Envelopes containing powder come weeks before midterms as federal agents try to identify who is behind campaign
More than three dozen members of US Congress have had their offices targeted with envelopes containing white powder, less than three weeks before the 3 November midterms, as federal agents try to identify who is behind the campaign.
The latest is the Virginia Democrat Suhas Subramanyam, whose Leesburg district office was evacuated on Monday after an envelope containing a suspicious substance arrived. He said the office was cleared quickly, adding that “acts of political intimidation have no place in our country”.
Two weeks before the midterm elections, Trump’s approval rating has hit a two-term low. The war with Iran has driven up the cost of a tank of gas and a cart of groceries, millennials have turned away from him faster than the rest of the country, and part of his base plans to stay home.
Donald Trump’s name is not on any ballot on Nov. 3, yet much of the U.S. electorate will head to the polls with him in mind.
A national poll released Sunday, Oct. 18, and conducted Oct. 9-13, puts his approval rating at 33%, the lowest the series has recorded in either of his terms. Two in three adults disapprove of his performance, 52% strongly, and the same survey had him at 37% in both April and July.
The poll also asked whether the next Congress should act as a check on the president or support his agenda. Fifty-eight percent preferred a Democratic-controlled Congress as a check on him, compared with 39% who want a Republican Congress aligned with the White House, a gap nearly twice as wide as a year ago. Neither party is calling this election a referendum, but the answer brings it close to one.
Almost six out of ten U.S. citizens want the next Congress to counterbalance Trump, a gap that has nearly doubled in one year. Graph: teleSUR
In the race for the House of Representatives, Democrats lead Republicans 52% to 44% among likely voters. Among registered voters the gap holds at eight points; in July it was three.
Between the first bombings on Iran and the election, gasoline soared above 4 dollars and Trump’s approval rating plummeted. Graph: teleSUR
From Hormuz to the Gas Tank
The United States and Israel began bombing Iran in February, when a gallon of regular gasoline cost an average of $2.98, according to AAA. By late March it had topped $4 for the first time since 2022, and each new round of strikes pushed it back up. On Oct. 1, the national average hit $4.41.
At those prices, filling a 15-gallon tank costs about $21 more than before the war.
With Ormuz declared closed by Iran and no oil pipelines capable of replacing it, the gallon rose 48% in the US even with record crude production. Graph: teleSUR
In February, 7 in 10 U.S. citizens considered gasoline affordable. Eight months later, the same share says the opposite.
About a fifth of the oil the world consumes passes through the Strait of Hormuz. According to the official price index for September, consumer prices rose 3.7% over the year, energy 20.4% and gasoline 34.2%, while inflation excluding food and energy stood at 2.6%. Today, 65% of U.S. citizens believe attacking Iran was a mistake.
Tehran declared the strait closed in March and has reaffirmed that stance several times since. In October, Rear Adm. Habibollah Sayyari, chief of staff of Iran’s army, told the official IRNA news agency that the waterway remains closed and that all transit must be coordinated with the armed forces, and he blamed the closure for the rise in U.S. gasoline prices.
Washington says otherwise. On Oct. 7, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that “the Straits of Hormuz are open,” that as much oil is flowing out now “as there was before this conflict began” and that Iran has “lost complete control of the straits.” Overland routes cannot replace the strait either. Before the war, the EIA estimated that the Saudi and Emirati pipelines that bypass Hormuz had only about 2.6 million barrels a day of spare capacity to divert crude, compared with the 20 million barrels a day that moved through the strait.
Ten days later, Vice President JD Vance revealed another side of the same administration. “I recognize that gas prices are too high right now,” he said Saturday night at a televised town hall. Asked why the war had not ended in a clear victory, he said that “in some ways we have won decisively,” though “the enemy gets a vote.” And he repeated that Iran, “the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world,” cannot have a nuclear weapon.
On the campaign trail, the fix being sold in Washington points elsewhere. In a poll of 1,000 likely voters taken in early October, four in five agreed that increasing U.S. energy production “can help make everyday life more affordable,” and 67% backed a proposal whose wording already promised the result, “updating federal permitting laws to reduce delays and lower costs.” It is the same reform the oil industry pitches as the key to affordability.
