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6 Strategies Progressives Can Use to Win in November
Here are some suggestions that can be implemented quickly in the remaining three and a half weeks before Election Day, November 3.
Oct 11, 2026
Ever wonder why, more often than not, progressive candidates for public office lose to the most venal, corrupt, right-wing politicians? It is not just that progressives don’t have enough money. Too often, they run cookie-cutter campaigns—tediously monotone, without exciting and compelling activities. They also fail to draw a vivid contrast between their records and commitments to the public and those of Republican corporatists. Here are some suggestions that can be implemented quickly in the remaining three and a half weeks before Election Day, November 3.
1. The GOP is the Party of NO, NO, NO. As the party of big corporations, it has repeatedly resisted efforts to protect the public from corporate abuses. In the 19th century it opposed regulation of the railroads and the banks, resisted the organization of unions and women’s suffrage. In the 20th century, Republicans opposed the progressive agenda of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—among them were Social Security, the minimum wage, and unemployment compensation—and, in the 60s and 70s, the GOP fought to weaken or stop consumer, worker safety, and environmental health protections that have saved millions of lives.
Under President Donald Trump, the Republicans have gone crazy, leaving people unprotected and defenseless against the corporate crooks, the avaricious health insurers, the deadly polluters, and the freeloading corporate welfare kings. Trump has eradicated or starved the agencies protecting you as consumers and eliminated or weakened consumer regulations and the agencies responsible for enforcing them, including protections involving auto safety, fuel efficiency, and vehicle emissions, for example.
Bad as the past GOP has been, it would be much worse for people here and abroad in the next two years of Tyrant, Greedy, Violent, Cruel, Corrupt Trump who repeatedly breaks the law.
How can these GOP candidates deserve your votes? All people bleed the same color in red and blue states. Trump’s Republicans drove Congress in 2025 to weaken Medicaid and Medicare and increase the cost of coverage under Obamacare, leaving millions of families, including children, losing health coverage at an accelerating rate into 2027. Similarly, millions of people are being pushed off food assistance programs.
2. Bad as the past GOP has been, it would be much worse for people here and abroad in the next two years of Tyrant, Greedy, Violent, Cruel, Corrupt Trump who repeatedly breaks the law. A new Congress must stop him, by impeaching and convicting Trump and telling him, “You’re fired.” (His favorite bullying words inflicted on millions of innocents.)
3. Gather your policies into a pledge or compact for the voters, reflecting common left-right values of your citizenry that are opposed by your opponent. (See Ky. Values vs. McConnell published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, 2014). The core “kitchen table” issues are raising the minimum wage, now at the frozen federal $7.25 per hour; instituting an authentic child tax credit; increasing Social Security benefits, frozen since 1971, paid for by raising the income cap for Social Security taxes on the wealthy; cracking down on corporate crooks who exploit workers and consumers; and ending the tax escapes of the plutocrats and big corporations, so that the revenues can return to communities to fund better public services and infrastructure. (See Robert Reich’s 10-Point Plan to Make America Affordable and my Compact for American Workers). You may wish to add the looting of private pensions (see pensionrights.org) and the latest Trump restriction on 40 million student loan debtors.
4. Show how much you care for workers by midnight campaigning to reach the many midnight shift workers who rightly feel excluded from electoral campaigns. Hospital, nursing home, factory, fire, police, EMT, all-night stores, and guard workers among them, should be listed in your news release thanking them and announcing your campaign stops.
5. Trump’s dictatorship has left our country unprepared for pandemics, climate catastrophes, and the AI Frankensteins. He ignorantly calls warnings of perils on the horizon “hoaxes,” while he undermines and suppresses solar and wind energy in favor of the homicidal oil, gas, and coal companies. So, challenge your opponent to defend or disavow these failures of presidential responsibility. Any candidate who tolerates Trump’s dangerous abdications of presidential duties, along with his crazed statements about not “caring for Americans’ financial conditions,” urging Republicans to “cheat like hell” regarding the elections, and saying in January, “There shouldn’t be elections in November” certainly does not belong in Congress.
6. Call out the GOP for throwing millions of families off Medicaid, Obamacare, and Medicare through various mechanisms and press for Medicare For All, as Canada, Western Europe, and Taiwan have had for many years. A recent Yale School of Public Health study found a “single-payer universal healthcare system could cover every American, save more than 113,000 lives a year, and still cost over $1 trillion less than the system it would replace.”
For more ready-to-use, winning get-out-your-vote ideas, see what 24 civic leaders are proposing in their winningamerica.net presentations. If you have any further questions, you may wish to contact them directly about their articulate nonpartisan mission of advancing justice for all.
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It's the Corruption, Stupid: Democrats Need Just One Word to Knock Out the GOP
Every Democrat in America should scan their local horizon for examples of corruption they can use against Republicans. They won't be hard to spot.
Oct 10, 2026
In a nationwide poll conducted a few weeks ago and reported on by Axios, the majority of all registered voters surveyed said the number one word to describe Donald Trump is “corrupt.” This represents a massive opportunity for Democrats both now and for the next two years.
And the experience of candidates in today’s Democrats’ position around the world validates the argument that this is the best way to both campaign and win elections and political power.
Péter Magyar defeated Viktor Orbán in the Hungarian elections because he ran a Navalny-style playbook, calling Orbán’s and his billionaire buddies’ capture of the media and most other aspects of Hungarian life a “state capture system” grounded in good old-fashioned “corruption.”
From Orban’s son-in-law pulling a Jared and using his government position to become one of the richest men in the country, to his billionaire cronies buying up the media like the billionaire Ellisons are doing here now, corruption was Magyar’s singular through-line message. And it worked, producing an overwhelming turnout and undeniable victory.
It will work here, too!
Democrats are (continuously, it seems) debating what should be their campaign strategy, their main through-line message, for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Every faction and special interest group in the country is pushing their own idea, but there’s one overarching concept — one word — that can encompass most all of them and do so with a proven political punch: “Corruption.”
At every level, ever since the Reagan Revolution, the heart of Republican policies has been the naked corruption of our American political and economic systems. Since the 1980s, Republicans have sold their corruption with slogans like, “Government is the problem, not the solution,” and “Let the market decide,” but their real message is, “Turn it all over to the billionaires and their corporations.” The result has been:
— Tax cuts and loopholes for billionaires and big corporations that, in aggregate since 1981, add up to more than our total national debt of $40 trillion (in other words, Republicans borrowed $40 trillion in our names that our kids will repay and gave all of it to the morbidly rich).
— Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust laws that has caused every industry in America to become a form of monopoly dominated by five or fewer massive corporations, gutting competition and raising prices.
— Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as “free speech,” handing our elections over to the highest bidders.
