a poll is wrong," Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic FCC commissioner, wrote on X. "FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith."

Carr doesn't specify what he thinks should happen to any offenders, though since he tends to define "public interest" as whatever Trump says, we can make an educated guess.

Right before the 2024 presidential election, The Des Moines Register published a poll that found then–Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa by three percentage points. Trump ended up winning the state by 13 percentage points, but he was apparently so upset by the poll that he sued both the Register and pollster Ann Selzer, claiming the inaccurate survey constituted "brazen election interference" that violated the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.

It was clear at the time that the lawsuit was completely meritless. Just as Carr suggested this week in his social media post, Trump was trying to create an exception to the First Amendment for "fake news."

"In the United States there is no such thing as a claim for 'fraudulent news,'" Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote in a motion on the defendants' behalf. "No court in any jurisdiction has ever held such a cause of action might be valid, and few plaintiffs have ever attempted to bring such outlandish claims."

A judge agreed and dismissed the lawsuit last month.

"If someone is accurately reporting the results of a poll, that wouldn't be a false statement," UCLA law professor Rick Hasen told The Washington Post at the time. "The poll might have errors in it, but that wouldn't be a false statement."

That's as true then as it is now. Unless he can somehow prove that a broadcaster knew a pollster had faked a survey, there's no way Carr can punish someone for reporting on the results without running afoul of the First Amendment.

"Brendan Carr is not the journalism police. And he is just about the least qualified person in the country to lecture the press about journalistic ethics," Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in an emailed statement. "News broadcasters have a First Amendment right to report polling data, even if it proves to be inaccurate, just like they have a First Amendment right to report on Carr and Trump's own countless lies and distortions, even when they turn out to be inaccurate. FCC policies about hoaxes and distortions must be applied narrowly to avoid clashing with the Constitution, if they can be constitutionally applied at all."

The post FCC Chair Brendan Carr Echoes Trump, Threatens Broadcasters Over 'Fake Polls' appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Nuclear power has historically been a divisive issue: During the Cold War, an entire generation feared annihilation at the hands of the same basic technology that some want to use to power their homes.

That's unfortunate, because nuclear energy has considerable benefits—a reliable source of power with very few greenhouse gas emissions—with increasingly lower risks.

Thankfully, it seems that message is catching on with people from both major political parties.

"About six-in-ten U.S. adults now say they favor more nuclear power plants to generate electricity," Pew Research reported in October 2025. "That's up from 43% in 2020, driven by increasing support among both Republicans and Democrats." The authors noted that "Republicans are more likely than Democrats" to favor the policy, with "roughly seven-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents" expressing support, but it still included 52 percent of Democrats and independents who lean in that direction.

Gallup found similar results earlier this year. The pollster "asked whether the U.S. should put more emphasis, less emphasis or about the same emphasis as it does now on producing domestic energy from each of six sources," wrote Megan Brenan. The six sources were solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas, oil, and coal.

"Nuclear energy is the only one of the six sources to see support grow since 2021, rising seven points to 46%," Brenan added. "This shift is notable given that preferences for nuclear energy had historically been more evenly divided among responses of more, less and the same." Instead, those favoring more emphasis on nuclear power outranked both those who want less and those who wish for it to stay the same, by about 20 points each.

It seems the consensus has been building: In 2024, a poll of first-time voters in The Wall Street Journal found overwhelming support for nuclear energy as a means of fighting climate change.

The trend is welcome, and it marks a major reversal of anti-nuclear sentiment that goes back decades.

The China Syndrome, a film about a possible meltdown at a fictional California nuclear plant, premiered in the U.S. in March 1979. One character in the film warns that a meltdown could "render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable, not to mention the cancer that would show up later."

Less than two weeks later, in a disastrous bit of timing, a malfunction caused a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Thankfully, Three Mile Island was not a disaster. "Some radioactive gas was released a couple of days after the accident, but not enough to cause any dose above background levels to local residents," according to the World Nuclear Association. "There were no injuries or adverse health effects."

