#us-midterm-elections

#us-midterm-elections

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.

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.

The suggestion, in which Trump did not specify which places he was referring to, amounts to an invitation to contradict the Constitution, given that it establishes in Section IV of Article I that in the United States, state laws govern elections, conceived as a decentralized process for which officials of both parties are responsible in the thousands of districts into which the vast map of the country is divided.