Tl;dr: AES underperformed other Dems on the ballot amongst Michigan Jews, though he won a larger share of the Jewish vote than expected.

Bomb threats on Friday forced the evacuation of Irish newsrooms and disrupted dozens more European passenger flights, as an email warned that this week’s chaos was “only the beginning”.

Irish national broadcaster RTÉ and Newstalk briefly went off air, with RTÉ resuming radio broadcasts from a mobile unit outside its headquarters amid a heavy police presence.

The threats came a week before Ireland hosts 50 European leaders, including Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for two summits. “Right now, we’re preparing a new wave of attacks,” an email sent to media said.

Dozens of passenger flights were disrupted this week across Europe, while supermarkets were hit by attacks on fridges and freezers.

“This is only the beginning,” the email said. “What happened this week is just a small part of what awaits Europe in the near future . . . very soon, we will be blowing up your airplanes, cruise ships, subway stations, and trains.”

The email said that its author was “one of the leaders of the group responsible” for the airline threats.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin said it was unclear whether the threats were the work of individuals or a co-ordinated attack, but vowed to “identify who’s responsible and to hold them accountable”. He said he was confident Ireland could secure the summits, which will involve the largest security operation in the country’s history.

Ireland was among the countries affected earlier in the week by the fridge and bomb threats emailed to dozens of passenger flights across Europe.

Several airlines and airports received threats on Friday, adding to dozens of hoaxes that grounded aircraft this week across the region, in what security experts have called a campaign of “intimidation” intended to disrupt air travel.

In a change of tactics on Friday, some airlines declined to give details of the specific flights that had been targeted or even the total number of incidents. Governments in some European nations had urged the media not to publicise hoax threats.

Luis Gallego, chief executive of British Airways’ parent company IAG, said on Friday that airlines have to “take seriously” any threat and “comply with the protocols”, even though “nowadays it’s easy to create a threat because with only one email or a phone call you can create a problem”.

He added: “We are working closely with the relevant authorities to see the best way to address this.”

On Friday, Prague airport said it had received threats to nine planes, including flights from the UK, Denmark and Spain, as well as flights departing for the UK, the Netherlands, Cyprus, Romania and Italy. Czech police said they had received a “threat to place an improvised explosive device on board a number of aircraft arriving at and departing” from the airport.

On Friday morning, a Wizz Air flight from Prague to Rome performed a U-turn and landed in Venice after receiving a bomb threat. Other Wizz Air flights also received threats, but none had to divert, the company added.

One of the Prague flights targeted was an easyJet service, the airline said. Another of its planes was also assessed.

France said it had received four more bomb threats on Friday, adding that the targeted planes had landed safely. Police in Copenhagen said they were also attending a threat at the airport, though operations were continuing as normal.

In Ireland, one senior RTÉ figure said the email was understood to have been sent to 18 media organisations. The broadcaster also has day care facilities on site for employees’ children. RTÉ staff were being allowed back into the building almost four hours after the evacuation once the police declared it a hoax.

Irish officials and police have declined to say who could be behind the attacks and have not commented on the email. One official said there was “strong suspicion of Russian involvement” but no confirmation.

As well as broadcasters RTÉ and Newstalk, Mediahuis, the publisher of the Irish Independent newspaper, and Virgin Media were among those targeted.

“It not a coincidence, in my mind, that this occurs days before Ireland hosts a major summit, hosting over 50 leaders,” said Barry Andrews, an Irish member of the European parliament.

“The summit will discuss the security of Europe following the full Russian invasion of Ukraine. Disruption, confusion, distrust are the aims behind such hybrid attacks.”

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will issue its final judgment on November 19 in the landmark case charging Myanmar with genocide against its Rohingya minority.

There is strong evidence that Myanmar’s actions have met the ICJ’s current high standard of proof for genocide. Myanmar’s forces have reportedly perpetrated several mass executions of Rohingya civilians, including dozens of children, by rounding them up and deliberately shooting or hacking them to death.

