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The GOP’s Message to Both Citizens and Immigrants: Be White and Christian

The Felon has a long history of racism that extends back decades and includes discrimination against blacks seeking to rent apartments in properties owned by the Felon's family to taking out a full page ad seeking the death penalty for young black males accused of violence against a white woman (the young men were subsequently exonerated).   Now, his regime is busy implementing Project 2025, a white supremacist/Christian nationalist agenda authored by extremists at the Heritage Foundation to take the nation backwards in time with a restoration of white privilege and white supremacist/far right "Christian" control.  For would be immigrants and non-white and non-Christian citizens, the message is clear: if one is not white and Christian - meaning right wing "Christian" one is not welcomed and should be relegated to an always inferior place in society and where meritocracy is for whites only and any advancement of non-whites and non-Christians is viewed as preferential treatment at the expense of whites. Even American born children of non-white immigrants are unwelcomed and possessing white skin provides special privileges.  A long piece at The Atlantic looks at how the GOP has become a white supremacist party:

Only a few decades ago, Republican presidents would happily evoke the idea of America as a haven for people around the world. Ronald Reagan, in his farewell speech, declared that “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” Reagan was no paragon of racial tolerance—he opposed the civil-rights movement and privately referred to Black people as “monkeys”—but he did not regard the presence of nonwhite people as an existential threat to America. For years the Republican Party insisted that what it wanted was a certain kind of immigrant—highly skilled people who came here legally, or even, not that long ago, those brought to the U.S. as children who lacked status through no fault of their own and had long since assimilated.

That Republican Party no longer exists. Today the GOP’s view is that almost all immigration—by which the Trump administration seems to mean nonwhite immigration, euphemistically referred to as “Third World” immigration—is bad. That view can be summed up by Homeland Security’s celebratory announcement on X last week that the country was seeing a decline in naturalizations, as if the decline itself were self-evidently a good thing: . . . . The “right” kind of immigrant seems to have become a much narrower category, one defined not by people’s education, potential, or ties to the country, but simply by whether they are white and Christian.

A recent Fox News headline exulted: “Republican Glee Erupts as White House Boasts Sharp Decline in Immigration From Muslim-Majority Nations.” These people could be doctors, engineers, or artists, but if they’re from a “Muslim-majority country,” these Republicans don’t want them here. . . . This is the language of racial purity, and it is not a concept that confines itself to immigration. It suggests that Americans who do not fit the Trump administration’s preferred “demographics” do not belong.

In the many parts of the United States where the native-born population is declining, communities desperately need immigrants. This is true in areas of Ohio, where Haitian immigration has contributed to an economic revival. But to President Trump, Haiti is a “shithole” country, and all Haitians are invaders to be expelled. . . . in July, Haitians in Ohio began being fitted with ankle monitors.

Pierre Damas Bel was in college at Wright State University in Ohio when he was issued his bulky ankle monitor. He was an athlete. And he hoped to study neuroscience and be a doctor. He was exactly the kind of young person whom previous versions of the Republican Party would have seen as an American success story. But he was a Haitian immigrant, so he was not wanted by the Trump administration, which did not seem to care who he was, or who he might become. In September, he called his father to say he felt “humiliated.” CNN reported that soon after, police told his father that he had “thrown himself under a truck.”

A year ago, The New York Times obtained documents submitted to the president by officials at the Departments of State and Homeland Security claiming that “the sharp increase in diversity has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity,” and arguing that the U.S. should admit only “refugees who can be fully and appropriately assimilate [sic], and are aligned with the president’s objectives.”

We now know what was meant by this. The Trump administration has turned refugee admissions into a virtually whites-only program for Afrikaners from South Africa. The applications of these so-called refugees—who do not face significant levels of persecution—are being processed quickly, while those of other groups around the world have largely been suspended. . . but it has supported South Africans in this whites-only refugee program at taxpayer expense.

The Afrikaner policy is illuminating, because it proves the catch-22 facing nonwhite immigrants: If you are poor, you are a moocher, and if you are gainfully employed, you are taking a job from a hardworking American. The only way to be a good immigrant is to be white and Christian.

Bo French, who is running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, has taken this idea a step further, suggesting that the only way to be an American is to be white and Christian.

Last month, French responded to a photograph of Asian students cheering the University of Texas football team by posting, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” adding that “social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.”

State law requires that 90 percent of UT’s students be from Texas; only 10 percent can be international or out-of-state students. French had no idea of the citizenship status of the young people in the photo. What made the students “foreigners” to French was that they were not white.

The conservative activist Christopher Rufo discussed French’s comments on a podcast with Jonathan Keeperman, who leads a book publisher of conservative titles. Keeperman explained that “the mere fact of us being able to notice that No, this is not an assimilated group, this is just a bunch of Indians at the game is itself sort of definitionally the case that they’re not yet assimilated.” What makes them not assimilated? Nothing more than the opinion of a guy who looks at a picture and sees, as Keeperman put it, “just a bunch of Indians.”

It is difficult to imagine a behavior more indicative of assimilation than rejoicing in the victory of your college football team in Texas. And that’s the point: Assimilation is no longer about going to school, getting a job, speaking English, and embracing local culture. It’s about being white and Christian.