But those details were lost on the public. Several recording artists formed Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), an activist group that opposed nuclear power. Just six months after Three Mile Island, MUSE held a series of "No Nukes" concerts at Madison Square Garden, plus a rally in Central Park that drew nearly 200,000 attendees.

That populist support spilled over into politics, particularly among Democrats. Running for president in 1980, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D–Mass.) called for a two-year moratorium on new nuclear plants. In its national platform, the Democratic Party pledged to "retire nuclear power plants in an orderly manner."

After the Three Mile Island incident, 39 planned nuclear plants were canceled.

That's a shame, for many reasons. As Reason's Ronald Bailey wrote in 2018, in a theoretical world where the development of U.S. nuclear power continued at its previous pace, "by 2015 it would have replaced all coal-burning and three-quarters of gas-fired electric power generation….Cumulative global carbon dioxide emissions would be about 18 percent lower, and annual global carbon dioxide emissions would be one-third less."

Yet even decades later, plenty of people—again, particularly Democrats—still opposed nuclear energy.

"Of all the Democratic divides on climate," Politico wrote in 2019, "the role of nuclear power may be the biggest. Progressives and some environmental groups have long lumped it into a category with fossil fuels, and some have spent decades opposing it."

At the time, a number of people were running to be the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, and many of them had strong opinions on nuclear energy. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) said that she would not license any new nuclear reactors; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) pledged to go one step further and not renew the licenses of any existing reactors.

But things have changed in just a few short years, and nuclear energy is now an issue with potential bipartisan support. When did this pivot take place, and why?

"It was really around 2021, 2022, I would say that things really began to shift," James Walker, CEO of Nano Nuclear Energy, tells Reason. "A lot of the popular support looks like it's coming from younger people….It is a zero-carbon-emission power, and they have been raised to [be] more climate goal-focused" than older generations.

It's not just Gen Z either: Lawmakers are more keen on nuclear power now too. Earlier this month, the MORE American Fuel Act, sponsored by Sens. Cynthia Lummis (R–Wyo.) and Mark Kelly (D–Ariz.), passed the Senate unanimously. The bill "modernizes outdated Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensing requirements for uranium enrichment facilities and aligns them with the process already used for other nuclear facilities and reactors," according to a press release from Lummis. It also "lets enrichment companies begin construction at their own risk instead of waiting years for a construction license before breaking ground, while preserving public participation and the NRC's rigorous safety standards."

"What we've seen up in Washington is that there is a nervousness around keeping pace with AI development," Walker adds. "There is a concern that rivals that are also investing very heavily into AI, such as China, are building nuclear reactors like crazy, and one of the reasons they're doing that is just so they have baseload power that allows them to scale up their systems. They are building two gigawatt-scale nuclear power plants every year at the moment, and a lot of it is to try and catch up with the U.S. tech industry."

The post Nuclear Power Now Has Bipartisan Support appeared first on Reason Magazine.

When Americans vote in the midterm elections next month, it seems likely that Democrats will see decisive victories across the country.

This trend seems likely to affect Georgia's two most high-profile races differently. Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, is running for reelection against Rep. Mike Collins, a Republican who represents the state's 10th congressional district, while in the race to replace Gov. Brian Kemp, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms faces Republican billionaire Rick Jackson.

Ossoff and Bottoms may both be Democrats, but their prospects look very different: A recent poll put Ossoff nearly seven points ahead of Collins, but Bottoms was a point and a half behind Jackson, trailing the senator from her own party by more than five points.

Democrats hope that if Ossoff does well enough, it will boost their other candidates. But it's worth asking why Bottoms, who was feted as a possible vice presidential candidate, is struggling to break even against someone with no prior name recognition, in a year expected to be a boon for her party.

It's possible that the crime and protests of 2020 could be weighing down Bottoms' candidacy in an otherwise auspicious year for Democrats.

---

Mayor Bottoms and the 'COVID Crime Wave'

Bottoms' single term as mayor of Georgia's capital city would be defined by summer 2020. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, violent crime rose across the country, but it was worse in Atlanta—homicides were up 59 percent, while most other cities averaged 33 percent. Bottoms herself later called it the "COVID crime wave."