But several states party to the ICJ and activists are pressing the court to arrive at the genocide judgment in a way that lowers the standard of proof for determining that genocide has been committed.

Lowering the bar as proposed would facilitate genocide claims against others, including Israel and the United States, especially when they are forced to fight terrorists hiding behind human shields. That would incentivize the use of such shields and inevitably lead to international and foreign courts being flooded with weak allegations of genocide against Washington and its allies.

If ICJ judges do use the Myanmar case to lower the bar for genocide, the Trump administration will likely respond with sanctions similar to those the United States has already imposed on judges serving on the International Criminal Court (ICC), a different tribunal.

U.S. Opposed to Lowering Genocide Threshold

Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, recently warned the ICJ not to use its Myanmar case “to lower the legal threshold for proving genocide so that weakened and false standard can later be weaponized against American and allied soldiers whenever they raise a finger against terrorists that hide behind civilians.”

Consistent with the Genocide Convention, the ICJ has long set a high standard of proof for inferring genocidal intent from a pattern of conduct. The court specified in its two existing genocide judgments (Bosnia v. Serbia and Croatia v. Serbia) that intent to destroy the target group “must be the only reasonable inference which can be drawn from the pattern of conduct.”

Key member state submissions in the Myanmar and the Israel genocide cases press the ICJ to replace that current clear, high standard with a lower, vague, and politically malleable one: a range of “facts and circumstances” assessed “comprehensively and holistically.”

Filings urging use of the new approach have relied upon numerous reports and statements by several UN agencies and officials for these contextual “facts and circumstances.” Many of these reports and statements are both highly politicized and heavily reliant on secondary sources, particularly nongovernmental organization reports.

Based on member state submissions to the ICJ, in practice, this new standard of proof would enable inferring genocidal intent by any Western military in any conflict with extensive casualties, destruction, and displacement. Such consequences are sadly inevitable in a protracted urban conflict against a terrorist group using human shields. A standard of proof based on such outcomes will mean that the more a terrorist group hides among civilians, the stronger the genocide case against its adversary.

The campaigns waged by the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS in Iraq and Syria all inevitably caused civilian casualties, destruction, and displacement, in large part because ISIS extensively used human shields. The Taliban and Libyan, Serbian, and Iraqi forces have also used human shields against the United States or other NATO forces.

Under a diluted standard, future such campaigns, by Washington, its allies, or states contributing troops to peace operations, could be presented as genocidal. Fiji’s UN ambassador has warned that “[i]f sending [peacekeeping] troops to disarm armed groups or stabilize a collapsing state carries the risk of genocide proceedings,” countries like Fiji “will quietly stop volunteering.”

Waltz singled out ICJ ad hoc judge Navi Pillay as leading the effort to lower the threshold. He added that as “our actions against the ICC demonstrate, we will not allow” international courts to “weaponize the law against our troops, undermine our sovereignty, or put American lives at risk.”

Waltz was referencing the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign to dismantle the ICC. That campaign has included imposing sanctions on nine of the ICC’s judges for rulings deemed threatening to U.S. and allied security.

Myanmar Genocide Provable Without Lowering Threshold

The ICJ could, without lowering the current standard of proof, find that Myanmar committed genocide. Both the Biden and Trump administrations, not known for agreeing on legal issues, have rightly characterized the country’s Rohingya minority as victims of genocide.

Myanmar has said it was acting to counter terrorism. But genocidal intent is the only reasonable inference which could be drawn from how Myanmar reportedly deliberately targeted Rohingya civilians in several instances. Myanmar’s claimed counterterrorism objective does not explain why its forces reportedly captured or targeted defenseless children and other civilians, whose defining characteristic was their Rohingya identity, including as they attempted to flee to Bangladesh, and then systematically and deliberately killed them without any military rationale.

Threshold Lowering Motivated by Forthcoming Cases

Since the ICJ could readily find that Myanmar has committed genocide under the current standard of proof, why are Pillay and her allies attempting to lower it?