— Virtually every legacy federal regulatory agency being run by industry insiders working on a revolving-door basis.
— Members of Congress and the corrupt Trump regime engaging in insider trading with impunity.
— A GOP-aligned military-industrial complex that’s essentially taken over Pentagon procurement.
— An anti-labor Labor Department; an anti-education Education department; an anti-civil rights Civil Rights enforcement agency; an anti-environment Environmental Protection Agency; etc…
— Trump’s mysterious pardons that always seem to go to people who’ve given him millions of dollars (after Giuliani claimed he and Trump were selling pardons for two million each and splitting the money).
— The wholesale gutting of the Internal Revenue Service enforcement budget and staffing that’s largely ended audits of morbidly rich people and increased audits of working-class people instead.
— The systematic sabotage and privatization of public institutions — from the US Postal Service to public schools to prisons — with virtually every one of the for-profit replacements becoming big GOP donors.
— The explosion of dark money after Citizens United so we don’t even know who’s buying our elections.
— The weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission to loosen media ownership rules while threatening outlets that dare criticize Trump or the GOP.
— Red-state-level voter suppression laws including strict ID requirements, purges of voter rolls, and reduced polling access all to discourage voting by people in demographic groups associated with Democrats.
— The Republican refusal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices for years and they’re still blocking most efforts.
— The systematic dismantling of campaign finance enforcement, turning the Federal Election Commission into a deadlocked, do-nothing body.
— The use of tax havens and trade policy to encourage offshoring American jobs.
— The Republican normalization of lobbyists literally writing legislation via groups like the Koch-funded ALEC.
— The rewriting of environmental and labor rules to favor polluting industries by GOP appointees who often came from those very industries.
— The strategic packing of the federal judiciary with hardcore rightwing/neofascist judges.
— And now Trump’s pathetic attempts to bribe voters with his $5000 offer backed up by $80 and $500 checks going out this week to people on Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.
Even Republicans understand the power of mobilizing the public’s outrage against the corruption that they themselves have participated in for over 40 years. Astonishingly, cynically, that’s the meta-message to Trump’s main campaign slogan each of the three times he’s run for president:
“Drain the swamp.”
It worked, even though it was an outrageous lie. Democrats, who have actually been trying to do something about corruption for years, need to appropriate the anti-corruption theme as their main message. Because, universally, it works.
— When working in Russia, I witnessed the way Alexi Navalny came so close to taking down Putin that the Russian dictator ordered him murdered; it was done via Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. It systematically and relentlessly exposed the ways Putin and his cronies were looting their nation’s government while passing out favors to oligarchs willing to align themselves with them.
— In the 1980s, I was working for a German international relief organization in The Philippines when Cory Aquino mobilized an anti-corruption message against the Marcos dynasty; the week Marcos and his wife fled the country I was bumped off Philippine Airlines flights five days in a row because so many of their cronies were appropriating all the seats (the airline was run by a crony).
— When Jair Bolsonaro first successfully ran for president of Brazil it was on a campaign against the corruption “Operation Car Wash” had exposed in the Lula administration. When elected, Bolsonaro, instead of ending the corruption, slid right into the system and expanded it, leading to his own ultimate downfall and current imprisonment.
— In Delhi, activist Anna Hazare’s 2011 anti-corruption hunger strike ignited a nationwide movement that helped spur passage of India’s Lokpal anti-corruption law and led his former allies to found the “clean government” Aam Aadmi Party.
— And, of course, it was the anti-corruption message of the EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that lifted then-comedian and TV star Volodymyr Zelenskyy into the presidency of Ukraine.
From Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era of the early 20th century to the present, anti-corruption messages have repeatedly proven to be one of the most potent forces in American politics, too.
— In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt built a foundation of mass support by casting monopolies as a “corrupt alliance” between the morbidly rich and our government, while the exposure of William M. “Boss” Tweed’s graft by Thomas Nast’s biting cartoons helped bring down New York’s Tammany Hall by converting complex examples of corruption into the simple story of “stolen public money.”
— The Watergate scandal turned corrupt abuse of power into a national reckoning that forced Richard Nixon from office and fueled sweeping electoral gains for reformers like Jimmy Carter, while more recent scandals like George Santos’ reinforced “clean government” as a winning local message.
— At the national level, Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign and the “rigged system” critiques advanced by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show that, across the ideological spectrum, framing political battles as struggle against entrenched, self-dealing elites remains one of the most consistently reliable ways to get energized voters to the polls and win power.
It makes perfect sense that this should be the Democrats’ main strategy: the core philosophy of the GOP that was first made explicit by the Reagan administration — “greed is good” — openly invites corruption. As we’ve seen in virtually every congressional vote over the past decade, Republican politicians are entirely in the pockets of the fossil fuel, health insurance, tax preparation, and weapons industries, among others.
Whether it’s the corrupt collusion between the Kushner and Netanyahu families that helped lead us into an illegal war against Iran, the billions Trump’s family has made in crypto and other schemes, the insider trading on the war, putting industry insiders in charge of regulatory agencies, the DeSantis and Paxton/Abbott corruption scandals, there are vivid examples of Republican corruption laying on the public ground all over the country in plain sight.
There’s a whole panoply of issues Democrats can and should seize on, from privatization to deregulation to climate change to affordability to healthcare and education, but the core — the foundation — of every one of them is corruption.
Every Democrat in America should scan their local horizon for examples of corruption they can use against Republicans. The words “Republican corruption” should be continuously on their lips, whether campaigning, speaking to constituents, or making media appearances.
Hammer these corrupt SOBs with their own crimes against democracy and the middle class, and Democrats will see results like Magyar, Zelenskyy, Aquino, and so many others have achieved.
It’s simple, easy, and powerful: “It’s the corruption, stupid!”
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Too Many in US Working Class Have No Political Home
To free the working class from MAGA's Trumpian grasp, is a new political organization needed to topple the corporate interests that dominate both major political parties?
Oct 08, 2026
In much of the country, there is an enormous vacuum for working people seeking political representation. In 2024, 132 Republican House victories were by 25 percentage points or more.
In nine Great Plains and central states—Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho—Democrats did not even field candidates in approximately 40 percent of the roughly 1,400 state legislative races, according to my own rough count.
Here’s what one 2026 projection looks like:
The above map shows all too clearly that in vast areas of the country working-class voters have no realistic alternative-party representation—the Republican is the only viable major-party choice, while the Democratic Party has largely abandoned many of these races.
But nature, as well as politics, abhors a vacuum, which is why we’re starting to see the emergence of progressive populist independents trying to take hold in this desert.