The government’s own energy agency supplies the missing piece. The United States has been the world’s largest crude oil producer since 2018 and is on track for a record of about 13.7 million barrels a day this year, while 84% of the crude that crossed Hormuz was bound for Asia. With output at record highs, gasoline has risen 48% since the bombing began. Crude is priced on a global market, and this year’s price spikes followed the calendar of the war, not the permitting calendar.
The price shock reached much of the world, and Latin American economies that import refined fuels absorbed it without having had any say in the decision to go to war. For those countries, the permitting fight in Washington is a distant concern; the price of their diesel depends on what happens in Hormuz. How much room Washington has to keep waging the war without congressional oversight will also be decided on Nov. 3.
For Latin American families living in the United States, the most visible face of the second term is immigration policy. At the start, half the country approved of it; now about 60% disapprove, and 56% say deportations have gone too far, eight points more than in April 2025. At the same town hall, Vance acknowledged that his rhetoric about immigrants had been “imperfect” and took the blame. “That’s on me,” he said. His goal, he insisted, is not “to dehumanize any immigrant.” “In fact, I love a number of immigrants,” he added.
An Economy Judged by Team Colors
The president’s approval on the economy has fallen to 28%, its lowest mark across his two presidencies. Forty-eight percent feel worse off than when Trump returned to the White House in 2025, the highest share in a series dating back to 1986, and for the first time in more than a decade, registered voters trust Democrats more to handle the economy, 40% to 33%. Before the 2022 midterms, the same series gave Republicans a double-digit edge on the issue.
That year, with Joe Biden in the White House, each party’s verdict on the economy was the mirror image of today’s, almost point for point, and independents stood at 16% in both surveys.
Democrats and Republicans reversed their judgment of the economy by changing government, meanwhile only independents stayed where they were. Graph: teleSUR
Voters who wear no team colors are moved by their wallets. In the October survey of likely voters, 37% said a candidate’s stance on affordability will decide their vote for Congress, more than double the 15% who put immigration first, an issue central to Trump’s 2024 campaign. That priority is shared by 43% of Democrats, 36% of independents and 32% of Republicans.
Among those who say they are worse off than in 2025, 78% lean toward Democrats, as do 71% of independents in that group.
The Generation that Turned Away Fastest
Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, are now 30 to 45 years old and make up the largest adult generation in the country. In 2024 they split almost evenly on Trump; exit polls showed voters ages 30 to 44 backing Kamala Harris over him 51% to 47%.
A YouGov poll conducted Aug. 28-31 found 27% approval and 70% disapproval in that age group, the group’s worst showing in the series. Its net rating went from minus 1 in January 2025 to minus 43 in August, a 42-point drop, compared with 30 points nationally.
The Economist makes the opposite case. It argues that millennials have turned their fortunes around and now earn more than any recent generation did at the same age, while narrowing the gap in homeownership. The magazine credits the recovery to markets rather than to a state-funded rescue. October’s polls show what that narrative leaves out.
In the House race, the Pew Research Center found voters ages 30 to 49 favoring the Democratic candidate 43% to 31%, with one in five still undecided.
October’s affordability survey, broken down by age, points in the same direction. Affordability will decide the vote of 45% of voters in their 30s and 44% of those in their 40s, above the 37% average. This is the cohort that entered the job market in the 2008 crisis, pays rent or a mortgage, raises children and fills the tank every day to get to work, and the tank is precisely where prices have climbed the most this year.
The cost of living defines the vote of almost half of voters aged 30-49, above the national average of 37%. Graph: teleSUR
The figures come from surveys with different age brackets and do not prove a single cause. Read together, though, they show the country’s largest generation turning away from Trump faster than everyone else, with the cost of living at the top of its priorities.
Among those who voted for Trump in 2024, 23% now disapprove of his performance and 38% reject his handling of inflation. Most of them still prefer Republicans for Congress, so the erosion does not take the form of a switch to the other party. What they have lost is the certainty that they will vote.
