Statehouses make health-care policy, guide education, and may redraw congressional districts ahead of 2028. With the stakes high, more than 6,100 legislators will be elected Nov. 3.
A new poll of the Ohio Senate and gubernatorial races shows Democrats ahead in both contests. In the Senate race, a Bowling Green State University (BGSU) poll found former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) ahead of Sen. Jon Husted (R) by 6 points, 48 percent to 42 percent, among likely voters. When BGSU surveyed the race…
Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election handicapper, shifted 11 more House seats toward Democrats this week, many in red states as the midterms inch closer. Cook has moved dozens of House seats away from Republicans in recent weeks as the political environment improves for Democrats, driven by President Trump’s unpopularity in the polls and growing…
When Vivek Ramaswamy ran for president in 2024, he liked to describe himself as a "national libertarian" whose worldview included skepticism of new Middle Eastern wars and support for free trade (provided it wasn't with China).
In a midterm election season in which voters are increasingly angry about higher prices born of protectionist tariffs and high gas prices caused by a new Middle Eastern war, that would seemingly give Ramaswamy, now running for governor of Ohio, a straightforward story to tell about how he'd bring costs down.
Unfortunately for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, the person responsible for the tariffs and the war is President Donald Trump, whose support he's counting on to get him over the finish line in a surprisingly close race against Democrat Amy Acton.
The latest polls show Ramaswamy slightly ahead of Acton, with many voters still undecided.
Other Republican midterm candidates, most prominently Mike Rogers in Michigan, are escaping this bind by criticizing the tariffs and the war without explicitly naming the president who's responsible for both.
Ramaswamy has chosen a different tactic: Shift the conversation to other sources of voters' cost-of-living anxiety that can't be directly laid at Trump's feet.
In the last weeks of this election campaign, Ramaswamy has focused like a laser on two proposals he says will deliver cost relief to Ohio voters. The first is his proposed rollback of homeowners' property taxes. The second is a moratorium on new data center construction.
Like many Midwestern and Western states, Ohioans' property tax bills have shot up in recent years, driven by a pandemic-era spike in home values.
That's in turn sparked a full-blown property tax revolt in the state. The Republican-controlled Legislature passed a raft of property tax relief measures in 2025. Activists are also collecting signatures to place a full abolition of taxes on real property on the statewide ballot next year.
Ramaswamy hasn't endorsed full property tax abolition, but he is promising voters that he will roll back property tax assessments for homeowners to pre-pandemic levels.
On the data centers, he has staked out a very restrictionist position.
Ohio is currently one of the leading states for data center development. Pew Research counts 57 projects currently in the pipeline there, attracted by cheap land and a robust power grid.
The state's data center boom has caused a backlash in rural communities, where voters have objected to data centers' consumption of land and electricity and the special tax incentives some projects have received.
On the ballot in 10 Ohio localities this November are initiatives that would impose additional restrictions on data center development.
Ramaswamy has proposed to go further with a statewide moratoriumthat will remain in effect until the Legislature passes laws that not only require data centers to cover the full costs of the power infrastructure they need, but also provide property tax rebates and free electricity to nearby homeowners.
Local property tax cuts paired with local reductions in spending would, of course, be well in line with a small government worldview.
But the residential property tax rollback Ramaswamy has proposed doesn't directly do that.
Instead, it would reduce property tax revenues and then leave it up to localities to make up for the lost revenue somehow. That could result in spending cuts.
It could also result in localities shifting tax burdens onto commercial properties, raising non-property taxes (like sales taxes), or relying on the state government for more of their revenues.
In the former two scenarios, local tax regimes would become more hostile to growth, given that property taxes are considered one of the most "efficient" taxes. In the latter scenario, the link between people who pay taxes and the people who consume taxpayer-funded local services would become more distant.
Neither is ideal.
While some data centers in Ohio have received tax subsidies, Ramaswamy's proposed solution is to block new data centers until they're legally required to subsidize their neighbors with free electricity and other community benefits.
All of that is to say that it's a shame to see Ramaswamy adopt increasingly non-libertarian positions to avoid making critiques of Trump's cost-increasing tariffs and Iran war that would align with his erstwhile "national libertarian" worldview.
It's ironic, too, that, in trying to avoid making those critiques, Ramaswamy has wound up being more restrictionist on data centers than Trump himself.
In an August Truth Social post, the president famously urged local communities to "let Data Reign" and welcome data center development. Those that did would become "rich and successful," he predicted. Those that didn't would remain "poor and backward."
At a rally in Vandalia, Ohio, over the weekend for Ramaswamy and Republican Senate candidate John Husted, Trump reiterated his support for data centers, saying, "We want them. Look, there's so much money to be made for Ohio. You can't just turn them off. They'll go to China."
Rather than criticize the president's statist interventions, Ramaswamy is talking up his own instead. Ohio will be poorer as a result.
At a rally, he spoke highly of the backside of John Husted, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Ohio. He has posted one video after another of big cats attacking real people before sharing one — created with artificial intelligence — in which he is seen fending off a fearsome lion, dressed in a suit and with his bare hands. And he has repeated tired memes disrespecting Greenland, as well as an endless stream of clips and videos flattering himself.
No longer so red: Long a swing state, Ohio went for President Donald Trump back in 2016, in 2020, and in 2024. Now, with midterms approaching, it looks likely to vote blue again, and there are early indicators that Republicans have failed to win over Ohio's working-class voters in particular.