Here are a few worth noting:
Dan Osborn, a mechanic, Navy veteran, and former labor union president, is running for US Senate in Nebraska against incumbent Republican Pete Ricketts, the former governor and son of billionaire Joe Ricketts. Osborn came within seven points of defeating Republican Sen. Deb Fischer in 2024, running 16 points ahead of Kamala Harris, and the 2026 race has again attracted national attention.
The current polling picture is close. The average of three recent Nebraska polls has Ricketts at 46.3 percent and Osborn at 44.7 percent, within the margin of error, with a substantial share of voters undecided or supporting other candidates. The latest polls that meet the New York Times criteria for worthiness show Osborn slightly ahead, a virtual toss-up pitting an incumbent Republican with deep pockets against an independent.
We can expect an inordinate amount of money to flood into the race to attack Osborn. A Republican super PAC has already put more than $3 million into advertising targeting him.
Osborn is running on his Nebraska Growth & Fairness Plan, which he says is “not a party’s platform or written by consultants. It’s written for the people who punch a clock and wonder why nobody in Washington is fighting for them.”
He explicitly disavows a connection to the Democratic Party, though the Republicans try to link the two at every turn.
If Osborn can overcome the Republican financial advantage, it would be an enormous boost to working-class candidates who have given up on the Democrats.
Unfortunately, Osborn faces the fallout from a leaked audio recording in which he made disparaging remarks about some of Trump’s voters. The recording was obtained by the Omaha World-Herald, and Osborn subsequently said that the voice “sure sounds like me” and apologized for the remarks.
He was recorded saying:
“Billy Bob in f—— Red Cloud, Nebraska, who lives next to the f—— Trump store as you pull into town and is waving the flag, all he knows is that he’s on the winning team. (Trump has) been so effective at taking Billy Bob and his wife Mary Jane or Mary Jo and telling them … you’re on the winning team. And that’s all they care about, because their lives probably suck so f—— bad.”
November will tell us whether his campaign against the two parties can overcome both the Republican financial advantage and the political damage from his choice of words.
Todd Achilles is running as an independent for US Senate in Idaho. He says:
“The two-party system has failed America. Both parties increase the national debt, keep us in endless wars, and favor big corporations, harming our families in the process…I reject the left-right divide because the challenge ahead of us is those at the top versus those at the bottom — those in power against the people. I will fight for all Idahoans, not billionaires or extremists.”
Achilles, a former Democratic member of the Idaho House of Representatives, is not a traditional working-class candidate. He is an Army veteran and technology executive who is running on a populist, anti-corporate platform.
The polling picture in Idaho is complicated. Recent surveys have produced very different results depending on the sample and whether voters are shown a two-candidate or multi-candidate race. One recent rather optimistic average of polls shows Achilles trailing by about 3 to 5 percent.
Whatever the polling, Idaho remains an overwhelmingly Republican state: Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris there by 36.5 percentage points in 2024, winning 66.9 percent to Harris’s 30.4 percent.
Brian Bengs, a US Navy and Air Force veteran, former JAG officer, and lawyer, is running as an independent for the US Senate from South Dakota. In 2022, he ran for Senate as a Democrat and lost by more than 40 points. He’s running as a member of the Independent Veterans of America.
He is attacking the billionaire class:
“who buy politicians to rig the system so they can pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries & condition us to see only through red or blue-colored glasses disguising how they pick our pockets.”
His campaign’s current platform indeed emphasizes getting big money out of politics, eliminating corruption, banning congressional stock trading, unrigging the tax code, and reducing the national debt.
Like Achilles, Bengs faces a formidable Republican political environment. Trump carried South Dakota by 29.2 percentage points in 2024.
Bill Hill, a commercial fisherman, construction worker, teacher, principal, and former superintendent, is running as an independent for Alaska’s sole congressional seat. He spent more than two decades in education and was named Alaska Superintendent of the Year in 2023.
Hill is calling for:
“a total ban on congressional stock trading. Billionaires and corporations need to pay their share like the rest of us. And we need to get big money out of our elections…I’m a lifelong independent running to do what’s right by Alaskans, not what’s right by billionaires, corporations, or party bosses in DC.”
Political analysts repeatedly warn that third-party candidates can serve as spoilers, potentially helping the candidate they least support. But Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system makes the situation more complicated.
The Democrat, Eric Hafner, remains on the November ballot, along with Republican incumbent Nick Begich, Hill, and Libertarian Jim McDermott. In the latest New York Times/Siena poll, the first-choice results were Begich 47 percent, Hill 35 percent, Hafner 8 percent, and McDermott 5 percent. After ranked-choice tabulation, Begich led Hill 53 percent to 47 percent.
So, in Alaska, the spoiler question is not simply a matter of who finishes ahead in the first round. The ranked-choice system makes the ultimate effect of Hafner’s candidacy dependent on how his supporters’ second choices are distributed.
Candidates Without a Party?
Currently, there is no unified effort to build a party of independents to run in deep-red America. Instead, the effort is largely driven by the candidates themselves. It’s unclear if this will be the best long-term approach.
The word “independent” does fit nicely with the idea of independent candidates, free from any broader party or political organization. But independence has its downside in terms of accumulating and sharing campaign expertise, funding, and building a unified platform.
To find out more about the viability of independent candidates, we will be conducting a new survey of 5,000 voters in red America. One question we will ask respondents is whether a new organization of independents should be formed and what to call it.
Will a New Political Formation Emerge?
The political logic of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of its working class roots, which led to the very red map of America, and the Republican Party’s failure to support workers and their issues while having control of the government, suggests strongly that something new could emerge. There are just too many working people with no political home. But it remains to be seen how this vacuum will be filled—and by whom.
There is some chance that the Democrats, responding to the independents, will address the void by running many more working-class and progressive populist candidates. But the Democratic brand is extremely tarnished.
As John Tester, the former Democratic Montana US Senator, put it in a leaked text attributed to him:
“Every race I ran as Montana Senator and US Senator it was about distancing myself from the Democratic Party…. During my last two races the Democratic Party was poison in my attempts to get re-elected.”
For those of us who want to end MAGA’s grip on national politics this November, let’s hope that an enormous blue (and independent) wave will serve, for now, as the antidote.
For more information, see A Party of Our Own.
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The One Issue the Midterm Victors Must Solve? Corruption
If they do not, we will be sentenced to one election after another where parties club each other with populist anger, alternating in power with little changing.
Oct 07, 2026
One of the most potent midterm election slogans was offered by the Republicans in 1946: “HAD ENOUGH?” The GOP swept into power after years of New Deal dominance.
We like to say that what counts is not what you are against, but what you are for. Not always, though. Sometimes “Had enough?” is enough.
Midterm elections often are waged as a rebuke to the party in control of the White House. Political scientists call this a thermostatic election. Voters adjust the temperature by turning the dial away from perceived overreaches.
Sometimes the floor just drops out from under a political party. This could be a year when “Had enough?” is enough.