In recent years, many conservatives have championed a kind of reactionary “color-blindness” that insists that any race-conscious effort to alleviate discrimination is itself equivalent to racial discrimination. White people earned their success, this argument assumes, but people in all other groups were given unfair advantages—a notable inversion of American history.

[T]he success of nonwhite people remains suspect. In fact, that success is evidence that something is deeply wrong with the system. As my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote about the Rufo and Keeperman podcast, “Resentment of these immigrant communities is understandable, the two men explained, not in spite of the fact that so many South Asians have been successful academically and economically, but because of it.” If “meritocracy” does not produce an overwhelming white majority in elite spaces such as Texas’s flagship public university, what good is it?

Color-blind meritocracy was, for many years, a successful rhetorical strategy for undermining antidiscrimination law and excluding Black people from selective schools and prominent positions. That’s why so many former segregationists seemed to suddenly embrace the concept in the 1970s. For them, resegregation—not color-blindness—was always the goal.

The declining “social trust” that the administration warned against is, of course, not the fault of these students. The problem is bigots like Bo French who cannot accept into their community people who do not share their race and religion, and those who monetize or otherwise profit from that bigotry by spreading it through social media. Like the proverbial child who kills their parents and asks for mercy as an orphan, they are responsible for the problem they are decrying.

Perhaps more significant than French’s remarks is that few Republican politicians in Texas were willing to criticize them. . . . The former Bush adviser Karl Rove, hardly a liberal squish, complained that “my party is being infiltrated by people like Bo French. Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi.” I’m afraid that these people have not “infiltrated” the Republican Party. Today, they are the Republican Party.

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In Texas, MAGA Voters Are Breaking Ranks

Republicans have controlled Texas politics for roughly three decades.  Thus, it borders on the ridiculous that many GOP candidates are running saying they need to be elected to fix the state's problems, conveniently ignoring the fact that is GOP policies that have caused many of the state's problems.  The state's power grid is a mess, the public schools are underfunded thanks to GOP efforts to expand school voucher programs, many Texans lack health care coverage, and catering to billionaires predominates over policies that benefit the many. All too often, Republicans - like elsewhere, including Southwest Virginia - have used culture war issues and racism to garner votes even as GOP policies actively harm these very same voters.  In Texas, the campaigns of James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa suggest that Texans may belatedly realizing that Republicans and GOP policies are not their friends or protectors.  It's something many rural Virginia voters need to learn as GOP policies benefit the very wealthy while everyone else gets screwed.  Indeed, Republicans - just like the Felon - have lied and mislead their base with the hope that they can continue to dupe voters.  While it's unclear whether Democrats can win in Texas, the very fact that Talarico and Hinojosa are doing so well suggest some Texans are finally waking up.  A long column in the New York Times looks at what's happening in Texas:

Lynn Davenport, a lifelong conservative, met Donald Trump backstage at a Texas rally in 2016. On Jan. 6, 2021, she was at his Stop the Steal rally in Washington, though she left before the Capitol was sacked. In 2024, she was a delegate to Texas’ Republican convention and a Republican precinct chair.

And in May, she filmed an ad for Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat running a surprisingly competitive race to become governor of Texas.

The two women have been friends for years, since Hinojosa, a state representative from Austin, helped lead opposition to a crusade by the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, to privatize Texas’ public school system. Abbott’s agenda was bitterly opposed by some conservative Texans, particularly rural ones in places where public schools are the center of the community. . . . Still, as a committed Republican, she didn’t think she’d ever vote for her.

But Davenport has grown increasingly disgusted with Abbott, over both schools and the data centers he invited into Texas. The governor, she said, is a “globalist. Which to me is scarier than a communist, a socialist or a Marxist, because what Abbott is imposing is technocracy. He’s giving the tech giants carte blanche in Texas.” . . . “Gina is someone that I can work with, whereas Abbott doesn’t care what I think,” she told me.

The premise of Hinojosa’s surprisingly competitive campaign is that there’s a critical mass of voters like Davenport in Texas. The opportunity for Democrats, Hinojosa believes, lies not with moderate, affluent Republicans put off by Trump’s norm-smashing vulgarity, but with disappointed MAGA populists. “The conventional political wisdom is that it is those country club Republicans who will swing over,” she told me before I traveled to Texas. “I think it’s always been MAGA.”

I’m still not wholly convinced. Trump’s appeal has never been only or even primarily economic; he taps into fear and rage about a country growing less white, less Christian and less deferential to male authority. And Hinojosa seems, at least on paper, ill suited to appeal to Trump’s base. . . . Though she now calls herself a “populist” rather than a “progressive,” she’s one of the more liberal members of the Texas House.

Still, Hinojosa has a group of supporters like Davenport, people furious at Abbott over school privatization and data centers. Mary Lowe, an education activist and a self-described “fundamental Christian,” told me that Abbott is “a globalist. He’s a tyrant. He’s a great deceiver.” And though she’s voted Republican in almost every primary and every general election since 1979, she’s voting for Hinojosa in November.

Several polls still show Hinojosa trailing by a couple of points, but three recent ones, including a New York Times/Siena poll released on Saturday, have her ahead. The polling aggregator Real Clear Politics now rates the race as a tossup, and last week Cook Political Report moved it from “likely” to “lean” Republican. Over the past week, national Democrats have started investing more heavily in the race: Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois and the Democratic Governors Association each gave Hinojosa $1 million.

