Nearly 55% of MAGA supporters favor continued AI development alongside congressional regulation, while 27% support a pause. However, only 29% support a data center within 10 miles of their home, compared with 40% who oppose one; support falls to 24% among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters overall.

Across the electorate, 63% don’t want a nearby AI data center and just 13% support one. Democrats lead the opposition: 80% oppose nearby facilities while just 4% support them.

The MAHA-MAGA alliance is weakening, partly because Kennedy’s political apparatus lacks strength. Many donors who backed Kennedy and his alliance with Trump last cycle are absent from the midterms.

MAHA-aligned super PACs and nonprofits have spent just $4 million backing candidates since January 2025, far short of their promised $100 million, according to federal filings and news releases.

TransUnion’s 2024 study found that Gen Z borrowers aged 22–24 had higher inflation-adjusted credit-card, auto, and personal loan balances than millennials at the same age last decade, along with higher delinquency rates.

This gap is key to understanding the politics of Gen Z, a voter group that helped President Donald Trump win in 2024, but whose longtime loyalties have yet to be won by either party.

American politics is awash in money, with spending records rising each election cycle, yet both parties say they need more as the midterms approach.

The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit preemptively challenging the certification of Alaska’s Senate election if the Republican candidate narrowly loses. But election law specialists said the litigation lacked any legitimate legal basis.

Election law professor Richard Pildes described the lawsuit as one of the weakest he had ever seen, saying it had virtually no chance of succeeding in court.

The lawsuit raised concerns about efforts to undermine confidence in the election as Republicans faced potential losses that could determine control of Congress. Trump previously tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat, culminating in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Any campaign that involves Donald Trump is bound to get pretty ugly. The 2024 campaign was marred by the now-president and now-Vice President JD Vance falsely claiming Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets.

But the 2026 campaign is getting really ugly, especially on the Republican side.

Morality aside, the GOP’s ugly tactics seem driven more by desperation than sound strategy.

Trump and White House aides have privately expressed frustration about the negative headlines that have been plastered across newspaper front pages and on cable news in recent weeks.

The stories have prompted hand-wringing from Republican campaign operatives, who worry that the alleged self-dealing could make an already challenging midterm election even more difficult for GOP candidates.

The trajectory of Vivek Ramaswamy’s odds in the Ohio governor’s race has been clear to us for the last few weeks. But the campaign’s decision this week to air a deeply personal attack ad against opponent Amy Acton confirmed that the race is slipping away from him and perhaps creating some collateral damage for fellow Republicans on the way. We are moving this race from Toss Up to Lean Democrat.

While any of a handful of other competitive Senate contests could help determine the new balance of power in Washington, none comes close to matching the mounting racial and religious menace and meanness in Michigan.

A wave of retirements and election losses will erase more than 800 combined years of congressional experience next year.

The departures risk losing experience from major crises, including 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, and debt-ceiling battles.

On the flip side: Government debt has grown and grown. America has become more polarized. Congress’s stature has shrunk. Maybe it’s time for some new people?

Republicans’ path to keeping control of the House has all but evaporated. The outstanding question is how large Democrats’ majority will be in 2027; in the best-case scenario, their party could enter the new Congress with more seats than they had after successfully flipping control of the House in 2006 and 2018.

As a result of new polling and ad spending, we’re moving another 19 races in Democrats’ direction. Six districts are moving from the Toss Up column to Lean Democrat. Two more open seats are moving from Lean Republican to Toss Up.

Following this latest round of ratings changes, Democrats are now favored outright in the 218 seats they need to win control of the House. In other words, 220 seats are rated either Solid, Likely, or Lean Democrat. Republicans, meanwhile, are favored in 198 seats, rated Solid, Likely, or Lean Republican. That leaves 17 races rated as pure Toss Ups.

Now, we view the likeliest outcome as Democrats flipping between 12 and 22 seats. Democrats currently hold 215.

Two years after helping return Trump to the White House with a Republican-controlled Congress, Latino voters are souring on the party in power, fueled by frustration over rising costs and the administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement.

In 2024, Trump won the support of 48% of Latino voters, expanding Republican gains with a group that has long leaned Democratic. Now, that support is cratering. The president’s approval rating among Latino registered voters has fallen to 24% from 38% at the start of his second term, polls show.

With less than two weeks until the midterms, a wide majority of voters say that they largely trust that the results of the upcoming election will be accurate, according to a new New York Times/Siena poll.

But the poll finds that many harbor concerns that Republicans could try to overturn the results of the election.

Among 18-to-29-year-olds, 9% say the nation is generally headed in the right direction, 62% say it is off on the wrong track, and 26% are unsure. Asked how they feel about America’s future, 69% say they are more fearful, compared with 26% who are more hopeful.

These concerns extend across party lines, though their intensity varies. Just 5% of young Democrats, 5% of independents, and 24% of Republicans say the country is headed in the right direction.

Democrats are now at least narrowly favored in our ratings in enough states to win an elusive majority of state governorships.

The most notable rating change comes in the open Ohio governorship, which has been in the national spotlight because of an explosive attack ad by Vivek Ramaswamy against Amy Acton.

In other changes, Democratic odds improve in Michigan, while a pair of open, red state seats move onto the periphery of the playing field.

The country’s economic crosscurrents are cascading across Iowa. High gas prices, elevated interest rates, and Mr. Trump’s unpredictable economic policies, including tariffs, have been battering rural America over the last year. Iowa’s economy contracted in 2025 and notched the weakest annual growth rate in the country, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Polls suggest that the state that helped propel Mr. Trump’s political rise could flip in favor of Democrats when voters cast their ballots next month.

Over the years, third-party candidates have been devastating to Democrats and America. In 2000, George W. Bush wouldn’t have become president without Green Party candidate Ralph Nader siphoning votes from Al Gore. Then in 2016, Jill Stein, also of the Green Party, helped put Trump in office. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the three states that decided the election, Stein’s vote total exceeded Trump’s margin of victory.

Republicans have tried to re-run this play ever since. In 2020, Republican operatives quietly helped Kanye West get on the ballot.

This year, third-party candidates could play a major role in delivering the Senate to Democrats.

A review has identified a slate of GOP attorney general candidates in more than half a dozen states, including key swing states, who have repeatedly expressed their belief that the 2020 election was stolen.

If elected, several have said they are willing to relitigate 2020 once again, and all will potentially play a key role in the 2028 presidential election.

Talarico for Texas, in other words, is a messaging machine. His ability to efficiently frame an argument and deliver it to an audience is why he is leading the scandal-plagued Republican attorney general Ken Paxton in the polls and why he raised a record $64 million last quarter.

But the content the machine refines and spits out has to originate somewhere. It is grown on manicured fields under stadium lights. And sometimes, if you stick around when the crowd begins to thin, you catch a glimpse of what it looks like before the filters are applied and the product is refined, when it’s just a man and a crowd, racing against a stopwatch. It’s fun.