But at times candidates have an agenda, detailed or implicit. Those are the years that produce the biggest change.
In 1974, the “Watergate Babies” ran to clean up politics and shake up a hidebound Democratic Party. Often they were Democrats from suburban districts, shifting the party’s focus away from New Deal-style economic issues toward issues of transparency and good government.
George Miller, a congressman elected that year from California, declared: “We were a conquering army. We came here to take the Bastille. We destroyed the institution by turning the lights on.”
In 1994, Republicans led by Newt Gingrich won the House for the first time in 40 years. On the Capitol steps, more than 300 candidates signed a “Contract With America,” a pledge to bring to the floor for a vote on 10 measures, such as a congressional term limits constitutional amendment, within the first 100 days of taking office.
In 2018, the midterm halfway through Donald Trump’s first term, dozens of Democrats won with an anti-corruption pledge put forward by the group End Citizens United.
The scandals of just a decade ago seem quaint. Back then, we worried that Trump would profit from guests staying at his hotel near the White House. Now he brazenly grifts, increasing his net worth by at least $2 billion. The most recent astonishing news suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin offered favorable oil concessions to investors who have donated to Trump’s super PAC or have financial ties to his son-in-law Jared Kushner as part of a bid to force a deal on Ukraine.
Today, Democrats are running on affordability. Diesel prices and exorbitant hamburgers speak for themselves. But it is not clear what the party would do about affordability if it were to win.
Corruption is the other big issue on the campaign trail. Here, the Outs have begun to say what they would do if they become the Ins.
End Citizens United, once again, has enlisted candidates to sign an “Unrig Washington” pledge. Candidates vow to ban congressional stock trading, refuse corporate PAC money, and “crack down on dark money.” Those are strong planks, though they may fall short of a Gingrich-style manifesto.
Some of the most talked-about candidates have embraced similar themes. Abdul El-Sayed, seeking a Senate seat in Michigan, calls for getting “Money Out of Politics.” James Talarico, running a surprisingly strong Senate race in Texas, rails against “billionaire mega-donors and their puppet politicians” in a “rigged system.” Jon Ossoff, the incumbent Georgia senator, has gone viral with his intensely delivered stump-speech exposés of executive branch corruption.
A survey by the Brennan Center earlier this year found an unusual and wide revulsion against corruption. It also found that voters blame Democrats as well as Republicans.
GOP candidates sense this mood too. They focus not on money in politics but on fraud in government. In Minnesota, which last year was rocked by Medicaid fraud allegations, state house Speaker Lisa Demuth, running for governor, declared that “fraud was exploding here in Minnesota.” Bobby Charles, running for governor in Maine, pledged to investigate alleged fraud in the state’s Medicaid system. Public disquiet about government waste, always lurking, could be forged into a potent issue once candidates find a way to distance themselves from the current administration.
There’s another issue heard on the hustings that reflects voter disquiet about out-of-touch institutions: Supreme Court reform. Josh Turek, running for the Senate in Iowa, has joined Talarico and others in urging action. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who would chair the Judiciary Committee in their chambers if their party won, recently roused a crowd of Turek supporters at the Polk County Steak Fry with calls for term limits for the justices.
Right now, it’s Democrats demanding reform. In the past, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have supported term limits. Could they do so again? Polls show wide and consistent public support, such as the Fox News survey showing 78% approval.
As I wrote last week, due to retirements and primary defeats in safe districts, we know that at least 83 new House members will be elected in a few weeks—and of course, depending on switches in party control, possibly many more. There already has been a wave election in both parties.
What will happen next? Ever since people stopped answering landline telephones, polling has been a struggle. In some elections, surveys underestimate Trump’s populist base. (Though in years when Trump is not on the ballot, that does not seem to be the case.)
But sometimes the floor just drops out from under a political party. This could be a year when “Had enough?” is enough.
The question for whoever wins is what they will do to try to curb corruption. Otherwise we will be sentenced to one election after another where parties club each other with populist anger, alternating in power with little changing.
And the presidential candidates who will soon dash around the country must do even more to bring these issues into focus, to say what they would do to change our politics.
The next two years could bring an even more intense debate about how to remake American democracy and renew government. As soon as the voting ends, that debate begins.
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'A Devastating Gut Punch': New Trump-GOP Cuts to Food Aid Take Effect Amid High Grocery Prices
"This is a plan to wreck state SNAP programs and push millions off of SNAP and into hunger."
Oct 05, 2026
The Republican budget package that President Donald Trump signed into law last summer included a change requiring states to fund a larger portion of the costs of administering the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food aid to tens of millions of Americans.
That change, which advocates and experts warned would impose unsustainable burdens on some states and potentially result in more cuts to food aid, took effect late last week, amid a nationwide affordability crisis that has forced many Americans to turn to food banks and other sources of support to meet their families' needs.
Katie Bergh, a food policy expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), explained that—under the Trump-GOP budget law—"every state now gets half as many federal dollars to ensure SNAP gets to eligible families on time and in the right amount."
"Some states didn't increase state funding to make up for this federal funding cut, which could lead to staff shortages, backlogs, and low-income families waiting months for help," Bergh warned. "Other states and counties are weighing property tax increases or cuts to other services to fill the gap."
CBPP has estimated that more than 5 million people, including more than a million children, have lost SNAP since Trump signed the Republican budget measure into law last year.
Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) condemned the newly implemented SNAP changes in a statement, noting that Trump and the Republican Party have created new work requirements—and thus new bureaucratic burdens for states and aid recipients—while also slashing administrative funding, a potentially disastrous combination.
"It’s a devastating gut punch and it’s intentional," said Brown. "This is a plan to wreck state SNAP programs and push millions off of SNAP and into hunger."
The Food Research & Action Center estimated in a recent analysis that the new cost burden for states "ranges from $3 million in Wyoming to $168 million in New York."
"States are being asked to administer a more complicated program with fewer federal resources. That is not an efficiency strategy. It is a fiscal transfer," the group said. "Ultimately, this policy does not simply affect state agencies. It affects every family waiting for an application to be processed, every community experiencing rising food insecurity, and every state budget attempting to balance growing needs with fewer available resources."
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Can America Recover From Trump-World?
For a forest to recover from a fire takes more than planting a few new trees. Rolling back what amounts to a domestic counterrevolution is a daunting task, and it is easy to be misled.
Oct 04, 2026
Humpty dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again—Nursery Rhyme
Much can be said about President Donald Trump, but it is impossible to say that he has “done nothing.” This boorish, megalomaniacal, unpredictable, and frighteningly ignorant real-estate salesman has transformed his country by unleashing an avalanche of executive orders, edicts, institutional transformations, legislative shifts, and policy changes. Whether the nation can recover its democratic roots should not be taken for granted despite its institutional resilience and civic culture.