"After the first days of early voting in Ohio, a state that could help determine control of the Senate, there are clear signs Democrats are more enthusiastic to vote," reports CNN. "So far, affiliated Democrats make up larger shares of pre-election voters than they did two years ago, even in the most Republican parts of the state. At this point in 2024, Republicans had a 30-percentage point lead over Democrats in counties that voted for President Donald Trump by 20 points or more, according to data from the Ohio Secretary of State. This year, that's shrunk to just five points."
Take this data with a grain of salt: It is just early-voter data.
But this is all rather high-stakes because Republicans are defending a Senate seat, as well as the governor's office. Two races for House seats are considered toss-ups. The conventional wisdom has been that Ohio is now solidly red, with three cycles of presidential election data to support that. But it's possible Trump has pissed off the voters who supported him to such a degree that Ohio will be sent back into swing-state territory.
"God knows we didn't vote for this," one voter—a pastor who went for Trump, then Biden, then Trump—told Reuters, referring to inflation. Other voters wonder about the decline in manufacturing jobs and the fact that the president has paid lip service to these problems but done very little to actually improve people's circumstances.
On Monday, Trump rallied in support of Sen. Jon Husted, who hopes to retain his seat. In the Mahoning Valley, the president announced a few new, uh, incentives to voters: a Defense Department facility based in Cleveland, and promises that a heat provider for Youngstown remained open. "The Youngstown area for decades used to vote Democrat, and then you ran for office in 2016 and flipped it red forever," said Husted in his speech. "Is that right, folks?"
OpenAI arrest: The FBI arrested a Saudi national who worked at OpenAI "and charged him with installing a hidden audio recording device in an executive conference room," per the Department of Justice. Abdulrahman Alfozan had worked as an engineer at OpenAI since July 2025, in the San Francisco office. The company found the recording device "plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room," per Reuters. The device had a microphone and allegedly connected to a camera; the data it stored was encrypted.
"At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated," said OpenAI. It's not clear who Alfozan may have been working for or with; he has been a permanent resident of the U.S. since 2020, with stints at Meta and Microsoft.
"If convicted, Alfozan faces up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release," notes Reuters.
Scenes from New York: Mayor Zohran Mamdani has reportedly reached a deal with the City Council to ban horse carriages in the city, perPolitico. I'll admit, I don't really care, but I'm intrigued by the fact that the reason this has taken so long to get through has been because the union representing the carriage-drivers has been so successful at advocating for its members' interests.
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Pope Leo XIV was diagnosed with lung cancer, said the Vatican yesterday. He underwent a successful surgery, and there's no additional information about prognosis at this time.
Daniel Cox's new book, Generation Uncoupled, makes the case "that problems with dating and romantic partnership are downstream from the decades-long deterioration of American social and civic life." Cox tells Derek Thompson (in a wonderful interview worth checking out): "There's a cultural dimension to all of this, as well. It's not entirely that young people have fewer social opportunities, but that they are encouraged to prioritize their own personal experiences and expression. On social media, self-optimization culture teaches young people that the most coveted rewards in life are secured through individual effort and ambition alone. There is a fear that our relational obligations can work against these goals by restricting our autonomy. It explains why more young people worry about what marriage and parenthood will require of them, rather than the benefits they offer. Not surprisingly, rates of family estrangement are at record highs, prenuptial agreements are more popular than ever, and most young people now feel that obtaining a divorce should be made easier." This obsession with self-actualization, or controlling one's circumstances, as well as risk-aversion, is something I'll be covering a bit in my book, City Without Children. This culture is shaping not only our decision to (not) couple up and get married, but also our decision to delay having kids, and how we parent them once they're here.
"The bond-market turbulence last month seeped into results as the banks each posted weaker-than-expected revenue from their businesses trading bonds on behalf of clients, and dealmaking slowed more than they had anticipated," reportsThe Wall Street Journal. "In a somewhat rare occurrence, JPMorgan missed analysts' expectations."
"The White House has asked Kimberly Guilfoyle, the ambassador to Greece, to resign, new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia told reporters on Tuesday, a day after President Donald Trump said he was considering firing her after allegations she asked a political donor for $100,000 to pay her personal American Express bill," reportsThe Washington Post.
The FIRE ("financial independence, retire early") people are now saying the quiet part out loud: that living on canned lentils well into your 40s is practically the same as being imprisoned.
President Donald Trump on Monday tried to boost Sen. Jon Husted's reelection campaign by attacking two groups of Black immigrants during a rally in Ohio.
U.S. President Donald Trump was halfway through his speech at a campaign rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, this Saturday, surrounded by his usual supporters: mostly white, dressed in red, wearing MAGA hats, and displaying messages of support for the Republican. “It’s amazing. I could say the stupidest things and you’d clap me,” he boasted. On cue, the crowd, amid laughter, applauded.
There is less than a month left until the midterm elections on November 3. The outcome will determine which party controls both houses of Congress and begin shaping the post-Donald Trump era.
Lo stabilimento di camion di Springfield ha chiuso con il passaggio da International Motors a Roshel. E un suo elettore ora farà campagna per i democratici
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has halted the one remaining execution for 2026 after a woman named Christa Pike on Wednesday survived two injections of pentobarbital, a situation described as unprecedented.
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