Seventy-five percent of registered Democrats say they are certain to vote, compared with 67% of Republicans. Within the Republican Party, certainty reaches 75% among supporters of the MAGA movement and falls to 57% among those who do not identify with it, and more than a quarter of the latter want Democrats to control the next Congress.
Only 39% of Republicans strongly approve of the president, down from 63% in February 2025.
How many of the 77 million people who voted for Trump in 2024 will return to the polls without his name on the ballot is a question no one can answer yet. Turnout models based on 2022 and 2024 favor Republicans; votes already cast or locked in, by contrast, favor Democrats.
The risk for Republicans is at home. Their MAGA-unaffiliated voters are the least confident of going to the polls. Graph: teleSUR
What is at Stake in the Senate
With the slim House majority Republicans are defending, losing a handful of seats would be enough to hand over control, and presidential approval is among the best predictors of midterm results. Even so, 58% of likely voters who “somewhat” disapprove of Trump still prefer the Republican in their district.
The Senate is split 53-47 in Republicans’ favor, and Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win back the majority. Of the 35 seats on the ballot, seven are rated toss-ups, and six of them — in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Ohio and Texas — are held by Republicans. North Carolina, a Republican seat, is already rated as likely to go Democratic.
The seven states that decided the last presidential election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — offer an early clue about 2028. Trump carried all seven in 2024, and today his net approval is negative in every one of them, between 15 and 25 points underwater among registered voters, according to the Civiqs tracker. He cannot run in 2028, and those numbers measure a president, not his successor, but they map the terrain his party will inherit.
Six of the seven open Senate races are played in Republican seats, while their approval is now negative in the seven states that gave the White House to Trump in 2024. Graph: teleSUR
On Nov. 3, Trump’s name will still be missing from the ballot. The outcome will depend less on votes that switch parties than on the votes that are never cast, among them those of a generation that split almost evenly on him two years ago and in August disapproved of him by more than two to one.
The Arch and the Gas Pump
On Wednesday, Oct. 14, 20 days before the election, the new Air Force One flew low over the airport in Bullhead City, in the Arizona desert. It is the Boeing 747 that Qatar’s royal family gave Trump, now painted red, white, blue and gold. “When they give you a 747, you say two words, thank you,” he told supporters.
Arizona is one of the swing states that change hands from one presidential election to the next. Joe Biden won it in 2020 by about 10,500 votes, Trump took it back in 2024, and today his approval there is 18 points underwater. The state has no Senate race this year, but it does elect a governor and all nine of its House members. The president chose Mohave County, where he won more than 77% of the vote two years ago, with early voting already a week underway. He went looking for his base, the voters he needs at the polls, not at home.
From the plane he moved on to people who leak military information. “In my opinion, leakers should be shot,” he said, and he called the journalists covering him “almost as bad as a leaker.” He touted the ballroom he is building at the White House and the triumphal arch he plans for the capital. On Iran, whose leaders, he said, “are gone,” he let slip a confession. “I might have gone too far. I don’t know who the hell to deal with.” And he promised that once the war ends,“your gasoline is going to go down to even lower than it was before it started.”
He was addressing a country that fills its tank at wartime prices and pays rents 2.8% higher than a year ago, according to the official price index. Three days later, his vice president admitted on television what the gas pump was already saying. Trump, in Arizona, had preferred to talk about monuments.
The planned arch would stand 76 meters (250 feet) tall, about 26 meters (85 feet) taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and would rise at the foot of the bridge leading to Arlington National Cemetery, as part of the celebrations for the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.
Napoleon commissioned the Paris arch in 1806, after his victory at Austerlitz, to honor his armies. Construction dragged on for three decades. When it was inaugurated in 1836, the emperor had been dead in exile for 15 years, and he passed beneath the arch only once, in 1840, inside the coffin that brought his remains back to France.
Jeffries, who is in line to become House speaker if Democrats seize the majority, has traveled to some 50 cities campaigning for Democratic candidates.