Part of that chance derives from Trump’s unpopularity and the country’s economic misery, which is particularly stark in Texas. Campaigning, Hinojosa talks about how the state has more people without health insurance than any other, and some of the nation’s highest rates of small-business bankruptcies. She describes blood plasma centers popping up in middle-class areas — she visited one next to a Sephora — as more people seek to sell their plasma to make ends meet.

But her surge can’t be attributed entirely to the economic environment: Hinojosa seems to be hitting her stride as a politician. She’s long had a talent for making people feel heard, but O’Rourke said she’s become dramatically better on the stump. “I campaigned with her in El Paso a few weeks ago, and I’ve never seen her speak so well,” he said.

Her message is simple: Life has gotten too hard for hard-working people in Texas. Schools are underfunded — hundreds have gone to four days a week — and new artificial intelligence initiatives are no substitute for a good teacher in the classroom. Data centers are both a blight and a symbol of Abbott’s misplaced priorities. . . . the governor doing the bidding of moneyed interests and leaving the people to fend for themselves,” Hinojosa told me.

It’s a platform, she insists, that can break through with those who in the past have felt alienated from the Democratic Party. “When I sit down with people who voted for Trump, with people who voted for Abbott, and hear them, and they hear me, there’s an opportunity for connection and alliance,” she said. Democrats have a chance, she insists, to move past the cultural battles that have kept them perennially on the defensive. “If we try to be post-culture wars, we can be post-culture wars,” she said. “I’ve experienced it. I’ve seen it.”

Of course, deep rifts over religion, race and gender can’t simply be wished away. But if Hinojosa can find a way to make them less salient, it could portend not just seismic change in Texas, but the beginning of a political realignment. If some fraction of socially conservative voters conclude that rapacious billionaires threaten them more than supercilious liberals, it would remake America’s political map.

In May, speaking to my colleague Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Tucker Carlson said that culture war issues — the issues on which he’d built much of his demagogic career — were becoming less important than matters of concentrated wealth and financial precarity. “Most of the debates about race, ethnicity, religion, to some extent immigration, are less resonant long-term than debates about economics,” he said. Hinojosa’s campaign is a bet that he was right.

She is, of course, far from the only Democrat running as a populist and seeking to persuade disaffected Trump supporters. Zohran Mamdani started his mayoral campaign by interviewing working-class Trump voters in Queens and the Bronx, and he won over a small but meaningful chunk of them.

Sure, Texas looks more promising for Democrats this year than it has in decades, with the party’s Senate candidate, James Talarico, maintaining a consistent lead over the Republican Ken Paxton. But Paxton is singularly sleazy and widely despised. As astonishing as a Talarico victory would be, Republicans could explain it away as the fault of a particularly bad candidate.

They won’t be able to do that if Hinojosa wins. Abbott has been elected governor of Texas three times by double-digit margins. If Hinojosa even comes close to beating him, it will be because the Republican coalition that Trump assembled is collapsing, and a new Democratic one is perhaps starting to take shape. “There are people who are responding to our message the same way they were responding to Trump’s message,” she said. “They want power. They want to feel like they’re in control of their lives again, and I think that they want to return to a time that feels like it makes sense again, where hard work pays off.”

A big part of the reason Hinojosa is pulling ahead is that Latinos, who swung toward Republicans in 2024, have soured on the party due in large part to Trump’s brutal mass deportation campaign. At a Spanish-language town hall last week, Hinojosa, whose mother is a Mexican immigrant, mentioned ICE’s fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who’d been in the country for 35 years. “They thought he was someone else, they killed him, and then they realized that he was only going to work,” she said. “When that’s happening, none of us are safe.”

But Hinojosa is also trying to chip away at Abbott’s — and Trump’s — white, rural base. No one thinks she’s going to win these voters outright; the goal is to lose them by less. “There’s definitely a backlash against Abbott over vouchers and over data centers in rural Texas,” said Suzanne Bellsnyder, who writes a newsletter called Texas Rural Reporter. “The question is, does that anger against Abbott translate into a vote for Gina?”

Bellsnyder is trying to make sure it does. A former field director for Abbott, she’s now working for Hinojosa’s campaign. “If I didn’t think she had a chance, I promise you, I wouldn’t be putting my entire Republican credentials on the line,” she told me.

[H]e was livid about Abbott’s relentless push for vouchers. “Our governor took billionaire money and then used it to beat Republicans that us Republicans elected,” he said. As he soured on Abbott, he’d also grown disillusioned with Trump and his flagrant, gluttonous corruption. “When you’ve lied to me enough,” said Clugston, “and sold us out for billionaires, I get to the point I’m done.”

Hinojosa’s inroads with the populist right might have been limited to those most committed to public schools, were it not for Abbott’s enthusiasm for data centers. The governor has aggressively sought tech investment in Texas; he’s offered billions in tax incentives to attract data centers and last year boasted that the state was “the epicenter of A.I. development.” Texas now has more in operation than any other state.

Many rural Texans who either live near these behemoths, or fear they will soon, detest them. Anger is so intense that Sid Miller, the state’s outgoing agriculture commissioner — he lost his primary after a series of scandals — told Rolling Stone that it could cost Abbott the election.