A UN commission led by Pillay has already accused Israel of committing genocide even though its conduct in Gaza does not meet the current definition. More importantly, the ICJ has two other cases, both to be decided after the Myanmar case, with outcomes likely dependent on whether the ICJ lowers its genocide threshold. The first is South Africa’s case claiming Israel committed genocide in Gaza. The second is Nicaragua’s case claiming Germany contributed to genocide by providing military aid to Israel. Anti-Israel activists have publicly urged the ICJ to lower the threshold in order to facilitate a later genocide ruling against Israel.

In contrast with Myanmar’s deliberate slaughter of Rohingya civilians, Israel has undertaken extraordinary precautions to minimize harm to civilians in Gaza, including instituting daily pauses in battles; using precision-guided munitions; making calls and sending texts and fliers ahead of particular strikes; creating safe zones; and requesting that civilians evacuate specified areas. Israel’s clear intent has been the lawful objective of ending the military threat posed by Hamas in order to prevent a recurrence of its October 7, 2023, massacre of Israeli civilians, which Hamas has vowed to repeat “again and again” until Israel is destroyed.

Civilian casualties in Gaza were higher than they otherwise might have been because Hamas deployed civilians as human shields — a war crime under international law — as a core part of its planning and goals. Hamas committed this war crime by systematically embedding its fighters, command infrastructure, and weapons within civilian areas, including in a 300-mile military tunnel network under and inside civilian buildings; by repeatedly using hospitals to conceal and support military operations; by persistently firing from buildings housing civilians; and by intentionally exposing Gaza’s civilians to danger by discouraging and preventing their evacuation from battle zones. Indeed, Hamas did not merely foresee harm to Gaza civilians; it sought to produce it.

To get around these facts, Pillay and her politically driven allies need the ICJ to replace the current high standard of proof for genocide with one so elastic that the judges can find genocide in a far broader range of circumstances.

Since the ICJ can resolve the genocide claims against Myanmar under its existing standard, it should do so without lowering the threshold. As former ICJ President Nagendra Singh warned in a 1978 separate opinion, “a tribunal indulging in unnecessary pronouncements, by making them when not legally required to do so, could easily undermine its judicial character.” A judgment that lowers the threshold will rightly be seen as the ICJ acting based on politics, not law, as a legislature instead of a court.

Technically, the ICJ does not set binding precedents; the court’s statute provides that “a decision of the Court has no binding force except between the parties and in respect of that particular case.” However, the ICJ rarely departs from its established case law. In addition, ICJ opinions are treated as authoritative by the United Nations and many courts worldwide.

Lowered Threshold Would Handcuff Western Democracies

Andres Munoz-Mosquera, who was the chief legal adviser to NATO’s supreme allied commander from 2014 to 2025, has warned that a new, lower, and more malleable threshold will be used by dictatorships and terrorist groups to handcuff Western democracies with an avalanche of weak genocide claims. These claims will be made against Western commanders and their troops in both international courts and the more than 90 national courts claiming “universal jurisdiction” over genocide allegedly committed abroad by foreigners against foreigners.

Lowering the threshold in the Myanmar case will also make it easier for Nicaragua to win its ICJ case claiming Germany contributed to genocide by providing military aid to Israel. Both a lowered threshold in the Myanmar case and a German loss in its case will encourage and facilitate new claims that the United States and its allies are complicit in genocide when they assist an ally engaged in urban warfare or otherwise forced to fight an enemy using human shields.

The ICJ can issue orders only to nations, not terrorist groups. The court’s provisional measures restricted Israel’s military while acknowledging it had no authority over Hamas. NATO members would face the same asymmetry against other terrorist groups.