Rep. Max Miller argues that housing shortages in rural Ohio hinder economic development and calls for federal support to ensure workers can afford to live in their communities.
Social Security is racing towards insolvency because the program pays out more in benefits to retirees than it collects in taxes from working Americans.
Handing out even more generous benefits will make that situation worse. Yet that is exactly what the trustees who run Social Security are planning to do: Retirees will get a 3.6 percent cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) next year. That increase is 0.8 percentage points higher than last year's, and it is 0.9 percentage points higher than what Social Security was expecting to pay.
The Social Security trustees are doing what the law requires during a time of high inflation. That's why Congress ought to intervene here.
It should cancel the COLA.
No, this isn't a demand that lawmakers stick it to America's retirees. It's an appeal for some fiscal common sense. There are three good reasons to cancel this year's COLA.
First: Handing out higher benefits to wealthy retirees simply doesn't make sense when Social Security is trending towards insolvency.
As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes, the announced COLA would be a $900 increase in benefits for the average retired household—but some retirees could receive as much as $3,600 more.
Paying generous benefits to wealthy households is the main reason Social Security is facing insolvency in the first place. A program originally intended to keep seniors from falling into poverty has become a huge wealth-transfer scheme that overwhelmingly benefits those who don't need the handouts. The COLA doubles down on this flaw.
Second: What about the workers who are paying for those lavish benefits? Wages have risen by 3 percent, on average, over the past year. Those pay increases have already been outpaced by inflation, which is up 3.7 percent in the past 12 months.
You'll often hear retirees talk about how they are living on a "fixed income," but the math simply doesn't bear this out. Social Security beneficiaries will get a COLA that is larger than the average pay increase for the workers who are funding the COLA. Retirees are protected from the impact of inflation while younger Americans must deal with inflation and finance that protection for the elderly. That's crazy.
Third: Cutting the COLA could kick-start a conversation about how to solve Social Security's looming insolvency. The Social Security trustees estimate that an across-the-board cut of about 22 percent will be necessary in 2032. Eliminating COLAs won't meaningfully change that arithmetic, but it would change the conversation—which has for too long been dominated by politicians promising seniors that nothing needs to change. That's wrong—and the sooner that becomes apparent, the better off the political system will be.
If eliminating the COLA is too radical a change, Congress should instead change how the trustees calculate the annual increase.
Currently, the COLA is based on one particular measure of inflation: the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, otherwise known as CPI-W. This is a relatively narrow index that reflects the spending habits of only about one-third of all Americans, as Romina Boccia points out in her newletter, The Debt Dispatch.
Instead, Boccia suggests using the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, or C-CPI-U, which covers about 93 percent of all Americans and is generally regarded as a better measure of the rising cost of living. Other parts of the federal government already use C-CPI-U to update such things as tax brackets.
If Congress simply changed how Social Security's COLA was calculated, it could close 12 percent of the program's long-term shortfall. And while some retirees would see smaller COLAs as a result, the result would more closely match those increases to inflation.
Social Security's COLA reflects many of the fundamental flaws with America's old-age entitlement program. Like Social Security as a whole, it is too generous to the rich, too costly to the taxpayers, and too unfair to younger, poorer workers.
US President Donald Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on 18 October that he did not want to “drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.” He also wrote: “Signing that document at this time will do that, and I can sign it later, or any time that I want!”
Trump was referring to sanctions and tariffs under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which he waived in an executive order on 16 October, days before the measures were due to take effect. The waiver suspends additional economic penalties intended to pressure Moscow over its war against Ukraine, while leaving earlier US sanctions in place. The decision came weeks before the 3 November midterms, in which Republicans are defending slim majorities in both chambers, and analysts said the penalties could have pushed up oil prices for Americans already paying more, largely because of the US-Israeli war with Iran, Reuters reported.
Trump says Zelenskyy could have made a better deal two years ago
A week before the waiver, Trump had announced a deal for Russia to increase diesel supplies to global markets. The Treasury also issued a license, valid until 7 April 2027, permitting certain transactions in Russian-origin diesel.