Still, he said, something is changing in Texas. A few weeks ago, Henson thought an Hinojosa victory was nearly impossible. Now he just thinks it’s unlikely. If only Talarico were to win, as he’s increasingly favored to do, “it’s going to be an earthquake,” said Henson. If Talarico and Hinojosa win, it will be a whole other order of magnitude. “People are feeling the ground shaking,” he said. “It’s just a matter of how big it is going to be.”

If it’s big enough, we’ll feel the reverberations from coast to coast. Conservatives triumphed when they were able to brand the Democratic Party as the stronghold of elites. Hinojosa thinks she can turn that association around, showing voters that Republicans represent heedless, exploitative oligarchs. “It’s 99 percent of us against like 15 billionaire dudes and the weak leadership that allows them to get away with whatever they want,” she said. If that argument can prevail in Texas, it can probably prevail most anywhere.

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Trump Has Alienated Voters for the G.O.P.

Like I suspect many other non-MAGA Kool-Aid drinkers, I find the Felon's second regime both frightening and exhausting. Many of the policies being pursued are horrible and are harming millions of people and meanwhile the chaos never stops. I believe that a majority of Americans want their government to quietly run the country for the benefit of the larger public and not just the so-called one percent.  The other expectation is that competent people will be in charge. In the Felon's regime, competence and expertise is shunned in favor of total loyalty to the Felon and a willingness lies to remain in the Felon's good graces.  Rather than lower prices as promised during the 2024 campaign - sane people knew better than to believe the Felon - the Felon has done nothing but pursue trade wars, tariffs and the Iran war of choice all of which have brough soaring prices, especially at the gas pump.  The result, as laid out in a piece in the New York Times is that many Republican voters are alienated and less than enthusiastic about getting out and voting in the mid-terms, causing what one commentator to coin the phrase "red undertow" even in red states that could pull down a number of GOP candidates.  Let's hope this undertow only intensifies.  Here are some article highlights: 

If Democrats make big gains in the midterm elections in four weeks, it may not only be because their most loyal voters come out in force, or because their candidates have converted Republican voters to their cause.

Instead, the Democrats’ dream blue wave could come from Republicans who sour on President Trump and stay home. It already has a name: the red undertow.

Across the country, signs are emerging of an enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans, even among those who consider themselves likely to vote. A stretch of rural southwest Michigan — long a Republican stronghold — illustrates the point, with more signs for blueberries and eggs than for political candidates. Volunteers are not showing up to door-knock. And many voters say they are tuning this election out.

“People are just more focused on everyday life,” said Lindsay Kronemeyer, 35, a conservative Christian mother of two who works in the construction industry. “I don’t hear the chatter on the Republican side of ‘Trump this, Trump that.’ He’s just not there in my head anymore.”

The idea of the red undertow was introduced last month by the political analyst Charlie Cook, who argued that the Democratic brand was still underwater, but that this election was not about a rising Democratic tide. It was about a drowning Trump brand.

In its wake, Mr. Cook wrote, an undertow will “pull many Republicans under.” . . . . In nearly three dozen interviews in Western Michigan, a sense of fatigue was constant, and that feeling goes beyond that region.

“President Trump has been saying, ‘Vote as if I was on the ballot,’ and that’s exactly what I’m going to do — not vote,” said Brandon Tremaine, 24, a graduate student in Texas who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020. “You do not campaign on being the ticket of peace and start a war of choice that is directly hurting Americans here at home and gotten Americans killed overseas.”

Polls can be unreliable, and moods may be fleeting. Trump loyalists are also known for not taking the calls of polling outfits, and that may be overstating Democratic strengths.

The numbers aren’t drastically far apart. A New York Times/Siena University national poll from last month found that Democrats were more likely to say they were absolutely certain to vote than Republicans, 61 percent to 56 percent. While Democrats led Republicans nationally by seven percentage points among registered voters, that advantage rose to nine points among likely voters.

But in close races, a small gap could prove meaningful.

“People are tired,” Al Pscholka, a Republican and a former member of the Michigan House of Representatives, said of Mr. Trump. “The whole divider-in-chief thing, it’s gotten to the point where it’s just exhausting.”

The concern is showing in unlikely places. Representative Bill Huizenga, a Western Michigan Republican whose four House victories were all by comfortable margins, is in “the fight of his life” against a well-funded centrist Democrat from Kalamazoo named Sean McCann, said Rob Pocock, a retired Republican political consultant who has worked on campaigns in the region.

Nancy DeBoer, the local Republican state representative, also faces a serious fight against Joseph McClusky, a graduate of Hope College, a conservative Christian liberal arts college in Holland, Mich., who is openly gay.

“I would be shocked if Joseph wins, but I can’t believe he’s done as well as he has,” said Mr. Pocock, who teaches at Hope and had Mr. McClusky as a student. He said in Ottawa County, he was seeing Democratic yard signs in numbers he’d never seen before. . . . “I think there’s a shift in the party back toward, we need a little bit of the establishment folks,” Ms. Kronemeyer said. “They exist for a reason.”

If anybody should be enthusiastic about the election, it is Ms. Kronemeyer. She ran for a statehouse seat in 2022. She door-knocked for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020. But she said that when a friend asked her recently about the races in her area, she had to admit she hadn’t been following them closely. She lives in deep-red Allegan County, where “traditionally in election years, yard signs would be peppered everywhere,” she said. But the only signs she’d seen this year were for a judge, she said.