Trump-World is about more than Trump the president and demagogic ruler of the Republican Party. MAGA stands on tradition. Its base is rooted in the same backward classes, with a similar authoritarian and fascist ideological outlook as its right-wing extremist forerunners such as the “know-nothings,” the KKK, “America First!,” McCarthyism, and the White Segregationist Councils. Whatever the president’s decline in poll numbers, his mass base isn’t going anywhere and its racist, xenophobic, chauvinistic, and anti-working class beliefs are firmly entrenched. A reactionary sword of Damocles still hangs over a Democratic Party torn between a sclerotic mainstream and an exuberant faction of democratic socialists. Republicans collapse the former into the latter and then attack this essentially “center-left” political organization as “liberal,” “socialist,” communist, “Marxist,” and “anarchist,” even as Trump followers haven’t a clue what these words actually mean.
For a forest to recover from a fire takes more than planting a few new trees. Rolling back what amounts to a domestic counterrevolution is a daunting task, and it is easy to be misled. It is not a matter of the next election or putting together a grab bag of issues that will leave the public as confused as it was before, but a readiness to change institutions, reorient economic policy, and refashion foreign policy by highlighting three or four crucial points in each domain.
This calls for shifting away from Trump, the insufferable person, and focusing on Trump-World’s devastating attack on the welfare state, neofascist battle against civil liberties, cultural parochialism, and xenophobic-imperialist foreign policy.
Trump has issued over 500 executive orders in 2025-2026 alone. These now touch upon virtually every aspect of everyday life. Every progressive social movement with a marginalized constituency has come under attack through legislative and often coercive means. Public lands have been privatized, coal has been promoted while wind and solar energy projects have been shut down. Agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security have been “weaponized;” indeed, between the beginning of June and the end of August 2026, more than 150,000 arrests were made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Meanwhile the “leftist” departments of education, environmental protection, and health and human serves have been gutted. Other regulatory agencies have been purged, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Legal gambits have insulated the presidency from criminal indictment, legal harassment of critics and “enemies” has become an everyday occurrence. The press has been intimidated, television shows have been canceled, and academic freedom is on the ropes. The threat to democracy is real and and the nation’s fabric is fraying. Drastic changes to the tax codes favoring elites and the top 0.1% have contributed to the greatest upward shift in wealth in American history. Unions have been banned from 40 federal agencies, collective bargaining agreements are imperiled, and worker health programs have been eviscerated. The new imbalance of class power is fixed, if not set in stone. Everything associaated with the “New Deal” of the 1930s, and the “Great Society” programs of the 1960s is hanging by a thread. With the Trumpist counterrevolution, the whole has become more than the sum of its parts, and everyday people find it difficult to process this avalanche of reactionary measures or the dangers that they pose. A mixture of political frustration and disorientation that provides fertile ground for nostalgia associated with the 1950s, when America was seemingly admired by the whole world.
US foreign policy has changed for the worse as multilateralism has surrendered to “America First!” Indeed, reference to the isolationist and quasi-fascist movement of the 1930s with the same name is not coincidental. Trump has identified the American national interest with his own. His personal enrichment by $2.6 billion in 2025-2026 occurred in concert with constantly fluctuating positions on the Russia-Ukraine War, the Iran War, NATO, the European Union, and Canada. The rule of thumb: Where cash is not to be made, support is not to be given. The United States has reneged on all major climate treaties. Aid to the United Nations, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the world’s most vulnerable nations has been cut to the bone. Trump has signed a sweeping bill imposing sanctions on Russia while simultaneously negotiating new “business deals” before the conflict ends, thus contradicting his previous warnings. His on-again, off-again imperialist threats to turn Canada into America’s 51st state, “protect” Greenland and Denmark, “run” Venezuela’s oil industry, create a “Gazan Riviera” (presumably based on Trump company investments), exploit Ukrainian minerals, sign a bill with sweeping sanctions and set up hotel deals in Russia, constitute the mix of personal and institutional goals that provide the president’s zigzag approach with a certain logic.
Trump’s foreign policy has no need for a state department, which has essentially been hollowed out along with the experts necessary to create prudent policies. Our president values the personal touch, and he is not above blackmail, threats, intimidation, bluster, and childish tantrums to get his way. None of this has worked. Trump has alienated NATO and the EU to Russia’s delight. Relations with Canada are at their lowest point amid a bitter tariff war. America’s squandering of military rources and diplomatic setbacks have left Taiwan and South Korea feeling increasingly uneasy as Chinese military actions linger in the background.
Trump’s record of failure is astonishing. After all the grandiose claims, mediation efforts to end the Russian-Ukraine War are stalled, policy toward Israel is an embarrassment, Venezuela has the same authoritarian regime, Iran’s geopolitical importance has actually increased, and there are rumblings about charging the United States with war crimes. Trump’s attempts to intimidate China have failed, the tariff offensive is tottering, and the president’s charismatic charm apparently hasn’t prevented North Korea’s “supreme leader” Kim Jong Un from further nuclear testing. Never has the moral and symbolic standing of the United States been lower, and never has it shown itself so incapable of distinguishing between democratic friends and authoritarian enemies.
“America First!” has turned into America last. Reversal of discrete policies is possible, restoring checks and balances is more difficult, and reigning in the charismatic presidency is likely. But this ignores the forest for the trees. Trump-World is more than the sum of its parts, and the avalanche of policies and edicts makes the counterrevolution difficult to process and threatens to overwhelm the ability of critics to prioritize their responses. MAGA will offer ongoing opposition to progressive forces and, in response, they must forward a rational and radical agenda of their own. This calls for shifting away from Trump, the insufferable person, and focusing on Trump-World’s devastating attack on the welfare state, neofascist battle against civil liberties, cultural parochialism, and xenophobic-imperialist foreign policy. That is what it will take for the United States to recover from its decade-long trauma—and even then...
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Trump's Iran War Has Proved We Need to Get Off Fossil Fuels
Starting a stupid and criminal war is probably the dumbest way to wake the world up to the need to kick their and our collective oil and gas addiction, but here we are.
Oct 03, 2026
The price of oil has come down marginally this past week, largely because the Iranians are letting oil tankers transit the Gulf of Hormuz (presumably in an effort to work out a peace deal with President Donald Trump).
Meanwhile, though, the big lesson the world seems to have learned because of Trump’s fiasco—other than that our military is under the control of an irresponsible alcoholic and a narcissist and unreliable wannabe king—is that it’s high time to get off fossil fuels.
Starting a stupid and criminal war is probably the dumbest way to wake the world up to the need to kick their and our collective addiction, but here we are: The war has done more to encourage conservation and the transition to renewables than any other single effort by anybody anywhere in recent memory.