In the Truth Social post, Trump accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of targeting Russian diesel refineries, saying the strikes were “seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including those in the United States.” Kyiv had paused its refinery strikes for three days at Washington’s request after Trump declared an energy ceasefire on 11 October, which Russia never confirmed, then resumed them. Since then, Russia has struck Ukraine’s energy sector 76 times, Zelenskyy said on 18 October.
Explore further
Kyiv gets no warning of the first of two Russian ballistic waves, hours after Zelenskyy said US alerts were back
Trump wrote that Zelenskyy “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did,” and that he “could have made a better deal two years ago than he can now.”
“His country is in shambles, a large portion of his land is lost, his oceans and seas are gone, and his male population is low, wounded, and/or dead,” Trump added.
He also said Russia was “doing very little, if anything, to help” Iran and that he wanted to keep it that way.
A day earlier, Trump said he had not made a final decision
On 17 October, Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago that he had not announced his final decision. “A lot of you don’t know what my decision is yet, but we’ll figure it out, and you’ll figure it out,” he said, Reuters reported.
“I think the president wants to take the 60-day period of time to sort of analyze what imposing both sanctions and tariffs will mean to the global economy and even to the US economy,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters before departing for Uzbekistan the same day.
Zelenskyy calls the waiver a pity as Republicans split
Zelenskyy called it a “pity” that Trump had waived sanctions under a law named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham, who “really believed in Ukraine.” He said he hoped Trump would change his decisions, NBC News reported.
Discussing the diesel deal on NBC’s Meet the Press, Zelenskyy said US oil prices had risen because shipping through the Strait of Hormuz was blocked, not because of Ukraine.
Explore further
A month before the diesel waiver, Trump’s envoys had already pitched Kyiv on Russian gas, NYT says
On 17 October, Zelenskyy told journalists that “the decision to undo all of this, to block all of it, seems wrong to me” and that it “definitely helps only the Russians.” His remarks appeared in Ukrainian on his official Telegram channel.
“Sanctions relief will continue. I think the diesel deal and the move regarding the Lindsey Graham Act are not the end of it. Unfortunately,” Zelenskyy said.
On 19 October, Zelenskyy wrote that partners had again given no warning of Russia’s overnight ballistic attack and that blocking missiles for Ukraine’s air defense while Russia gets sanctions eased or postponed amounts to partners denying reality.
Republican Senator James Lankford defended Trump’s decision on NBC’s Meet the Press, saying the president was “choosing the American people first.”
Senator Darline Graham, Lindsey Graham’s sister, whom Trump has endorsed for a full term, said at a campaign stop on 17 October that she would “choose to keep the pressure on Russia.”
“I don’t trust Putin and I don’t trust Russia,” Darline Graham said.
She did not directly criticize Trump but said she would not have made that choice, Reuters reported.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s approval rating has fallen to a new low of 33% two weeks before the U.S. midterm elections, amid cost-of-living concerns, according to a new poll conducted by Ipsos, The Washington Post and ABC News.
Disapproval stood at 66%, including 52% who strongly disapprove. The rating was four percentage points lower than in July and 12 points below February 2025, when approval was 45%. It marked a lower level than at any point in his first term. Among likely voters, 38% approved and 62% disapproved.
Voters were concerned about the cost of living and about the president’s decision to start the war against Iran, which affected fuel prices. 71% of respondents called gasoline unaffordable, up from 28% in February before the war in Iran raised fuel costs. 72% said the country is heading in the wrong direction, an increase of five points from April.
Trump's declining approval ratings are exposing a growing divide within the Republican Party ahead of the midterm elections.
A Fox News poll shows Trump retains 95% approval among MAGA Republicans, compared with just 47% among non-MAGA Republicans.
Approval ratings traditionally serve as a key factor in anticipating midterm results in the United States, and several Republican members of Congress are struggling in districts that were once conservative strongholds.