Now, Mr. Pasek said, Mr. Trump seems to have lost his way. He started a war when he said he wouldn’t, sending the price of gas through the roof. And he seems to talk more about ballrooms and arches than he does about how he will bring prices back down. “He’s losing touch with the American people,” Mr. Pasek said.

Mr. Pasek cited gas prices: “He says it’s chump change. No, it’s not! It’s killing the people.”

He has noticed someone living in a car in a parking lot when he drives into town, he said. He worried about his granddaughter, 28, a college graduate from Michigan State University, who is working three jobs — one full-time and two part-time — but can’t find a house she can afford.

Those misgivings are being felt at the local party level. Doug Koopman, a member of the Kent County Republican Party’s executive committee, said that it had been a struggle to get the foot soldiers of the midterm elections — volunteer door-knockers and canvassers — to pick up brochures to distribute door to door, leaving bags of them sitting around the party headquarters.

Even Republicans who are in politics say they are tired — worn out by the battles between pro-MAGA politicians and traditional Republicans. Bob Harrison, 76, a Republican county commissioner in Berrien County, where MAGA forces won control of the county G.O.P., said those forces took away the right to vote on party decisions from local elected officials like him.

“Does he really know what he’s doing?” Mr. Stewart said.

He would never vote for a Democrat; he feels bludgeoned by liberals online, he said. But he’s not sure he’ll vote for Republicans, either.

“I just spent $60 on $30 worth of groceries and am about to go fill up for $5 a gallon,” he said, carrying two bags of groceries to his car. “It feels like they’re stress-testing us.” 

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Democrats Cannot Let Polls Make Them Complacent

At the moment, the polls and mid-term election predictions are looking positive for Democrats and anti-Felon candidates.  While this is certainly a welcomed development, I and others worry that the positive polls may make anti-Felon voters complacent and perhaps feel they do not need to go and vote. In 2016, many thought Hillary Clinton had the election in the bag and stayed home.  In 2024, as many voters failed to votes as those who cast ballots for either Felon and Harris. We cannot let this happen again and Democrats need to want to not only win in elections, but to make the margin of victory as large as possible. The larger the margin of victory, the more clear the repudiation of the Felon, his failed policies and his GOP enablers becomes. Wide victory margins will make it harder for the media to down play the Felon/GOP defeat and perhaps lead more within the GOP to grow spines and cease their self-prostitution to the Felon.  A piece at The New Republic looks at the polls while cautioning that they cannot be allowed to instill over confidence and/or complacency.  Here are excerpts: 

I’m nervous about the polls and election forecasts projecting a huge Democratic wave. And I think you should be too.

Why? For two reasons. First of all, the numbers, as eye-watering as they are, may be setting us up for disappointment, even if Democrats have a solid night next month. They simply seem too good to be true. According to polls and forecasts, the Democrats are virtually guaranteed to win back the House. Fairly progressive Democrats (Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, Maine’s Troy Jackson) are leading in blue-leaning swing states. More centrist Democrats (North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff) are comfortably ahead in swing states that traditionally lean a bit red.

It gets better. Democrats seem poised to win several races in states that have been reliably red in the Trump era: Alaska and Texas Senate, Iowa governor, the Senate and gubernatorial contests in Ohio. They have an outside chance of winning the governorship in Texas and Senate seats in Iowa and Kansas too.

I’m not done. Democrats could win enough governorships and state legislatures that a majority of Americans live in states with a Democratic trifecta next year. A Black politician from Milwaukee (David Crowley) is favored to win the governorship in Wisconsin, overcoming long-standing resentment against the state’s biggest city. In Georgia, Keisha Bottoms has a real chance of becoming the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history.

Twenty-one months ago, after Donald Trump won a second term, I would have been thrilled if just one or two of the things I enumerated above happened. Now, the polls suggest a blue wave that would even eclipse 2006 or 2018. If the polls are right, we are looking at a political earthquake akin to 2008, when America, including Indiana and North Carolina, chose a Black man to be president. Democrats winning statewide elections in Texas raises the prospect of the party being competitive in the state that delivers the most Electoral College votes (40) to Republicans, putting GOP prospects in presidential elections in peril.

Some data experts say that we should trust the polls; others argue that they might be inflating Democrats’ chances. In my view, polls are generally reliable, but they can’t predict the winner of a race that’s within three to five points—as many of these contests are.

I’ll admit it: I don’t have a data-based reason to doubt the polls. It just comes from covering U.S. politics for more than two decades and being a Black person in America. I will believe that a Democrat can carry Texas the moment that the Associated Press or one of the television networks officially declares that Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico or gubernatorial hopeful Gina Hinojosa has won—and not a moment before.

And honestly, to assume that the big blue wave that’s being projected won’t happen is probably better for my mental health. I was saddened when the 2016 and 2024 elections did not permanently force Trump out of politics and put a woman in charge of the country for the first time. I was dismayed at how close the swing states were in 2020, considering how terrible Trump’s presidency had been.

My advice for TNR readers and other liberals would be to assume that Democrats win 48 or 49 Senate seats, 225 House seats, and nothing major in Ohio or Texas. That’s not a prediction; it’s an exercise in setting expectations at a realistic but low level.