Then on May 25 in Minneapolis, a police officer killed George Floyd, an unarmed black man accused of passing a counterfeit $20 bill. Footage went viral, and protesters across the country took to the streets.

In some places, including Atlanta, protests turned destructive, and the police responded in kind.

Bottoms called for peace. "If you care about this city, then go home," she exhorted rioters in a news conference. "When you burn down this city, you're burning down our community."

She won bipartisan praise. "Your passion, your composure, your balance, has been really incredible," then-presidential candidate Joe Biden told her.

But just days later, Atlanta police officers shot and killed a black man, Rayshard Brooks, in a Wendy's parking lot. Protesters gathered the next day and burned the restaurant to the ground.

Meanwhile, after the district attorney announced charges against the cops involved in Brooks' shooting, more than 170 officers called out sick in protest. Bottoms admitted that officer morale "is down tenfold."

Then on July 4, less than half a mile away from the site of Brooks' death, protesters shot into a car, killing 8-year-old Secoriea Turner.

The crime spike persisted into 2021, and in May of that year, Bottoms announced that she would not run for a second term.

Officially, she said, it was "time to pass the baton on to someone else," though her announcement "came as the city faces a homicide rate topping that of this time last year—a historically deadly one in Atlanta," Henri Hollis wrote at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Indeed, it seems the "COVID crime wave" had caught up with her: A September 2021 poll found that while 57 percent of city residents approved of the job she was doing, 53 percent also felt the city was on the wrong track, including 48 percent of Democrats. The top issue was crime, which 70 percent of respondents felt was headed in the wrong direction.

She later told New York that by stepping down, she was "putting my emotional and mental health first"—a worthy reason, though a bit odd since she now seeks an even higher office.

Then again, she also had higher aspirations. Bottoms was one of the first officeholders to endorse Biden for president in 2020, and she later made his shortlist of potential running mates. After the end of her term, she joined Biden's White House as director of the Office of Public Engagement, after which she moved over to the President's Export Council for the remainder of his term.

Bottoms announced her run for governor just four months after leaving Washington. And while she locked up the Democratic nomination easily, winning 56 percent of the vote among seven candidates, she didn't exactly fire up the base, and it seems like she just expected to coast to victory.

"It feels a lot like she gained the nomination…largely from name identification," progressive journalist Zaid Jilani tells Reason. "She really wasn't raising that much money or spending that much on television….It should be a high-profile race in many ways, but the ideas she's putting forward are fairly rehashed," and "she doesn't have that much creative advertising."

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Rick Jackson's Deep Pockets and Shallow Record

Rick Jackson, meanwhile, seemed to come out of nowhere.

President Donald Trump endorsed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in August 2025, and Jones led the Republican primary field at the end of that year.

While Kemp famously resisted Trump's efforts to subvert Georgia's presidential election results in 2020, Jones was a willing participant in the scheme.

"I've been the Trump guy since 2015, not '16," Jones bragged. "I've taken all the battle scars and everything else. I know who ran and hid during 2020 and everything else."

Then in February 2026, just three months before the primary, Jackson entered the race. He was a septuagenarian with no name recognition, but he was also quite wealthy, so he blanketed the state with ads to introduce himself to voters.

In six weeks, he spent over $30 million—"more than any candidate has ever spent in a primary race for Georgia governor, with more than two months before the May 19 election," wrote Jeff Amy of the Associated Press.

It worked: Jackson beat Jones in a primary runoff with 53 percent of the vote. By then, he had spent $108 million on his campaign while raising less than $400,000 from donors.

Jackson has made much of his background, as a child of poverty who entered the foster system at age 13 to escape a dysfunctional household. As an adult, he started in sales and worked his way up to entrepreneurship, starting Jackson Healthcare in 2000 and growing it to more than $1 billion in annual revenues. He is also a generous donor to charitable causes, particularly those relating to foster care.

But with no political record, Jackson can be hard to pin down on certain issues.

For example, one Jackson ad criticizes Bottoms for the rise of data centers in Atlanta, even though he has also spoken positively of their economic potential.