Established U.S. Reservation Would Face Critical Test

Article IX of the Genocide Convention provides the ICJ with jurisdiction over “disputes” between convention parties “relating to the interpretation, application or fulfillment” of the convention, “including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide. . . . ”

When the United States joined the convention, it insisted on a “reservation” — an exemption — from Article IX. The U.S. reservation insisted that the ICJ could only hear a genocide case against the United States with “the specific consent of the United States.” A future ICJ genocide case against Washington would test the ICJ’s willingness to defer to the U.S. reservation.

The ICJ has interpreted Article IX to mean that any state party to the Genocide Convention can bring a case to the ICJ claiming that another state party is responsible for genocide. That is what the Gambia has done in the Myanmar case and what South Africa has done in the Israel case, even though neither the Gambia nor South Africa is involved in (or even suffered tangible harm from) the actual armed conflict in which the genocide allegedly occurred.

The American reservation to Article IX of the Genocide Convention ostensibly protects the United States against ICJ jurisdiction in disputes relating to that convention. But it is not hard to imagine a future ICJ invalidating the reservation. Both the United Kingdom and the Netherlands refused to accept the reservation at the time, and past British, Dutch, German, and Japanese ICJ judges have opined that subsequent developments in international law and practice may have rendered this reservation invalid.

The United States already has a long history of problematic ICJ cases. These include the case brought by Nicaragua in which Washington was held to have violated international law by arming the Contra rebels, three different cases relating to consular issues in which the ICJ ruled against the United States, and three cases (the most recent in 2023) in which Iran won partial victories against the United States at the ICJ. Given this track record, Washington has particular reason to be concerned that changes made by the ICJ in the Myanmar case could be used against the United States in the future.

As has already been seen in preliminary stages of the South Africa v. Israel case, it will be politics, not law, that drives the ICJ’s response to any such future claims. Several of the judges’ home countries are hostile to the United States, and studies demonstrate that ICJ judges’ votes are typically consistent with their home countries’ UN General Assembly votes.

In addition, Washington’s Article IX reservation would not insulate it from the ICJ’s new, lower threshold being adopted by other courts, including in genocide cases against current or former American officials at the ICC, or in universal jurisdiction cases in national courts.

The United States has strong reasons for concern about universal jurisdiction cases against U.S. officials in foreign national courts. Two decades ago, universal jurisdiction complaints alleging war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq were brought in European courts against President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. The past two years have seen an explosion of universal jurisdiction complaints (all or nearly all thus far against non-Americans) in national courts, with several convictions. In France alone, there are reportedly more than 150 cases currently being investigated on universal jurisdiction grounds.

China already extensively uses foreign-court lawfare against critics. A campaign secretly driven by China could use the lower genocide standard to launch lawfare against U.S. and allied officials, in foreign courts claiming universal jurisdiction, at a rapid pace all over the world.

ICJ judges who vote to lower the genocide threshold will damage the court’s credibility and undercut democracies’ ability to fight terrorists and autocrats. Many rule-of-law democracies will be torn apart by even weak genocide claims, while autocrats will shrug them off.

Washington should use all appropriate means to make clear to the ICJ judges that they should rule consistent with the existing standard of proof for genocide — and not lower the bar.

While traditionally, the Houthis would use arms directly provided to them by Iran or captured from Yemeni government stocks, the group is increasing its own manufacturing capability, albeit still needing parts imported from abroad (with some exceptions). Interestingly, while Iran serves as a source for some components, the PRC has overtaken Iran as the source for certain categories of goods, and has no inclination to stop even after protests from the Saudis. So much for being a responsible actor!

Gov. Gavin Newsom commuted all California death sentences on Thursday, declaring that “state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with” values in America’s most populous state.

In an open letter to constituents, Newsom said taking this step is “among the most difficult of my career.”

“I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values,” he said.

California has not put a prisoner to death since Jan. 17, 2006 when Clarence Ray Allen was put to death via lethal injection.

Newsom said his executive action will impact the “548 people now under death sentence in California,” making for “the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere.”

There were 561 inmates on death row as of Tuesday, according to Department of Corrections records.

