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.
CNN's Manu Raju pointed out that Donald Trump frequently touted low gas prices during his presidency, but when prices rose under Biden, he shifted to attacking the current administration. Raju stated, 'And the person who liked to talk about it a lot was none other than Donald J. Trump.'
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.
I'm here because we're starting the campaign to win the midterms. We've got to win the midterms. Trump told the crowd at an Iowa rally, signaling his central role in the Republican Party's midterm strategy despite not being personally on the ballot in 2026.
The New York Times recently reported that four conservative operatives spent the Biden years quietly building the legal and regulatory infrastructure to kill the federal government's ability to fight climate change. Russell Vought. Jeffrey Clark. Mandy Gunasekara. Jonathan Brightbill. They drafted executive orders. They got Heritage Foundation money. They solicited white papers from friendly scientists. They built the whole thing in secret so nobody could stop them before it was done.
"It has been baked in that the states are largely in charge of the election process, and that the federal government can set or override rules for that process if they wish, but it's very specific that that has to be done through Congress and not through lone executive action," said Justin Levitt, a constitutional and law of democracy scholar at Loyola Law School who was a non-partisan policy adviser for Democracy and Voting Rights during the Biden White House.
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.