Here’s a second reason to be wary of the polls: They are creating expectations that the mainstream media might use against Democrats. In January 2025, if you told reporters at AP, The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, and other centrist news outlets that Democrats were going to win 225 House seats and 49 Senate seats in November 2026, they might have been skeptical Democrats would do that well. In January, I wrote a piece that was titled “Amazingly, the Democrats Have a Shot at a Senate Majority,” reflecting how unlikely that seemed even nine months ago.

Now, polls and election forecasts based on those surveys are projecting a much stronger showing for Democrats. The “median outcome” of the election is 242 Democratic House seats and 52 in the Senate, according to FiftyPlusOne, an election site run by G. Elliott Morris and other alums of FiveThirtyEight. Other sites view it similarly

If Democrats fall short of these projections, even if they win 229 House seats and 50 in the Senate, I am quite confident the mainstream media will revert to its preferred approach to covering politics: centrism/false equivalence/balance/both sides/“independence.”

This is nonsense, of course. Trump is an incredibly unpopular president, so disliked that Republicans are struggling to win in Texas. He is also an authoritarian figure bent on eroding democracy, including the freedom of the press. But the mainstream media is still eager to cast itself as above the fray, neutral, and certainly not opposed to a president trying to destroy its industry. If neither Talarico nor Hinojosa wins, the media will likely not cover this election as the decisive rejection of Trump that it almost certainly will be.

So for now, I’m taking the polls seriously but not literally, to borrow a formation from earlier in the Trump era. I am confident that Republicans will do worse in Kansas, Texas, Iowa, and other red states than usual. I am sure that some Democrats will win by larger margins in many swing states than seemed possible two years ago. But I will be delighted and surprised if there are Governors Bottoms, Crowley, and Hinojosa or Senators El-Sayed or Talarico. It could happen, though. The polls in 2026 look as rosy for Democrats as 2008. They were right back then. They could be right again.

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ICE Is Everywhere and Acting with Impunity

For years Republicans were preferred on the handling of immigration and securing the nation's borders. Yet the Felon and his Josef Goebbels-like henchman, Stephen Miller, have pushed brutality and cruelty as ICE has run amok and mistreated immigrants and citizens alike with impunity and no accountability whatsoever,  When ICE abuses are challenged, ICE and DHS lie about abuses, always blaming the victims of ICE violence even when video evidence reveals the lie.  The result has been that support for the Felon and Republicans among Latinos has cratered - personally I cannot grasp how Latinos ever voted for the Felon in the first place - and the brutality towards children and deliberate family separations have repulsed many white American citizens.  Rather than detaining criminals ICE has seized landscape workers, maids, restaurant workers, construction workers, farm workers and workers at meat packing plants who have no criminal charges and in many cases have worked in the USA for years and collectively paid taxes to support the government now hunting them down. Of course, the Felon also continues to spread the lie that non-citizens are voting in U.S. election even when no evidence can be produced. A piece in the New Yorker looks at ICE abuses:

It has taken the Trump Administration less than two years to make violent encounters with federal immigration agents a regular fact of American life. On a single day late last month, a citizen and a noncitizen—one in Illinois, the other in Texas—became the most recent examples of this new reality. That morning, in Evanston, a Black man walking to a pharmacy was left injured and bleeding by the side of a road after a group of ICE officers, mistaking him for an immigrant “fugitive,” threw him to the ground and tried to handcuff him. Once the agents realized that he was a U.S. citizen, they said that they offered him “assistance,” then drove off. A few hours later, in Austin, an ICE officer shot a Venezuelan delivery driver in the back as he tried to flee in his car. He was detained, and partial paralysis had set in before doctors removed the bullet, several days later. Last Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced that it was charging the man with assaulting the officer who shot him.

Almost as alarming as the incidents themselves has been the government’s refusal to acknowledge a pattern of abuse that is clearly metastasizing at the Department of Homeland Security. Since Donald Trump took office last year, agents from D.H.S. have shot at some two dozen people in the United States, killing six of them.

[I]n South Padre Island, Texas, Ruben Ray Martinez, a twenty-three-year-old U.S. citizen, was shot and killed by an ICE officer—something that the government didn’t disclose for nearly a year, until American Oversight, a nonprofit group, obtained the incident report. In one week this past July, ICE agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who had lived in this country for thirty-five years, raising a family and running a building company, and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a twenty-five-year-old Colombian with a wife and toddler. These incidents were documented as officer shootings. But how, for instance, should news outlets categorize the death, on July 14th, of a Mexican man visiting family in Florida, on a tourist visa, who was hit by a tractor-trailer as he ran from immigration agents?

Not only has no ICE officer been federally charged in these deaths, but the agency has made a habit of casting blame on the people it has appeared to victimize, turning impunity into another form of aggression. The most common claim is that immigrants attempting to escape arrest are “assaulting” officers and, in particular, that motorists are “weaponizing” their vehicles. In many cases, video evidence seems to contradict such accounts; in others, officers weren’t wearing their body cameras. The Times found that the Administration had filed assault charges against more than five hundred and fifty people and that, in about half of the roughly four hundred cases that have been resolved, “juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them.”

Because the federal government has largely forsworn—and, indeed, actively blocked—independent investigations of its agents, states have tried to bring their own cases.