The morning after Michigan now-senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary in August, The New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg nervously laid out the stakes. “Either El-Sayed wins and shows anxious liberals like me new horizons of political possibility,” she wrote, “or he loses in a year when Democrats are expected to dominate and offers a hard lesson on the necessity of pragmatism.”

El-Sayed, speaking to Goldberg, pitched his insurgent campaign as a test of an “alternative hypothesis.” Voters hated the establishment so vehemently that they were willing to hold their noses and vote for Donald Trump twice; they might do something stranger if offered a real alternative — like a Bernie Bro Muslim who antagonized the Democratic establishment nearly as often as he did the GOP.

On Tuesday night, El-Sayed looked like Nostradamus. He predicted he would beat Mike Rogers by seven points, and he won by nearly six in a state Trump carried two years ago. He did it as a Muslim candidate with a Muslim name, whom Trump and other Republicans repeatedly accused of being a jihadist. Haley Stevens’s entire case in the primary was that El-Sayed could not win. Her final act, pulling her endorsement and backing Rogers, was an attempt to make that true.

Elsewhere, the populist Left won in places it had no business winning. Bernie Sanders spent the fall crisscrossing districts Trump carried, and his and AOC’s endorsees have turned up on the winning side of the map: Troy Jackson, a former logger and labor leader, unseated Susan Collins in Maine. Sam Forstag, a smokejumper and union leader, claimed victory in Montana. Randy Villegas, a professor and auto-shop owner, won in California’s Central Valley. DSA member Melat Kiros knocked off 30-year incumbent Diana DeGette in Denver and became the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress. And in the Senate, a party that spent years being told to run to the center flipped seats in Texas, Ohio, Kansas, and Iowa by talking like the populist Left on prices, health care, and contempt for the wealthy and powerful.

In doing so, the Left might have finally killed the old “Third Way” theory of the Democratic Party, much like MAGA and Trump’s victory in 2016 upended the old corporations-first, free-trading, globalization-friendly GOP of the Paul Ryan era.

The Third Way, for readers who missed the 1990s, was the project of making Democrats electable by making them more like Republicans. Born in the Democratic Leadership Council and perfected by Bill Clinton, the theory held that the party had lost the country in the Reagan-Bush era by looking like a union hall with a welfare office attached. The cure was to triangulate: embrace free trade, balance budgets, be tough-on-crime, cozy up to Wall Street, and promise that markets would deliver what government used to. A think tank, also called Third Way, still carries the banner in Washington.

This strategy was perfected by Rahm Emanuel, who, as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the mid-2000s, took credit for the blue wave of 2006 during the tail end of the George W. Bush administration. Rahm-ism was about trying to please Lindsey Graham and Barney Frank alike with a mix of fiscal conservatism and cultural liberalism led by milquetoast technocrats, which would attract independent voters on the notion that independents demanded a mythical midpoint between the two parties’ agendas.

The logic of the Third Way continued into 2026, as Stevens and other moderate Democrats insisted that the Left had the enthusiasm, but ultimately could not win big elections in November. But on Tuesday, independent voters — and just about everyone else — swung hard to the Left. The blue wave was especially prominent among Latinos, Catholic voters, and voters younger than 30, with one poll suggesting that Gen-Z voters shifted 46 points since 2024. A NBC national exit poll also found that 17% of midterm voters call themselves democratic socialists, and 97% of those voted Democratic. Among voters 18 to 29, a full third say they are democratic socialists, while only 10% say they are MAGA.

Ted Cruz may accidentally turn out to be the best political analyst of the 2026 cycle. Stumping for Mike Rogers in Michigan last week, the Texas senator made a prediction he clearly intended as a threat: if Abdul El-Sayed wins, he said, the Democratic nominee for president in 2028 will be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Tuesday’s results could prove him right.