Instead of subsidizing fossil fuels to jack the profits of the companies that fund the GOP, we should be taxing them the way Europe does and using that money to turn every American roof into a power plant.
A new report from the International Energy Agency found that global demand for oil has fallen 2.5% this year, the equivalent of taking 42 million gas-burning cars off the road.
I’ve been watching all this from an odd vantage point. Three years ago we put solar panels and batteries on our all-electric house, where our winter electric bills had been running as high as $200 a month.
Now, the only time we buy electricity at all is in the dead of winter, and even then it costs a fraction of what it used to because I can download power at night when it’s cheapest. Between that and having an electric car I charge off my rooftop, energy prices exploding because of Trump’s and Bibi’s war haven’t much affected us directly.
But such benefits shouldn’t be limited to people who can afford to put solar panels on their roofs and live in blue states with huge solar subsidies. Every American should have such an option.
I first understood how this could work for an entire country back in September of 2009, when I was invited to join German Member of Parliament Hermann Scheer as a keynote speaker at a conference at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.
Almost a decade earlier, Scheer had shepherded his “100,000 Rooftops” program through the German Parliament and was eager to talk about how it worked and how it could work in Spain. As he laid out the concept to me over lunch, it was simple and elegant.
Banks would loan people the money to put rooftop solar on their houses at a super-low interest rate, with defaults backstopped by the government so there was no risk to the bank and they could make money on a super-low-interest loan. Power utilities would buy surplus power from those homes at a “feed-in tariff” rate that was higher than the retail price of electricity until the bank loans were paid off, typically in five to ten years.
The rates were set so that if the monthly loan payments on your rooftop system were $100, the local utility would be paying you around the same $100 a month. When the loan was paid off you’d own a solar system that would last for decades, and you’d have gotten it for free.
The extra expense to the utilities for those payments to consumers would still cost less than building a new power plant. The system let the Germans decommission a few and avoid building any new nuclear plants.
Politics intervened, of course, and the program wasn’t implemented as cleanly as Scheer described it to me, but it got a long way there, even though he died the following year at just 66. Today well over a million German homes have both solar panels and battery storage, and solar covers around 14% of the country’s electricity, all of it in the cloudiest country in Europe at the same latitude as Calgary, Canada.
And the rest of the world is following following at a faster and faster rate. The IEA now expects electric vehicles to make up a record 29% of all the cars sold on Earth this year, with sales records set in 50 countries last quarter as fuel prices from Trump’s war pushed drivers away from gasoline and diesel.
In the European Union overall, EVs are now more than 30% of sales and over 50% in China; they’re nearly 100% of sales in some countries like Norway. Here in America they’re just a pathetic 5.8% this year.
What explains the growing enthusiasm for electric cars around the world and here in America is, in large part, the price of fuel.
For a century in America the price of oil and its refined products has left out most of what they truly cost us. It doesn’t include the cancers and the asthma, the wildfires and the floods, or the wars we fight to keep tankers moving through places like the Strait of Hormuz.
Economists call these externalities, and the International Monetary Fund puts the worldwide total at $7 trillion a year in costs—subsidies, really—that the fossil fuel industry hands off to the rest of us. As I laid out in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, we’ve been burning through millions of years of stored sunlight as if it were free of any real costs or externalities.
We figured out how to handle this problem of paying for externalities and discouraging destructive behavior long ago with alcohol and tobacco, which we tax heavily both to discourage their use and to pay for some of the damage they do to our individual health and to our society.
Europe has taxed fuel that way for decades. Germans pay upwards of $3 a gallon in fuel taxes, while our federal gas tax has been stuck at 18.4 cents since 1993.
And you can see the results in any European town: People drive smaller cars and fewer miles, they take the train, and because driving is expensive they walk to the bakery and the hardware store down the street, which also has the added benefit of boosting Europeans’ health while keeping their money circulating in the local economy.
A high price cuts consumption whether it comes from a war or from a tax, but what separates the two is where the money ends up.
- When a war drives up the price of oil, the extra dollars flow to fossil fuel companies and dictatorial petrostates as windfall profits.
- When a tax does it, the money belongs to us. It can go right back to working families as a rebate check or EV subsidy, and it can pay for the kind of loan guarantees that put solar on all those German roofs.
Europe is now extending the principle to trade with a carbon charge at its border, which is the closest the world has yet come to the international price on carbon we need to make it reflect the very real damage it’s doing to our lives and environment.
None of this is happening here in the United States, however, because of the Republican Party’s Faustian bargain with the fossil fuel industry.
Ronald Reagan took Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the White House roof to make his oil industry donors happy, and every Republican administration since has handed our public lands and resources to the industry at giveaway prices while the industry pours money into gifts, trips, and Republicans’ campaigns.
Trump made the deal explicit at Mar-a-Lago in 2024 when he asked oil executives for a billion dollars and promised to gut our climate rules in return, a promise he’s kept by killing the wind, solar, and EV incentives that would’ve let millions of American families do what we did with our house and car (both bought and installed with credits from the Obama administration and our enlightened Oregon state government).
So when the price of gas and diesel begins to fall back and Trump and the GOP start taking credit, remember what this year proved: Instead of subsidizing fossil fuels to jack the profits of the companies that fund the GOP, we should be taxing them the way Europe does and using that money to turn every American roof into a power plant.
Call your members of Congress through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you want fossil fuels priced at what they really cost us and rooftop solar financed the way Germany did it.
And if you found this useful, please share it with your friends and family and consider subscribing to and supporting The Hartmann Report, because reader-supported media is how ideas like these get past the industry’s wall of money.
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The Supreme Court's Latest Shadow-Docket Ruling Could Help the GOP Win the Midterms
Standing alone, neither the expanded SAVE program nor the citizenship lists may be capable of changing the outcome of the midterms. But they do not stand alone.
Oct 03, 2026
Just when it seemed the Supreme Court might be prepared to stop Donald Trump from sabotaging the midterm elections, the six Republican justices who dominate the court handed the president a potentially far-reaching victory on September 25 with another ruling on its emergency “shadow” docket. The ruling in Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters permits the administration and Republican-led states to use a newly expanded federal database to review state voter lists, overturning a lower-court decision that had concluded the database could not be used for the midterms because it violates federal privacy laws and the Administrative Procedure Act.
The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program was created in 1986 to allow federal, state, and local government agencies to verify the citizenship and immigration status of noncitizens applying for public benefits, relying on records maintained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Department of State. However, in March 2025, Trump promulgated Executive Order 14248 (titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections”), that revamped the program to permit state and local authorities to verify the citizenship status of registered voters so they could purge noncitizens from the rolls—a purpose the SAVE program was never intended to serve. The executive order also directed the Social Security Administration (SSA) to make its records available to the DHS for that purpose. Two months later, the DHS, acting on its own, launched a modified SAVE program that allows state and local authorities to conduct unlimited bulk searches of multiple individuals at once.