Likely voters surveyed backed the Democratic congressional candidate over the Republican, 52% to 44%. Among all registered voters, the margin was 50% to 42%, an improvement for Democrats from July, when the gap was barely three points.
Trump has redoubled his participation in campaign events around the country to maintain control of Congress.
A sense of deja vu is likely washing over Republican lawmakers. Many of the struggles GOP candidates are facing in 2026 eerily mirror their plight in 2018. Ahead of that year’s midterms, voters were similarly unhappy with President Donald Trump and unimpressed by the massive tax cuts passed the previous year. The conditions this time around, however, are much more dire, emphasizing how few lessons Republicans learned from their last midterm defeat.
Eight years ago, GOP candidates under House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had hoped to campaign hard on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, also known as the Trump tax cuts. The $1.5 trillion bill was the biggest legislative package passed by that Congress, with the GOP trifecta having failed to repeal and replace Obamacare as promised. But voters weren’t very interested in hearing about the bill once it passed, and its popularity cratered as 2018 continued.
Many of the struggles GOP candidates are facing in 2026 eerily mirror their plight in 2018.
Things aren’t faring much better this time around. As previously mentioned, lawmakers have been having a tough time selling the megabill that Trump dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill. The White House briefed House Republicans last year on rebranding the package as the “working families tax cut.” A new poll from Politico released Wednesday confirmed that while respondents prefer the new name, taxes are near the bottom of voters’ list of top issues.
The congressional Republicans of yesteryear originally planned to follow up their tax cuts with another round in 2018. (Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who insisted that a third reconciliation bill was possible long after it seemed plausible, must relate.) Those goals swiftly fell apart in the face of a fractured caucus and no real vision for what a new middle-class tax cut would look like. By September, the GOP was far behind in the general ballot against Democrats and looking for a way to catch up.
As The Washington Post reported at the time, Trump led the way in Republicans making “a hard pivot away from economics and into nationalism, a debate with heavy racial overtones meant to energize the conservative base.” In the weeks leading up to the midterms, the president, Fox News and many GOP candidates flooded the airwaves with warnings about a caravan of migrants making its way from Central America to Mexico. But the GOP’s caravan-forward strategy didn’t work. Democrats still gained a net of 40 seats, more than a dozen more than needed to win the majority. Republicans held control of the Senate, but the odds of that happening again are less certain.
Which brings us to the biggest differences weighing down the GOP this time around, presaging what could be an even more brutal potential loss. In short, the party’s lack of interest in any policy beyond tax cuts and nationalism has caught up with it. MAGA has hollowed out the Republican Party to place Trump at its center, leaving it intensely vulnerable without his coattails support its candidates. But Trump was already a hindrance in 2018 to more moderate Republicans trying to brace themselves against the oncoming blue wave. Today, he’s an anchor dragging down everyone with an “R” next to their name, prompting the “red undertow” effect that has conservatives prepared to stay home on Election Day.
It is only right that in failing to learn from the past, Republicans seem doomed to repeat it.
The president already wasn’t very keen on selling the 2017 tax cuts to voters himself. At a May 2018 tax roundtable, Trump instead spent time talking about “China, North Korea, Syria, immigration, the mayor of Oakland, Calif., Congress’s budget deal, his own poll numbers and the media’s coverage of his presidency.” He’s grown much worse at staying on topic in the intervening years, preventing him from providing a coherent message for rank-and-file members to rally around.
A repeat of the anti-immigrant play would also likely backfire in 2026. Democrats have mobilized heavily around Trump’s detention strategy and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tactics. Conservative voters poised to stay home are unlikely to find a sudden burst of enthusiasm, not when more pressing matters are weighing on them.
Rising prices, inflation and other economic concerns have become the focal point of this year’s midterms. There is no avoiding how much the blame for each falls at Trump’s feat, try as candidates might to split the difference. And blame for Trump’s return to the White House — a choice the GOP had every opportunity to avoid — falls at the feet of all those who backed him when his stock was higher. It is only right that in failing to learn from the past, Republicans seem doomed to repeat it.
Login