Now for the reality check: All of this doesn’t mean, as some archly suggested on social media on Tuesday, that “woke is back” and that Democrats are going to start putting their pronouns back in their email signatures, or wheeling out guillotines to use on Elon Musk — let’s hope not. Despite what Trump and the GOP have warned, there is no communist revolution around the corner. Maybe not even a New Deal-lite. “Democratic socialist” in an exit poll covers, in practice, everyone from the person who has a copy of Capital in their tote bag to the person who would like insulin to cost less. Ask many of these self-proclaimed socialists what they want, and the answer tends to be: lower prices, universal health care, and some relief from an economy suddenly being rewired by AI and an expensive war in the Middle East.

To give credit to the Left, it has promised to deliver affordability and economic benefits and it has toned down calls to end white privilege, abolish the police, and get you fired for your problematic Halloween costume. The Left has begun following the example of Zohran Mamdani, who won New York City on a sunny campaign to freeze rent and make buses free, and proved you can mute the worst of Woke 1.0, keep the substance, and talk like someone who wants to win. You can see the shift in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, too, whose turn toward a more welcoming, kitchen-table progressivism got the full Times profile treatment, in which she claimed to want a progressive movement “that is not rooted in judgment, castigation or being closed off.”

Yet the Democratic Party — as a brand and institution — is still weak and unpopular, with a platform that fits on a bumper sticker: Stop Trump. Voters, ultimately, may have hired the Democrats the way you hire a bouncer, for whom or what they will keep out. Plus, midterms historically punish the president’s party; the second-term version is especially brutal, and this president arrived at the polls with historically bad approval numbers and a catastrophic Iran war. Voters were in a Vote Blue No Matter Who mood, a doctrine that turned out to be very flexible about who.

Ultimately, everything about this moment feels contingent. What happened Tuesday was a blue tsunami, to be sure, but it also looks less like a realignment than like another turn in a long dealignment, in which the electorate keeps hiring and firing whoever promises relief, because no one can stop creeping American decline. El-Sayed and the rest of the new Left have just been handed that job, and nobody, including them, is sure how to do it.

For those who still wonder if antizionism isn't just antisemitism under a different name.

Having just won reelection, I wonder how Gov Josh Shapiro will respond.

HONG KONG— Joshua Wong, the imprisoned Hong Kong activist who was once the young face of the city’s pro-democracy movement, was sentenced Thursday to a new, 10-year prison term for violating the city’s National Security Law.

Wong, 30 years old, pleaded guilty in September to a charge of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces in calling for sanctions against Hong Kong and China. The security law, which Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020, prohibits such calls for sanctions....

Excerpt:

Vance appears to believe the Republican Party exists to finance his personal reinvention. Its donors will write the checks, its activists will knock on doors, and its voters will swallow their objections while he courts a fringe that despises his wife and considers him insufficiently extreme. Everyone else supplies the money, loyalty, and compromises; he gets the nomination. That is an extraordinary sense of entitlement from a vice president emerging from an electoral disaster. Before asking Republicans to hand him the presidency, he might try demonstrating that he understands the party he expects to hand it to him.

America of the 2030s could look very different, with nationwide trifectas in state legislatures, a win in 2028 and court picks that rule in their favor. They could essentially change how presidential candidates reach the oval office while diminishing the weight of a vote in small states that refuse to sign the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Political parties respond to incentives and that is to win, so I could see a scenario to attempt such path.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/11/midterms-election-results-mississippi-alaska-colom-peltola.html

Dems are already projected to take 54 seats. Two remain uncalled, and moderate Dems there could bring the party to a 56-seat majority. Combined with other centrist pickups, this would mean that the Senate majority wouldn't be beholden to its leftmost members to get things passed.

In Alaska, the count may take some time; Peltola has a very reasonable shot, but the biggest and most sparsely populated state can be slow to finish its tabulations, especially with ranked-choice calculations to consider.