In September 2025, the League of Women Voters, together with its affiliates in Texas, Louisiana, and Virginia, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the federal government, claiming that the expanded SAVE program violated the Social Security Act, the federal Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. On June 22 of this year, District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, who sits in Washington, DC, blocked the revamped SAVE program from being used for the midterm elections. The Justice Department, led by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, took its case to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, and, after failing to secure relief there, turned to the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, where the administration has enjoyed great success.
In one Texas county alone, searches conducted under the database returned an astounding error rate of 21%. There is no reason to believe the master citizenship lists will be any more reliable.
The high court granted Sauer’s request with a seven-page unsigned “per curiam” ruling, holding that the plaintiffs’ claims about the expanded database lacked merit, and that “the Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.” In their dissent, the court’s three Democrats argued that the use of the database will result in voter disenfranchisement.
On its face, as some commentators have noted, the court’s ruling appears limited in scope because the National Voter Registration Act (NRVA) of 1993 prohibits states from conducting “systematic” purges of registered voters in the 90-day “quiet period” prior to elections. If the terms of the NRVA are faithfully and literally applied, this means that states can utilize the expanded SAVE program to conduct only “individualized” (one at a time) citizenship checks of prospective voters in the weeks remaining before the midterms. Use of the SAVE program is also voluntary, as states are not compelled but only urged to use the system.
The problem is that neither the NRVA nor the Supreme Court’s shadow docket ruling defines what is meant by “systematic” purges, and that individual purges can easily be aggregated to have a mass impact. In a post for Democracy Docket, reporter Yunior Rivas explained the problem this way:
Now, a crucial voter protection [under the NRVA] could hinge on whether the Supreme Court [in subsequent cases that will surely come its way before the midterms] wants to narrow the definition of “systematic” as applied to purges. And there’s reason to fear that it does [ … by allowing states to] run thousands of voters through SAVE and then evade the NVRA’s quiet period by treating each resulting citizenship challenge as an “individualized” inquiry.
Rivas also observed that the Supreme Court’s shadow docket decision does not prevent the Trump administration from preparing master citizenship lists for each state, which GOP-led states could use to purge unlimited numbers of individual voters without even using the SAVE program.
In fact, those citizenship lists are being compiled pursuant to Executive Order 14399, which directs the DHS, SSA, and State Department to create lists of all “confirmed” citizens residing in every state who are entitled to vote. Once again, states are not required by the order to use the lists to purge their voting rolls, but the order stipulates that election officials in states that permit noncitizens to vote will be referred to the DOJ for possible criminal prosecution.
On September 14, the Supreme Court handed Trump a rare shadow-docket defeat, preventing the US Postal Service from interfering with mail-in balloting. But that decision did not address the legality of the citizenship lists. The legality of the lists is currently pending in litigation brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the public-interest groups Protect Democracy and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, but no decision has been rendered.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.
According to the DOJ, 27 states, including Texas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Indiana, have agreed to use the expanded SAVE database, which in practice has proven to be plagued by serious mistakes. In one Texas county alone, searches conducted under the database returned an astounding error rate of 21%. There is no reason to believe the master citizenship lists will be any more reliable.
Standing alone, neither the expanded SAVE program nor the citizenship lists may be capable of changing the outcome of the midterms. But they do not stand alone. They are part and parcel of a multifaceted plan to sabotage the elections, engineered by a president with dictatorial aspirations and a core of committed quislings determined to keep him and the MAGA movement in power through the midterms and beyond.
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'It Has to Stop': Community Members Condemn ICE Arrests at Bus Stops After GOP Blocks Bill to Protect Kids
"It doesn’t have to be this way. ICE doesn’t have to traumatize children, tear families apart, and treat people like this," said one Austin, Texas official.
Oct 02, 2026
Since Republicans in the US Senate this week blocked a bill to make school bus stops off-limits for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, community members in Pennsylvania and Austin, Texas have expressed outrage by arrests made in front of children—in at least one reported case, leaving a child abandoned as officers detained his mother.
"It doesn’t have to be this way. ICE doesn’t have to traumatize children, tear families apart, and treat people like this," said José "Chito" Vela III, the mayor pro tempore of Austin, on social media late Thursday.
Vela made the comments as he posted a video that he said shows the aftermath of an ICE arrest at a school bus stop, with officers driving away with the mother of a 9-year-old boy who was left with other community members.
"They fucking took her," said one woman angrily as the child sat on the ground crying. "What the fuck are they going to do with the child now? ... Y'all have no fucking shame."
ICE arrested the mom of a 9-year-old at a school bus stop in Austin, leaving him alone and crying. The video has profanity and is heartbreaking to watch, but it shows the fear/pain of what happened.
This is evil. This is wrong. And it has to stop.
Video: Leonardo Pelaez on FB pic.twitter.com/F52rCjZwIF
— Mayor Pro Tem Chito Vela, III (@chitoforatx) October 2, 2026
Vela posted the video a day after Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) introduced a bill aimed at stopping ICE and other Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies from conducting enforcement operations at school bus stops.
In August, Murphy and many of his constituents were outraged when ICE arrested parents at school bus stops in Danbury, Connecticut—detaining them after their children boarded buses, leaving them without anyone to pick them up after school let out and giving the family no time to ensure their children would be cared for.
Murphy said on the Senate floor Wednesday that the bus stop arrests were part of an operation in which 118 people were detained in Connecticut. Federal data has shown that a majority of people being arrested by ICE, which is carrying out President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda, have no criminal convictions.
“For parents in this body, you know how anxious that first day of school is, how kids are just brimming with nervous anxiety about that first day, and you know what that feels like to watch your kid walk onto that school bus," said Murphy. "Well, what do you think it does to those kids on that first and second day of school to see ICE officers at the school bus stop? Imagine that 6-year-old who boarded the school bus, and when he got back from school that day and got off, his parent wasn't there. A 6-year-old feeling like he had been abandoned. In this case, he may or may not have seen the arrest because it happened almost immediately after he got on.”
The senator added that ICE has "blatantly lied" about its practice of carrying out arrests at school bus stops.
"When they were presented with these stories from Danbury, DHS doubled down and said any claim that ICE targeted parents at a school bus stop is false," he said. "Then just days afterwards, we had the video evidence. This often happens—ICE says something didn't happen, and then we have the video proving that it did."
Also on Wednesday, about 75 community members gathered at the corner of Tremont Avenue and East Fornance Street in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where ICE reportedly detained three people in front of a group of children who were waiting for the school bus.
