#midterm-outlook

#midterm-outlook

By rallying behind Talarico, the party sided with someone who pledged to change Washington while finding consensus. The 36-year-old state representative's win over Crockett cements his status as a rising star and will likely make him one of Democrats' most prominent candidates this year. He campaigned with denunciations of 'politics as a blood sport' and an insistence that people want 'a return to more timeless values of sincerity and honesty and compassion and respect.'

In perhaps a vain attempt to prove themselves moderate, the Democratic lawmakers helped override Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's vetoes. Voters responded with the kind of ballot-box fury that should serve as a lesson to other incumbents. It wasn't just a case that the incumbents lost. They were buried, with several of them getting trounced by margins of 40 points or more.

Affordability has been, understandably, the watchword for Democratic candidates over the last year. After downplaying inflation under Joe Biden, the party learned a brutal lesson when Donald Trump rode the cost-of-living crisis back to the White House in 2024. In 2025, Zohran Mamdani put affordability at the center of his own campaign and surged from the back of the pack to City Hall.

The FTSE 100 appears to be faring best, benefitting from strong gains in the precious metals space and defence stocks. Notably, the weekend newswires told of a potential military deployment into Greenland from the likes of Germany and the UK in a bid to deter Trump's overtures for the island. While Trump's apparent willingness to take aim at land owned by a fellow Nato member does highlight the need for Europe to ramp up defence spending,

They want to cheat, he said of Democrats. They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that their only way to get elected is to cheat. And we're going to stop it. Trump has put action to his long-debunked claims this year, with FBI agents seizing 2020 election documentation in Fulton county, Georgia, and the Department of Justice pursuing voter data from state elections officials across the country.

2026 is going to be a chance to answer a pretty strange question: What if one of the most powerful and theoretically coveted jobs in the world was actually one that very few wanted to keep?

The death of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen who was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday, has the potential to shake the political landscape in ways reminiscent of George Floyd's killing in 2020. The Trump administration initially claimed Good weaponized her vehicle in an act of domestic terrorism, an account that appears to be contradicted by video evidence.

Driving the news: In a memo Thursday, the Kennedy-aligned political advocacy group MAHA Action warned the chairs of the Republican Senate and House campaign committees and House and Senate leaders that the GOP "is renting MAHA voters. They haven't decided to purchase them yet." The group says Republicans could still close the polling gap with appeals to this segment, which it said could represent 10% of the electorate.