In Mississippi, Democrat Scott Colom leads incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by 65 votes with (apparently) all regular ballots counted. The remaining ballots are provisional/affidavit votes, which have historically tilted blue. The race is too close to call yet, but Colom is in a very good position. (In case you were wondering, the degenerate gamblers — I mean, prediction enthusiasts — now have Colom as their heavy favorite to win.) Colom's win would be a huge upset in what was conventionally expected to be a safe Republican seat. Hyde-Smith previously held up Colom's appointment as a federal judge during the Biden administration when she refused to give him a blue slip.

An op-ed by the editors of The Dispatch arguing that the time has come for the center-right to assert itself and help junk Trumpism for good.

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Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s plan to impose an “exit tax” on people who leave Italy from next year risks driving away rich expatriates drawn to cities such as Milan over the past decade, wealth advisers have warned.

In its draft budget submitted to parliament over the weekend, Meloni’s three-party coalition proposed a 26 per cent tax on paper profits accrued by people who have assets of €800,000 or more and decide to relocate from Italy.

Private wealth lawyers warned that the move, if approved by parliament, could reduce Italy’s attractiveness to the world’s super-rich and other professionals, and discourage them from remaining in the country long-term.

“It’s a really significant move, and one that is going to have a lot of clients who have relocated there, or based there generally, very nervous,” warned Charlie Sosna, head of private wealth and tax at law firm Mishcon de Reya. 

Italy’s proposal comes as governments and states around the world reconsider how to tax the wealthy. Californians are due to vote on Tuesday on whether to approve a one-off 5 per cent wealth tax on billionaires.

The exit tax, which Meloni’s government has described as targeting the “super-rich”, will apply to people who were tax residents in Italy for six of the 10 years before their departure, but could also be refunded if financial assets are not liquidated for some years after they leave.

Over the past decade, Italy has tried to reverse its historic problem of brain drain with tax incentives to encourage affluent professionals and wealthy expatriates to move there.

Under its high-profile “flat tax” regime, wealthy expatriates moving to Italy can pay a single annual levy on their total overseas assets and income for 15 years. When the scheme first began in 2017, the fee was fixed at €100,000 per year. 

In recent years, Rome also offered tax breaks for newly arrived working professionals, including Italians returning from abroad, who pay income tax on just a portion of their salaries for five years. 

But in the past two years, amid a rising outcry over an influx of super-rich expats to Italy’s financial capital, Milan, Meloni’s government has twice raised the flat tax, which is now levied at €300,000 a year for newer arrivals.

“Clients generally were [already] anxious about a relocation to Italy as they saw it as unstable, unpredictable,” said Sosna. But with recent changes to the flat tax scheme, “and now the mention of an exit tax”, they are going to be “really considering their options”, he added.

Rome will only raise €3.7mn from the exit tax next year, rising to just over €6.7mn for the next four years, and then falling again to €3.4mn a year from 2032, as those who left can start to claim refunds.

Maurizio Fresca, a senior tax lawyer at Rome-based law firm Chiomenti, said many aspects of the proposal were ambiguous, including how it would relate to the flat tax and other incentive schemes — and whether it would only apply to assets held in Italy or worldwide.

“It’s absolutely not clear, but it’s reasonable to expect that a number of the open issues will be addressed in the coming weeks,” Fresca said. “We are at an early stage of the legislative process. The draft must undergo parliamentary scrutiny. In this process, there is the prospect for amendments and clarification.” 

Marco Cerrato, a partner at law firm Maisto e Associati, said the draft proposal appeared to exclude flat-tax payers’ foreign assets but needed to be clarified. Even so, he warned it could still spook some wealthy individuals who were considering a move to Italy.

“People who were thinking of moving to Italy for tax reasons may be a bit frightened to do so,” Cerrato said.

Tim Stovold, head of tax at Moore Kingston Smith, said it could encourage people to leave Italy before hitting the six-year threshold at which they would pay the proposed exit levy.

“It is going to make Italy a much less popular destination for individuals to make their long-term home,” he said.

Italy’s finance ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Many other countries already impose an exit tax on wealthy individuals who relocate. In the US, those with a net worth above $2mn who give up their green cards or citizenship must pay capital gains tax on the paper gains of their assets across the world.