They called on Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and local officials to pass legislation to bar law enforcement from cooperating with ICE.
“When enforcement happens in places where families live their everyday lives, at bus stops, on streets, near schools, or in neighborhoods, the effects can reach beyond the person who is detained,” Jorge Liborio, 16, told WHYY. “It can affect children, parents, coworkers, friends, and entire communities.”
Jay Lee, an advocacy and civic engagement manager at the Woori Center, which provides resources for the area's large immigrant population, said that "attendance is falling" in local schools. Immigrants make up about 18% of Norristown's population.
Chalkbeat reported this week that nearly two years after Trump rescinded a policy that barred immigration enforcement in sensitive areas like schools and hospitals, school attendance dropped below 40% at one Indianapolis school when ICE was conducting operations in the city.
Two federal lawsuits challenging Trump's termination of the sensitive locations policy are ongoing.
On Wednesday, Murphy denounced Republicans for blocking his bill, pointing to Sen. Jim Banks' (R-Ind.) claim that it would create "sanctuary bus stops"—safe havens for immigrants who commit crimes.
"If we prohibit ICE from operating at school bus stops, you know what will happen?" said Banks. "All the illegals in the country will just hide out at bus stops, knowing that ICE isn’t allowed to touch them! Bus stops will become the most unsafe places in the country."
Murphy called Banks' objection "bizarre" and "dishonest."
"I did not anticipate that one of the arguments against this bill would be that it would lead to the development of ‘sanctuary bus stops,'" said the senator. "But what do we imagine here? People are going to live at bus stops? We're going to have encampments around bus stops of people who are here without documentation? I just think it's an example of how this whole debate has gone way off the rails. It is just fundamentally detached from the reality.”
In Austin, Vela said that "families pay the price" when ICE "chooses to use these tactics."
"This is evil. This is wrong. And it has to stop," said Vela. "We must demand accountability. We must demand better. Our children deserve better."
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Republicans’ Belated Reckoning With the Iran War
More and more Republicans are calling for an end to the Iran War as the midterm elections approach, but is this an opening for true accountability or merely a ploy to win votes?
Sep 29, 2026
On September 21, Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson, the Republican Senate nominee, called for a “successful and immediate end” to the Iran war. In Washington, the conflict still appears primarily to be a question of presidential power. In Michigan, Iowa, and Ohio, however, it has become a question of Republican candidates’ ability to win or retain office. As the midterms approach, the White House continues to define the war through its own authorities and objectives, while Republicans facing voters increasingly have to explain how it should end. Their cautious distancing suggests less a change in foreign policy than a belated confrontation with political accountability.
Republican appeals to party loyalty rest on a familiar premise: On national security, the party should stand behind its own president. But a war without a clear end in sight raises a difficult question: Can party loyalty substitute for an explanation of where a military conflict is heading? Or do elected representatives, even when they support their own administration, have a duty to ask why the war continues and under what conditions it can end? The recent positions of some Republicans suggest that these questions are no longer confined to debate among analysts; they have entered the governing party itself.
Alongside Hinson, Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers, Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Michigan Rep. John James, and Ohio Sen. Jon Husted have called for an end to the war, while others continue to support it. Retiring Sens. Joni Ernst and Thom Tillis have also questioned its duration or the lack of a clear path to its conclusion. Yet on September 22, Senate Majority Leader John Thune appealed for Republican unity. The next day, he encouraged candidates to run their own campaigns, even when they disagreed with President Donald Trump. These positions suggest a party in which alignment with the president carries growing political costs.
Republicans cannot indefinitely choose loyalty to the president over accountability to the public.
The significance lies not simply in the number of Republicans calling for an end to the war, but in their changing political language. The issue is no longer merely whether to support or oppose the president. It is also how representatives explain a prolonged war to voters who may demand answers about its necessity, purpose, and prospects. Calling for an end to the war becomes a way of redefining the relationship between lawmakers and their constituents—a relationship that cannot remain indefinitely obscured by party discipline or loyalty to the White House.
This shift does not necessarily indicate a principled reassessment of Republican foreign policy. Distancing from the war may stem from electoral calculations, concern about voters’ reactions, or an effort to reduce the political costs of a protracted conflict. Even if some lawmakers have concluded that continuing the war conflicts with the preferences of some voters, their positions cannot yet be treated as a strategic break with Trump’s approach. What is emerging is cautious distancing: an attempt to avoid the war’s political costs while preserving ties with the party leadership.
Nevertheless, that caution reveals an important reality: The war can no longer be treated solely as a matter of executive decisions and geopolitical calculations. Responsibility extends beyond the White House to lawmakers who have supported its continuation, remained silent, or used party unity as a substitute for public debate. Accountability is no longer simply an external demand imposed on the party; it has become an internal issue affecting its credibility and cohesion.
Thune’s appeal for unity matters in this context. Party unity during wartime can be presented as a sign of strength and political stability. Yet as disagreements over the war grow, that unity risks becoming organized silence. The party may ask lawmakers to stand with the president, but loyalty must not render the ballot powerless or erase constituents’ questions. Unity that cannot articulate a clear objective or a conceivable endpoint for the war may turn from a political asset into a liability.
The midterm elections are thus becoming a mechanism of political accountability. Lawmakers who once explained the war primarily through party loyalty must now demonstrate whether they accept responsibility for limiting it, defining the conditions for its conclusion, and responding to public concerns. This demand does not necessarily imply opposition to every aspect of the war. Voters may support the administration’s security objectives while demanding explanations for the conflict’s prolonged duration, the absence of an exit strategy, and its uncertain costs. Republican politicians are increasingly being forced to take that distinction seriously.
From this perspective, some lawmakers’ distancing from the Iran war is less evidence of an abrupt transformation within the party than a sign that accountability has entered Republican political calculations belatedly. Calls to end the war are growing louder because the conflict is no longer merely a presidential decision; it can affect politicians’ relationships with voters. Yet that delay leaves a fundamental question: Why has explaining how the war should end gained such urgency as the elections approach?
Political accountability has meaning when it begins before a crisis becomes an electoral threat, not when politicians conclude that continued silence may cost them votes. If Republicans are calling for an end to the war, they must pursue that position beyond campaign statements through clear demands concerning the conflict’s objectives, limits, and exit strategy. Otherwise, their recent distancing may amount less to accountability than to managing the consequences of a policy that previously escaped scrutiny.
The Iran war is not merely a test of Republican foreign policy; it is a test of when responsibility is assumed. Republicans cannot indefinitely choose loyalty to the president over accountability to the public. The question is not who distances themselves from the war first, but why calls to end it have grown louder as the elections draw closer. If that question remains unanswered, these positions will signal not a change of course, but only that the cost of silence has finally become greater than the cost of dissent.
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