Georgia Democrats have tarred Jackson as a Trumpian election denier, singling out a comment he made at a campaign event: When asked if the 2020 election was stolen, Jackson replied, "That was totally ridiculous what happened in 2020 and our people really let us down." ("Just as Governor Kemp did, Rick acknowledges both Biden's win and that there were issues in the 2020 election that needed to be resolved in order to ensure Georgians have faith in our electoral system," a campaign spokesperson told CNN.)

During the primaries, he even took heat from both sides on abortion: Jones accused Jackson's company of working with Planned Parenthood, while Jackson himself seemed to suggest he wanted to change the state's abortion ban to remove exceptions for rape or incest. ("Rick believes we have a strong pro-life law in place and he wants to keep it as it is," his campaign said in a statement.)

And while he made Trump-like pledges, like to "make Georgia No. 1 in the nation for criminal deportations" and keep "the religion of woke ideology" out of schools, his platform calls for an "intelligent Medicaid expansion" in the state.

Jackson has also pivoted just over the course of the campaign.

He bragged in his campaign announcement video that he "donated a million bucks to Trump," and he's said that if elected, he would be "just like" Trump but "with a southern tone."

He said Trump had "no bigger supporter" than himself, and he could not name a single Trump policy he disagreed with. When Trump endorsed Jackson at a campaign rally in July, the candidate pointed to the president and said, "I'm going to be this man's favorite governor."

But like many other Republicans, Jackson has distanced himself from the president, whose approval rating is at an all-time low. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that in campaign appearances, Jackson has stopped mentioning Trump directly, preferring to compare himself to Kemp, the sitting governor who remains popular.

He apparently also scrubbed all mentions of the president from his campaign website.

But one thing that has remained consistent in Jackson's campaign strategy is criticizing Bottoms' record as mayor.

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Will the 'COVID Crime Wave' Sink Bottoms?

Some of Jackson's campaign ads feature grateful children who grew up in foster care and benefited from his philanthropy, but for the most part, they have targeted Bottoms over her record.

One ad, titled "Disaster," paints Bottoms' tenure as exactly that, with the city becoming practically unlivable during summer 2020.

"Keisha ended cash bail, gutted the corrections budget, let Atlanta burn, and unleashed a crime wave," Jackson wrote on X to accompany another ad. "Then she walked away."

"If Keisha wants to run from her record," according to a campaign email, "we're going to make sure Georgia remembers exactly what that record was."

Many Jackson ads, flyers, and mailers have featured images of Secoriea Turner, the 8-year-old girl killed by gunfire. (Turner's parents have asked Jackson's campaign to stop.)

But is it fair to blame everything on Bottoms? While Atlanta was worse than most, many major cities saw large homicide spikes: Chicago's murder rate climbed more than 50 percent that year, while New York City's went up nearly 40 percent. Murders in Columbus, Ohio, rose a staggering 67 percent.

Regardless, Bottoms was in charge at the time. And the attacks do seem to have an effect, as she's locked in a dead heat against Jackson.

Granted, Bottoms was never a particularly strong candidate. When she ran for mayor in 2017, she won the runoff election by fewer than 800 votes, even with the endorsement of the outgoing mayor.

Georgia also has not elected a Democratic governor in nearly three decades, though it has elected Democrats to the U.S. Senate three times since 2020 and seems poised to reelect one this year.

There's also the fact of Jackson's money, saturating the state with eight-figure ad buys while Democrats were spending only a fraction of that.

Of course, money alone can't buy a victory: Kemp defeated Stacey Abrams in each of the last two races for governor, despite being comfortably outraised and outspent each time.

But Bottoms currently trails Ossoff by five points in an election cycle expected to be quite beneficial to their party.

It seems the race will serve as an indicator of how fresh the summer of COVID-19 still feels for Georgians.

"To the kind of voter that Jackson is courting, it probably is true that had Democrats [instead] nominated the mayor of Macon [a smaller Georgia city], they would be in a stronger position than nominating the mayor of Atlanta, especially one who was in power during those years," Jilani tells Reason. "If he wins, it demonstrates that that is still a fairly potent line of attack."

The post Atlanta's Former Mayor Is Running for Georgia Governor. The 2020 Protests Could Cost Her the Race. appeared first on Reason Magazine.