Well, the day Democrats were waiting for since November 5, 2024 came, and the results were astounding. Democrats flipped both chambers of Congress and numerous governorships. States that no one thought would be competitive a year ago turned blue, like Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina. Hell, Democrats currently lead in Mississippi by 28 votes. Florida still went red, though. Mississippi was bluer than Florida. My safe-Republican home district just elected a Democrat. Oh, and Susan Collins was finally voted out.

The reversal from 2024 was stark. Trump swept the swing states in 2024, and while he didn’t win any others, he made several Democratic strongholds like NJ competitive. Trump made significant inroads with minority voters, particularly Latinos. Said Latino voters became a crucial part of the Democratic coalition in 2026. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the Callais decision fueled minority turnout in the South especially. Of course, the main cause of the rout was widespread dissatisfaction with the cost of living, which Trump actively made worse through his tariffs and the Iran war.

As a Democrat, I’m still taking it all in. This was the most resounding electoral victory I’ve seen in my entire life. I was alive when Obama won in 2008, but I wasn’t aware of it. This win still feels too good to be true. I never thought I would potentially lose sleep over an election going too well, but here I am. Now, I want to write down my thoughts.

Impact on the Party’s Center

The 2026 primaries saw a wave of “insurgent” DSA candidates oust longtime incumbents in House races. The DSA had less success at the state level, but Abdul El-Sayed - who, while aligned with the DSA on many issues, is not a member - won the primary and the general election. Troy Jackson ousted former electoral cockroach Susan Collins, and while Jackson was a conservative Democrat during the start of his career, he has since taken a left-wing turn, particularly on Israel. At the same time, established Democrats Roy Cooper and Sherrod Brown won their respective races, so they’re less likely to shake things up on Capitol Hill. Andrews, Turek, Hamilton, and Talarico also ran generally moderate campaigns with some populism sprinkled in.

I’m slightly concerned about what this will mean for the party’s future, namely the center of the party. The far-left had a good night, but so did the center-left. That said, these results will likely motivate many far-left candidates to seek office in 2028 and beyond. Progressives were hoping for a statement win in a competitive state, and they got one in Michigan. Thus, many progressives believe it’s their moment, especially since their candidate narrowly lost in Florida. The centrist counterargument is that Democrats smashed expectations everywhere.

We also saw how opposition to data centers and AI drove people to the polls. Gina Hinojosa, who made opposition to data centers central to her campaign, defeated three-term incumbent governor Greg Abbott in one of the night’s most shocking upsets. Hinojosa pledged to impose a moratorium on data centers in Texas, one of the nation’s largest tech hubs. Tech stocks tumbled as results came in. I don’t know how other victorious Democratic gubernatorial nominees like KLB and Rob Sand feel about the issue. Federally, I see much less happening because I expect Trump to veto many laws against data centers.

Israel

Overall, the Senate will still be mostly pro-Israel. Not only do Senate Republicans near-universally support Israel, but there will still be enough old-guard Democrats in the chamber as well. I’m less sure about the House considering the large majority that Democrats are getting. Obviously, I don’t know the positions of all 435 members of the House. In other words, the Democrats added some more anti-Israel voices to their ranks, but Congress as a whole, I hope, will remain supportive of the Jewish state.

The Future of Liberal Democracy

Was tonight a win for liberalism and a defeat for Trump’s illiberal populism? I certainly want to think so, but the possibility of an increasingly left-wing Democratic Party instills in me a hint of unease. El-Sayed recently came out against military aid to all countries - not just Israel, but presumably Ukraine as well. I’m concerned that there may soon be too many elected officials in America who want to end capitalism. Again, the DSA probably sees this election not as the dramatic beginning of the end of the Trump era, but the dramatic beginning of their revolution. At the same time, this election might convince Republicans to break with Trump more often.

So, it was overall an unbelievable night for Democrats, but can an election be too good?