This all comes at a time when ICE arrests have reached a record high—nearly fifty-one thousand in August alone—with agents conducting operations nationwide at hospitals, at airports, and outside schools. Past calls by Democratic lawmakers for D.H.S. agents to end the practice of wearing masks in public were ignored, and this summer the department announced that it would be purchasing for its personnel twenty million dollars’ worth of gloves that deliver powerful electric shocks. Flush with cash from Congress, D.H.S. is planning to hire five thousand more ICE officers by the end of the year.

Given the lack of accountability at D.H.S., it should come as little surprise that Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of ICE, has taken the lead in prosecuting one of Trump’s principal obsessions: searching for evidence that noncitizens might vote in the midterms next month. Noncitizen voting is virtually nonexistent, as D.H.S.’s own figures show. Since last year, on the President’s orders, the department has pursued some sixteen hundred voter-fraud cases, only a hundred and sixty of which even led to arrests.

Over the summer, Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of Homeland Security, announced that some sixteen thousand noncitizens were on the voter rolls in Nevada. But a subsequent review by the Nevada secretary of state’s office of a list of voters provided by D.H.S. found that they were all U.S. citizens.

Deploying government agencies without regard for facts or consequences is, of course, a hallmark of authoritarianism. Last week, it emerged that the White House used part of the D.H.S. budget appropriated by Congress to make ads that celebrate the President. They carry a disclosure that doubles as a warning: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.” 

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New Fox Poll—a Disaster for Trump

A new Fox News poll came out last week that is a disaster for the Felon and his sycophants who have been a study in corruption and incompetence. The Iran war - a war of choice that was poorly planned - and the resulting soaring prices combined with the Felon's repeated statements that "affordability" is a hoax have severely eroding support for both the Felon and the larger GOP.  Throw in the lawlessness and cruelty of ICE operations that have Latino support for Republicans plummeting and its a toxic mix for Republicans to surmount as they find themselves increasingly have to defend congressional seats long thought to be "safe." The Felon's unchecked corruption and self-enrichment are the icing on the cake.  A piece at The New Republic looks at the poll results and the alarming message for Republicans.  Yes, much can happen in the coming 30 days, but if this trend continues - or better yet, worsens - November 3, 2026 could be a much deserved bloodbath for Republicans.  Critically, those who oppose the Felon need to get out and vote, preferably early and in person, to make sure the bloodbath occurs, No one can be complacent.  Here are highlights from TNR.

“If you look at that Fox News poll, he’s ahead by seven points in the state of Texas,” Fox anchor Ainsley Earhardt lamented on Friday, adding: “How is that possible?” The “he” is Democrat James Talarico, who leads Republican Ken Paxton in Fox’s striking new poll of Texas. This shocker prompted Earhardt’s guest to warn: “Texans have to wake up!”

In truth, both Fox figures are slightly overstating matters. The poll does show Talarico up by seven points among registered voters, 53–46. But it shows his lead is much tighter among likely voters, 51–49. The latter might matter more.

Still, Talarico’s lead among both groups is remarkable in a state where no Democrat has won statewide in decades. What’s more, the poll’s internals help shed light on Trump’s role in bringing about Talarico’s lead. Here the news for Trump is very bad, and it captures something essential about the winding-down Trump era.

Let’s start with Trump’s approval among Texans. The Fox poll finds Trump badly upside down at 44–55—remarkable in a state he carried by 14 points in 2024. Drill down, and it’s worse: Trump’s approval is underwater with non-college voters (47–53), meaning he’s losing the working class, and Latinos (38–61). He won the latter by 55–45 two years ago.

And here’s a surprise: Trump is even underwater with Republicans who don’t identify as MAGA, or “non-MAGA Republicans,” at 46–53. Why does that matter? The Fox poll sheds light here too: Only 50 percent of non-MAGA Republicans are “extremely interested” in the election, which lags behind Texas likely voters overall (62 percent), and even further behind Democrats (67 percent).

Though MAGA Republicans are enthusiastic, a nontrivial number of GOP voters, alienated by Trump, may peel away and stay home.

Critically, this dovetails with the Talarico campaign’s theory of the case. Talarico is winning around 10 percent of Republican voters in the Fox poll, versus only 1 percent of Democrats going to Paxton (not a typo). This is driven by Talarico getting 22 percent of non-MAGA Republicans.

In addition to getting more than one-fifth of non-MAGA Republicans, Fox finds Talarico winning nearly one-fifth of conservatives, almost exactly at parity with Paxton among non-college voters—Talarico is getting half the working class!—and edging into the requisite mid-60s with Latinos. His 79 percent of Black voters probably needs improvement, but a big tent appears to be forming. . . . .Many are exactly the voters who would have supported Senator John Cornyn, and didn’t understand why Trump ordered them to vote for corrupt adulterous dirtbag Paxton in the primary. Talarico’s ads, Rocha notes, often echo attacks on Paxton from Cornyn’s primary ads.

Let’s be clear: None of this means a Talarico victory is remotely assured. This is absolutely on a knife’s edge. Talarico has led in most polls, and some quality surveys have found his lead significantly larger than Fox’s two-point likely-voter lead. Yet the averages have the race within three points. That’s very, very close. We’re talking about Texas here.

But for now, at least, what’s happening seems to confirm some basic insights about the slowly expiring Trump era. The Trump coalition is fracturing due to his peculiarly terrible misrule. Inflation, tariffs, and war are alienating working-class voters. His subjugation of the GOP into his own personal cult is alienating non-MAGA Republicans. His violent ethnic purges are driving away Latinos. The Latino shift to Trump—which was never the durable realignment observers discerned—has come undone . . . . His corruption and dictator-megalomania are badly alienating independents.

All of which might be creating the conditions for a large anti-Trump, anti-MAGA coalition to come together, a coalition perhaps broad enough to swamp Trump-GOP rigging efforts. Crucially, Democrats are now outperforming in Texas in ways that could overwhelm the GOP gerrymander there. It all hints—let’s hope—at the very broad anti-corruption, anti-authoritarian coalition that ousted Viktor Orbán in Hungary earlier this year.

If Democrats can win the House and/or the Senate with such a coalition, it will have the party’s back in constraining Trump as the era of Late Stage Trumpism sputters out during his final two years. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. First—and again, it’s all on a knife’s edge—that coalition has to really show up, and candidates like Talarico have to put this election away already.

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The GOP’s Desperate Culture-War Hail Mary

For decades the GOP has used "god, guns and gays" to dupe their electorate into voting against their own economic and financial best interests, gays and the transgender being the favorite GOP bogeymen. With a month until the 2026 mid-term elections and the Felon's poll numbers completely in the toilet and the latest polling for Democrats in red states suggesting a number of formerly viewed "safe seats" for Republicans might potentially flipping to Democrats, Republicans are dragging out the same old made up bogeymen in the hope fear and/or bigotry will motivate voters to vote Republican even as the Felon and his GOP enablers have trashed the economy for millions of Americans. As noted and as was the case in 2024, the favored GOP bogeyman are transgendered Americans. Never mind that a review of sexual abuse cases reveals no drag queen or transgender perpetrators but plenty of GOP politicians and right wing clergy being indicted for sexual crimes.  The big questions is whether the GOP's disingenuous fearmongering will be enough for their sheep like base to ignore high gas prices, unprecedented corruption at the White House, rising interest rates and increased inflation.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the desperate GOP messaging. Here are excerpts:

Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss something else entirely: youth sports. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.

With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans. . . . . In Texas, Republicans are running an unsettling AI-generated ad that shows the Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico dressed as Maria von Trapp and singing about girls with mustaches. A spot in Iowa accuses the Senate candidate Josh Turek of supporting “sex changes for kids.” On X, former Representative Matt Gaetz offered a tidy summary of his party’s agenda: “I hate the war too,” he told a concerned voter. “But the Democrats want to trans your kids.”

Partly, this is because Republicans don’t have much else to say. The administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy isn’t exactly popular. Voters have lost faith in the GOP on economic issues. Meanwhile, the president is obsessing over Corinthian columns. But Republicans also have some reason to believe that making trans happen is a useful strategy: It’s helped them before.

“They believe that it energizes the base and divides ours,” Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way, told me. “And they’re right about that.”

The most jaw-dropping attack on Talarico probably comes from the American Principles Project, which has released an ad that is essentially a modern version of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy,” a sinister spot about the threat of nuclear war. The ad opens with a little girl standing in a field, counting flower petals. Everything is gray. Suddenly, the scene shifts, and the girl is in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask. An AI-generated Talarico looms over her in a pair of scrubs. “Irreversible puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Sex-change surgeries,” the vaguely southern narrator declares. “This November, stop them before it’s too late.” . . . . (Talarico, for his part, is running ads focused on funding schools and health care, and countering corruption in Washington.)

The [Felon] president is aligned on the persuasive power of the anti-trans message. At the GOP convention in Dallas last month, Trump said that he was “petrified” that Democrats might change their position on transgender athletes in sports. “That will really hurt us,” he said. “That’s one of our great sound bites of all time.”

Unfortunately for him, some Democrats are already doing just that. . . . Asked last month whether girls should play in boys’ sports, he [Talarico] answered: “As a former public-school teacher, I care a lot about our student athletes, I care a lot about our students. And so I will oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it risks safety or fairness.”

Two years ago, this might have gone differently; Talarico might not have responded to Republican attacks at all. . . . In the run-up to November, Erickson, who advises Democrats on how to talk about LGBTQ issues, has seen a sharp increase from candidates in requests for help. As GOP campaigns launch their last-minute trans-focused ads, Democrats want to know when to respond, what to say, and how to avoid offense. “They’re so scared they’re going to say the wrong thing,” she said.

Erickson, who declined to name the specific candidates she’s advising, offered some general advice. When answering questions about transgender players in sports, she argues, Democrats should embrace the sandwich method: Start with empathy, mention rules and fairness, and end with a little more empathy. Questions about health care for minors can be answered by reiterating that parents, not lawmakers, are the best decision makers for their own kids.

Gina Hinojosa, who is running to replace Texas Governor Greg Abbott, has said that she won’t take up legislation related to the “culture wars” as governor; in a new ad, she declares, “My pronouns are mom, Texan, and soon-to-be governor.” The Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown’s strategy is to point out the absurdity of focusing on trans issues at a time like this. “Here they go again, those same attacks against Sherrod Brown,” one voter says in a new Brown ad. “With everything going on, that’s what they’re talking about?” says another voter.

Republicans are hopeful that a dogged focus on trans issues in the final days of this election season can depress turnout among Democratic voters like Childrey just as much as it energizes their own base. Democrats will have to hope that, this time, the GOP’s gambit will fail.